by R. Lee Smith
“Very good,” Horuseps agreed with a nod. “It was Master Ochalis. It had to be tried, my dear. Everything, you see, had to be tried. But the result, the Scrivener…no, child. Further efforts to mingle the tribes were expressly forbidden by our lord and master, and we did not object very much. Humans are not the best solution—”
“But they’re the safest.”
“Yes! You do see!” In his excitement, one of the demon’s clutching clawless fingers popped through Mara’s wrist and stabbed down, scraping jarringly against her bones. He withdrew with a bow of apology, licking his fingers while she slapped a hand over the wound. “Or perhaps you don’t. I’ll try to make it clearer for you. God made the high tribes first, you see, and made us all differently.”
“You son of a bitch!” Mara hissed, trying to knit her damaged meat together.
“Then came Man, God’s favorite child, who may indeed have been made in His image, but whose image was greatly augmented by our gifts. For each king of the high-born gave at their Creator’s command to the clay of Adam’s birthing. Letha gave the pleasures of flesh, Golgotha gave strength and earthly power, the Horuspex gave intelligence and the ability to anticipate beyond the moment, and each of them gave something, but only to Man, not to one another.”
“What—”
“In the ages following Man’s birth, God set the lesser tribes upon the world, and built each in corrupted strain of Man’s making. The Suti, born of that pride which has perverted into disdain for all others. The parasitic Shen who devour the host that loves them. The vacuous, indolent Uulok, feeding upon the labors of others. And so forth, but all of them, these lessers, all were made of Adam’s line, Adam’s sins.” He swept one arm broadly back, his hand clenching in empty fury before the silver figure in the center of the room. “So are we all spokes of his wheel,” he seethed. “Denied our full birthright, denied the world we were promised, denied even the love of God, and now this. We are denied our continuation, but we will have it back and we will have it of the children of Men! The connecting line that God drew between him and every one of us, we will use to breed new life back into the Broken Tribes!”
“Why are you telling me this?” Mara asked, now rubbing at the blood left on her undamaged skin. “I couldn’t care less what you do here.”
“No?”
“In three thousand years, you said it yourself, you successfully bred, what? Eighty kids?”
“Eighty-two,” Horuseps said softly. “True-born.”
“So I imagine you’ve got quite a ways to go before you raise an army to take over the world or whatever the hell you’ve got in mind. As for the students you’re keeping, you know what, they should have known better than to expect a demon to give them a fair deal.”
“So true.”
“But I am for damn sure leaving and I’m taking Connie with me, so if you’ve got a point to make in all this, you’d better get to it.”
Horuseps pursed his lips slightly. “Again,” he said, “and for only the second time, you disappoint me. I truly believed you’d guess on your own.”
“Guess what?” she demanded, at the end of her patience. “I swear if you don’t start talking straight—”
“You healed your arm.”
“What?”
“You healed your arm.” Horuseps nodded at the bloody smear drying on her wrist. “How?”
She looked at it, baffled, than at him. “I made it malleable, of course. What in hell—”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“You didn’t…Weeping, creeping Christ, man! Make sense!”
“I did not hear a Word,” said Horuseps, enunciating very clearly.
Mara started to object and then stopped, confused. Had she said one? Horuseps waited, examining the nail-less tips of his fingers as she stepped back to the Panic Room and dialed through the last few minutes. She saw his finger punching down into her arm, saw herself staunching blood, mending veins and tendons, sealing skin. She never spoke a Word.
“No doubt you think this is nothing unusual,” Horuseps said when she returned. “That with true mastery of an art, every student achieves the ability to recite without consulting the page, so to speak. Not so. As I told you at the very beginning, magic eludes the human mind.”
“I’m not…not getting you.”
“It isn’t the first time, either. Stop and think. I’ll wait.”
Mara merely stared at him, shaking her head in spurts of uncertainty and frustration.
“No? You’ll have to take me at my word, then. But it’s true.”
“It doesn’t mean anything!” she insisted. Her stomach was starting to cramp, cold and hot at the same time.
“Oh yes. Yes, it does.”
“I’m just better at it than they are!”
“You’re better at lots of things, I imagine. No doubt you’ve grown accustomed to that as well, never given it a second thought. Perhaps you’ve just assumed it’s all due to your skill as a mentalist.”
“It is!”
“Mentalists come here, my precious. All the time. A little sip of power whets the appetite so, and what you call telepathy, although rare, is not unheard of in Adam’s line. His children have degenerated some, but he is still one of the high-born. You, my darling heart, are no mere mentalist. If you ever really stopped to think about it, you’d have suspected long before now. But you’re not very imaginative, are you?”
“Wh—What are you…”
“And you don’t get sick, do you?” Horuseps lifted up a lock of her fine, pale hair. “Or easily tired. You’ve never cried, not even as an infant. Not when sad, not when in pain…not even when grit dares to abrade them. Your strange, light eyes make no tears.”
“I know what you’re going to tell me!” Mara shouted, slapping his hand away.
“I mentioned, didn’t I, that some of the children that come of us are human? Not many, not often. Like opposite ends of our dark spectrum, demon and human, with nephalim as the broad ribbon between us. Ah yes. But I don’t believe I mentioned what we do with them.”
“And it’s a lie!”
“We let them go. We’re really not so monstrous as all that, you know. We let them go, we let them grow…and children do so love to wander…”
“You’re wrong!”
“Blood doesn’t always stay thin, it would seem.”
“I know what I am!”
“Sometimes it only recedes.”
“I know!”
“Like the tide.”
“You shut up!” she screamed, oblivious to the power streaming out of her in forks of dark fire, oblivious to all but the rage. “You’re lying to me!”
“And sometimes, apparently, the tide comes in again.”
Mara roared and hit him. She didn’t have to move to do it. She didn’t have to speak. Horuseps flew back and hit the statue of Adam, snapping it in three pieces. He landed hard in the middle of them, oozing black blood from a dozen cracks in his chitin. He was laughing.
“You really must learn to control that temper,” he said, sitting up. “Ah, but you are young yet. So very young.”
She spun around and there was Kazuul on the stair behind her. He caught the hand she swung at him, slapped aside her spear of thought, and turned her forcefully around. She fought him every step as he dragged her to the center of the room. He did not speak, but merely kicked Horuseps aside and shoved her face-down over the gleaming mirror-like surface of Adam’s chest.
Her reflection snarled back at her with his calm face and burning eyes behind her. Her reflection…
Her eyes were glowing. Her open mouth glinted with the points of fangs. She saw herself as she had been in the eyes of the murderous pilgrim at the foot of this mountain. He’d believed then she wasn’t human, that he lay with a demon. ‘We are not human,’ Horuseps kept saying, looking right at her, and ah God, they had never lied to her, there had been a thousand terrible truths even from the first day!
In panic, Mara turned her Sight
upon herself and Saw—as with the true shape Ruk yet carried beneath his monstrous husk—the real Mara that had always hidden, dormant, enshelled by humanity. Something in her tore, like the skin of a bitten apple, impossible to unbite, as power grown vast and beyond her control bound itself that true form and ripped it from the inside…out.
Mara screamed, ignorance shattered, as bone exploded through her skin in dozens of tiny, bloodless thorns. She grabbed one blindly, ripped it out, and immediately doubled over, shrieking agony.
“Little fool,” Kazuul growled, not unkindly. “It will only grow back with greater pain. Rail as thou wilt, thou canst deny thy nature no more than thou mayest pluck down the sun.”
“I’m human!” she groaned, tearing out another spike. “I’m human, I am!”
“No longer. Once thee might have hidden in thy mortal disguise all the years of thy life and even shared a mortal death in ignorance, yet thy fate wast sealed the hour that ever thou didst enter here. Thy heart hath devoured thy flesh, and now thou art wholly Golgotha.” He turned her around, ignoring her struggles, and forced his mouth over hers in a kiss she, however hatefully, did ultimately return. “And thou art mine,” he rumbled, releasing her.
She didn’t run. She wanted to cry, but her eyes stubbornly refused to make tears.
“Tis not so great a change as thou fearest,” Kazuul said. “And I shall ease what can be eased to soothe thy way.”
She looked at him.
He held out his hand to her, his eyes gently burning. “Come, my Mara. This mountain is all my lair and every door shall open at my command. I shall give her to thee, as freely as thou didst enter here, if thou wilt only stay.”
Her breath caught, but she didn’t seem to need it…not like she used to. She stepped back, seeking Horuseps in a turmoil of confusion, but found him merely smiling up at her from where he sat on the floor, one arm tossed casually across his knees. His mind was open to her now, open and clear and welcoming. He called her sister.
“Mara.”
The demon’s hand, outstretched.
“Only stay,” she said. Her voice hardly shook at all. She was cool. “And you’ll find her for me.”
“And restore her. And see her safely set down among her people.” His arm showed no strain, no sign of ever falling empty. “If thou wilt give thyself to me wholly.”
“To a Master?”
“To a mate. To be mine own. To take me for thine.”
Every door, open.
“When?” Mara whispered.
Kazuul considered her without smiling, without triumph, without lowering his open hand. “When thou hast seen thy friend away and know me to be honest. When she is safely laid in her mortal life and all memory and ambition for this place is gently ended. When thou art content to give and give without regret, beloved.”
“I hope you’re fond of long engagements,” Horuseps murmured.
Neither of them looked at him.
“I told thee once,” Kazuul said. “I’ll have naught but thine own self, thy truth, and the whole of thy heart.”
Was this what it came to? Her life for Connie’s? Her freedom? Her humanity? Mara squeezed her eyes shut, grabbed at a horn and tugged, but not hard enough to pull it free. Her breath scoured through her lungs, hissing out through the bared fangs of her mouth, but they were not sobs; she could make no tears.
“Until then, come. I shall uncover her, make well her fragile mind, deliver her to Adam’s realm, and ask no vow upon thy life to seal thy promise. Mara, come,” he said, not without a dark compassion. “The hour is late. And when we are done and thou art returned to my chambers…I’ll draw thee a bath. Beloved. Come.”
She shuddered once, her hand still pressed to her inhuman brow, but then she lowered it, let his enfold it as they both knew it always would, and followed him away.
* * *
“M-Mara?”
“I’m here.”
“I can’t…I can’t move.”
“Just relax. I’ve got you.”
“I was dreaming, wasn’t I?”
“Yes. It’s over now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I missed you.”
“I know that too.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Just relax.”
“Mara?”
“I’m here, Connie.”
“I want to wake up now. Please? I want to go home.”
“Soon, honey.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I love you.”
“…”
“Are we still friends?”
“Always, Connie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just rest.”
* * *
The found her on the roof of a hospital in Bucharest: a young lady, unconscious, naked, with a child’s gold-colored locket in the shape of a heart clutched in her hand. She received the best care, better by far than her situation warranted, but all those who touched her felt the same illogical and overwhelming desire to nurture and care for her, beyond all cost, beyond all reason. She slept for three days and woke without memory.
She spoke only English. The American Embassy was contacted with photographs and fingerprints. In ten days, her family arrived. They said her name was Constance Vitelli. They took her home. No one spoke the name of Kimara Warner to her, not then, not ever again. That came when they touched her, too.
But she dreamed sometimes, and the dreams were like the tides: they receded for days, for weeks, sometimes for months, but always rolled in again. In her dreams, there was a room, like a control center of some sort, where the walls were all glass and concrete, and a terrible storm full of colors and voices raged outside. Inside, there was a girl, a few years older than she herself (because she was always a child in these dreams, always trapped at the bosomless, freckled age of eight), and they sat on the floor together and talked, the way that children do. In the dreams, the other girl looked sad, even when she smiled, but Connie was always so happy to see her, always hugging on her and crying when the time came for her to wake up.
But the dreams always washed away in the morning, and as the years moved on, that tide came less and less. For Constance Warner, who had no history, the dreams became her only childhood, and the older girl, her only friend. It seemed sometimes that she only drifted through what was left of her life, looking for something she couldn’t remember, wishing for power that didn’t exist, and waiting always to wake up dreaming.
Years later, cleaning out the closets after her mother’s funeral, she found a photograph of herself at some childhood birthday party, where she sat centered in a sparkly hat, surrounded by brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, grandfathers…and one young, unsmiling girl with ice-grey eyes: the girl from her locket, the girl from her dreams. She asked everyone she knew, everyone she could think of, but no one seemed to know who she was and the same expression always seemed to sink down over their faces when she asked them—a lost, sick, confused expression that made her feel a little guilty just for asking, as if she were hurting them somehow. Eventually, she stopped asking, but she never stopped wondering.
She found six other pictures eventually, and framed them all. She carried them with her through all the cheap little apartments and government housing she inhabited, as a kind of talisman to keep the dreams coming. She had them with her when she was taken to the senior care home, childless and alone, the last of her family, just an old woman who stared out the windows all day and had less to forget than the other old women, but who forgot it all anyway.
There was only one tired young nurse with her in the room the night that old Miss Vitelli died, roused from her magazine by the old women mumbling in her sleep, as she so often did. “You were my best friend, Mara,” she said in her quavery way, as the nurse heaved herself up and came to check on her. “I loved you.”
And taking the ancient, delicate hand to check the fading pulse, the young nurse heard
, or thought she heard, a thin sound, like a breeze through the last leaves of autumn: “You were mine, you know, my one and only. I loved you the best that I knew how.”
“I’m so sorry,” the old woman whispered as the nurse stared bewilderedly around her in the dark.
“It’s all right.”
The pale-eyed girl in all those cracked photographs seemed to stare at her, stare at her. She’d never liked to look at them. There was something really creepy about that kid.
“Are we still friends?” asked the old woman, making the young nurse jump a little, her skin breaking out in gooseflesh.
“Always, Connie.” And the voice was right there, almost, sneaking up through her fingers where she carefully pinched the old woman’s wrist, whispering not in her ears but in her brain. “Always. Just rest.”
Then it was over and Constance Vitelli lay silent in her spinster’s bed. With a pounding heart and shaking hands, the young nurse tucked the gnarled hand with its ancient, worthless locket still clutched inside like a rosary underneath the blankets and pulled them over the wizened head, then hurried from the room and never told anyone about the voice she did not hear or why she’d deemed it necessary to snatch up those old framed photographs and throw them out into the dumpster so immediately. The old woman was dead, and when the time came to record such things it was recorded only that she’d gone peacefully, in her sleep. The old woman was dead, and on the other side of the world, Mara of the tribe of Golgotha lay down in the bed of Kazuul, lord of the Scholomance, and welcomed him at last. It was not the love that Men feel, but like the child they began that night, it was still a true thing, and it endured.
THE END
September 2008 – November 2009