The Scholomance (37 page)

**He thinks you’re
a woman,** Mara silently said.

‘Does he?’ Horuseps
replied. He knew. Aloud, sliding his fingers through the tombola as one
stirring bathwater, he said, “Each creature’s energy is unique unto itself. It
surrounds you all, stains all you touch, and there remains where neither Time
nor Element may wipe it clean. Only a fresher touch of living energy consumes
its enduring print.”

Mara frowned at
the pebble Proteus held. She saw nothing but the rock itself, which put her
firmly in the majority here, but at least some of the students did see more. Proteus,
gazing into his own hand, could actually see it shining like a star, so
brilliantly blue that it seemed white in his eyes. The sight filled him with adrenaline,
with triumph. He still couldn’t See what he wanted every time he wanted to, but
it was getting easier. He would master it some day, and when he did—

Proteus looked
hungrily up into the demon’s pale, pretty face. He dropped the stone into the
tumbler, which Horuseps gently sealed. A pass of his long, black hand set it
spinning, and then he just sat, flirting with the boy before him in every coy
glance and predatory smile.

**What are you
going to do with him?** Mara asked without speaking.

‘Beyond a few
hours’ sport, I don’t imagine much. But such delightful hours!’ The rocks
settled. Horuseps opened the tombola and gestured within.

Proteus picked
up a long-handled spoon from the shelves behind the dais and came back. Through
his eyes, Mara saw hundreds of dull rocks, worn shiny by ages of handling. He
began to turn the pebbles over, searching for his own light among them. All of
this, Mara could see, but when she withdrew to her own mind, there was nothing
but a man in a Halloween costume loudly stirring a badly-cast cauldron full of
rocks.

‘Did you think
you would master my art in a day?’ Horuseps wondered.

**Sort of.**

‘You must be
American. No other country puts forth people so convinced of the power of
possession. Yet magic is no trinket to be bought and applied by whosoever
desires it. We allow our students ten years of training. Rarely is it enough.’

**How good of
you to remind me,** Mara thought, as Proteus succeeded in spooning out the
radiant light of himself coating his own particular stone. **We Americans also
invented the grand tradition of the hostile takeover.**

‘I don’t believe
I’m familiar…?’

Mara dove back
into Proteus, boldly now, paralyzing him in an instant and then flipping
through the years of his study with the image of that glowing pebble before
her, listening for resonance. She found it, and under the demon’s curious eye,
followed it to its source.

“You
incorrigible cheat,” Horuseps said, marveling.

“Anyway you can
get it, right?” Proteus replied, slurring only a little. He had a pronounced
overbite. He hadn’t been very aware of her until that moment, but hearing those
words come out of him without his control spurred him to panic. She could feel
his consciousness fighting her as a trapped moth fights against a window,
easily ignored. And there. After six years of training, Sight came to Proteus.

“It won’t be as
meaningful,” said Horuseps, plucking the stone from Mara’s stolen hand and
tossing it back into the tumbler. He gave it a spin and crossed his arms.

“Funny, and
perhaps relevant, story,” said Mara through the other student’s mouth,
carefully playing and replaying that moment of remembered epiphany. “Connie had
a lot of brothers. They played a lot of computer games. It’s okay, I don’t
expect you to know what those are.”

People had begun
to whisper. Horuseps silenced them with a raised hand, then nodded politely for
her to continue.

“The point is,
most of those games come with cheats that allow the player to, among other
things, have infinite health, infinite armor, infinite ammunition…magic, in
other words. Invulnerability. God-like power over every outcome. And watching
them, I learned a valuable lesson.”

“Pray tell.”

“Whether it’s
meaningful or not,” Mara said, settling back in her own body. “You still win.” She
got up, climbed the dais, and flexed her mind to See. It was easy once you knew
how, as easy as winking one eye, or raising one hand, or crushing the struggles
of the man whose body you have possessed to better steal his memories. Mara reached
into the tumbler and pulled out the rock that Proteus had touched. She tossed
it to the demon, who caught it out of the air with a flick of his delicate
wrist. “You just win faster.”

Horuseps rolled
the pebble slowly between his thumb and forefinger, erasing the white light of
his favorite student’s touch. The lights of his own eyes spun at precisely the
same lazy speed, growing dimmer as well. “You realize that once an art is
mastered, you can never return to this classroom.”

“I’ll miss you
terribly, but I’ll survive.” Mara headed up the risers, with whispers closing
in behind her.

“One moment.”

She stopped,
turned back, her defenses raised, but Horuseps had merely crossed to the
cupboard at the rear of his dais. He unlocked it with a touch, opened the door,
and brought out a neatly-rolled bundle of black cloth. “Your acolyte’s robe,”
he said, and tossed it to her.

She caught it,
not so neatly or as elegantly as he’d caught the pebble.

“I knew I would
see you in it soon enough,” Horuseps murmured, ignoring all the students around
them to smile only at her. “And I suspect I will see you out of it before very
much longer.”
 
His eyes dazzled. He
laughed, then turned and clapped his long hands together once to bring his
class back to attention. “For the rest of us, there must be practice. Locate a
partner, please. Proteus…dear boy…you are with me…”

*
         
*
         
*

Alone in her
cell just a few minutes later, Mara took off her locket for the first time
since receiving it so many years ago. She leaned against the door, looping the
chain around her fingers to let the tiny heart dangle. Not much light could
find its way in through her cell door’s narrow window and what there was had
the unhealthy yellow shine shared by all the blister-lamps, but she didn’t
really need her eyes to see the locket anymore. She had lived with it since her
twelfth birthday; she knew the lay of every line, the story of every scratch,
the shape of every flaked-off bit of paint. Now she did what she had done
perhaps three times before, and slid her thumb along the locket’s tiny clasp,
popping it open.

A couple of
fifth-graders looked back at her: twelve year-old Connie with her shy Picture Day
smile, and eleven year-old Mara, just staring.

Mara smiled
faintly, just looking for a time. Then her mind flexed. Her vision blurred,
then came back to her filled with new light and color—the silvery shine of life’s
own energy smeared over walls and floor and robe and door and all of it. Her
touches stood out brightest, but beneath them were still the muted and
much-trampled traces of the cell’s past inhabitants, and there in her hand, she
Saw what she had gone to Horuseps to learn how to find. Glowing over the
photographs that Connie had cut out and clumsily fit into the locket,
photographs Mara rarely looked at and had never touched, a delicate wisp of
life remained, washed out over the years to a fragile shade of coral-pink but
still visible.

Connie’s life. Mara
focused, taking lessons stolen from the six years of a far better student than
she would ever be, and as she did, the brighter lights of contact faded into
shadow. Connie’s remained, fragile and dim, but there before her as all the
rest of the world dropped away. The shine of dampness along the wall, the
golden edging of her new black robe, even the yellow gleam of the blister-lamp
outside her narrow window—all died, became insubstantial lines of grey and
black on a flat, two-dimensional canvas in which Connie’s locket was the only
true thing.

Mara
straightened up, opened a door she neither saw nor felt, and stepped out into
the hall. A moment to orient herself, and then she began to walk, holding the
locket up before her eyes and staring through it, she began to Search the
labyrinth of well-traveled tunnels outside the cells for the lingering smudge
of Connie’s bare footprints.

She was at times
aware of other students around her as she made her way slowly in and out of
half-sketched passageways, but she ignored them. Whether they ignored her or
not, she couldn’t tell and didn’t care. She searched, looking nowhere but
through the locket and straight ahead. The Sight required so much more effort
than she’d anticipated that very little else got through; voices were tinny,
figures mere lines intersecting other lines, and even thoughts seemed no more
substantial than shadows on the wall. The locket’s light was steady but pale,
and holding the necessary will to keep it lit made even walking a
physically-demanding chore. She could not afford distraction.

“Oh hey! It’s
you!”

Mara’s Sight
flickered. “Go away, Devlin. I’m busy.”

The sound of
loose flip-flops slapping at the stone floor beat on Mara’s ears, and with
every throb of them, the rest of the world seemed to gain a little more clarity
and the locket in her hand seemed to dim. “Was that hers?” Devlin asked, right
behind her.

“Go away, I
said. I need to concentrate.”

“This is
actually the plan I was going to tell you about. How ironic is that? Only I
figured you were going to have to get someone else to do it for you and I wasn’t
sure if you had anything—”

“Goddammit,
Devlin, shut up!”

He did, glimmers
of hurt seeping into the air around her. Mara stopped moving and got a new grip
on herself, until the churning anger subsided and took the world with it. She
brought the little haze of Connie-pink back up and let it shine out like a
lantern from the end of her arm. Slowly, she began again to walk, aware of
Devlin at her back but paying him no further mind. Back and forth, she moved
through the ephebeum, crossing and re-crossing the vast open space in the
central cavern in narrow rows, and finding nothing. She moved up to the second
landing and there, Saw it at last.

Glowing high on
the side of the first tunnel-mouth, the smudgy imprint of Connie’s bare hand
remained. Mara stopped and studied it, wondering. She’d been here. It was not a
sense, not a guess, but real proof. Connie had been right in that spot, rested
her hand just there on the wall…on her way back to her own cell? Or out, to
take a meal in the dining room on the upper level of the mountain? Perhaps she’d
just stepped out of the way there to brace herself while she checked a pair of
ill-fitting sandals. But she’d been here, right here.

“So you must
have already had Sight when you got here, huh? God, you’re lucky. I’m not like,
you know, those other guys who—”

Pink light
shattered. The world surged up.

Mara swung,
shouting, “Devlin, for fuck’s sake, get away from me!”

He jumped back,
hit the low balcony that edged the walkway and nearly went right over and on
his head into the ephebeum below. Near-death put the spine in him. He bounded
back at her. “Why are you always so fucking hostile?”

“Because I’m
doing something here, that’s why! I don’t have time to sit around in your
imaginary beauty parlor getting my nails done and being girlfriends! I don’t
care, you goddamn fool! Whatever it is, I don’t care!”

He was quiet,
half-fuming, half-despondent. Mara focused once more on her locket, found a
place of calm, flexed her mind in the way of Proteus, and let the world bleed
away. Connie’s handprint seemed to hover just above the dusty, indistinct
tunnel wall. The fingers pointed inward. Connie, turned away from the ephebeum.
Mara raised the locket higher and looked through it. Deep in the mouth of the
tunnel, another flash of pink beckoned.

She started
walking. Devlin followed.

Pink in
handprints, most of them partially obscured by other touches. Pink in thin
smears where she’d let her hand trail along the rock as she’d walked…walking in
the dark, perhaps. It was another long and winding tunnel, where the blister-lamps
were mostly black and the distance between them considerable. Here, Connie’s
two hands close together, pushing. A door.

Mara groped,
unable to see it herself, touched stone. It was gone in the next instant.
Connie’s hands swept inward. Devlin, eager to please, had darted in to open the
door for her. Mara eased in another step or two and stopped, looking grimly
through the locket at a haze of pink.

Pink in naked
smears across the floor, pink handprints on the wall, pink nearly everywhere
she looked. Connie’s cell.

She relaxed out
of Sight and let her aching arm drop to her side, looking at the room with her
real eyes, her real vision. It was empty, but she was encouraged.

The walls had
been pushed out, creating a much larger cell, with cornices, no less, and a
running board with a geometric pattern just hip-high. There were candles in
carved bowls, unlit now but with black, burnt wicks and caked puddles of wax
around them. There was a table, two chairs, an alcove beside the door to hold
assorted toiletries, including a comb, earrings, even a crude mirror of
polished stone. Shelves filled with stone cups lined the walls of this spacious
cell. There was a bed, raised well off the floor on a stone surface, and
softened by dozens and dozens of red and white robes. How long the room had
been uninhabited, she couldn’t tell, but the signs of occupation were
everywhere and there was nothing to suggest Connie wouldn’t be back.

It was a far
more comfortable cell than her own, Mara thought, beginning to frown. For
someone who needed such desperate saving, clearly, she’d done all right for
herself.