The Scholomance (36 page)

When she
emerged, he was there, weakly bristling with determination. “I have an idea,”
he began.

Mara tapped at
him, and to her mild surprise, it was a pretty good one, as well as being one
that was bound to make Horuseps happy. “Leave me alone,” she told Devlin, and
started up for breakfast.

“But…But I think
I can help you find your friend.”

“I don’t need
your help.”

“But—”

“Find her and
then talk to me!” Mara snapped, turning on him in the ephebeum. “Don’t come
crying at me with half-baked schemes and expect me to fall down on my knees in
gratitude.”

There was some
sniggering at the edges of the room. It was never entirely empty at this time
of day, and its two biggest lions—Le Danse and Loki—were only too happy to fix
their eyes on a gazelle in distress. Mara marked them and, scowling, grabbed
Devlin’s sleeve when he started to slink away, yanking him into step beside
her. She wouldn’t leave him alone in their company when they were prowling. She
wasn’t a killer.

“She forgives
you already!” Le Danse called, and one of the white-robed sycophants quivering
at his elbow saw this as a golden opportunity to get on his good side. Leaping
up, the man added, “Gratitude is not the only way to get her, boy! She’ll kneel
for any reason at all, won’t you, pretty bird?”

How thou
singest
…

Her step
faltered. She rubbed irritably at her temples, as if she could push the memory
away. It meant nothing, after all. It was just sex, and like the song goes,
just another brick in the wall.

“A bird?” Le
Danse asked, amused.

“What else?” the
other man called, wanting everyone to hear him now. “A swallow!”

Mara turned
around, already lashing out as hard as she could, not a slap this time but a
roundhouse punch. Le Danse’s new friend jerked back hard enough to crack his
head on the wall behind him. Color spiked across Mara’s mind, and then the man slumped
backwards off his bench, saved from a second and nastier impact only because he
landed head-first in Le Danse’s lap. He lay still. His foot twitched, but only
once.

The silence held
for a moment, and was broken by Loki’s horrified giggles. Then there was a
general rush of movement as students either gathered around him or bolted out
of Mara’s path.

“Is he dead?”
Devlin asked uneasily.

“Of course not,”
said Mara, walking again. “He may even wake up in a day or two, if someone
takes care of him.”

“No one takes
care of people in here.” Devlin ran a little to catch up to her, jogged back
when she glanced at him, then trotted after her again. “Do you want to hear my
plan?”

“I don’t need
to.” She went up to the dining room by the back way. Students tended to
congregate on the wide stair that led to the Nave, and she’d dealt with them
enough already for one day. Lamps flickered and came dully on ahead of her,
flickered and died to black behind her. Devlin’s sandals flapping were the only
sound and it wasn’t much. His misery hung over the whole of the tunnel, all the
thought there was to read.

“What is it you
expect me to do with you?” Mara asked finally, fiercely. “Pull the sword from
the stone and anvil, bring the tablets down from the mountaintop, and ring the
fucking bells for freedom? You knew what you were getting into!”

“So did Connie,”
Devlin muttered, and when she glared at him, defiantly added, “People can be
wrong, you know!”

I was wrong
about this place. Please come and get me
.

The ground was
canting upward, twisting in on itself as it became the spiral stair, too narrow
now to walk side by side. Mara used it to her advantage, quickly moving ahead
of him, but Devlin had been in the mountain far longer than she and had
adjusted to the steep stairs in ways she could only envy. He took them two at a
time behind her, not even out of breath, and slipped in at her side again at
the top.

“You’re not my
problem,” Mara said, speaking tersely to try and disguise the panting sound of
her breath. “For God’s sake, you’ve had eleven years to escape.”

He didn’t
answer, but his mind was whirling…eleven years, gone. Eleven years, locked away
in this place. This terrible place. Over and over, one thought cut across his
chaos: There is no escape but one.

Mara shoved his
mind away from hers. “If that’s true, why come to me at all?”

“You’re
different,” he mumbled.

“Oh bullshit. What
a handy way to free yourself of any responsibility. Just wait for someone
different to come along so they can take care of you.”

She turned the
sharp corner into the final long passageway, the dining room a circle of golden
light and noise at the end of it. The kitchen doors were ajar, but as they
approached, a hooked and scaly claw reached out, not a furtive movement at all,
but a cold, deliberate one that shut them away from the warmth of the unseen
fires and the smell of roasting, unknown meat. The doors were closed, one after
the other, just before she could come near enough to look inside, ‘Like
vampires closing their coffins,’ she thought, and smiled because there were no
vampires in Romania.

“It isn’t funny,”
the surly goat said beside her.

“Grow up,
Devlin. Learn to deal. Did they say that back when you were around? You brought
yourself here. Get yourself out.”

“You’re helping
her
!”
he burst out. “You’re saving this…this Connie person!”

“That’s the
great thing about dealing,” said Mara, walking out into the dining room and
giving a nod to the Master’s table. “You get to pick who you save.”

And pick the
plan by which to do it. Devlin’s wasn’t bad. Mara found an empty place at one
of the tables and looked back at the demons. Only some of them were watching
her today. The novelty must be wearing off. She sent a thought to Horuseps: **I’ll
be joining you in class today.**

His head tipped
and he raised his cup to her. ‘Delighted,’ he thought. ‘I had begun to think
you immune to my charms.’

**I am. But not
to my own desires.**

‘There’s a
stirring thought,’ he told her, smiling, unstirred. ‘And where have your desires
led you recently? I so missed your smiling face yesterday.’

He was guarding
himself well. She couldn’t see very deep inside him without letting him know
she was looking, but what she could see made her suspect he already knew. All
he wanted was to see her dance.

**I’ve been
around,** she told him, shrugging. **Did you want me?**

She threaded
suggestion beneath the words, well-hidden by idle curiosity above and suspicion
everywhere that he might sense it if he looked, and of course he looked.

‘In every way,’
he thought back. He may have even believed he was teasing, but she could see
beneath to the dark soil where her subtle ideas germinated. Her efforts were
beginning to pay off already.

Mara broke away
and cleared a place at her table, slapping lightly and indiscriminately at the
minds around her until she could take a loaf of bread without risking a punch. It
was poor stuff to fight over—heavy, dark, and thick with sharp seeds—but better
to her mind that the blood-heavy hunks of skinless meat or marrow-rich bones
that filled the other platters. Devlin dropped onto the bench beside her,
taking advantage of the void as slapped students shrank away, to help himself
to the excess.

“So I have a
plan,” he said around a mouthful of meat as he stuffed wrinkled fruit and
cheese into his sleeves for later.

“Shut up,
Devlin.”

He hunched,
picked at a moldy spot on his potato, said nothing.

“Do you really
want to help me?” Mara asked.

“Yes,” he
muttered, at one sullen and hopeful. He looked like the world’s largest toddler,
promised a treat if he could behave, at a stage when good behavior was still
more or less as thing of fiction.

“Then don’t
follow me to class today. I’m serious. I can’t have you with me today.” She
could keep her own mind armored easily enough, but that wouldn’t do much good
with Devlin psychically bleating out the plan to anyone who could listen. “Promise
me,” she said.

“Why?”

Oh, why indeed? As
in, why did she always do things the hard way first? Mara reached rudely into
Devlin’s head and got an expert hold on the place where suggestions rooted. “Don’t
follow me to class today,” she said again, not speaking to him anymore but
directly to his brain. He looked a little stupefied when she let go, but only a
little. She’d gotten pretty good at stuff like that in the past few years of
dealing with her mother.

The bells rang.

Mara got up with
the rest of them, clearing a path out of the general crush of students until
they all learned to give her room. They didn’t all go meekly. Lions and
gazelles, Devlin had said, and it seemed very true now, as so many students
cringed away without thinking about it and others merely retreated to a better
distance to see her and mark the face of another lion among them. She’d been
subtle long enough; it was an intoxicating liberty to push back like this and
not have to worry who saw her or what they would suspect.

Intoxication
could be dangerous. On the outside, Mara did not drink. Here, she did not revel
in her advantage. She simply cleared her path and went on.

She’d left
Horuseps in the dining room, and took the most direct route to the lyceum, yet
he was there before her when Mara reached his theater. There and standing
motionless at the center of his dais, his arms crossed and hands cupping his
shoulders, as if he had stood there a thousand years already and could easily
stand a thousand more. He smiled when he saw her, long fingers twitching,
wanting to relish her surprise.

She’d seen this
trick before, but it was still a good one. “Do you teach that here?” she asked,
stepping down the risers to find a seat in the front row.

“I? Only Sight. There
was a time when we taught the art of Correspondence to our most promising
students, but no longer.”

“Were they
blinking themselves out of the mountain?” Mara asked, smiling.

“No. Midway through
the walls.” And he smiled while she pictured that. “We’ve learned over the
years to teach all that you learn here, not all that we know. No,” he said, as
the lights of his eyes spun. “I see that you have never been deceived. Forgive
my presumption, that I dare to lecture you as though you were any other human.”

There was a joke
in that somewhere, and she was the butt of it, but she couldn’t see how. Instead,
she said, “I forgive you,” which needled him, so that was all right. “What can
you help me to see, Horuseps?”

“Oh, that’s
refreshing. Most students have demands, not questions.”

“You already know
what I want. How can you help?”

“Help. I see. You
want my…help.” Horuseps strolled around to the fore of the dais and trailed his
fingers along the rim of what looked for all the world like a tombola, the kind
used in bingo parlors to mix the playing balls around. This one was filled with
large round stones, shiny as jewels after years of tumbling together. “Sight is
not an art in the strictest sense, but it is one of the ultimate powers,
dearest, with countless applications. Most students seek me out at one time or
another, but few master my lessons entirely. Sight is essential, you see, but it
is the nature of vision to be selective. After all, it is Man who interprets
what he sees, and Man is flawed.”

“Aren’t we all?”
Mara said dryly.

Horuseps
shrugged and nodded once. “So how can I help you, my most precious one? Let me
think.”

Mara waited while
Horuseps posed and the classroom filled behind her. Beneath his mental armor,
his thoughts were of her. She could see them now and then, eerily chaste, yet
charged with carnality. He saw her as a sculpture—no matter how beautiful, how
desirable, she was never to be touched.

Which raised
that same old question in Mara’s mind. Why not?

“It is has been
said,” Horuseps began, and the room fell silent, “that nothing exists in the
dark that is not there also in the light. True, to a degree.” He walked around
the tombola and seated himself gracefully at the corner, crossing one chitinous
leg over the other and looking very lean, very graceful, very harmless. He
smiled, and Mara felt the hot leap of arousal from out in the audience—male
heat responding to female attraction. The demon’s smile widened. “Yet more
exists than the human eye perceives. This, you have been taught. Proteus, tell
me.”

One of the
black-robed students stood, staring raptly down at his instructor. It was not
lust he felt, exactly, but he responded in that way even so. Power came with a
Master’s favor, and Horuseps wanted him. This was another test, that was all,
and when he had passed the last of them, he would have her (the anticipation of
real sex after all this time, not the clandestine and unnatural fumblings with
other students, or the humiliating mountings he had endured under the crushing
weight of Master Ruk or Master Nezgulon, but real sex!) and she would give him
the greatest magic, the magic she did not show to the weak. He licked his lips
and said, “All living things emit the charge of life’s own energy. When
perceived, it becomes power.”

“When Seen,”
Horuseps murmured, nodding approval, “it becomes Sight.”

This seemed very
similar to Malavan’s lessons, Mara thought.

“Of course it
is,” Horuseps said, turning to her at once. “There is only one truth.”

“Then why so
many arts?” she asked.

“Oh my darling
one. How many Christs came out of Galilee? And how many books have been writ of
his one true word? Sight is selective. Man is flawed. And you, my dearest, are
very young. Sit quietly. Observe. Proteus.”

Mara ignored the
snickering delight of those who believed she’d been chastised, and watched
closely as lucky Proteus came down the risers to stand beside the false female
he dreamed of penetrating. Horuseps trailed his hand over the tombola, then
opened it and dropped one of the stones into his student’s waiting,
sweat-shined palm.