The Scholomance (10 page)

Mara paced, her
hands uselessly pressed over her psychic ears. Screaming, screaming…and the
worst of it was, she was beginning to understand it.

Oh, she still
couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t separate single words or pictures out of the
wholeness, but understanding came anyway. Thoughts she didn’t want, thoughts
that sickened her, breathed themselves into her mind like maggots chewing free
of bloated corpse-flesh. Not all of it was in English. In fact, most of it was
not, but that didn’t stop her from knowing things.

Mara returned to
the monitors so she’d have something to look at, something that was hers and
free of obscenity, hoping the sight of her fainted body would help to ground
her. It did, sort of. She couldn’t look around with her eyes closed, and still
covered by that stupid hood, most likely. She had only a vague impression of
the way her arms and legs were sprawled, floating like a ghost-image over one
screen. She couldn’t even tell if she’d soiled herself.

‘I can’t lie
there like that all day,’ she thought. ‘I’ll be harrowed to death in my damn
sleep.’

Or worse (if
there was anything worse). Anything could be happening out there. She switched
on her dreams, but there were none, only screams. She switched them off again.

“If you survive
it,” the woman had said, but people didn’t die here, Mara knew that now. They
went mad. They went mad and they were grateful when it finally happened.

“I have to get
up,” Mara muttered. From the Panic Room, it was possible to make her body do
things even when she wasn’t at the helm, so to speak, but she’d always at least
been conscious. She had to wake herself up and how was she supposed to find a
way to concentrate with that damned scream eating up her brain?

She’d better. She
couldn’t afford to be helpless in this place. After all, she wasn’t alone out
there. Somewhere, there was supposed to be a librarian, and anyone who could do
anything as prosaic as organize books while listening to this could not
possibly mean any good for Mara. What if he’d already seen her? What if he were
coming for her right now?

Mara returned to
the monitor where her body sprawled in its ignominious heap. She bent over it,
staring into her own slack face, and willed those stupid eyes to open.

Screaming,
screaming. She understood all at once the true and obvious science behind the
blueness of the sky, after years of taking it on faith that light bent or
something on its way through the atmosphere. The information boiled in her as
she endured an onslaught of perfectly sound reasons how a six-year old boy
could be sexy, could in fact be coquettish, could even practically demand to be
taken out into the woods and—

Mara’s body on
the monitor kicked unconsciously and spat out a little frothy bile. So
something was getting through.

‘Wake up,’ she
thought at it, and then, as if it were the living doors of the Oubliette, Mara
slapped her hands down on the flat surface of the monitor and hammered at it,
shoved at it: ‘
Wake up
! Get up, you idiot! Wake up and start acting like
you can
save
someone, for God’s sake! Wake
up
!’

Mara-in-the-monitor
kicked again, then blurred. The screams seemed to double in volume. The air
inside the Panic Room grew dark and heavy.

And then her
eyes were open and she was looking out of them.

Her first breath
was a choking swallow and it ended badly as she rolled onto her side and puked
what little there was in her out onto the floor. It didn’t help. The air was
still thick, as if the silent screams she was still hearing had enough
substance out here to taste. An oily, salty, rancid taste.

Suddenly, she
understood Analytic Number Theory, not just as some abstract concept tossed off
in the back of a textbook in her Senior mathematics class, but as a fact. As a
fact she could
prove
. It would involve only the study of the Riemann
zeta function, as defined on half the complex plane as the sum 1 + 1/2
^s
+ 1/3
^s
+ 1/4
^s
+ …well, and so on, but the
important thing was that zeta is never zero, except along the line Re(s)=1/2, or
at the negative even integers, and if that was true—

Where was she? Mara
found her knees and managed to push herself about halfway up before she noticed
that the heaviness in her limbs wasn’t entirely psychological. Someone had come
along while she’d been out and clapped her in irons, by God. Iron rings around
both her ankles connected by a thick length of chain, which in turn connected
her to a table. The rings were reasonably loose, not so much that she had a
prayer of getting them off, but enough to wear comfortably, if one could use
that word to describe an set of irons and a hundred pounds of chain.

She looked for
the door she’d entered through and found it clear across the room, closed. Carved
on this side were characters, alien lettering she could not comprehend. Not
yet.

She saw herself
suddenly, as from a great height, on her hands and knees with one bare foot
sticking out from a fold of red robe. Mara jerked her head up, and high above
her, past several flights of stairs and balconies, Horuseps watched her.

Another wave of
knowledge crashed into her—sailing and smelting steel and the cellular
structure of irradiated wheat and how to turn coal into diamond in an instant,
an
instant
! Mara retched dryly, spat, and shivered it out until it broke
in her like a fever. The demon was gone when she looked up again, but he was
here somewhere. She could feel him moving like an oil slick across the tossing
waters of all these other minds.

Mara stood. It
took a lot of effort, as if she were pushing against an invisible yoke on her
shoulders. Even upright, she swayed, badly off-balance. The floor seemed tilted
when she wasn’t looking directly at it; the walls bulged at the corners of her
eyes.

‘I’ve been
poisoned.’

That was what it
felt like: a cloud of heavy, toxic gas. Mara made herself look around, made
herself concentrate beyond the screams and the pressure and the fits of
illogical knowing that battered her.

She saw a
library. Just a library.

The room was not
quite round, not quite squared. Egg-shaped, maybe. Its two widest walls were
bookshelves, shelves that towered over her until the spines of those books at
the top blurred into a single stripe of color. At the narrowest curve of the room
were cupboards, some open to offer sparing glimpses of bookmaking supplies—inkwells,
sheaves of paper, bolts of colored leather, unburned candles. At the other,
stairwells rose out of this miasmic Hell. Students in black robes lounged at
the railings, watching her and the other initiates suffering here below the way
casually cruel boys will study the effects of flies once their wings are
pulled. All across the floor, red-robed figures worked, sitting quietly at
tables to write, dragging their chains behind them when they went for fresh
paper, and occasionally conferring in whispers that were somehow perfectly
audible over the never-ending screams. They had no faces, these initiates, only
hoods pulled low over shadows. Their hands were blackened, gloved by ink. Some
were bandaged and Mara knew at once, the way she knew so many things, that they
had written their fingers, quite literally, to the bone.

For him. For the
librarian. The Scrivener.

He sat at the
center of the room, doing nothing: a great, heaving mass of wet, brown flesh,
pulsing with dozens of open, lidless, frost-filmed eyes. He seemed to have a
head, he
seemed
to, but the rest of him was just a mountain enclosed on
all sides by a circular desk. There appeared to be no hinge, no access panel to
let him in or out. The Scrivener sat, his gelatinous head bobbing slowly,
complacent in his containment. His head turned blindly toward her. Beams of
purposeless knowledge hammered against her and moved on, leaving her to stagger
into a table.

He was the source
of it all,
him
, the unthinking transmitter of all this poisonous,
deafening thought. He radiated it. The air around him actually shimmered if she
stared hard enough, showing her the flow of his idiot omniscience.

A hand stroked
once down her hair. She knew it for Horuseps—knew it because she couldn’t
not
know—and she yanked her hood down and over her eyes reflexively. She heard him
chuckle. The sound made her think incongruously of spiders mating. His hand
came into view before her, his fingers gracefully offering a steel-nubbed
quill. The tip swelled with ink, forming a single pregnant drop that refused to
fall.

She took it and
found a table with an unattended book, a bottle of ink, and a thick sheave of
unbound paper. She touched the paper first—twice the size of a standard sheet,
very thick and soft, it seemed more like cloth than paper. She’d had a letter
once written on paper like this. She’d come to find the girl who wrote it. A
girl who would always be younger than Mara, a girl who would always need
saving. She put that image before her and held on to it, drawing strength and
will until the trembling of her hands and the aching of her mind could be
overcome.

Mara sat down. She
opened the book.
Breaking the Moon
, it was called. It was not written in
English, but she understood it anyway. She had to, here in the Scrivener’s
service.
 
Horuseps patted her shoulder
and drifted away toward the stairs. Mara kicked her chains underneath the table
where they couldn’t trip anyone, dipped her quill, and began to write.

*
         
*
         
*

The things she
wrote were terrible things. She tried not to pay attention to them. She spent
as much of her time as she could in the Panic Room, supervising her body’s work
from this place of relative quiet. She got to know the other aspirants because
they were here, all around her, seeping in through her pores, but she did not
try to talk to them. They were not nice people to know.

Mara was given a
cup at some point. The man who brought it was named Alim Muhammad and he had
come seeking a way to summon djinni in an age when even he did not truly
believe in them. Now he believed, but now he feared the summons. He did not
want to leave and he did not want to learn anything more. He dreamed of the
Black Door opening and taking him in with teeth made of fire. All this, Mara
knew. She drank it in with her water. She ignored it and she wrote.

Bells rang. She
forgot to count them, but she did rouse herself on hearing them to fetch fresh
ink and a candle. Her movements were followed by the Scrivener. His huge head
swung slowly after her until she stopped walking. He had a mouth. It opened to
emit a saurian grunt. Part of his side bulged outward into a boneless arm that
groped at the air for a second until he became distracted and took it back in,
turning away. His interest was bearable only because there was nothing in it to
touch, only a stupid intent without reason, absolute awareness without a mind.

Sometime later,
as she dimly recalled being promised, bread was brought. In the Scrivener’s
company, Mara could have no appetite, but she ate it anyway. The bread was
tough, brick-hard and mud-brown, gritty. The man who gave it to her was named
Shome Akai. He had come from a village of crushing poverty, father of seven
starving children. He had killed one of them, his most beloved son, as part of
a spell that he had been promised would bring wealth. It hadn’t. In the
darkness, before his crime could be discovered, he had fed the flesh of his son
to dogs, and then fled. Sometimes he dreamed of dogs with human faces, dogs who
cried out to him in human voices. Sometimes it was a dog who took him, a dog
who laughed with Master Madrek’s mouth and bit, bit, bit at the back of his
neck.

Mara stayed in
the Panic Room, making her body eat as she stared thoughtfully into the monitor
that showed her these tangled, doom-swept thoughts when another flickered to
life. Horuseps, coming towards her. She braced herself as best she was able and
dropped back into her body to meet him.

She managed not
to vomit, but it was a near thing. Mara stared into her open book and was a
thousand miles away, a lump of newly-budded tissue and blood suddenly hooked
and ripped apart, ripped away, and it was aware, yes, aware of pain if nothing
else, and she was its weary mother also, back on this filthy table and
thinking, ‘That’s done, that’s over again and I can be back at work in half an
hour.’ She was fetus-pain and mother-relief and she was the infection already
creeping in, the infection that would kill in three months’ time, but not
before she spread the virus to another hundred unknown men, not before she
spawned another swimming, mindless, hopeful lump to die with her in baffled
agony.

A covered tray
appeared before her. Mara looked at it, then up into the face of the
black-robed student who had set it down. ‘Your name is Aaron Micheals,’ she
thought without emotion. ‘You had sex with your sister once when you found her
passed out after a party. And then you got her drunk to do it again, but she
never passed out all the way, did she? She just got sick enough to need to go
to the hospital, just sick enough to come back from it unable to talk straight
or write or take herself to the toilet. You tell yourself you’re here to learn
how to fix her, to fix what you did to her, but that’s not what you’re
studying, is it? You’re studying with Master Letha, you’re studying the art of
Allure, so that you’ll never need to make them drunk again, you’ll just make
them want you.’

The tray was
uncovered. Horuseps passed a hand over it, solicitous as a game show hostess
telling her what she might win. Beneath the lid were several objects, arranged
in a neat, tight circle: a jade frog, a silver thimble, a painted clay cup, a
golden egg-shaped censer, and a scrimshawed shark’s tooth.