The Scholomance (8 page)

The pain did not
increase exactly, but it did spread, eating out her arm from the inside until
she screamed on her knees, screamed over and over without the mind or even the
ability to make words. Her throat cracked and she kept screaming. If it
ruptured and bled, if it burst and killed her, she still couldn’t stop. In that
moment, she would have cut her own arm off to get out of that terrible pain,
but she did not let go of the locket.

Without
conscious thought—there could be none in the thick of that agony—Mara retreated
from her body, curling in on herself in the haven of the Panic Room, where
sensation could not follow. She looked at the monitor that showed her the body
and stared in disbelief at her entirely uninjured arm. The speakers fed her the
sounds of her screams. The lights blinked a warning yellow as pain receptors
fired and fired without end, but there was nothing wrong here, nothing at all.

Mara made
herself shut up then. She stood the body up and stared at him from the Panic
Room’s peace. The body still breathed raggedly and too fast, but she managed to
slow it down some. It dangled limply from his grip, but it was steady and more
to the point, it kept its hand solidly wrapped around the locket.

The demon’s
eyebrows rose again. His head tipped the other way. She felt him in the storm
outside the Panic Room, felt his alien fingers brushing at the walls she’d
built, seeking a crack through which to enter. He didn’t find one. “Most
impressive, child,” he said at last. “Shall I huff and I puff?”

Mara gathered in
a little of her own strength and sent it out like a stomping foot, shoving him
back from her secret place with more ease than she’d expected.

The demon’s grip
on her wrist tightened until the monitors lit up on behalf of the tendons
strained to snapping point, the bones that ground together, but his voice
remained low and musing as he said, “You are a better cut than our usual haunch
of meat, yet you can be as easily devoured, I promise you. Indeed, the danger
is greater for that which tastes most sweet.”

“I won’t take it
off,” she said again. Her voice was rough, worn almost to a whisper by
screaming. It made her sound weak and frightened. Mara was neither.

The demon leaned
toward her, close enough that she could feel the touch of the light that came
from his eyes—feel it like ants across her skin. Then he closed them and drew
in a savoring breath. His hair rippled and stilled. He sighed and looked at her
again. “Think well how you begin here, child.”

Mara said
nothing.

 
“Hm.” Time did not stop while the demon looked
at her, but it crawled. She could feel its tiny, hooked feet moving down her
spine. But at last, the demon’s smile returned. “The Scholomance is filled with
tests. This one, you have passed.” He opened his hand one finger at a time,
gracefully, and used it to stroke her hair back, smiling wider when she
shivered. “But only because you cheated. Keep your toy. Come with me.”

The demon turned
away, letting his freakishly long arm drop to close the wooden box that held
Mara’s things before moving out through another doorway into another passage. His
hand drifted along the top of the box as he walked. It made a rasping sound,
too quiet to be abrasive but which raised the gooseflesh on her arms anyway. He
didn’t look back to see if she followed him.

Mara hesitated,
shivering once in the chill of the room. Her box had no marker, no number,
nothing to distinguish it from the roomful of others supposedly awaiting the
return of their owners.

It didn’t
matter. None of it did. Only Connie.

Mara left it and
went after the demon.

She could see
him easily, glowing like a ghost in the blackness ahead of her. More of those
chitinous plates grew partway up his spine, bisecting the alabaster perfection
of his back, making him easy to follow even though he made no sound.

“Who are you?”
she called. Her voice did not echo. The rock surrounding them caught her words,
ate them.

But he heard. He
smiled at her over his shoulder. “You are ambitious indeed to think you can
trap me so easily as that. You’ll find no true names here, young one. That book
is written. I am Horuseps, Master of Sight, at your service.” He twisted to bow
as he walked, a gesture every bit as mocking as his words. “You will see much
of me, if you pass your next test. One can do little if one cannot see.”

She wanted to
ask him about the others here, the other students as well as teachers, but his
smile was unpleasant, daunting. “Does it mean something?” she asked instead. “Your
name?”

“Yes,” said
Horuseps. “It means me.”

There was a door
ahead of them. She didn’t see it until he opened it, and then only because his
eyes flashed and illuminated a bit of the jamb. It had been deeply and
elaborately carved, the jamb, so that it outlined the rather plain face of the
door in a knot of writhing serpents.

“Within, expect
an exam,” he told her, gesturing in that elegant way he had. “For some, the
first. For others, final. And for you, only one of many, I should think.”

“What’s inside?”
Mara asked, knowing perfectly well he wouldn’t answer.

Horuseps tsked, put
his long hand on her back and pushed her gently across the threshold into the
lightless room beyond.

“I’ll see you on
the other side then,” she said, taking her first cautious step into shadows.

“I’ve no doubt. And
I await you, child, with bated breath.” He bowed, smiling, and then closed the
door on her.

CHAPTER FOUR

S
ilence. Blackness.

Mara shivered,
waiting. After a while, she reached out and found the door again. The stone was
flat, but rough as sandpaper. There were no carvings on this side. She followed
it to the floor and touched wetness, but not a lot. She followed it up and
could just brush her fingertips across the low ceiling. Slowly, testing each
step with a toe, she walked the perimeter of the room. Twelve paces by
seventeen by fourteen by twenty. Not quite square, then. The floor, not quite
level. But there was a set of double doors, uncarved but still impressive, on
the widest wall. Apart from those two exits, the room seemed featureless.

But not empty. In
one of the canted corners, Mara’s questing toe knocked into a mass of jumbled
objects, all sort of heaped together and tangled up in cloth. She knelt down
carefully to feel them out, thinking it must be part of the test, and perhaps
it was. Or perhaps just one of the people who failed it.

Because it was a
person lying there, or had been once. Bones, wet and slimy, still wrapped in
leathery folds of skin and hair, were all that remained now. The whole mess of
it had a waxy feel, as if it had been here long enough to become partially
calcified by the constant dripping of mineral-rich water. The skull had been
crushed, but fairly recently. The broken edges were rough, not waxy. Maybe
someone had stepped on it.

Mara sat down
beside the remains, a piece of skull still in her hand. She tapped it
thoughtfully against the floor as she considered her options. The demon, Horuseps,
had told her there would be a test. At a guess, she’d have to say that test was
getting out of the examination room. The doors had to open.

She got up again
and found her way to the double doors. Pushing accomplished nothing apart from
sore arms and shoulders. She found no latch, no seam wide enough to sink her
fingers in and pull. She went around the room a second time, now feeling floor
to ceiling every inch of the way, but found no panel or lever or anything at
all that could be connected to either exit, only a couple of fingernails and
they came right out when she pulled on them. In the ceiling, chill drops of
bitter water seeped through hairline cracks. On the floor, more cracks carried
them away before they could form puddles.

An untold time
later, exhausted and frustrated, Mara and her bit of skull got cozy in the
corner again. A thought struck. “Hello?” she called, thinking that if this was
it, if all she had to do was ask, she was going to be pissed.

But no, nothing.

“Open the door.”

More nothing.

“Open the door…please.”
Just in case manners counted for something in this stupid test, like penmanship
back in school.

Still nothing.

Okay, back to
the facts. Even if she got the little door to open, she’d only be back in the
hallway with Horuseps, so the answer had to be opening the big ones.

Mara got up,
carrying her skull-fragment with her, and felt her way to her destination. She
rested her palm flat on the rough face of the unmoving doors and scowled.

They were out
there, somewhere. People. Minds. Moving about in their little lives and
completely unconcerned with what was going on in here, and every goddamned one
of them had gone through this test and therefore knew how to open the doors. If
only it weren’t for the rock…

Mara had known
about the muffling properties of minerals for many years. It had been the
mental quiet inside the summer house’s concrete basement, after all, which had
inspired her Panic Room. Her own personal theory, when she bothered to think
about it at all, was that brain waves had to be a lot like the signal from a
cellular phone, because the same sorts of things were likely to hamper them:
long distances, great depths, and of course, layers of solid rock.

Mara tapped her
piece of skull on the door, trying to think.

Over the years,
she’d managed to improve her telepathic powers quite a bit. She no longer had
to look at the person she was trying to read, for example, although it still
helped her sense of focus. Her range of clarity, particularly for a mind she
knew very well, was about a mile. The Mindstorm reached much further,
inarticulately eating up her inner senses, but useless to her in any search.

She had to try. There
were no other alternatives. She had to reach through the rock and snag someone.
She had to, or she’d be here forever.

Mara tossed the
skull away and put her hands on the doors. Touching someone always helped,
particularly if she was doing something sneaky or difficult. As futile as this
whole exercise was apt to be, she had to at least say she’d made the attempt
and done it right, so she put her hands firmly on the door and aimed her mind
out like a searchlight.

What she struck
in that next instant sent her leaping back in exactly the same skittish alarm
she’d always despised seeing in other people. Such a rabbity response, the sort
of thing that made someone…well, someone like her, want to validate it with a
good slap. Now she was doing it. She may have even let out a yelp of some sort.
In the perfect blackness of the little room, it would have been very easy to
lose her balance and smash her own head open on the stone floor, but luck alone
kept her upright. Upright and staring without sight into the living doors.

The doors were
alive. They were alive and they were listening. It was not a person, it was a set
of doors. It was solid rock, the same as the floor or the ceiling or the walls
around her, but it was alive. Someone had made it be alive. Someone had poured
some kind of mind into it and brought it to life and given it a job. The
door
.

‘And this is how
you get out,’ Mara heard herself think. She shuddered, then bared her teeth in
the blackness because she hated the thought of cringing in front of a damned
door. Nothing had happened, after all. Nothing had changed. She could still die
here if she decided it was more fun to wring her hands and get all girly about
this. She was in the Scholomance, for God’s sake! There was bound to be worse
than this out there!

“True,” Mara
whispered. Her voice sounded surprisingly firm, even as quiet as it was. It
helped her focus, helped her center. Ignoring the rapid beating of her heart,
Mara put one foot in front of the other, reached out her arms, and slowly
forced herself back before the living door.

Its thoughts
were not human thoughts, but they were there, impregnating the dead stone with
awful, unnatural life. It did not see her standing before it, did not feel her
small hands on its cold body, and did not respond until she reached out and
gave it a queasy mental tap, and then, only by writhing psychically around
inside her mind.

Alive. The doors
were alive. That huddle of miserable bones that used to be a human was wholly
dead, but the doors were alive.

‘Let me out,’
Mara thought at them.

The doors
twisted in her mind, reacting to her command as a severed tentacle reacts to
little jolts of electricity, writhing and clutching at itself, but unaware of
her.

Mara focused,
crushing her own unease to lock her mental hands around the dull intelligence
before her and squeeze. **Open up,** she thought at them, thought
into
them, drilling her will down deep where it would have to hear her.

The doors
moaned, a terrible and silent groan that resounded in her every psychic pore. She
shuddered again, snarled again, and kept her hands where they were.

**Open!** Mara
ordered, not just thinking but shoving at them, beating at them. She heard a
faint pop somewhere, felt warmth pouring down her face, tasted blood in her
open, panting mouth. She ignored it, sank her psychic grip in tighter, and
bellowed,
**Open
, doors! Open to me! Open
now
!**