The Scholomance (16 page)

Mara frowned,
taken aback by the abrupt shift in questioning.

“She hasn’t,”
Horuseps said. “She’s come to find a friend.”

“Here?”

Horuseps bent
his head once in a mocking nod. “Isn’t it too delightful?”

Zyera didn’t
look delighted. In point of fact, she looked alarmed.

“She went by
Connie when I knew her,” Mara interjected, annoyed. “She’s a little taller than
I am, with dark, curly hair and brown—”

“Impossible
there should be another undetected!” Zyera said, still looking only at
Horuseps.

“Agreed.”

“—brown eyes,”
Mara finished. “Have you seen her?”

“Possibly.” Zyera
shrugged, eying Mara with a distinct expression of unease. “Perhaps I do not
see them all, but I see many in my time. Do I recall her? Ah, there is the true
question. I am surrounded even now by a host of humans I do not recall. Do let
me know if you find yours.”

Off she went,
the slender tips of her coral forks swaying ever so slightly with her sensual
stride. She was completely naked from behind, except for the belts. Her spine
protruded here and there, delicately branching, crystalline.

“Zyera,” said
Horuseps unnecessarily. His fingertips tapped along Mara’s shoulder in a
distracted way as he watched her go.

“Friend of
yours?”

He thought about
it, his head cocked and eyes dim. “No,” he said at last, and smiled. “You are
my only friend, dear Mara.”

The bells
stopped ringing all at once. The silence that followed was a thick one as the
students waited, some of them still staring in bewilderment at Mara, others
gradually fixing their attention on the demons. Horuseps gave Mara’s shoulder
another squeeze, but she knew better than to talk even without his warnings. She
waited with the rest of them, mystified.

“We have very
few rules here,” Horuseps said. He did not raise his voice, but such was the
quality of the silence that it carried out as effectively as if he had. Releasing
Mara, he stepped up to face the crowd, and those in front bowed to him. He
walked among them, touching the backs of their heads as he spoke, idly glancing
this way and that, strolling. “And we take pains that there are no surprises. Our
ways are not secret. Nor, I think, are they difficult to comprehend. There are
only a few inviolate laws and they are very simple.”

He turned
around, walked back through the crowd until he came out of it and stood before
the Black Door. He faced them again, resting his hands on his shoulders, his
expression severe. “The breaking of those laws is never to be tolerated,” he
said.

Mara felt a
spike of fear, not her own, piercing the Mindstorm. She looked around in time
to see a demon enter through a side-passage. The demon was a hulking thing,
thickly-muscled and bristling with bony spikes, but it was the very ordinary
humans he had gripped in each hand that held her attention. There were two—man
and woman—and although both walked under their own power, the man was obviously
afraid of whatever lay at the end of their walk. The demon who held him paid no
attention whatsoever.

“It is
forbidden,” Horuseps continued mildly, “to defy any order given by a Master of
the Scholomance.”

Now she could
hear him with her ears and not just her mind: “It won’t happen again, I swear
it, I swear! Upon my mother’s grave, I swear it! Please, Master Argoth! It was
only the once! It was her fault!”

The woman did
not answer the accusation. Her eyes were huge and staring. Mara knew that look.
She’d seen her mother wearing it almost every day.

“It is forbidden
to remove books from the library without a Master’s permission,” Horuseps said.

“Please, Master,
I—I—” The man’s frantic gaze lit on someone in the crowd. “Giova! Giova, tell
him I am honest! Tell him when I swear a thing, it is true! Please!”

Horuseps paused
and cocked his head, waiting patiently. Giova, whoever he was in the silent
hall, said nothing.

“It is forbidden
to linger more than ten days each year without attending a lesson,” said Horuseps.
“As it is forbidden to linger more than ten years in the study of any one art.”

The man’s feet
took smaller and smaller steps as he made his increasingly incoherent pleas and
promises. Soon he was being pulled, then dragged along the floor when he stumbled
to his knees. The woman just kept walking.

“And it is
forbidden for our students to fornicate in such a manner as to possibly produce
offspring,” Horuseps concluded.

“She seduced me!”
the man howled. “She made me do it! She is a hateful, evil bitch! Siren! Destroyer
of men!” The rest was lost in screams. His demon impassively picked him up and
plunked him down before Horuseps, more or less on his feet. The demon,
muscle-wrapped and spike-studded, managed despite his malformed face and
sinister features to look bored.

“As rules
without enforcement are meaningless, it falls to us to punish transgressions. Master
Argoth.”

The demon,
Argoth, reached down one clawed hand and ripped through the man’s robe, pulling
it off in shreds with one easy sweep of his arm. The man did not seem to notice
his nakedness. He had fallen into such a state of terror that it was all Mara
could feel in this room where hundreds watched.

“Human called
Rastan,” Horuseps said, cutting across the hysterics without dulling them any. “We
have been told many tales of your sexual indiscretions in your time here, but
we have given you the benefit of our doubt. Now, at last, you have been
discovered by a Master of Scholomance in the act of releasing your seed within
a woman’s womb. My judgment is upon you now.”

“It was her! It
was her! She made me!”

Horuseps gave a
nod. Argoth reached down and dug his claws impersonally into the man’s
shriveled scrotum. His powerful arm rocked back in the same wide arc he’d used
to tear the man’s robe off, but there was no more robe.

It looked, Mara
thought, from the quiet haven of the Panic Room and its distancing monitors, as
if he’d vomited out a stage-magician’s scarf—all glittery/shiny and tumbling to
the ground with a flourish and a pause for the audience to gasp. Then
everything came out of him. His legs flopped, limp as string. His emptied skin
sagged outward, bulging with the weight of his meat and bones. His mouth opened
and closed once more. Even if Mara were in her body and right before him to
feel the hot gore of it around her toes and smell the broken stink of him, she
doubted anything could be worse than seeing his opening and closing mouth.

Argoth dropped
the wet sack that used to be a man and stepped back, fastidiously shaking off
his toes as he licked his claws. The woman behind him did not react. The clawed
hands on her shoulders rested lightly. She was numb to fear, numb to panic,
numb to all thought.

Mara looked
around, tapping in mute astonishment at mind after mind, and finding only a
dull spectrum of distaste, when she found any emotion at all. Some of them were
bored, some viciously amused, one or two mildly aroused, but most were like the
woman standing barefooted in her lover’s blood, only numb. The Mindstorm roared
on, no louder and no more urgent than it had been at the airport.

“Human called
Alanza.” Horuseps did not raise his voice. If anything, he softened it some. The
woman blinked twice and looked at him. She did not plead, not even with her
eyes. Horuseps smiled at her, but his fingers curled restlessly over his
shoulders, as though even in his play of sympathy, he could not resist the urge
to clutch.

“This is the
first we have heard of your disobedience. Of course, one lapse of judgment is
one too many, and yet, there have been questions raised as to your willingness
in the matter. What have you to say?”

Alanza had,
seemingly, nothing to say. She stared at this gift of lenience as she’d stared
at the execution and was silent.

Horuseps nodded
just as though she’d given him some unheard, lengthy argument. His fingers
twitched. “We can tolerate no fornicators amongst us. You have defied our laws.
Yet some there are who speak for you. Therefore, know a Master’s mercy. You are
expelled, human. Your return means only your death. Go.”

The demon who
had walked her to this fate now gave her shoulder a little pat and lumbered
over to the Black Door. It took no heaving, but opened with a touch, making no
sound, admitting no icy draft or stench of brimstone. Mara looked and saw only
shadows on the other side. She felt and felt nothing.

The woman,
Alanza, did not move until the demon who brought her here came back and got
her. She kept her eyes on Horuseps, turning as she walked until she reached the
threshold. There she hesitated, showing the only sign of life since her
arrival, and half-raised a hand, but her mind was so numbed over that Mara
couldn’t tell whether it was a gesture of entreaty or farewell. In any case, it
didn’t last. She turned away, small and white against the blackness, and padded
quietly out of sight.

The door shut. That
was all. There was no muffled scream, no roar, no ray of light around the jamb.
Just the closing of the door and the loss of one more mind, one which had not
been altogether there in the first place.

“So does their
time end prematurely,” Horuseps said, looking out over the students. “They are
not counted toward the Tenth.”

A gust of breath
answered this—in some, it was a sign of frustration, and in others, relief. Both
reactions struck Mara as odd, considering no one could possibly know where to
start counting. But the crowd was breaking up, humans and demons alike
departing down the dark halls that had brought them here.

“Do not think
too harshly of us,” Horuseps said, rejoining her. “It is all for the better, I
assure you, lest the mountain be filled up with human offspring.”

“Does every
student have to attend these things?” Mara asked.

“You have just
heard our only inviolate laws.” Horuseps tipped his head to study her, then
looked sharply at the retreating rows of students. “Was she not among them? Your
Connie?”

“No. She wasn’t.”

“Ah. No doubt
she hid away in her cell when the bells tolled. Ask not, as they say.” He
chuckled to himself. “We allow it, having learned long ago that the only thing
that comes of forcing the weak-stomached to bear witness is a soured floor.”

“Not like it is
now,” Mara said, with a pointed glance back at the eviscerated Rastan.

“That is but a
small souring in comparison. Once one human purges, they all seem to follow
along. The stench has a way of lingering.” Horuseps dropped his hand to the
small of back, propelling her politely ahead of him. “I am pleased to see you
in such admirable control, however. Such demonstrations are infrequent, but
they do occur.”

“I’ll admit I
didn’t know what I was getting into,” Mara replied, “but I knew it wasn’t
nursery school.”

“What a
delightfully callous observation. You’ll go far, dearest.” He gave her a pat to
send her on her way down the wide stair into the ephebeum while he remained at
the top. “It is not yet first bell, o heartless one, and while it is not
forbidden to wander after hours, it is discouraged. Strongly.”

“I’m not
heartless,” Mara muttered, and louder, said, “All the better to give me empty
halls for my illicit affairs. Why would you make something like that forbidden
and then provide us all with such perfect opportunities to do it anyway?”

“Consider it a
trial of willpower. Did I not say there would be tests?” His head tipped again
and he came a few steps after her before stopping. “I’m sure I need not tell
you there are ways in which lusts may be satisfied without the risk of pregnancy.”

“Define
satisfied.”

“One learns to
adjust.”

“In light of the
alternative, I’m sure one does.” She looked back in spite of herself. The Nave
was just a glimmer of light and sculpted pillars from here, silent and empty. “What
happens to him now?”

“That would be
between him and his God,” Horuseps replied, his voice stained by a certain sour
amusement. He turned around and started back up the stairs. “As for the
carcass, it shall be disposed of.”

“By whom?”

He stopped
again, came back down with his head at an angle, smiling. “Are you
volunteering?”

“Not until I
know the method of disposal. For all I know, you’re eating them.”

“For all you
know,” he agreed, blithely enough to be disturbing. “Master Suti’ok has gone to
fetch the hounds. At first-bell, you’ll not see so much as a stain.”

“Hounds? You
have dogs here?”

“Dogs? Nothing
so prosaic. Our hounds are bred of demon stock.”

“Are they
Masters, too?”

“No, although a
very sound question, I applaud you. You may indeed encounter many terrible
things within these walls, but Masters, my dearest, are those who teach. Only
those. And if ever you hear your name called by a hound hiding in the shadows,
and if ever he gives you dark command in the name of Master, I advise you in
the strongest terms to find one for true and report it at once. But walk away,
child, do not run. Running only attracts their attention.”

“Many terrible
things,” Mara echoed.

“The Scholomance
is more than thee and me, young one.” His thoughts, always dim and difficult to
grasp, briefly drew into a dark focus, something about tribes—the Old Tribes or
maybe the True Tribes, the words seemed interchangeable in whatever language he
thought in. The tribes were broken. Then he glanced at her and his mind closed,
leaving her with only a lingering echo of his strange emotions. “Much more,” he
said, coming down the rest of the stairs to stand before her. “Yet there is
time enough to learn as much as you would know. Return to your cell, my dear. I
should hate to see you punished.”