The Scholomance (12 page)

“So be it.” Horuseps
shrugged his thin, white shoulders and stood up. He walked away, not hurriedly,
calling his parting shot back to her as he went. “You should know, dearest,
that I have never made such an offer before, not in all the years of this, or
any other, harrowing. And here you sit, surrounded by those who would willingly
pluck out their own left eye to have what you so scornfully refuse. When next
you are tempted to bandy bold observations of cruel jokes, look at your fellows
in suffering.” He stopped on the stair and turned back, no longer smiling. “And
laugh.”

*
         
*
         
*

Day and night
were one in the library. Initiates labored or slept or howled madly as they
tore at their chains, and each hour passed the same as any other hour that came
before, but Mara knew it was night because there were no students on the
stairs. Without witnesses, Mara sat on the edge of the bench to which she’d
been chained, and stared at the mocking open mouths of the tunnels above her. She
had finished copying
Breaking the Moon
some time ago, but was loathe to
pick up another, loathe to imbed herself so soon in some new nightmare. The
Scrivener never slept. Even in the Panic Room, she could feel his poison
clotting in the air around her, see him moving through the Mindstorm like
flashes of lightning, but he was no Overseer to demand she work for him. She
was free for now to keep to her own devices, even if she couldn’t quite hold to
her own thoughts.

She could not
see how Connie had survived this. She couldn’t see how she would, either. It
didn’t particularly disturb her not to know. She knew wasn’t very imaginative,
but she always managed to get by.

This was
different.

Her mind
wandered. Impossible to keep focus in this place, even in the relative peace of
the Panic Room. Thoughts came and went and took Mara with them, and the harder
she fought to control their direction, the louder their gibbering insanity
became. The tree that stands against the hurricane is broken; the reed that
bends is spared. Mara bent and let the wind take her where it would.

The Scrivener,
wrapped within his circular desk, let out one of his groggy, good-natured
groans and exuded a lump of formless flesh with which to wipe at some of his
many rheumy eyes. His, yes. Not ‘it’, but he. One day in the monster’s service
had made it impossible not to know the Scrivener was male—somewhere inside that
mass of amorphorous flesh—and she felt no small amount of gratitude that his
masculinity was really more of a genetic code than an ever-present sexual urge,
as was so often the case with people.

Even these
people. Even the initiates drowning in the Scrivener’s miasma occasionally
erupted in pointless, unnoticed orgasm when the inundation of stimuli touched
upon some carnal trigger. This was just humanity. People liked to believe they
were logical, reasonable, advanced, civilized. Mara knew better. People were
nothing but animals in clothes—rutting, brutal beasts whose first instinct was
always to bite, to feed, and to fuck.

Mara didn’t need
a harrowing to know sex in all its many faces. She could not remember a time
when she had not known it. Sex, like death, was everywhere, even though people
didn’t like to talk about it. The things they did like to talk about—niceness,
for example—Mara was still waiting to see. Her father had been in many ways an
honest man who saw all women through the eyes of an alpha predator, which made
living with him after she’d reached puberty uncomfortable for both of them. Then
there was her mother, by all appearances asexual, who had nevertheless filled
her days with substitutes for sex and maternity, both of which she considered
failed in her own life: she had failed to produce a son, failed to hold her
husband’s interest in the bedroom, failed to raise a proper daughter. Between
them, there was Mara, who had heard every lascivious and breathless speculation
ever made about her, beginning at the age of ten. She did not date, did not
attempt to form relationships or play the feminine games of attraction, but
when the urge came on her or when it seemed the best way to solve a problem,
Mara used sex.

And she was good
at it. Hubris on her part, perhaps, but it been a blow to her
not-inconsiderable ego to hear insincerity when told how good she was, or
worse, to hear a man’s mental ruminations on how best to tackle that tricky
leak in the bathroom sink while grunting away on top of her. She wanted a man’s
mind to wipe white with pleasure when he came to her. She wanted him incapable
of speech, incapable even of screams. She wanted him to be afraid when he saw
her again, by God, and she wanted him to remember her every sweaty unfulfilled
night for the rest of his life. And getting it was easy, when all you had to do
was open his mind and look inside. Conversation was pointless in bed anyway. Everyone
lied about what they wanted; everyone lied about how it felt.

The initiate
chained on Mara’s right began to throw up, his mind consumed by hellish images,
purging himself with greater and greater violence until pain burst through his
brain and he fell heavily to the floor. The Scrivener began to rock and grumble
to himself, easing further and further over the desk until he finally poured
out and over. Mara got up and backed away as the mewling mountain oozed under
the table to suck up the fluids, first from the floor, then from the aspirant’s
robe, and finally from the man’s slack mouth. Mara didn’t watch, but even
closing her eyes couldn’t shut up the image. Sound became reality here. Everything
became reality.

Mara went to the
end of her chain and leaned against a bookshelf until the monster was finished.
His feeding habits did not particularly scare her, although the sounds he made
were certainly nauseating enough. There were at least a dozen initiates here in
the library and she felt nothing for any of them. Most were as utterly unaware
of her as a piece of furniture. What few did dimly see her through the haze of
the Scrivener’s mind saw only competition in a place with little room for it.

Perhaps they
were right to feel threatened. Mara was still the only one of this year’s
aspirants to have fought free of the Oubliette, which meant that everyone she
saw here were a year or more into their harrowing. Horuseps said the knowledge
gleaned here was random. She could have years ahead of her too, and she rather
doubted she’d remained unscathed for long, if she were even unscathed now. The
Panic Room had not been designed to withstand the Scrivener’s toxic storm, and
she couldn’t muster the strength of focus necessary to shore it up. When it
broke (and all minds break upon the Scrivener eventually), there might not be
any fixing it.

The Scrivener
crawled past, rumbling to himself in pleasure. The initiate he left behind was
not dead, but neither was he sleeping. His eyes were only half-closed, and one
of them was full of blood. A stroke, maybe? An aneurysm? Mara had no idea. Either
one would be fatal, she supposed. In this place, an abscessed tooth could
probably be fatal. It wasn’t as though there were a doctor on staff, or a
pharmacy down the hall, or even so much as a bandage in the bathroom, if it
came to that.

She should be
more worried about that, but Mara had always been a fairly healthy person, even
as a child, prone neither to the bumps and scrapes of youth’s exuberance, nor
to the host of unsightly illnesses to which her age-mates were so susceptible. If
something did happen, well, this was a school for magic, after all. Surely
there must be some way to magically heal oneself. In any case, it did no good
to sit here and stress over it. Mara believed in being prepared, but only if
preparation were at all feasible.

But Mara rolled
the initiate onto his side, just in case he had it in him to pull through. She
was never going to be accused of having a compassionate nature, and she really
didn’t care if he dropped dead on his own, but standing idly by while some guy
choked to death on his own bile was just a little too much like murder for her
taste. Mara knew she was a bit of a cold bitch, but she wasn’t a killer. She
meant to get through this, but she wasn’t going to let it change her.

The Scrivener
succeeded in pouring himself back into his desk. He settled there, swaying and
gronking to himself, pausing now and then to aim his bland face at another
initiate across the room. The one who’d tried to cheat his way out of his harrowing,
Mara saw. In the hours since the injury’s infliction, the wound had worsened
considerably. The empty socket leaked a constant colorless fluid, another
reminder of the total lack of doctor’s care. He lay in a heap, arms out at
angles with his bloody hands at the end of them like mangled, badly-fit gloves.
He’d dislocated both shoulders and one ankle before he’d finally given up on breaking
his chain. His pain was excruciating, but his hysterics had ended, even if his
mind hadn’t quite returned from the shock-blank space he’d put it in. For the
moment, the man was quiet, but he’d been screaming off and on all day, and once
he started up again, he’d only bring the Scrivener onto him and Mara really
didn’t want to see that again.

She withdrew to
the Panic Room, where it was dark even if it couldn’t be quiet, and sat down on
the concrete floor. She told herself it wouldn’t last forever. She told herself
Connie was waiting for her, maybe right outside the library doors. She sat her
body down at the table and put it to sleep. She did not watch her dreams. The
Scrivener’s storm passed over her, and she sat there on the Panic Room’s floor
and waited for the bells to ring.

She’d get
through this, for Connie’s sake. She wasn’t going to let it change her. She
just had to stay calm.

Mara’s mind
drifted and the harrowing went on.

CHAPTER SIX

H
ow many more days passed in the Scrivener’s
service, Mara didn’t know. Even if there had been a window to show her days
passing, even if the sun itself had risen and set across her own worktable, she
couldn’t have done anything so complicated as count. Her world was full of
knowledge screaming to be known, her mind was lord to a relentless siege, and
every new hour’s struggle against the harrowing depleted whatever energy she
might otherwise have had to spend on the reckoning of luxuries like time.

She kept her
hands busy in the futile hope that it would put what was happening in her head
at some distance. It didn’t. She tried to bind her copy of
Breaking the Moon
herself, but the work was too detailed and fussy for her fractured mind and she
left it for one of the other initiates, one of the crazy ones. He had it done
in less time, it seemed, than it took her to burn the old copy. She wandered
the stacks at the far end of her chain looking for new work, hating even the
touch of the titles—
The Book of Black Earth
,
Openings
,
The
Bleeding Bones
,
Circles of Innocents
—but knowing she had to do
something because she was still being harrowed and still being watched.

She copied books
because it was the only thing, really, to do. Copying meant reading, or at
least, letting the words she wrote burrow into her mind and fill it with
senseless horror. Bread and water kept the life in her, but she was aware as
she occupied the Panic Room that extending life was hardly the same as
promoting health. As her strength waned, the power of the Scrivener became that
much harder to hold back. He never slept. Soon, madness would no longer be the
comforting fantasy of her more masochistic moments, but inescapable truth.

No, there was no
time, but the bells did ring. Sometimes it seemed only minutes apart, sometimes
whole days, but they sounded all the same, reverberating through the rock where
not even thoughts could penetrate, and waking her from the worst of the
stupors. Students came with bread and water. Students came to empty the
chamberpots. And students came with Horuseps, of course.

She never seemed
to know when he was coming, no matter how dependably he followed the bells. He
cut across her thoughts like claws, tearing at the little peace she’d wrestled
for herself and supplanting it with his strange game of the tray, his toys, and
his strange, indecipherable speech. Not always, but sometimes, he would return
to her after making his rounds through the library, seeming to delight in her
struggles to converse through insanity’s haze. Knowing that she
was
struggling made her work harder at appearing not to, which in turn entertained
him even more. She began to look forward to his visits. This infuriated her and
she punished herself in the Panic Room with memories of Connie.

And then it
happened.

Horuseps set the
tray before her. He lifted away the lid and indicated the small objects in
their precise arrangement and said, “Turn the cup over, if you would, and kiss
the frog.”

“What a
classical sense of humor you have,” Mara said, writing in her book. “But no. I’d
hate to think of where that thing could have been in this place.”

The demon’s mind
sharpened. Not until she heard his thoughts (‘At last. And still sooner than
anticipated.’) did she realize the words were not in English—not his, and not
hers. She understood them anyway, but not the way she understood so many of the
things that came to her in the Scrivener’s company, washing in and out again
and leaving nothing behind but the unpleasant tang of their passage. It was his
language she was speaking, and she spoke it as well as if it were her own.