The Scholomance (73 page)

Never mind. She
had exhausted her limited imagination as far as the search went, but the search
wasn’t everything. She pushed it all aside now and focused instead on the next
step, the last step: How to get out.

It was a
comforting thought, and if it was less about taking Connie away than leaving
Kazuul behind, so be it. At least it didn’t make her angry. She was so tired of
always being angry.

How was she
planning to leave, anyway? She’d made it out as far as the pblister-lamportcullis
before. She could do it again, Malleate herself an opening, and climb down the
way she’d come. There might be nephalim on the mountain. If she believed
Kazuul, there surely would be, and they’d be the starving, savage reavers. She
hadn’t been able to sense it, but she guessed she could kill one. As long as
they didn’t overwhelm her—

Mara looked back
bleakly to that grueling midnight climb and tried to imagine it again in the
snow, every hand- and toe-hold coated in ice, with Connie perhaps clutching at
her all the way down, and suddenly a reaver leaping out of the howling wind. Who
was she kidding? She’d have two or three seconds to regret her decision as she
plummeted to the ground, and maybe a few fragments of dying thought before she
went to the place all would-be wizards and orange cats ultimately go.

Where then? Behind
the Black Door, presumably, there lay some safe passage down and out of the
mountain, but the Black Door could not be opened. Not by her, at any rate. It
might be possible for her to tunnel under or around, but Mara was not so
unimaginative that she couldn’t picture those black fireworks spraying out of
the wall or the floor as lethally as they had from the door.

Perhaps there
was a passage leading to the garden from the kitchens. Those doors weren’t much
different from the ones on the students’ cells, and she’d only have whoever or
whatever worked on the other side to deal with. Of course, assuming she
survived that fight and found the passage, where would it lead but up to the
top of the mountain, not the bottom? She’d still have the climb to deal with,
and the weather, and Connie, and the reavers.

Maybe she could
find the source of water that flowed through the garderobe and follow it out.

She thought
about that, picturing in perfect detail how it would be to kneel beside the
foul opening of the garderobe and Malleate it wide enough for her and Connie to
drop through.

Ugh.

Maybe it
wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe everything dropped into a river and was carried right
away.

Maybe.

Why the
garderobe, Mara wondered suddenly. Why not the baths? The water poured through
that room too, and it was a hell of a lot cleaner when it passed through those
vents and away into parts unseen. Why did her mind always go first to the
garderobe?

Because of the
sound it made, she realized. The water fell into the bathing pool and out
through the overflow vents, which sounded like nothing but a channel to take
the water away, but what fell out of the garderobe fell into someplace big. Not
just a cistern, but a room, maybe. And where there was one room, there could be
others.

That was
something worth investigating.

She really,
really didn’t want to crawl through a latrine tonight. That she was considering
it at all seemed to her less of a plan than a rare moment of regret. She’d
probably set the Master of the Hounds up to receive a spike through his chest,
but that was no reason to jump in a puddle of shit.

Probably. There
was an interesting choice of word. There was no ‘probably’ in what she’d done
with Suti’ok, no blurring of possible outcomes, no spreading of blame. The
whole reason she’d tried to put Devlin at arm’s length had been Kazuul’s
possessive temper. She didn’t mind so much using that temper against Argoth for
feeling her up under the dinner table, but what had Suti’ok done except turn
the wrong corner to find her in a bad mood?

It was the first
time she’d ever used sex as a weapon, and for that matter, it was the first
time she’d ever aimed any kind of weapon at a man just for screwing around on
her. On the contrary, a man who didn’t believe in monogamy was prime meat when
Mara went prowling. There was never any annoying clinging-on or awkward
attempts at meaningful conversation with that sort, just sex.

“I’m not
jealous,” Mara muttered, and no, she wasn’t, but she was fairly annoyed with
herself. After all, what difference did it make in the matter of the ultimate
goal who Kazuul slept with, as long as he still wanted her? Wasn’t the whole
damn point keeping his good favor so that she could find Connie? Wasn’t she
supposed to be willing to do anything to keep it? And if she wasn’t, well for
God’s sake, what did you call that but jealousy?

“Go away,” Mara
said loudly, alone in her empty room.

Horuseps opened
her door anyway. He looked around at the cell as he pushed it gently closed
behind him, and then he folded his hands and offered her a smile. “You’ve made
some changes since last I was here. Very well done.”

“Since last you
were sent to extort me back to him, you mean.” Mara gave him a hard stare. “Has
he decided to put me in chains after all?”

“He doesn’t know
I’m here.” Horuseps seated himself beside her, crossing one leg gracefully over
the other in a distinctly feminine fashion. “I doubt he’d approve if he did. You
left him in something of a passion, I’m told. I’m sure he thinks you’re apt to
leap on the first man you see and take the most petty possible revenge.”

The demon
chuckled while Mara stared straight ahead and said nothing, did nothing. The
cell was larger than it had been, but was not big enough to smother her
silence. Horuseps quieted, ran a finger along one of the seams of his armored
leg-plates, and finally sighed.

“We can only be
what we are.” He glanced at her. “I said that to you earlier.”

“I remember.”

“It’s very true,
you know.”

“Are you going
to tell me it’s just Kazuul’s nature to be an unmitigated ass?” she asked
sourly.

He looked at
her, both eyebrows spiking straight out from his head, and then laughed. “No,”
he said finally, still smiling. “I can honestly say that I would never dream of
telling anyone that. But neither is it in his nature to refuse or even question
the tribute that is offered him. And it is very much in Letha’s nature to offer
such tribute, particularly when she feels threatened. She will always use her
body before she bares her claws.”

“I don’t care if
she fucks him,” Mara insisted, no longer absolutely certain this was true.

Horuseps smiled
at her. “Make up your mind, precious,” he said, not unkindly.

“What I care
about,” she said slowly, “is that he fucked her.”

They sat
together in silence that was not quite quiet. She could feel him thinking about
what to say next, stirring through arguments like they were pebbles in his
tombola, hoping for one to shine out brighter than the rest. It had to be the
truth, that was the unpleasant thing. It had to be the truth, because she was
well beyond the point of forgiving a lie.

“Would you like
to hear something funny?” Mara asked.

He gave her a
cautious look. “All right.”

“From the day I
met him, I knew better than to ever be with him,” she said. “When he told me to
come back that very first time, I knew to stay away.”

Horuseps shrugged
one shoulder and nodded.

“But he kept
after me and kept after me…so I gave in, hoping he’d get what he wanted, and
even if I didn’t get anything in return, at least he’d leave me alone. And I
guess he did, but only because he was too busy mutilating anyone he thought
could come between us. That’s a bad sign in any new relationship,” Mara said
dryly, and Horuseps smiled. “But I went back to him. I went back so that he
could call me names, call Connie names, and run me out of his room laughing at
me, and I
never
should have gone back again, but…you convinced me. You
really are good at that.”

Horuseps rolled
his hand modestly through the air, then patted her knee.

“So I went back.
But I wasn’t abject enough in my devotion, and he was forced to humiliate me
over dinner. I never should have gone back after that, and I never would have,
if I hadn’t gotten hurt. He seemed to think that looking after me gave him the
right to keep me, and when I walked away, he went after Devlin.” Mara glanced
aside at her empty bookshelves where Devlin had put her food. There was nothing
left now, of course. Not even crumbs. “I don’t care how many days of lessons
the man missed, that was still a dirty trick. Was it your idea?”

“Mine? Oh
dearest, no. I tried to talk him out of it.” His hand was still on her knee,
telling her it was the truth. He rubbed it back and forth in a distracted sort
of way, then noticed what he was doing and took it back. “I might have had some
success if only you hadn’t let him
sleep
with you. Honestly, Mara.”

“It wasn’t like
that.”

“I thought…if I
could show him the boy was gone…” Horuseps shook his head. “But you let him in
your bed, and that was all the unmitigated ass would hear.”

“So he called a tribunal
and he made me choose between watching a man get disemboweled or going back to
the man who could think that choice up. And I…I went back to him. I went back
and I stayed with him, in spite of everything. And if you look close and squint
your eyes…” Mara demonstrated, stone-faced. She wasn’t good at making jokes. “…you
can sort of see a pattern forming.”

Horuseps raised
his eyebrows slightly, tingeing the Mindstorm with very very cautious
encouragement. “Does that mean you’ll be going back?”

She shot him a
dark stare. “What it means,
precious
, is that much as I’d love to tell
you he’s made a fool of me for the last time, I am confronted with the
inescapable truth that he never made a fool of me without my help. That’s an
ugly thing to sit with in the dark for as long as I have today.”

“This is
starting to sound less and less like acquiescence,” Horuseps remarked, still
smiling.

“I had just
begun to come to terms with the idea that all he wanted from me was sex. Well,
he can get that from anyone, clearly. He can get it from
her
.” Mara’s
lip curled on its own. She smoothed it out with effort and was calm. “Do you
know what he told me when I walked in on the two of them? Do you know what he
wanted his last words to be in that fight?”

Horuseps took a
deep breath and let it out slowly. “I suppose you’d best tell me,” he said.

“He called me
his dog.”

The demon raised
his hand, made half a fist, then opened it again and covered his eyes. Whatever
emotion there had been at the start of that gesture washed itself out in a wave
of rueful humor. “No, he neglected to mention that.”

“He made such a
big goddamn deal out of my not being his whore so that he could call me his
dog.” Mara thought about that, rubbing restlessly at the lip of her empty bed. “That
makes sense, in a way. You have to pay for whores. You can kick dogs for free.”

“Oh Mara.” He sighed
at her, then reached and brushed the back of his glass-smooth hand against her
cheek. “He does want you back, bittersweet.”

“I don’t care,”
she said, “about what he wants. I have reached the point where I don’t even
care what
I
want as long as he doesn’t get what
he
wants, can you
understand that?”

“Oh yes,” said
Horuseps, almost laughing, but not quite.

“And he says I’m
not going crazy, but I have had—I have
embraced
—the very irrational
thought that while I’m still not willing to leave this place without Connie, I
would cheerfully make him mad enough to kill me if it meant he’d never get to
fuck me again.” Mara shook her head, marveling at these words just as if she
hadn’t been the one to speak them. “Have you ever heard of the Stanford prison
experiment?”

“No.”

“In 1971, some
professor of sociology on the other side of the world used college students to
prove that monsters breed in dark places.” She frowned. “There was more to it
when Devlin told me about it, but that’s the gist of it. Not exactly shocking,
is it?” The lamp in the tunnel began to dim again. Mara watched the light fade
through her narrow cell window. “People are so full of dark places,” she said.

Horuseps glanced
around. The lamplight flared and shone out more brightly. He looked at her
again, head canted, thoughtful. “I’m listening.”

“I know you are.
That’s probably the most dangerous thing about talking to you. I’m going to
tell you one more thing, and then I’m going to ask you to leave. I could make
you,” Mara said calmly, “but I’m just going to ask.”

“I appreciate
that.”

“I’m going to
tell you about my father,” she went on, “because he has been the thought that
kept coming to me as I sat here being angry at Kazuul, and I think I mentioned
that I don’t, generally speaking, think about people.”

“You did.”

“My father had a
way of looking at women, you see. He didn’t hate them and he certainly didn’t
love them, he just saw them differently. He fucked a lot of them, but by the
time he got around to fucking them, he almost didn’t have to anymore. He
already knew he owned them.

“This was the
thing his girlfriends never understood about him,” Mara said, looking back
through the Panic Room at the girls—and there had been so many girls—pulled
over the years from Cade Warner’s unguarded mind. “Some of them slept with him
because they thought he’d advance their careers and some because they thought
he’d give them nice presents, but all my father wanted was sex, and he knew he
was going to get it pretty much as soon as he met them. They were his dogs, you
see, even if he never thought of them in precisely those terms. They came when
he called them, did the tricks he taught them, and when he was done, he left
them by the side of the road and got himself a new dog.”