The Scholomance (11 page)

Horuseps spoke
while Mara studied these. It wasn’t English this time. The words twisted in her
mind, wanting to catch, but their meaning eluded her.

Horuseps waited
for a while, then heaved a theatrical sigh, turning his hands up in a gesture
of resignation. His palms were unlined. He had no fingerprints. He covered the
tray and his black-robed assistant picked it up. The incestuous Mr. Micheals
took two steps after the demon, bent unexpectedly to vomit down his own front,
and then had to stagger to catch up.

At the next
table, Mara watched as the scene played itself out again. The initiate to whom
Horuseps addressed himself did not respond, not even when touched. He/She just
kept writing. Horuseps waited and finally moved on. His assistant gathered the
tray, vomited again, and this time fell sluggishly over in the mess.

Horuseps,
without turning, raised an arm and laconically waved to the stairwell. Mara
tracked the general path of his beckoning hand and saw a silent group of
students whispering at each other. One of them came forward, easing down the
stairs with a look of repugnance, as if she were stepping into a pool of hot
human waste and not a library. The newcomer made her way to her fallen
colleague, covered her ears briefly, then picked up the tray and its strange
artifacts, and moved quickly to the demon’s side.

The next initiate
listened closely to whatever Horuseps had to say, then looked at the tray. His
face, even the little bit Mara could see of it, was a portrait of anguish—a
drowning man looking at a bit of rope dangling just out of reach. Hesitant at
first, then with a sudden desperate rush, he reached out and took the shark’s
tooth. He looked at Horuseps—the demon merely watched, smiling—and placed it
with a shaking hand on top of the frog.

Horuseps glanced
back and locked eyes with Mara, as if to see for himself that she was paying
attention. His smile broadened when he saw she was. Then, without warning, he
swept his clawless fingers across the initiate’s face, shearing it open to the
bone. The initiate fell back, arms raised and wildly waving. One of his eyes
split and poured down his cheek, through his cheek, and out his screaming
mouth. He spat, retched, then seized the chains connecting him to this terrible
place and began yanking and beating at them in a state of pure hysteria. His
fingers broke. One of them may have gotten caught in a link and ripped clean
off, but he was not aware of it and so Mara couldn’t be sure. He scratched and
pulled and screamed and screamed, and Horuseps moved on, holding out his hand delicately
for his assistant to wipe clean on her sleeve.

Movement. Mara
jerked around and saw the Scrivener leaning out over his desk, his head
unerringly aimed at the shrieking, thrashing man on the library floor. The
front of his body spewed out an arm to take his weight as he shifted himself
forward. He grunted again, a sound of grotesque eagerness, then muttered and
sank back behind the desk, temporarily lost.

Another test,
then. She didn’t appear to have passed this one, but at least she hadn’t failed.
Mara looked down. The pen was still in her hand, still resting where it had
stopped on her half-finished page: the formula and ritual for the creation of a
bottle-bred homunculus, translated from whatever this was into English. Time,
turning pages, and candlesmoke would wear away these words someday and some
other aspirant would spend his harrowing copying it over, effortlessly turning
English into his own native tongue. And Horuseps would still be here, playing
his inconceivable games with thimbles and frogs.

“I play no
games, young one. Not here, at any rate.” A thin, black hand touched the book,
turned it slightly at an angle so that, presumably, he could read it. “Elsewhere,
many.”

Mara
straightened the book with a curt tug and wrote a few words. It didn’t bother
her that he’d heard those thoughts. It was always wise to keep a few out where
someone could see them, particularly if you know yourself to be in the company
of telepaths. If there was treasure at your feet, one was far less inclined to
dig.

“You look well,”
Horuseps commented, still standing behind her. “Much better than your fellows,
and heaven knows, some of them have had long enough to acclimate. Who is Ka-nee?”

Mara’s pen
jerked hard, leaving a black fork of lightning across her printed page. Angrily,
she wadded it up, and threw it across the room. The Scrivener’s head snapped
around to follow it; he panted hard, perhaps laughing.

“Fear not,
child. Your mind remains fascinatingly closed to me, for the most part. But
things, oh, things have a way of slipping out in the library.”

“Don’t you have
somewhere else to be?” Mara asked tightly.

“Not
particularly. I dismissed my students early.” His fingers scuttled along her scalp.
“And I would much rather spend my time with you.”

“Charmer.”

“Mmm.” He was
quiet, but not still. His hands moved over her freely, imperious as a man
stroking his pet cat. “Look around you,” he said suddenly. “I command it. Look
and tell me what you see.”

No student may
refuse a Master’s command. Mara tapped her pen sourly against the table and
looked around. Through the haze of the Scrivener’s toxic aura, she saw aspiring
students working. A few still had bread to eat. A few slept on their arms on
the tables or lay in senseless heaps on the floor. A number of black-robed
students watched from the higher floors—some with expressions of contemptuous
enjoyment, but most watched only Horuseps and looked very much as if they
wished to be gone. The Scrivener sat inside his desk, rolling his hundred eyes
and grunting to himself in idiot joy. What did she see? What was there to see? It
was the Scholomance, that was all. The world’s wealth of knowledge compressed
into one room so that it could be made into shiftwork for infant magicians. Priceless
books, books any one of those watching from above would have once killed to
possess (and some had), now shuffled from shelf to shelf, practically
untouched, essentially unread. She could be copying a phone book for all anyone
would ever know.

“I see a joke,”
she said, dipping her quill. “And it isn’t funny.”

“An astute
observation,” Horuseps murmured, playing with her hair again. “But not quite
what I was looking for. To put another way, my dearest, what is it you think we
do here?”

“You harrow
people.”

“Which means?”

“It means
climbing a mountain maybe isn’t the best measure of a wizard’s potential. I
suppose you think you’re panning for willpower.”

“Panning for…?” Horuseps
trailed off as Mara fed him loud thoughts, images of mountain men scooping out
the sediment of rivers and knuckling through the detritus for gold. He hummed
pensively at the end of it, his fingertips tapping at her shoulders. “I suppose
we are, in a way. In another way,” he went on, shrugging, “I don’t suppose we
care. Such is the arrangement we have made. Knock, and the door must open.”

She didn’t
inquire, although she knew he wanted her to.

He watched her
write, not her hands, which moved in painstakingly level lines back and forth
across the thick paper, but her face, as if he could read the book she copied
there. After she had filled several pages (and had actually begun to forget he
was there, due to the suffocating atmosphere of the Scrivener’s library), he
abruptly cleared a place opposite her at the table and sat.

She looked up,
seeing him all over again, and then retreated, dizzied and nauseous, to the
Panic Room to continue her work.

Horuseps wiped
away a stray drop of ink, then rubbed his fingertips fastidiously together
while frowning at it, as though testing the ink’s color against his own
blackened hands. “How long would you say the Scholomance has existed?”

“At least three
thousand years,” Mara answered distractedly, pressing down a sheet of blotting
paper over her newly-completed page. Whatever they were using for this purpose
had a tendency to smear rather than soak.

“You say this
because…?”

“King Solomon
supposedly studied here and we know when he ruled. His was one of the first
accounts of the Scholomance Connie ever read about. I heard all about him.”

“King…?”

“Solomon, right.
Or Sulayman or Salomoh, or whatever his real name was.” She arched an eye up at
him, adding, “If you can’t remember Connie from two years ago, I’m going to
pissed if you remember King Solomon.”

“Forgive me,
dearest, but we do tend to recall excellence when it stumbles upon us.” Horuseps
smiled. “I’ve little doubt we’ll be given cause to remember you.”

“How flattering.”
Mara dipped her quill and started in on a fresh page. Under her pen, the methods
of binding ‘Spirits of Fire native to the Middle World’ were laid out in
concise steps. Have the imprisoning object ready, and be warned to make it of
lasting solidity and notable size. Bottles break, the text warned, and gems
could be easily lost or stolen. Madness comes quickly to those in captivity. Beware
of making the spirits in your service mad.

“So he was made
a king over mankind…a good one?”

“Some people
thought so.”

“And you?”

“I never
bothered to look into it. He’s dead and dust three thousand years.” She copied
a few more words, fought her way through a brief and blinding interlude of the
science of anthropomancy, and added, “Honestly, I have to say that if he came
here, the odds of him being a good anything are damned slim.”

“You’re here,”
Horuseps said.

“I’m not a good
person.”

He did not
argue, although he did give her an appreciative chuckle. “So we do have legends
among our alumni who seize even our notice. Solomon, von Brukenthal, Rangard,
Crowley… Have you ever stumbled across them in your Connie’s investigations?”

“Some of them. Why
do you ask?”

“An idle
curiosity, my dear. They were not students in the traditional sense, but came
to us, each one, daring to strike a bargain. The same bargain, actually. In
exchange for limitless time among us and the freedom to leave uncounted, each
swore to keep the legend of this school alive and bring new students to seek us…new
blood, so to speak, to strengthen us in our solitude. We have not left our
mountain since the days of its shaping, you see. The golden age of magic is long
past and there have been many years when we opened the portcullis to no man.”

“So you let them
go because they fed you.”

“An apt analogy.
The bargain is well in our favor, particularly since none of them stayed long
or learned much. Solomon learned the ways of summoning and binding and swiftly
departed. Rangard was far more diligent, and did really rather well in his
lessons, but one gets the impression he was not a patient man under the most
ideal circumstances and circumstances were not at all ideal. Von Brukenthal
scarcely left the library, but read all he could from the high shelves before
he left us. Crowley, or Anhkafnakhonsu, as he insisted he was to be called,
fluttered in and out of every classroom, but was repelled by the discipline one
requires to master them, and soon scorned our company. You shall not find more
devoted students than those we have imprisoned,” Horuseps added with a chuckle.
“Freedom makes a man impatient.”

“I’ve never
heard of Rangard,” Mara said, writing. “Connie might have.”

“Ah.” Horuseps
tapped his fingers on the table, reading as she wrote. “There have been
precious little pickings for quite some time, but we’ve started seeing an
abrupt increase in our admissions. And a considerable decrease in the quality
of the aspirant.”

“You’re on the
internet now,” Mara told him. “Get used to dealing with idiots.”

“Three thousand
years,” Horuseps mused, gazing at the shelves above him. “A fair guess,
conservative by some eight hundred. Why do you suppose I mention this?”

“You like to
hear yourself talk.”

“I do. But this
in particular?”

Mara looked up
without raising her head from the detailed image of the summoning circle she
was attempting to copy. “Enlighten me.”

“You call this a
joke.” Horuseps waved his hand in an elegant, all-encompassing gesture. “Perhaps
so. But after nearly four thousand years of our own company, should we not feel
entitled to make our own entertainment?”

Mara put her pen
down and folded her hands in deliberate, sarcastic imitation of his genteel
posture. “That would depend. Am I a part of it?”

She felt his
surprise, though he did not show it. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid you won’t
believe me, and truthfully I can well understand why not, but no. You are not. You,
my precious darling, are in bitter earnest.”

His sincerity,
so much more disturbing than his oily lies could ever be, went as deep as she
could touch. She frowned.

“The harrowing
is no true test of a student’s mettle,” Horuseps said, breaking her gaze to
glance idly about the tables. “Every mortal mind breaks upon the Scrivener
eventually. Even we Masters are not entirely immune to his infection. And the
knowledge gleaned is, unfortunately, quite random. It may come the first day,
the second, or never in a thousand years. Of course, one tends to learn first
what one is exposed to by proximity, and so one’s odds of harrowing
successfully are better than, say, one’s odds of learning the means of
trepanning, although the latter has come before the former in some cases.”

“Is that
supposed to comfort me?”

“No. Why? Did
it?” He smiled at her tight eye-roll, and then reached to pluck the quill from
her fingers, holding it over her head like a playground bully teasing a timid
child. “I might make the process easier.”

“And this is
where I ask how and you make some sleazy innuendo, and I either act shocked or
mercenary, depending on what you’d expect least, and eventually we’d fuck—” She
noticed his eyes narrow at that, compressing the lights within into white
slits. “—and you probably still wouldn’t do a damn thing,” Mara finished,
snatching her quill back and dipping it defiantly. “This is my test. I’ll
survive it without your help.”