The Scholomance (9 page)

The doors
screamed inside her mind, vibrated beneath her hands, and suddenly heaved
apart, giving way before her as flesh gives before a knife. Mara hurt the
doors, had to feel that dumb, insane agony throbbing through their horrible
consciousness, and then had to hurt them again to keep them open as she
staggered through into light. She couldn’t yank her mind back fast enough, but
retreat could not unmake that memory or the sick and stunted feel of the doors
quivering under her hands.

What kind of
place had she come to?

There were
people in the light. Mara veered into a wall and hung on there, shielding her
eyes as they adjusted to this brilliance. The people were staring at her, really
staring. She wiped self-consciously at her nose.

“But…You…”

She recognized
that voice. This was the woman who had taken her things, who had tried to take
her locket. She backed away when Mara looked at her, her hands half-raised as
though expecting an attack. “You…You were only admitted tonight!”

Mara let go of
the wall (half a dozen robed figures stepped hugely back) and made herself look
as dignified as possible with no clothes on. “Do I get a robe yet or what?” she
asked.

*
        
*
         
*

Her robe was red
and it had a hood. The fabric was thick and heavy and actually pretty soft, far
more comfortable than she’d been expecting and absolutely essential against the
pervading chill of the damp mountain. It had no belt and no pockets, but the
voluminous sleeves were sewn up about six inches at the bottoms to form pouches
of a sort, although at the moment, Mara had nothing to put in them. The woman
who gave it to her said her name was Desdemona, but it wasn’t. The first thing
the woman did after Mara put it on was pull the hood up and over Mara’s eyes,
forcing her to pretty much look only at her own feet.

“You are nothing
here,” the woman said crisply. She’d recovered nicely from her shock at Mara’s
early arrival and seemed determined to make up for it with extra helpings of
rude. “You have no name, no rights. For now, you are only an initiate. You will
not be considered a student until you have survived your harrowing. You will
find it more difficult than opening a door.”

“Why? Because
you did?”

The woman
slapped her. “Initiates do not speak to students!” she spat.

‘I bet we don’t
knock you into walls either, but that’s what I’ll do the very next time you hit
me,’ Mara thought. She wanted to say it. God knew, she wanted to do it too, but
this was not the place or the time. Now was the time to be patient, to learn. The
reckoning would have to wait until after she had Connie.

Oh, but she
could make this woman cry. She could make her scream. She could make her get on
her knees and beg…if she wanted her to.

The woman eyed
her, perhaps remembering the slap-that-had-not-happened, uneasy. “Silence,” she
said at last, but she only said it this time. “If you must speak, do so in
whispers. Bow when spoken to.” She demonstrated, pressing her fists together at
heart-height and bending low. “Show no one your eyes.”

Mara nodded,
tight-lipped.

“If you are successfully
harrowed, you will be accepted as a neophyte, one of the untrained. This you
will remain until you have mastered at least one of the arts taught here. I am
an acolyte,” the woman added, raising her chin and giving the folds of her
black robe a little shake. “Mine is the Mastery of Sight and of Allure.”

It was on the
tip of Mara’s tongue to offer her congratulations, since she seemed so
ridiculously proud, but she didn’t care for another slap. She said nothing, and
sensed a faint embarrassed sort of disappointment from the woman in front of
her when her achievement went unmarked. Sometimes, you just couldn’t win.

“All neophytes
owe respect to acolytes,” the woman continued. “But all students, regardless of
their talents, owe respect to every Master. You will bow to them. You will
answer every summons. You will obey every command. Do you understand?”

Mara shrugged
and nodded.

The shrug
probably wasn’t smart. Angrily, the woman said, “You are here by the grace of
the Masters, and their grace is not guaranteed, initiate! Show them all
obedience or suffer the consequences. It is not permitted for any student or initiate
to defy an order given by one of the Masters. The price of defiance is death. Do
you understand?”

Mara nodded
again, omitting the shrug.

“Your harrowing
begins in the Great Library. There you will attend the Scrivener, copying
manuscripts.”

That was the harrowing?
Doing lines for some librarian? In disbelief, Mara tapped, and caught a blurred
and badly-remembered image of this woman, this Desdemona, in her own red robe,
crouched over a candle-lit table, writing. It wasn’t much of a memory, which
was curious all of itself, but then, people could sometimes have trouble
remembering the things that really hurt them. Mara could force it out, she
knew, but the woman was still talking and she had to pay attention.

“If you attempt
to leave the library before you are fully harrowed, you forfeit your right to
study. You will be used in lessons instead. These are not pleasant deaths,” the
woman added, almost in a joking way.

“No, I guess
they wouldn’t be,” Mara remarked, and got slapped again.

“Water is made
available at all times,” the woman said, flexing her hand as Mara gazed
thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Bread, twice each day. We have no timepieces
here. Listen for the tolling of the bells—”

‘And ask not,’
thought Mara. She smiled to herself.

The expression
disconcerted the other woman, enough to force her back a step. She regarded
Mara as one regards a dimly-seen lump in the crawl-space one must enter: it
could be a rock, it could be a wadded-up bit of trash, or it could be some
crouching, silent, savage thing just watching you and waiting for you to come
close enough to bite.

Mara really
liked that image.

“First-bell
rings to waken us and summon us to our morning meal,” the woman said slowly,
still uneasy. “At second-bell, lessons begin. At third-bell, lessons end and
the evening meal begins. At fourth-bell, our day ends. Your bread shall be
brought after first- and third-bell. Do you understand?”

Mara nodded.

“There are
chamberpots beneath the tables. Try not to soil your robe,” the woman concluded
in a doubtful tone. “You will not receive another. This way.”

Try not to? With
a chamberpot under every table? Mara had no exhibitionistic tendencies and yet,
if everyone else was doing it, why would she balk? She’d much rather piss in a
pot in front of people than wet her damn self like a baby.

The librarian
must be a demon, the sheer terror of whose visage had to be the ‘harrowing’
part of copying books. Mara thought she’d be okay with that. Horuseps was
terrible, in his own quiet way, but he wasn’t exactly harrowing.

Mara followed
her guide along yet another passageway, this one winding slightly upwards. More
of those glowing blisters lit the way. The floor had been worn smooth and
somewhat shiny by ages of untold feet. Connie had perhaps come this way.

For the first
time, it occurred to her to wonder how in hell Connie had opened those doors. The
flinching idea that Connie’s may have been the bit of bone Mara had so
callously toyed with during her ordeal didn’t hold up. Connie had sent a
letter. Two years after her disappearance, Connie had sent a letter.

‘Not
necessarily,’ a part of her whispered. ‘Two years after her disappearance,
Connie’s letter was found and sent.’

Mara crushed
that, too. Then, because even crushed things leave a stain, she reached out and
sank unnoticed into her guide’s mind.

Her real name
was Lynn Wynwick, that came first. Twice married, once disastrously, and twice
widowed by her own hand. The first time was almost an accident, a misjudgment
of medicinal herbs she’d been using to keep Richard’s bold and roving eye under
control. Both deaths escaped lawful notice and both brought her money.

Mara went
deeper. This was familiar territory for her, a familiar sort of game. Deftly,
she took the woman’s unsuspecting mind and made it into a filing cabinet for
her own use, thumbing through loose sheaves of memory for Connie’s name, Connie’s
face. She found nothing, but—

The Oubliette,
that was what they called that first room, those who survived it. Lynn had been
in the Oubliette long enough to lose forty pounds. Oh, tell the truth and shame
the Devil, closer to fifty. She’d spent most of it maddened by thirst, crawling
on her belly through her own waste, trying to suck drops of water off the
floor, no longer even hoping to open the doors but only to survive another day,
another hour. Sometimes, she thought her husbands were with her, alive
sometimes and sometimes dead, but always accusing. Her second, that bastard
Nathaniel, had raped her. There on the wet floor, his breath reeking of rotten
meat and his last cup of bitter tea, he’d raped her all over again just the way
he used to when he was alive. So she’d killed him again, killed him screaming
as he was inside her, just put her hands on him and wished him ferociously
dead, and he was, and so the doors had opened—

Frowning, Mara
withdrew and let the woman keep taking her away. She was as incapable of imagining
Connie killing somebody, even in the extremity of some hunger-induced hallucination,
as she was willing the door open with her mind. Heck, as badly as she’d wanted
to be magic, that was the reason she’d left that one coven back in college,
because they wanted to sacrifice a dog and Connie couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t
even dissect a dead frog in high school biology, that was Connie. No, she didn’t
believe it…but she had to believe Connie got through those doors somehow.

“There.” The
woman stopped and pointed on ahead. “I go no further.”

Naturally not. Because
of the harrowing. She tapped, but the woman was not thinking of the room
beyond. Was rather pointedly not thinking of it, in fact. Mara pried, and got
back that dim and strangely distorted image—the red-robed Desdemona, the
candles melting on the table, and the writing, the awful writing. There was no
sense of pain, no sense of sickness, exactly, only a terrible, formless
strain
,
and with it, an all-encompassing desire never to remember it any better. Mara
could make her, of course, but Mara let it go. The woman was a bit of a bitch,
but there was no need to torture her over something Mara would experience for
herself soon enough.

She shook her
sleeves back a bit, raised her hood so that she could see the flight of stairs at
the end of this sloping corridor, and the little gleam of light from one of
those glowing blisters higher up, out of sight. She could feel something, she
wasn’t sure what, something like the droning of flies or the sound of static eating
up the radio, only on the inside. Nothing serious. Nothing that even seemed
precisely alive. She started walking.

“If you survive,
you will be a student of the Scholomance,” the woman said, frustrated by Mara’s
total lack of hesitation where she herself had once stood paralyzed. “And you
will learn such things as you cannot imagine. Nothing is beyond the reach of a
true student. The embrace of the Masters is all-reaching.”

When Mara came
to the foot of the stair, she climbed. And with each step she took towards the
Library above her, she felt the press of that drone, that static, dialing
itself up around her. Halfway up the stair, her ears needed popping. After
another three steps, her nose began again to bleed. She stopped then and looked
around, but the woman who had brought her here was gone.

‘I really should
have checked to see exactly what this harrowing was, and never mind the torture,’
Mara thought, then realized she was stalling and climbed the rest of the stairs
in an angry burst of energy. They brought her to a sharp turn, a short
corridor, and a wide door. It opened at the touch of her hand, and Mara was
knocked out of this world into Hell.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
creaming. That’s all it was. Just screaming.

She’d fainted. She
realized that when she discovered she couldn’t move her body, but
unconsciousness was no escape from the screams. They bored into her like seven
billion beetles. She could feel them crawling on her, crawling
in
her,
their combined weight driving her down into the earth and burying her.

Mara wrenched
herself into the Panic Room. For the first time in nearly twenty years, it was
hard to do. Even there, the screams were only muffled, not silenced. The
monitors, when she switched them on, were black.

So were the
windows. The Mindstorm was not gone. It was full. There were no fragments for
her to see flashing across her inner skies, only every thought in its entirety,
every memory, every voice, all blending together into a solid cover of
blackness, and a single unending scream.

‘I’m being harrowed,’
she thought, and it was every bit as bad as she’d been warned it would be. What
was she supposed to do now, just wait it out? She tried to lift herself up into
the air and couldn’t. The scream dug into her, undiminished, devouring her
concentration and her will.