The Scholomance (77 page)

Ruk released her
and straightened up, out of her easy reach. “Didst thou think we took our Tenth
to rooms of pleasure and great riches? We take and use them, child. We feed
them to the mountain and reap what harvest may be sown. Such is the bargain
made between our kinds in the first founding. Yet this I tell you also—”

Mara lunged up
and slapped her palm over his naked chest.

He let her and
spoke on, speaking truth: “I have seen our lamps set, every one. No woman-child
born of Earth hath ever been so used. Thy lost lamb is not among them.” He let
that sink and settle, then quietly added, “I did not mark her, this Ka-nee thou
seekest, yet I can swear to thee and stand honest that she hath not left
through the Black Door, nor been set alit. That she liveth, I cannot promise,
nor more than I can tell thee she is dead. Take thy hand from my flesh, child. I
have not given thee leave that thou mayest freely touch my body. Never do so
again without mine invitation. Tis not my desire to see thee punished, yet I
will before I am made thy plaything.”

Mara let her
hand drop.

Ruk’s mandibles
spread in a lipless smile. “I shall not order thee to speak words of apology.” And
then he aimed a stern hand at her and said, “Yet rememberest thou, all Masters
here are set above all students. Whilst thou remains among the latter, thou
owest the former all respect, even lowly worms as Malavan. Do not sacrifice thy
life for pride’s sake. There are some yet who value it.”

“Why?” she
demanded. “Come clean about that, at least. There are hundreds of people in
this mountain, dozens of other women. Why me? Why not them? Why not Connie?”

Ruk gazed at her
for a long time. Under the misshapen mask of his face, his true self remained
imprinted, and it was that Ruk looking down on her—ancient, pure, and
untouchable. He opened his mouth.

“Don’t tell me,”
Mara said bitterly. “I already know it’s a lie.”

He shrugged and
did not deny it.

“It isn’t hate,
what I’m feeling.” Mara rubbed at her chest, glaring without focus into the
wall where the face of a man might be if it were not buried within rock. “It
isn’t hate, but I want you dead anyway. How does that work, Ruk?”

His heavy hand
rested gently on her shoulder. “With surprising ease.”

“I think I could
do it, if I had the right Word,” she went on, almost to herself. “I think this
feeling, whatever it is, is strong enough to fuel my will, even for that. I
think I could kill you, maybe even all of you.”

Ruk did not
reply.

“If she’s dead,
I will. You should know that, in case you start thinking of this as fun again. If
she’s dead, if you’ve killed her, I’ll bring this mountain down.”

“I believe thee,”
Ruk said, but he was not afraid.

“Then tell me
where she is! Tell me!”

“Lady.” He took
her hand, brought it gently to his great heart, and pressed her palm to his
honest flesh, gazing into her wild eyes all the while. “I know not.”

“Someone knows!”
she shouted, her voice cracking in her tight throat. She yanked her hand back
as a fist and stood there, shaking in the grip of helplessness and rage. “Someone
has to know, damn you all!
Someone knows
!”

And all at once,
she realized that someone really did. Breathing hard, pinned between fury and
confusion, she retreated, never taking her eyes from Ruk’s. When she reached
the corner, she ran. Not to her cell and not aimlessly through the mountain,
but to the one person in all the Scholomance who would know where Connie was,
if Connie lived.

The one person
who knew everything.

*
         
*
         
*

There were
students in the Great Library as always, clustered at the landings to take
their malicious pleasure in watching the harrowed aspirants below. Mara beat a
path through them and down, putting anger between her and the hammering wall of
all-knowledge that rose up around her. It was enough to carry her across the
floor to the desk where the Scrivener nested. His head rose as she neared him,
swaying in thick enthusiasm, but she didn’t let herself see it, didn’t let
herself wonder if he knew what was coming. She just ran and when she reached
the desk, she jumped over it, arms out, and grabbed him.

The Scrivener
roared, thrashing either with distress or dumb excitement, but didn’t shake her
free. She wrapped her arms around his gelatinous neck, her legs around one
waving arm, and dug herself in like a tick. Contact brought his mind to her,
his mind, which was so much bigger than the world shrieking around them. He was
the eye of the storm and the eye was quiet, absent of the shrieking, cataclysmic
atmosphere pouring out of him. Mara lashed out, found a ripping place and
worked herself in, birthing herself into his brain with tooth and claw and
ferocious force.

The Scrivener
knew everything, it seemed, but he had never in his ageless life known pain. He
thrashed, battering his desk to splinters and smashing Mara into the ground,
but she would not be loosened. She just dug in deeper, aiming first needles and
then daggers and finally spears of her own mind’s making at his until she’d cut
him into bleeding submission. His agony was as formless as his will, easily
shut out. The right jab finally stilled his contortions and he crashed to the
ground and lay quivering with Mara still clinging to his neck, mercilessly
peeling back the countless layers of his mind.

She heard her
name, and at once, as instinctive and effortless as pulling a page of text into
focus, she brought the speaker’s words before her endless ear. **—matters not,
‘tis the blood of a Master all the same!** someone was saying, but not out
loud. These were thoughts, foolishly flying back and forth, unprotected, as
easily seen through the Scrivener’s power as the most brightly-painted
butterflies…and perhaps as easily caught and crushed.

**Her reins are
his,** sent Letha, sulky but subdued. **He hath set her whims above us, and
this we must endure, brother.”

**He hath set
our throats open beneath her jaws! She is utterly beyond control—yours, his,
everyone’s! Tis a matter of time, and precious little of that, before she
learneth all the truth, and then what for us?**

Horuseps, smiling
even in his mind. **Pray we have her lost calf to lay upon her altar, that’s
what.**

**Oh aye, laugh,
but she—**

And eyes were
suddenly upon her.

**She has the
Scrivener!** they thought, all at once, screaming it as alarm to every other
mind in the mountain, to Kazuul’s, flaring hot and white above them all. **
She
is inside the Scrivener
!**

Enough of this. **Connie!**
Mara shouted. Not with her mouth, her mouth was useless. She had seven billion
mouths now, fourteen billion eyes. She was the world in its entirety. She was
every creeping thing under the eye of the absent God. **Connie, answer me! Answer!**

They were
coming. Mara reached out through the Scrivener, and turned the air inside the
Great Library to a scum of stagnant awareness, one a thousand times thicker
than what emanated from him normally. It was easy. She had become him, become
what he would have been with a consciousness at the furnace of his power. All
around her, bodies hit the floor—aspirants dropped where they worked with
bloody sockets for eyes; students tumbled in from the landings and spilt
themselves over the stone floor, first screaming, then choking, then quiet. The
first demon to reach the room, Master Dalziel, slithered in, met the poisonous
fugue of a vengeful Scrivener, and clawed his way out again, spewing frothy
bile over himself like any senseless student. ‘Oh,
very
good!’ she heard
him think, astonished. ‘We’ll never get her out!’ And then he was howling for
help.

**Answer!** The
will and the Word, Ruk had said. The will and the Word, but any word could be a
Word if there was only enough will, and Mara had all the world’s inside her. **
Answer
me!
** she roared, and all of Earth groaned to hear her.

Her monitors
were lighting up, spilling out into the Mindstorm, throbbing yellow urgency
over all her vision. Her heart again, quivering as it tried to work with all
this magic pouring through it. But it would last just a little longer, just one
more cry.

Someone tried to
Correspond in next to her, but she reached out through the Scrivener and batted
him away before he could reach cohesion. His essence diffused, shrieking, and
came together again with an ear-splitting bang, dropping whoever it was in a
bleeding heap somewhere in the lyceum, unconscious for the first time in all
his unnatural life. She could have killed him, and for one endless instant, she
wanted to…but that wasn’t why she was here. Mara gathered the Scrivener in like
armfuls of clay, giving direction to all his idiot power, and turned it out
from her like a megaphone. **
ANSWER
,** she commanded, a word no longer,
but a Word, a true Word, and her own command, one no student could refuse.

Resonance, no
louder and no lighter than the tolling of a tiny bell after it has been rung.

Mara stilled,
suspended in herself, listening to the timorous note of Connie’s life hanging
in the air. Weakened, wretched, but alive.

**I’m here,**
Mara sent out. **I’m here. I’m going to find you. I’m going to take you home.**
She reached as one reaches to catch a bubble in her hand, and had time enough
to feel the good, true touch of Connie’s mind, that lost and familiar shivering
sense of twinned hopelessness and joy, time to know that Connie felt her,
recognized her, knew she was coming, and then the Scrivener’s leprous heart
erupted and it was all gone.

Caught in the
eternal instant of a dead mind, Mara thrashed violently, tumbling free of the
corpse first and his brain’s decay last. Her head hit the stone. Her vision
swam inside and out, and came slowly to a true focus.

Kazuul, a
thousand miles above her, looking down.

Then, nothing. Nothing
but the black.

*
         
*
         
*

Comas, like sex,
surgery, and so many other things, apparently got easier with repetition. Mara
came around, lingered in the Panic Room until she’d recovered from the worst of
it, and then made herself wake up. She saw the tattered curtains and broken
columns of Kazuul’s bedchamber, but not the demon himself. She also saw that
he’d chained her to the bed. The manacles at her wrist left her little slack
for movement. A Word would free her, but she was too tired to muster the will
for it, so she lay there, dozing and sore, waiting for him.

She was here
after all. Connie was here. She was alive and she could be found. As soon as
Mara was on her feet again, she would take this whole damn mountain apart until
she found a way down to where she was. And God help anyone who tried to stop
them from leaving.

But first, oh,
everything hurt so much. It hurt her heart to beat, it hurt her lungs to
breathe, it hurt her skin to stretch over her bones. Not as much as the last
time, maybe, but it still hurt and Mara wasn’t good with pain.

Where was
Kazuul? Speaking for her before a meeting of the Masters, no doubt, and lord or
no, it was still going to take some hard talking. She’d hit Malavan. She’d
killed the Scrivener. Sure, she’d killed some aspirants and students too, but she
doubted anyone cared about that. Human lives were cheap.

She’d hadn’t
meant to kill the librarian. She even felt a little bad about it, if only
because he couldn’t have known it was coming and now it would be so difficult
for next year’s batch of hopeful sorcerers to learn the language. She wondered
if they’d still have a harrowing and if so, what it would be. She could imagine
nothing as awful as the Scrivener’s library had been, but then, she wasn’t very
imaginative and she knew it.

Connie. How was
she going to get to Connie?

There had to be
a door somewhere, a stair, some dark tunnel she hadn’t yet discovered. The
fleeting impression she’d had from the Scrivener’s perspective had been of
being above Connie, but then, everything had been skewed in the demon’s mind,
his senses overlapped by everyone else’s.

It didn’t
matter. She’d pull up the floors one handful at a time if that was what it
took. She’d dig her way down. She’d do whatever it took, but she’d find her. Connie
was here and she’d find her.

The sun was
rising. Mara turned her head to watch the skies turn grey, bleeding light into
Kazuul’s chambers. The curtains tossed in the wind. To Mara, half-asleep, it
looked like mermaid’s hair, adrift in the ocean’s currents. She could remember
lying on her back in her bathtub when she was very small, looking up through
the clear water and watching her hair drift just like that above her, shining
silver against the distant white tiles. She remembered swimming with Connie and
her whole family down at the community pool, suffering the madhouse roar of all
those summer swimmers because Connie was always so happy to go, and diving down
with her friend, holding hands at the bottom, and how Connie’s dark hair
drifted, drifted, just like a mermaid’s, just like torn curtains over the
Carpathian mountains.

Kazuul’s heavy
step on the stairs finally registered. He rumbled conversationally at her as he
crossed the floor, but went to the opening and shut the sun away with a wave of
his arm. The curtains flapped harder as the aerie shrank, then slowly hung down
and were still.

“You killed the
mermaid,” Mara croaked.

“Tis possible, I
suppose. I have killed many people, of many tribes.” He came to the bed, gave
her bonds an experimental tug, and smiled to see them as tight as he’d left
them. “Art thou trapped then?”