The Scholomance (6 page)

None of them
were Connie. Connie’s mind was still burned clear in her memory. She didn’t
need to hold it up and compare it to know none of these were she. Nevertheless,
hope that Connie was here somewhere, as yet unseen but able to be saved,
renewed itself in her heart, and if it didn’t exactly give her wings, at least
it gave her the will to keep climbing.

The Great Rock
Battle was winding down, its opponents exhausted and beginning to remember how
dangerous that was now that they were thirty feet up a jagged cliff with what
could easily be two thousand feet yet to go. The climbing continued.

Mara opened up
her backpack and started getting ready. Some of the others had brought helmets
with lamps set right in them, and that was a neat trick, but they hadn’t been
selling any in the village store where Mara had bought all her gear. She’d have
to make do with flashlights and duct tape. Sure, it looked goofy—

The overweight
fellow from France or Switzerland or wherever he was from lost his footing and
fell shrieking to a sudden, silent stop not far from the first guy, who
promptly started getting hysterical again.

—but it sure
beat climbing blind. Mara switched each light on and taped them tightly to her
body: one over the top of each wrist, and one over the toe of each boot. She
tucked her knife into her pocket, took a climbing pick from the belt of the
very messily-dead French guy, and started up.

*
         
*
         
*

Funny how the
hours fly by when you only have one night to do something. By Mara’s best guess
(and she didn’t put much faith in it), the opening where the figures waited was
a good half-mile over a mostly sheer drop onto the rocky shore of a very deep
lake. A bad climb, particularly when the other climbers were so determined to
see the competition killed, but certainly not one that should take all thirteen
hours of night to complete.

But an hour went
by, and Mara had gained only two hundred feet. Another hour added scarcely half
that to her total. She had underestimated the cold, the numbness of her frozen
fingers, the watery sensation that would seep into her arms after only a few
minutes, no matter how long she rested. Pain and physical discomfort—conditions
she had grown accustomed to avoiding in the Panic Room—gnawed steadily at her
reserves. She couldn’t hide away from them now. She depended on her tactile
senses too much to leave her body, even for an instant.

Over the night,
the climbers spread themselves out over the mountain and they were mostly quiet,
laboring under their own efforts rather than undermining anyone else’s. Mara
checked on them as routinely as she checked her own footing, making certain she
didn’t wander within reach. Many stones were thrown. She could sense each one
coming, of course, but there was nothing she could do about it except to try
and protect her head. One of them clipped her in the ear despite her best
efforts, and another hit her hand, necessitating a rapid retreat to a safe jut
of rock where she could rest until she got her grip back. She did not throw
stones back at them. As much nasty pleasure as she knew it would give her to
watch one of the troublemakers plummet to his death, Mara was not a killer.

The Americans
continued to make the best time, particularly after they cut their injured teammate
free. He fell like a sandbag into the lake, thrashed briefly, and was gone. The
girl didn’t seem any more emotional about it than she’d been when she’d taken
the man into her tent last night. The remaining teammates climbed rapidly,
leapfrogging like experts in spite of the rain and leaving the rest of them far
behind. Half a mile straight up was nothing to those two. They were there well
before midnight.

At the lip of
their destination, the man stopped and unhooked the girl from his harness. Mara
felt no surprise from anyone. He kicked her in the face; the girl swung her arm
and buried the steel bill of her pick in his thigh. Mara, resting for the
moment on a ledge, raised her arm and shone a spotlight on the battle for
everyone to watch, and everyone did. They made very little sound, no doubt
having exerted themselves too heavily on the climb. The girl took her lumps
like a prizefighter and kept that pick swinging until his thigh was nothing but
raw hamburger squeezed through a denim tube and her face was painted with
blood. Her last blow caught him in the groin and it was all over. He lost his
grip and dropped, managing only a single strangled cry that seemed, to Mara’s
ears anyway, more angry than anything else. He fell, smacking meatily into the
cliff-side twice before breaking on the rocks below. Hoarse, terrified squawks
rolled up the mountain from the man with a broken leg lying at its bottom, and
the girl finished the race alone.

The other
climbers froze, some of them wailing out protests, but the portal that opened
into the mountainside did not vanish, as some had believed. The light, and the
figures within it, remained.

Mara, safe on
her ledge, gave in to curiosity. She reached up and tapped at the girl’s mind,
already receding into the mineral-rich baffle of the mountain. She caught a
tangled glimpse of color, light and shadow, the ferocious joy of the victor,
and the taste of blood in her mouth, but nothing telling, nothing really that
needed to be seen.

And it was still
such a long way to go.

Mara rubbed her
shoulders, kicked ice carefully off each boot, and swung herself up and onward.
She stared only at the rock beneath her frozen, bloodied hands. She kept her
mind in wary motion and did not waste its energies on empty speculation. She
climbed and the night passed.

Just seeing that
the way remained open to them had a calming effect upon the other pilgrims. There
were no other rocks thrown. After another hour (marked only because someone’s
watch beeped), another climber reached the top. He staggered away from the
ledge, raised his arms and roared. In his mind, he was a bear, an invincible
and victorious bear, which Mara thought was a bizarre sort of connection to
make, but okay, it made him happy, let the man be a bear.

Sometime between
then and the end of the hour, screams came up the mountain from below. A pack
of wolves had come for the corpses, and found the man and his broken leg. Mara
gripped the rock and shut her eyes, not daring to retreat to the Panic Room,
forced to endure the sight of teeth, the pungent stink of their bodies, the
persistent way they circled and lunged and circled and bit and how it felt when
the black one caught his leg and wrenched it back and forth and back and forth
and then ran away, pulling the meat right out of his pant-leg with a
shwooop-ing sound. Screaming, screaming, he didn’t really have the voice to
scream forever, but when he stopped screaming, the wolves came skittering back
to him, so he kept trying but the big brave black one came back and tore out
the throat that was making all the noise, and after that, no one heard the
screams but Mara and the dying man himself.

She couldn’t
stay here, hugging the mountain. It wasn’t a ledge, wasn’t safe, and the hours
were rolling by. Mara shook her head, shook it harder, picked up a handful of
ice and rubbed it over her face. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever felt a man
die, wasn’t even the worst and most painful way to go (which would surely be no
consolation to the man who had just suffered it), and Connie still needed her. She
only had one night and the night was almost over. Mara dragged herself into
focus and climbed.

A third man
reached the portal, but he didn’t get over the edge. Someone—
Three! Only
three can enter!
—threw his climbing pick, which went end over end in
perfect circles and dug itself in to the hilt square in the back of the man’s
skull. Mara’s vision swam dangerously, eclipsed by a sudden sheet of white
light, the sharp smell of lemons, and the meaningless fragment of memory that
came to him as his brain split itself open—
red ball flying green grass green
and yellow and the dog runs runs and jumps and
catches
ball good dog o
good doggie love is o love is everywhere
—and then he was dead and falling.

Mara waited
until the nausea passed, and then waited for the killer to reach the ledge
ahead of her and rise triumphant into the light. He’d had another climbing
pick. With him out of the way and only a few other pilgrims on the mountain,
Mara gathered up what was left of her strength and made her final ascent.

Another hour came
and went in electronic beeping. She knew the end was near, not because she
could see anything—all her attention was focused on finding that next handhold,
on keeping the strength in her weakening arms, on pushing herself up on her
watery legs—but because she could see it in their minds, the minds of the
figures in the light. She guessed she was only ten feet down. Not much. Might
as well be a mile if the sun broke over those mountains.

The sky was
turning blue. Not her imagination then, but the sun rising on the pagan new
year. The day that stood outside the wheel of time was ending and the door, she
was certain, was about to close.

She took
chances. She told herself she wouldn’t and she took them anyway. Rocks slipped,
skittering away into silence below her, but somehow she stayed up and went on. She
could see herself now in the eyes of the watchers. They knew she was going to
make it, and now so did she.

They didn’t say
anything, these watching people. There were no jeers or catcalls, no cries of
comradely encouragement, only silence. Their minds were ordered, but not
disciplined, exactly. She’d touched the minds of marines, of policemen, of
Buddhist monks. She knew self-control and self-assurance, but this was
different. Quiet had been pressed into these people who watched her, carved
into them. They were fear shaped into a mask of stillness, shaped until
resignation became ritual. Mara thought, heaving herself determinedly towards
them, of rabbits and the way they stand so still as they watch the car bear
down on them. But Mara wasn’t the car in this analogy. She knew it and so did
they. The car was all around them. They were driving at the wheel themselves.

Her hand caught
flat stone, solid stone. The ledge. The end of the climb. The finish. She
looked up now, for the first time, and looked at them. Men. Just men. Two
women. Some old and etched by time, most ridiculously young and good-looking. All
in plain black dresses. Robes. As in, ‘see how magic we are in our magic robes?’
She wondered if Connie had been impressed. She thought the answer was probably
yes.

No one helped
her up and over. She didn’t need their help. She staggered forward on solid,
forgiving ground, into the open mouth of the tunnel. The other three climbers
were waiting inside, as bruised and breathless as she. The American girl had
taken her shirt off and had used it to soak up the blood on her face. Mara unwrapped
her flashlights—batteries were dying anyway, cheap Romanian things—and found
room in her pockets to wedge them. She could hear cries on the mountainside;
the sun was rising. They were begging for time, alternately cursing and
pleading, all without hope.

Mara touched the
rock of the ancient doorway, holding it to steady her. She leaned out and
looked for daylight.

‘Remember this,’
she thought grimly, and was instantly furious with herself for tolling doom’s
bell. Furious, but she looked. She saw the slivers of glowing peach/rose sun
rising like a bubble over the dark crust of the mountains. She saw the sky
washed out to a pastel impression of itself, painted thick with bruise-colored
columns of clouds. She saw morning come, saw it stealing through the sky above
and reflected in the lake below.

Wordlessly, the
robed men and women began to file inside. Mara let go of the doorway and went
with them. While her back was turned, the door closed. There was no heavy grinding
sound or resonating clang to echo in her ears, only darkness, sudden and
silent, and she knew herself to be trapped inside.

*
         
*
         
*

No torches lined
the walls of this passage and the sallow-faced watchers carried no candles. The
only light came from widely-interspersed bubbles of glowing gold that grew out
of the rock itself. Each was nearly half Mara’s own height, bloated and not quite
symmetrical. The rock somehow came in right over the edges of these fixtures,
if they were fixtures, and so gave them the tumorous appearance of something
that had grown out of the rock itself. They flickered, not steadily and not
often, but now and then, making the shadows of the grim welcome party and their
new-come applicants dance high on the ceilings. Mara paused once, daring
herself to touch one, but her arm was taken before she could and she did not
resist it.

In silence, they
were taken deeper in the mountain, past the last of the glowing blisters and
into perfect darkness. No sound but their own footsteps met their ears; no
voices, only their own ragged breathing. ‘Pageantry,’ she thought, and wondered
how Connie had felt, walking this hall at last after so many years of searching.
The minds around her were divided: some cloaked in that unnatural quiet,
deadening the vague scorn they shared for these interlopers, the others
jangling with trepidation and triumph in equal measure.

A light sparked
ahead of them—a single line drawing itself downward through the darkness. A
door, opening for them at the crown of a slight rise. Light washed over them
and like the others, Mara raised her hand to shield her eyes from its piercing
glare.

Contempt struck her
first: a watching, anticipant sense of superiority. She honed in on it, saw
herself through his eyes as another bedraggled and ignorant creature, unworthy
of the honor
he
had earned on his arrival. No, there were no peers here.
He saw sheep and wished for slaughter, and instead he must sit here and give
them welcome, he must take their names and set them down in the book where his
own had been penned, he must bring them in as though they were equals.