The Scholomance (79 page)

She’d miss him.

The realization
stirred her to another of those quasi-emotions, this one neither remorseful nor
tender, but nearly so. Very nearly.

Slowly, with
real reluctance, Mara returned to his bedside. She moved him onto his back and
the snoring stopped. Her hand lingered on his side, almost but not quite
caressing him. Then she reached up and touched his forehead, just below the row
of short horns at his hairline. The skin there was smooth, surprisingly smooth,
utterly free of the rough patches and bony nubs that pebbled so much of his
hide. He could never be even almost human, but he was handsome in a way, and
when he was relaxed like this, she could readily believe she’d miss him.

Of course, when
he woke up, he was going to want to rip her spine out one knot at a time. She
doubted he’d seem quite as endearing then.

But for now,
Mara could afford to be pensive. She bent and pressed her lips to that smooth,
young brow. She told him goodbye, down deep where he’d hear her and remember on
waking. Then she left him.

There was only
one place left in the mountain she hadn’t searched, hadn’t explored. It was a
place that lay below her, a place in the dark, the only place, logically, that
Connie could still be. She wasn’t looking forward to it, but having rendered
Kazuul unconscious, she was more or less committed not only to the search, but
to success as well. She only hoped she was strong enough to do what magic
needed doing. There would be a lot of it, if she was right. If she was wrong,
there’d be even more.

No students
shared her shadows in the mid-day hours between last-bell and first. No demons
prowled the passageways looking for violators. The caverns took the echoes of
her footfalls just as they guarded the sleeping minds she surely passed. The
Scholomance kept a thousand secrets. Today, she was one of them.

Mara passed out
of the lyceum into the Great Library, empty now. She paused at the rail and
looked down into the pit where she had passed her harrowing. The Scrivener’s
desk still lay in splintered pieces across the center of the floor. Of the
Scrivener himself, nothing remained, not even a stain upon the stone floor. They
had cleared the tables too, removed the chamberpots, put away the completed books
and neatly stacked the unfinished ones. She saw nothing in the shadows, nothing
more sinister or haunted than any other empty library might be. All the same,
she didn’t like to linger.

Mara walked
along the high catwalk over the library and passed through another doorway,
onward and outward, into the Nave. She walked past the Black Door with little
more than a glance into the dark mirror of its face, and on to the open
corridor that led to the dining room. The double doors were open, the tables
made up for the first meal, but empty, dark.

In the narrow
rear passage that led from the dining room to the secret stair down to the student’s
dorm, Mara saw light at last, heard movement and the rattle of metal and glass.
The kitchen doors, open. She walked, expecting at any moment to see that same
thin and scaly hand reach out to pull them closed, but nothing appeared, and
so, on impulse, when she reached the waiting doorway, Mara stopped and walked
boldly inside.

Crawling over
the tables, silhouetted before the fires, clinging to the sills where they hung
in and out of open windows with their mouths full of herbs, the grotesquely
gaunt creatures who worked the Scholomance’s kitchen stared silent and
motionless back at her. Spits stopped turning. Gnarled hands rested on
half-counted plates or half-polished silver. Sauce bubbled, unstirred. They
watched her.

Mara looked over
at the butchering block by the fire. The meat lying on its back with its bloody
ribs pointing at the ceiling was wild boar, only that, nothing more. Its head
was still on, sightlessly staring. Its four sharp hooves stuck stiffly out at
the walls. The creature carving it crouched inside the cavity of its empty
belly, gory chunks of pork in each hand dripping slowly onto the floor.

Then, movement. One
of the creatures slid all the way through the window and onto the floor in a
servile huddle, its whip-thin tail lashing like that of a nervous cat. It slunk
sideways to a cupboard and fetched down one of the golden cups the demons used.
It dipped it in a bowl and then it came for her, peeling back its lips from its
fang-crowded mouth and breathing wetly through its smile, if smile it was,
holding the cup out before it in an inviting way.

“Ma-a-a-sssster,”
it was saying, or trying to say. It slouched forward on its belly, eyes
averted, and long neck arched back, grinning as it offered the cup. Dark liquid
sloshed down its arm, falling in thick clots to the floor.

Mara backed out
again and gently shut the door. The meat was pork, only pork, and it had
probably been pork all along. Satisfied, she moved on.

The ephebeum was
silent, but the lamps lit for her, one by one, radiating out from her where she
walked. The reading rooms, the supply chamber, the baths—all empty. And so was
the garderobe, but here, she turned in. She walked along the channel of quietly
splashing water to the gaping hole at its ultimate end and looked down.

The smell of the
cesspit came up to meet her, but so did sound, and the sound of water falling
into filth far below had the echo of a large room. She’d always thought so. Now,
at last, it was time to search that room.

Mara knelt down
and put her hands on the rock. She made it malleable, as much as she could, and
scraped it back to form a passage wide enough for her to enter, with good, deep
handholds for her to climb. She didn’t think about the next step, didn’t think
about the smell, how it would feel under her bare feet or soaking up into her
robe, if it would be cold or warm, or anything like that. She thought about
Connie at the end of it, and the task right before her, and let all the rest
fade away.

Mara climbed
down on her Malleated ladder. The light stayed above her, deceptive, pouring
down in prisms as the water fell. She closed her eyes so they couldn’t distract
her and felt her way down instead. The rock was more honest than sight anyway. Shadows
hid and depth deceived, but a mountain’s memory was absolute. Through it, she
felt the room opening up beneath her, just as she’d felt bones and blood
vessels in their natural place in the bodies she had Malleated before. Its
dimensions were grounding. When her foot broke down through softened stone and
into empty space, she was not surprised, but only kicked the opening wider
before turning it all hard again. She rested there awhile, in the Panic Room,
where the smell couldn’t bother her, and watched the Mindstorm.

Something was
alive down there. She could see close living minds flashing outside the Panic
Room’s windows, circling aimlessly through human filth, unaware of her. Medieval
castles kept pigs in their cesspits, she recalled, to eat whatever there was to
eat and keep the waste from blocking up the simple pipes. Somehow, Mara doubted
what she met when she dropped down would be a pig.

Oh well. Time to
find out.

Mara moved
slowly, carefully, down the chute she’d fashioned, letting her legs dangle out
into empty space. She stayed in the Panic Room for this maneuver. It was a
dicey decision; from here, she had only the dullest sense of her hands and the
risk of losing her grip was great, but from here, funneling her body’s strength
into her arms and correcting its balance was as simple a thing as watching a
monitor and making adjustments to what she saw. She couldn’t do a simple
chin-up on her own. In the Panic Room, she simply forced her arms to do the
work as her legs hung, moving cautiously down hand over hand, until she clung
right at the lip of the garderobe’s opening.

Water splashed
over her head, crawled merrily over her body, dripped from her toes. Mara
listened. She figured the surface of the cesspit was about three feet below her
toes, maybe as much as five, but it was deep, very deep and wide. All four
garderobes emptied into this one room, and with a thousand or so students to
service, that made for a lot of raw material. Of course, she had only the rock’s
memory to go by and the rock couldn’t tell her if she’d find a solid mass of
compacted waste to stand on, or a vat of piss to swim through, or—a black
possibility, but one that had to be considered—a sucking pit of thick sludge
where she could do neither, but only drop thickly through until she drowned.

But something
moved down there, and so Mara had to believe she’d be able to move too. The
logic didn’t necessarily follow, but what a person believed didn’t have to obey
facts. That was one of the great things about the human brain. Mara flexed her
toes a few times, took a deep breath and held it, then opened up her hands and
fell.

She splashed
down into a warm swamp of fermented shit. Her feet scraped through a sediment
of warm mire, then hit a more or less solid clay-like layer, and went out from
under her. She sat hard, her chin up, grimacing with her eyes and lips tightly
shut, but didn’t quite go all the way under. Not quite.

She couldn’t do
this from the Panic Room. Her footing was too precarious. Mara dropped
reluctantly into her body, got the puking out of the way, and thrashed herself
up onto her feet, so that she could puke some more.

‘Get a grip,’
she told herself furiously, spitting bile blindly into the dark. ‘Get a grip
because
you are not alone
down here, and you had better stiffen the fuck
up and get out!’

Good advice. She
was always so full of good advice. How did such a sensible person keep getting
into these situations?

Mara allowed
herself a final croaking heave, and then set her shoulders and began to slog
grimly towards the wall, any wall. The sound of water falling overhead echoed a
lot more loudly down here then it had seemed to up there. She couldn’t hear
whatever it was sharing this pit with her, but she could sense them, sort of. She
kept looking back, even though the only light was that dim cone coming down
through the hole she’d widened, and it wouldn’t show her a damn thing unless
whatever it was down here was dumb enough to—

A long,
flat-topped, tooth-lined head slid noiselessly into sight and paused there,
angling back on its thick neck to drink from the clean stream pouring over it. Mara
stopped too, partly because her reaching hand had just struck the wall and
partly just to stare, because she knew was she was looking at. She guessed she’d
known all along.

They’d taken its
eyes away. She supposed they’d decided the creatures wouldn’t need them in
their new home. Or want them. And they were probably right. They had no eyes,
but the rest of the features were still there, and no matter how horrifically
stretched or shaped, they were still recognizable. That was a human nose,
pulled into two long grooves over the top of its wedge-shaped head. Those were
human teeth filling out that crocodilian jawline; some of them had fillings. Those
were human ears before
 
they’d been
improved to flap shut against the muck if the creatures should submerge. It was
a human being and its mind was gone, replaced either by the feral purpose its
Master had installed within it, or by whatever ugly instinct was left behind in
all of us once our comforting blanket of reason has been ripped away.

Mara groped for
a firmer grip on the wall and put her back flush up against it. The creature
opened its ears and aimed them around, clacking its lipless jaws in a
thoughtful way, searching. Another creature bled out of the blackness behind
it, sniffing at the falling water and ultimately drinking. As it did, the first
creature rose up out of the cess to paw at the air—walking upright was no
longer a natural position for this thing, but its forepaws were still human
hands, ghastly to see at the ends of those mangled, bestial legs—and then
dropped down again with a heavy splash. Its tongue lolled, flicking like a
snake’s. It swung around and faced her, dropping its head between its shoulders
like a stalking cat, and it was then and only then that Mara saw the tattoo
that used to be on the back of his neck, perfectly preserved by some demon’s
sadistic whim, over the distorted muscle and bone of his new body. Not a rabbit
and not a hare, no matter what he might have liked to think. A bunny.

Mara stared at
Devlin and made no sound.

He pushed
through the swamp, his head always level, his eyeless face always aimed at her.
When he grunted through his teeth, the creature on his right raised its head
and a third appeared just at the edge of the light. There may have been others
beyond that, but it was impossible to tell. All their minds blended together. There
was nothing of Devlin to reach for, nothing to appeal to. He was gone and this
was what was left.

Time to leave. She
could Malleate the rock behind her and crawl inside it, but that temptation was
a trap. It could be miles of solid rock, for all she knew. She’d exhaust her
air in minutes. There had to be a door.

Mara moved, her
back pressed to the wall, her eyes fixed on the monstrosities that hunted her. She
tried to make no noise, but the creatures re-oriented after each lick at the
air. They were drooling, rivers of it running unchecked through their human
teeth into the filth they wallowed in. They had no conscious memory of fresh
meat, but an ugly, animal want for it remained, pulsing in them like infection.
She wasn’t going to be able to fight them off.

And just as she
had that thought, Devlin jumped.

He crashed into
her, nothing but a heavy, reeking mass of scrabbling hands and snapping teeth. Mara
grabbed at his swollen neck and fell back, smacking her head a damned good one
on the wall and feeling his hot breath heaving at her face as he bit air in
frustration. His skin, slimy with shit, gave her nothing to grab, nothing to
push back. In desperation, Mara shoved her arm into his mouth as deep as she
could, wedging his jaws open and useless as she grappled with him. It would be
easy enough to snake her other arm around his neck and bring them together,
either snapping the creature’s spine or crushing his windpipe, but she couldn’t
bring herself to do it. It was Devlin. She’d shouted her last words at him. She’d
told him she wasn’t here to save him. She’d all but sent him to this place.