The Scholomance
Author: R. Lee Smith
Date: 2012-01-08 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Horror; Dark; Demons; Paranormal; Romance; Erotica; Magic; Adult; Supernatural
Description: Alternate cover edition of ASIN B006VJHHQO For centuries, there has been a legend of a hidden school where magic is taught by the demons who dwell there to anyone who seeks them out, but they ask a terrible price: Anyone who reaches the door of the Scholomance may enter, but the Devil takes every tenth student who tries to leave. A hidden school. Demonic masters. An inescapable fate for one out of every ten graduates. But Connie would do anything to have the magic her best friend was born with. And Mara would do anything to get Connie back.
Publisher: A Red Hot Romance Book

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Here’s what readers are saying about R. LEE SMITH and

OLIVIA

“The imagination of this author…is impressive and addictive…I enjoyed this book tremendously.”

—C . How

“I have never cheered and hated a character so much in my entire novel reading life…I couldn’t put it down, I couldn’t stop reading it. I just had to finish it…”

—Jade Williams

“I can’t remember the last time a book had so much power over me. R. Lee Smith is writing what can only be called masterpieces in a genre that sorely needs them.”

—Andi Devereaux

“R. Lee Smith is simply masterful in plot, pace, character, dialogue, setting, suspense, and mythology—in pure story-telling.”

—P. Willson

Also by R. LEE SMITH:

Heat

The Lords of Arcadia Series:

The Care and Feeding of Griffins

The Wizard in the Woods

The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

The Army of Mab

Olivia

THE

SCHOLOMANCE

R. Lee Smith

This book is dedicated to my grandfather and to his habit of keeping books with such marvelously terrifying illustrations down on the bottom shelf where any little kid could read it.

Copyright © 2010 by Robin Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

Purplhouse@yahoo.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

Mara came home on a Wednesday with a mild sunburn and a bank receipt for eighty-three thousand dollars stuffed indifferently in the front pocket of her jeans. The house looked empty from the street, but her mother was in, sitting in the front parlor with the lights off, working on her second bottle of wine. Mara was tired and inclined to let her, but when she walked in and dropped her bags at the foot of the stairs, her mother said, “Your little friend sent you a letter,” and everything changed.

Mara paused, one hand on the banister, and looked back. She wasn’t aware that she had any friends at the moment. “Who?”

Her mother didn’t look up. Just sat and stared at the wall and sipped her wine. She wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t even remembering things, although there were plenty of photographs on the wall where her blank eyes rested. Caroline Warner was empty tonight, and so much bigger than the space her skin enveloped.

She was like this more and more often these days, whether or not anyone was around to see her. Usually Mara was content to let important matters slide until her mother felt like being lucid, but tonight she was jet-lagged and worn out, so she reached in and gave the blackness inside her mother’s head a light slap. Her mom jerked hard, spilling wine over her chest. In the darkness, the spreading stain looked uncomfortably like blood. Immediately, a feeling that was not guilt but probably should have been welled up and Mara thought, ‘There might have been a better way to handle that.’

But it worked. Color and life came slowly up from wherever they’d been buried. Caroline Warner looked dully around and thought, ‘Such a strange child.’

There was no love in the thought. Mara couldn’t remember if there ever had been.

“I have a letter?” she prompted.

“Are you home?”

“Yes. You got a letter for me?”

“I dreamed about you…I think.” She was fading out, thinking of the past, but in ways so blurred, even Mara couldn’t be sure if the things she saw had really happened. “Did you…take care of things?”

“Not yet, but I put the money in the bank in Nevada. I can call the firm tomorrow. My little friend…?”

“Your little friend sent a letter. I had to…I had to pay the postage due.”

“I’m sorry,” Mara said patiently. “Where is it?”

Her mother drank wine and thought, ‘Those aren’t my eyes. Those aren’t Cade’s eyes. Where did those awful, awful eyes come from? Jeepers creepers, just like the song. Where did she get those eyes?’

Christ, she could be at this all night. Mara ignored her mother’s mental ramblings and started looking for the damn thing herself.

The kitchen was trashed, and unless the care service had just up and quit while Mara was away, all this mess had happened after the girl left for the day at six. She’d be tempted to make some angry midnight phone calls, except that Jenny’s cheerfully illegible handwriting was down in the log: good apetite for din., quiet to-day but active!! Active, right. It looked like her mom had just opened up every Lunchsnax in the fridge, taken one bite, dropped it, and opened up the next. When did this happen? When did her austere, somewhat brittle mother turn into a crazy person? How did a woman go from a little chronic depression to…to wallowing in her own frigging Lunchsnax?

She needed to hire a live-in, that was all there was to it. Another damn brain in the house, one that wasn’t prone to peaceful lapses into nothing. God damn it.

Caroline appeared in the doorway, lightly swaying on her feet. She wasn’t drunk. “Is your father home?”

“He died two years ago, Mom. Where did you put my letter?” Mara dragged the garbage bin over and started gathering up wrappers and food indiscriminately, her lips pressed tight together, seething as she stared at the undeniable clarity in her mother’s mind. It was laziness, pure and simple. Caroline wasn’t crazy any more than she was drunk, she just wanted to be. Being crazy was easier than picking up after herself, easier than living life and doing things. Who wouldn’t want to be crazy and just let someone else pay all your bills?

“When…When is he coming back?” Her mother’s voice shook. She was thinking of the girls. There had been a lot of girls. “I need to call him.”

“He’s dead, Mom.” The hell with it, she’d leave the mess for Jenny, along with another hundred bucks. Two hundred, and orders for a refrigerator lock. And if Jenny pocketed the change, as Jenny so often did (in her cheerfully dishonest way), so be it. Mara was not in the mood to deal with it, and throwing money at the things one was not in the mood to handle was the Warner way. “He’s not coming back. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Oh no.” Caroline Warner began to cry. Amazing that she could do that and drink at the same time. She cried and wished she were back in Venice, back on her honeymoon when Cade still loved her. She wished she were back in a time before this horrible, ice-eyed person ever existed.

“I missed you too,” Mara muttered, and shoved herself into her mother’s head.

‘Postage due’ meant the post office, so Mara started there, calling up an image of the quaint little brick building to see what resonated. She thumbed through half a dozen memories before she found one in the right time frame (or at least, one with her mother in a stained blouse and uneven hair, looking vague as she walked with fat, happy Rosalie up to the glass doors. Rosalie made this a Monday or a Wednesday.), and pulled it open for closer inspection. The letter was a big manila envelope. The amount due was $18.03. Seemed excessive.

Mara let the memory spool out through her phantom hands, watching closely. Her mom came home, made poor Rosalie work too damn hard to make sure she got fed, and then went upstairs. She shuffled vapidly through the house and finally put the letter in the linen closet where she picked up some clean sheets. ‘That horrible person will be home soon,’ was the thought behind this lifeless act. ‘She’ll be home and tired. She should have fresh sheets to sleep in.’

As always when offered glimpses of her mother’s caring, however indistinct, Mara felt a surge of hopelessly mingled pity and anger, and something else, something that ought to have grown into some kind of tender feeling, if only it had known nurture. She closed herself out more gently than she’d torn her way in, and gave her mother a weary pat on the shoulder. “Go to bed, Mom,” she said, giving the words a push to make them root. “Don’t drink anymore tonight. Just go to bed.”

“I’m waiting up for your father. He’s…working late tonight. He works so…so hard for us.”

She could have told the truth again. She probably should. But her mother would take herself to bed as soon as she’d been ground down long enough by the command Mara had left inside her, and anyway, she’d bullied her mother’s muddled brains enough for one night. Mara left her bags where they were and went upstairs, rubbing her tired eyes.

She took the envelope from the linen closet into her room and sat down at the desk where she used to do homework, where she kept all their financial papers now. This was the only piece of personal correspondence she’d received in a long time. Two years, at least.

Mara Warner, said the envelope, and it had to be a friend, all right. Her parents were not nickname people; the whole rest of this wide world knew her as Kimara. Her father had wanted a son. Her mother, thanks to a smudgy ultrasound, had expected to give him one, and so they had planned out only boy’s names. Malcolm Cade, she was supposed to have been. The delivering doctor’s name had been Jonif Kimara, and that was good enough for the likes of her. Malcolm Cade would be preserved for the next child, preserved forever as it turned out. Life was funny.

Mara Warner, in the middle of the envelope. Neatly-lettered. She didn’t recognize the handwriting. Beneath it, her mom’s address. Mara’s address, since she’d never really lived anywhere else, unless you counted college. And in the upper left-hand corner, another name: Connie Vitelli.

‘Your little friend,’ her mom had said, and God knew Mara only ever had the one—then, now, or anytime in between—but all the same, she hadn’t expected to see this. Connie was gone, run off to find some Romanian fairy tale from which there was only a slim chance of coming back and, one would assume, no mail service at all. Gone away with just six words left behind her and none of them goodbye. Gone away when Mara’s back was turned, just like the sixteen years between them never mattered.

Mara’s hand strayed up to her throat, touching the cheap gold-colored chain for a cheap, gold-colored locket. Her birthday present. The very best birthday. Best Friends it said on the outside. “Best friends,” Mara murmured, looking at her letter. “Right.”

*          *          *

The friendship was, like all the great ones, a total accident. Mara never would have met Connie if crusty old Mrs. Matsuo hadn’t forced her second-graders into alphabetized double-rows for every possible occasion, even the walk to the lunchroom. Every day, sometimes twice a day, Vitelli, Constance stood side by side with Warner, Kimara.

Mara, who had been living with the worst faces of humanity all the years of her young life, had already stopped trying to make friends and would have been content to stand and stare at the back of Underwood, Trevor’s blonde head without ever speaking, but Connie was lonely. Lonely was a bit of an understatement, really. Little Connie was one of those friendless and fundamentally forgettable people who are born under a cloud of gloom and are pretty much fated to go through life unloved because of it. It used to be that such people could at least join a monastery (or a convent, as the case may be) where personality didn’t much matter, but in these fine and enlightened modern times, little Connie suffered ostracism without end: shunned by her peers, misunderstood by her family and overlooked by teachers, with nothing to look forward to but cruel jokes in the high school crowd, dateless weekends rolling over into desperate sex with strangers, failed efforts at counseling, and ultimately, a one-room apartment and half a dozen cats. Connie Vitelli was one of Life’s Great Throwaways, even at the tender age of nine, and yet one day, this wretched creature glanced over and interrupted her own hazy funk of human misery to think, ‘She always looks so sad. I should sit with her today. Maybe she’ll be nice to me.’

Mara did not consider herself to be sad, but even then she knew she wasn’t happy. Who could be happy, living like this? Over nine hundred kids went to Frieda Kahlo Elementary School, along with sixty-plus adults. The little ones were nothing but nerves, afraid of teachers, afraid of schoolwork, afraid of the buses, the playground, the bigger kids. The older ones were already turning ugly on the inside, learning how to lie, how to cheat, how to dominate and feed off each other. The grown-ups were the worst of all, because even the ones who still loved you had enough reasons to hate the job that it stained everything they thought about you, and there weren’t too many left who loved you in the first place. All those minds in constant motion, and the Panic Room back then was still just concrete walls and one big-screen TV she couldn’t turn off. No, she wasn’t happy.

But sad?

Connie didn’t sit with her that day, but she wanted to. She sat at the other long table in the lunchroom and watched Mara eat her apple slices, wanting to be with her, wondering if she would be nice. Those thoughts had a cringing quality, all jumbled up with rejections both real and imagined, and yet Mara found herself starting to listen for them if they didn’t come in clear enough on their own. Through these slippery, frantic touches, she learned that Connie was in the middle of seven children, that they were not only Eye-talian but very Eye-talian, that the world at home was noise and shouting all the time, whether angry-shouts or happy ones, and everything was shared there, nothing new, nothing her own, nothing special and for only Connie. There was no niceness, in other words. There was love and there was family, there were hugs and kisses and cookies, but never niceness, and never (maybe) would there ever be.

Mara thought about this when she went home to her own big house behind the green gate. Her mother was arranging flowers, thinking only of flowers, unaware of Mara’s presence in the house even when Mara walked right by her. She thought about this when she passed her father on the stairs, saw him give her one of his distracted, polite nods, and heard him think, ‘Strange sort of child. Wonder where she gets it from? Intelligent enough, but look at those eyes…if it wasn’t for that nose, I’d wonder who’s been digging my potatoes,’ and then his mind would go off first in fuzzy waves of blame for Wife, who could not keep the babies he put in her except that one, the strange one, and never the son, never the Name, and then to even fuzzier thoughts of whoever the girl was at the moment and when he could get away, what reason he’d have to come up with this time, and such a fuss such a damned-awful fuss but better than a divorce by-God, and oh her thighs/hips/breasts, whatever. Mara’s room was always clean, always tucked away and tidy, and the house was distant enough than everyone else’s lives were only flashes of light and movement in her mind’s horizons, unless the Robbersons got very drunk or that-Kimmy-girl-next-door snuck in her boyfriend at night for the sexthing. Niceness was all around her, Mara thought, but it sure wasn’t very pleasant.

The next day, Connie didn’t sit with her either, and she was making her tummy cramp with the indecision of it all. Mara ate her school macaroni and drank her milk and just listened as Connie agonized. Would she be nice? There were mean kids on the bus, big kids who kept tugging on her braids and laughing and calling her names like wop, dirtywop, names she was afraid to ask Mama what they meant. She thought they would be nice once, too. No one was nice, that was the thing. Mama said just make friends, everyone wants to be friends with a pretty little girl like you, but no one wanted to be friends. No one thought she was pretty. No one was nice.

How true, Mara would think On the inside, no one was ever really nice. The best people in the world were ugly if you looked deep enough.

On the third day, Mara picked up her lunch tray and went over to Connie’s table. “Can I sit here?” she asked, and as Connie gaped at her with the shiver-wide eyes of a feral cat on a sidewalk, she added, “I like the way you wear those ribbons in your hair, all braided in,” because she knew about the mean kids and how Connie had to sit so still while Mama did the braiding and then cried in the bathroom because the mean kids would pull on them and it was dirtywop hair. “It’s very pretty,” Mara said, and that was all she had to say.

That was the beginning of sixteen years. She liked to think about that day—the way they’d traded bits of their lunches, those first hesitant Connie-smiles, the slow gentling of her frantic Connie-thoughts as she decided that maybe, just maybe, this was real and Mara was her friend—but she never dreamed of it. She could make herself dream it, she knew, but what was the point of that? She could have made Connie ask her to sit down, too (even at eight, she was already beginning to learn how to reach into someone’s head and make them think of things, although it would be four more years before she could do it every time), but that would have made everything that followed into a lie. Mara had been born psychic; she knew all about lies. Connie was the one person she wanted to be entirely honest with.

That was probably a mistake.

“Do you ever wish you were magic?” Connie had asked one night—one fateful night, as the writers might say. It was a sleepover at Connie’s house and they were in their pajamas up in the living room, tucked away on the floor in sleeping bags (Mara’s sky-blue new one, bought for this event earlier that afternoon, and Connie’s ancient army-surplus one). Connie was coloring. Fairies and dragons. She did a lot of those. “Like, that you had powers?”

If ever there were to be lies between them, it would have to come now, because that was the unavoidable question. Mara felt at Connie’s familiar rhythms of wistfulness and daydreams, knowing it would all change if she told the truth.

But she had never lied to Connie. Connie was her friend. Her one and only.

She said, “I do.” Said it with all the solemnity of a bride in church. Said it and then had to prove it. And when the shock and fascination faded (children were remarkably resilient to both, Mara had found) the wistfulness remained and the only change was envy. Not fear, not distrust, not even a bright flare of paranoia as she thought back at all the unpleasant things Mara might have overheard, but only envy. In retrospect, that was bad enough, but at the time, Mara had been relieved.

“I wish I had what you have,” Connie had said, coloring her fairy’s hair purple. “I’d give anything to be magic.”

The obsession began there. Mara really thought so. If not for that confession, that stupid hour spent doing card tricks, Connie might have stayed with fairies and dragons for another year or two and then gone on to boys and ponies like a normal kid. Instead, with undeniable proof before her that mystical powers existed, Connie had tried to make herself receive them, and no amount of failure could ever slam the door that Mara had opened. Gone were the sleepovers with coloring books and popcorn. Now it was all meditation and Freemasonry and Zener cards and the books of Charles Fort.

Mara tried. Best friends always try. But in the end, the truth came out: You could teach someone a foreign language with immersion and with enough time, even the accent would come out. You could teach someone with no musical talent to play the piano well, if not with any real passion. But no one could just teach someone to be psychic. It was not perception so much as connection, and somewhere inside Connie, that connection simply wasn’t there.

Long after she recognized the futility in Mara’s compliance, Connie never gave up. From that moment on, her pursuit of finding magic all her own came before everything and everyone. Every week, every day, it was something new: vampirism, mesmerism, levitation, transcendent chants, tantric sex, voodoo, Ouija boards and pendulums, animism, totem quests, and the Scholomance.

Always the Scholomance. That damned Devil’s Scholomance. All the others came and went, debunked, outgrown, or just plain impossible to prove, but the Scholomance hung on.

“It’s a school,” Connie said, that first time she’d ever dragged Mara off to the library to hunch over a book of badly-illustrated European ghost-stories. “A real place—”

“Oh Connie…”

“—deep in the mountains of Transylvania,” Connie stubbornly continued, now gripping her book in both hands, as though she feared it would be snatched away and maybe burnt. “And all kinds of magic is taught there by demons, real demons! And only ten people get in at a time, and listen, listen! ‘There they are trained for ten years, overcoming obstacles and surviving ordeals, and when the course of their learning is expired, nine students are released—” Here, Connie looked up, actually flushed with her excitement, as any girl her age might appear if poring over one of those teen celebrity magazines she’d ought to be obsessing over, if not for Mara and the lies she wouldn’t tell. Breathing hard, making certain that Mara had heard the discrepancy in number and was giving her full attention, she bent back over and hoarsely whispered, “—released to find their homes, but the tenth is given over to the Devil and detained as payment for all the glammar learned there.’ Imagine.”

Mara patiently sat quiet and let Connie do the imagining for both of them. She never expected such a ridiculous story to hold Connie’s attention, not for more than a few weeks, much less all those years, but there it was and there it stayed. All through high school and all through college, the Scholomance remained. Every few months, just when Mara would dare to hope the dream was finally dying, Connie was call her up with some new rumor, some new idle comment thrown away on one page of some obscure book, some new ‘fact’ that absolutely must be explored.

The Scholomance could only be entered once each year, or every ten years, or once a century, or under a solar eclipse, or only after all the present students had passed from its halls. Its magic was taught by demons, or by the half-human sons of King Solomon, or by deathless wizards, or by the Devil Himself. Only ten students at a time could enter its halls, only three, only fifty, only one.

But in all this ever-changing nonsense, one thing remained constant, anchoring the rest of the legend to a seeming of possibility, of truth: The price of tuition was always the tenth graduate.

“You really like those odds?” Mara asked once, only once.

“Ninety percent is better than anyone else could ever give me,” Connie answered. “Even you.”

And so Mara let it go, and that was probably her second mistake, but who could blame her for it? Who would ever believe that the Scholomance was real? How could Mara ever have prepared herself for coming back to the dorm that night and finding no Connie, but only a note with one line on it in Connie’s pink pen.

I think I can find it.

That was all. Not even goodbye. And for all the good it did, Mara tried to find her, but all of Connie’s notes and books and scrounged-up Scholomance nonsense was gone. Asking questions and tapping at minds for three days told her only that Connie had gone to the airport. What little research Mara was able to do on her own placed the Scholomance in the Transylvanian region of Romania, in the mountains, in the center of a lake, or perhaps even floating around in the sky like a dark cloud, invisible without the full moon behind it. Fairy tales.

Romania was not, she supposed, a really huge country and Transylvania narrowed that down even more, but it was still plenty big enough to hide Connie. Mara considered flying out after her, but in the end, she did not. A chase would be very dramatic and noble and all that, and surely it would work in the movies, but life was not the movies. Mara could not pick out her best friend’s most familiar and beloved mind from all these surrounding her right here in this stupid dorm unless she was very close, and so there would be no chase, no heroic flight to Romanian mountains, no rescue and no reunion. Connie was gone and all Mara could do was wish her well and hope she came back on her own and give this damned thing up for good.

She didn’t.

The days passed. One of Connie’s brothers came to get her things and left, baffled and furious with her for not being able to tell him where his little sister had gone (Mara could have at least shown him the note and said the word Scholomance, but she didn’t. Connie was the only one who ever had honesty alone out of her). Mara started playing cards to make up Connie’s half of the rent and learned how to temper big wins with frequent, inexpensive losses so that people wouldn’t realize how good she was. The Panic Room evolved many monitors and lost its chair. Mara’s father had his inconvenient heart attack in the bed of his twenty year-old girlfriend and Mara went home for the funeral, witnessed the first of her mother’s many slumps into depression, and just stayed there. Life went on. There were no phone calls, no postcards. No Connie.

And now, two years later, a letter.

The envelope was thickly padded. Her address on the front of it had been neatly-written, but not in the loopy scrawl she remembered coming out of Connie’s pen. There were a lot of foreign stamps, hence the outrageous postage due. There was no return address under Connie’s name.

Mara got her thumbnail underneath the seal and slit it open. She looked inside, and between the sleeves of bubble-paper, saw another envelope—smaller, pale, rustic-looking. She shook it out into her waiting hand.

A strange urge came over her in that moment. Before she’d even turned this second envelope over, much less opened it, Mara felt a piercing impulse to take it right back to the Post Office and mail it. Not to look at it, not to read it, not even really to get rid of it, but just to…just to send it on. It was the right thing to do.

The urge faded. Mara tried to hold onto it, tried to chase down whatever weird, paranoid place inside her had launched it, but it was gone. The envelope, however, the envelope remained.

The letter and envelope were one, made from a single sheet of thick paper, folded together into a clumsy square. The edges looked slightly chewed, as if someone had sealed them by gumming them. When she did finally turn it over, her address was there, looking back at her just as it had been on the outer cover, and yes, it was Connie’s handwriting now, the familiar balloony letters slanted—she’d been in a hurry when she wrote it—but it was definitely Connie’s. Still no return address, but only her name, written large, needing to be seen, pleading with her. No stamps here, either. Just the envelope.

Mail it.

Mara closed her eyes, but the urge was already blowing itself apart, not violently, but in the easy manner of a smoke-ring—inexorably adrift, impossible to snatch back, spreading out to invisibility even as the smell of it lingered. Frowning, she began to work the envelope’s seams open, smoothing it out into its original form.

What the heck kind of paper was this? It wasn’t just thick, but dense and soft, almost more like cloth than paper. And a weird size too, nearly twice the size of a standard sheet. One edge was rough, as if it had been hastily torn away. The other edges were oddly blunt to the touch, slightly curled under, like the pages from a very new book.

All of this, Mara noted. All of it seemed important, the way that little things will seem in the face of something bigger, the way that a spilled glass or a loose hair can seem important only in the same room as a murdered body. Because what was written on this very odd sheet of paper was just as jarring in its way as any corpse. It wasn’t long, just a few lines, and it wasn’t in pink ink, but it was Connie’s handwriting and it hit every bit as hard as the last note she got.

South of Altenmunster. West of Lake Teufelsee. Look for the door on Halloween night ONLY.

I was wrong about this place. Please come and get me.

*          *          *

Mara slept on the plane. It was a good place to sleep, a safe place. Maybe even the only safe place. Surrounded by the drone of the engines, the tinkle of ice on glass, the meaningless babble of businessmen-thoughts and stewardess-thoughts and pilot-thoughts (which were not always relaxing, but usually predictable), Mara surrendered her consciousness and retreated to the cozily controlled part of her mind she’d named the Panic Room to watch her dreams. They were dreams of Connie. She was not surprised.

She didn’t have to watch to wake up rested anymore, but she did most nights anyway. Habits were hard to break, and besides, dreams were almost always more interesting than looking out through the Panic Room’s windows and sorting through the tangle of minds that laid a constant siege to her peace. So she watched, hovering at a comfortable angle over the screens (she used to need a chair in order to lean back like this, but she’d outgrown it around the same time she’d outgrown the need to watch) where her dreams played out. It was her and Connie tonight, sitting up in Connie’s living room, both in their pajamas. She already knew where this one was going. She had this one a lot.

Connie was only eight in the dream, the age she’d been when they met, while Mara was twelve, the age she’d been when they’d actually had the conversation that was about to replay itself in some demented fashion. She was always older than Connie in her dreams, which was funny because in reality, Connie was older than her by about ten months. Still, you didn’t have to be a shrink to understand the symbolism: Connie was always going to be the kid in their strange, doomed relationship—always the one who needed help, who needed comfort, who needed attention and extra love.

She was always going to need to be saved.

“I wish I was what you are,” little Connie was saying, still in that same hot, frustrated, hopeless voice—the one just made for haunting dreams like these. “I wish I could do what you do.”

“No, you don’t,” dream-Mara said, as she always said in these dreams, words she had never said to the real Connie. Maybe if she ever had, things would be different now. Life was full of empty maybes. “It isn’t like you think it is. It isn’t fun at all.”

“I tried to be you and I couldn’t.” Little dream-Connie’s skin was coming in grey around the edges, curling in on itself like burning paper. “I tried to be what you are and I couldn’t. I fell down and skinned my knees and got mud on my new dress. I can’t get up, I can’t go home, I can’t go anywhere without you.” Grey, all grey, Connie’s arms and Connie’s face and Connie’s hand-me-down baby-heart pajamas, but mostly Connie’s voice, turning to ashes right in her throat. “I wish I had what you had,” dream-Connie whispered, just beginning to crumble. “Because look at me look at me look at me now.”

Mara touched the screen as it began to go dark. She didn’t turn it off. She didn’t have to. She’d learned that dreams only lasted a few minutes, but there would be more of them and they’d all probably be about the same.

But she didn’t have to watch anymore. That was something.

Mara looked out the window at the Mindstorm and all that it had for her tonight: Snatches of song, stranger’s faces, blurs of motion, screams, shouts, laughter, sobs—the lunatic babble of the two hundred and six people sharing this flight, surrounding her with their combined insanity. Those closest to her came in clearest. The woman sitting in front of her dreamed of cooking a chicken while a man-not-her-husband stood naked on the kitchen table, stroking his erection, saying, “Choose, Susan. You know you have to choose,” and the woman wept and wept and cut up her chicken. Beside her in the aisle-seat, a man in his forties sat and dozed and thought not seriously about trading in the minivan and getting that Porsche, always wanted one, but May-Dee was going to be driving in another few weeks, and really, if she was going to crash something (and kids always did), it may as well be the minivan than a Porsche. Sitting next to Mara, loudest of all, a wide-awake May-Dee counted days over and over, digging grooves into her brain and Mara’s as she wondered if she was late, was she really late, was she just late or was she caught, oh God, caught pregnant, caught up and why hadn’t she made him wear it? The stewardess walked by, her thoughts blending into bitter focus as she neared—five more years, I swear to God, five more years to retirement and then I never have to see these puling little shitsacks again, five more years and I’m golden, five more and if that bitch in C-3 pukes one more time, I’m going to break the fucking bag open on her fucking head—and then faded out again as she went back into Coach. The pilot spiked briefly—HolyChristwhat wasthat?—but Mara was used to jittery pilot-thoughts and sure enough, he relaxed and drifted away. Nothing much here, just two hundred and six strangers screaming out their strange little lives. Quiet night, compared to the flight back from Tahoe. Lord, she loved to fly.

Another dream was starting: Mara in a dark place and Connie crying somewhere out of sight. Connie, who wasn’t just lost in Dreamland this time. This time, Connie was lost for real.

“And I’m going to find her,” Mara said, watching her dream-self stumble through the dark maze of her own mind. She reached up by habit to touch her throat and saw, through another screen, her real-life fingers twitch towards the real-life locket hanging around her neck. A cheap, childhood birthday present, nothing more, from the only best friend Mara Warner ever had.

Connie kept crying. The dream died away and she let it go, leaning back in empty space to watch the Mindstorm and wait for another one to start.

CHAPTER TWO

The plane touched down in Bucharest and customs was a bitch. There was a bit of a language barrier—even the ones who spoke English didn’t think in it—so she had to make her suggestions more visceral than was her habit. Mara had long ago learned the value of being difficult to notice, and she was glad the officials weren’t rooting through her luggage just for kicks, but it did prolong the process of getting out of the airport.

She used the time she had to its best advantage, changing her money over, checking the map, and making phone calls so she could be sure the lawyers and the banks were speaking to one another so her mother wouldn’t be left in the lurch if this trip went long. Rosalie had been willing to stay until the care people could get someone in on a permanent basis, so Mara could rest easy knowing her mother wasn’t lying drunk on a mound of rotting food wrappers while she was away, and if she was, it was someone else’s headache.

If only she’d had more time to make arrangements. ‘Halloween night,’ the letter had said, and that was only a few days away, but finding her way in was only part of the problem and not, she suspected, the thorniest part.

But getting in was the part she concerned herself with now. She took the train to Brasov, and it was there, away from the more cosmopolitan flair of the city, that she really got the feeling of Romania in her surroundings. Interspersed among the blue jeans and business suits, she now saw colorful shawls and embroidered belts livening up workday clothing. There were fewer cars, more bicycles, and a handful of donkeys pulling carts. Dogs and children ran wild through the street, seeming to speak a mad pidgeon of laughing barks and howls at each other. Old men smoked pipes, young men smoked cigars, and boys stood in full view with cigarettes staining their small fingers. The people’s faces began to run together—all craggy brows and hooked noses, frowning mouths and deepset, suspicious stares. When she took her sunglasses off to read a time-table at the train station, three old ladies forked the sign of the Evil Eye at her. She left the glasses off, irritated.

There were cabbies lined up around the station, leaning against the sides of their well-traveled Buicks and vans to eye the tourists as they came into town. Most of them called out to her, claiming to speak English. Only some of them did. She picked the first one who wasn’t overly contemptuous of Americans and thought she’d done all right even though he charged her twelve lei as soon as she slid into the back seat, telling her it was a pick-up fee. “This is law, the way of things,” he lied, holding up his empty hands in mournful supplication to an uncaring legal system. His accent lay thick over every word—Zis is law, ze way of t’ings—and he spoke in the same slow, serious manner that seemed to be the cultural standard here, as if every word were in some intellectual doubt and ought to be pondered first. “These men, they care nothing for the work a man does, only for to pick his pocket. So they fee me, eh? So I must fee you.”

Mara took out her newly-changed money and passed over a few bills without looking at them. The driver took them the same way, thinking, ‘She’s blind,’ with hungry complacency as he watched her settle herself in the back seat. ‘Poor little lost lamb, to be blind among wolves.’

Mara looked at herself in the cracked rear mirror, seeing just the slice of her face that it had to offer: wisps of blonde hair, so pale and fine it was generally assumed that she bleached it, the suggestion of high cheekbones, the very top of her father’s thin, straight nose, and her eyes, of course. Very pale, very clear, only a few shades darker than the whites around them, the ink-black centers shocking in contrast, these were Mara’s eyes. Lots of people thought she was blind, at first. Then they just thought she was freakish.

“Where I take you?”

“Altenmunster,” she said, watching him tilt the mirror so that he could look at her breasts, imagine them without her sweater, think about burying his face between them. Lamb among wolves, indeed. “Do you know it?”

“Know very well, miss. My mother, she born there,” he lied. He consulted a much-weathered map of his own, his heavy brows beetling. “But is long drive. Four hour.” A pause, as he considered her not-cheap clothing, her clean skin. “Five, if bridge is out.” A longer pause, as he brooded on his dingy flat above his cousin’s shop, with only half a bottle of wine awaiting him, and on the endlessly deep pockets of the Americans. “Is probably out.”

“I see. Well, if you can’t take me all the way, just take me where you can and I’ll get another—”

“No, no! I take you. You never find another honest driver, miss, not in Brasov. Den of thieves, it is. Mountains like fairy tale, full of dark place, full of thieves.” He eyed her breasts some more as he started the engine and lurched out into traffic. He thought of good American money and good Romanian drink. “Who you go to in Altenmunster, eh? Family?”

“A friend, I hope.”

“Young man?” He leered, licking at his thick lips. “Young lover?”

“Just a friend.” She turned to the window, letting him see her watch the scenery. She felt his flare of surprise and when she turned back, he’d re-adjusted the mirror. “She’s studying Transylvanian folk tales. Legends.”

“Ah, yes? Vampires,” he said scornfully. “Always with vampires in Romania, but there are none. This was Irishman’s story, ha! Vampires.”

“Have you ever heard of the Scholomance?” Mara asked.

The steady, cheerful flow of his thoughts did not freeze, exactly, but it did buckle. He shrugged, outwardly uncaring, but growing distinctly darker on the inside. “You go to meet this friend, eh? Or to find him?”

“Her,” Mara corrected, feeling out this change in him with careful hands. “I’m going to meet her.”

“Ah.”

“Do people go missing a lot when they come to Romania?” Mara asked, pretending to be teasing as she studied his mind. “Are you sure there are no vampires?”

“Yes, you laugh,” he said with great dignity. “But is dangerous country for fools to wander.”

Mara murmured something properly abashed, listening closely. He thought in Romanian, of course, but now and then, bursts of meaning came through, like bubbles rising through tar to pop in the open air. The dark woods were filled with corners where pretty girls walked in and never walked out. Vampires, no, but there were wolves, and there were worse than wolves. She could see the memories of a small boy, an aged woman in the kitchen, telling stories Mara couldn’t understand, stories that made every creaking branch outside the window into a grasping hand, stories that came in nightmares again and again, and soaked the sheets with sweat and piss.

The cabbie hooked out a small cross from the collar of his shirt and kissed it, thinking of the old woman and hating her in a dry, distracted way—for the stories and the nightmares and the beatings that had followed every morning in those damp, stinking sheets. He said, “Yes, I hear of Scholomance. Children’s tales. Foolishness.”

“Like vampires.”

“Vampires make fools because they are no true, no there to be found,” the cabbie said, and kissed the cross again. “Who would look for such a thing as Devil’s School? Who but fool? Men come, every year come, even after all this time. What for they hope to find it?”

“What, people actually look for it?”

“In the mountain, they say. In the middle of the lake. They look for Devil’s School in Sibiu, in Paltinisch lake, in waters of Balea.” He shook his head, scowling, then shrugged again. “You friend wise to stay in Altenmunster, clear of bad places. Just listen to stories, not chase after. But to listen, ah, that do enough harm.”

He was thinking of those sheets again. Mara thought of fairies in a coloring book and one dumb kid’s honest confession that should have been a lie.

“You no go look for it, eh?”

“I’m here to get my friend,” Mara said. “And take her home.”

“Away from nonsense stories,” the cabbie said with a curt nod. “Good.”

Conversation died after that, which was just as well. Mara turned back to the window and let the cabbie relax until he was once more in the here and now, once more thinking blissfully of the soft swells of her breasts against his stubbly cheeks. The mountains stayed where they were, innocent by morning’s light, while the forests moved before them. Traffic blew by, bringing strange thoughts in and out of range like muffled slaps. Mara settled back and closed her eyes, slipping into the Panic Room to wait out the trip where she couldn’t feel it as clearly, but she didn’t sleep. She was a lamb among wolves, perhaps, but no fool.

*          *          *

Mara did not consider herself an imaginative person. Imagination, after all, is born of ignorance, and it is a hard thing for a telepath to be ignorant. The Panic Room’s design was therefore very basic, having evolved from Mara’s very basic need for some sort of barrier between herself and the barrage of mental noise in which she lived. She’d always had it, in some form or another. Her earliest memory in all the world was of drawing off into some dark, interior place one afternoon because her father was doing the sexthing to Ola, the girl who got paid to walk Mara to and from preschool. Of course, in those days, she didn’t have a name for the place, nor had she imbued it with any of its current conveniences. It was just a place to go to when things got unpleasant or thoughts came in too loud or too fast.

The earliest Panic Room in its recognizable form had been built over the course of a single summer when she was seven and had gone with her mother to the house in New Hampshire. That house had a basement, and nothing else she saw or experienced that summer had quite the same impact as Mara had found there in the bottom of that old house. The walls were poured concrete—cool, grey, solidly built and impervious to time and weather. Exposed wires and pipes ran across the low ceiling, connecting the room to the rest of the world, but in such a way that no part of it could actually intrude. Sound was muffled; light, diffused. The air had a heavy, musty quality that Mara had never known in her mother’s immaculate home. And everywhere around her were relics out of time, held away from the dangers of intrusive Life. It was Stillness and Protection. It was Peace.

She wanted one to take home with her, and so, while her mother played tennis and shopped and had parties, seven year-old Mara built a Basement. It took several weeks, during which time, the young girl terrified the servants and disturbed her mother with mysterious fainting spells, nosebleeds, and on one memorable morning, pitching out of her chair at breakfast for six and one-half minutes of frothing convulsions.

An examination by the local doctor was duly performed and Mara pronounced healthy overall, merely suffering from ‘nervous energy’ caused by her strange surroundings and a child’s usual vigor. Mara knew her mother believed the doctor was a quack (condescending quack, makes his living patronizing the summer people, wouldn’t know real medicine if it bit him on the ankle), just like she knew the doctor thought Mara had actually swallowed something (probably got hold of one of the old bitch’s Valiums, kid’s got that too-calm look about her, probably been stealing them for years), but they both pretended to be satisfied with this explanation and Mara went home. If Mara’s mom had pushed a little harder, she might have gotten an MRI for her little girl and that would have revealed some truly astonishing developments in little Kimara’s brain, but Caroline Warner was not a pushy woman even then and the Basement work proceeded.

By the end of that summer, Mara had succeeded in creating for herself a windowless, doorless, featureless space inside her own mind where the cast-off jabber of the rest of the world could not penetrate. The walls were cool and grey, and she could sit upon the hard floor and just be in the quiet. The only trouble was, when she was there, she wasn’t in herself and if she happened to be awake when she went into the Basement, her body tended to drop vapidly on its face and drool, which scared people. If she went in as she went to sleep, she got up in the morning feeling heavy, sick, and generally exhausted.

By the time she’d met Connie, the Basement had already undergone its first transformation, which included the addition of a big-screen TV like the one in her dad’s game-room. While she was awake, the television showed her the world through her own open eyes and kept her from looking quite so spaced out (in time, she was even able to walk and hold conversations from the Panic Room, which made going to school infinitely more bearable) and when asleep, the TV played the dreams she had to watch so that she woke up rested. But it was still cramped quarters and rather limited in scope.

Over the years, modifications were made, both to the room’s comforts and its usefulness. The plain, grey walls grew windows which allowed her to see the Mindstorm. Slipping back into her body before the advent of the windows had been a lot like walking outside without any idea of the weather, and many was the time she’d fallen unwittingly into the psychic equivalent of a typhoon, the shock of which frequently caused her to spontaneously urinate, vomit, or generally embarrass herself and whoever happened to be with her. Then came the chair, because even though she knew she didn’t really have a body on the inside, her legs stubbornly insisted on cramping up after long hours on the Basement’s floor. Now, of course, she could hover, but the chair had been necessary for many years. The monitors replaced the television: one to let her look out from her eyes, one that took in her brain’s spatial readings of what her arms and legs were doing and therefore made it possible for her to walk around and touch things without having to go back into the body, and a third, which showed her the dreams she had at night and any memories she wanted to explore during the day. In other words, it had ceased to be the Basement of her childhood and transformed itself into an adult’s paranoid place of refuge. Hence the new name, which was as close to humor as Mara really got. She was not prone to panic. Neither did she joke.

At this point in her life, slipping into the Panic Room, which had once come damned close to putting Mara in a child-sized coffin, had become as casual and as essential an act as slipping on a pair of eyeglasses. There, she could look up the memory of a phone number from a decade past as easily as another woman might glance in a mirror, or shield herself against a Christmas Sale Mindstorm as if she were shrugging into an overcoat. Without it, riding in a car on a busy highway was torture; driving one, impossible. Beyond that, it permitted Mara to make a tidy living around the poker tables, counting cards and studying her opponents’ hands without the distracting babble of the rest of the casino bleeding in.

A very tidy living.

It did not surprise her to discover psychics like herself plying the same trade on her frequent trips to Nevada’s copious casinos (or employed there), but it astonished her that they had no Panic Rooms of their own. The human mind was, to Mara’s unimaginative way of thinking, like a room filled with loose sheets of paper blowing wildly about. The other telepaths she’d come across could put those papers in neat stacks or perhaps in labeled filing cabinets, but not one of them had put those files in a computer like Mara, or locked that computer away behind walls.

Even as a child, she had never believed herself to be unique, she’d just assumed that she was one of a very few. As an adult, her discovery that other telepaths had no Panic Rooms had been heavily stained by the suspicion that they were just better at hiding them. And so, not knowing whether she were retaliating or laying in a pre-emptive strike, Mara had developed an almost schizophrenic way of thinking: She had surface thoughts, floating around in the Panic Room for those presumably sneaky psychics to see, and hidden thoughts, hidden even deeper and shut up even tighter, in the Panic Room’s Basement, so to speak. Likewise, she could not simply listen to someone talk without also feeling at his thoughts, and she had become quite adept at stealing in and out again undetected, even from those minds who believed they were defended.

None of this had ever seemed important enough for Mara to think about, any more than a person ordinarily invested thought in the formation of her thumb, although it is undeniable that a human thumb is absolutely essential to one’s function and quality of life. As she rode in the Romanian’s cab, safely shut away from the shrapnel of other motorists’ thoughts, Mara enjoyed the Panic Room’s protection without dwelling on its origins or the skills its use had allowed her to hone. At no point in the coming days would it occur to her to marvel at the power of her Panic Room, although she was certainly grateful for it. It had become a tool—her eyeglasses, her overcoat, her mirror, her thumb—and tools existed to be used without wonder.

And it was just as well, for wonder surely would have been detected and followed to its source, but Mara’s indifference could only be to her benefit. Being unimaginative did have its advantages. One could not think of purple-haired fairies, perhaps, but one was surprisingly well-equipped to deal with them.

*          *          *

The town of Altenmunster was ten streets, twelve bars, two churches, and one fountain. The cabbie let her out at one of the taverns, fancifully named La Dansul Capra, The Dancing Goat. He accepted her generous tip, then began to drive away, braked, sat idle for nearly two minutes, and finally came back. He thrust his fist through the open window. His little silver cross dangled, catching what grey light the sky had to offer and turning it into a hopeful sort of gleam. “God go with you,” he grumbled when she took it, and then drove rapidly away. He believed he would not see her again. Coming from a man who never saw any of his tourist fares again and never thought twice about it, this was a sinister note to depart on.

She watched him go, and when his coarse, brooding mind was entirely out of range, she turned and gave her new surroundings a hard stare. To Mara, the mountains of Romania bore a striking resemblance to those she’d hiked at home in Washington State. The Cascades may never appear in one of Universal’s grainy horror movies, but they had no doubt made good practice for climbing the crumbling, ice-covered cliffs she saw before her now. She did not anticipate trouble on the ascent, an attitude not due so much to confidence in her own skill as to the knowledge that Connie would have had to have gone before her, and Connie’s idea of roughing it was camping without an electrical hookup and a flushing toilet.

The thought brought a faint curve to her lips. Mara let her eyes drop, unfocused, to touch the smile with careful fingers before it could die away. Her heart ached briefly; she touched that, too. ‘I should have gone after her when this whole thing started,’ she thought. ‘I could have caught her.’ And she listened, but no answering knell of grief or regret sounded. Oh well.

Altenmunster did not see many tourists, clearly, but they were able to provide surprisingly well for a camping trip. In a very short while, Mara had solidly rigged herself with a sleeping bag, backpack, climbing gear, food, and a good hunting knife. The rough men in the store watched her shop and laughed at the free way in which she spent her money, thinking Romanian thoughts in sneering tones, but the laughter stopped when she got close enough for them to see her eyes.

She showed Connie’s picture around, reasoning that if Connie had known the town’s name, she’d probably been there, and indeed she found half a dozen folk who did remember her, although they all solemnly denied it. She saw the Evil Eye forked at her quite a few times. She put on the cross, but it didn’t stop them. The town priest came out of one church, following at a discreet distance and splashing holy water on the ground where she walked. Not to be outdone, the other church soon spat out a second priest, who dogged her from the other side of the street, swinging a censer. She did her best to ignore them both and they didn’t follow her very far out of town.

Lake Teufelsee was seventeen miles out from Altenmunster. Between the weather and the wilderness, it made two days’ hike. There was a compass in the pommel of her new knife. She used it to orient herself south of the one and west of the other and then she began to search. Halloween night only, the letter had said. Emphasis on ‘only’. She wasn’t sure what to look for and so, in her unimaginative way, she looked for everything.

And found nothing.

For three days, Mara scoured the foot of frozen, crumbling cliffs for some sign of a cave, an encampment, a road, anything. Now and then, she stumbled across the detritus of human life—the charred remains of bygone fires, rusted cans, broken bottles of foreign beer—but that was all.

On the fourth day, October 29th, something touched at her mind. Immediately, she pulled back into the Panic Room and looked at the Mindstorm, where the muted, smoggy haze of the empty landscape now flickered with someone’s approach. She thought of Altenmunster’s roughs first, but when she snuck out a stealthy hand to test it, realized that whoever he was, he wasn’t Romanian. She thought he might be Italian. The language was similar to the boisterous babble she recalled from visits to Connie’s house, and the architecture she saw in his memory was certainly reminiscent of Rome, although a lot of those European countries looked the same to her uneducated eye. But he was coming towards her and not by accident. This was no holiday for him. He had come here three times before. He meant to get inside this time.

He came for the Scholomance.

As he made his grim way towards her, Mara sorted through his mind, locating each image he had of this place. Using them, she studied the mountains around her and identified one of them from the Halloweens of his past. In this man’s mind, in the black of some remembered night, there was an opening in the cliff-side, midway between the peak and the lake. She looked now and saw nothing, not even a shadow in the place he believed he had seen some tunnel’s vast mouth open and throbbing with torchlight. She headed over anyway. People could lie and eyes could be deceived, but thoughts were impossible to fake.

She was standing at the bottom, where the lake met the mountain, looking up at a sheer face of rock when he saw her. He was neither surprised nor pleased to find company, but in those first moments, believing he had caught her unawares, he contemplated, in foreign words but explicit imagery, how best to sneak up and kill her.

Mara looked at him.

He stared back at her, savoring his red thoughts, and began to make up his camp.

Before dark, they were joined by another man, one whose mind spoke some sort of French far too rapidly for Mara’s halfhearted high school studies to follow. Nevertheless, the word Scholomance was clear, and so was his intention. He was out of shape, out of breath, and badly startled by the presence of strangers here before him, yet seeing their tents, set up his own and waited.

All through the night, people closed in on them, some staggering through the dark in vague search patterns, others coming in bullet-straight lines towards this most particular peak. Mara watched them from the Panic Room, resting her body while keeping the more sinister of her two companions under close mental observation. Twice, he got up with murder in mind; twice she woke and put a hand on her knife, letting him see her see him. Although he had many opportunities, he never went after the French guy. He apparently saw Mara as his only real competition. She couldn’t help but feel a little flattered.

It rained the next day, all day. The wind blew fantastically cold. In the Panic Room, none of this had any effect that she could feel, so she stayed there, monitoring her body’s condition without any of its discomforts and making sure it was kept fit in case Mr. Murder made a run on her. Four more people trickled in at four separate hours. Three were American, and one of these, the only other girl Mara saw or even sensed out there. They immediately grouped up, united by a common language. Mara pretended not to understand them when they hailed her, but she watched them make their communal camp. They had a bottle to pass, and later, little dried mushrooms and some good, pungent reefer. They talked about the Devil in adoring tones, about deathrock and shoegazing, about nihilism and Baudelaire, but after dark, the talk died. They emptied the bottle and then just looked at each other. The fat man who spoke French tried to go over and sit with them, but they turned him out with jeering laughter, and he went into his tent and did not come out again.

Midnight. Someone’s watch beeped. The Americans looked up at the mountain. They talked a little more, smoked another two joints between them, and went to their separate tents. So did Mara. So, eventually, did Mr. Murder, but his thoughts stayed with her and stayed dark.

There were wolves in the mountains somewhere. They howled to each other, the sound deceptively close as it bounced and rolled over rock, and the wind howled back, shaking the tents. The lake slapped at the stony shore. No one slept but Mara.

The fat French-speaker stayed shivering in his sleeping bag and cried a little, off and on. The other guy poured some pills into his shaking hand and washed them down with a fifth of vodka. Eventually, one of the Americans slipped out of his tent and across camp. The girl didn’t mind waking up for him. They had loveless, frightened sex, and he returned to his own tent. The other American went next, to the same welcome, the same silent return. Mr. Murder lay awake thinking they would all be asleep in another hour or so and it would be the work of a few minutes and his sharp knife. This was no longer the idle hostility of a man surprised by strangers, but a real plan and she supposed she’d better deal with it.

Mara woke herself up and walked barefoot to Mr. Murder’s tent. He had the knife in his hand already when she let herself in, but seemed reluctant to use it when she pulled her shirt over her head and dropped it on his floor. She closed his tent, opened his sleeping bag, took his wrist, and helped him cut her panties away. She licked the blade and he forgot about killing her.

She didn’t talk, didn’t react to his whispers or his attempts to embrace her, but she gave him things to think about, even things he didn’t particularly want to think about. The human mind can desire many things that repel it, and once a seed is planted under the right conditions, it almost always grows. It stopped being fun for him. She got on top and pushed him down, staring into his eyes as he lay motionless and panting beneath her, and made him remember every sordid, shameful, secret pleasure as she moved. He began to think she wasn’t human, began to be afraid. She rode him harder, let her fingernails dig into his chest and draw tiny dots of blood, but he was too far gone to move. He saw fangs in her mouth, thought her eyes were filled with moonlight. He came crying and she grabbed his throat and leaned in close, letting him believe whatever he wanted to believe about what was coming next, how it would end for him, where he would go after.

Then she kissed him, her lips shut and her eyes open wide. She got up, put her shirt on, and left without ever speaking.

He packed up and left soon afterwards.

Mara slept.

CHAPTER THREE

The others were up with daylight, but Mara made herself stay under and at rest until well after noon. It was apt to be a long, difficult night. When she did rise, she didn’t bother breaking her camp. It would be here when she and Connie came back, or it wouldn’t and they’d have to do without a tent. Either way, its weight was bound to be too great a distraction. Mara was not an accomplished climber, but she knew enough to be careful of her balance.

No one, it seemed, was eager to start up the mountain. Over the course of the day, four more stragglers had come in from the questing fields, but only four. She could sense dozens out there, searching the cliffs in mounting frustration as the day wore on, but they were ignorant of this location and it was unlikely they would come across it by accident. Of those gathered in the proper spot, only two had a clear memory of where the opening had appeared in years past: Mara had stolen hers from Mr. Murder, and the other had seen it only from a distance. There was nothing now, of course. The rock stayed shut against them and would remain so until dark.

In the dark was a bad way to climb a mountain under any circumstances, and this was Romania in October. The wind, the cold, and the treacherously crumbling cliff-side weighed on her more heavily as the hours passed. She was tempted to start up now, while there was still a little daylight to speed her way, but knew that the first person on the rock was likely to start an exodus and she was certain the competition would turn bloody. Most of these people believed that only the first person to reach the opening would be allowed to enter the Scholomance that year. Mr. Murder had known, and therefore so did Mara, that they were wrong, but there would be no convincing them. Best just to stay back and take no chances. Connie was depending on her.

As she had often done since arriving at the foot of this mountain, Mara scanned the Mindstorm for the particular frequency of her friend’s thoughts, and again found nothing. She was not discouraged. Her psychic range was hardly infinite, after all, and it was always more difficult to reach through solid objects, particularly heavy minerals. If there were very many tunnels occupied by this fraudulent little coven, she might have a tough time finding Connie even on the inside. All the same…

Mara did not often experience doubt, but here was a situation that went well beyond the normal crowd of people with the petty lies and desires she was accustomed to feeling. She had a rough idea of what was going to happen when the sun went down, because Mr. Murder had seen it all before, but after that?

Outside, the wind blew. The tent shook, deafening her physical ears. In the Panic Room, Mara listened to the uncertain babble of minds both near and excited, and distant and dismayed. They were nerving themselves up to meet the Devil out there, and she knew that she must either join them or walk away and leave Connie’s last letter unanswered.

Around her neck, a cheap heart-locket hung as it had for half her life. Eight bucks worth of stainless steel and gold paint…Did it really buy the rest of her life?

The Americans were mustering, shrugging into backpacks and harnesses, planning a joint ascent. They didn’t know each other, didn’t trust each other, but felt, perhaps not unduly, that they stood a better chance of success that way. E Pluribus Unum and all that. Forty billion nickels couldn’t be wrong.

And that was pretty selfish, yes, but it had to be nobler than Mara, hiding in a tent and cold-bloodedly considering the abandonment of her one and only friend. After coming all this way, oblivious to cost and inconvenience, that she could permit herself to succumb to hesitation now grated on her. Succumb, ha, she’d thrown herself at it, wallowed in it, and why? Because she couldn’t guarantee an outcome. Of all the world, Connie had called out to her—not her family, not her priest, not the police, but only her—and here she sat, looking for a better reason than that to save her.

Mara dropped down into her body and found it smiling. She guessed her mind was made up. It was half past four and the sun was going down. Time to climb.

The last ray of sunlight left the sky as Mara zipped her empty tent up and walked to the shores of the lake where the others had loosely gathered. The sky held on to color for another minute more, turning the mountains to shadows and the clouds to clots of blood, and then it just seemed to give up and die. Darkness came with hungry speed after that, eating the rest of the overcast light and giving nothing back—no moon, no stars, only darkness. The Americans moved closer together without seeming to be aware of it. The other hopefuls shifted further apart, eyeing one another. Mara put her backpack down by her feet and waited.

Stillness. In the distance, the lost and hunting stragglers grew louder as their emotion turned to desperation, but here at the foot of the mountain over Lake Teufelsee, the minds of the pilgrims of the Scholomance quieted to a subaudible hum of wordless anticipation.

‘The killing is about to start,’ Mara thought suddenly, and frowned.

Sound, low, more felt than heard. It groaned upwards against the soles of Mara’s boots, then passed away into the hissing trees. The wind wheeled abruptly about, sending stinging sheets of rain into her face and plastering the tossing mane of her hair to her skull in seconds. That sound again, like rusted gears at the core of the Earth, like the explosion of some undersea volcano, like the death knell of a dragon. The Americans, pale even under their deaths-head makeup, huddled closer. One of the others broke then, broke and ran, muttering incoherent excuses in a language no one else knew. At the very edge of Mara’s perceptions, Mr. Murder’s brain sent out a plaintive pulse of anger, loss, and a piercing relief that wore Mara’s face. He would not be back next year, nor any other year. He would never look again upon the golden light of the UnderEarth, or drink from the cup of Solomon. He had failed in his pilgrimage and would live and die as mortal.

High above them, the mountain opened. Not as a mouth, which was meant to open, and not as a door, which had been built to open, but as a wound, torn open suddenly and in violence. It bled light, unnatural light, like yellow paint poured over the black rock, illuminating nothing. How done? She didn’t wonder, didn’t care. The night was not infinite and the climb was not going to be easy.

Mara’s first step broke the eerie paralysis that held them all. With a tidal surge, they ran at the rock and up it, swallowing rain and snarling at each other like animals. No, she sure didn’t want to be first, unbalanced and fighting for each grip with that behind her. Mara paused, watching the first lap of this race run itself to its predestined conclusion.

The man in the lead was foreign, unprepared, unequipped. He’d expected stairs, for some reason. He slipped only a few feet off the ground and fell badly; the snap of bone seemed louder than his scream, and was ignored. The others swarmed over him, kicking off his grasping hands and punching at each other. The Americans, united by language and experience, went up like monkeys, screaming encouragement over the wind and covering great strides in a well-choreographed drill of pick, heave, clip, swing, and climb. They angled themselves out over the lake, directly below the opening and out of the throng. The made great time, enough to provoke one of the others into prying rock out of the crumbling cliff-face to throw at them. Once he started, the others took it up, and it was just a matter of time before one of the missiles—a rock the size of a big man’s fist—smacked into an American’s skull.

Mara didn’t hear that sound, but she was close enough to hear the others shouting when the man fell. Roped together, he couldn’t fall far, but his weight was enough to stop the climb. Did they pull him up, check his wound? No. Did they cut him loose, keep climbing? No. They started throwing rocks too.

Safely out of the crossfire, Mara was free to examine the mountain, plan her route, and study the opening above. There were figures in the light, dark figures in the shape of men. They stood without moving, watching the carnage from their high vantage. She could sense them, sort of, but there was something strange about their minds. It wasn’t that they were protected as much as overlaid by something else, something foreign. Feeling at them was like looking at an x-ray, seeing bone (disconcerting enough), but also the ghostly smudges that could be organs, skin, stones, tumors, and not knowing what any of it meant.

None of them were Connie. Connie’s mind was still burned clear in her memory. She didn’t need to hold it up and compare it to know none of these were she. Nevertheless, hope that Connie was here somewhere, as yet unseen but able to be saved, renewed itself in her heart, and if it didn’t exactly give her wings, at least it gave her the will to keep climbing.

The Great Rock Battle was winding down, its opponents exhausted and beginning to remember how dangerous that was now that they were thirty feet up a jagged cliff with what could easily be two thousand feet yet to go. The climbing continued.

Mara opened up her backpack and started getting ready. Some of the others had brought helmets with lamps set right in them, and that was a neat trick, but they hadn’t been selling any in the village store where Mara had bought all her gear. She’d have to make do with flashlights and duct tape. Sure, it looked goofy—

The overweight fellow from France or Switzerland or wherever he was from lost his footing and fell shrieking to a sudden, silent stop not far from the first guy, who promptly started getting hysterical again.

—but it sure beat climbing blind. Mara switched each light on and taped them tightly to her body: one over the top of each wrist, and one over the toe of each boot. She tucked her knife into her pocket, took a climbing pick from the belt of the very messily-dead French guy, and started up.

*          *          *

Funny how the hours fly by when you only have one night to do something. By Mara’s best guess (and she didn’t put much faith in it), the opening where the figures waited was a good half-mile over a mostly sheer drop onto the rocky shore of a very deep lake. A bad climb, particularly when the other climbers were so determined to see the competition killed, but certainly not one that should take all thirteen hours of night to complete.

But an hour went by, and Mara had gained only two hundred feet. Another hour added scarcely half that to her total. She had underestimated the cold, the numbness of her frozen fingers, the watery sensation that would seep into her arms after only a few minutes, no matter how long she rested. Pain and physical discomfort—conditions she had grown accustomed to avoiding in the Panic Room—gnawed steadily at her reserves. She couldn’t hide away from them now. She depended on her tactile senses too much to leave her body, even for an instant.

Over the night, the climbers spread themselves out over the mountain and they were mostly quiet, laboring under their own efforts rather than undermining anyone else’s. Mara checked on them as routinely as she checked her own footing, making certain she didn’t wander within reach. Many stones were thrown. She could sense each one coming, of course, but there was nothing she could do about it except to try and protect her head. One of them clipped her in the ear despite her best efforts, and another hit her hand, necessitating a rapid retreat to a safe jut of rock where she could rest until she got her grip back. She did not throw stones back at them. As much nasty pleasure as she knew it would give her to watch one of the troublemakers plummet to his death, Mara was not a killer.

The Americans continued to make the best time, particularly after they cut their injured teammate free. He fell like a sandbag into the lake, thrashed briefly, and was gone. The girl didn’t seem any more emotional about it than she’d been when she’d taken the man into her tent last night. The remaining teammates climbed rapidly, leapfrogging like experts in spite of the rain and leaving the rest of them far behind. Half a mile straight up was nothing to those two. They were there well before midnight.

At the lip of their destination, the man stopped and unhooked the girl from his harness. Mara felt no surprise from anyone. He kicked her in the face; the girl swung her arm and buried the steel bill of her pick in his thigh. Mara, resting for the moment on a ledge, raised her arm and shone a spotlight on the battle for everyone to watch, and everyone did. They made very little sound, no doubt having exerted themselves too heavily on the climb. The girl took her lumps like a prizefighter and kept that pick swinging until his thigh was nothing but raw hamburger squeezed through a denim tube and her face was painted with blood. Her last blow caught him in the groin and it was all over. He lost his grip and dropped, managing only a single strangled cry that seemed, to Mara’s ears anyway, more angry than anything else. He fell, smacking meatily into the cliff-side twice before breaking on the rocks below. Hoarse, terrified squawks rolled up the mountain from the man with a broken leg lying at its bottom, and the girl finished the race alone.

The other climbers froze, some of them wailing out protests, but the portal that opened into the mountainside did not vanish, as some had believed. The light, and the figures within it, remained.

Mara, safe on her ledge, gave in to curiosity. She reached up and tapped at the girl’s mind, already receding into the mineral-rich baffle of the mountain. She caught a tangled glimpse of color, light and shadow, the ferocious joy of the victor, and the taste of blood in her mouth, but nothing telling, nothing really that needed to be seen.

And it was still such a long way to go.

Mara rubbed her shoulders, kicked ice carefully off each boot, and swung herself up and onward. She stared only at the rock beneath her frozen, bloodied hands. She kept her mind in wary motion and did not waste its energies on empty speculation. She climbed and the night passed.

Just seeing that the way remained open to them had a calming effect upon the other pilgrims. There were no other rocks thrown. After another hour (marked only because someone’s watch beeped), another climber reached the top. He staggered away from the ledge, raised his arms and roared. In his mind, he was a bear, an invincible and victorious bear, which Mara thought was a bizarre sort of connection to make, but okay, it made him happy, let the man be a bear.

Sometime between then and the end of the hour, screams came up the mountain from below. A pack of wolves had come for the corpses, and found the man and his broken leg. Mara gripped the rock and shut her eyes, not daring to retreat to the Panic Room, forced to endure the sight of teeth, the pungent stink of their bodies, the persistent way they circled and lunged and circled and bit and how it felt when the black one caught his leg and wrenched it back and forth and back and forth and then ran away, pulling the meat right out of his pant-leg with a shwooop-ing sound. Screaming, screaming, he didn’t really have the voice to scream forever, but when he stopped screaming, the wolves came skittering back to him, so he kept trying but the big brave black one came back and tore out the throat that was making all the noise, and after that, no one heard the screams but Mara and the dying man himself.

She couldn’t stay here, hugging the mountain. It wasn’t a ledge, wasn’t safe, and the hours were rolling by. Mara shook her head, shook it harder, picked up a handful of ice and rubbed it over her face. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever felt a man die, wasn’t even the worst and most painful way to go (which would surely be no consolation to the man who had just suffered it), and Connie still needed her. She only had one night and the night was almost over. Mara dragged herself into focus and climbed.

A third man reached the portal, but he didn’t get over the edge. Someone—Three! Only three can enter!—threw his climbing pick, which went end over end in perfect circles and dug itself in to the hilt square in the back of the man’s skull. Mara’s vision swam dangerously, eclipsed by a sudden sheet of white light, the sharp smell of lemons, and the meaningless fragment of memory that came to him as his brain split itself open—red ball flying green grass green and yellow and the dog runs runs and jumps and catches ball good dog o good doggie love is o love is everywhere—and then he was dead and falling.

Mara waited until the nausea passed, and then waited for the killer to reach the ledge ahead of her and rise triumphant into the light. He’d had another climbing pick. With him out of the way and only a few other pilgrims on the mountain, Mara gathered up what was left of her strength and made her final ascent.

Another hour came and went in electronic beeping. She knew the end was near, not because she could see anything—all her attention was focused on finding that next handhold, on keeping the strength in her weakening arms, on pushing herself up on her watery legs—but because she could see it in their minds, the minds of the figures in the light. She guessed she was only ten feet down. Not much. Might as well be a mile if the sun broke over those mountains.

The sky was turning blue. Not her imagination then, but the sun rising on the pagan new year. The day that stood outside the wheel of time was ending and the door, she was certain, was about to close.

She took chances. She told herself she wouldn’t and she took them anyway. Rocks slipped, skittering away into silence below her, but somehow she stayed up and went on. She could see herself now in the eyes of the watchers. They knew she was going to make it, and now so did she.

They didn’t say anything, these watching people. There were no jeers or catcalls, no cries of comradely encouragement, only silence. Their minds were ordered, but not disciplined, exactly. She’d touched the minds of marines, of policemen, of Buddhist monks. She knew self-control and self-assurance, but this was different. Quiet had been pressed into these people who watched her, carved into them. They were fear shaped into a mask of stillness, shaped until resignation became ritual. Mara thought, heaving herself determinedly towards them, of rabbits and the way they stand so still as they watch the car bear down on them. But Mara wasn’t the car in this analogy. She knew it and so did they. The car was all around them. They were driving at the wheel themselves.

Her hand caught flat stone, solid stone. The ledge. The end of the climb. The finish. She looked up now, for the first time, and looked at them. Men. Just men. Two women. Some old and etched by time, most ridiculously young and good-looking. All in plain black dresses. Robes. As in, ‘see how magic we are in our magic robes?’ She wondered if Connie had been impressed. She thought the answer was probably yes.

No one helped her up and over. She didn’t need their help. She staggered forward on solid, forgiving ground, into the open mouth of the tunnel. The other three climbers were waiting inside, as bruised and breathless as she. The American girl had taken her shirt off and had used it to soak up the blood on her face. Mara unwrapped her flashlights—batteries were dying anyway, cheap Romanian things—and found room in her pockets to wedge them. She could hear cries on the mountainside; the sun was rising. They were begging for time, alternately cursing and pleading, all without hope.

Mara touched the rock of the ancient doorway, holding it to steady her. She leaned out and looked for daylight.

‘Remember this,’ she thought grimly, and was instantly furious with herself for tolling doom’s bell. Furious, but she looked. She saw the slivers of glowing peach/rose sun rising like a bubble over the dark crust of the mountains. She saw the sky washed out to a pastel impression of itself, painted thick with bruise-colored columns of clouds. She saw morning come, saw it stealing through the sky above and reflected in the lake below.

Wordlessly, the robed men and women began to file inside. Mara let go of the doorway and went with them. While her back was turned, the door closed. There was no heavy grinding sound or resonating clang to echo in her ears, only darkness, sudden and silent, and she knew herself to be trapped inside.

*          *          *

No torches lined the walls of this passage and the sallow-faced watchers carried no candles. The only light came from widely-interspersed bubbles of glowing gold that grew out of the rock itself. Each was nearly half Mara’s own height, bloated and not quite symmetrical. The rock somehow came in right over the edges of these fixtures, if they were fixtures, and so gave them the tumorous appearance of something that had grown out of the rock itself. They flickered, not steadily and not often, but now and then, making the shadows of the grim welcome party and their new-come applicants dance high on the ceilings. Mara paused once, daring herself to touch one, but her arm was taken before she could and she did not resist it.

In silence, they were taken deeper in the mountain, past the last of the glowing blisters and into perfect darkness. No sound but their own footsteps met their ears; no voices, only their own ragged breathing. ‘Pageantry,’ she thought, and wondered how Connie had felt, walking this hall at last after so many years of searching. The minds around her were divided: some cloaked in that unnatural quiet, deadening the vague scorn they shared for these interlopers, the others jangling with trepidation and triumph in equal measure.

A light sparked ahead of them—a single line drawing itself downward through the darkness. A door, opening for them at the crown of a slight rise. Light washed over them and like the others, Mara raised her hand to shield her eyes from its piercing glare.

Contempt struck her first: a watching, anticipant sense of superiority. She honed in on it, saw herself through his eyes as another bedraggled and ignorant creature, unworthy of the honor he had earned on his arrival. No, there were no peers here. He saw sheep and wished for slaughter, and instead he must sit here and give them welcome, he must take their names and set them down in the book where his own had been penned, he must bring them in as though they were equals.

Mara lowered her hands, glaring into the brilliance, but she did not see the man who regarded her with such disdain (regarded all of them, really). No, her eyes were yanked violently to one side, yanked and held, by the sight of something inhuman.

The Scholomance was run by demons, Connie had said. Run by the Devil Himself. Mara’s very limited and mildly condescending expectation had been of more people in robes, perhaps more garish ones. Her equally limited and condescending experience of demons depicted in the media were always rather cartoonish to her mind: red skin or maybe black, yellow or red contact lenses, pasted-on horns, a computer-generated tail and wings dubbed on in the final edit. Comic-book demons, in other words. Men in costumes.

This was not a costume. Nor was it a man.

Oh, but he might have been. He stood very much like a man, on two legs. He had two arms, very long and thin, but arms for all of that, folded across his chest so that his bony, blackened hands rested on opposite shoulders. He had the features of a man—a pretty face with two eyes, a mouth, a nose, even eyebrows, although they hung well out in silky lengths so as to frame his sharp cheekbones. He had hair, fine strands as pale as spiderwebs that dropped straight and shining over his shoulders, with just one errant tress that cut playfully across his black and glittering eyes. A man could maybe dress up like this thing in a movie. People watching that movie may even laugh at the costume. But this, this was not a man.

He wore no clothes, although at first glance, he seemed to. From the hips down, he seemed to be covered in layers of black, plated armor of some alien design, with odd serrations and grooves over each snugly-fit seam and joint. On closer inspection, one could see those seams moving slightly, just slightly, with each minute movement of his body, and one realized it was skin. Those heavy, shiny, armored plates were him, his shell, from which his moon-white upper body grew like blown glass somehow affixed to obsidian. He had no nipples, no navel. His chest had all the sculpted look of muscles (in a slender, slightly effeminate way), but no hint of bones beneath—no ribs, no sternum, not even collarbones. His demon’s face was thin, beautiful, smiling welcome as he waited for them, and his eyes were the eyes of an insect—ovid and black, shining as with many facets, but these were in fact lights. Lights not reflected from somewhere else, but generated inside him and moving around. He had galaxies in his eyes. His mind…

Mara slammed her own away, not with a jerk and a bang, but softly, unhurriedly. Things that run are the first to attract the hunter’s eye. He did not seem to see her as she made herself fast against him, except as he saw all of them. His eyes moved over her and moved on.

Somewhere in this room, the man who had been waiting for them began to speak. Again and again, in different languages, sounding both impatient and bored in all of them. After a while, one of the arrivals flinched and stared around. The robed man beckoned him closer to where he sat behind his imposing desk and interrogated him in that other language. After a while, one of the robed watchers from the cliff-side stepped up and took the newcomer away and the man began his droning call again. The demon watched their numbers dwindle without speaking. His smile never changed.

“Are you English? Are you American? Canadian? Who among you is of this tongue?”

“I am,” said the goth-girl, and Mara raised her hand without looking away from the demon or the lights swirling in his eyes.

The man behind the desk blew out a breath, one more richly stained with derision than the others. The demon looked at the girl behind her, his mild expression unchanged, and then at Mara, at her and into her, past the storm of outer thoughts which assailed and surrounded her even here, to bump up against the little sanctuary she had constructed for herself.

His pale brows rose and twitched once.

“Over here, then. Over here!” Snapping fingers, summoning her as if she were a dog. Mara moved toward the desk, but her eyes stayed with the demon. “I’ll have your names now. You first. Give me your hand.”

The girl behind her uttered a sudden little yelp. Mara tapped at her without turning away from the demon and saw blood welling from tip of a dirty finger.

“Sign here,” the man said. Mara tapped at him as well. Gamaliel, he called himself. The archivist. Summoned once each year from his studies to bring the applicants through the portcullis and into the school. Gamaliel, but that was not his name. His name was Kaspar Cortoreal, whose only talent had been with words and whose favorite vice had been with women, and who had fled Portugal in the stillness and the heat of that long-ago night with blood pooling out over the streets. She should not have laughed, should not have threatened to scream, but she did and it was her own fault, all her own, and he had taken her watch and her money and the book, her journal, the little book where he first read in fevered wonder of the Scholomance.

“Take her. Go! And you. You! Come here!” Snapping fingers again. Mara put out her hand without looking to see what he did with it. She kept the demon in front of her and watched through the archivist’s eyes as he took up his pen and pierced her naked finger. Blood welled. He took her hand and pressed the wound to a fresh line in the ancient page, drawing a bar of wet red to dry below the other names of applicants before her, applicants far more worthy. “Give me your name,” he said, releasing her. He wiped his pen and dipped it in ink. “Name! Now! Have I all day to spend ungluing the slack lips of foolish sluts who cannot even speak their names? Give me your name!”

“Kaspar Cortoreal,” she said, and the archivist cut a black gash of shock through the page.

The demon’s head tipped, regarding her from an angle, like a bird will do, or a bug. His hair moved, rippling as if in the wind, but there was no breeze here.

“What are you?” Mara asked.

The lights in the demon’s eyes sparked and faded, like fireflies in a field. He did not reply.

“Here,” said the archivist, quietly now, subdued. “Take her.”

A hand touched her arm. One of the plain-robed watchers, one of the women, waiting to lead her away, but going meant turning her back on the demon and Mara wasn’t ready to do that yet.

“What is he?” she demanded, turning on the woman who held her.

“He is a Master of the Scholomance,” the woman said. She tried to sound haughty, as if the question were beneath contempt, but inside, she was taken aback by this pale-eyed stranger who asked questions as with ignorance, but without fear.

That was all the answer Mara was going to get, but she guessed it was answer enough. The women believed what she said, believed they were in the Scholomance, that place of evil legend, and she believed this creature in Man’s image was one of its inhuman Masters. Nowhere in the mind yawning open before her was even a hint of doubt or disbelief.

The archivist had moved on to other languages, trying to ignore her, to ignore the fears and memories stirred up by the sound of his name in the stranger’s mouth. He waved them away, the woman who held her more than Mara herself, cursing them both in another tongue. The woman, recovered and embarrassed, grabbed Mara’s wrist and wrenched it, trying to pull her away, to make her stumble after like an errant child in a schoolroom. Mara sensed it coming, got moving in time to rob her of the worst of it, so that her arm got a good yank and that was all. She looked at the demon once more as she was towed to a passageway and he looked back at her, still smiling as he inclined his head for farewell.

One of the Masters, the woman had said. There were more.

Mara was taken to a small chamber, lit by another of those grossly-swollen blisters of glowing light, and bare except for a large wooden box on the floor, opened and empty.

“Remove your clothing. Put everything in here. All the things you wear. All that you possess.” The woman rolled her eyes at Mara’s hesitation. “You will have it all back when you leave this place.”

“Not everyone leaves,” Mara said.

The woman smiled unpleasantly. “Then we’ll burn it for you. Hurry up. I have better things to do than herd stubborn sheep like you.”

Mara undressed. She watched her body bare itself through the woman’s eyes and tasted a little envy, which she was used to, and a little nervousness, which struck her as odd. ‘Beautiful,’ she was thinking, not quite fearfully. ‘Already so beautiful.’

Mara inspected herself from this new perspective as the clothes went into the box. Beautiful, yes, why not? She’d been an object of desire since she turned thirteen, even younger in certain cases. Hers was a body of unreal beauty, the sort other women could not hope to achieve without paying for it, or at least working at it. Her hips were full, her buttocks shapely and toned, her belly flat, her legs firm and long and perfectly curved. Her woman’s sex was hairless, smooth, plump and taut at once. Her breasts were heavy, youthfully buoyant, and even. The chill in here made her nipples hard. Her pale hair, disheveled by the climb, fell in fine, wavy strands down her back. The sickly light shining out of the walls turned it orange in places, made her too-pale skin seem to glow. Her lack of embarrassment about her own nudity unnerved the woman further, spurning on that strange envy. ‘Another pet for them,’ she was thinking. Aloud, she said only, “Everything.”

Mara didn’t have much to divest herself of: shoes, socks, jeans, sweater, sunglasses, climbing gear, flashlights. The cab driver’s little cross, of course, which the robed woman laughed at. Her wallet and passport, along with a good wad of Romanian cash and traveler’s checks, so that when she got out of here, she’d have the means to get herself and Connie back to the States. She put it all into the box without resistance; she’d deal with the problem of getting it all back when that time came. Soon she stood over it in nothing but her skin and Connie’s heart-shaped locket.

“Everything,” the woman said again.

“I’m not taking this off.”

Heaving a curt sigh, the woman moved to snatch it.

Mara slapped, not with her hand, but with her mind. The woman staggered back violently, both arms flying uselessly up as her head snapped back. She overbalanced and fell, her short cry of alarm cut into a grunt of impact. She sat there, sprawled, looking up at Mara and clearly wondering what had just happened.

“Nobody touches this,” Mara said softly.

“Who do you think you are?” Up came the woman, her hands closing into fists of frustration, but she didn’t raise them. “You don’t make the rules here, little cow! You’re not different! You’re not special! Take it off immediately!”

“No.”

“Leave us,” said a voice. An awful, quiet, scuttling sort of voice. The demon’s voice.

He came in from the darkness of the passageway, gliding through it like ripples over tar. His legs were invisible until he was nearly on top of her, but his upper half seemed almost to glow. The yellow light from the blisters on the wall, Mara saw, did not touch him.

The robed woman bowed in a cringing, angry fashion. She left by backing out around the demon and into the hall, her head down and eyes shut the whole way.

Alone with him, Mara stood naked and waited.

The demon came no nearer. His hands rested comfortably on his shoulders. They were black to the wrists, like badly-painted gloves. One of his fingers twitched off and on, as though keeping time to music only he could hear. He looked at her, all of her, but began and ended with her eyes.

“Are you here to make trouble?” he asked finally, smiling. He spoke English very well, only slightly accented, and not in any way she recognized. His voice had a hissing quality, even without any sibilants.

“I’ve never taken this off,” Mara said. “Never since it was given to me. I won’t start now.”

He raised a hand and brought it around to her face, brushing back her hair to slide the very tip of his finger along her earlobe. His touch was too smooth, too cool. He had no fingernails, no claws, nothing but smoothness. “You think you alone come here with treasure? Do you think no other woman ever hesitated to part with her trinkets? A wedding ring? A child’s birthstone? A bible or…” His eyes drifted to the cabbie’s gift, shining in the top of Mara’s trunk. “…blessed cross?”

“I won’t take it off,” Mara said again.

“Such is the price of admission.”

“Then I’ll leave.”

“That door is closed.”

“Then kill me,” Mara snapped. “But I’m not taking it off!”

The lights of his eyes swam, clustering together for a heartbeat before spinning apart. He lowered his hand from her cheek.

She reached up fast and closed a protective fist around Connie’s locket, glaring at him defiantly.

His smile broadened, but only on one side. “Many things I am, young one, or have been in my time, but never a thief. Open to me.”

“But maybe a liar,” Mara said, tight-lipped. “No.”

“I will see this thing that engenders such unwise devotion.” The demon’s hand closed gently around her wrist. His thumb pressed on her and suddenly it was as if he had punched a spike through the back of her hand and detonated it somehow. The pain was like nothing she’d known in her life. Entirely focused in her hand, it nevertheless took the bones right out of her knees. Mara dropped, hoarsely howling, slapping at his restraining grip, but did not release the locket.

“Stubborn child,” the demon said, almost fondly. “You tempt me to indulge you, and I should never hear the end of that.”

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

Silence. 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!**

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

Screaming. 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.

Mara paced, her hands uselessly pressed over her psychic ears. Screaming, screaming…and the worst of it was, she was beginning to understand it.

Oh, she still couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t separate single words or pictures out of the wholeness, but understanding came anyway. Thoughts she didn’t want, thoughts that sickened her, breathed themselves into her mind like maggots chewing free of bloated corpse-flesh. Not all of it was in English. In fact, most of it was not, but that didn’t stop her from knowing things.

Mara returned to the monitors so she’d have something to look at, something that was hers and free of obscenity, hoping the sight of her fainted body would help to ground her. It did, sort of. She couldn’t look around with her eyes closed, and still covered by that stupid hood, most likely. She had only a vague impression of the way her arms and legs were sprawled, floating like a ghost-image over one screen. She couldn’t even tell if she’d soiled herself.

‘I can’t lie there like that all day,’ she thought. ‘I’ll be harrowed to death in my damn sleep.’

Or worse (if there was anything worse). Anything could be happening out there. She switched on her dreams, but there were none, only screams. She switched them off again.

“If you survive it,” the woman had said, but people didn’t die here, Mara knew that now. They went mad. They went mad and they were grateful when it finally happened.

“I have to get up,” Mara muttered. From the Panic Room, it was possible to make her body do things even when she wasn’t at the helm, so to speak, but she’d always at least been conscious. She had to wake herself up and how was she supposed to find a way to concentrate with that damned scream eating up her brain?

She’d better. She couldn’t afford to be helpless in this place. After all, she wasn’t alone out there. Somewhere, there was supposed to be a librarian, and anyone who could do anything as prosaic as organize books while listening to this could not possibly mean any good for Mara. What if he’d already seen her? What if he were coming for her right now?

Mara returned to the monitor where her body sprawled in its ignominious heap. She bent over it, staring into her own slack face, and willed those stupid eyes to open.

Screaming, screaming. She understood all at once the true and obvious science behind the blueness of the sky, after years of taking it on faith that light bent or something on its way through the atmosphere. The information boiled in her as she endured an onslaught of perfectly sound reasons how a six-year old boy could be sexy, could in fact be coquettish, could even practically demand to be taken out into the woods and—

Mara’s body on the monitor kicked unconsciously and spat out a little frothy bile. So something was getting through.

‘Wake up,’ she thought at it, and then, as if it were the living doors of the Oubliette, Mara slapped her hands down on the flat surface of the monitor and hammered at it, shoved at it: ‘Wake up! Get up, you idiot! Wake up and start acting like you can save someone, for God’s sake! Wake up!’

Mara-in-the-monitor kicked again, then blurred. The screams seemed to double in volume. The air inside the Panic Room grew dark and heavy.

And then her eyes were open and she was looking out of them.

Her first breath was a choking swallow and it ended badly as she rolled onto her side and puked what little there was in her out onto the floor. It didn’t help. The air was still thick, as if the silent screams she was still hearing had enough substance out here to taste. An oily, salty, rancid taste.

Suddenly, she understood Analytic Number Theory, not just as some abstract concept tossed off in the back of a textbook in her Senior mathematics class, but as a fact. As a fact she could prove. It would involve only the study of the Riemann zeta function, as defined on half the complex plane as the sum 1 + 1/2s + 1/3s + 1/4s + …well, and so on, but the important thing was that zeta is never zero, except along the line Re(s)=1/2, or at the negative even integers, and if that was true—

Where was she? Mara found her knees and managed to push herself about halfway up before she noticed that the heaviness in her limbs wasn’t entirely psychological. Someone had come along while she’d been out and clapped her in irons, by God. Iron rings around both her ankles connected by a thick length of chain, which in turn connected her to a table. The rings were reasonably loose, not so much that she had a prayer of getting them off, but enough to wear comfortably, if one could use that word to describe an set of irons and a hundred pounds of chain.

She looked for the door she’d entered through and found it clear across the room, closed. Carved on this side were characters, alien lettering she could not comprehend. Not yet.

She saw herself suddenly, as from a great height, on her hands and knees with one bare foot sticking out from a fold of red robe. Mara jerked her head up, and high above her, past several flights of stairs and balconies, Horuseps watched her.

Another wave of knowledge crashed into her—sailing and smelting steel and the cellular structure of irradiated wheat and how to turn coal into diamond in an instant, an instant! Mara retched dryly, spat, and shivered it out until it broke in her like a fever. The demon was gone when she looked up again, but he was here somewhere. She could feel him moving like an oil slick across the tossing waters of all these other minds.

Mara stood. It took a lot of effort, as if she were pushing against an invisible yoke on her shoulders. Even upright, she swayed, badly off-balance. The floor seemed tilted when she wasn’t looking directly at it; the walls bulged at the corners of her eyes.

‘I’ve been poisoned.’

That was what it felt like: a cloud of heavy, toxic gas. Mara made herself look around, made herself concentrate beyond the screams and the pressure and the fits of illogical knowing that battered her.

She saw a library. Just a library.

The room was not quite round, not quite squared. Egg-shaped, maybe. Its two widest walls were bookshelves, shelves that towered over her until the spines of those books at the top blurred into a single stripe of color. At the narrowest curve of the room were cupboards, some open to offer sparing glimpses of bookmaking supplies—inkwells, sheaves of paper, bolts of colored leather, unburned candles. At the other, stairwells rose out of this miasmic Hell. Students in black robes lounged at the railings, watching her and the other initiates suffering here below the way casually cruel boys will study the effects of flies once their wings are pulled. All across the floor, red-robed figures worked, sitting quietly at tables to write, dragging their chains behind them when they went for fresh paper, and occasionally conferring in whispers that were somehow perfectly audible over the never-ending screams. They had no faces, these initiates, only hoods pulled low over shadows. Their hands were blackened, gloved by ink. Some were bandaged and Mara knew at once, the way she knew so many things, that they had written their fingers, quite literally, to the bone.

For him. For the librarian. The Scrivener.

He sat at the center of the room, doing nothing: a great, heaving mass of wet, brown flesh, pulsing with dozens of open, lidless, frost-filmed eyes. He seemed to have a head, he seemed to, but the rest of him was just a mountain enclosed on all sides by a circular desk. There appeared to be no hinge, no access panel to let him in or out. The Scrivener sat, his gelatinous head bobbing slowly, complacent in his containment. His head turned blindly toward her. Beams of purposeless knowledge hammered against her and moved on, leaving her to stagger into a table.

He was the source of it all, him, the unthinking transmitter of all this poisonous, deafening thought. He radiated it. The air around him actually shimmered if she stared hard enough, showing her the flow of his idiot omniscience.

A hand stroked once down her hair. She knew it for Horuseps—knew it because she couldn’t not know—and she yanked her hood down and over her eyes reflexively. She heard him chuckle. The sound made her think incongruously of spiders mating. His hand came into view before her, his fingers gracefully offering a steel-nubbed quill. The tip swelled with ink, forming a single pregnant drop that refused to fall.

She took it and found a table with an unattended book, a bottle of ink, and a thick sheave of unbound paper. She touched the paper first—twice the size of a standard sheet, very thick and soft, it seemed more like cloth than paper. She’d had a letter once written on paper like this. She’d come to find the girl who wrote it. A girl who would always be younger than Mara, a girl who would always need saving. She put that image before her and held on to it, drawing strength and will until the trembling of her hands and the aching of her mind could be overcome.

Mara sat down. She opened the book. Breaking the Moon, it was called. It was not written in English, but she understood it anyway. She had to, here in the Scrivener’s service.  Horuseps patted her shoulder and drifted away toward the stairs. Mara kicked her chains underneath the table where they couldn’t trip anyone, dipped her quill, and began to write.

*          *          *

The things she wrote were terrible things. She tried not to pay attention to them. She spent as much of her time as she could in the Panic Room, supervising her body’s work from this place of relative quiet. She got to know the other aspirants because they were here, all around her, seeping in through her pores, but she did not try to talk to them. They were not nice people to know.

Mara was given a cup at some point. The man who brought it was named Alim Muhammad and he had come seeking a way to summon djinni in an age when even he did not truly believe in them. Now he believed, but now he feared the summons. He did not want to leave and he did not want to learn anything more. He dreamed of the Black Door opening and taking him in with teeth made of fire. All this, Mara knew. She drank it in with her water. She ignored it and she wrote.

Bells rang. She forgot to count them, but she did rouse herself on hearing them to fetch fresh ink and a candle. Her movements were followed by the Scrivener. His huge head swung slowly after her until she stopped walking. He had a mouth. It opened to emit a saurian grunt. Part of his side bulged outward into a boneless arm that groped at the air for a second until he became distracted and took it back in, turning away. His interest was bearable only because there was nothing in it to touch, only a stupid intent without reason, absolute awareness without a mind.

Sometime later, as she dimly recalled being promised, bread was brought. In the Scrivener’s company, Mara could have no appetite, but she ate it anyway. The bread was tough, brick-hard and mud-brown, gritty. The man who gave it to her was named Shome Akai. He had come from a village of crushing poverty, father of seven starving children. He had killed one of them, his most beloved son, as part of a spell that he had been promised would bring wealth. It hadn’t. In the darkness, before his crime could be discovered, he had fed the flesh of his son to dogs, and then fled. Sometimes he dreamed of dogs with human faces, dogs who cried out to him in human voices. Sometimes it was a dog who took him, a dog who laughed with Master Madrek’s mouth and bit, bit, bit at the back of his neck.

Mara stayed in the Panic Room, making her body eat as she stared thoughtfully into the monitor that showed her these tangled, doom-swept thoughts when another flickered to life. Horuseps, coming towards her. She braced herself as best she was able and dropped back into her body to meet him.

She managed not to vomit, but it was a near thing. Mara stared into her open book and was a thousand miles away, a lump of newly-budded tissue and blood suddenly hooked and ripped apart, ripped away, and it was aware, yes, aware of pain if nothing else, and she was its weary mother also, back on this filthy table and thinking, ‘That’s done, that’s over again and I can be back at work in half an hour.’ She was fetus-pain and mother-relief and she was the infection already creeping in, the infection that would kill in three months’ time, but not before she spread the virus to another hundred unknown men, not before she spawned another swimming, mindless, hopeful lump to die with her in baffled agony.

A covered tray appeared before her. Mara looked at it, then up into the face of the black-robed student who had set it down. ‘Your name is Aaron Micheals,’ she thought without emotion. ‘You had sex with your sister once when you found her passed out after a party. And then you got her drunk to do it again, but she never passed out all the way, did she? She just got sick enough to need to go to the hospital, just sick enough to come back from it unable to talk straight or write or take herself to the toilet. You tell yourself you’re here to learn how to fix her, to fix what you did to her, but that’s not what you’re studying, is it? You’re studying with Master Letha, you’re studying the art of Allure, so that you’ll never need to make them drunk again, you’ll just make them want you.’

The tray was uncovered. Horuseps passed a hand over it, solicitous as a game show hostess telling her what she might win. Beneath the lid were several objects, arranged in a neat, tight circle: a jade frog, a silver thimble, a painted clay cup, a golden egg-shaped censer, and a scrimshawed shark’s tooth.

Horuseps spoke while Mara studied these. It wasn’t English this time. The words twisted in her mind, wanting to catch, but their meaning eluded her.

Horuseps waited for a while, then heaved a theatrical sigh, turning his hands up in a gesture of resignation. His palms were unlined. He had no fingerprints. He covered the tray and his black-robed assistant picked it up. The incestuous Mr. Micheals took two steps after the demon, bent unexpectedly to vomit down his own front, and then had to stagger to catch up.

At the next table, Mara watched as the scene played itself out again. The initiate to whom Horuseps addressed himself did not respond, not even when touched. He/She just kept writing. Horuseps waited and finally moved on. His assistant gathered the tray, vomited again, and this time fell sluggishly over in the mess.

Horuseps, without turning, raised an arm and laconically waved to the stairwell. Mara tracked the general path of his beckoning hand and saw a silent group of students whispering at each other. One of them came forward, easing down the stairs with a look of repugnance, as if she were stepping into a pool of hot human waste and not a library. The newcomer made her way to her fallen colleague, covered her ears briefly, then picked up the tray and its strange artifacts, and moved quickly to the demon’s side.

The next initiate listened closely to whatever Horuseps had to say, then looked at the tray. His face, even the little bit Mara could see of it, was a portrait of anguish—a drowning man looking at a bit of rope dangling just out of reach. Hesitant at first, then with a sudden desperate rush, he reached out and took the shark’s tooth. He looked at Horuseps—the demon merely watched, smiling—and placed it with a shaking hand on top of the frog.

Horuseps glanced back and locked eyes with Mara, as if to see for himself that she was paying attention. His smile broadened when he saw she was. Then, without warning, he swept his clawless fingers across the initiate’s face, shearing it open to the bone. The initiate fell back, arms raised and wildly waving. One of his eyes split and poured down his cheek, through his cheek, and out his screaming mouth. He spat, retched, then seized the chains connecting him to this terrible place and began yanking and beating at them in a state of pure hysteria. His fingers broke. One of them may have gotten caught in a link and ripped clean off, but he was not aware of it and so Mara couldn’t be sure. He scratched and pulled and screamed and screamed, and Horuseps moved on, holding out his hand delicately for his assistant to wipe clean on her sleeve.

Movement. Mara jerked around and saw the Scrivener leaning out over his desk, his head unerringly aimed at the shrieking, thrashing man on the library floor. The front of his body spewed out an arm to take his weight as he shifted himself forward. He grunted again, a sound of grotesque eagerness, then muttered and sank back behind the desk, temporarily lost.

Another test, then. She didn’t appear to have passed this one, but at least she hadn’t failed. Mara looked down. The pen was still in her hand, still resting where it had stopped on her half-finished page: the formula and ritual for the creation of a bottle-bred homunculus, translated from whatever this was into English. Time, turning pages, and candlesmoke would wear away these words someday and some other aspirant would spend his harrowing copying it over, effortlessly turning English into his own native tongue. And Horuseps would still be here, playing his inconceivable games with thimbles and frogs.

“I play no games, young one. Not here, at any rate.” A thin, black hand touched the book, turned it slightly at an angle so that, presumably, he could read it. “Elsewhere, many.”

Mara straightened the book with a curt tug and wrote a few words. It didn’t bother her that he’d heard those thoughts. It was always wise to keep a few out where someone could see them, particularly if you know yourself to be in the company of telepaths. If there was treasure at your feet, one was far less inclined to dig.

“You look well,” Horuseps commented, still standing behind her. “Much better than your fellows, and heaven knows, some of them have had long enough to acclimate. Who is Ka-nee?”

Mara’s pen jerked hard, leaving a black fork of lightning across her printed page. Angrily, she wadded it up, and threw it across the room. The Scrivener’s head snapped around to follow it; he panted hard, perhaps laughing.

“Fear not, child. Your mind remains fascinatingly closed to me, for the most part. But things, oh, things have a way of slipping out in the library.”

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Mara asked tightly.

“Not particularly. I dismissed my students early.” His fingers scuttled along her scalp. “And I would much rather spend my time with you.”

“Charmer.”

“Mmm.” He was quiet, but not still. His hands moved over her freely, imperious as a man stroking his pet cat. “Look around you,” he said suddenly. “I command it. Look and tell me what you see.”

No student may refuse a Master’s command. Mara tapped her pen sourly against the table and looked around. Through the haze of the Scrivener’s toxic aura, she saw aspiring students working. A few still had bread to eat. A few slept on their arms on the tables or lay in senseless heaps on the floor. A number of black-robed students watched from the higher floors—some with expressions of contemptuous enjoyment, but most watched only Horuseps and looked very much as if they wished to be gone. The Scrivener sat inside his desk, rolling his hundred eyes and grunting to himself in idiot joy. What did she see? What was there to see? It was the Scholomance, that was all. The world’s wealth of knowledge compressed into one room so that it could be made into shiftwork for infant magicians. Priceless books, books any one of those watching from above would have once killed to possess (and some had), now shuffled from shelf to shelf, practically untouched, essentially unread. She could be copying a phone book for all anyone would ever know.

“I see a joke,” she said, dipping her quill. “And it isn’t funny.”

“An astute observation,” Horuseps murmured, playing with her hair again. “But not quite what I was looking for. To put another way, my dearest, what is it you think we do here?”

“You harrow people.”

“Which means?”

“It means climbing a mountain maybe isn’t the best measure of a wizard’s potential. I suppose you think you’re panning for willpower.”

“Panning for…?” Horuseps trailed off as Mara fed him loud thoughts, images of mountain men scooping out the sediment of rivers and knuckling through the detritus for gold. He hummed pensively at the end of it, his fingertips tapping at her shoulders. “I suppose we are, in a way. In another way,” he went on, shrugging, “I don’t suppose we care. Such is the arrangement we have made. Knock, and the door must open.”

She didn’t inquire, although she knew he wanted her to.

He watched her write, not her hands, which moved in painstakingly level lines back and forth across the thick paper, but her face, as if he could read the book she copied there. After she had filled several pages (and had actually begun to forget he was there, due to the suffocating atmosphere of the Scrivener’s library), he abruptly cleared a place opposite her at the table and sat.

She looked up, seeing him all over again, and then retreated, dizzied and nauseous, to the Panic Room to continue her work.

Horuseps wiped away a stray drop of ink, then rubbed his fingertips fastidiously together while frowning at it, as though testing the ink’s color against his own blackened hands. “How long would you say the Scholomance has existed?”

“At least three thousand years,” Mara answered distractedly, pressing down a sheet of blotting paper over her newly-completed page. Whatever they were using for this purpose had a tendency to smear rather than soak.

“You say this because…?”

“King Solomon supposedly studied here and we know when he ruled. His was one of the first accounts of the Scholomance Connie ever read about. I heard all about him.”

“King…?”

“Solomon, right. Or Sulayman or Salomoh, or whatever his real name was.” She arched an eye up at him, adding, “If you can’t remember Connie from two years ago, I’m going to pissed if you remember King Solomon.”

“Forgive me, dearest, but we do tend to recall excellence when it stumbles upon us.” Horuseps smiled. “I’ve little doubt we’ll be given cause to remember you.”

“How flattering.” Mara dipped her quill and started in on a fresh page. Under her pen, the methods of binding ‘Spirits of Fire native to the Middle World’ were laid out in concise steps. Have the imprisoning object ready, and be warned to make it of lasting solidity and notable size. Bottles break, the text warned, and gems could be easily lost or stolen. Madness comes quickly to those in captivity. Beware of making the spirits in your service mad.

“So he was made a king over mankind…a good one?”

“Some people thought so.”

“And you?”

“I never bothered to look into it. He’s dead and dust three thousand years.” She copied a few more words, fought her way through a brief and blinding interlude of the science of anthropomancy, and added, “Honestly, I have to say that if he came here, the odds of him being a good anything are damned slim.”

“You’re here,” Horuseps said.

“I’m not a good person.”

He did not argue, although he did give her an appreciative chuckle. “So we do have legends among our alumni who seize even our notice. Solomon, von Brukenthal, Rangard, Crowley… Have you ever stumbled across them in your Connie’s investigations?”

“Some of them. Why do you ask?”

“An idle curiosity, my dear. They were not students in the traditional sense, but came to us, each one, daring to strike a bargain. The same bargain, actually. In exchange for limitless time among us and the freedom to leave uncounted, each swore to keep the legend of this school alive and bring new students to seek us…new blood, so to speak, to strengthen us in our solitude. We have not left our mountain since the days of its shaping, you see. The golden age of magic is long past and there have been many years when we opened the portcullis to no man.”

“So you let them go because they fed you.”

“An apt analogy. The bargain is well in our favor, particularly since none of them stayed long or learned much. Solomon learned the ways of summoning and binding and swiftly departed. Rangard was far more diligent, and did really rather well in his lessons, but one gets the impression he was not a patient man under the most ideal circumstances and circumstances were not at all ideal. Von Brukenthal scarcely left the library, but read all he could from the high shelves before he left us. Crowley, or Anhkafnakhonsu, as he insisted he was to be called, fluttered in and out of every classroom, but was repelled by the discipline one requires to master them, and soon scorned our company. You shall not find more devoted students than those we have imprisoned,” Horuseps added with a chuckle. “Freedom makes a man impatient.”

“I’ve never heard of Rangard,” Mara said, writing. “Connie might have.”

“Ah.” Horuseps tapped his fingers on the table, reading as she wrote. “There have been precious little pickings for quite some time, but we’ve started seeing an abrupt increase in our admissions. And a considerable decrease in the quality of the aspirant.”

“You’re on the internet now,” Mara told him. “Get used to dealing with idiots.”

“Three thousand years,” Horuseps mused, gazing at the shelves above him. “A fair guess, conservative by some eight hundred. Why do you suppose I mention this?”

“You like to hear yourself talk.”

“I do. But this in particular?”

Mara looked up without raising her head from the detailed image of the summoning circle she was attempting to copy. “Enlighten me.”

“You call this a joke.” Horuseps waved his hand in an elegant, all-encompassing gesture. “Perhaps so. But after nearly four thousand years of our own company, should we not feel entitled to make our own entertainment?”

Mara put her pen down and folded her hands in deliberate, sarcastic imitation of his genteel posture. “That would depend. Am I a part of it?”

She felt his surprise, though he did not show it. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid you won’t believe me, and truthfully I can well understand why not, but no. You are not. You, my precious darling, are in bitter earnest.”

His sincerity, so much more disturbing than his oily lies could ever be, went as deep as she could touch. She frowned.

“The harrowing is no true test of a student’s mettle,” Horuseps said, breaking her gaze to glance idly about the tables. “Every mortal mind breaks upon the Scrivener eventually. Even we Masters are not entirely immune to his infection. And the knowledge gleaned is, unfortunately, quite random. It may come the first day, the second, or never in a thousand years. Of course, one tends to learn first what one is exposed to by proximity, and so one’s odds of harrowing successfully are better than, say, one’s odds of learning the means of trepanning, although the latter has come before the former in some cases.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“No. Why? Did it?” He smiled at her tight eye-roll, and then reached to pluck the quill from her fingers, holding it over her head like a playground bully teasing a timid child. “I might make the process easier.”

“And this is where I ask how and you make some sleazy innuendo, and I either act shocked or mercenary, depending on what you’d expect least, and eventually we’d fuck—” She noticed his eyes narrow at that, compressing the lights within into white slits. “—and you probably still wouldn’t do a damn thing,” Mara finished, snatching her quill back and dipping it defiantly. “This is my test. I’ll survive it without your help.”

“So be it.” Horuseps shrugged his thin, white shoulders and stood up. He walked away, not hurriedly, calling his parting shot back to her as he went. “You should know, dearest, that I have never made such an offer before, not in all the years of this, or any other, harrowing. And here you sit, surrounded by those who would willingly pluck out their own left eye to have what you so scornfully refuse. When next you are tempted to bandy bold observations of cruel jokes, look at your fellows in suffering.” He stopped on the stair and turned back, no longer smiling. “And laugh.”

*          *          *

Day and night were one in the library. Initiates labored or slept or howled madly as they tore at their chains, and each hour passed the same as any other hour that came before, but Mara knew it was night because there were no students on the stairs. Without witnesses, Mara sat on the edge of the bench to which she’d been chained, and stared at the mocking open mouths of the tunnels above her. She had finished copying Breaking the Moon some time ago, but was loathe to pick up another, loathe to imbed herself so soon in some new nightmare. The Scrivener never slept. Even in the Panic Room, she could feel his poison clotting in the air around her, see him moving through the Mindstorm like flashes of lightning, but he was no Overseer to demand she work for him. She was free for now to keep to her own devices, even if she couldn’t quite hold to her own thoughts.

She could not see how Connie had survived this. She couldn’t see how she would, either. It didn’t particularly disturb her not to know. She knew wasn’t very imaginative, but she always managed to get by.

This was different.

Her mind wandered. Impossible to keep focus in this place, even in the relative peace of the Panic Room. Thoughts came and went and took Mara with them, and the harder she fought to control their direction, the louder their gibbering insanity became. The tree that stands against the hurricane is broken; the reed that bends is spared. Mara bent and let the wind take her where it would.

The Scrivener, wrapped within his circular desk, let out one of his groggy, good-natured groans and exuded a lump of formless flesh with which to wipe at some of his many rheumy eyes. His, yes. Not ‘it’, but he. One day in the monster’s service had made it impossible not to know the Scrivener was male—somewhere inside that mass of amorphorous flesh—and she felt no small amount of gratitude that his masculinity was really more of a genetic code than an ever-present sexual urge, as was so often the case with people.

Even these people. Even the initiates drowning in the Scrivener’s miasma occasionally erupted in pointless, unnoticed orgasm when the inundation of stimuli touched upon some carnal trigger. This was just humanity. People liked to believe they were logical, reasonable, advanced, civilized. Mara knew better. People were nothing but animals in clothes—rutting, brutal beasts whose first instinct was always to bite, to feed, and to fuck.

Mara didn’t need a harrowing to know sex in all its many faces. She could not remember a time when she had not known it. Sex, like death, was everywhere, even though people didn’t like to talk about it. The things they did like to talk about—niceness, for example—Mara was still waiting to see. Her father had been in many ways an honest man who saw all women through the eyes of an alpha predator, which made living with him after she’d reached puberty uncomfortable for both of them. Then there was her mother, by all appearances asexual, who had nevertheless filled her days with substitutes for sex and maternity, both of which she considered failed in her own life: she had failed to produce a son, failed to hold her husband’s interest in the bedroom, failed to raise a proper daughter. Between them, there was Mara, who had heard every lascivious and breathless speculation ever made about her, beginning at the age of ten. She did not date, did not attempt to form relationships or play the feminine games of attraction, but when the urge came on her or when it seemed the best way to solve a problem, Mara used sex.

And she was good at it. Hubris on her part, perhaps, but it been a blow to her not-inconsiderable ego to hear insincerity when told how good she was, or worse, to hear a man’s mental ruminations on how best to tackle that tricky leak in the bathroom sink while grunting away on top of her. She wanted a man’s mind to wipe white with pleasure when he came to her. She wanted him incapable of speech, incapable even of screams. She wanted him to be afraid when he saw her again, by God, and she wanted him to remember her every sweaty unfulfilled night for the rest of his life. And getting it was easy, when all you had to do was open his mind and look inside. Conversation was pointless in bed anyway. Everyone lied about what they wanted; everyone lied about how it felt.

The initiate chained on Mara’s right began to throw up, his mind consumed by hellish images, purging himself with greater and greater violence until pain burst through his brain and he fell heavily to the floor. The Scrivener began to rock and grumble to himself, easing further and further over the desk until he finally poured out and over. Mara got up and backed away as the mewling mountain oozed under the table to suck up the fluids, first from the floor, then from the aspirant’s robe, and finally from the man’s slack mouth. Mara didn’t watch, but even closing her eyes couldn’t shut up the image. Sound became reality here. Everything became reality.

Mara went to the end of her chain and leaned against a bookshelf until the monster was finished. His feeding habits did not particularly scare her, although the sounds he made were certainly nauseating enough. There were at least a dozen initiates here in the library and she felt nothing for any of them. Most were as utterly unaware of her as a piece of furniture. What few did dimly see her through the haze of the Scrivener’s mind saw only competition in a place with little room for it.

Perhaps they were right to feel threatened. Mara was still the only one of this year’s aspirants to have fought free of the Oubliette, which meant that everyone she saw here were a year or more into their harrowing. Horuseps said the knowledge gleaned here was random. She could have years ahead of her too, and she rather doubted she’d remained unscathed for long, if she were even unscathed now. The Panic Room had not been designed to withstand the Scrivener’s toxic storm, and she couldn’t muster the strength of focus necessary to shore it up. When it broke (and all minds break upon the Scrivener eventually), there might not be any fixing it.

The Scrivener crawled past, rumbling to himself in pleasure. The initiate he left behind was not dead, but neither was he sleeping. His eyes were only half-closed, and one of them was full of blood. A stroke, maybe? An aneurysm? Mara had no idea. Either one would be fatal, she supposed. In this place, an abscessed tooth could probably be fatal. It wasn’t as though there were a doctor on staff, or a pharmacy down the hall, or even so much as a bandage in the bathroom, if it came to that.

She should be more worried about that, but Mara had always been a fairly healthy person, even as a child, prone neither to the bumps and scrapes of youth’s exuberance, nor to the host of unsightly illnesses to which her age-mates were so susceptible. If something did happen, well, this was a school for magic, after all. Surely there must be some way to magically heal oneself. In any case, it did no good to sit here and stress over it. Mara believed in being prepared, but only if preparation were at all feasible.

But Mara rolled the initiate onto his side, just in case he had it in him to pull through. She was never going to be accused of having a compassionate nature, and she really didn’t care if he dropped dead on his own, but standing idly by while some guy choked to death on his own bile was just a little too much like murder for her taste. Mara knew she was a bit of a cold bitch, but she wasn’t a killer. She meant to get through this, but she wasn’t going to let it change her.

The Scrivener succeeded in pouring himself back into his desk. He settled there, swaying and gronking to himself, pausing now and then to aim his bland face at another initiate across the room. The one who’d tried to cheat his way out of his harrowing, Mara saw. In the hours since the injury’s infliction, the wound had worsened considerably. The empty socket leaked a constant colorless fluid, another reminder of the total lack of doctor’s care. He lay in a heap, arms out at angles with his bloody hands at the end of them like mangled, badly-fit gloves. He’d dislocated both shoulders and one ankle before he’d finally given up on breaking his chain. His pain was excruciating, but his hysterics had ended, even if his mind hadn’t quite returned from the shock-blank space he’d put it in. For the moment, the man was quiet, but he’d been screaming off and on all day, and once he started up again, he’d only bring the Scrivener onto him and Mara really didn’t want to see that again.

She withdrew to the Panic Room, where it was dark even if it couldn’t be quiet, and sat down on the concrete floor. She told herself it wouldn’t last forever. She told herself Connie was waiting for her, maybe right outside the library doors. She sat her body down at the table and put it to sleep. She did not watch her dreams. The Scrivener’s storm passed over her, and she sat there on the Panic Room’s floor and waited for the bells to ring.

She’d get through this, for Connie’s sake. She wasn’t going to let it change her. She just had to stay calm.

Mara’s mind drifted and the harrowing went on.

CHAPTER SIX

How many more days passed in the Scrivener’s service, Mara didn’t know. Even if there had been a window to show her days passing, even if the sun itself had risen and set across her own worktable, she couldn’t have done anything so complicated as count. Her world was full of knowledge screaming to be known, her mind was lord to a relentless siege, and every new hour’s struggle against the harrowing depleted whatever energy she might otherwise have had to spend on the reckoning of luxuries like time.

She kept her hands busy in the futile hope that it would put what was happening in her head at some distance. It didn’t. She tried to bind her copy of Breaking the Moon herself, but the work was too detailed and fussy for her fractured mind and she left it for one of the other initiates, one of the crazy ones. He had it done in less time, it seemed, than it took her to burn the old copy. She wandered the stacks at the far end of her chain looking for new work, hating even the touch of the titles—The Book of Black Earth, Openings, The Bleeding Bones, Circles of Innocents—but knowing she had to do something because she was still being harrowed and still being watched.

She copied books because it was the only thing, really, to do. Copying meant reading, or at least, letting the words she wrote burrow into her mind and fill it with senseless horror. Bread and water kept the life in her, but she was aware as she occupied the Panic Room that extending life was hardly the same as promoting health. As her strength waned, the power of the Scrivener became that much harder to hold back. He never slept. Soon, madness would no longer be the comforting fantasy of her more masochistic moments, but inescapable truth.

No, there was no time, but the bells did ring. Sometimes it seemed only minutes apart, sometimes whole days, but they sounded all the same, reverberating through the rock where not even thoughts could penetrate, and waking her from the worst of the stupors. Students came with bread and water. Students came to empty the chamberpots. And students came with Horuseps, of course.

She never seemed to know when he was coming, no matter how dependably he followed the bells. He cut across her thoughts like claws, tearing at the little peace she’d wrestled for herself and supplanting it with his strange game of the tray, his toys, and his strange, indecipherable speech. Not always, but sometimes, he would return to her after making his rounds through the library, seeming to delight in her struggles to converse through insanity’s haze. Knowing that she was struggling made her work harder at appearing not to, which in turn entertained him even more. She began to look forward to his visits. This infuriated her and she punished herself in the Panic Room with memories of Connie.

And then it happened.

Horuseps set the tray before her. He lifted away the lid and indicated the small objects in their precise arrangement and said, “Turn the cup over, if you would, and kiss the frog.”

“What a classical sense of humor you have,” Mara said, writing in her book. “But no. I’d hate to think of where that thing could have been in this place.”

The demon’s mind sharpened. Not until she heard his thoughts (‘At last. And still sooner than anticipated.’) did she realize the words were not in English—not his, and not hers. She understood them anyway, but not the way she understood so many of the things that came to her in the Scrivener’s company, washing in and out again and leaving nothing behind but the unpleasant tang of their passage. It was his language she was speaking, and she spoke it as well as if it were her own.

“Is that it?” she asked, looking up at him. “Am I harrowed? Can I leave?”

“Traditionally, one must follow my instructions.”

“Do you really need to see me kiss a frog before I can leave this hellhole?”

His head tipped on side. “Shall you truly hold your pride higher than your release?” The lights of his eyes flashed and dimmed. He smiled. “Yet I must indulge you in your every whim, precious one. You may, if you like, kiss my hand instead.”

He held it out, palm up, fingers only slightly curled, waiting.

“I’d hate to think of where that’s been too.” Mara turned the clay cup over and bent to press her lips perfunctorily to the frog’s carved head.

“No student is permitted to refuse the order of an instructor, were you not told?”

“You said, ‘If you like.’ Is that the way you give orders?”

Horuseps tipped his head the other way and lowered his hand. “I can see that you are determined to give us trouble, child. So be it. Even troubles can prove amusing for a time.” His smile thinned. “A very short time.”

Mara waited, resisting mightily the temptation to squirm now that release was so near, and at last Horuseps knelt before her. He gave her a sly glance as he cupped her heel in his smooth palm and raised her leg just slightly. His eyes closed. He drew in a slow breath and let it out with an oily chuckle before finally touching his fingers to the iron ring around her ankle. It fell away with a heavy clang, but Horuseps continued to kneel, in no great hurry to remove the other.

“You are very different from the others who seek this place,” he said, rubbing his thumb lightly over the smooth, pink band where her shackle had chafed the worst. “Humans, for all their stirring songs of freedom, take quite easily to captivity. Not you.”

“Then why are you prolonging it?” she asked.

“Ah well. I don’t need to engender your favor, dear heart. You need to engender mine.” He raised his gaze to hers; the lights of one eye flashed in a wink. “However shall you engender mine?” he inquired, and slid one hand slowly up her leg.

“Is this really where you want to do this?” Mara asked dryly. “Right here?”

He considered it, but even if he hadn’t been touching her, she would know the answer. His mind was mostly dark to her even here, where all things insisted on understanding, but not entirely. He was not immune to the disturbing effects of the monster at the room’s heart any more than she was, and as much as he would enjoy teasing her with her imprisonment, he did not like to dwell in the Scrivener’s library.

Horuseps opened the second shackle and stood up, gesturing to his waxen-faced assistant to take the tray. ‘This day was bound to come,’ he was thinking, as he watched her cap her inkwell and blot her last unfinished page. He didn’t have those thoughts out in the open, either, but down deep, where he thought they were guarded from her. ‘Bound to come, yes, but still my dawn to break. My secret…if only for one more night.’ Aloud, he said only, “If you’re quite ready…?” and held out his arm for her to take.

She took it and let him lead her up the stairs, out of the heavy air that pooled in the Great Library, giving him her very real relief to feel while secretly creeping about in his own dark mind. His thoughts of her were covetous, perilous things she did not dare to chase down or hold. Where he passed, students bowed to him. Where his gaze fell, even for a moment, they gathered in expectant dread. Quite a few lingered close enough that he had to wave them back in order to move through without touching them. From the flutterings of their unguarded minds, Mara knew they were trying to anticipate him, trying to come and collect Mara from him, because that was the way it was done here, but Horuseps kept her for himself. This was unusual, if not exactly shocking to the other students, and she supposed it would not make her any friends.

That suited Mara fine.

“Need you catch your breath?” the demon asked, once they’d reached the top of the fourth and last flight of stairs. The library lay beneath them now, the Scrivener and those who served him mere toys strewn about a careless playroom. There was no sign, here, of the Hell that held sway over every mind within.

“I can go on,” Mara said, though her legs were watery from the climb. She’d always considered herself fit enough, but fit meant something entirely different here. A lengthy hike through the wooded wilderness, a hard midnight mountain climb, a few days chained to a table, and then four flights of steep stairs after a diet of bread and water left her not just tired but a little dizzy. “I’ll get used to it,” she insisted.

“Will you? We have always admired that quality in humankind. We do not adapt well, you see.” Horuseps reached down to cup the railing over the short wall that separated the stairwell’s landing from a damned deep drop onto the library’s stone floor. His face was pensive, unsmiling. “And some of us, not at all. Still we survive.”

Mara waited him out, controlling her breath and flexing her legs.

“Tell me your name, young one,” Horuseps murmured, still gazing into the library. “I would know you better.”

She thought briefly of refusing—this wasn’t an order, and she still remembered how deftly he’d shied away from giving his own name as he took her to the Oubliette—but in the complicated ripples of his mind, she could see that evasiveness was just what he expected of her, that he had a plan even, a way to wrest it from her. So she said, “Mara.”

He looked at her, brows raised so that they arched straight out from his head for an instant before lying flat once more. Then he looked away again, laughing that mildly unpleasant laugh of his. “Mara. You give your jewels too freely, and hoard the most trivial coal.” He gave the locket at her throat a dismissive flick with one fingertip.

She covered it in her fist, scowling. “Try burning jewels some time. Value is relative.”

“How true.” He considered her, making no attempt to hide his pleasure, either inside or out. “Yet few there are who come here knowing no better than to guard their names. You make it all too easy for me.”

She laughed right back at him. “I love that you assume I told you the truth, and you this supposed expert on the ways of wizards and deceit.”

Again, he showed surprise, if not quite so deeply. He laughed with her, and his delight seemed genuine. “Did you indeed, child? Did you look into my face and lie?”

“It’s not such a scary face,” she said. “And no, not exactly. I just didn’t tell the whole truth.”

One word—precious—pushed in clarity outside the confusion of his hidden mind. He smiled at her. “Mara it is then. She of the Bitter Waters. It suits you.”

She shrugged.

“Come then, if you’ve quite recovered.” The demon took her arm again, and with that touch came another deeply-set and covetous thought: ‘I’ll never keep her secret from him.’

But just who the ‘him’ of that thought might be, Mara could not dig for without risking discovery. She let it go for now. She had time, after all, in which to dally with the secrets and the politics of the Devil’s School, but one must learn to prioritize. Connie came first.

There were several doors set in the topmost ring around the library. Horuseps brought her through one of them and into a narrow, winding hall choked with students. He cleared them with waves of his hand, by all appearances absorbed with lofty inner musings of his own, but Mara could feel him outside the Panic Room, where he no doubt believed he skulked undetected, searching for a door that did not exist. She let that go too, but she watched him closely.

“Why have you come here?” he asked at last, abandoning the effort.

“Why would you ask?”

“If I am to set you on your way, I had ought to know. You have endured much, wouldn’t you say, to languish now in ignorance.”

“I’d say that would be my problem more than yours.”

“Oh my bittersweetness, these games of yours do tempt me. Must I order you to answer?”

She laughed. “Would you need to know that badly?”

“My dear, there is no limit set upon a Master’s commands. I may make every one of them solely to vex you.” He gave her chin a tickle, then just as playfully lashed out and slapped a preoccupied student out of his path and into a jutting ledge on the tunnel wall. As the robed man fell heavily to the ground, Horuseps blithely continued, “So I do order you to answer. Why have you come?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Oh? Who?” He thought she meant a demon. He even wondered if it might be he.

“A friend of mine.”

That stopped him. He stared at her, not shocked as much as intrigued. “A human? This…Ka-nee?”

“Connie, yes.”

The lights of his eyes spiraled together into twin gleams. “A lover?”

She laughed again, this time with sincere humor. “Jesus, not again. No. Just a friend.”

“Humans do not rashly enter Hell for the sake of friendship. Are you quite certain,” he inquired silkily, “it is not a lover? One of imagining, if not of fact?”

She kept laughing, although it died to soft chuckles soon enough, and shook her head. “No. And I’ll tell you something, since you seem so interested. I’ve been to bed with a lot of men, but there’s not one of them I’d run across a busy street for, much less fly to Romania and do time with the Scrivener. Sex isn’t the same as love, and taking a lover is sure as hell not a promissory note of my devotion.”

“Indeed? Then I think you shall do quite well here, Mara. The heartless often do.”

Her smile vanished. “I’m not heartless. And you’ve got no right to say so just because I don’t care about the people I fuck when I’ve come halfway around the world for my best friend.”

“Ah well. That is the failing of my kind, you see. We have few friends and little love.” He took her arm again and gave her a hard, sidelong smile. “Fucking is one of only a few passions we share with humanity, although not, I suppose, to the same degree.”

She didn’t know what she was supposed to say to that, so she only shrugged and started walking again.

The floor rose as the tunnel curved around. It was very quiet, particularly as crowded as the passage was. The rock, pitted and scored, vaulted and dripping stone, hoarded all sound. It had to be done deliberately. She remembered reading somewhere that only man-made caves echoed because their surfaces were made too smooth, but these were no more natural tunnels than the subway system in New York. Nevertheless, whoever had shaped them had been careful to simulate enough of the natural flow of rock so as to trap sound, and if it was a psychological ploy, it was damned effective. It disoriented her, made her feel very small and easily misplaced.

“We will be coming soon into the lyceum, the college-proper, as you would say. Here you will find the theaters where every art is taught. You will find them empty now,” Horuseps said, waving a last cluster of students away. “Lessons are held between second- and third-bell. Students must return to their cells within a reasonable time, and of course, they are not permitted to wander after the last bell is rung.”

“Cells?”

“Ah, you think of prisons? No, these are honest cells, as for scholars of old…or religious disciples, I suppose. My theological education is severely outdated. But fear not, dear heart, there are no locks, no dungeons. Why would we need them?”

A good point. All the mountain was a dungeon.

“Here,” said Horuseps, as they came out into a great cavern. It was, as he’d said, empty now, but it could have held easily five hundred people without any of them touching, and it had been lightly furnished with stone tables and chairs. Water spilled out from several small spout-like protrusions in the innermost wall, collected in a crescent-shaped pool, the room’s only real decoration. The floor rose up along the perimeter, forming a spiral that narrowed as it climbed, giving the entire room the seeming of a cathedral or a beehive. Tall, heavily-carved doors stood open at evenly-spaced intervals along this wide path, and a short wall gave a nod to the prevention of accidental tumbles over the side. Light came from more of those glowing bulges of yellow rock dispersed along the walls and set in waxy columns of cave-stone, casting a sallow hue over Mara’s arms and turning the demon’s moon-like skin to corpse-flesh.

Horuseps released her at her first step away, resting his long hands on his shoulders as he watched her move to the first vacant doorway and peer cautiously within. She saw no classroom, but only another tunnel, pocked with open doors. “Wander here at your will,” he called, when she eased a short way into it, “and also at your peril. Here will you find all the wizardry of the mortal ages, but all things come at a cost.”

“And you teach here too?” Mara asked, returning to the great cavern.

Horuseps did not answer, but started walking, climbing the round flight of stairs to the first landing and passing several open doorways before he paused. When he saw her jogging after him, he entered. By the time she reached the opening, he was just a white blur vanishing around a corner. He led her on like this for some time, his mind disappearing in fits and lunges where the tunnel curved around on itself, until he came at last to a particular set of doors. There, he waited, one hand resting on the carved jamb, until she came up close. One of his fingertips tapped; she stopped before entering the room beyond and looked at the door instead.

The first thing she saw was the sinewy and contorted figure at the bottom—a naked man on his hands and knees, his neck arched and agony in his face, split down the middle where the two doors joined. Other figures surrounded him, men and women both, all nude, all straining upwards while huddled small. Mara backed up obligingly, trying to see the whole picture, and it was only then that she noticed the abstract lines carved above this teeming display of unhappy humanity was not so very abstract after all.

It was Horuseps, carved as an angular column. Horuseps with his hands on his shoulders, head bent…smiling. A very good likeness, actually, for all that it used lines so sparingly. And the people groveling at his feet were not writhing in torment after all, but begging him for knowledge, for magic, for power.

“A tad ostentatious, isn’t it?” Mara asked.

“A tad,” he agreed, and bowed, gesturing within. “Yet some might argue that I am deserving of it. For here do I instruct my students in the art of Sight, and there are none within this mountain who do it better. Behold my theater, Mara.”

“Theater?” she echoed, walking between the open halves of the carved demon to stand in his domain.

“All the world’s a stage, my dear. Do feel free to look around.”

Mara looked, and apart from the fact that everything was made of stone and lit by cancerous blisters of yellow light, it was identical to any number of lecture halls she’d sat in back in college. A number of wide benches fell in half-circles over a central platform where the instructor was meant to stand, and beyond that were a small assortment of teaching aids—urns and glass cases, wooden trunks, mirrors, and less identifiable tools of the demon’s mysterious craft. At the extreme opposite of this door, at the very lowest level of the room, another tunnel reached down into darkness.

“My private chambers,” Horuseps said mildly when Mara frowned in that direction. “Modestly attired…and not at all fit to receive company. Do forgive me.”

“How long do lessons last?” Mara asked, using the layers of benches as stairs on her way down to the platform at the bottom. They made for very steep stairs. “I was told from second-bell to third, but how long is—oh, very good,” she interrupted herself, looking sharply around. “I just realized…nine rings, with ‘dais’ at the center. That’s hilarious, Horuseps.”

“Thank you. I wish I could take the credit, but alas, it wasn’t my joke. As for lessons, they are taught all day. We Masters require little in the way of respite and you’ll find that the material under study rather repels close examination.” He joined her on the platform. His thin fingers drifted down her back and up again, toying with the ends of her hair while she inspected the shelves at the back of the classroom. “Students tend to come and go several times throughout the day in an attempt to master what they pursue. How long, you ask? I can only tell you that the lessons take as long as they take. We are not timekeepers here.”

“How bohemian.”

“Hardly. We may have few rules, but what rules there are must be obeyed on pain of death or expulsion.”

Mara had to smile, even as she was distracted by what appeared to be the skeleton of a two-headed bird mounted under glass. “Expulsion. Is that as good as death, or worse?”

“That would depend, I suppose, on how one is expelled…or through what window.” He made another pass down her hair, lifting it now to breathe in whatever scent clung to her. It couldn’t have been a pleasant one, all things considered, but he smiled as if it were dewed with rosewater. “Now hear me, bitterness, and heed well, for ignorance is deadly here. You have won the right to study, but that right must be protected. You shall be required to attend lessons and you shall be expected to apply yourself to them. Do not smile,” he cut in sharply, his eyes flaring. “Many has been the craven mortal who sought to present himself poorly at an art he had mastered so that he might linger past his appointed hour.”

“So you are timekeepers.”

“What cheek.” He bent, stole another breath from her hair, and murmured wordlessly to himself. “Many come here believing the price of tuition to be low…but having achieved what they set out to achieve, suddenly realize that one-tenth is rather a large number after all. Only we Masters keep an accounting. None of them are given to know where the cruel cut falls. And so there are always some who seek to hide in their lessons, rather than to learn from them. But we are not in the habit of harboring refugees. There lies your only warning.”

“I have no intention of staying longer than I must.”

“In order to find your friend, yes.” He chuckled. “And how is it you plan to take her away?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, but for argument’s sake, what happens if I decide not to go to lessons but just to study on my own?”

“On your…?”

“You have enough books, surely.”

“Surely.” Horuseps rolled one shoulder in a gesture that was not quite a shrug but was probably meant to look like one. He couldn’t pull it off without collarbones. “Yet books may not be removed from the Great Library without the permission of a Master, and seldom do we give it.”

“What happens if you catch me reading in my room?”

“Need you ask? You will be punished.”

“Yes, but there ought to be several degrees of punishment in this place.”

“True, yet all of them, I assure you, are punishment enough.” He placed his hand on her back and, with gentle pressure, led her back to the benches. He climbed without effort, pausing at each step to wait for her ungainly company before continuing on. “Ultimately, it comes to our good judgment whether a student is making the best of his education here, and our judgment is absolute. Make use of our advantages, young one, and you need not suffer it.”

“I’ll remember that. What is the ‘appointed hour’ of each class?”

“Every student is free to pursue whichever art he will, until mastery or until ten years have elapsed, whichever comes first.”

“Ten years?” Mara echoed, staring at him.

“Time flies,” said the demon dryly. “We aren’t teaching automotive repair, dearest. Magic eludes the human mind by its very nature.”

“But…” Mara took the last two benches quickly and returned to the passage outside, looking left and right at the other doors she saw, and that was just here, in this tunnel. “Do all of these doors lead to a different classroom?”

“A theater,” Horuseps corrected, joining her. “Yes.”

“And every doorway in the big r—in the lyceum,” she said. “They all open on tunnels like this?”

“Yes.”

“How many of you are there?” Mara asked.

The little smile he wore became unexpectedly hard. “Not as many as we’d like,” he answered. “Certainly not as many as find their way here.”

“Do you all teach?”

“All those you find in the lyceum,” he said, but he was taking a greater care in the way he answered now. His mind darkened, deliberately armored against her.

“Different magic?”

“Oh. I see. No, my dear. There are degrees of difficulty to each art, and to the ways in which arts may interact with one another. And so we each have our own specialties here and our own theater. Explore. Through each open door, you will surely find a demon.” He laughed and took her arm. “I advise you therefore not to open those closed to you. Come.”

She followed him out, through the empty beehive of the lyceum, and downward through another winding passage, riddled with archways and side-tunnels, until they came to yet another cavernous chamber. Alternating stalactites and stalagmites formed a fanged fenceway along the two long walls, behind which more of those yellow blisters glowed out. Rock rippled upwards along the ceiling in white-capped lines that emulated the cornices and sconces of a cathedral. Stone benches and columns set with what may well have been centuries’ of melted candles forced visitors to walk respectfully down the center of the long room, which was dominated at the far end by a vast slab of shiny black stone—a door. Ten meters tall at the very least, it spanned the full height of this great room, and was as wide or wider than the wall of Mara’s bedroom back home. It had no latch, no carvings, no hinges, no mark of any kind to spoil the mirror-like gloss of its surface.

“Where are we?” Mara asked, since she could sense that he wasn’t ever going to volunteer any information.

“They call this place the Nave,” Horuseps said. “And we call it simply the threshold, for beyond that door lies the graduate’s camber, and the last test of the Scholomance. Ask me no questions of the trial within. It is not for me to answer.”

“Fair enough. Is that the only way out?”

“Yes.”

“What about the way I came in?”

“The portcullis opens but once a year, dear one, and at no student’s behest.” Horuseps watched as Mara approached the black door and tentatively laid her hand upon it. “You don’t really want to do that, do you?” he asked, smiling.

“Probably not. How does it open?”

“With effort.”

Thinking of the doors in the Oubliette, Mara reached out through her hand and tried to touch whatever might be inhabiting the black stone. She felt nothing there, but sensed a leap of surprise from Horuseps and turned to see him only just composing himself. “Is there a problem?” she asked coolly.

“Not at all. You are perfectly free to experiment how you will, only be aware that the other students share this freedom, and our home defends itself blindly. Besides which, if you met immediately with success, where would you be but out of the Scholomance for another year? You’ve only just arrived. Do leave a little mystery for later delving.” Horuseps took her arm, gave the door a grim sort of backwards glance, and led her firmly away. “There, you can just see the main entry to the dining hall, my dearest. And through there, the reading room, for those few who have earned a Master’s favor. And through there and there and there, o so many secret places, but for now, down we go!”

Down again, out of the Nave on a wide, sweeping staircase that came out of its close-walled tunnel to arch down over empty space into a great stadium of a cavern. By the now-familiar flickering lights of the blister-lamps, she could see dozens of passageways over three separate floors, and at least a hundred students in black or white robes milling about below them.

“This is the ephebeum,” Horuseps said. “The student’s dorm, so to speak. Think of this as the exercise pen. I understand they have races here, and other games, some of which I suspect are rather unpleasant, but I trust you’ll make friends quickly. Or if not friends, at least an impression. There are many amenities provided here…the garderobe is to your left, and the baths upon your right, and the cells, of course.”

“Do you show every new student around?” Mara asked, knowing the answer already.

“Observe your fellows,” Horuseps replied dryly. The students scattered through the ephebeum were indeed staring, although they were all careful to keep clear of the demon and bow when he passed by. “Yet I confess you do interest me and so I suffer the infamy of it.”

Mara was reasonably certain that if there was going to be suffering attached to infamy in here, it was likelier to fall on her than on him, but saw no point in saying so. Being an A-student came easy to a telepath; she’d dealt with the fallout of favoritism before and she wasn’t worried now, just because the other students thought they could put the whammy on her. She’d tapped at nearly every mind she’d come across out of habit and found not even one of them who knew she’d done it, let alone one that could keep her out. She may not be able to make friends in this place, but she was confident she’d always see an enemy coming, as long as she stayed in the open.

The bells sounded, ringing through the rock in four separate, doleful peals. Last bell. Day’s end. The students lounging about the ephebeum immediately stopped whatever they were doing and gathered themselves up. More students poured in through other stairwells, chatting together in the way of students everywhere, and only a little startled to see a Master among them. They dispersed, quickly if not exactly quietly, vanishing down the many holes that opened in the high stone walls. In moments, mere moments, they were alone.

Mara stumbled, disoriented by the sudden psychic silence in a place she knew teemed with living people. Ever the gentleman, Horuseps caught her hand to steady her, and then just kept holding on, his thoughts squirming with black pleasure, but all he said was, “We’ve timed this well, haven’t we? Now to give you a cell to call home…and I know just the one.”

He led her out of the ephebeum and deeper into the mountain, past open doors and empty rooms, into narrower and darker corridors. The blister-like lamps that lit the tunnels came less and less frequently, and often stayed black until Horuseps lit them in some unimaginable way in the dark. He explained nothing, just kept walking in his swift, graceful way, humming a little under his breath.

“You’re sure this isn’t a dungeon cell?” Mara asked, frowning at a hanging stalactite as she ducked under it.

“You strike me as one who prefers her privacy over convenience. Here.” He stepped and touched the tip of one finger to the lockplate on an otherwise unremarkable door. It sparked and swung inward, groaning on its hinges.

The door was small, only a little taller than she stood herself and narrow enough that she had to turn sideways to get in. As small as the door was, the room was worse: Six stone surfaces, utterly smooth and featureless. The only light came from a lamp in the tunnel through the door’s narrow window that was the tiny cell’s sole ventilation. Using herself as a general instrument of measurement, Mara guessed the room to be six feet in height, three in width, and only five deep. To sleep, she would either have to draw her knees up or leave her feet out in the hall. That was assuming she could sleep at all on this floor, without even a straw mat for a bed.

“Well,” said Mara finally. “This is pretty horrible.”

Horuseps threw back his head and laughed.

“This is part of your sinister plot to force your students to learn magic, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is.” His head cocked. “I must say, for someone who came here without any intention of seeking sorcery, you are proving remarkably amenable to its utilitarian uses.”

“All part of my charm,” Mara said distractedly, scraping her bare foot across the floor. It remained very hard stone. “If I ingratiate myself enough, perhaps I’ll wheedle a better bed out of you.”

“I? Not likely. Yet there are always beds for those who seek them ardently. And now, if you’ve no other questions—”

“One, actually.”

“Oh?” He’d already been walking away, but he turned back now, ingenuously cordial on the surface and distinctly wary on the inside. The lights of his eyes had drawn together, like wagons circling against Cherokee attack, she thought. “Pray tell me, child. Ever I am at your service.”

“Do you meet with everyone who enters the Scholomance?”

“I do.” Polite puzzlement held him a moment more before comprehension smoothed it away. ‘Her Connie,’ he thought, and said, “You ask if I recall the friend you’ve come to find? Sadly, you are yourself the only applicant of note in many, oh, many dreary years. Perhaps she has indeed passed under my watchful eye, and certainly if she’s been harrowed, I spoke to her, yet I have not marked her.”

“I haven’t even told you what she looks like.”

“Dearest, were you to paint her image in the air before me and give me the day and hour of her entry, still I couldn’t tell you better. Time is all the same here, you’ll discover that for yourself, and human faces change as often as the moon’s. I cannot help you, to my regret.”

She studied him, his gracious smile, his slick and oilsome manners, and found them to be disturbingly sincere. When he spread his hands in a courtly gesture of honesty, she seized on it, boldly thrusting a part of herself into his mind while keeping a greater part back, hidden and quiet, to see how he dealt with her.

He was not without defenses and he brought them up fast, but before he shoved her out, she sensed he was actually telling the truth. Maybe Connie was here and maybe not, he wasn’t in the habit of paying attention to students. Nor was he in the habit of doing mental battle with telepaths. She was very briefly tempted to wrestle her way back in, if only because she sensed she could do it, but in the end, that was a secret too precious to give up so early in the game. She let herself be rebuffed and looked evenly up into his furious face.

“I misunderstood,” she said, mimicking his open-hands gesture of a second ago. “I thought you were offering to let me look, to see for myself if you’d seen her, since she’s so far beneath your notice.”

His eyes narrowed coldly, but only for an instant. Then he pretended to believe her, relaxing the set of his pale shoulders and giving a cavalier wave of one hand, although his mind stayed tightly armored. “Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. A mistake I’ll not make twice, child. I trust you’ll do the same.”

“My apologies, Master Horuseps.”

“Hm.” A smile cracked at the corners of his lips. “It’s going to be quite interesting to have you among us…for however short a time. I wish you luck in your search.”

“Do you?” she asked, raising her voice as he moved away down the hall.

“Oh yes,” he called back to her. She could hear the smile in his words, even though he did not turn. “After so many ages, even the worst difficulties can only be a passing entertainment, and I think we shall not see the worst from you, Bitter Waters. Luck to you and to your Connie, wherever she might be. No doubt we shall meet again.”

“No doubt,” Mara murmured, watching until the darkness and the rock swallowed him. She stood awhile in the hall, letting the silence settle around her, the reality of it all growing louder. With the demon out of sight, she no longer felt that eerie sense of displacement, of the Scholomance brooding over her like some dark and hungry djinn, and the urge was on her all at once to take a long step back and disbelieve in some or all of it. This place couldn’t exist. Hundreds of people did not disappear to live inside a mountain, and have nobody know about it. To live inside a mountain with demons, no less.

But the rock was real. it rippled over the ceiling like endless rows of elephant teeth, dripped out countless jagged claws and melted-wax ribbons. She could touch it and feel its slick, craggy reality cold under her fingers. She could hear it breathing in the way of caves, taste its musky minerals in the air. She’d never been spelunking before, didn’t know that a person could feel a mountain creeping in on you with all of its weight behind it, all that weight above you. Demons, magic, and hundreds of people had a way of fading in and out of a person’s grasp, but you sure couldn’t argue with rock.

Mara walked into her cell and stared at it for a bit. In a weird way, it was cozy. If she stood with her back to the door, she could almost be back in her first Panic Room, back in the Basement. ‘Welcome to the Scholomance,’ she thought. She’d done it. She was in.

Now what?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mara slept. It was impossible to say how long, with neither a watch nor a window at her disposal. Her sleep had been a fitful thing, easily broken and difficult to recapture, interrupted by moments of half-awake states in which the psychic quiet and colorful Mindstorm made her think she’d fallen asleep in her body and was now part of her dream, dreaming of being in the Panic Room. She began to feel more and more as though she’d spent the night in a drunken stupor.

The robe which was her only clothing was also her only bedding, and the stone cell was cramped and damp and cold in addition to being very hard. Far more damaging to her night’s rest was the strange muffling effect of the mountain’s enclosing rock, which all but silenced the chatter of stranger’s minds and made her feel deceptively isolated, although she knew she was surrounded. Even in the Panic Room, the Mindstorm was washed-out and smudgy in appearance. Now and then, some burst of noise and clarity betrayed the presence of some other student wandering close by in the hall, but that was all. It was strange and deeply unsettling, but Mara was exhausted and eventually, she slept.

When she did fully awaken, stiff and drowsy, it was to the sound of tolling bells. Not merely one or two peals, as she’d heard in the library, but a discordant mash of many keys and tempos, similar to the traditional songs of church bells. Similar, yes, but only on the surface. The song these dark bells told was somber enough, but the timing was bad, rushed, giving the impression of a sly, unpleasant giggle running through a eulogy.

Mara got up, doing her best to walk out the aches and pains of her night on the floor as she followed the sound out into the winding, sparsely-lit passages. Horuseps had really put her in the outskirts. It was some time before she saw another student and he was also moving towards the bells. As she kept unobtrusively at his back, he led her out of the tunnels, through the ephebeum, and into the heart of the mountain, picking up more and more people as they went. All the Scholomance was gathering, it seemed, and where they gathered was in the Nave, before the Black Door.

Acclimating to the crush and pulse of so many minds after her night of unnatural quiet was not difficult, but it wasn’t pleasant either. She found a place far back along the wall from which to view the proceedings, where she could be dizzy without being obvious about it.

“Ah, you came!”

Robed figures bowed aside for Horuseps. He paid them no mind, as careless in his step as if he were walking through fields of corn. All his attention—his glittering, starlit eyes and easy smile—was for Mara. He lifted one long hand from its resting place on his own shoulder to cup hers, bringing her with him away from the wall and back through the gathered students. “I thought of fetching you out personally, but of course, that would hardly be proper for either one of us. Not that there are no Masters here who show favor to one above the others, but I have a reputation to maintain, you understand.”

She didn’t, but accepted his rambling words at face-value, meaningless as they were to her ultimate goal. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Shall you have a guess?”

Mara looked thoughtfully at the crowd of shifting, muttering students, and then ahead, where the knot of them had thinned out and a few demons stood instead, watching Horuseps escort her towards them. She could feel her scalp crawling the closer she came, as if their cast-off excitement were setting a static charge in the air, but it was a very strange sort of anticipation.

“It isn’t a graduation,” she said finally.

“No?”

She wanted to tap at a few minds to make sure, but not with Horuseps here, not with his hand on her shoulder, his naked thumb caressing her naked throat. Physical contact always gave her an advantage when she was looking for a way into someone’s head. The advantage may be mutual, and while she believed the Panic Room was mind-tight, reaching out to tap someone just might expose her. She wouldn’t risk that with Horuseps so obviously playing a trapdoor spider.

“No,” she said instead. “If it was, there would be a few people dumb enough to want to be in the front row, to catch a peek inside, thinking it would mean something when it was their turn. Some of them want to see…but no one wants to be that close.”

“You sound very certain.”

“Just look at them.”

They weren’t frightened, these watchers in robes. There were only a few with that pale, waxy pallor that meant real nerves at work, but no matter how unsuccessfully they played at stoicism, the Mindstorm was hot with dread. And no, they weren’t jostling to get closer to the door or trying to count backwards through other graduations they may have seen. If anything, they cringed back from it, crushing at the walls in small groups to whisper at each other. The only anticipation she could see flashing through the Mindstorm was of a low and sadistic sort.

“What then?”

“I don’t know.” Mara puzzled at the windows of the Panic Room for a few moments more, then shook her head in defeat. “Have you come to watch newcomers like me doing a loyalty oath or something? Am I supposed to cross my heart and kiss the door?”

“No, but what a splendid idea.”

“What have you there, Horuseps?” one of the demons asked. It was female, weirdly beautiful despite hundreds of coral-like growths sprouting from the back of her head, neck and shoulders, all tangling together and reaching upwards like the branches of a dead tree. Her hands were uneven, gnarled things, dripping fingers like roots, but they were graceful enough as they plaited together at her smooth hip. She wore only a single length of plain white cloth, gossamer as spider silk, that hung from her throat to the floor, held against her body only by the strategic application of several tight belts. She came the last few steps to meet them, eyeing Mara with the polite interest of a woman meeting a good friend’s new dog. “I hadn’t realized your tastes had changed so,” she said, smiling. “From red meat to candy.”

Horuseps laughed. “No, Zyera, this is our newest student. Mara, she is called.”

“Bitter candy,” the demoness mused. “Such an unusual face. Pretty, but very odd.” She reached out to pet Mara’s hair, then rubbed some between her crooked fingers. “Do you know, she almost reminds me of…well, it doesn’t matter.”

Horuseps just smiled, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly.

“Such delightful eyes…” Zyera dropped Mara’s hair and touched one of those ghastly fingers to Mara’s cheek. Her mind was at once there, ripping through the Mindstorm in a callous, clutching act, only to bounce off the Panic Room. Without thinking, Mara reacted as if it were an attack, sending out a mindslap against the intruder, and connecting, somewhat to her surprise. Zyera let out a glassy shriek and stumbled back, both arms flying up and crossing before her face, all her roots and branches quivering as she stared at Mara.

The students and the demons both stopped any and all conversations mid-word and focused in on them.

“You look perfectly ridiculous,” Horuseps announced, his smile broadening. “Come, come sister. She’s not apt to bite if you offer your hand and keep to low tones.”

Slowly, Zyera’s arms dropped. On her face, a look of wonder spread, blanching the color out of her coral-like ornaments. “This is unexpected,” she breathed.

“Isn’t it?”

“A very pretty plaything.” Zyera looked at Horuseps, a solemn and matter-of-fact stare. “You’ll never keep her secret.”

“I know it. But before the sharing of my bitter wine—” He gave Mara’s shoulder a light squeeze. “—we have this unpleasantness to endure.”

“Ah yes.” Zyera gave Mara a long, considering stare. “You are new here,” she said at last. “And I don’t imagine you frighten easily, if at all. So only keep very quiet and learn what you can from what you are about to witness. What have you come to learn?”

Mara frowned, taken aback by the abrupt shift in questioning.

“She hasn’t,” Horuseps said. “She’s come to find a friend.”

“Here?”

Horuseps bent his head once in a mocking nod. “Isn’t it too delightful?”

Zyera didn’t look delighted. In point of fact, she looked alarmed.

“She went by Connie when I knew her,” Mara interjected, annoyed. “She’s a little taller than I am, with dark, curly hair and brown—”

“Impossible there should be another undetected!” Zyera said, still looking only at Horuseps.

“Agreed.”

“—brown eyes,” Mara finished. “Have you seen her?”

“Possibly.” Zyera shrugged, eying Mara with a distinct expression of unease. “Perhaps I do not see them all, but I see many in my time. Do I recall her? Ah, there is the true question. I am surrounded even now by a host of humans I do not recall. Do let me know if you find yours.”

Off she went, the slender tips of her coral forks swaying ever so slightly with her sensual stride. She was completely naked from behind, except for the belts. Her spine protruded here and there, delicately branching, crystalline.

“Zyera,” said Horuseps unnecessarily. His fingertips tapped along Mara’s shoulder in a distracted way as he watched her go.

“Friend of yours?”

He thought about it, his head cocked and eyes dim. “No,” he said at last, and smiled. “You are my only friend, dear Mara.”

The bells stopped ringing all at once. The silence that followed was a thick one as the students waited, some of them still staring in bewilderment at Mara, others gradually fixing their attention on the demons. Horuseps gave Mara’s shoulder another squeeze, but she knew better than to talk even without his warnings. She waited with the rest of them, mystified.

“We have very few rules here,” Horuseps said. He did not raise his voice, but such was the quality of the silence that it carried out as effectively as if he had. Releasing Mara, he stepped up to face the crowd, and those in front bowed to him. He walked among them, touching the backs of their heads as he spoke, idly glancing this way and that, strolling. “And we take pains that there are no surprises. Our ways are not secret. Nor, I think, are they difficult to comprehend. There are only a few inviolate laws and they are very simple.”

He turned around, walked back through the crowd until he came out of it and stood before the Black Door. He faced them again, resting his hands on his shoulders, his expression severe. “The breaking of those laws is never to be tolerated,” he said.

Mara felt a spike of fear, not her own, piercing the Mindstorm. She looked around in time to see a demon enter through a side-passage. The demon was a hulking thing, thickly-muscled and bristling with bony spikes, but it was the very ordinary humans he had gripped in each hand that held her attention. There were two—man and woman—and although both walked under their own power, the man was obviously afraid of whatever lay at the end of their walk. The demon who held him paid no attention whatsoever.

“It is forbidden,” Horuseps continued mildly, “to defy any order given by a Master of the Scholomance.”

Now she could hear him with her ears and not just her mind: “It won’t happen again, I swear it, I swear! Upon my mother’s grave, I swear it! Please, Master Argoth! It was only the once! It was her fault!”

The woman did not answer the accusation. Her eyes were huge and staring. Mara knew that look. She’d seen her mother wearing it almost every day.

“It is forbidden to remove books from the library without a Master’s permission,” Horuseps said.

“Please, Master, I—I—” The man’s frantic gaze lit on someone in the crowd. “Giova! Giova, tell him I am honest! Tell him when I swear a thing, it is true! Please!”

Horuseps paused and cocked his head, waiting patiently. Giova, whoever he was in the silent hall, said nothing.

“It is forbidden to linger more than ten days each year without attending a lesson,” said Horuseps. “As it is forbidden to linger more than ten years in the study of any one art.”

The man’s feet took smaller and smaller steps as he made his increasingly incoherent pleas and promises. Soon he was being pulled, then dragged along the floor when he stumbled to his knees. The woman just kept walking.

“And it is forbidden for our students to fornicate in such a manner as to possibly produce offspring,” Horuseps concluded.

“She seduced me!” the man howled. “She made me do it! She is a hateful, evil bitch! Siren! Destroyer of men!” The rest was lost in screams. His demon impassively picked him up and plunked him down before Horuseps, more or less on his feet. The demon, muscle-wrapped and spike-studded, managed despite his malformed face and sinister features to look bored.

“As rules without enforcement are meaningless, it falls to us to punish transgressions. Master Argoth.”

The demon, Argoth, reached down one clawed hand and ripped through the man’s robe, pulling it off in shreds with one easy sweep of his arm. The man did not seem to notice his nakedness. He had fallen into such a state of terror that it was all Mara could feel in this room where hundreds watched.

“Human called Rastan,” Horuseps said, cutting across the hysterics without dulling them any. “We have been told many tales of your sexual indiscretions in your time here, but we have given you the benefit of our doubt. Now, at last, you have been discovered by a Master of Scholomance in the act of releasing your seed within a woman’s womb. My judgment is upon you now.”

“It was her! It was her! She made me!”

Horuseps gave a nod. Argoth reached down and dug his claws impersonally into the man’s shriveled scrotum. His powerful arm rocked back in the same wide arc he’d used to tear the man’s robe off, but there was no more robe.

It looked, Mara thought, from the quiet haven of the Panic Room and its distancing monitors, as if he’d vomited out a stage-magician’s scarf—all glittery/shiny and tumbling to the ground with a flourish and a pause for the audience to gasp. Then everything came out of him. His legs flopped, limp as string. His emptied skin sagged outward, bulging with the weight of his meat and bones. His mouth opened and closed once more. Even if Mara were in her body and right before him to feel the hot gore of it around her toes and smell the broken stink of him, she doubted anything could be worse than seeing his opening and closing mouth.

Argoth dropped the wet sack that used to be a man and stepped back, fastidiously shaking off his toes as he licked his claws. The woman behind him did not react. The clawed hands on her shoulders rested lightly. She was numb to fear, numb to panic, numb to all thought.

Mara looked around, tapping in mute astonishment at mind after mind, and finding only a dull spectrum of distaste, when she found any emotion at all. Some of them were bored, some viciously amused, one or two mildly aroused, but most were like the woman standing barefooted in her lover’s blood, only numb. The Mindstorm roared on, no louder and no more urgent than it had been at the airport.

“Human called Alanza.” Horuseps did not raise his voice. If anything, he softened it some. The woman blinked twice and looked at him. She did not plead, not even with her eyes. Horuseps smiled at her, but his fingers curled restlessly over his shoulders, as though even in his play of sympathy, he could not resist the urge to clutch.

“This is the first we have heard of your disobedience. Of course, one lapse of judgment is one too many, and yet, there have been questions raised as to your willingness in the matter. What have you to say?”

Alanza had, seemingly, nothing to say. She stared at this gift of lenience as she’d stared at the execution and was silent.

Horuseps nodded just as though she’d given him some unheard, lengthy argument. His fingers twitched. “We can tolerate no fornicators amongst us. You have defied our laws. Yet some there are who speak for you. Therefore, know a Master’s mercy. You are expelled, human. Your return means only your death. Go.”

The demon who had walked her to this fate now gave her shoulder a little pat and lumbered over to the Black Door. It took no heaving, but opened with a touch, making no sound, admitting no icy draft or stench of brimstone. Mara looked and saw only shadows on the other side. She felt and felt nothing.

The woman, Alanza, did not move until the demon who brought her here came back and got her. She kept her eyes on Horuseps, turning as she walked until she reached the threshold. There she hesitated, showing the only sign of life since her arrival, and half-raised a hand, but her mind was so numbed over that Mara couldn’t tell whether it was a gesture of entreaty or farewell. In any case, it didn’t last. She turned away, small and white against the blackness, and padded quietly out of sight.

The door shut. That was all. There was no muffled scream, no roar, no ray of light around the jamb. Just the closing of the door and the loss of one more mind, one which had not been altogether there in the first place.

“So does their time end prematurely,” Horuseps said, looking out over the students. “They are not counted toward the Tenth.”

A gust of breath answered this—in some, it was a sign of frustration, and in others, relief. Both reactions struck Mara as odd, considering no one could possibly know where to start counting. But the crowd was breaking up, humans and demons alike departing down the dark halls that had brought them here.

“Do not think too harshly of us,” Horuseps said, rejoining her. “It is all for the better, I assure you, lest the mountain be filled up with human offspring.”

“Does every student have to attend these things?” Mara asked.

“You have just heard our only inviolate laws.” Horuseps tipped his head to study her, then looked sharply at the retreating rows of students. “Was she not among them? Your Connie?”

“No. She wasn’t.”

“Ah. No doubt she hid away in her cell when the bells tolled. Ask not, as they say.” He chuckled to himself. “We allow it, having learned long ago that the only thing that comes of forcing the weak-stomached to bear witness is a soured floor.”

“Not like it is now,” Mara said, with a pointed glance back at the eviscerated Rastan.

“That is but a small souring in comparison. Once one human purges, they all seem to follow along. The stench has a way of lingering.” Horuseps dropped his hand to the small of back, propelling her politely ahead of him. “I am pleased to see you in such admirable control, however. Such demonstrations are infrequent, but they do occur.”

“I’ll admit I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Mara replied, “but I knew it wasn’t nursery school.”

“What a delightfully callous observation. You’ll go far, dearest.” He gave her a pat to send her on her way down the wide stair into the ephebeum while he remained at the top. “It is not yet first bell, o heartless one, and while it is not forbidden to wander after hours, it is discouraged. Strongly.”

“I’m not heartless,” Mara muttered, and louder, said, “All the better to give me empty halls for my illicit affairs. Why would you make something like that forbidden and then provide us all with such perfect opportunities to do it anyway?”

“Consider it a trial of willpower. Did I not say there would be tests?” His head tipped again and he came a few steps after her before stopping. “I’m sure I need not tell you there are ways in which lusts may be satisfied without the risk of pregnancy.”

“Define satisfied.”

“One learns to adjust.”

“In light of the alternative, I’m sure one does.” She looked back in spite of herself. The Nave was just a glimmer of light and sculpted pillars from here, silent and empty. “What happens to him now?”

“That would be between him and his God,” Horuseps replied, his voice stained by a certain sour amusement. He turned around and started back up the stairs. “As for the carcass, it shall be disposed of.”

“By whom?”

He stopped again, came back down with his head at an angle, smiling. “Are you volunteering?”

“Not until I know the method of disposal. For all I know, you’re eating them.”

“For all you know,” he agreed, blithely enough to be disturbing. “Master Suti’ok has gone to fetch the hounds. At first-bell, you’ll not see so much as a stain.”

“Hounds? You have dogs here?”

“Dogs? Nothing so prosaic. Our hounds are bred of demon stock.”

“Are they Masters, too?”

“No, although a very sound question, I applaud you. You may indeed encounter many terrible things within these walls, but Masters, my dearest, are those who teach. Only those. And if ever you hear your name called by a hound hiding in the shadows, and if ever he gives you dark command in the name of Master, I advise you in the strongest terms to find one for true and report it at once. But walk away, child, do not run. Running only attracts their attention.”

“Many terrible things,” Mara echoed.

“The Scholomance is more than thee and me, young one.” His thoughts, always dim and difficult to grasp, briefly drew into a dark focus, something about tribes—the Old Tribes or maybe the True Tribes, the words seemed interchangeable in whatever language he thought in. The tribes were broken. Then he glanced at her and his mind closed, leaving her with only a lingering echo of his strange emotions. “Much more,” he said, coming down the rest of the stairs to stand before her. “Yet there is time enough to learn as much as you would know. Return to your cell, my dear. I should hate to see you punished.”

She took a few steps to placate him, then swung back. “Who was it?” she called.

He too paused and turned back. “I beg your pardon?”

“Which one of you spoke for her?”

“Whyever would you assume it was a Master?”

“Please. No student would ever argue with one of you over something like this. Was it you?”

“I? No.” He gave her another of those speculative stares and finally smiled. “It was Master Kharnath. I can’t think you’ve met, so the information is utterly meaningless to you.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Is it so impossible to believe one of us capable of mercy and affection?”

“Yes. Why did he do it?”

“I believe he was fucking her,” he replied mildly. He reached up and passed a hand over his left eyebrow, then returned it to his shoulder. “Does that satisfy you, darling?”

She thought about it and slowly shook her head. “It doesn’t follow.”

“No?”

“She’s gone either way, so why not let her die? And don’t try that mercy/affection line on me twice.”

“You disappoint me. I suppose that was bound to happen eventually, but I confess it comes as a blow.” Horuseps came towards her, his head canted and motionless at each step. “We do feel, Mara. Perhaps not in the same fashion or to so stirring a height as humankind, but we feel. The baser emotions come easiest, I admit that, but lust does not preclude love. Whether Kharnath truly cared for her, I do not know, but he asked that her life be spared. And one life, after all, means little one way or the other. To humor him, we spared her.”

He knew, though. Everything he said sounded plausible, but what he did not say spoke louder. She could see only the broadest outlines of his thoughts behind his curtained mind, not enough to guess whether that dark blot under the water were a rotting log or a hungry crocodile, but she did know that he knew why this Kharnath had saved Alanza’s life and he was not surprised by the reason, whatever the reason was.

At the same time, it felt like truth when he said his kind could have affection. At least, it felt like truth that he was disappointed when she said he did not.

She sensed that she could be sure, just dive in and take an unclouded look at him before he pushed her back out—if he could—but she was not wholly impervious to the memory of the hollow man’s mouth opening and closing one last time. She did nothing.

“It’s early yet. If you’ve other observations to make, perhaps you’d better return to my quarters and make them at your leisure.” Horuseps lifted one arm and swept it back in a grand invitation, smirking at her. “One may upon occasion bend the lesser of our rules, but it is a right that can be earned only with time. Formidable as you are, you may not wander at your will.”

She acknowledged this with a nod, but held up a hand to decline his offer. “Some other time. I’ll wait for the bell in my own cell.”

“Pity. We might have passed the time so pleasantly.”

“So I could be dragged across the Nave screaming that you’d seduced me?”

“It amuses me that you assume my interests are physical. Have you never heard of pleasant conversations? Besides which, fornications are only forbidden between students.”

“How unfair.”

“We are your Masters, my dear, not your equals.”

“Then order me to join you.”

His eyes flashed brilliantly white for just an instant. “Is that a challenge, little one?” he asked, his lips barely moving, frozen in his smile.

“Maybe it’s a test. Why should you have all the fun?”

“Mmm.” His fingers twitched, and his smile broadened. “Then I say goodnight. I give no orders at the whim of a student, no matter how precious she may be.”

“Goodnight then.”

He was watching as she walked away, and letting her know with what carnal delights he might otherwise have relished her company, but the rock took away the crawling of his thoughts in just a few dozen steps and then she was alone again.

Alone.

Her feet slowed, then stopped. There were no echoes, not of her footsteps, nor of lingering minds, and in that awful silence, she considered turning back. An hour or two in the company of a demon was better, infinitely better, than silence.

Mara found her way back to her cell and shut herself in. She sat on the floor and withdrew from the discomfort of the cold, flat stone to the numb oblivion of the Panic Room. She switched off the monitors, hovered in space, and watched the Mindstorm’s distant thunder and flash. It was not in Kimara Warner’s character to miss people or to wish for companionship or to feel lonely. She only knew that there was something misplaced inside of her. She switched the monitors back on and waited out the time until first-bell, wondering what was wrong.

*          *          *

At the tolling of the bell, Mara got up. It took some doing. Her limbs, stiff and bruised, were even slower to respond now than they had been in the night. Her body, unrested, felt heavy and difficult to balance. Her first experimental steps sent her clumsily up against the cell wall to rub at her feet until they felt a little less like blocks of wood.

When she finally managed to hobble out into the tunnel, it was silent. Most of the doors she passed on her long way to the ephebeum were still locked and uninhabited, but a few opened on empty rooms. She paused now and then to look in on them, unashamedly handling the sparse possessions she found and examining the adaptations these strangers had made with what magic they’d managed to pick up. Almost all of them had tried to make a softer bed, either by stacking spare robes or by scraping out a pit to fill with grainy sand. Some had even widened the interior of the cell, making quite a large space for themselves, but she saw no tool marks in the rock to indicate how. One of the cells had a ledge carved in to act as a kind of table; he or she had shaped little chess pieces and was well on the way to checking an opponent who may or may not exist. Another had drawn over damned near every inch of the walls, mostly crude cartoons wherein monstrous penises spat improbably huge puddles of semen over goliath breasts. She didn’t touch the furnishings in that room. One cell held a neat row of three skulls, one of them with hair. Another, a deeply-carved stone box. But the vast majority were as empty and featureless as her own.

Well, hers wasn’t going to stay that way. Finding Connie may take a while, especially if she was only allowed to search during certain hours. She might as well build a bed as sleep on the stone and resent it. Idle hands and all that. She was altogether too close to the Devil to be tempting him with a workshop.

There! Someone ahead of her. Two someones, arguing the principles of entropic decay in the human life-force. She couldn’t hear their words, only the drift of their thoughts, until the passage opened up and Mara stepped out into the ephebeum. The debate raged on; the two students thus engaged did not notice Mara until she came within arm’s reach of them, and when they did, they were immediately unified by expressions of scorn.

Mara hadn’t intended to speak to them. There was no need. She’d tapped at their minds as soon as she’d sensed them and already knew neither one knew Connie by name. Short of ripping through their memories day by day, looking for her face, that was all she could do. And if it came to that, she’d do it, but it was bound to be a lengthy process that would leave some scars (it may, in fact, leave pudding in place of a brain, she didn’t know) so it needed to be a last resort. Their contempt needled her, but contempt could be ignored. On the other hand, his, “Ah, the whore of the harrowing,” that needed an answer.

Mara turned around. She was cool, calm. “Excuse me?” she said, knowing what was coming.

The man she faced shrugged elaborately as his debate partner sniggered. “I understand. This place.” He glanced around. “It breeds desperation in the weak-minded. And you, a woman, it is easy for you to buy favor. It is intuitive. But tell me, does the Scrivener even have a cock?”

“I see.” Mara smiled thinly. “I must be a whore, because you can think of no other way to escape the harrowing.”

He shrugged again. His companion laughed, imagining her over the Scrivener’s desk, every orifice plugged by the monster’s loathsome, boneless body. It was making him hard.

“Of course, it is Horuseps who tests the harrowed,” Mara said. “Did I fuck him, too?”

“Him?” The man’s honest confusion curdled into deeper derision. “Master Horuseps is no ‘him’.”

They shared laughter, richly amused by this woman, this girl who sought mysteries above her station and did not know how to look at the truth of her own eyes. Mara, who had been inside the demon’s mind, and knew damned well he was male, let them laugh. She wasn’t here to educate them or to argue with them. “In any event, I’m speaking,” she said. “So it should be obvious even to you that I came through the harrowing honestly.”

“I’m sure,” the man purred, while the donkey beside him brayed anew.

Why had she ever stopped to argue with him in the first place? She might as well have painted a target on her head…or quite a stretch further south. He’d gone and found a button and now he was going to push it for all he was worth. Mara, who didn’t honestly care what he called her at the moment, strongly suspected she was going to hate the sound of his voice before too damn long at all. For now, however, she kept walking.

“Do not worry, little slut-child,” the man called after her. “You will have many chances to grease your pretty holes. I would not have the Scrivener’s leavings in any case, would you, Loki?”

The laughing jackass thought about it, in every possible position. “Never,” he said, wondering where Mara slept at night, wondering how best to follow, how many he would need to hold her down. They laughed some more, and then took up their old roles of argument again, this time in a new thread: “She won’t last out the month, will she, Le Danse?”

“You allow for an entire month? A week, I say. She’ll run out of cum to drink and die of thirst.”

The donkey laughed. “Die of thirst!”

“‘Him,’ she said. Him! Master Horuseps! How foolish a whore not to recognize the shape of her own livelihood? Perhaps her eyes were gummed shut.”

“By what, one wonders.”

“One does indeed, Loki. Why did such a foolish whore ever come to this place? Who would expect to find trade in the ephebeum so soon after first-bell?”

Mara turned around.

“She’s heard you, Danse. Beware!”

“Her ears are clean yet. You! Whore! Why are you here?”

“I was looking for the garderobe,” Mara said.

“Here?” Both laughed. Loki laughed hardest, slapping at his thighs while sneaking peeks at his friend. “Here, you silly slut?”

“Here. I followed the smell of shit.”

Donkey-boy kept laughing, but his friend stopped cold. “Use your mouth for sucking cocks,” he said. “Talk gets little girls into trouble.”

‘Be subtle,’ thought Mara, feeling out his intentions. ‘Be calm.’ “A little girl would be all you could manage. Come put me in my place.”

He wanted to. He thought he could do it. He knew the Word of Entropy, even if he hadn’t mastered it yet. He couldn’t speak it correctly each time, but he’d done it before. If he used it now, he could wither the whore’s flesh, rot her haughty face away with a touch. But if he tried and failed…as so often he failed…he would have her laughter to endure, and Loki’s like as not, and then all the school’s by first-bell tomorrow…

He chose to be magnanimous. “The garderobe lies through that passage,” he said, tossing his chin to show the way. “Through the tunnel opposite the bath. It is marked, idiot.”

The archway above the tunnel he indicated had been carved by vaguely Egyptian-looking glyphs: an inverted bowl over a double-row of wavy water lines. A crude cistern, perhaps. It served to orient her in the windowless room, at least. Mara went, letting the rock take the whispers first and the men’s thoughts second, and came quickly to a crossroads with a fairly predictable odor.

She checked, and found all four short passages leading from this point went to more or less identical rooms. In each, water emerged from several holes high along one wall and converged together in a series of channels that flowed across the full length of the floor, until it dropped down into a narrow, noisome hole, where it was presumably carried out of the mountain. Disgusting, but functional, and certainly not as bad as it could have been.

Mara probed the hall, found herself alone, then hiked her robe and urinated, splashing herself with clean water in lieu of paper, and covering quickly. She probed again; someone was coming. The surrounding rock made it difficult to read just who, but she was reasonably sure this someone was neither Le Danse or laughing-boy Loki. Hmm, to stay and pretend to be caught unawares, or confront someone who might just be coming to take a leak?

She’d been subtle enough for one day. She went out to meet the interloper.

Sallow light from a glowing blister showed her a woman in a black robe standing at the crossroads, holding what looked like a white sheet in her arms. The woman turned, and Mara saw surprise flash over a face she actually knew. It was the woman who had taken charge of her after she’d been brought into the mountain: Lynn, the black widow, or Desdemona, as she called herself here.

“So it is you!” the woman gasped.

“It’s me,” Mara agreed.

The woman stared and Mara waited her out, tapping at her mind. No one had ever come through the harrowing so swiftly or endured it so well, and things of that sort. Mara wasn’t a bit surprised. No one else had a Panic Room to work from.

“I…I’m to tell you the laws.”

“I heard them this morning.”

“You attended the tribunal?”

“I attended an execution.”

“That—” is a tribunal, Desdemona thought. She bit at her lip and carefully amended, “That is the fate of all who break the laws of the Masters. Remember that. Now. We have only a little time. Put this on—” She thrust the white sheet into Mara’s hands. “—and do it quickly.”

Mara didn’t move. “Is there a reason why I should be listening to you?”

“All neophytes are given the attentions of an experienced acolyte during their first days, to prepare and orient them. I am yours, your guide and warden.”

“I don’t think I need one.”

“I don’t care,” Desdemona snapped. “It is what my life is worth to see my duty done. Whether you need me or not, the Masters will see me at your side. Put that on and follow, or by Hell, I will drag you!”

In the end, two things decided her. The first was the very real fear hiding inside this outward show of annoyance and anger. The woman knew Mara was special, knew she was bound for great things, bound to surpass Desdemona herself, and such pets are marked from the moment they enter. She believed entirely that to allow Mara to walk alone on her first day would be viewed as abandoning her warden’s duties, and therefore insulting the Master who had so assigned her. Much as Mara did not want a shadow dogging her heels in her search for Connie, she also didn’t want to be responsible for the next tribunal.

Secondly, she was hungry.

Mara shook out the white ‘sheet’. It was a robe. A neophyte’s robe. How special. She put the new one on over the old one and smoothed it out a little. “All right,” she said. “Show me around.”

“You are too gracious,” her warden snapped.

“I really am, you know.”

*          *          *

Mara remembered Horuseps pointing out the dining room from the Nave the night before, but Desdemona didn’t take her the same way. Rather, she was led out of the ephebeum by way of one of the twisting, narrow tunnels up an extremely claustrophobic stair, down another door-lined passage, directly into the dining room itself. The noise could be heard from the stairs. Mara had never heard anything like it.

Oh, the minds were nothing. The minds were the chatter of an airport, a movie theater, anywhere that hundreds of people could gather and be social. It was an adjustment to pass from the muffled quiet of the tunnels into that roar, but not a difficult one. It was the real noise, the one she heard with her ears, drummed in her bones, that stopped Mara in the open doorway.

They’d done it deliberately. They had to have done. Where every other room and passage had been carefully shaped to reconstruct the sound-absorbing nooks and crevices of natural rock, this room had been made into an amphitheatre. The walls, so straight and smooth as to shine, slanted up to a vaulted shell of a ceiling, directing the sound not outward to an appreciative audience, but right back down upon their heads. The echoing din forced the students to shout to be heard, which in turn brought greater noise hammering down at them.

The students were arranged at five long tables, like five radiating lines drawn from the center of the room toward the horns of a crescent-shaped platform, where perhaps two or three dozen demons sat, overseeing the lot. The whole of the room had been backlit from blisters growing out of the wall behind the Master’s table, so that the demons themselves were mostly silhouettes, many with glowing eyes or glinting horns. The students’ tables, by comparison, had only a few candles for illumination, guttering madly in the wind made by all that shouting breath.

Desdemona gave her a nudge towards one of the tables, but she didn’t move yet. The Masters were watching her. She could feel their many minds prodding at hers, sniffing like starving wolves around her darkened windows, all but Horuseps. His angular, pale silhouette raised a hand and waggled the black-tipped fingers in welcome. His thoughts aligned, knowing she would be reading them, to inquire if she’d lost herself in the dorms below and what a poor guide he must have been.

**You were such a good guide, I was waiting for you,** she replied, speaking silently over the questing minds of the other demons. It was the first time she’d done such a thing—not tapping but speaking, wanting to be heard. There was something thrilling about being so brazen when all her life she’d kept this secret. **I suppose now we’ll have to pretend our meeting here was accidental and there’s nothing more between us.**

He called her a tease, lacing his long fingers together as a cradle for his chin.

**I never tease. I have no sense of humor.** She glanced at her warden, who seemed to share this deficiency, and allowed herself to be seated at a table. There were no individual plates or bowls, only communal platters from which all students fought for handfuls of bread or meat or crumbling cheese. Some of them had cups, which they filled at slopping bowls of wine, but only some. The rest dipped their naked hands and drank from them like monkeys. Mara watched them, faintly disgusted.

Horuseps silently asked if she were hungry.

**I don’t think it’s wise to eat the food in Hell,** Mara replied, watching the student across from her suck meat off what sure looked like a bird’s head before throwing it on the floor.

Horuseps assured her there were no pomegranates.

One by one, the demons retreated from her mind. Mara glanced over their physical forms, each one so different from each other, so fundamentally inhuman. She counted twenty-eight of them.

‘Oh, there are many more of us,’ Horuseps assured her when she asked. ‘These you see—’ He waved a hand gracefully at either side of him. “—are but those few who enjoy watching the animals feed.’

**A base entertainment.**

‘Needs must,’ thought Horuseps in a mocking way, ‘when the Devil demands. We have no recreations but those our little pets provide us. You should eat something.’

**You have enough entertainment in front of you.**

He gave her a thought which was at once denial, apology, and oily amusement.

The bells rang twice.

The students stood up, very nearly in unison, and the sound of their feet as they stepped away from the tables made a thunder Mara could actually feel in her bones as it rolled from wall to wall. They left in a shouting, tromping tide, grabbing last handfuls of food to carry in their sleeves, and taking away their cups. What was left on the tables was nothing but a few guttering candles and one godawful mess. Desdemona waited for her out of the press of humanity, her hands clasped whitely together and her back bent low.

‘One cannot help but observe that you’ll make little progress in your quest if you starve yourself to death,’ Horuseps told her, still without speaking aloud, although now he certainly could. ‘Nevertheless, that is your decision. Will you be joining me in class?’

**No.**

“Move!” hissed her warden. “It is not permitted to stay in the dining hall after the bell has rung, you cow! Go!”

‘However will you make your search if you have no Sight?’ wondered Horuseps, his gaze wandering to the woman behind her.

“Do not even dare to think of keeping her for yourself,” said Zyera, the coral-bodied demoness of that morning.

“She’s useless to you, dear sister,” Horuseps murmured, smiling.

“As useless as to you, and yet there is still fun to be had by her. Shall you hoard it?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

One of the unknown silhouettes suddenly stabbed what looked like twin swords into the table, using them to rock his small, thick body up onto his own empty platter. He (it was a he; no physical proof could be made out in this light, but even if Mara could not sense the masculinity in his mind, there was only a male strength and power in his stalking movements) pulled the swords and folded them against his body, walking forward on his knuckles like an ape—an ape in his prime and confidant of his authority—across the table, to leap down in front of it, and also into a puddle of light, so that he was suddenly and, she was certain, deliberately revealed.

He might have been taller than her, if he stood upright, but hunched as he was, his eyes were on a level with hers as she sat. The hunch was no affectation. Oh, his back was straight, his torso long and powerful, but his muscular legs were bent back in the way of an animal, so that he walked upon the toepads of his thick feet. And it wasn’t his knuckles he balanced by after all, she saw, or at least, not many knuckles. He had only the one finger at the end of each muscular arm, and the swords now comfortably curving back against his ribs were the two lengthy claws that tipped them.

Now he settled forward, sinking slightly upon his bent arms so that he stared up at Mara in a particularly brooding fashion, his shoulders rolling like a cat stalking squirrels. He had no body hair of any kind, but a number of fleshy rope-like tendrils grew from his head a little longer than his shoulders. They slid over his skin with snakish hissing sounds at his every movement, and as he studied her, their blunt tips gradually darkened to a deep, bloody red.

“What are you called?” this creature demanded. His voice was hoarse and the words thickly-made. He wasn’t used to talking, which was strange, because he wasn’t much of a telepath either.

“Mara,” she said, flicking a subtle question at her warden. Master Malavan, was the answer.

“It is my command, Mara,” this demon, this Malavan, said next, showing his teeth to his fellow Masters in a grin, “that you attend my lesson.”

“Cheat,” Zyera sniffed. She was the only one who spoke, but every mind that Mara could read had some derisive sting about it. Malavan thought he was doing something clever, that he was taking the first turn with the toy everyone wanted, but no one had any envy for him, only a cold and smirking contempt.

“I’ll go,” said Mara, studying the other demons at the table. “But I thought students were free to choose their arts.”

“Hereafter.” Master Malavan shrugged. “Should not your first be given special attention?”

“That’s why I have a warden, isn’t it?”

Malavan’s gaze shifted to the woman bowing low beside her. His expression puckered, meanly thwarted. He thought. Then he swung his arm. He did it fast, so fast Mara wasn’t even sure she’d seen it all. It seemed to her just that he’d rocked back and crooked his terrible claw in toward his body, only now it was dripping.

Desdemona let out a gurgling, soundless shriek, bleating fear and disbelief and finally pain all over Mara’s brain. Mara turned around into a spray of hot blood and saw a gaping red chasm open over the woman’s face, splitting her nose and opening her mouth into a four-petaled orchid.

“She’s sick,” Malavan said, dropping diffidently onto his knuckles. Some of the Masters at the table laughed.

It was a fight not to show the shock she felt, but Mara managed. She wiped her face on her sleeve, smearing red across that crisp, new white fabric, and projected only irritation, irritation and calm. “That was unnecessary. I said I’d go.”

“Now your reservations are at rest. Come.” He stalked ahead of her, but paused to glare at the woman until she, still screaming, forced her hands together and bowed for him. Then he continued out into the Nave, putting her utterly from his mind.

Mara followed, watching students stare at her as she and the demon moved among them. They resented her for the preferential treatment, but oddly, they weren’t envious of it. A Master’s moods were volatile, and when interest faded, suffering began. For some of the Masters, the rewards were worth the risk, but this was Malavan. “What do you teach?” she asked.

“What do you wish to learn?”

“I didn’t come here to learn anything.”

“So I hear.” He took her out through a tunnel and down a well-lit stair, not one she knew. It wound around and around and suddenly came out again, not in the lyceum, but on the catwalk above the Great Library. Malavan moved on without stopping, but Mara simply had to go to the balcony and look down.

Even at this height, the Scrivener was not lessened and his place in the library drew the eye. He was his own well of gravity, sucking in the light and vitality of the room’s inhabitants as much as sight. Funny. She could not see the Hell of the harrowing, but it was there, just four long flights of stairs below her. All the knowledge of the universe was there, curdled into madness, but she couldn’t see it, not with her eyes, not even in the Mindstorm.

Master Malavan waited for her at the passageway that led to the theaters above. Patience was not natural to him, but he was content for now to watch her and guess at what she must have endured. Listening to the things he imagined was worse than what she had to remember. Mara left the Scrivener to his initiates and ascended to the lyceum.

Students swarmed in the great cavern, a mass of white and black blobs moving down tunnels and through doorways. They bowed if they saw Malavan, but most had their hoods up to keep the dripping ceiling off, and Malavan was not so noticeable a demon as coral-edged Zyera or glowing Horuseps. He didn’t seem to mind. His thoughts, armored in strangeness, seemed fixed on a single point and she thought it had something to do with her.

“You never said what you taught,” she remarked, extending a piece of her mind like a needle to circle the armored dark that was his.

“Growth.”

“Good for gardening, I suppose.” She thought loudly of what possible use turning saplings into trees might be, and while he focused clumsily on that, she slid that needle in, quietly, painlessly probing.

Malavan grunted and glanced at her, unaware of her infiltration. “It is the art of all life force. I think you are the first even to think of trees and fruit and growing things. Most consider my art solely a means of preserving youth or the vitality of one’s seed.”

“Invigorating my seed never occurred to me,” said Mara, probing deeper. No, he was no telepath, but his mind remained irritatingly dark all the same. When she’d been younger, Mara had spent a number of afternoons dragging her au pair to the zoo because she’d heard that chimpanzees were intelligent and wanted to know what they thought, and those experiences were very much like this one: Malavan was intelligent, as the apes had been in their way, but his mind was just too strange. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t even…whatever Horuseps was. She could probably learn to read him in time, as she could have learned to read the chimps, but that wasn’t why she was here.

Besides, she got the broad strokes. She could sense the currents of his thoughts, his basest emotions and how they changed when he thought of her. Now, for example, she could feel his crawl of crude amusement as he looked at her feet, at her toes in specific, and how they winked in and out of sight under her robe. Why in God’s name he should be hung up on that she couldn’t begin to fathom and was afraid to examine too closely, lest she give herself away. If the price of disobeying a Master was death, she could only imagine the penalty for trespassing in his head. “Eternal youth must appeal to a lot of people, though,” she said, withdrawing.

“Studies require lifetimes. Man is mortal.” Malavan glanced at her, so suddenly that she thought at first he’d felt her retracting her needle, but no, he was grinning. “Do you not wish to live forever?”

“That sounds pretty awful, actually.”

He faced forward, grunting to himself again, or maybe laughing, it was hard to tell.

“You’d outlive everyone you cared about,” Mara said. Without meaning to, she thought of Connie, an old woman, and herself, still young. It made her feel something. She wasn’t sure what.

“Life requires few things to sustain it. Love is not among them.”

“Neither is magic.”

Malavan hissed laughter out his teeth. “A point,” he said, and stopped before an open theater door to rise up on the points of his claws, almost but not quite on level with her eyes. He smiled, or tried to smile. “Study with me. I can give you a thousand years of power if you will stay with me, stand at my side, and call me…Master.”

“I’ll consider it.”

His eyes narrowed. He dropped back onto his knuckles. “You’re lying.”

“I do that a lot.” Mara moved into the circular room and down the descending rings to find an empty place in the second row. Even with forty-three other students sharing this space and forty-three other minds clamoring in her head, the round benches were mostly vacant.

Far from projecting an appearance of size and strength, this persistent theme of oversized and empty rooms only served to instill Mara with a sense of vacuum, of some unhealthy place being slowly eaten away from the inside. The air of isolation and desperation infesting the students only made the analogy that much stronger. Everyone knew that something was preying on them, but as long as the predators fed them, no one seemed to care.

Lambs among wolves, thought Mara. Lambs suckling of wolves. And if one or two got snapped up by their mothers, oh well, said the rest of them, it made the milk that much more abundant.

Malavan descended to the dais, drawing silence like a curtain across the rings of students who gathered to hear his lesson. He swung lithely up beyond the lectern, reared, and jabbed his two long claws deep into the podium’s face, so that he might lean on them upright. He’d dug out two grooves of prodigious depth, proof of this comfortable habit of long age’s making. His eyes raked across them, everyone counted, even those sitting behind him in shadows, and when his eyes fell on Mara, he grinned.

“All things that live,” he said, staring up at her, “bleed energy. It is the spark of all magic, the soul of creation, the very breath of Life. This is the art of Growth, to breathe in what God breathes out.”

Mara settled in, bracing herself for a long stretch of boredom.

“Death,” said Malavan. “Death is only ignorance. You are mortal—” His eyes burned into Mara’s. “—because you expect to be. Yet within your body, the countless fibres of flesh make and remake themselves, immune to decay, until ignorance and weakness of will corrupt them. The years, like beetles, burrow in. You soften. You wither. You collapse.”

Amazing how many people responded to those words with real fear. Mara propped one foot up on the riser in front of her and wiggled her toes, trying to distract her teacher. It worked. That was pretty amazing, too.

“Mortality is an unnecessary limitation,” said the demon, staring raptly at her foot. “Yet mortality is not the only enemy a student of Growth conquers.”

Was it sexual? It didn’t feel sexual. She couldn’t read him any better now than she had before, but sex things had a way of rising to the surface of any mind. This fascination was more what one would expect of a man in a museum, as if toes were art.

“I am reminded,” Malavan said, pulling his claws to drop comfortably onto his knuckles, “that human vanity is not the purpose of my art. Flesh is not the sum and substance of all power. Heed.” He walked to one edge of the dais, deftly stabbed the tip of his claw through a wooden box on one of his shelves, and brought it to the lectern. A few casual slices dissected the box handily and he brought out what looked for all the world like a shriveled testicle or a—

A walnut.

And as Mara watched, trying to puzzle out just why a demon would keep a single walnut in a carved wooden box with a lock on it, the demon spoke. Just once, one syllable of horrible sound that scraped out of his hoarse throat and twisted its way into Mara’s ears. A short word, almost a bark coming from him, and as Mara recoiled from the hearing of it, the nut cracked open and sent up a spindly, pale shoot.

“Every instructor you meet within this mountain will tell you his is the greatest art,” Malavan murmured, seemingly fixated by the slow thickening and straightening of that slim, stretching stalk. “And each is, in its own limited way, truly great. Do not be deceived. Fiery shapes and monstrous transformation may impress the eye, but this…this is life itself.”

Roots spilled over the sides of the lectern and dug in, boring into the stone as effectively as the demon’s claws. The stalk forked as it grew, darkened with bark, forked again. The podium creaked under its growing weight, snapped out a few shards, then let go with a crash. Students bolted back as the tree rooted itself to the dais and stabbed upwards, its branches beating at the walls, gouging grit from the high ceiling.

“Life is always at its most terrible when it is young, when it is beautiful,” Malavan continued, walking along the raised platform’s edge, his head tipped on side to watch his creation’s growth. “This is why you all seek it, even when you do not understand its consequence. Life, growth…these are merely words to mean potential, and what is potential but unresolved ambition?”

The tree’s thousand branches suddenly erupted in size, pushing out a hissing, furious cloud of new leaves. The green stink of it permeated the air. Waves of nausea echoing out from the students turned Mara’s own stomach.

“It is will that makes for greatness,” said the demon as branches groaned and spread, bowed by the weight of budding walnuts. “Life itself can become death in the hands of one who has the power, and the will, to command it.”

The nuts began to drop, one by one, and then in a clattering, deafening hail. It lasted only a few seconds, and when it ended, the leaves buckled over, bleeding red and brown, and dropped on top of them.

“It is not the word, but the speaker,” Malavan said. He twitched a claw and putted one of the nuts up in a high arc to land smack in the open box at his feet. He bound it together again with the same unreal agility he’d used to take it apart, saying, “Too many of you desire forever with no idea how to fill those endless years. But life can be deadly when it stagnates. Potential, undirected, rapidly decays. Ambition, without strength of will, cannibalizes itself. And magic, in the hands of the ignorant, becomes very dangerous.”

That didn’t sound good. Mara got up calmly and started back up the risers, away from the giant, rapidly-decaying, magic walnut tree.

The sound of dead wood cracking carried exceptionally well in the classroom. Some of the students shifted uneasily in their seats, particularly when Mara passed by, but no one followed her example. It was a test, they were thinking. A test of their resolve. And those who ran (Mara resented the notion that she was running) did nothing but prove themselves unfit before their Master.

Malavan heaved a sigh, heard even above the ominous death-knells of the tree. “Have I no student of quality before me? Have I, after all, only dogs fawning at my knees?”

“And bitches who run,” someone muttered—Le Danse, from the ephebeum. “I suppose it was the wrong kind of growth to hold your interest, eh?”

His henchman laughed obediently.

“If I were you, I would worry less about insulting me and more about how to avoid being killed by an exploding tree,” Mara remarked, still climbing risers, nearly to the door.

Now Danse laughed too, somewhat hesitantly. “Idiot.”

The sound of Malavan’s bone claws cracking down over the podium silenced him, silenced everyone. “You’ve ruined my surprise!” he snarled. “Now you share their punishment!”

The double doors before her swung inward and slammed, trapping her inside. Mara stared for a second, then caught the carved handles and pushed, but might as well have been pushing at the wall.

The tree began to splinter, bulging outward as with terrible pressure, sending shrapnel of bark whipping through the air, some of them hard enough to chip the walls where they struck. The first threads of panic stabbed up through the Mindstorm. Students stared at each other, stunned, and Malavan crouched down at the edge of his dais and grinned at them.

“Is there not one of you, not one, who can seize hold of the power I’ve put before you? Come, you dogs, the threat and the solution are one! You, Silvana? You, Mercutare? Revanche, will you not come and earn the favor I have so lavishly given you? Where is my pretty Adamantine’s will today? Do you think that I will save you? Do you think I will have you back if you survive disgrace?”

The tree groaned.

“For God’s sake,” Mara snapped, tugging futilely at the immoveable doors. “Someone pick up a walnut and grow another tree!”

Students gaped at her in stupefied silence. The dead tree cracked, firing shards of itself ominously out in a wide fan that seemed, to Mara’s distracted eye, capable of reaching every corner, every riser, every unprotected point of this killing room.

“Quickly,” Malavan murmured, tapping his toe-claws comfortably on the dais. “Else I have none to hear lessons tomorrow.”

His voice broke them into a surge of motion as students dove for walnuts. Bare feet slipped on shells, heads conked together, but there was no comedy in the moment. Then, the shouting: the same word over and over, howling from mouth to mouth. It couldn’t have taken very long—the tree didn’t have very long in it—before the first green shoot went spiraling up the splintering trunk, quickly followed by another, then another. They grew at differing speeds, none of them so rapidly or well as Malavan’s.

“Wrap it tightly,” the demon called out as the dead trunk sent out another shower of bark shards so sharp and dry, they might as well be stone. “Contain the whole or suffer the lack, as my sire would say. You see, Mercutare, you had it in you all along. Ah! Ah! Here is the test!”

The tree burst. The trunk, by now netted in by saplings, merely bulged once and collapsed in on itself, but the higher branches exploded outward in a shower of spears. Mara, high on the tenth riser and forewarned by Malavan’s cruel glee, hit the floor with her hands over her head, fending off a heavy fall of petrified rain. Jagged flares of pain wracked the Mindstorm, but she didn’t think anyone was killed. It would have been easy to miss one death among the chaos of so many, but Master Malavan’s disappointment was difficult to misinterpret.

“So,” he said, moving easily through the debris to inspect the new trees. “Of you all, only…five with the skill to act, and none at all with the wit to recognize danger.”

“I resent that remark,” Mara grumbled, gaining her feet with a wince. Her brand-new white robe was now the nice splotchy color of an unwashed floor. Slapping at the dust only ground it in worse. Lovely.

“You resent…” The demon eyed her, his head low and small eyes shimmering from the shadows of his face. “You have made it clear you are not one of mine. You are like all the rest of them. Even as you are, powerless, you would set yourself above me.”

He hated her.

Mara felt at what she could feel of him, baffled. She had been hated before and it didn’t bother her, but Malavan hardly knew her. His hatred was as black as cancer in the Mindstorm, but it seemed to have more to do with the demons in the dining hall than with anything she had said or done. “You are the Master here,” she said carefully, sliding one foot out from beneath the hem of her robe. “I’m just a student.”

“Just! Ha!” But he was mollified, some. He hunkered low, shifting his weight from his claws to his knuckles as he glowered at her, and finally tried to smile again. “Mine is a valuable art. You would do well to remain, though I know you will not. Perhaps it is for the best. My students must earn their successes.” His eyes wandered to a bleeding, crouching student in the first riser, a broad-faced girl with a half-sprouted walnut clutched in each white-knuckled hand. “Such as they are.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“As you wish.” The theater doors opened at his distracted nod. All his attention remained fixed on the dazed student before him, at her feet, bare beneath her hiked-up robe. His thoughts colored with the first stains of his strange, black desire. “Yet return whenever you will. My door is always open. Almost always. Akiri, is it? Akiri…come here.”

Mara left. A few cowled heads turned as she passed by, but not many and no one at all moved to follow her. As exciting as the morning lesson had been, it was over now and class was still in session. Students who had managed to grow the life-saving trees wanted to stay and bask a little while in their own adrenaline and the envy of those who hadn’t. Students who had failed now shuffled back to their seats, newly determined to learn from their failures and so be one of the privileged few when the next test came around. If they thought anything at all of her leaving, it was only the peevish pleasure of seeing someone else slink away from what they themselves resolutely faced. No one, not even hate-mongering La Danse and his little laughing henchman, even bothered to catcall her.

*          *          *

Empty tunnels opened on a silent cavern. Mara stood awhile, feeling out in futility for some sign of life in the lyceum. The Mindstorm belied the quiet. Through the overcast haze of its cover came the muted shrieks and flashes of surrounding thought, but all of it proved untouchable. It was a new experience for her to be so blind to others, and she didn’t like it.

Light flickered deep in another passageway, away from the hive-like central room. Mara moved toward it instinctively, then caught herself. This had to be the first time in her life she’d ever voluntarily sought out the company of another person, or at least, the first since Connie. She couldn’t conceive of being lonely after so many years of avoiding other people, and so she told herself that she was here to ask questions, and walked a little faster.

She saw no one. The hall coiled out in front of her, dark and empty. The light was only one of those glowing blisters just on the corner where the tunnel curved away. The flickering, nothing more than shadows moving over its surface. Or under it.

Mara moved closer, staring into the core of the thing where the bulge was deepest. The shadows, when they moved at all, did almost seem to be cast from within. Nor did they seem to be exactly random, come to think of it.

Not without a due sense of trepidation, Mara reached out her hand. Nothing stopped her. Nothing would, in this place.

Her fingertips brushed over something repulsive—leathery and hard, faintly warm, something with just a little give to it. ‘Like a mummy,’ she thought, and was annoyed with herself for putting the image in her own mind. She kept her hand on the light to punish herself, daring it to come to life, to slap some monstrous hand up against the other side of the blister’s surface and grope for hers.

Nothing happened. The shadows moved, but without intelligence. Nevertheless, the longer Mara stood with her palm flat over the bulbous light, the more certain she became that it was skin, not tanned to leather, but calcified and gone to rot. That it was alive, in the same idiot manner as the doors of the Oubliette, and worse, that it was aware of her in some vague and helpless way. Even if it couldn’t touch her in return, some part of it was twisting torpidly around to look at her, perhaps to warn her, and some part of it was screaming.

‘I’m giving myself the heebie-jeebies,’ Mara thought, and scowled. Of all the things she’d seen in this mountain, that she picked the light fixtures to go all girly and squeamish over genuinely embarrassed her, but embarrassment did not remove the conviction that the lights were horribly, horribly wrong.

Determinedly, Mara kept her hand where it was, and through that contact, she opened her mind.

“What are you doing?”

Mara snatched her hand back fast—fast enough to disguise her gasping flinch, she hoped—and spun around. She’d been so fixed on the lamp, she’d been blind to anyone else and now there was a man in the hall with her, a tall man with his hood back so that she could see his earnest, acne-scarred face and his squinting, heavy-browed eyes. His hair was a thatchy mess of no particular color, in that awkward stage of growing-out that was not quite long enough to reach his shoulders but to long too lie flat against his head. He did not grow a beard well, but neither had he figured out how to shave. The overall effect was that of a hornless, excitable young goat.

Since he didn’t get an answer out of her, the man walked up to the light (moving in that bent-knee, bobbing way of some self-consciously tall men and all ostriches), and touched it himself. His manner was first wary, then perplexed. “What am I doing?” he asked.

“Acting like an idiot.”

He withdrew his hand, looking wounded. “I’m just doing what you did.”

“I knew what I was doing.” She hated being caught by surprise, and knowing that she’d exposed herself didn’t make it any easier to bear. Mara started walking deeper into the hall, hoping he would take the hint and leave her alone. Instead, not surprisingly, he came after her.

“How come when you do it—”

“What are you, twelve?” she snapped. “Get away from me.”

He did stop, but only for a few seconds. Then he ran to catch up with her. He’d made sandals for himself somehow, but he’d made them too big and the flapping sound as he hurried over the stone floor was like a physical blow to her ears after all the quiet.

She tried a different tactic. “Why are you following me?”

He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. “People say you’re somebody to know. They say Master Horuseps took you through the halls after your harrowing.” He squinted at her, but she gave him nothing to read. As if this were encouragement, he pressed on with greater enthusiasm. “They say you were only in the Oubliette, like, an hour.”

She shrugged that away. It hadn’t felt like an hour in the Oubliette, but then, perfect blackness came with a time all its own. “How long were you there?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked away again, watching the featureless walls roll by. “A few days, at least.”

Longer than that, Mara decided, tapping at his mind. A week, maybe two. There had been a pool in his Oubliette. Towards the end, something had crawled out of it.

“A few days,” Mara echoed, listening to the sound of trickling water and his own ragged breathing as it faded into the here and now. “Does that make you someone I should know?”

He stopped again, longer this time, but again squared himself up and came after her. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Mara.”

“See, you shouldn’t tell people that. Names are sacred, and you can use them to do magic on people once you know how. Did you ever read, um, A Wizard of Earthsea? Or—”

“What’s yours?”

“Huh? Oh. Astregon,” he said proudly.

Mara shot him a withering glance. “I didn’t ask for the name of your main on World of fucking Warcraft, I asked for yours.”

He hunched in on himself and stayed that way, even if he did keep walking. “Devlin,” he mumbled.

She gave him a tap. It was. “That’s ironic, in a way.”

“I know,” he said glumly.

They walked. The corridor looped back around and into the lyceum. Mara, with no particular agenda, chose another to explore. Devlin stayed with her.

“Who are you looking for?” he asked finally. “I know where all the Masters teach. I could show you around.”

“I’m just getting my bearings.”

“Oh. Yeah. This place.” Devlin tipped his head back and gave the rock formations above them a brooding sigh. “You never know how essential windows are to finding your way around until you don’t have any. I was lost once for four days. Days! I could hear the bells ringing, but I couldn’t get to them. I don’t even know where the ringing comes from, you know? Because nothing else carries very far in these tunnels, that’s for sure. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen the bells, come to think of it. Much as I’d like to believe they’ve got speakers hidden in the corners here—like at the zoo, you know?—it’s probably resonating through the rock through some—”

“Why are you still talking to me?” Mara demanded.

He hunched again, just like a turtle tucking into his shell. “Just making conversation,” he mumbled.

“No, you’re chewing my damn ear off. Go away.”

He dropped back half a step. That was all.

They walked, returned to the lyceum, chose another tunnel.

“Can I ask you a question?” Devlin called.

“Can I stop you?”

“Why did you come here?”

She glanced back at him. “Why did you?”

“Oh, you know. The whole millennium thing.” He shrugged one shoulder, looking at his feet. “You know how all the computers were going to reset because of how they weren’t going to know 2000 from 1900 and it was going to destroy the world’s economy and all that? I thought…you know…be a great time to hide out for a while. Guys like me don’t do so well in post-apocalypse movies.” He peeked up at her, his mouth twisted into a crookedly rueful smile. “It was one of those ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’ things. And I was pretty spaced back then, to tell you the truth. I don’t know. I mean, the most I could have lost out there was a few hundred bucks and I spent it all getting here anyway.”

They walked past the open door of a theater and Mara looked in, as she had been doing through every door they passed. She saw, as usual, a few dozen robed backs sparsely scattered over the risers and a demon at the very bottom, watching them work. The demon was a stranger to her, all feminine curves, gleaming bronze skin, and tiny tooth-like quills rippling all over her body, short and sharp over her belly, long and graceful down her back. The demon raised her eyes to meet Mara’s. ‘Tasty,’ drifted to her over the waves of studying minds, but Mara didn’t explore whether it was Devlin the demoness fancied or Mara herself. She moved on.

“That was Master Letha,” Devlin supplied. “She teaches Allure. Just about everyone wants to learn that. It’s, you know, sexy.”

Mara ignored him, found another tunnel, kept walking.

“So what did happen?” Devlin asked, after the silence apparently tore away his nerves. “Out there, I mean. What happened with the millennium?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Nothing. A couple minor PC glitches, I think. Nothing huge. Nothing that hit the banks anyway.”

“Oh.”

“Just ‘oh’?” Mara prodded, trying for a teasing tone. She reminded herself that she’d been restless just a few minutes ago, enough to feel up the light fixtures. “You sound disappointed.”

“I traded my life in,” Devlin said bluntly. “No, I didn’t exactly hope that civilization would collapse, but Jesus, yeah, something would have been nice. Something to justify…I mean…this.”

They passed a few more doors. She recognized one, paused to look in. Horuseps was on his dais, gesturing to what looked like an large terrarium half-filled with sand. A nervous-looking student was on his knees before it, exposing one scrawny arm preparatory to reaching reluctantly inside. Every watching student leaned raptly forward. No one noticed her at all.

“How did you hear about this place?” Devlin whispered. He hung further back in the corridor, as if afraid to be seen loitering out of class. “You look awfully, you know, young.”

“No younger than most of this crowd.”

“Yeah, but they’re faking it.” Devlin shrugged. “I told you Allure was popular. Also, you can use the art of Growth to kind of reverse aging if you know how, and just about everyone wants to learn how because otherwise, you don’t have enough time to study what you want to know before, you know…you die.” He shifted on his feet, scratched at his arm through the robe. “I tried,” he said, with a self-depreciating little laugh. “But I could never get the hang of it and, you know…it’s been ten years, I guess, because Master Malavan kicked me out. Well, he didn’t actually kick me. Have you seen Master Malavan?”

“Be quiet for a sec, would you?”

Horuseps glanced up, smiling to let her know he was not just noticing her arrival, then returned his attention to the student now easing his arm into the sand. The expression on the man’s face as he felt around inside the tank was puckered and queasy, but gave Mara no real clue as to what was happening. She tapped at a few students; they didn’t know either. She sent out a silent inquiry for the demon to read.

‘Come down then,’ he replied in kind. ‘I am at your service always.’

The touch of his mind killed whatever curiosity she had with the sure knowledge that, no matter what horrible secret lay buried under the sand, it wasn’t likely to end well for the poor sap feeling around there. Mara moved off down the hall and Devlin followed her. They’d taken about ten steps, far enough that she could no longer get a grip on any of the minds in the demon’s theater, when she heard the scream.

“I heard about it from a friend,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “How about you?”

“Sort of the same, only he wasn’t a friend. More of a mentor. A guru. Kind of an idiot, honestly. I used to get peyote from him. Have you ever tried that stuff? I didn’t like it too much. Made me see cactuses everywhere. It fucked with me. Anyway, he was the guy who first told me about the Scholomance, but he thought it was around Hermanshadt, near Lake Beleal. For all I know, he’s still looking there.” Devlin’s wide, triumphant smile faded as they came out into the lyceum again. He looked up, down, and hunched in on himself. “You never did say why you came here.”

“To find someone.”

He was quiet for a bit, still morosely fixated on peyote and the Y2K-bug and Lake Beleal, but all at once started and said, “What, you mean a student?” in tones of sharp amazement.

And what the hell, he was here, she might as well make some use of him. “She’d be a recent arrival,” Mara said. “A little taller than me, willowy. Dark hair, real curly. Dark eyes. Kind of nervous.” She did not give Connie’s name.

Devlin’s expression melted to one of bewilderment. “A girl?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Yeah, actually, I…You know we don’t get many girls…But it wasn’t last year I saw her, it was the year before.”

Mara stopped walking and turned around to face him.

He backed up at once. “Kinda swarthy,” he rattled off, as if hoping to appease her with proof of the sighting. “Very Italian-looking. She said her name was Faith, but, you know, names here…” He shrugged.

Constance. Faith. Mara drove a needle into his mind, chasing Faith to the memories that resonated, and saw her.

She sat on a bench by the fountain in the lyceum, separated from Devlin’s casual glance by crowds of black and white robes. Her hood was back. She’d cut her hair, badly. Her face was pale and her eyes too dark. She looked like she might be crying, but even at this distance, even without Devlin’s interest, it was impossible not to recognize her. It was Connie. Her Connie.

“Take me to her,” Mara said.

Devlin blinked.

“Right now.”

“Gosh, I haven’t seen her in…I mean, I never really knew her well enough to talk to her or anything and…she just…”

“Wasn’t someone people needed to know,” Mara said sourly.

Devlin shrugged again, avoiding her eyes as he scratched at his robe. “There’s two kinds of people who come here. Her and me, we’re the same kind, you know? It’s not a good idea to hang out together.” He looked at her, saw her flat and undisguised dislike, and turtled up a little. “In Africa, you know, you see the gazelles all grouping up in herds to keep the lions away, right? Around here, lots of gazelles just bring on lots of lions. You don’t…I’m sorry, but you don’t know what it’s like here…how it gets…when there’s nothing else for them to do but…eat you.”

Mara turned around and started walking.

This time, when he tried to fall into step behind her, Mara put out an arm and shoved him back. “I’m here for her, not you,” she said into his hurt, hunched face. “Go find another lion to suck up to.”

He let her go a few steps, then lunged for her and grabbed her arm. She sensed it coming and let it happen only because his desperation so completely precluded his doing any harm, but he flinched just as though she’d come around fighting all the same. “If I help you find her,” he whispered, already cringing back from her hot eyes, “will you take me with you?”

“No,” she said, and scraped him off her side with a shove and a mindslap. “You don’t know anything more than I do. You’re useless to me. And I am not Moses leading people to the Promised Land.”

He finally stayed back as she walked away, and she got the feeling he’d be crying pretty soon, but some perverse vindictiveness made her kick him when he was already down and soundly beaten. “Remember this the next time you see some scared new kid sidling up to you in the hall, Astregon,” she called. “Even a gazelle is better than nothing.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The lyceum was bigger than it looked, and it looked pretty big. Its tunnels crawled like roots through the mountain, senselessly forking and intersecting, sometimes climbing up and sometimes steeply dropping down, but always they led back to the main room and another passage. Mara climbed the spiraling stair around the lyceum’s outer wall all day, taking each open doorway as she came to it. She didn’t try to orient herself, or commit even a small part of the labyrinth to memory. She wasn’t going to be here long enough to need to know where all the Masters made their homes. Mara walked, her mind flying out ahead of her to tap at every living thing she encountered, searching only for Connie.

As the day wore on, more and more students emerged from their classrooms to sit in the central cavern or cluster around the lamps. As Horuseps had remarked, the matter under study had a way of repelling those who tried hardest to master it. The people she touched upon were worn, exhausted things that looked back at her with the murderous hostility bred by only the blackest frustration. She did not avoid them, but neither did she ignore them. Five times she was followed into the dark, empty forks of the furthest tunnels, and five times she was forced to turn around and deal with the wolf who tried to prey on her there. A good mindslap and the hard stone floor were more than a match for even the worst of men, and Mara moved on.

The lyceum ceiling opened over the stairs higher up, so that it might seem to those below that it circled around and met the rock, when in fact it merely passed out of sight. Probably to the belfry, Mara decided, but she went on ahead to look, feeling her way with one hand on the wall as she left the light behind her.

It was much slower going in the darkness. The stairs came to an end after a while and then the walls moved away, so that she found herself in a fairly wide tunnel. At one point, her trailing fingers brushed up against the solid, unpleasant lump of a blister-lamp. She started to feel for a switch, but gave up quickly. There were no switches in the Scholomance. **Light,** she thought at it, hammered at it really.

The lamp responded by leaking a weak, yellowed glow. Mara paused there, holding her palm over the repellent lamp to strengthen its power (which it seemed her touch did do), to let her eyes adjust. She looked back, although she knew she was alone here, and saw first the telltale bulge of another lamp on the opposite wall well in the distance, and another ahead of her. She saw benches pulled out from the stone, narrow enough to have passed beneath her outstretched arm without her scraping against them, and alcoves cut into the overhanging stone to allow for grotesque and fantastic carvings.

Mara left the lamp guttering behind her and went to light the next one, moving from one wall to another and examining all she passed. The walls were smoother here. She’d known that in a peripheral way as she walked beside them, but seeing their smoothness was another matter. A thick ribbon of carvings ran along them, about hip-height, just a tangle of ornate knots that seemed to her uneducated eye vaguely Celtic. The floor beneath her bare feet, also smoothed, and richly carved where they met the walls. Here and there were splotches of ancient wax, proof that there had been candles long before the lamps.

The ceiling gradually arched and the hall widened. The carvings became more elaborate and less abstract. Knots turned to flames, then to writhing bodies, and then whole cities of wild and wanton dancers who bathed in showers of fire and who executed mad orgies on beds of bone. Soon the carvings ate up all the stone surrounding her and still the passage went on, painfully straight and level, until suddenly, it stopped.

There was a door here. At the very end of the hall, flanked by carved pillars and dully-glowing blisters, a door. Similar in many ways to every other door in the lyceum, she supposed, but much larger. Like all the theater doors, its face had been carved in relief to show a demon triumphant over a cluster of writhing, pleading supplicants, yet the supplicants in this case were not naked humans, but demons themselves, of many different kinds. She was pretty sure she recognized the tree-like Zyera among them, and she thought the angular one huddled near the bottom and clawing at his own back might be Horuseps, but for the most part, they were so grotesquely intertwined, she couldn’t make out individuals. All of this held a certain fascination for her but of course, what interested her the most was that the doors were closed at all. The backswept horns of one upturned face made clear handles, but when Mara gave them a cursory tug, they didn’t budge.

Mara put her ear to the door and heard, naturally, her own pulse echoing back from unmoved stone to her own ear. She rubbed her palms briskly on her robe, braced her feet, and gave the horns as powerful a pull as she could manage.

Futility.

Mara spent a few fruitless minutes searching without expectation for some secret latch or button hidden among the carvings. When she came up empty, as she’d rather thought she would, she found a place on the carved wall where she could lean and brood over the matter.

How likely was it really that this door led anywhere important? Her sense of spatial relationships were badly askew underground, but she knew she was higher than the portcullis where she and the other applicants had been brought in, much higher than the Oubliette, and she thought she was higher than even the Black Door and whatever lay beyond it.

The wall was not as flat as it needed to be. Stone elbows and gyrating hips shoved painfully into her back and kept her neck bent at an awkward angle. When she straightened up, light from the glowing blisters fell across the demon’s mouth, making him seem to sneer at her for giving up. Her own lips twitched sullenly back at it; she stayed.

So there were no mechanical switches…this meant the likelihood of a mechanical lock was also low. There had to be another way in.

On impulse, Mara touched it. Not the handle this time, but the door itself. Her hand traveled up over writhing knots of pleading demons to the Master who stood over them all. She wondered if it was meant to represent whoever was on the other side, the way the other theater doors acted as portraits for those who taught within. If so, this one cut an impressive figure.

It was a man’s shape, essentially. Heavily-built and wrapped in muscles well beyond most male proportions, he posed atop his writhing fellows with one clawed foot digging at someone’s spine, his arms slightly outspread to further emphasize his sheer size and strength, staring straight out and down at her. He had hair and he wore it in a high knot and a long fall that was, like the carvings around him, almost Asian and almost Aztec, but somehow neither one. A short ridge of blunt horns grew in symmetry along his hairline—the smallest perhaps thumb-sized directly over his eyes, growing progressively larger as they wrapped around his head, so that the ones sprouting above his pointed ears swept up and out like daggers. More of these bony nubs grew along his jaw, they outlined his thick neck, jutted from his wrists, ribs, thighs and biceps. The jagged points of larger spikes thrust themselves out from his shoulders, his back, even his hips. He wore some kind of layered skirt or complicated loincloth, baring his powerful body in defiance of any vulnerability, and the belt that cinched it all together was as sharply studded with points as he was. His eyes were deep-set, his mouth somewhat snouted. She couldn’t tell if he were snarling or just grinning, but the effect was not a cheering one, whichever. Like a fun-house portrait, the demon’s gaze had a way of following her as she paced restlessly before it. She couldn’t say there was any malevolence in his expression, but it was disquieting to stand before it and feel, however foolishly, that she was being seen and sneered at.

That notion, illogical as it was, suddenly put her in mind of the Oubliette again, and the tar-thick intelligence which had sealed its doors. After a moment’s thought, she touched the handles here, but didn’t try to pull on them. Instead, she opened her mind to them, sending out thought like a spear, searching for that vital crack in an enemy’s armor. She got no sense of awareness, but there was more to the door than just stone, she was certain of it.

**Open,** she thought.

She felt, or imagined she felt, a subtle vibration under her fingertips, just briefly, pulsing once through the rock and into stillness once more. ‘The mountain’s heart beats only once a year,’ Mara thought vaguely and gave her head a shake to clear it. When she looked up, the demon’s stone face was looking down, his teeth bared in what struck her increasingly as a condescending smile.

Outwardly, Mara did not move, apart from a slight curling of her upper lip, but outward appearances ceased to matter. If Connie herself had walked by, Mara couldn’t have noticed. All her attention drew inward, flexing into focus for one explosive command. She felt it drive out of her with good, righteous force. She felt it slam home and drive itself in deep. ‘Open’ was the word she gave and that word resonated once, just once, seeming to blow itself up into something far bigger than its echo, something ancient and alien of herself.

The doors didn’t budge, not even to hum this time, but Mara, without any hesitation, slipped her hands down to the curved horns of the pleading demon, and pulled them easily apart. She was not surprised. It was impossible that any intelligence could hear that word and not obey. Late that night, she would think this hugely conceited of herself, but at the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. She pulled the doors open and stood between them and felt, just for a moment, ready to take whatever hidden thing laired within and crush it in her fist.

‘I’m here to find Connie,’ she thought, and that tight, feral sense of triumph faded. Connie. Right. This wasn’t a challenge, but a search. She let go of the doors.

Air breathed over her in one long, slow draft, but only once. It brought with it a musty smell, reminding her in a vague way of attics or basements—a dark place, where forgotten things gathered dust.

Very dark. In the dim glow spilling in from the hall, Mara could make out the pregnant bulge of another lamp on her right, but it wasn’t working at the moment. Moving slowly, testing each step, Mara felt her way through the doors and along the rock wall until her fingers brushed over the waxy lump of the blister-lamp. Light was slow in coming and it guttered badly when it did, but it was illumination enough to make out the next lamp, and the next, until she had awakened all five set in the wide outer ring of this classroom.

Because that was just what this was, another theater. No bigger, and not really more impressive than any of those below her in the lyceum. Disappointed, Mara climbed carefully down the risers to the empty dais, then turned at the bottom and looked up at her footprints in the dust. They were deep, deep enough to cast shadows in the bottom. She was the first person to walk here in years, in centuries maybe.

They’d closed it off for some reason. Maybe the demon who taught here had died, or left the mountain, or moved on to another part of it to work. Strange, that they wouldn’t salvage any of his stuff, she thought, as she ran her eyes over shelves of glass jars and boxes, books and archaic objects, all heavily-grimed with neglect.

This was likely to be her only chance to fully explore a theater. Mara headed for the stair behind the Master’s dais. It was wide, steep, and dropped down into absolute black—too inviting to resist. She had very little light, none at all after she’d rounded the second corner, but she went slow and kept her hands on the wall, hoping at each step to come across one of the blister-lamps.

After an eternity of climbing down in a black spiral, she finally caught a glimmer of light at the bottom. It grew as she approached, enough to make out an open doorway, covered in layers of hanging curtains, no less. They waved in the grip of a cold breeze, spilling out slivers of tantalizing light with each lazy billow of crimson, black, and gold.

‘This is it,’ Mara thought, with no real idea of what ‘it’ was. She crossed the final distance in a few short steps, letting determination lead her when common sense might fear to tread. The curtains were thick and old, but although ragged, they didn’t have that greasy/fuzzy feel of neglected fabric. When she passed between them, they tried to cling to her, and she was compelled to move completely out of their reach, not into daylight, but into a natural light all the same.

The draft, of course. The freshness of the air she breathed. These things had been obvious to her, but the moon held her transfixed. The far wall was open, the whole of it, without a ledge or even a rail to keep idle wanderers from stepping off and into oblivion. Mara went, mindful of the danger, but she had to go. The moon would be no closer, really, for her few extra steps, but she went. She had forgotten it was so beautiful. She had forgotten how the stars would shine. And they were no different here, in the Scholomance’s mountain of secret arts, than they were out the window of her bedroom in her mother’s house. Somehow, that didn’t seem fair.

Nothing happened, nothing changed, but the air grew somehow denser. She wasn’t alone here. She knew she wouldn’t be.

“They told me the time between first-bell and last was daytime,” she said.

Her voice didn’t ring boldly out into the room. The open air pushed it back. The stone walls swallowed it. It was the voice of an insect.

His was far more impressive—deep and rolling, relaxed, even amused, but never human, never that.

“Days are that by which mortals measure time’s passage. For simplicity’s sake, we call it so. As our students seeth not the sky, what harm?”

Mara turned toward him, not fast. He rose from his lazy crouch in the shadows just as slowly, as deliberately. The carving on the door had been a very good likeness after all. His skin was grey and rough even to look at, like living stone, raised and thick where the ivory spikes pierced through. His hair was black and very fine, and waved out behind him in the same breeze that moved the curtains. His eyes glowed green, just a little.

“Shall I disrobe?” he asked, indicating the ornate buckle of his plated belt.

“Disrobe?” Mara echoed, frowning.

“So I must assume, as thou hast come to my bedchamber.” He motioned, and true enough, there was a bed, crafted in a wide oval, with a stone lip all around and great bat-wings looming at its head.

Mara raised her eyebrows. “Do you sleep?” she wondered.

“Nay, not often,” the demon replied affably. “Yet I do fuck, and one must have one’s comforts.” He cocked his head, spreading his mouth in a wide, humorless smile. “Thou dost not flee, nor rebuke, nor submit to me. How curious. I suppose thou hast some request to make. Speak it.”

“Is that my prize for finding you?” Mara asked.

“Thy life and mine indulgence should satisfy thy wish for prizes,” he answered. He came toward her, his eye roving freely as he circled and came to a stop before her, bringing his gaze up with aggressive insolence to at last meet her own. There, for an instant, his smile splintered. His nostrils flared. Slowly, his indulgent smirk melting into a look of narrowed disbelief, he reached up and touched a claw to the thin skin below her left eye.

She didn’t flinch.

The demon looked at them, each one in its turn, then at her altogether for a very long time. Suddenly, he smiled. “I see the glint of gold at thy slender throat,” he said, taking back his hand. His breath on her face was hot, like an animal’s. “Thou must belong to someone, to have won such privilege. And yet thou art here, come seeking me.”

“I wasn’t looking for you.”

“Nay?” He straightened and folded his arms, smiling that tolerant smile. Up close, it had a distinctly predatory shine. “Then who?”

“A student,” Mara said. “She came here two years ago, a woman my age…perhaps you’ve seen her.”

“Nay,” he said, flicking his fingers on one bicep in an offhand wave of dismissal. “I have seen no students for many years. Centuries, perhaps. None save thee, o fearless one.”

“Why not? Did you stop teaching?”

He closed his eyes and opened them again. It was not quite a blink. His smile never shifted, but his eyes glowed brighter. “I tired of that game,” he told her. “Perhaps too soon. Thy manner is much changed from those I once knew…the world has moved on, and thou art new-come to it, I think. How many years hast thou?”

“Why?”

“I do not lie with children, no matter how prettily they do beseech me at my bedside.”

“After centuries of retirement, you’d be robbing the cradle even if I said ‘a hundred,’” Mara countered. “So what difference does it make?”

He uttered a low, noncommittal sound and eyed her again, unabashed in his scrutiny. “And how art thou called, thee of so many years?”

“You’re the Master here. You can call me what you like. Why all the questions?”

He chuckled, still inspecting the shape beneath her voluminous robes. “I wished to see how thou wouldst answer, and so I have. Even silence telleth secrets here. Evasiveness doth scream them. Yet I will have thy name.”

And then she felt him, reaching his mind like a hand into hers, open so as to snatch something out. He struck the solid wall of her Panic Room. She waited to see shock broaden the features of his inhuman face, but it never showed. He looked thoughtful, only that, and even a little pleased.

“It’s Mara,” she said.

His eyes flashed and focused sharply on her.

“And what do I call you?” she continued.

He did not answer right away. It took a long time for the surprise to fade out of his features, leaving behind a narrow wariness like a stain. This was not a demon like Horuseps or Malavan, whose minds were strange and difficult to grasp but essentially pliant. If she’d wanted to, she knew she could open Horuseps like an oyster and take whatever meat there was, but she’d never get far with her treasure and she knew that too. This demon…his mind was perfectly black to her, perfectly armored. Here was a telepath, she realized. Not like Horuseps, who knew she was reading him and sometimes put thoughts out for her to take, but a true telepath with a Panic Room of his own, only his was a Stronghold, a Fortress. She would get nothing from him but what he chose to tell her.

Mara rolled her eyes and turned around, moving toward the stair. “You may enjoy games,” she said pointedly, not slowing. “I expect my questions answered.”

“Thou hypocrite,” he said without sting. He didn’t follow her, but after she’d passed the curtains and had her foot on the first step, suddenly called, “I am Kazuul, to mortal tongue. So thou mayest call me.” When she paused, he added, “So much thou wouldst learn at thy first clever inquiry, so hear it first from me, Mara. Know thy Master. Know Kazuul and return.”

His last words were spoken in tones of unmistakably sensual intensity, a purr and not a growl. She wanted to say something, if only ‘We’ll see about that,’ but she knew how it would sound. Against the thunderous baritone of the demon’s voice, the most rebellious words in the world could only be reedy and petulant. It hadn’t been wise to spar with him in the first place. She wouldn’t compound the error now. She left him without speaking, and suffered the low, indulgent laughter he sent after her with fire burning in her chest.

*          *          *

“Did you find her?” Devlin shouted.

He had to shout. Third-bell had rung. This was the dining room. The Scholomance’s thousand students squabbled over their dinner (or breakfast, considering what the hour must be), which Mara again did not eat. She had been hungry enough on hearing the bell, but once here, all appetite had left her. What was not killed by the disgusting table manners of her fellow students had been thoroughly ruined by the meal itself: wide platters sparsely piled with ribcages snapped open and stuffed with even less appetizing hunks of unidentified meat and bone, all undercooked and shiny with grease and blood. Looking at this, it was impossible not to remember the dead man of the tribunal—had it only been just this morning? Or evening. Or whatever. ‘For all I know, you’re eating them,’ she’d said, and Horuseps had only smiled and murmured, ‘For all you know.’

“Mara! Hey, Mara! Did you find your friend?” Devlin bellowed. So great was his anxiety, his need to connect, that he reached across the table where he’d wedged himself in shortly after she sat down, and shook her sleeve for attention, just like a toddler to his preoccupied mother.

He hadn’t forgiven her for their little exchange earlier, but after a few lonely hours and one good cry, he had done the human thing and simply rewritten all the parts he didn’t like, gradually convincing himself that her tone hadn’t been quite so sharp and that anything that could be seen as, well, mean when taken out of context had in fact been spoken out of concern by someone who clearly wasn’t much of a people-person.

This part was true. Mara wasn’t.

Now she shook her head, mostly to shut him up without doing the indignity of bellowing back at him like a sick sea lion.

“Well, don’t get too discouraged!” Devlin shouted cheerfully. “I’ve been here a long time already and I still hardly know anyone. We’re not, like, friendly.” He lunged for another chunk of meat, took several punches for his trouble, and relinquished it, rubbing grease into his cheek with a hurt expression. “Anyway,” he continued, “This is a big place. And it’s just your first day. If you want, I can help you look.”

Mara got up and headed for the door.

‘You really must eat something,’ came to her in the silkily silent voice of Horuseps, watching from the Master’s table. ‘If the meat is not to your liking, I could perhaps arrange better fare…a private meal, perhaps, in my chambers.’

Mara paused and looked back at him. It surprised him some. His teasing offer had been just that, teasing, and he’d thought she’d know it, which of course she had. Seeing her stop as if considering it first startled, then intrigued him. He considered it as well, but oddly, not as the right of a Master towards his beholden, but as something furtive, something forbidden to be savored against the threat of discovery.

**I went to the top of the lyceum today,** she sent to him, ending that speculation.

He studied her, closing off the good-humored openness of his mind. At length, he stood, rested his hands on his shoulders, and glided toward her. The tables quieted a little as he neared them, but such was the nature of the dining hall that it could never be very quiet unless everyone shut up, so the roar went on. No, even Horuseps couldn’t make it quiet, but what he did do was send Devlin—who had every intention of trip-trapping at Mara’s heels all the way back to her cell—scuttling back to the table instead. For that alone, Mara could afford to play his game. She fell into step beside him and the two of them went out into the Nave together.

“Did you find what you were searching for?” he asked, once the heavy doors were shut on the shouting. His tone was light, like his hand on her shoulder, gently steering her at his side.

“I think you know I didn’t.”

“Do I?”

“Tell me about Kazuul.”

“Ah.” Horuseps blew a short, irritated sigh, and then gave her his familiar smile. “Yes. Kazuul. What would you like to know?”

“What does he teach?”

Horuseps waved his hand dismissively before returning it to the small of her back. “He doesn’t teach anything anymore, darling one. And truthfully, he was never a very good teacher even when he did. He had something of a temper then…and he’s never suffered fools with any good grace. And, oh, fools come here just dreadfully often.”

“What did he teach, then?”

“I don’t recall.”

“You’re a liar.”

“That I am,” Horuseps said merrily, and smiled at her. “If you want to know, Bitterness, you’ll have to ask him. I’d much rather risk your anger over my evasiveness than his when I betray his confidence. He still has something of a temper, you see.”

“Who is he?”

“A Master of the Scholomance.”

“How can he be, if he doesn’t teach?”

“We make an exception for him.”

“Why?”

“Because he would kill us if we didn’t.” Horuseps laughed. “Or so he’d have us think. I won’t test him.”

Down they went on the wide stair into the ephebeum. A handful of students were here, lining the walls in small clots, engaged in their own conversations and quiet games. All of them stood when they saw the demon and bowed.

“I suppose you asked him about your little lost lamb,” Horuseps said, ignoring them. “But I’m afraid he hasn’t left his rooms in a very long time.”

“So he said.”

“Did he?” Feigning nonchalance (and feigning it badly, despite his efforts to keep his mind dark to her), Horuseps brushed at a patch of ground-in blood and dirt on Mara’s robe. “And what else did he say?”

“He said he was my Master and he told me to return.”

Horuseps pursed his lips just slightly and nodded. “When?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Ah. Well.” Horuseps gave her a wide, winning smile and a wink. “You could easily keep him dangling for a year or two, but then, what of your search for the hapless Connie? You’d ought to go now.”

“Last-bell is about to ring.”

“I’m sure he’ll be good enough to give you a bed for the night.”

“For the day.”

“For however long it takes, dearest. I’ve no personal experience, but I have it on good authority that a day and a night together are easily within his speed. Whatever else may be said of him…” His expression lost most of its humor and became something cold, something bitter. “…he has never done things by halves.”

They walked together into the tunnel leading to Mara’s cell. Beyond the first corner, where the lamps were still lit, two men huddled close together, one on his knees before the other. The one standing had a sharp shard of stone pressed tightly enough to the other’s neck to draw blood. Engaged as they were, neither one noticed Mara and Horuseps quietly pass by.

“So how are you getting along?” the demon inquired once they were clear. “Making friends, I hope?”

“You are my only friend,” Mara said with a deliberate lack of feeling.

“You shameless flirt, you. If I didn’t already have a piece in play for this evening’s entertainment, I’d be tempted to join you tonight.”

Still teasing, but not as much as he thought he was. Kazuul had changed all that, somehow.

“You’re a Master of the Scholomance,” said Mara. “Ditch your date. I’ll make it up to you.”

He cut her a sharp glance. “You aren’t serious.”

“I might have been, if you’d actually told me something about Kazuul like I asked. I may be shameless, but I’m no flirt. I have no scruples whatsoever when it comes to getting what I want.”

“Is that a fact?” the demon murmured.

“But since I gave out all the information, you get nothing from me.” She stopped at her cell door. “Without your express command, of course.”

He gazed at her, the lights of his eyes all that moved.

“The Scholomance is full of tests,” she told him, pulling her robe off to stand naked in her cell. “This one, you have failed. Good night, Horuseps.” She took a step back and shut the door.

He didn’t leave. She’d suspected he wouldn’t. And although she was aware of him standing just outside, watching through the small slot window that ventilated her cell, she put him wholly from the surface of her mind as she spread out both her robes for a bed and lay down on top of them. She wanted him to feel dismissed, but it wasn’t her he thought of at all as his gaze lingered, but Kazuul. He thought about Kazuul, not so loudly or precisely that she could see those thoughts clearly, but his mind was troubled, conflicted by casual desire, by the certainty of pain, by his own dark sense of humor. He knew he was being played, especially when she rolled onto her back, spread her legs, and began lazily to stroke herself, but he didn’t leave.

This wasn’t the sort of thing she did for her own pleasure—getting a man was easy enough, and she too had never seen the point in doing things by halves—but enough men found it a vital part of the sexual experience that she’d learned to do it well. She gave him her best performance now, all innocence and exhibition as she touched herself, putting every shivering new-felt sensation out on the surface for him to see.

Her body became a stranger’s as she explored it. Her breasts had to be fondled, her nipples pinched to points while she licked her empty lips. Down over her writhing belly to her pubis, where she let the first little moan spoil her silence. His mind was her camera; she watched herself open to her own questing fingers and shared his quick hot leap of lust, darker perhaps, but the same as any man’s. She drew it out for him as much as she ever could, tracing tiny circles over her clitoris as she stroked the soft folds of her bare labia (briefly, a distraction: she had never grown hair there, had always remained child-smooth. This, like her strange, ice-pale eyes, and perhaps even her telepathy, had always seemed very obviously a continuance of the same basic genetic fault, and it did not disturb her). It never took her long to warm up, and when she parted herself with eager fingers, it was to show him the shine of her ready oils.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re accomplishing with this endearing demonstration,’ Horuseps thought archly (each word pulsing with its own inner lining of heat), ‘but it isn’t working.’

She pretended not to hear him, filled the surface of her mind with only this—with the slick, tight welcome of her pussy, the chip-hard thrust of her nipples, the ache of need now throbbing in her core, a need bitterly unrequited by only her well-practiced hand.

‘Not at all,’ the demon reiterated, but not so firmly as he had first done.

She gave no hint that his mind had registered. Hers was aflame with the first of several peaks, but it was not enough. She thought of him—not him outside her door of course, but him in all his funny little poses, the essential Horuseps, he of the moon-white body and black-stained hands. In her mind, she clasped that glassy body to hers (he must be male I know he is o for his cock in me right now), and she thrust her fingers hard and fast inside her, groaning at the unfairness of it all.

The sight of herself in exultation burned in him at her suggestion, and then was stolen away as he swung away from the door and stared instead at the fading light of the blister-lamp in the tunnel. ‘She can’t be serious,’ he thought, no longer addressing her, but black with disbelief all the same, and quite a heavy hint of resentment as well, resentment seething with Kazuul’s name.

Nicely spent for the moment, Mara rolled her body in stretching completion and ended on her side, gathering in a fold of her robe to use for a pillow. “No, I’m not,” she said. “But I can fake it with the best of them. Come in, Horuseps. Tell me about Kazuul. I can make you very welcome.”

He was quiet for so long, his mind so dark behind the stone door, that she briefly wondered if he’d gone away and left her. Then he spoke, not dangling out thoughts for her to grasp, but out loud, where, although he made an effort, he could not quite disguise his angry, unfulfilled lust, or his genuine amusement. “I’ll tell you this much, darling Mara,” he said. “You belong here. And you belong with him.”

She was sure he left her then, because he laughed as he walked away, and because the lamp at last died for an empty hall. Still, it felt like a victory and a good start. Mara gathered up a little more pillow, dropped down into the Panic Room, and put herself to sleep.

*          *          *

It began sometime after last-bell rang, which was right about when she’d expected it. He probably thought she was asleep and defenseless. Actually, she was asleep, but she was never without defenses.

Hovering at the center of the Panic Room, Mara saw the monitor that played out her dreams first flicker, then subtly darken. She checked her body, but it looked okay. In the Mindstorm, all remained muted. Nevertheless, someone was there, easing into her dreams.

Mara touched down onto her psychic feet and turned up the speakers. There he was, Kazuul, whispering. Mara double-checked her body again, not just her vitals this time, but all of it.

There was a hand upon her stomach, very lightly resting, and it wasn’t hers. He was right next to her in her cell. He was touching her. And yet, he managed not to be in the Mindstorm. Now there was a well-cloaked telepath.

It didn’t take much to influence a dream. His scent, his touch, his voice—he needed no magic to pour himself into her subconscious mind. On the dream monitor, Kazuul grew out of mist and shadows and moved toward her. On the body monitor, the hand so carefully stroking her stomach slipped between her thighs.

How far to let this go? The cell was really too small and stony to have any kind of comfortable sex. If that was his intention, he had to expect her to wake up, which rendered the exquisite care he was taking now sort of pointless. But that was definitely the direction the dream was going.

Mara studied the monitors, wondering what to do. She had a lot of voluntary control from the Panic Room, even while her body slept, but the involuntary stuff stayed out of her hands for the most part. She couldn’t stop herself from experiencing the arousal he so expertly orchestrated and the longer she sat here watching, the worse it got. He was still only petting her, but her mons was already throbbing, her hips already stuttering in dreamy writhes. When he brushed a thumb across her lips, she opened them, moaning, and dreamed in embarrassing detail of going to her knees before him and taking his cock into her mouth.

Whispering, he was whispering, commanding her to pleasure her Master, and he would reward her.

She was going to cum soon, there was really nothing she could do about that. Mara drummed her psychic fingers on the non-glass of the monitor, flexing her mind. The body’s lips moved; the body’s lungs pushed air out at her will. “Master,” she made herself sigh.

Kazuul’s laugher rumbled soft and low against her ears. He pierced her with one clawed finger and moved it deep and slow, telling her to cum for him.

Mara let it happen, unmoved by her gyrations or the swift, embarrassing rush of heat that came out of her in such wet urgency, but before the whole of it could fade, she stole some control and arched her neck to groan, “Oh, Horuseps!” and then leaned back smugly to listen.

The whispering stopped. So did the hand at her sex. He stayed that way for quite a long time as Mara slept the sleep of sexual completion. The next breath he took blew hot against her cheek as an animal snarl.

“What’s the matter, Kazuul?” the sleeping body asked, and he jerked away from her. She could hear the hard crack of his bony spikes hitting the very close confines of her cell. “Not the name you were hoping for?”

“So,” he breathed. That was all for a while, and then there was another snarl and he said, “I ordered thee to return.”

“You invited me,” she corrected, still sound asleep. “And I’m considering it.”

His growl was nothing that could have come from a human mouth. The Mindstorm, pictureless, began slowly to bleed red.

“I was considering it a lot more favorably before you snuck in here to molest me, I must admit.”

“Mind thy words,” he spat. “Thou art not beyond my punishing will!”

“Likewise. Thank you for a lovely interlude. Now get out of my cell. Oh, and Kazuul…”

He snarled out some sort of acknowledgement at a short distance, probably standing over her.

“I’m willing to forgive and forget the horny indiscretions of someone perhaps too far out of touch to realize what he did was wrong, but now you know. The next time you try something like this, I’m going to do my best to make you very, very sorry. Please. Let’s keep this pleasant.”

He grunted. The door bumped hard against her legs as he opened it (and how had she not noticed that on his entry?) and slammed shut again.

In the Panic Room, Mara shook her head and turned her attention back to her dreams, already smudging out into something new. In her cell, Mara’s body rolled onto its side and found a way to cushion her head on her arm without too much discomfort, then stretched out her legs. She saw no reason to wake up, but did wonder how best to retaliate.

Well, they said absence made the heart grow fonder. She’d try that for a while, and see.

CHAPTER NINE

The second day waking up on a stone floor was, if possible, even worse than the first, despite the trifling benefit of a second robe to pad her bed. Mara limped most of the way to the ephebeum, which was entirely empty this morning (evening, she corrected herself mentally, and thought of the open wall in Kazuul’s chamber, the fresh air blowing through the curtains, a sky filled with white stars. It was oddly difficult to shake). Her stomach cramped hungrily at the thought of food, but doing battle with the other students for a few handfuls of mystery meat did not appeal to her. Baths, Horuseps had said. Time to find them.

She’d hoped for hot springs—as long as one was dreaming, why not dream big?—but was not exactly devastated when she came to a large, plain cavern where water rained heavily out of the ceiling into a single wide pool. Overflow vents kept the depth no higher than her knees. A thick, mineral sediment clouded the water to the color of thin milk. The temperature, it went without saying, was just this side of ice.

But there were sachets of soap and pungent herbs hanging from juts of rock on the wall, and there were even rough towels made of woven grass that might be marginally better than just dripping dry. It was better than nothing.

She was not alone, unfortunately. A woman sat against the far wall, naked, her knees drawn up and her head bent, silent. A tap at her unguarded mind told Mara it was her warden, Desdemona. She looked up when Mara stripped and splashed into the pool (she’d had the foresight to drop into the Panic Room first, so as not to embarrass herself with a lot of undignified hopping and squealing, but even there, watching the yellow light of alarm flare in her body’s health monitor, Mara could not resist a mild, “Sweet fiddling fuck, that’s cold.”) and gave out a pulse of weary blame that proved the recognition was not one-sided. Her face, Mara noticed, had swollen around the bisecting scar left by Malavan’s claw until her lips were the size of thumbs…all four of them.

She stood there for a while, wondering what this made her feel, then decided she didn’t have to feel anything at all about it. She hadn’t done the injury and certainly hadn’t enjoyed seeing it done. Mara dunked her soap sachet and started scrubbing. She needed it. Badly.

Desdemona said something unintelligible through the drumming of water and the mangled petals of her mouth. Mara tapped at her mind again. Apparently, they kept shampoo on a shelf nearby.

And so they did. Mara slogged over and got some. It lathered poorly and stung at her scalp, but her hair felt infinitely better once it had rinsed clean. “Thanks,” she said.

“A’a ba ob.”

Tap.

I have a comb, she’d said, and was holding it out when Mara looked her way: a crude, metal-worked thing with two rows of rounded teeth, not much wider than her hand. Mara accepted it with another word of thanks and found a wet ledge out of the worst of the rain to sit and work her snarls out. Desdemona watched her, miserable.

“Can anything be done for that?” Mara asked finally, still combing.

Desdemona nodded painfully. “A urgee a’ih.” I’m working on it, she’d said, but in her mind were not thoughts of bandages or ointment, but of what she would have to do to get someone called Shaitan to heal her, to draw out the infection, and reshape her ruined face. There were others who could do it, but she knew Shaitan…and knew him well enough to know what he would demand in return. It would be Nathaniel all over again. It would be worse.

“If you had a needle and thread, I could try stitching it up for you,” Mara said.

Desdemona only shook her head. There were no needles, and thread pulled from the robes surely could not be clean. It would only get infected and she would end up begging Shaitan after all.

Mara shrugged. She’d made the effort. Even if she didn’t consider herself responsible for the woman’s plight, she wasn’t heartless. “Thanks for the comb,” she said, holding it out.

“Eeb ih,” Desdemona said, not moving. Keep it. It would mean a nightmare to earn another, of course, but what was one more nightmare in this place? What did a few nights more on her knees really matter, if she made a friend in Mara, who had the favor of the Masters, if only for a little while. She wouldn’t be pretty and new forever. She’d learn. Even if she did everything right, she would never be completely safe.

Mara waded out of the pool and put on her robe, tucking her new comb into the pocket of one sleeve. She started to leave, then sighed and came back. “I’m looking for someone,” she said bluntly. “A young woman about my age, a little taller than me, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She came here two years ago. She was calling herself Faith. Do you remember her at all?”

“Ai?” Desdemona’s frown split her wounds open. Her lips poured discolored blood thickly onto her chest, where it was washed away by drops of rain. “Ai ood’oo ah ee?”

Why, was the gist of that, Mara knew it without even tapping. Why would you come here, why would you ask me, why would it even matter? Desdemona’s eyes above the open petals of her weeping face were only puzzled, tired. Just for kicks, Mara told the truth: “I came to get her out of here.”

The woman stared without comprehension. “Oo and.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see, I guess. Have you seen her or not?”

Desdemona shook her head. A tap at her mind confirmed it—her fellow students were only robes and teeth to her, predators and prey. There was no escape, only the door, only the demons and the ringing of their bells.

“I’m sorry he went after you like that,” Mara said finally. “I didn’t know he would.”

Desdemona only shrugged. The Masters did what they did. No one could predict them. She still hated Mara in a dry, distracted way, but not because she really blamed her. She hated her for being beautiful, for catching the collective eye of the Masters and holding it so easily, for being fearless upon the library steps and fearless under the hand of Horuseps. She hated her for being everything, in short, that she herself was not, either as Desdemona, acolyte in the Devil’s School, or as Lynn Wynwick, free woman of London. Life inside the mountain was no different than outside. The cup never held better than bitter wine for woman like Lynn, while every hand reached to pour pink champagne for the Maras of the world.

Mara scowled, looking down at her, thinking.

It would be a small enough diversion to haul this miserable creature up and march her out to find this Shaitan, to force him to do whatever he was capable of doing to see her repaired. And what would it get her but another one like Devlin, stapled to her damn shadow and useless in her search? She wasn’t here to start a Student’s Union in the Scholomance.

In the end, she turned around and left her. She wasn’t heartless, but she wasn’t a hero, either. She was here for Connie. That was all.

*          *          *

The first meal of the day was gruel. Great big buckets of it, the color and consistency of wet cement, served without bowls or spoons. The students dove in, burning their hands and their mouths as they fought each other for swallows. Mara was by now hungry enough that she could not lose her appetite simply because she wanted to, but this was truly revolting.

At the Master’s table, the demons ate off silver platters with knives and hooked skewers. Bread and cheese, fruit and meat, hot tea and wine. Mara found herself a seat with the animals at the center table and contemplated walking up as bold as Oliver and asking for something else. The only thing that kept her from doing so was the certainty that she would be refused, and would then have to walk back empty-handed in front of everyone.

A stray elbow slammed into Mara’s back unexpectedly, knocking her into someone else, who actually grabbed her by the robe and tried to topple her off the bench. She resisted, shoving not just against him but against everyone, the entire crowd like a single suffocating organism all around, and just as she’d managed to straighten up, a thick gobbet of gruel went flying, landing like bird shit directly in Mara’s left eye.

She lost her temper and slapped.

Not with her hand, but with her mind, Mara struck out in all directions, indiscriminately flattening the squabbling students who jostled her. The ease of it inflamed her. Before she knew she was doing it, she tore through defenses, broke open pain centers, and got every last one of them to leap spastically away. Since most of them were still sitting at the time, the result was a rather comical shockwave of black and white robes tumbling backwards onto the floor.

Students at the other tables swung around to gape. Demons at the far end of the room erupted in laughter. Mara righted herself, knuckled gruel out of her eye, and made herself stop there. She had to be cool. She had to stay calm.

“What the…What the fuck just happened?” One of the black-robed acolytes got up, flushed and bleeding, hunting for his attacker. He saw Mara and homed in at once.

“Let it go,” someone muttered.

“Did you just hit me?” the acolyte demanded, not even angry as much as just stunned. Very much as Mara would be, she supposed, if their positions were reversed.

“To be fair, I hit everyone,” she replied, flexing her mental muscles. “I don’t care for crowds.”

“You don’t care for—” He lunged forward, was restrained by two of his cohorts, and stood shaking in their grasp, filling the Mindstorm with the colors of his fury. “I ought to turn you inside-out for that, you cunt!”

“I don’t care to be shouted at, either.”

“Fucking cunt!” he shouted.

She didn’t lose her temper twice, not really, but all at once, she had to wonder just why she had to stay cool? To a Master, yes, but why to this man? Why to this screaming, swearing fool in his magic black robe? She could see inside him as easily as if he were made of glass and like glass, by God, she could shatter him. This was not the Outside, it was the Scholomance, and it was perfectly okay if people knew about her, it was just as fine as fresh paint, and just maybe she’d been cool long enough.

“Apologize to me,” Mara said softly.

Somewhere in the room, Loki’s laughter honked out, shared and expanded upon by students at the other four tables. Where the Masters sat, Zyera also laughed, the sound like tinkling bells, stilled when Horuseps put his hand on her arm. Mara saw all of this, saw none of it. She stared into the acolyte’s fury-dark face and was ready for his outburst. More than merely ready. She wanted him to come.

“Apologize?” Disbelief cracked his voice, took away twenty years, and left him just as reckless and foolhardy as he’d been the day he’d first read of this place. He pushed back his murmuring friends and advanced on her, screaming, “I’ll pound your brains out with my dick, you shit-faced stinking cow-cunt! That’s my apology!”

He lunged.

Mara, without moving, threw out a needle of thought and jabbed it precisely into his brain, but for just a moment, it didn’t want to be a needle at all. Just for a moment, she could feel her own mind flexing, wanting to take that power that nestled so quietly in the calm heart of her and draw it out big, not a needle but a spear. Just for a moment, she could see herself throwing that at him, and not sending him crashing to floor in a sound sleep as he was doing now, but flinging him back in one last spectacular convulsion, snapping his spine with the strength of his spasm, spraying bloody froth like a fountain and bursting the eyes out of his head.

The urge left her, but it didn’t leave her as shaken as it should have, and that bothered her. She wasn’t a killer.

‘You don’t make friends easily, do you?’ Horuseps thought loudly, as the rest of the room began to return to its normal level of activity and noise.

**I already have a friend,** she answered, watching as the unconscious acolyte was rolled impersonally away from the tables and his place usurped. The two who had tried so hard to pull him away from the conflict were going through his sleeves, removing what they found as deftly as any back-alley thief. **I don’t think I want to make new ones here anyway.**

‘It isn’t all bad.’

There was no polite way to answer that, so she stayed silent and turned her attention back to breakfast. Against her better judgment, she dipped one finger in the closest bucket of gruel and brought it to her lips for a taste. Salty, greasy, with the lingering tang of rancid fat. Mara spat the bitter swallow out and got up.

‘Oh dearest, you really must do better than that. You’re wasting away before my eyes.’

**This is disgusting, Horuseps.**

‘Yes, it is. More’s the pity, because it’s all you’re going to get…unless you ingratiate yourself to one with the means to provide better. Kazuul takes his meals early, but the kitchens are never closed to him.’

**Subtlety isn’t your strong suit, Horuseps.**

‘It is. It would simply be wasted on you, dearest.’

No doubt he was correct, she thought, and even let him hear her admit it. She knew she’d come here with a single purpose, and she didn’t handle distractions well. As evidenced by the man lying half-stripped on the floor.

‘I’m always correct. It’s the curse of my kind.’ His mind tickled at hers, inviting laughter, and when she didn’t oblige him, he blew a psychic sigh and thought, ‘What were you expecting, dormice drizzled in honey? Eels roasted in placenta of porpoise, perhaps?”

Mara thought that sounded worse than the gruel and told him so, which did surprise him, but also made him laugh.

“Yes, well, so tastes have changed. My point is this, o precious one, we give our students only what is required to hold the life in their greedy bodies and no more. And yet still they come, every year, expecting marble halls and golden platters laden with—”

**Dormice?** suggested Mara, taking another fingerful of that awful gruel and grimacing. She had only the vaguest notion of what a dormouse was.

‘Sweets of some sort. Oh damn me for a tender touch, come here.’

Mara got up and went to the Master’s table, careful not to smile or hold out her hand presumptuously. She even bowed, a gesture he waved off with two curt flaps of his black hand before he gave her a long crust of bread, toasted brown and covered first in a mouth-watering onion sauce and then by tart, golden-bubbly cheese.

It was better than sex.

“Indeed?” Horuseps said dryly, watching her eat.

“I suppose that really depends on my partner at the moment, but this is damned good.”

“You jellyfish,” Zyera murmured, giggling behind her hand.

Horuseps sighed theatrically, smiting the soft heart that so betrayed him. “Try the wine,” he said next, and offered his cup.

Mara didn’t take it. “I’ve had the wine, thanks.”

“Try ours. Ten days in the barrel is enough for the sons of Adam, but for his Masters, ten years or more.”

Mara had never seen in the appeal in forfeiting one’s self-control to alcohol, and she couldn’t help but think it was tacky to drink at breakfast anyway, but the bread had made her thirsty. She accepted the cup and risked a short swallow, aware of the envious eyes of the students. The taste was crisp and rich and only slightly sweet, not the fermented fruitiness she associated with wine, but almost more like some unknown blend of tea.

“Thou woman’s heart,” said a demoness from further down the line. Tall, voluptuous, with oiled-bronze skin shot through with quills, and yet still beautiful. Mara knew her, sort of, had spied her once through an open door in the lyceum. Master Letha, who taught Allure. Now this demoness uttered a melodious sigh and rolled a fruit down the tabletop for Mara to catch. “Thou brooding hen,” she said to Horuseps. “Thou quivering oyster. And yet, aye, who among us can resist so pretty a pet when it standeth upon its hind feet and howls?”

It was a plum, the soft rind black and speckled with sugary stars, the meat as golden as dawn. Not in season, but fresh and juicy and simply delicious.

“I hope you realize you’re getting a treat,” said Horuseps. “I don’t care how nicely you howl, you shan’t embarrass me again.”

“You have always been too good to me,” Mara replied, sucking juice from her fingers. “Thank you.”

A good many of the Masters laughed or clapped their hands at this, and even Horuseps hooked a wry smile at her. “You’ll be the ruin of me yet. Another crust?”

“Please.”

He passed it over, saying, “I suppose the meals we provide here truly are execrable, but we must have our little revenges. You would be surprised how many humans come here expecting their studies to consist of long walks in the golden cities of the Underearth, where they feast at every hour on purple cushions, take peeled grapes from the hands of aether-slaves—”

“And drink from the cup of Solomon,” Mara agreed distractedly.

Horuseps looked at her sharply, then laughed, but his laughter had a strained quality and his mind was deeply armored. “Wherever did you hear about that?”

“From one of the pilgrims who didn’t make it in.” Mara eyed him curiously as he evaded her gaze. “Is there a cup of Solomon?”

“Oh. Well.” He waved one hand expansively, ending with his arm slung round Zyera’s shoulders as he tried another of his boneless shrugs. “One might as easily ask, ‘Is there a great sphinx of Egypt?’ but what one finds is merely a heap of crumbling stone and not the magical guardian of unlimited arcane power heralded in myth.”

“So…there is a cup.”

He interrupted his unconcerned nibbling of Zyera’s coral-crusted cheek to cast a withering glance her way. “Yes. There is a cup.”

“Did Solomon make it or just own it?”

The other Masters were watching them, all with nearly identical expressions of amusement. No matter what they might have thought of her, they all relished the sight of Horuseps in interrogation. He knew it, played to it, but his mind grew increasingly dark to her, and cold.

“I’m sure he considered it his personal symbol of power, particularly while he was here, but whether he crafted it himself or ordered his alchemists to create it…or plundered it from some other lord’s treasury, I’ve no idea. I wouldn’t have thought it noteworthy enough for its legend to survive so many centuries. It’s really rather a dull thing to look at.”

His use of tense intrigued her. “Is it still here?” she asked, brushing the last bread crumbs off her robe.

Horuseps looked away, his lips tightening, and endured Zyera’s giggles with an expression of pained resignation. “Perhaps I should show you. Would that satisfy your curiosity?”

“Probably not, but it sounds like a good way to kill an hour.”

“Very well then.” Horuseps dropped a kiss on Zyera’s bristling brow and stood up. “Follow me.”

“Now? Don’t you have class soon?”

“I’m sure my students will eventually notice my absence and find another theater in which to prove hopelessly inadequate. Your wishes prevail. Come.”

They left the dining hall and went out into the Nave, where students who had lost the battle for a handful of gruel skulked on their way either to the lyceum or back to the ephebeum. They all bowed to the demon, but there were a lot of dirty looks for Mara beneath the respectfully-lowered hoods.

“You’re gaining a reputation,” Horuseps remarked.

“I’ve had one most of my life.”

“But not here.” Horuseps glanced at her, sighed, and said, “Dear child, if I may make an observation, you act as though this place is no different from any other you have known. It is. You act as though the humans who inhabit it are no more dangerous than the humans you have always lived among. They are. You act as though there are protections in place to hold order over them, but all protections come through the Masters, and you are deliberately avoiding the one who offers you shelter.”

“That’s three observations.”

He sighed again and gave her head a pat. “No one likes a know-it-all, darling. I merely wished to warn you that surviving the dislike of your peers is slightly more difficult when your peers do in fact want to kill you. Take a little care, Bitterness. Who will you save when you are yourself laid low?”

“I feel the love, Horuseps. I do.”

“Ah well. All babes must burn their hands before they truly understand fire. So it must be with even you. Here.” Horuseps waved, and one of the Nave’s many closed doors sparked and opened for him. The tunnel beyond descended into darkness, its stone walls riddled with dripping calcite formations like thousands of melted candles, blowing back the breath of neglect.

The now-familiar blister-lamps were in the ceiling and they began to glow as Horuseps moved forward, throwing shadows around him in a dark starburst. She walked behind him, shamelessly admiring the way his tall, angular body rose whitely out of the dark, knowing he was listening by the single arch smile he sent back at her over one shoulder, although he did not comment. His silence, and the silence of his mind, began to weigh on her as they left the Nave and all other minds behind. The Mindstorm quieted, became indistinct, ominous.

“It’s very pretty here,” Mara said finally, studying the rock formations as she passed them. “Why do you keep it closed off?”

“To prevent the weak from wandering. The doors are shut,” Horuseps added, nodding towards a sealed archway branching away from the main passage. “But not locked. We encourage those with the will for it to explore. There are so many secret tests in these quiet corners.”

“Does anybody live down here?”

“Nothing human and no Masters, but it would not surprise me to come across the lair of something or another. The darkness appeals to many of the lesser creatures who populate the mountain.”

“Like the hounds?”

“The hounds, no. They live under the close watch of Master Suti’ok.” He glanced at her. “No one else can control them.”

“Not even Kazuul?”

“Does it comfort you to think of his power as finite? But no. He could kill them, but that would distress Suti’ok. Our lord is so considerate of our feelings,” he concluded tartly.

“Are the hounds demons?”

Horuseps appeared to think about it. “Demon-stock,” he judged at last.

“Are you breeding them?”

“Not deliberately.” He gave her another glance, one a little darker than the last. “You recall that it is not forbidden for Masters to enjoy fornications with students.”

“On the contrary, it seems to be one of your privileges.”

“Understand that it is never our intention to breed one of the degenerate kinds that dwell among us,” Horuseps said with impressive sincerity. “But having done so, we are compelled to care for them, even the more unpredictable of them.”

“If they’re so unpleasant to be around, why would you risk it at all?”

“I could fuck you a thousand times and never father of you,” he said bluntly. “Ten thousand times. You, indeed, and every other human female who resides with you at this hour.”

“Is that an explanation or an offer?”

“You tease.” But he smiled. “The pleasure outweighs the inconvenience, and so we prey upon our students freely and accept whatever rare consequence may follow. However, if we rescinded the law which holds humans from mating without restraint, we would see every sow made a mother by the end of the year.”

“You could be right.”

“How good of you to acknowledge the possibility. We are aware, Mara, that trapping several hundred rapacious males in an enclosed environment with relatively few females and fewer standards of behavior has made for a rather…predatory situation. We have done what we can to make the punishment suitably steep so as to discourage the crime, but honestly, it isn’t as though the females are entirely cast as victims.”

“No, I imagine they’re not. People like to think that women don’t think about sex, but we can be pretty rapacious ourselves.”

She felt his attention waver ever so slightly, and the part of him which he believed hidden from her withdrew even further to consider that, and all the pleasant possibilities which might be implied. Then he let it all go with a dry laugh. “If I wanted you, my Bittersweet, I have only to command your submission.”

“You do want me,” Mara countered. “And you’re not commanding me. Why not?”

“You’re not my taste.”

“I don’t think that’s it. It’s something else. Something to do with Kaz—”

He moved fast when he wanted to. Just a flash of whiteness in a high arc and suddenly her back hit the tunnel wall, his arm was a silver bar bruising her throat, and his eyes were blazing before her like exploding stars. “Are you in my mind, precious?”

“No,” she answered, honestly enough. “You have more windows than doors and you think loudly when you’re not paying attention.”

He stared her down without blinking for a very long time.

“Touching me doesn’t help,” Mara said finally.

He pulled his arm back at once, then frowned and used that hand to slick along his long eyebrows.

“You should know this,” said Mara. “You’re a telepath, I know you are.” And silently, **Why don’t you ever talk this way? Why just put out thoughts for me to read?**

“Or simply to take,” he murmured with an arch sidelong glance.

Mara waited, tapping at him impatiently for an answer.

“Yes,” he sighed, “I am a mentalist. Rather a better one than you, I dare say. My touches…are more intimate than I desire to share.”

“I’m hurt,” said Mara, trying to joke.

His smile broadened in a nasty slant. “You would be, if I opened my mind to you fully. You may, in fact, be killed. You have a considerable raw talent, precious, but note my use of the word ‘raw’. Perhaps in time, with training, we will come to some deeper communion, we two. Until then, these pale shadows are all that can be safely shared. Shall we speak now of mentalism and all the ways it has diminished in the bloodlines of this Earth or may we continue on to the reliquary?”

She frowned at him, staring deep into the flickering lights of his eyes. “You’re trying to distract me.”

“More fool I,” he replied with some exasperation. “But ah well, for the sake of our great friendship, I’ll tell you why I shan’t command you to your back, dear Mara, and yes, it does have something to do with Kazuul. You recall that I expressed some sympathy for the plight of the students here, their many hundreds of males and few females.”

“I recall you acknowledging it, I’m not sure I’d call that sympathy.”

“Oh but it is. We Masters are very nearly in the same predicament, to a much smaller ratio, of course. Nevertheless, we are as trapped, and often as frustrated, and we have had many centuries to learn that long after our students have left us, we remain with one another. Yes, I want you. But Kazuul has claimed you.”

Mara felt her eyes narrow. “Oh he has, has he?”

“And the sooner you resign yourself to it, the better for all.”

“Why? Are you hoping for his leftovers?”

“Ha! Kazuul does not share his spoils. Great bone-headed brute,” he murmured, drawing aside into another passageway. “And if you think he’ll tire of the pursuit and move on to simpler prey, he’ll never. Your fate was sealed when you entered his lair. Embrace him and despair, little one.”

Mara snorted.

“Ah, she doesn’t wish to be thought of as the plaything of another,” Horuseps said lightly. “And yet she came here, where all students are at the questionable mercy of those who teach.”

“Kazuul doesn’t teach,” Mara pointed out.

“Even so. It is unwise to provoke him. And besides, were you not just lamenting your lack of fucking? One wonders why you are restraining yourself.”

“What is his big fascination with me?” she asked, genuine frustration bleeding into her voice and her thoughts. “And why is he being so damned persistent when all he has to do is just order me on my back?”

Horuseps walked in silence, his mind black to her.

Scowling, she changed the subject. “What did Solomon make his cup to do?”

“Among other things, he used it to display the soul-stone of his favorite enslaved djinn. Breaking that great race and binding them to mortal service was what he wished to be his ultimate legacy.” Horuseps walked for a while. “Is it?”

“Not really. I guess he’s best known for threatening to cut a baby in half.”

He kept his back to her and his thoughts cloaked, but she could see his eyebrows twitch. “Oddly, I’m not so much surprised by that as perhaps I should be. In any event, merely holding the cup was said, by Solomon himself of course, to give him ultimate power over any demon. He believed it to be the reason we acceded to his wishes when he entered here.”

“Was it?”

“Certainly not. It was just a cup.”

“But you kept it.”

“We did. Solomon, however, kept the djinn.”

The tunnel ended in a rock formation like a frozen waterfall, but Horuseps scarcely paused. He touched the wall and rock bubbled back from his hand at once, opening without sound on a room whose only source of light came, not from a blister-lamp, but from a round mirror propped haphazardly on a jut of rock where the pale light of its glass eye could illuminate the small chamber in its entirety.

“Our Reliquary,” Horuseps said, and stepped inside.

No effort had been made to organize the contents of the room. Where there was space, a ledge or shelf had been pulled out of the wall and made only as level as needed to keep the artifacts it carried from falling. No two were exactly alike in width or depth; no two were exactly aligned to any other. The anarchy of it hurt the eyes, distracting her from the objects themselves.

There were a handful of idols—animals mostly, some abstract, and many plainly meant to mimic the forms of demons from the Scholomance itself—and even fewer body parts—a withered hand, a very small skull whose eyes were filled with gold, a fetish of hair-wrapped bones, and a whole pile of irregular lumps which were either dried organs or gall bladder stones—but most were rather ordinary. There were many mirrors, ranging from polished rock to silver-backed glass to ornately-molded brass, and with the exception of the one radiating feebly above her, all were dark, their reflections warped by age and neglect. There were knives of every shape and substance. There were stone spheres by the dozen, heaps of rings and crowns, and many, many cups.

She got no sense at all that she might be surrounded on every side by mystical talismans. There were a few here or there she might expect to see in a museum, but the rest of them were, at best, gift-shop fodder for a medieval faire, and at worst, utter junk. This was something of a disappointment, and she let him feel it.

“Humans,” said Horuseps, picking up one of the cups, “are of limitless imagination. If you knew me better, you would better appreciate my admiration. Nevertheless, when it comes to arming themselves against the supernatural, there is something in them that screams for practicality of form. It is as if…” He turned the cup over in his hands, his expression growing distant as the lights of his eyes focused into a single bright point. “…as if even they cannot believe in what they are making, or in what they are making it to combat, and so they must be certain of a dual purpose. To fall back on, as it were.” He looked at her. “Would you like to see my favorite?”

Mara shrugged.

Horuseps handed her the cup and picked up the fetish. He handled it with touching care, arranging it in the center of his palm where he could trace the flow of hair as it wrapped around and through the bones. “It pretends to be nothing but what it is. Even the most innocent child need only look at it to know its business is not with this world.”

“What was it supposed to do?”

“What else? Protect its bearer from the will of demons. Useless, of course. Still, I like it.”

“Do any of these things work? Besides that,” she added, thumbing up at the glowing mirror.

“Even that isn’t doing what it was intended to. Oh, some of them might have had some small ability once upon a time, but most of these are merely foci for ignorant minds that once believed themselves sorcerers. Scrying stones and pointing sticks…toys for infant magicians.”

“And this?” Mara raised the cup he’d given her. “I assume it’s Solomon’s.”

“It was indeed. But it’s quite powerless now, my dear.”

She studied it in silence. Finely made and gilt with gold, it had a deep well and thick stem, every inch of it a vehicle for the gems fixed to its surface, but the largest setting was empty. A place-marker for the imprisoned djinn, she supposed, but it still didn’t look much like a magical artifact, just a really gaudy cup. “Among other things,” she murmured.

“Yes, Solomon often claimed that the cup protected him from all poisons, restored his youth and vigor, and that if he caught the reflection of the sun inside it as he drank, he was able to see and speak with God. A great liar, even for his time. An excellent quality of kings.” Horuseps reached out a finger to run along the cup’s rim, but didn’t take it from her. “Cut a babe in half, did he?”

“Threatened to.”

“Ah.”

To her mild astonishment, the idea seemed to sincerely repel him. He was a demon, wasn’t he?

“There are degrees of evil,” Horuseps said distractedly, and glanced up with a thin smile. “I have, of course, seen many infants murdered in my lifetime, by parents who believed they could not spare its food, by priests who believed it would curry divine favor, and by fools, who hoped to curry mine.”

His tone was light enough and his expression seemed benign, but the mood behind his mental armor blackened and churned. Any reply might be dangerous. Mara said nothing.

“I shouldn’t take it so seriously, I know. Humans can so easily replace the young they dash upon the altar, and really, it doesn’t matter whether you kill them at thirty years of age or thirty days…or even thirty minutes. Human lives are tenuous at the best of times. All the same…” His attention drifted. He gazed without expression at the small skull on its stone shelf. “I can imagine no God who could reward the bloodletting of babes. Only Man could rationalize such a thing, try to use it to give him power. Small wonder we kill them with impunity.”

Mara busied herself with the cup.

“I suppose there’s a paradox in that,” Horuseps said after a while.

“A small one, maybe. Like Kazuul, who wanted to know how old I was.” She half-smiled at the memory. “He said he wouldn’t lie with children, and him all of four thousand years old.”

“And yourself,” Horuseps remarked. “To dare even this dark place for want of one true friend. The longer I live, the more I think there is no absolute evil, no absolute good…only the little fancies of those with power, exercising it over those without.”

“Do you believe in God?” Mara asked.

He cast her a glance and an acerbic smile. “I rather have to, being what I am. Shadows cannot exist apart from light.”

“Oh, so today you’re a biblical demon. The last time I asked, that was just a word ignorant people used for any inhuman being. What’ll it be next time?”

“Hm. I’ve passed myself off quite successfully as an alien before.” He checked her, found her unsmiling, and rolled one shoulder in his boneless shrug.

Neither of them spoke for a time. He gazed around the Reliquary, playing idly with the objects within easy reach—all but the skull, which, though it sat right beside him, he neither looked at nor touched. Seemingly unbothered by the silence, the way in which he armored his mind told her that his serenity was, like so many things about him, a facade.

Mara waited him out, inspecting the mirrors one at a time.

“I do,” he said suddenly, softly. He stared straight ahead, his face half in shadow. The uncharacteristic gravity of his expression stole much of the haunting beauty that made mistaking him for a female so easy for others, and gave him instead an equally devastating handsomeness. “I believe in God.”

Of all the answers he could have given, this was the one she’d least expected.

“Why?” she asked.

“Ah well. I consider myself an artist in the medium of cruelty,” he said, giving himself a modest pat on the chest. The gesture could not even begin to cloak the bitterness in his light tone, or the snapping hate in his eyes. “As such, I can attest that the sheer spitefulness shown in the universe’s grand design simply demands conscious direction.”

She had nothing to say to that.

“No, child. I have never seen Him, trembled before His awesome voice, or beheld His fiery hand reached down to Earth, but I do believe.” He looked back into the opposite wall, his thin jaw very hard. “And there are nights I stare into the heavens and wonder what lies in store for me when at last I go to kneel before that throne. We are not immortal, for all that we are ageless.”

Silence descended again, broken swiftly by his dry chuckle. “And other times, I confess I believe I will find that throne long vacant, tarnished by aeons of neglect. That God has fled, or worse, remains and has been driven as mad by His divinity as Man by his mortality. How fitting that would be. Still…the thought remains.” He glanced at her. “And you?”

“I never thought about it,” she answered honestly.

He nodded, smiling again, as if this answer were only what he had expected to hear.  “Yet neither do you disbelieve.”

Mara shrugged. “I never thought much about demons either, but here you are.” A stray memory bubbled up, and she had to laugh. “I didn’t believe in the Scholomance.”

“The irony.”

“I don’t think it’s ironic. I think it’s just an error.” Mara picked up Solomon’s cup again and ran her thumb over the empty place where a djinn’s soul-stone had once been. “Why do you keep these things if they don’t mean anything?”

“Dearest, if they did mean something, they would be dangerous for us to keep. Therefore, holding them is valuable as a show of power over our braver students. Besides—” He took back the cup and admired it himself. “Some of them are pretty.”

“Have you ever seen a real relic?”

“With the existence of God in doubt, I must deny it, solely because a relic must be, by definition, a holy object. If you ask, have I ever seen a magical object, why, of course I have. The making of such things is even taught here, even the least of which could put any of these to shame. I suppose you think it isn’t the same thing.”

“Is it?”

“Magic bleeds, dearest, and nothing natural may staunch its flow. Eventually, even the most powerful talismans are rendered impotent. Without God, without eternity, can something truly be said to be a relic?”

“Nothing natural,” Mara echoed, frowning.

“Perhaps I should have said nothing of Earth, where magic is itself not natural.” Horuseps waved a hand dismissively and put the cup back on the shelf. “But there are other worlds, dear Mara. Worlds beyond measure, beyond all imagining. There are worlds were magic forms in pools as natural and as vital to life as seawater on Earth, and there are worlds so blasted by the lack that any power ignited there instantly is absorbed, as drops of water sprinkled over desert sand. Yet here we are.” He looked around the cavern, his mouth twisted. “And my belief in God must grow.”

“Why don’t you leave?” Mara asked.

He turned on her fast, hissing, “I was born here!” with violence enough to send her leaping away, a mindslap aimed and trembling right at the cusp of being thrown. “This is my world also and I have every right to—” He stopped there and simply looked at her, perhaps sensing her defenses armed. The lights of his eyes dimmed. He leaned back, waving a kind of apology at her as he said, “A moot point now, Bitter Waters. The destinations may exist, yet transportation, alas, has perished. Here we are. Here we remain. We have learned, as you say, to deal.”

Mara could feel herself frowning. Horuseps, although he did not look at her, made another of those humorless half-smiles, and said, “Yet if we are such masters of magic, why not simply remake the old Roads and go where we will?”

“Obviously, it’s not that easy.”

“Oh, the pure hell of it is, it is that easy. It simply isn’t a power we possess. Only humans know the ways of opening Gates and building Roads, and they have forgotten how. Just as our magic eludes their minds, so does that one elude ours.” He was quiet for a moment. “That one,” he breathed, staring at the wall. And a little later, “All of us.” At last, he shook his head and said, “There again, behold the indisputable work of God.” He glanced around, his eyes lighting here or there as he studied the contents of the Reliquary. “Have you seen enough?”

“I suppose so. Have you shown me enough?”

“In this room, yes.” He caressed her cheek, then straightened up and clasped his long hands together. “You can, if you like, continue to search the tunnels without, as I know you’re keen to find your poor lost lamb, but if she has found her way here below, the story shan’t end well. We don’t come down here often.”

“I would like to look, thank you.”

He waited a moment, then laughed again, a far more natural laugh for him—one that was sly and filled with unspoken humor. “I note you do not gallantly urge me on about my own business, however.”

“I want my story to end well.”

A strange look came over his face, a strange feeling rippled across the well-armored surface of his mind. “One man’s happy ending is another’s tragedy, they say. It all depends upon one’s perspective.”

“I’m only interested in my own.”

“I see. Well, one can always hope. Even here…” Horuseps joined her out in the hall and looked back into the little room, his hand raised to close the rock over it. It seemed to Mara that his gaze rested on the little skull, and grew pensive again, eerily handsome in his gravity. “Even here, we are allowed hope. I’m not certain yet if that’s one of God’s little jokes…or His gift.”

This side of him fascinated her.

After a moment, he stirred, lowered his hand, and let the rock roll soundlessly in and seal itself. Horuseps smiled down at her—a broad, beaming smile—and gestured on ahead. “Any door you will, dear Mara,” he invited. “We’ll look for her together.”

*          *          *

A thorough search lasted all day and left Mara exhausted both physically and mentally. Horuseps, as good as his word, took her patiently turn by turn throughout the secret passages beneath the Nave, only returning to that cathedral-like cavern after the last of them had been opened, lit, and examined. They found artifacts from ancient lives in the form of candles, broken cups and bowls, even a heavy tarnished ring which Horuseps remarked was the signet by which they once denoted the acolytes, before they’d hit on the idea of different colored robes. They found several students hidden away to engage in furtive, often brutal acts of sex, although thankfully, none of it was of the sort that would have meant a tribunal. They found the skeletal remains of two others, both so decayed by time as to make her certain neither one could have been Connie. They even found the stash of some unknown student’s stolen library books, which Horuseps picked up and carried with him. But at last, there were no more tunnels to walk through, no more doors to open. She simply wasn’t down here.

“This makes no sense,” Mara snapped, limping over to a bench so that she could see the damage a day-long barefoot hike had done instead of just feel it. “She has to be here somewhere!”

“Agreed. Yet try not to be so discouraged—my, that looks painful—you have already seen more of the school than most of your peers, and there is still much left to search. And really, this is a good sign—here, child, let me see it.” Horuseps put his books on the bench and knelt before her. Taking one of her sore feet into his cool, thin hands he gently began stroking it. “It takes determination and great effort to elude my eyes. If your little friend was merely lost, one of us would have surely found her by now. That we have not—” He released her foot, whole and pink and pain-free, and picked up the other. “—would seem to indicate that she must be actively hiding herself.”

“Or someone else is hiding her.”

“It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t mean a friend. I mean maybe someone took her and put her someplace. Maybe she can’t get to where we’d find her.”

“Oh, I’m sure that isn’t true.”

He’d lied to her. She couldn’t see his real thoughts, but she knew the lie when he spoke it and his hands were still stroking her feet. She’d heard him lie like that before, when he’d said he didn’t know why his fellow Master had chosen to spare the life of the doomed girl at the tribunal. This time, she wasn’t about to let it go.

“Where do you think she is, Horuseps?”

“I’m sure I don’t kn—” He looked sharply at his hands, then up at her. He let go of her foot. “Know,” he finished smoothly, and smiled. “There. All better.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

He merely looked at her, his smile slipping by degrees until he was entirely serious. He sighed. “It’s possible,” he said quietly. “I shan’t lie to you.”

“Not about that,” she observed. “Then where is she? I know you have an idea.”

“I have many, and therefore, I refuse to speculate.” He glanced upwards and a second later, the bells rang, four of them. His mouth twisted, not into a victorious smile, which would have made her dead positive he had rung them himself, but in what sure felt like sincere irritation. He stood up as the first students poured into the Nave from the dining room, assuming his stateliest pose while attempting to continue the conversation without raising his voice. “What I will tell you now is that students die here quite often.”

“Because you kill them.”

“Some, yes. But by no means all, or even most. By far the greatest killer is illness or infection. Did you not wonder why it is always I who opens the portcullis, Mara? It is so that I can See the blood that is drawn from each aspirant, and cull death before it finds us. I’m sure it helps, but the damp, the chill, the mingling of so many peoples in such close quarters…all conspire to breed virulent, deadly disease. Were we to make a count even now, we would find not one human in five wholly free of it. Then we have the rock.” He reached out to give the wall behind her a pat. “Slick at times, jagged at others, and always unforgiving. Bones break, wounds fester, and students die.”

“Let’s not forget those who kill each other,” Mara said.

“Indeed, no. Nor those who kill themselves, although I daresay these are also well in the minority. There are humans of a predatory nature here, but well they know that when their prey are made extinct, they will have no one to feed on but other predators…perhaps stronger predators. And so they are careful, darling Mara, to let their rabbits slip the snare after they’ve had their fun. As for the suicides, well, it is fear of death which keeps our students so long among us.”

“And how many students hide from you?”

“How am I to answer that? I hadn’t yet realized we were missing the two whose unfortunate remains are cluttering up our saculleum. As I have mentioned, precious, there simply aren’t that many students we notice at all.”

“Then what’s the point of threatening them with a tribunal if they cut too many classes? What, do you just pick a guy at random and say—”

He held up a hand with a stern expression and she let that one go without finishing it, although she could feel her temper rising right to the limits of her control. “We have no need,” Horuseps said, frowning at her. “Our students hang themselves without our rope, dearest.”

“But how can you tell?” she demanded. “If everyone is so beneath your notice, how can you be sure?”

“It is difficult to explain to one without Sight…You!” His mind reached out past her, snatching at one of the students surrounding them. “Human called Enoch, come here.”

An older, bearded man in a white robe came skulking forward at the command, his back bent and hands pale where they pressed together.

“Now,” said Horuseps, knotting his fingers impersonally in the man’s hair and pulling him upright. “When I brought this distinguished gentleman out of his harrowing, I set a mark upon him, invisible, indelible. Here.” Horuseps touched one inky fingertip to the point between and just a bit above the man’s eyes. “The mark fades fairly swiftly, however. Each day, it must be renewed by passing through a Master’s door into the theater of his art. If ever I, or any other Master, were to discover a student in whom the mark of study has gone entirely dark, we have only to make a note of  it. Here.” Now he gestured at the neophyte’s cheek, just below his eyes. “Upon the day of Opening, these marks of truancy are forgiven, the slate struck clean. Our fine friend here has somehow managed to allot himself three days truancy in a very short span of time. Naughty boy.”

The neophyte’s eyes bulged. Mara tapped at him, frowning, and sure enough, he had spent three days sneaking down to the highest levels of the library to read rather than attend class.

“You can see this?” Mara asked dubiously. She looked, but no angle, no flex of mental effort, nothing permitted her any special vision.

“And I teach others to See, also. Run along, Enoch. In the same manner, each instructor marks his students indelibly for each year of attendance. We don’t have to remember them,” he concluded as the neophyte raced off down the wide stair to the ephebeum. “We have only to read what’s written. The irony of this is that if a student were only to stay truant, he could avoid his tribunal indefinitely. Perhaps your Connie knows this.”

“Perhaps.”

“But you don’t believe it.” Horuseps studied her out of the corner of his eyes as he watched the students clear the stair. “You don’t have a very high opinion of your little lamb’s intelligence, do you?”

“She’s here, isn’t she?”

Horuseps chuckled.

“Connie always did have more enthusiasm than study-smarts,” Mara admitted. “And enthusiasm can take you only so far. If you haven’t got anything to back it up, you end up…”

“Here?”

“In a bad way, regardless of where.”

“You’re here,” Horuseps observed with a small smile.

“I cheated my way through school,” Mara answered. “I don’t have any more brains than Connie, but I’m not enthusiastic either. I think it evens out.”

“I see.” The Nave was nearly empty now, and Horuseps looked up again with that same distracted, annoyed expression. “Forgive me, Bittersweet, I’ve kept you far longer than was my intent. I release you to your bed of hunger and to sleep.” He bowed low, and turned away.

“Won’t you offer to take me back to your place and feed me?”

His mental armor was so well-prepared that she couldn’t even tell if she’d surprised him. He glanced back, his brows twitching, but his smile was only polite. “I’m afraid I must decline your most intriguing offer tonight. I’ve business elsewhere.” He started away, paused, then said, “If you seek the comforts of cup and platter, perhaps Kazuul could accommodate you?”

“I’m hurt. You’re throwing me over.”

His smile remained, still polite, only slightly strained. “It is complicated,” he said.

“How so?”

“Because you complicate them.” He bowed again, placed his hands to his shoulders, and swept away.

She wasn’t alone long.

“Hey!”

Mara sighed. She’d felt him in the crowd, of course, and knew that he’d been lurking behind a pillar, but she had rather hoped that he would move on without her.

“Hey!” A hand caught her sleeve and tugged it. “Hey, I saved you some dinner. Where were you all day?”

“Busy.” Mara headed for her cell. Her overused legs still ached, particularly in the knees, but her feet felt great.

“Doing what? Here. I was worried about you,” Devlin continued as Mara gazed contemplatively into her hand, dripping now with greasy chunks of much-handled meat. “Someone said they saw you leaving with Master Horuseps this morning and he never showed up at class.”

“Why was anyone even watching? And do you have any bread? I can’t eat this.”

“Um…no, but I have a…a…Christ, I don’t know. A turnip? Is this a turnip?”

“It might be a parsnip,” said Mara doubtfully, exchanging the meat for the knobby root he offered.

“Some kind of nip, I dunno. And what do you mean, ‘Why were they watching’?” Devlin gave her look of scorn that would have done Le Danse proud. “People notice you, and even if they didn’t, they’d for damn sure notice Horuseps. Where did you go?”

“He was helping me look.”

Devlin gave her a blank stare. “For what?”

“For Connie, you ass.”

“No, I meant for what as in, what for? Why was he helping you? Masters don’t help.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it amused him. Maybe it was the first time anyone had asked. I don’t really care.” The parsnip, or whatever it was, was hard as wood in her hand. She tucked it into her sleeve, ignoring the urgent snarls of her stomach, determined not to wolf anything until she got to her own private cell.

“Did you find her?” Devlin asked, trotting at her heels.

“Is she standing here, you idiot?”

“That doesn’t mean you didn’t find…I mean,” he amended hurriedly, when she gave him a black stare, “She might have been hurt.”

His evasiveness reminded her of Horuseps. She replayed some of his conversation as she walked, and finally said, “Have you ever been sick, Devlin?”

“Well, of course I—Oh, you mean here? Yeah, off and on.” The admission shamed him some, a reminder of the lessons he had not learned despite all his effort. “The first year was the worst. I don’t even want to know how close I came to a tribunal. I mean, I think I actually had pneumonia, you know? God, I didn’t think that cough was ever going to go away. Felt like I had it for months. And a while back, some guy came here with something pretty nasty, some fever-thing. I don’t know, someone said it was typhoid. I don’t know if that’s what it was or not, but I was sure sick with something.”

“I didn’t think typhoid was something you could just get over on your own.”

“I didn’t. We didn’t, I mean. That was one of the few times the Masters actually got involved. Usually, they just let nature, you know, take its course.”

He was drifting again, thinking of the theater where he had fought to wrap his head around Growth, coughing into his sleeve so hard he’d actually blacked out once or twice. He’d never gotten the Word to work, not even once.

“What did they do?” Mara asked, bringing him back on track with a light tap.

“Mm? Oh. Yeah, they just came and got everyone one night. Pulled us all out of our cells one by one, dragged us into the ephebeum, and stood us up in a line. Master Toth fixed us up. Inoculated us, I guess.”

“Do I know Master Toth?”

“Probably not. He’s teaches the highest-up combinations of Growth, Entropy, and Transmutation. Which I guess makes sense if you’re going to, you know, inoculate someone.”

That was all he wanted to say, more than he wanted to say, really, but in his mind, he was there again, standing naked in a line with Master Argoth’s clawed hand like a vise around his bicep, placidly holding him while Master Toth worked with another student. The demon looked harried, which was a disturbing thing to see on one of them. Devlin stood meekly, shivering and coughing, until Toth finished and waved Argorth over, hissing his impatience. Devlin’s arm was yanked out, his hand cut open. Toth drank from the wound, then seized Devlin’s face, wedged his jaws open, and drove…something down his throat. Not a tongue. Hard, leathery…and hollow. It scraped down into his esophagus and then disgorged some kind of thick, hot sludge where Devlin couldn’t even gag on it. Toth withdrew, spat a few times as Devlin staggered, and then waved him aside and reached for the next one. “No stamina,” the demon was hissing to himself, his eyes huge and ringed with white like that of a spooked horse. “We’ll lose half of them no matter what we do. Ra, no, pointless, that one! Dead already and still walking! Just throw him on the pile, Nezgulon. Ra, show mercy and crush his skull! Next one, quickly!” And then the dizziness struck, and after it, the pain, and then Argoth was carrying him back to his cell, screaming and writhing and pouring sweat. For hours, he’d lain on the floor, insensible and raving, but when an exhausted Suti’ok brought his hounds skulking around at first-bell looking for bodies, he was alive and the cough and fever were gone.

“Does that happen often?” Mara asked, sharing this memory with a faint sense of alarm.

“I wouldn’t say often, but it’s not unheard of. This one guy told me they had to do it something like ten times before they figured out how to screen for, you know, HIV and all that. And one of the really old guys said it was the same way with one of the other sex-diseases, I don’t know which one. And, you know, sometimes the flu will get real bad, but most of the time, they’re perfectly happy to watch us die, except that if we all go, they won’t—” The Black Door loomed suddenly in his mind and gooseflesh popped out over his arms. “—get what they want from us,” he finished.

“What happens when people die?”

“I don’t know. Master Suti’ok gets told. Him and his…the hounds. They take care of it, you know…the body.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what they do with it. It’s not a big deal.”

“I’d think the complications of disposing of a corpse inside a closed environment like this one would be a damned big deal, particularly if they’re so against the spread of virulent disease.”

“I’m sure they just chuck it out a window somewhere.”

“I’m sure they don’t. All it would take is one tourist finding a heap of human skulls and everyone would know about this place.”

“Okay, so they’re burying them. The rock doesn’t make much difference. The Masters can just magic a grave open and shut.” Devlin was not thinking of the meat they were so often served in the dining hall, not on the surface anyway, but deep down, that connection had been made and squashed again with real horror, because he ate the meat here, he always would, and therefore, he would not allow it to be anything but meat. “But there’s no graveyard or anything, if that’s what you’re after. I don’t think anybody keeps track of who dies.”

No one keeps track…but that didn’t make much sense, did it? After all, someone had kept track of the new arrivals. Mara remembered all at once tapping at the mind of Gamaliel, who called himself the archivist, whose studies were interrupted each year so that he might enter the names of the aspirants into the Book.

Perhaps he also crossed them out.

CHAPTER TEN

She dreamed of Kazuul again and, preoccupied with the trouble of how to get down to the archivist’s room unseen and where the book might be if it wasn’t there, she didn’t even notice until the health monitor flashed the faint blue of orgasm. She glanced down at the dream spooling out on the other screen, saw her hands scratching blood from the demon’s broad, stone-grey back, and immediately sprang up to look at her vitals.

He wasn’t there. No careful touches below the Mindstorm’s radar, no whispers in the darkness, no Kazuul with her in her cell. Just a dream.

Clearly, she needed to get laid.

The figures on the monitor moved together in violent, kinetic sex, neither one with any obvious consideration for the other. It held a certain attraction, she couldn’t deny it, and so she settled herself again in the air to watch the fantasy play out, aware of a faint wistfulness in her as she did so. She had to be so restrained in real life. A man’s idea of an uninhibited woman meant moaning extra loud, maybe a little play-scratching. Not this. Mara liked to fight.

Kazuul, bound to be the victor of any combat, gave back as good as he got, savaging her when she bit, wrestling her arms to the ground when she clawed him, and always battering her to new heights with his fierce and furious thrusts. Dream-Mara screamed, the furious pleasure of a heat-crazed cat, then attacked, driving him back so she could leap atop him. Savaging him into position, she rode at her pace, back arched, teeth bared.

He tolerated it, growling as he gathered his strength. Then his hand knotted in her hair, dragging her up by the head only to throw her down again on her belly. His thigh wedged between hers; he entered roughly from behind and dropped his entire weight over her, grinding her into the floor with complete abandon. Crushed immobile, she slapped spastically back at him and came and came.

Good times…and yet Mara couldn’t help but notice that this was turning into a suspiciously long dream. The average length for her, after all, was somewhere around three minutes, and she’d probably been watching at least that long already. She looked at her vitals again and again found them untouched by outside forces. On the dream-monitor, Kazuul reared back onto his haunches, his claws digging into her hips as he moved her fast back and forth on his cock, not even fucking her as much as masturbating with her body. It was impossible to tell whether she were even struggling at this point, or just fucking back at him. She came again, washing the health-monitor with blue, and then he bucked her off, yanked her up by the hair, and gagged her screams of pleasure with his cock.

A very long dream. As a test, Mara made her dreamself bite him.  He roared, dug in his claws, and drove himself deep into her throat, holding her there. Oddly, she needed air in her dreams. She thrashed wildly as Kazuul growled above her, grinding his hips against her face, and just as she began to lose consciousness (how could you even do that in a dream?), he shoved her back and fell over her again.

No way was this a dream. Mara gave the monitors a final baffled inspection, and then woke her body brusquely and dropped back inside it.

She’d been cumming, and every nerve still tingled as she sat up and stared around her empty cell. She saw nothing, not with her eyes and not in the Mindstorm, but nevertheless felt the unmistakable residue of another person’s will around her. He wasn’t connecting, not really, and that was just as inexplicable to her because it meant that he was blindly pumping thought at her mind even though he couldn’t possibly know if it was being received, and what in hell could he be getting out of it if that was the case?

And how was he doing this? Mara got up, grabbing for her robe, and heard a dull clatter as something caught up in the one she used for a pillow fell out. It didn’t register right away, but when it did, she knelt down and carefully felt along the floor until she found it. When her fingers brushed its solid sides, Kazuul’s will enveloped her, bringing the dream, and countless other dreams just like it, hammering against her.

Mara gloved her hand in folds of robe and cautiously picked it up, exploring its shape in her lightless cell. It wasn’t a rock. That would have been weird enough. For all that the mountain and all its furnishings were made of stone, it was solid stone. Not a lot of loose pebbles here. But no, this wasn’t a rock. This was bone, smooth and hard in her hand, somewhat tapered at one end and rounded at the base. Like a horn.

Or like one of the spikes that grew from Kazuul’s body.

Mara put her robe on. She went out into the hall and groped her way to the blister lamp there, slapping at it until it came to groggy life. She looked, and by God, that was exactly what it was: one of his spikes. There was no way that got in her cell, in her bed, by accident.

He was using it somehow, transmitting himself through all this rock into her dreams. Impressive. Infuriating, but impressive.

Mara took it with her down the hall to the first occupied cell she found and gave it a toss through the narrow window onto the soft mound of a sleeping student. Let that be a fun discovery for both of them.

But now she was awake, and even though it was forbidden to run amok after hours, the temptation to use this time to her advantage was more then she could resist. Mara made her way cautiously into the ephebeum, reaching out ahead of her as far as possible, but touched on no one.

Slowly, silently, Mara crept down the winding tunnels and flights of darkened stairs, until she came to the Great Library.

The upper landing was empty apart from her, but several initiates moved down below her. She remembered only too well the timeless quality of that place—without day, without night, without peace. The initiates worked and slept and suffered exactly as they had done during her service, oblivious to her, to everything. The Scrivener sat in his desk, licking at some of his eyes and rumbling to himself in idiot bliss.

God, she did not want to do this.

Gritting her teeth, Mara dropped into the Panic Room and started down the stairs. Every step brought her closer to the librarian’s toxic seepage, but she was unaware of it until was on the final flight and felt it closing in over her head. The sound of all-knowledge, like cicadas screaming in her brain, consumed her senses even as the Mindstorm blacked out. She could feel it humming at her from without, relentless, indefatigable.

She didn’t have time to be overwhelmed by it, not today. Mara fought her way across the floor, giving the Scrivener’s desk a wide berth (still, he reached for her as she passed by, gronking happily) on her way to where she’d originally entered. One or two of the initiates raised their heads when she opened the heavy door, but said nothing. Thoughts of freedom fluttered briefly and were swallowed again by other things. Terrible things.

Mara slipped out into the stairwell on the other side and closed the door quickly. Quiet, not silence, but better than nothing. She took her body back and climbed rapidly down the narrow stair she remembered, feeling her way along the wall.

A mind ahead of her, drowsing and bored, but human.

She went carefully around the corner into the glow of a blister-lamp and saw a man sitting on a heap of red robes, only half-awake, serving his time as he waited for this year’s batch of newcomers to free themselves from the Oubliettes. Mara entered him, slid out a needle-thin shred of her own will, and jabbed it in deep to a very particular place. The man jerked hard and suddenly sagged, fast asleep. He never saw her, never knew she was there.

There had to be a tunnel leading from here around to the portcullis, but going through the Oubliette was bound to be quicker than looking for it. Mara went to the first set of double doors she saw (and there were many, reaching out in both directions through this room and out into the halls), and touched them, driving her will at them until they opened. It was much easier than she remembered.

Was this her Oubliette? No, there was someone in here. A man, the guy who’d thought he was a bear when he first reached the summit of the Scholomance. Mara remembered him standing there, his fists raised, roaring. Now he shrank back from her, crying and jabbering at her, unable to understand if she were real or another dream, another nightmare.

Mara left the doors open for light, found the other one, and opened it the same way. Outside, the tunnel was dark and bitterly cold. As Mara felt her way along, her naked toes touched ice hiding in the crevices of the floor, only once in a while at first, but more and more often as she continued on. By the time she reached the room where she had been forced to strip and relinquish her possessions, she was walking on a thin sheet of ice. It was only early November, but may as well be in the heart of winter in these mountains.

November. Three weeks until Thanksgiving, give or take. She wondered if the care service people would do anything special for her mom. Rosalie usually had holidays and she always asked Mara for a little extra cooking money. She pocketed most of it, of course, but she was a darn good cook, so Mara kept shelling it out. Last year, she’d baked a tiny pumpkin pie and a game-hen as part of a whole miniature Thanksgiving-Day spread. Her mom had seemed to enjoy it.

Mara no longer believed she was going to be out in time for the holiday. For that matter, she wasn’t certain she’d be back in time for Christmas. It didn’t bother her, but she knew it should. Her finances were in order. Her mom would be taken care of for years yet. And if not, if something did happen…well, maybe it would be the incentive Caroline Warner needed to stop faking crazy and start acting like a person again. Mara could only be there for one person, and it was Connie.

The thought came to her, without rancor or resentment, that her mother might actually see having to pay her own way as a fair price to finally be rid of her strange, white-eyed daughter. There had never been much love in that family, and none at all after Mara became old enough to understand that the voices she heard belonged to other people and not everyone could hear them. Maybe if there had been, Mara’s filial devotion would have outweighed the interrupted friendship between her and Connie. Maybe.

Kind of pointless to speculate now.

The desk where Gamaliel had registered the aspirants was empty now, but Mara found the book in a chest underneath his chair, where it was mostly protected from the constant dripping and frozen air. The chest had no lock; the book did, but it gave after a few good whacks on the corner of the stone desk. Mara took it over to the nearest blister-lamp and found the page with this year’s maroon-streaked names. There were no dates, but that didn’t much matter. She began to read backwards, and there, just sixteen lines above her own Kaspar Cortoreal, the word Faith had been penned in over a bar of dried blood.

That was all. One word. No secret code to follow, no cryptic hints, no death-denoting line through the middle. Just Faith.

Mara touched it. She didn’t know why. It couldn’t tell her anything. She touched it anyway, and felt only the stiffness of the stained paper beneath her fingertips. “Only this and nothing more,” murmured Mara.

Other names had been drawn over, though, quite a few of them, which made her theory sound. She flipped through the pages of the book one at a time, not reading it so much as meditating over it. Five years, eight, ten. She saw the name Astregon squeezed in between Childer (Deceased) and Aurora (tribunal). It was another six pages before she saw her first (Graduant), and then another, and so on until the names were almost completely accounted for in this fashion.

Assuming two or three years per page, and assuming the book’s records were accurate (and she know it wasn’t infallible, since she and Horuseps had found bodies unaccounted for), some of the students listed here had first entered the Scholomance over a hundred years ago. And Horuseps was right, there were far more names marked dead than graduated, and far more graduates than victims of a tribunal.

At least Connie wasn’t counted among them. Not yet.

What if she really was hiding? Not taken, not imprisoned, but only hiding? There were a thousand twisting passages here, ten thousand dimly-lit rooms. Maybe she was running around while the others slept, thieving crumbs from the kitchens and running from the sound of footsteps, secure in the knowledge that her psychic friend would come and find her no matter where she hid, and completely ignorant of the baffling effect of heavy minerals on Mara’s telepathic prowess.

Scarily plausible.

She’d never even considered the possibility that she would have to look for Connie once she got here. Now that she thought about it, she supposed the only difficulty she’d really anticipated was how to find the school. Once on the inside, she supposed she’d expected to find her friend at the door with her bags packed, just like escape was another sleepover from their childhood.

Mara flipped back to the first page of the book, but saw nothing, really. It had told her all it could. She would learn nothing more here.

Replacing it in its protective chest, Mara left the portcullis for the Oubliette. The victorious bear whose test it had been had nerved himself to creep out at last. She found him huddled in the robes just outside, hiding his face against the sleeping acolyte’s side as Mara passed and holding very still. Whatever. The acolyte would wake up on his own sooner or later and who would be there to say that Mr. Bear hadn’t willed his doors open fairly?

Re-entering the library took more willpower, but she was across and up the stairs in seconds. She met no one in the tunnels, heard no sound apart from her own footsteps. She felt no mind…until she came out in the ephebeum.

Mara gasped and swung a scant instant before Horuseps murmured, “Out for a stroll, my dear?”

His blown-glass body gleamed in the darkness, illuminating nothing but his own self, fading to black at his hips. He stepped away from the wall where he’d been leaning, uncrossed his arms, draped one of them casually over her shoulders and began to walk, not towards her cell, but to the wide stair that led to the Nave. “It is forbidden for students to wander out of hours. I believe I’ve mentioned this.”

“Will there be a tribunal?” Mara asked. Her voice didn’t shake; she was proud of that. Her mind flexed. She’d never really used it as a weapon before, not a real weapon, but no toy slap would do now.

“Oh, it isn’t that forbidden,” Horuseps said dismissively, waving his other hand. “But where were you?”

“The Great Library.”

His arm tightened on her shoulders, although his tone remained light. “Now it is that forbidden to borrow books.”

“I didn’t take anything.” And before he could question her further, she said, “Were you waiting for me?”

“Oh yes.”

“Why?”

“Need you ask?”

Was this about Kazuul? “Humor me,” she said.

He glanced at her, and behind his sly smile, Mara clearly heard his desire to dangle his purpose over her, to torture her, however casually, for the few short minutes he had, but no. He would tell her and his reason for doing so had less to do with a generous nature than his recollection of the easy way in which she’d pierced his mind the last time she believed she’d been dared to do so. If he gave her cause, she would do it again. She was so much stronger now, so soon…

“I’m sorry,” Mara said, genuinely surprised. “Are those supposed to be secret thoughts?”

Horuseps removed his arm and darkness dropped between their minds. “How good of you to bring the deficit to my attention,” he said. “Although perhaps not very wise. There’s very little more enticing to me than an honest streak running through a delightfully amoral soul. You’ve been warned.”

“Warned,” she repeated scornfully. “You’re the Master here. If you see something enticing, demand it.”

“You shameless flirt. This way.”

Across the Nave, through an open door, down yet another winding passageway. There were no lights here. Mara followed the white cut of the demon’s body in the blackness, letting one hand trail along the damp tunnel wall for balance. Her feet, badly burned by the icy floors below the library, hurt terribly, but she refused to limp. He had a reason for all this and her intuition told her it would be worth the hassle, but still she didn’t entirely rule out the possibility of a trap.

“Here,” said Horuseps, pausing before one of the rare closed doors of the Scholomance. It opened at his touch and a blister-lamp within came to a slow and sullen life. “Your diligence inspired me,” the demon said as he drew aside to let her enter. “I have been searching the private chambers of my fellow Masters. I found her among Malavan’s harem.”

Dark brown hair spilled in curls off the end of the stone ledge where the girl lay. It didn’t quite serve for a bed. Her arms overhung the sides. Her fingers twitched, about every four seconds, as steady as a metronome. The hands were too small, not just to be Connie’s, but to be real. Like the tiny feet at the end of the girl’s twitching, elegant legs, they were sized for a child on the body of a woman. Her breasts were not large, but perfectly-formed and perfectly-placed upon her delicate torso. Her waist was too small, her hips too rounded, her sex as hairless and smooth as Mara’s own. In fact, apart from the glossy curls growing from the girl’s head, she had no hair at all, no scars, no blemishes or birthmarks, nothing to disturb the perfect whiteness of her body. As for the face…there was none.

It wasn’t ruined, wasn’t torn or mangled beyond recognition. It was gone, wiped clean, a perfect porcelain blank. The brow was high and smooth and regally rounded down into heart-shaped cheekbones and chin, but she had no features, apart from a tiny pointed nose, which was the girl’s only means of respiration. It was beautiful, that was the worst of it, beautiful in its macabre inhumanity, a face that epitomized anonymity in perfection.

“It isn’t her,” said Mara.

“Are you certain?”

Mara tapped at the mushy remains of the girl’s mind. There were no more thoughts, no true memories, but there were impressions, as with every mind, a kind of sediment built up after years of existence that were absolutely unique to each individual, and it endured even after the existence itself had been rendered obsolete. “It’s not Connie,” she said again. But it had been someone.

“Pity. I’m afraid I was rather harsh with Malavan. Now I shall have to apologize.”

“You’re not taking her back to him?”

“Not this instant, but yes, I might as well. For certain, she’s not much use elsewhere.” Horuseps lifted the girl’s dangling hand and arranged it on her soft, white belly, but its twitching soon dislodged it. “Malavan has been warned, of course, not to fill his harem from the student body, but—”

“No one noticed.”

“No.” He met her eyes without apology, as if daring her to push the matter.

She’d always found it difficult to let a dare go. “Will there be a tribunal?”

The demon’s long eyebrows twitched up in surprise. “Against a Master?”

“He broke the law, didn’t he?”

“It’s really more of a suggestion. Besides, it’s entirely possible that the girl was herself punished for breaking the lesser of our laws…perhaps he caught her out of her cell before first-bell.”

“Or perhaps he just liked the look of her feet.”

Horuseps gave her a quick smile. “So you noticed that, did you? Ah well, we all have our own affectations.”

“What are yours?”

“Oh, I’m quite boring, I assure you, especially compared to some. Master Uulok, for example, favors amputees.”

Mara opened her mouth to ask how many amputees could possibly have made the climb up the steep mountainside, and then realized that was exactly his point. “Let me guess. There’s no law against that, either.”

Horuseps shrugged.

“Do the students here have any rights at all?” Mara demanded, beginning to lose her temper in spite of every effort to rein it in.

“They had the right to stay away,” Horuseps replied mildly. “But gave it up to enter here. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but as someone or another once said, they knew it wasn’t nursery school.”

Mara looked at the faceless girl, at her flawless skin and perfect beauty. She had been made into a doll, as near to inanimate as any living thing could be. She served only one purpose now, to be an object of admiration, a vessel of lust. And it was not a crime.

“If this had been Connie,” Mara said slowly, watching the delicate hands jump and dance. “What would have happened next?”

“Next?”

“Yes, next. The interval between me discovering my best friend transformed into Master Malavan’s cock-sleeve and me leading her out of this mountain. Next.”

“Leading,” Horuseps echoed, looking at the twitching doll with something like amusement.

Mara’s temper slipped again. Holding on to it had a weight now. She was beginning to tremble from the exertion of keeping it. “Yes, leading,” she said, somewhat hoarsely, although still calm, still in control. “Because, you see, if there were no way to restore her from this condition, it would be the same as finding her dead.”

“I suppose so.” He began to look slightly disturbed, as if this scenario had not yet occurred to him. He too considered the body of the girl on the slab. “The human mind is remarkably pliable. What Malavan dismantled could, I’m certain, be repaired.”

“By you?”

“Sadly, my talents lie elsewhere. But any of the tribe of Ochalis could engender her healing, if properly motivated.”

“Then fix her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Fix her!” Mara pointed and the faceless girl’s whole body bucked once, as if in response. “Find one of these tribesmen and fix her!”

Horuseps, looking pained, raised his hands in a kind of entreaty. “Dear child—”

“He shouldn’t have done it, you said so yourself!”

“I said he shouldn’t have taken a student—”

“What, you think he sent for her through the mail? Of course she’s a student!”

“Every Master has the right to take what he desires.”

“He didn’t just take her, God damn it, he changed her! Don’t tell me that’s not wrong!”

“Morality,” Horuseps began, then abruptly came a step closer and dropped to one knee before her, reaching up for her hand as a man proposing. Mara jerked back, but he held his pose, his empty hand outstretched, entreating. “Morality, dearest Mara, is born of human frailty. The perceptions of right and wrong are merely Man’s feeble attempt to protect himself, his property, his life and his way of life. Morality, my darling one, is mortality. It does not apply here.”

Mara looked from him in disbelief to the spastic, silent doll of Malavan’s sex-toy. “Some things are wrong,” she insisted. “Some things are always wrong!”

“No!” He closed the gap between them in a lunge, his bare hand closing like iron around her wrist, and in that touch was only a baffling, overpowering sincerity, and his determination to make her understand a thing so element that it was to him like explaining life’s reliance upon sunlight. “We are not human. We do not require a code of conduct to keep us above the petty hurts of the Earth. We are its Masters and for us, there is no morality but only privilege.”

Mara yanked, but could not break his grip. She slapped at him with her mind instead, and Horuseps released her at once, showing her his empty palms. “You can preach to me all you want,” Mara spat. “But that is not what we agreed to when we got here and you know it goddamn well.”

“Is it wrong for the wolf to feed upon the rabbit?” Horuseps countered in the same patient tone. “Is it sickening to one’s ethical senses when the spider traps and binds the moth? It is the nature of the strong to subdue the weak.”

“Wolves don’t rip off the faces of their rabbits before fucking them into Jello!” Mara shouted. “Don’t feed me this bullshit! It is not the same!”

Horuseps started to speak, then seemed to give up. He sighed, dropped his arms, and rose to his former stately height. “Malavan is, of course, a wretched little deviant who knows better than to prey on those who do not yet deserve punishment. But that does not make what he does with his playthings ‘wrong’. Nevertheless, I will see what can be done to mend this creature’s mind.” He spread his hands, mutely asking if she were satisfied.

She was shaking, she realized. Actually shaking with anger. She’d never been so mad in her life, never. And she hated it, hating losing even this much control. Mara got a lock on her emotions, battled them down, and spoke only when she was confidant her voice would not betray her. “While you’re asking around for a healer,” she said, “you’d better mention that I will be searching every room in this mountain myself, and that includes the private harems of every Master.”

His eyebrows twitched. He frowned, opened his mouth.

“And if I find ‘this creature’ or anyone else like her, hidden under any Master’s bed, may God help him because I will make it my mission to make him as sorry as any of you soulless sons of bitches can be!”

“So be it,” Horuseps said quietly. “But I would advise you to think well, dear Mara, before issuing edicts of this sort. I rather suspect my brothers shall be disinclined to give you all the mountain to take away. Will you sacrifice your Connie to save this one?”

‘Calm down,’ Mara told herself. It wasn’t the time to make demands, and no…this was not the person to make them over.

The faceless woman twitched.

“Do you have one?” Mara demanded, not looking at him. “Is that the reason for all your concern? Have you got a little toy of your own chained to your bed?”

“I? Alas, the centuries have left me thoroughly jaded. I can abide no lover’s company for longer than one night. My bed is as cold and empty as your own. And you should return to it, child. Before the bells ring to expose your unlawful sojourn, return to your cell. Mara.”

She had turned away, but looked back now, as calm as she should be, even when she saw the demon’s hand resting on the girl’s white belly as he would any inanimate object. Horuseps gazed at her, not smiling, and kept his thoughts well-hidden.

“Do not think too harshly of us,” he said at last.

“That’s twice you’ve said that. Why do you care what I think?”

“We are long accustomed to taking what we desire,” he said, and turned up one corner of his mouth. “Perhaps I desire your goodwill.”

“You don’t have it,” she said bluntly, killing his little smile. “Not while that—” The girl twitched, as if she heard and knew she was being singled out. “—or anyone like her is shut up with your brothers, and students are ripped apart for cutting class. Not while Connie is missing. You’re no better than they are, Horuseps. You’re no different from Malavan!”

He flinched, not in his face, which remained cool and slightly smiling, but in his mind, where a flinch was far more difficult to cover. He did not blink, simply looked at her, and the longer he looked, the harder it was to hold on to her anger. He did not remind her that he had been at her side searching for Connie under the Nave, but she thought about that anyway. And he had been looking on his own time, hadn’t he? Possibly at some personal risk. At least, he’d been willing to tangle with Malavan when he’d thought this might be Connie, and he’d come to get her right away. Eventually, seething, she had to look away, and the only thing in the room to look at besides him was the faceless, twitching, mindless doll he’d brought her.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said finally. There was no forgiveness in his voice. “I did know of Malavan’s propensity to amuse himself with stolen bodies. And I know there may be others. Certainly, when students go missing in this mountain, they are most often found in a Master’s bed. But you, my bittersweetness, you cannot possibly think to boldly dare those dragons’ dens and have them all out.”

The faceless woman’s breath moved in and out of her, smooth, unconcerned. Her arms jumped, flopped.

“But I will,” Horuseps said.

Mara’s chest squeezed out a single harsh laugh. “Sure you will.”

“I give you my word.”

She wanted to spit on him. She’d never in her life wanted to spit on another living thing, but she could think of nothing that would feel better. She turned around, away from him.

“The vow of an immortal is not the fickle thing of Man,” Horuseps said with real heat, although he did not move. “We lie as pleases us, but when we swear upon our lives to do a thing, it is the end of our lives to renege. This is not a question of morality, child, or virtues, or indecencies. I am giving you my word. I have no desire to die, Mara. Nevertheless, I do swear upon mine own unnatural death that I shall inspect the harems of my brothers. I will turn out any I find that may conceivably be your Connie.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Even so.”

She swung back to him, her useless hands in fists. “How am I supposed to trust you when you’re so damned proud of living without a conscience? I can’t believe a word you say now! Swear me anything!”

“I acknowledge the paradox,” he said evenly. “Yet morality is, as I have said, mortality. As it means my own mortality to break my given oath, you may believe me now.”

“Even if you were telling me the truth, why would you do it? What do you think I’m going to give you in return?”

He looked at her, his eyes very dark and full of movement. “If I do not take it upon myself to investigate my brothers,” he said at last, “I honestly believe that you will, because you are very young and, at times, mind-swimmingly stupid.”

Mara clamped her jaws shut on her first instinctive reply. She would not lose her temper twice. She was calm.

“So I will go. I will not enjoy it. In fact, I suspect I will be quite cross with you until my vow is satisfied. But I will go, because your life is worth a great deal to someone we both know, and if you insult me by asking whom, I will slap your face.”

“Do you hear me asking?” She knew damned well who.

“Good. Then return to your cell, child. Now. While I still have some affection for you.” He turned and started to gather up the twitching doll.

Mara headed for the door, paused and stood with her head bent and her fingernails digging at her palms. Then she went back to him—I will be calm—stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed his glass-smooth cheek.

He flinched. Hard. And stared at her.

“Thank you,” she told him. “I’m sorry I insulted you. I’m very young and mind-swimmingly stupid and frequently something of a bitch, but I know enough to say thank you when someone sticks his neck out for me.”

She was covering her bases and she thought he probably knew it, even though she kept her motives locked up deep and tight. There was no sense in making an enemy out of Horuseps, particularly over the fate of a total stranger, however horrifically-used that stranger might be. She could kiss ass with the best of them when she had to.

But his star-filled eyes seemed to soften, even if nothing else about him did. “Accepted,” he said, and let her feel his sincerity. “We immortals live too long to carry grudges. Good night, precious. You are always first in my heart.”

She went, forgiven, and tried not to hear the limp smacking of the twitching woman’s hands as they rose and fell against the stone.

*          *          *

Mid-day already, or mid-night, depending on one’s perspective. Mara walked the halls of the lyceum, trying to think about the Masters who taught there, about what or who might be hidden away in the rooms below the theaters, about Horuseps and his word of honor…about Connie. She couldn’t quite manage to bring any of it into focus. Kazuul wanted her.

This was not an idle thought. His wanting itched in the back of her mind in what he no doubt believed to be a subtle suggestion. She wasn’t sure when he’d planted it (it had surely been subtle enough at its seeding) but she suspected he’d gotten her during the morning meal. At least, she was confident it had not been there when she and Devlin went into the roar and press of the dining hall. In the midst of that noise, a little psychic dart might have easily escaped her notice, although it was several hours before her irritation at this unshakeable fixation caused her to hunt down the source.

A psychic seed, and a much better one than anything she’d ever planted. He’d slid it in into her as easily as his broken spike beneath her pillow, and it was having much the same effect, except that she was awake now, awake and still dreaming his dreams. It had been easy enough to find, despite his obvious skill and power. He’d been apparently unwilling to risk piercing the Panic Room and drawing her notice, and so had hidden the suggestion in the Mindstorm instead. It was a good hiding place, all things considered, but once she’d known to look for it, it was only too obvious where it had to be. No, finding it was easy. Uprooting it was another matter.

Mara sat by the pool in the central cavern of the lyceum for what felt like hours, her body switched off and staring while she circled the damn thing in her mind, trying to pry it out. No good. He’d put it into her as deeply as he himself obviously planned to be once he’d worn her down. She was just going to have to live with it until it died. None of hers had ever lasted longer than ten or twelve hours. His, Christ, who knew?

In the meantime, he wanted her. As with his ‘subtle’ assault of the previous night, he bombarded her with half-grasped images of lust and violence. His breath on her neck, his claws tearing at her hips, the phantom flood of his seed filling her—even awareness of the interloping suggestion could not counteract its effects. Unceasingly throughout the day, he made his wordless demand and succeeded, not so much in making her want him, but at least in making her want someone.

She wandered in and out of classrooms in a daze of distraction, infuriated each time she caught herself merely going through the motions of the search. She sensed, or thought she sensed, a kind of sly amusement in the Masters she interrupted at lessons, which only made her temper flare dangerously close to the edge of her control.

Kazuul. He had made her the butt of some joke and he would not be satisfied until the whole mountain laughed. Well, Mara had never been renowned for her good sense of humor, but everyone who knew her knew better than to cross her. By God, he was going to learn too.

But not until this suggestion died away. Mara worked her way to a bare stretch of wall and leaned against it, one hand rubbing restlessly at her stomach, which was not what she wanted rubbed. She shut her eyes and scoured the Mindstorm with her stare, seeing herself behind the idiot flashes of color and sound cast off by the students of the Scholomance—herself in ecstasy beneath Kazuul.

“Having troubles?”

A Master’s voice. Not the dark silk of Horuseps or the rolling thunder of hated Kazuul, but the cracked granite of Malavan. He came out of the shadows in his hunched, stalking way, his eyes level as a cat’s, furious. Mara started walking; he cut across her path. She turned around; he lunged and drove the tip of one long claw through her robe and into the rock, striking sparks to prick and burn at her bare feet.

She was caught and she knew it, but with Kazuul’s fantasies eating up her mind, she wasn’t capable of feeling trapped by him. She looked at him as he bared his black teeth at her and felt only a throbbing knot of impatience.

He heaved himself upright, bracing his weight on the points of his claws, so as to bring his hot eyes on a level with hers. “You have robbed me of my harem,” he growled, his breath burning on her face and stinking of shadows and blood.

Mara said nothing.

The demon grunted through his teeth, twitching the hem of her robe aside to appraise her feet. “Perhaps I should take you to replace them.”

Even Kazuul’s relentless carnal drumming could not make this a pleasant prospect, but Mara did not flinch.

Malavan’s eyes narrowed. The tips of the fleshy tendrils he grew for hair began to pulse red. “On your knees.”

So she knelt, feeling neither dread nor rebellion, but only a tense frustration which she didn’t bother to disguise from him. In her experience, the best and most bloodless way of dealing with a bully was to make him feel insignificant. And because she knew Malavan was not a strong psychic, she did not merely place her impatience on display for him, but drove it into whatever passed for his subconscious, stabbing at him repeatedly with needles of her annoyance and disdain.

It almost worked. She could sense his determination curdling the longer he held her stare. In another minute, half that maybe, he might have dropped and slunk away, but the mind can be an unpredictable target, especially when one cannot clearly see what one is stabbing. One of her needles sank in too close to the surface, and suddenly Malavan felt a bilious surge of disembodied humiliation. It found an anchor in Mara’s projected contempt and turned instantly to fury and the need to see her suffer for looking on him in his shame.

He reared, blowing a reptilian sort of roar down at her in hateful defiance, and spread his thighs. He had no obvious genitals, but as she withdrew from his mind, a nearly imperceptible crease low on his abdomen buckled outward, releasing a pungent wash of musk first and then his red, raw-looking phallus, sharply-tapered and gnarled by veins. The heat of it against her face was a furnace; the stench, bestial and unclean. Mara looked up between the bone blades of his claws, silently daring him to make his next command.

He didn’t give it, but he did think about it. Not because he wanted it—he had no real sexual urge at the moment, in spite of the lie proclaimed by his jutting cock—but because he wanted to punish her. She had taken away his Pretty One, and then Horuseps had come for the others as well: his Sleeper, his Song Bird, even his Little Laugh. (The flickering images that accompanied these nomenclatures were too awful to hold and examine for detail, but worst of all was Little Laugh, whose screaming giggles were born out of some shred of mad awareness.) Now she dared to face him with disdain, with superior sufferance, with contempt for one of the Lesser Tribes, and he wanted to cut that haughty shine from her and replace it with humiliation. He wanted to drag her out before human eyes and climb her naked back and take his revenge with every whimpering grunt that escaped her lips.

Malavan’s thighs flexed. The tip of his angry cock twitched and dripped pale fluid onto the floor between Mara’s knees. He leaned over her, his fleshy hair burning red up to his skull now, and more color pulsing at his throat. “Even the mighty Kazuul,” he snarled, dripping drool onto her robe, “cannot know everything. And when he has you at last, precious, he’ll have my leavings.”

And the next words would have been his command, she could feel it pounding in his crude mind, along with every way in which he meant to have her before he left her for the other students to make use of, but he never got to say them.

“Hold, brother!” boomed out a good-natured voice. “Hold and give me welcome!”

Malavan yanked one claw and slammed it down behind Mara, covering her in his heat and stink. He hissed, his breath rattling in his lungs, through his yellow teeth, onto Mara’s back.

“No more of that,” the other said, his cheer heavily tempered by an ominous note of warning. “Thou art alone at a table set for plenty and I will be fed. Takest thou whichever end, and I shall have the other. My rod hath not been wetted since the moon showed her fullest f—”

A sharp intake of breath, a moment’s stillness, and then Mara was wrenched back by a clawed hand pulling at her hair. She winced up into a bone-studded, astonished face, and then was yanked fully off the ground and swung around behind the newcomer’s muscular thigh by her hair alone.

“Art thou mad?” this demon demanded, dragging Mara with him as he backed up. “Dost thou not know who thou wouldst cross with this act?”

Malavan’s mouth peeled back on a sullen sneer.

The stranger uttered a long, low, unamused laugh. “And who thou art crossing now?” Suddenly, he shoved Mara to the floor and stepped on her, pressing her painfully flat as he lunged forward to strike his chest in challenge. “Who art thou to show me thy sparking eyes? Drop, worm, else I drop thee, and whet my cock with the blood of Malavanon!”

Malavan pulled his claws and dropped into a surly crouch, his gaze averted and his lips tight together. There was no satisfaction in the sight, not with the demon’s foot crushing at her from above. Mara groped behind her, caught his spurred ankle, and tried in vain to shift him as grey light began to explode before her eyes.

“On thy way, crawling thing. If next I spy thee so, I’ll pull thy limbs and send thee forth on thy belly as the worm thou art.” But he stepped back and dragged a gasping Mara roughly up onto her feet. “Art injured?” he asked gruffly, glaring after Malavan’s retreat.

“No,” she managed.

“Art violated?”

“What? No!”

He grunted and released her, still without looking at her. “To thy cell then, or to study. Wander not these unlit halls.” He gave her a shove to start her going and stalked off in the opposite direction, snarling under his breath in an inhuman tongue.

Dost thou not know who thou wouldst cross…

Mara tipped her head back, staring up as though she could see through layers of rock to the theater that crowned them all. Kazuul’s desires rang even more insistently through her blood, amplified by her thoughts of him, for as sure as she was standing here and not bent under Malavan’s pumping weight, Kazuul’s mark on her had saved her.

“Wait!” she shouted, and the demon, now merely a dark blur deep in the shadowed tunnel, halted. He did not turn to face her. She thought he drew his hands up into fists, but couldn’t be sure. Even when she quickly moved to catch up to him, he did not look at her. “Who are you?” she asked.

The muscles of his bone-studded back tightened. “A creature not to be toyed with.”

“I’m not. I only want to know…” But where to go with this, she wondered, circling behind him. And how hard to push? “…who to thank,” she finished.

He grunted sourly. “I need no reward for that I maltreat one of his low breed.”

“You were willing enough to share his spoils,” Mara pointed out. And when he continued to stand unmoving in the tunnel, she quietly added, “But you don’t need to share now.”

His clawed hands opened and closed once, sinews cracking like old leather.

This wasn’t going very well. Mara knew she was no good at flirting, but she hadn’t realized she could be this bad. This demon clearly knew more than she did about Kazuul’s game and how it concerned her, and she was willing to use her body to get his answers (more than merely willing; perhaps only because he was of Kazuul’s same breed, but with that damned suggestion still gnawing through her every subaudible sense, she could even find him desirable). But he wouldn’t look at her, and he kept his anger like a wall between them, unbreachable.

She touched him, a light and sensual pass of her hand down his back, parallel to the row of spikes accentuating his spine. Her intent had been to interlay a suggestion of her own with this contact—not enough to encourage him to fall on her right here in the hall, but just to soften him up a little, lower his defenses, ease her way into his well-fortified mind. She never had the chance.

The demon swung and shoved her away, hard. Her back hit the stone wall of the tunnel before she even knew her feet had left the ground, but he caught her before she could fall. She could see his eyes burning in the darkness, steady even as her head swam. His face—Kazuul’s face…for a moment, she didn’t know where she was or with who. Had she gone to him after all? Or had she just concocted this…this hallucination to protect herself from his relentless subliminal pursuit, as an oyster makes pearls out of sand? But no, Kazuul’s eyes were green, the sickly green of a Halloween goblin-mask, and these eyes were yellow.

“Do not touch me,” he said, but said it softly, as a lover might. His eyes—those gleaming, furious flames—dimmed and swelled as he moved nearer. “Well do I know the treachery hidden in thine innocent hand. Do not…” His breath puffed on her lips. “…dare to touch me.”

Kazuul or not? Dream or reality? Whose claws were these digging at her shoulders until the sting of blood drew itself down her arms? Whose mouth came grudgingly to hers when she pressed her hands behind his neck and pulled? Whose thigh insinuated itself between hers and pushed her easily up along the wall, all her weight riding on him?

“Thou art fruit of the forbidden vine,” he breathed, moving his thigh slowly up and down. “Yet this we sons of the Second-born have alike to the sons of Adam: We must bite what is put to our lips.”

And he did, his sharp teeth scoring over her swollen lips, nudging her chin up, and coming together with orgasmic bliss on her jaw, just beneath her ear. She felt herself pierced there, as rapturously as she could be pierced with his cock, and ground her hips to brilliant climax there on his thigh. She could feel his erection like a brand against her body and it would take only the quick shift of her clothes and his and he could have her—right here, right up against this wall, with a hundred students ready to spill out of their lessons to watch them—but one thought rose over the candescence of even this desire.

“Who said I was forbidden?” Mara asked, clinging resolutely to her fading sense of purpose. Their minds were weirdly joined, though separate. She could see the carnal circus of Kazuul’s suggestion surrounding both of them. “And why?”

He heard her, but he heard it as a warning.

He drew back, his passion melting once more into anger. He looked at her, wanting her so deeply that it pulsed in him nearly as hatred. Then he let her go and stepped well away. “To thy cell,” he said. “I forbid thee lessons and order thee to thy cell until the bells ring for second meal. I order thee.”

Mara, dazed, oriented herself through a fog of his desire, and hers, and Kazuul’s over all, and started walking. She could feel him watching her, feel him wanting her, and before the rock curved and cut him out of her mind, she felt/saw/heard him throw back his head and roar—a terrible, hungry and unholy sound that ended as he seized the first human stupid enough to come creeping out seeking the source and thrust himself inside it.

But she went back to her cell alone.

*          *          *

Time alone in her cell was just what she needed, and if she’d had her head on straight, she’d have known it at the start. Here, with thick walls on every side, Kazuul could not slip in at the edge of her tangled perceptions to renew his suggestion, and without his maintenance, it finally began to die. As her head cleared, her temper receded under the iron grip of her will. She had to look at the thing practically: Yes, he’d invaded her, but he didn’t get what he wanted out of it, and even better, he hadn’t been able to plant his suggestion without her noticing. She may not be the more powerful telepath, but she did seem to be more powerful than he knew and that could only be in her favor.

What did he want with her, really? She supposed it could just be sex, although she doubted it. He had plenty of women here to choose from if that was the case. On the other hand, it could be as simple a thing as the male ego, stoked to demonic fervency: No woman he desired, however idly, would be allowed to refuse him. If that were so, her best interests would be served by giving in, preventing further distractions of this sort and entrenching herself in his favor. But if he did have some ulterior motive after all, it behooved her to keep him dangling, except that dangling a demon was apt to be a dangerous game.

If only she knew which way to play.

The oil-slick of Horuseps’s mind bubbled up into the psychic silence, breaking Mara from her thoughts. She got up, stretched out her stiff legs, and opened her cell door, catching the demon with his hand raised, presumably to tap at the lockplate, since knocking on a solid stone door would be almost silent. She also caught a faint look of consternation in his eyes, as if being caught with his hand up—being anticipated—were very vaguely embarrassing to him.

“Do you have someone else to show me?” Mara asked, thinking this must be it, another episode to follow last night’s inspection of Pretty Doll. She only hoped it wasn’t another of Malavan’s harem. She didn’t think she could handle having to hear Little Laugh in person; hearing her through the demon’s mind had been awful enough.

“I regret to say, or perhaps I should be pleased to say, that I have been able to account for them all thus far, but be of some hope. My search is not yet done.” After a moment, Horuseps rested his hand on his shoulder. “Come to dinner,” he said.

“What, now? The bells haven’t rung.”

The bells rang.

“Come to dinner,” Horuseps said again, when Mara finally looked at him after giving the rock above her a scathing stare.

“No,” she said. “And you can tell Kazuul for me that if he wants to replant his adolescent suggestion, he can come do it in person instead of shooting me in the back in a crowded room like the consummate coward that he is.”

Horuseps twitched his long eyebrows almost straight out, but smiled. “I’ll tell him no such thing. I like my innards where they are. And he didn’t send me.”

“Liar.”

“You are altogether too free with that word. And the caution that holds you to your cell, though commendable, is wasted for the moment. He isn’t lurking outside the dining hall this time, dearest. Believing his adolescent suggestion to be undetected, he is content to await your inevitable surrender in his chambers. It is my will alone to invite you to dinner.”

“Why?”

“Because you haven’t eaten what would feed a flea in all the time you’ve been here. It worries me.”

Mara laughed at him.

He sighed and waved one hand theatrically through the air. “Because I wish to ply you with wine and then ravish your insensible body before a thousand reveling witnesses, do you like that better? Honestly. Suspicious little creature.”

“I don’t like crowds.”

“That’s understandable. But the alternative, my dear, is the gradual weakening of your body, mind, and will through slow starvation. You have already begun to feel its effects, whether you want to admit it or not. You are not a fool. Surely you grasp the danger inherent in your stubborn refusal to eat.”

“I don’t refuse to eat, I just refuse to fight over pig swill for the amusement of you and your friends.” She looked at him, showing a hint of frustration, a hint of humor, both genuine. “You used to offer to feed me in your quarters.”

“Tastes change.”

Mara nodded, holding his mild, smiling gaze. Then she said, “Malavan approached me over the little matter of his harem today.”

“Little matter?”

“He put me on my knees.”

The demon’s smile vanished. It returned swiftly, but not soon enough to escape her notice. “Oh?”

“One of the other Masters came along and, I’m sure you’ll find this funny, actually stopped him from going any further, which was a relief.” She measured out a deliberate pause. “Of course, I was grateful, which meant I wasn’t quite as interested in stopping him from going any further.”

Horuseps did not reply. His lips stayed curved, docile, but his eyes were cold and the lights of his distant galaxies looked on her without humor.

“Kazuul has been trying all day to get me to come to him by the novel tactic of overwhelming me with erotic impulses. Apparently, he never imagined that I could be overwhelmed by someone other than himself.”

His expression did not change, but the lights in his eyes burst outwards like fireworks, a visual aide to the spike of alarm that shot through him. Then he armored himself again and said, “You lie,” quite distinctly.

“Are you sure?”

“No one would dare defy him so.”

“No one besides Malavan, you mean? Please.” She laughed. “Morality, dear Horuseps, is mortality. You are not human. You have no morality, but only privilege.”

His eyes flashed again. “And there are oaths we have sworn, o my bittersweetness. We are all beholden to his law, and for now, his law states you are for him alone.”

“He made you all swear upon your immortal lives to obey every word he ever said?”

The lights of his eyes dimmed and narrowed. “He made it clear he was our lord and Master.”

“I’ve been here long enough to know that semantics matter,” Mara said. “And making it clear is not the same as swearing an oath. You’re thinking about it now, aren’t you?” she went on, and Horuseps took a long step back and stared at her. “He made you all swear not to kill each other for any reason…not to use arts on each other…and something else I’m not getting…”

“Do not provoke me, Mara!” he said sharply, one of the few times he had ever used her name, and he used it now like a knife. “You are not welcome in my mind!”

“I’m not in your mind,” she countered. “Learn to control your thoughts.”

He locked them down in blackness so complete, it seemed to leave a vacuum in the air around him. Even his eyes were entirely lightless. His hands on his shoulders were clenched.

Mara held his empty stare for a long time in silence, and then let go her breath and dropped her eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with me,” she said.

“You express it oddly.”

“Kazuul…dreamed on me all day. All day!” She threw herself against the wall and crossed her arms, staring blackly straight ahead of her and not at him at all. “Malavan came after me…and what happened after Malavan…I shouldn’t take it out on you, but you are starting to feel like a part of it.”

“Am I?”

“What does he want? You know, don’t you?”

“He wants to fuck you.”

“Besides that!” she snapped.

And Horuseps smiled. “There’s nothing besides that, dearest. He wants to fuck you, he doesn’t want anyone else to fuck you, and he doesn’t want to wait. If you were looking for profundity, you were badly misled.”

“So was he, if he thinks he can make me stupid-drunk on his secondhand lust and trust his fellow demons not to take advantage of me.”

“Thinking things through has never been among the strengths of his kind,” Horuseps said. “But there are exceptions. Perhaps his intent was not to bring you to him, but to make you uncomfortable enough to drive you away from the others.”

“Then why does he want me at dinner?”

Horuseps heaved a sigh. “He doesn’t, child. I do. Never in a thousand years would it occur to Kazuul simply to woo you over fine food and drink.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?”

“If it was, I wouldn’t be asking you to the dining hall. You really are too suspicious. Will you come?”

“No.”

“So be it. I leave you to your thoughts.” Horuseps turned around, but paused just beyond the doorway. His head bent. After a minute or two, he faced her again. “I suppose you know that when I grow tired of merely encouraging you to eat, I shall simply command you to do so, and like as not command you to gorge until you vomit and gorge again. So it has also occurred to you that the same is true of Kazuul’s desire for carnal intercourse. He will command,” he said calmly as Mara’s smile slipped into a thoughtful frown, “and you will gorge. Until you vomit. And gorge again. I like you, darling heart, and so against my better judgment, I am compelled to warn you: This is not the way to play the game. Do have a pleasant sleep.” He bowed, turned, and took himself away.

Mara closed the cell door, and then just stood there with her hand on it, deep in thought. Her life’s experience told her the surest way to secure a man’s devotion was through carefully-orchestrated scorn and capitulation, but then, her life’s experience was with humans, and all of it together didn’t add up to one blink of a demon’s eye. She was going to have to adjust her plan of attack.

She’d never been one for pulling plans out of her pockets at a moment’s notice. She’d sleep and maybe inspiration would strike her in the Panic Room. If not, well, she’d just blunder ahead and hope for the best. Mara thought, without any sense of sarcasm whatever, that this tactic had served her pretty well so far.

Then she took off her neophyte’s robe and lay down in her cell to sleep in the heart of the Devil’s School.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

She slept on it for two days, but wandering the Scholomance’s halls all night while demons preyed on students and students preyed on each other gave her no new ideas, and brooding in the Panic Room all day while her body dreamed lost-Connie dreams failed to improve her outlook. Mara woke on the third day at the tolling of the bell, and knew she had to stop stalling. After scowling at her ceiling for a few minutes, she got up, collected her comb, and went to get a bath. As hard as Kazuul had been trying, she doubted she needed to look her best, but she still had some shreds of pride. She was a telepath, and the last thing she wanted to hear when she gave herself to this arrogant son of a bitch was him thinking she smelled.

Most of the students were already upstairs when Mara came out of the tunnels into the ephebeum. She could hear the stragglers on the wide stair, running to catch up to this or that one before they waged war in the dining hall. Mara was hungry too, but she could ignore it for a shot at privacy when she had to get naked, not a foregone conclusion when several hundred students shared the same crude facilities.

She got half-lucky. The garderobe was empty when she used it, but there was a man standing next to the bathing pool. He had his back to her and he wasn’t bathing. He’d pulled his robe partway down, tying his sleeves around his waist to hold it up, and was bent all the way over, attempting to give himself a haircut with only the distorted reflection in the rippling water for a mirror and a sharp shard of stone for a knife.

‘What kind of idiot puts his back to the door in this place?’ Mara wondered, and tapped at his mind.

It was Devlin, of course.

Mara picked up a sachet of soap from the wall and walked over. She waited until the knife he was using was nowhere near his neck before patting his shoulder. “You’re an idiot,” she said calmly, after he was done shrieking and splashing hysterically away from her. “See? That wouldn’t have happened if you’d been able to see me coming.”

“I can’t do this anywhere but here,” Devlin said, dragging his arm nervously across his face. “It’s the only place the water is, like, remotely calm.”

“And you can’t turn around because…?”

“I need the light,” he said, and pointed unnecessarily at the room’s only blister-lamp. That gave Mara some pause, which Devlin interpreted oddly as encouragement. He splashed back over to her, holding out his knife. “Can you do this for me?”

She recoiled. “Can I cut your fucking hair?”

He flinched and shied away. “Never mind then,” he mumbled.

“How ‘bout I scrub your back and paint your fucking nails while I’m at it?”

“I said, never mind!”

Mara stalked away, yanking her robe off and throwing it out into the hall where it would stay dry. It might also be stolen, but she’d deal with that if and when it happened. Right now, the bath was what mattered. Kazuul was waiting.

She waded into the frigid water and found a steady trickle from above to stand under. The soap didn’t lather and it needed a lot of rinsing. She washed until that hot bloom of anger had been sent back to whatever irrational place had spawned it and Devlin never said one word.

“Sorry,” she said finally. “That wasn’t about you. I’ve got to do something…I don’t particularly want to do, and I think I need to do it today.”

“It’s cool.” He didn’t ask questions and his suspicions were close enough to the truth that she didn’t bother to correct them. He simply looked down, found his reflection again, and continued cutting.

“Oh, give me that,” Mara said, heading over with her hand out for the knife. “I’ll give it a shot. You only want the—”

Devlin started to hand it over and then screeched out something that sounded like, “Yarp!”

Mara stopped, bemused, and tapped at his mind again.

Even he didn’t know what he’d just said. All that he knew, every part of his functioning brain, was occupied at the moment by her naked body. Pale and perfect, her wet limbs gleaming and hair falling around her shoulders and over her breasts in golden streams where the lamp light hit it, tarnished silver where it did not. She was naked, completely naked, her…her…everything right there!

She looked down at herself.

“I’ll do it,” Devlin stammered. “It’s cool. It’s very cold—cool. You’re cold.”

“You see a hot water tap around her somewhere, let me know,” said Mara, incredulous. “Don’t act like you’ve never seen a naked lady before!”

“Of course I have.” He grabbed a huge handful of hair and sawed at it vigorously. “I’m not, you know, I’m not a virgin. I’ve had…women and…porn. I’ve had lots of porn!”

“And I’ve seen more naked people since I got here than I ever saw on the outside, so what is your problem?”

“No problem, I’m fine.”

“Oh for God’s sake.” Mara resumed washing, but after a few minutes of listening to him try frantically not to stare at or think about her nudity, she went back and nudged him again. “Seriously, you’re going to strain something,” she said. “Look all you want, just don’t touch.”

“I’m not a pervert!” he cried, grabbing more hair.

“There is nothing is less perverted than a guy wanting to look at a wet naked woman. Knock yourself out. I’m not offend—” She stopped and stared hard at his neck. “What the hell did I just see?”

Devlin dropped the handful of shaggy hair he’d been sawing at and clamped a hand over his neck. “Nothing.” He started to turn around, suddenly desperate to face her, even if it meant having to see her…her…everything.

She caught his shoulder, shoved him back the other way, and firmly swept his hand aside. She stared for a long time.

“Oh come on!” he groaned, embarrassment shooting out spikes of resignation all around him. Now she would make fun of him. Everyone always did. “I was high, okay? You never made a mistake when you were fucked up?”

“You’ve got a bunny on your back,” Mara stated, and started to smile.

“It’s a rabbit,” Devlin insisted weakly.

“It’s a bunny.” It would be more accurate to say it was a marshmallow with floppy ears, rainbow-shaped eyes, and outflung arms that radiated lunatic joy to the whole damn universe, but it was definitely a bunny.

“Rabbits were worshipped in ancient cultures as symbols of cunning and vitality, okay? Like, for thousands of years, people didn’t see a man in the moon, they saw a rabbit, okay, and they thought all rabbits could travel back and forth running messages for the gods. Even today, the concept of the rabbit as the magical trickster—”

“It’s a bunny, Devlin. Christ, that thing looks like it could have its own cartoon show in Japan.”

“It does,” he said glumly. “I was high, for God’s sake. We did, like, a whole bag of dusted grass and then that guy I told you about? My mentor? He took us on this bullshit Indian totem quest and mine was a rabbit.” He gave her a hopeful sort of glance. “Lots of people say I remind them of a rabbit.”

“Really? I always saw you as more of a goat.”

He hunched his shoulders and stared down at the water. “Yeah, well. We all went to get tattoos to celebrate our bullshit totems and mine was supposed to be a rabbit except I was fried out of my mind. To this day I don’t know whether I asked for that stupid thing or if the tattoo guy just fucked with a bunch of stoners. You should have seen my guru, seriously. He went in for a panther and came out with Hello Kitty on his ass.”

“That needs to be on a DARE poster.”

He snorted. She let him go and he went back to his hair, deliberately not looking at her.

Well, she wasn’t a sadist. She rinsed herself off under one of the heavier overhead falls and reclaimed her robe. Devlin became infinitely more comfortable after she was dressed. Honestly, it wasn’t like he never thought about her naked.

Mara put her soap back and found a dry bench to sit on while she combed her hair. Now and then, Devlin threw a glance her way, as if to reassure himself that she was still dressed and not thinking up new bunny-jokes. Eventually, he splashed out into the pool to find a calmer patch of water for his mirror, and it was only then that Mara noticed he was still wearing his sandals.

“It’s just the smart thing to do,” he said when she commented. “So if I have to, you know, run…I don’t leave them behind. Same principle as this,” he added, tugging at the hanging drape of his robe. “It’s not like we can just run down to the store and get another one. Besides, I’m kinda hoping they’ll shrink.”

“Where did you get them anyway?”

Devlin glanced down and his expression clouded over. “From a guy,” he said evasively.

Mara gave him a tap, which brought her a face and the name of Variden, but nothing more. “Is he still around?”

“No. He graduated a little while after I got mine.”

“Well, where did he get them?”

“From…” Devlin’s toes curled, a minute representation of his self-conscious turtle-tuck. “From me, actually.”

She looked at him. He bent down and took a sandal off, holding it out to her pinched between two fingers like a dead rat. She didn’t take it.

“It’s skin,” said Devlin. “It’s my skin.”

She didn’t move. After a while, he shrugged and put the sandal back on.

“Variden kind of pulled it out of me and did something to it, I don’t know exactly what, Transmuted it or something to make it tougher, you know, so it wouldn’t just rot. Then he cut it up into sandals. I gave him my aspirant’s robe. Like a trade.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No.” His expression clouded over again and he went back to his hair. “It felt…pulled, that’s all. Nasty, like…like he was pulling a worm or something out of me. But it didn’t hurt. I’m sure there’s someone else around here making sandals if you really want a pair.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Yeah, it’s weird. I’m not sure why. Variden says it’s just like wearing cow leather, but that’s not how it feels. It feels like, I don’t know, cannibalism.” The word hung in the air like the tolling of a tribunal bell. He tried to laugh it away, but his laughter wasn’t half as honest as the word. “Auto-cannibalism, if you can dig it.”

“You are what you eat, they say,” said Mara. She wasn’t good at jokes.

“Yeah, and we’re all cannibals here,” Devlin muttered, sawing at himself. “This place…It’s not that it’s so horrible as much as that it makes everyone inside it so horrible. Everybody here, you know, they were all normal once. You ever hear about the Stanford prison experiment?”

“No,” she said, uninterested.

“Okay, so in 1971, this professor at Stanford University gets the wise idea to study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner as opposed to a prison guard. He gets a bunch of college kids, none of whom have any criminal history or mental issues so he can stay as neutral as possible, and randomly assigns them roles as either prisoners or guards. He sets them up in a fake jail rigged with cameras and just lets them go, right? And for a while, everything is fine, all laughing and joking, first-name basis, you know?”

“Then it broke down,” Mara said.

“Oh, it was nuts! Guards started taking things way too seriously. Throwing their weight around, shoving people, shouting, cursing…acting like the fake prisoners had really been found guilty of something. The second day, there was a riot to protest their treatment, and the guards actually beat on them with fire extinguishers! The second day! And it just got worse and worse, and pretty soon prisoners are having full-scale nervous breakdowns, guards are torturing people, and the professor is just writing it all up, you know? It actually took his girlfriend being all shocked and, I don’t know, probably threatening to tell the school board or something before he suddenly decides to shut the whole thing down. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that someone was probably damned close to getting killed in there and do you know how long it all took?”

“Tell me,” said Mara.

“Six days.” Devlin shuddered, looked at his knife, and resumed hacking at his hair with even greater vigor. “In six days, twenty-four kids went from ground-zero normal to total psychos. That’s this place, Mara. We’re all these nice, normal kids after the laughing and joking wears off, and it starts to sink in that it’s okay to tie people up and strip them and make them crawl around on the floor. That no one’s going to stop you if you just, oh, bend someone’s arms and legs backwards so they look like a crab and make them scuttle around while you and your friends pitch pebbles at their bellybuttons. Nobody here started out evil, you know? We’re all normal!”

Mara nodded distractedly, knowing as she had known all her life that normal people were never very nice, deep down. “You’re still okay.”

“Yeah, right. I’m the guy wearing sandals made out of human skin.”

“At least it’s your own human skin.”

“Yeah.” But he didn’t sound very convinced. “So what’s next in your search?”

Mara scowled, fixing her attention once more on Connie, missing Connie. “I haven’t seen her in the dining hall. I haven’t seen her here, where the students live. I haven’t found her in the lyceum, but—”

“Not all the doors are open,” Devlin said, nodding. “You have to know some of the arts in order to take some of the lessons. You know, like, Advanced Transmutation 201.”

“I thought once you’d mastered something—”

“In the beginning, all you really master is the Word, but you still can’t use it. Most people still can’t use it,” he amended, glancing at her. “The other Masters teach you how to specialize. How to combine arts. That sort of thing. But you can’t do anything until you know the Words, so they keep the doors closed.”

“Connie might still be—”

“Sure, she might, but she’d still have to eat, wouldn’t she?”

“Stop interrupting me, Devlin, it is pissing me off.”

Devlin shut his mouth and tucked his head, sawing a little faster at his hair and shooting swift, nervous glances at her over his hunched shoulders.

“Connie might still be taking lessons,” Mara said again. “And hiding from the other students.”

“Hiding where?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? A lot of tunnels went unexplored in the Scholomance, a lot of doors only opened for demons. If she was hiding, she couldn’t be doing it without help. Assuming that she was hiding and not being held against her will (the image of Malavan’s faceless, twitching Pretty Doll rose in her mind and had to be pushed ruthlessly away), she had to have an arrangement with one of the Masters.

Horuseps had promised to check every Master’s harem and the promise had been so painful that she had to believe him when he said she hadn’t been there.

Maybe she’d been moved. Malavan could have easily warned whatever passed for his friends that Horuseps was making inspections. If he thought that one of his friends really had Connie, he might have even hidden her himself. But now that the search was over, she might have been moved back.

Maybe. Could have. Might. God damn it all, where was she?

“The advanced theaters are the same as the basic ones, right?” Mara asked. “The Masters who teach there have to live there too?”

“I guess. Why?” And then he looked at her, half-smiling but faintly alarmed. “She’s not going to be down in one of their rooms! Students aren’t allowed!”

“I happen to know for a fact that sometimes they are.”

A puzzled stare was her only answer.

“When the demons want to fuck—” Mara began patiently.

He blushed and untied his robe’s sleeves, covering himself up in quick, self-conscious jerks. “They do it right out in the halls.”

“You aren’t aware that sometimes they keep harems?”

“No! Well…I don’t know. Maybe.” He was thinking about it now, so Mara tapped restlessly at his thoughts and took whatever seemed relevant for herself. He’d never seen a student go up or down the dark stair at the back of any theater, but he had seen Masters ask this or that one to stay behind after class. For how long, he didn’t know. It wasn’t as if roll were called, and Devlin was very good at keeping his head down. In the end, all he could do was shrug at her. “Whatever they do here…you can’t stop it.”

“We’ll see.”

She felt another flare of emotion out of him, but this time, it was anger. “You know, you’re not one of them, no matter how hard you try to be!”

She stared at him.

“And if you’re not trying to be, then…then that’s even worse, because that’s what it looks like.” He shoved his comb and his knife into his sleeve and glared back at her, his stomach in knots. “Not just to me, to everyone!”

“Do you honestly think I care what I look like to you?” she snapped.

“I don’t think you care about anything,” he said, dropping his eyes. “Not even her. You just don’t want anyone else to have her. It’s all about winning.”

She did not lose her temper. She stayed calm, she stayed cool.

“This is pretty tough talk for a man with a bunny tattoo,” she remarked. “And I really have to wonder if you’d still be saying it if I’d come here to find you.”

He flinched, inside and out, and kept his eyes averted. His hands drew up into fists, and then opened again. He stared at his sandals and didn’t dare to speak.

“You’re fine,” Mara said with a short sigh. She headed for the door. “Go on up. Get some breakfast before they ring the bells on you.”

And Devlin, of course, followed her. “Where are you going?”

“To do that thing I mentioned before I talk myself out of it.” She glanced at him. “And I don’t want a witness.”

“Are you going to kill someone?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“I don’t kill people,” she said crossly, and walked faster.

“But you could if you wanted to!” he insisted, trotting after her.

Mara stopped on the stair and swung on him. “Want to know who I’d start with?”

He drew up fast, trapped in her hot stare, then sidled around her and fled for the dining hall.

“Idiot,” muttered Mara, and let him go.

She passed several students as she made her way across the Nave and into the hive-like open cavern of the lyceum, including a few who bathed with a complete lack of self-consciousness in the fountain there. Some just wanted a place to eat their hard-won breakfast outside the noise and confusion of the dining hall. Others gathered in small groups to practice a particular art or gossip about their instructors. They all saw her, recognized her, and paid her no mind as she climbed the spiraling stair to the top. She was just another student to them, attempting an early start on some lesson or another.

True enough, she supposed. And the lesson for today was how to balance deception with need.

More and more, she was certain that she needed Kazuul. She wasn’t sure yet just why, but she was used to trusting her instincts. And until she figured it out, it couldn’t hurt her cause to bask in the king’s favor while she continued searching his kingdom.

But if Kazuul knew or even suspected how essential he had become to her plans, any advantage she might have over him was gone. And Kazuul was a telepath. A telepath who would be touching her in a very short time, flesh to flesh.

None of these thoughts were any changed from those that had tumbled around her head in the past few days, and she supposed there was no point in wrestling with them again now. Nothing had changed. Whether she needed him or not, Kazuul still wanted her, which meant it was only a matter of time before he took her. If she wanted that on her terms, this was the only way. Anything else was really a secondary consideration. She would have to be careful, that was all. Armor her mind, control her emotions, and say…

Say what?

She had reached the last stair now and stepped out into the long tunnel that led to the demon’s door. The time for manufacturing clever lies was running out.

Well, how clever did it have to be, really? Most men of Mara’s experience had no trouble at all believing in their own irresistibility, and whatever else he was, Kazuul was a man. A man who was used to getting what he wanted without resistance. A man who had invested a great deal of time and energy trying to get her on her back. Would he really care how that happened as long as he got it?

Yes, Mara decided, staring at the portrait carved into his door. He’d care, and if he was at all suspicious of her reasons, he’d never touch her. He wasn’t stupid, even if he was horny, and he knew she was a telepath too.

But perhaps there was a way to use that to her advantage. Tongues could lie, after all, and thoughts could deceive with practice, but a body never could.

Mara gazed into the stone eyes of the carved Kazuul, then stepped back into the Panic Room. After a lifetime of habit, she checked the Mindstorm first, but the hundreds of people she knew were with her in this mountain had dulled through layers of stone into a murky darkness which no single thought illuminated. It was disconcerting.

Mara turned away and focused on the monitors, making the body raise its robe and moving one hand to her smooth sex. It was better here, undistracted by sensation and alert to any discovery. From here, she could fine-tune every nerve’s reaction without the inconvenience of having to experience it. Masturbation was a work of fine motor skill, difficult to manage from the Panic Room, but she’d always been quick to respond even to rough stimulation. She couldn’t feel her fingers playing over her clit, but she could watch the body’s health monitor and see the tidal wash of orgasmic blue as she brought herself to climax.

Now she was committed.

She gave herself a slow count of ten to wind down, then dropped back into herself and wiped her fingers on her robe. She could still feel the glow of her cumming pulsing deep in her womb, but it could be ignored. By her, anyway. She readied her defenses and opened Kazuul’s door.

A chill breeze blew up the stairs, bringing with it the smell of trees and earth and clean rain. She descended, not bothering to light the lamps along the way, but when she saw the curtains blowing across her path, she knew she’d reached the bottom.

She looked for daylight first as she crossed into Kazuul’s bedchamber and saw a grey sky filled with bruised clouds that hid the setting sun. She walked to the aerie, seeing no one, hearing nothing, and put out her hand to feel the rain.

A scrape of claws over stone.

She smiled. “Hello, Kazuul.”

There was no reply, not even the drifting ghost of a thought, but on the other side of the room, a candle sputtered into life. She looked that way and saw the shadow of his longest spikes cutting off into darkness.

“Am I interrupting you?” she asked. “Because I can leave.”

His growl emanated from all sides.

Mara came away from the aerie. “Are you surprised to see me?”

“I knew thou wouldst return.”

“Naturally,” she said, letting him know his subtle invitations were not as subtle as he may have thought. “I come when I’m called.”

“As any well-trained bitch.”

He lunged from the darkness then, not out of the shadows where she’d thought him to be, but leaping down from the broken top of a pillar to land heavily just before her. She jumped back and hated him at once for grinning, for knowing he could make her jump whenever he wanted. The only thing that kept her from lashing out at him was the certainty that he would enjoy her anger as much, if not more, than her fear.

“I knew thou wouldst come,” he murmured, gazing down at her as she fumed in silence. “But dost thou know why thee did?”

“Enlighten me.”

He reached out to pinch her chin between his thumb and forefinger in what he no doubt believed a sultry gesture. “For that thou art fascinated,” he purred. “Thou hast recognized thy lord, thy mate and Master, and I do take thee in to fall upon thy knees and worship me.”

It wasn’t hard at all to maintain a dry, unamused stare, or to armor the surface of her thoughts with the same emotion. “I see.”

Kazuul shrugged and dropped his arm, rattling the bone-spears that stabbed out from his back and shoulders.  “What then?”

“I don’t expect you to understand the analogy, but having some jackass lean on your doorbell all day and night is irritating. Besides,” she went on his eyes narrowed, “I would have come to see you again anyway.”

“Indeed?” His smile returned, but did not touch his eyes as he reached up to take a lock of her hair. He inspected it, then drew his hand slowly down all the way to the tips, squeezing out several drops of bathwater which he rubbed between his fingers. “And thou hast made ready for the occasion.”

“I’m actually in the habit of bathing every day, particularly when my days consist of climbing a lot of stairs, but you go on and think it’s for you if that helps.”

“Helps.” His eyes came back to hers, cool. “Hast thou come to beg aid in thy quest?”

“If I thought you had aid to give me, I might. But I know you don’t.”

“Then why? For if I’ve nothing to offer thee, how then shall I meet thy bargain? Ah, but wait!” he said, lifting one finger in feigned illumination before sweeping it under her chin again, tilting back her head almost to the point of pain so that he could smile into her face from an inch away. “I have just recalled that I am Master here, and so there is no need to bargain. Whatsoever I desire, I have only to demand.”

Mara rolled her eyes and turned her back on him. She didn’t say another word, not even a “Never mind, then.” She just went and he let her get all the way out of the room and halfway up the stairs to the empty theater before he tried to call her back. Very aware of the laws of the school, Mara nevertheless did not consider either her name or, ‘Hold!’ to be specifically an order. She kept going, rounded a tight curve in the winding steps, and nearly smacked into Kazuul’s naked chest.

Once more, she made that hated backwards flinch, and probably would have taken a very bad tumble if he hadn’t reached lackadaisically out and snagged her by the robe. He didn’t pull her back, exactly, just kept her hooked on him until she found her feet, making his enjoyment of her awkwardness quite obvious. Once she was settled, he opened his fist and showed her his empty palms.

“How the hell did you get in front of me?” she snapped.

“Truly, thou shouldst attend more lessons. Didst thou not hear me call thee back?”

“You didn’t say ‘Simon Says.’ If you’re going to insist that we students follow your orders, you’re going to have to start making those orders clear.”

“Thou drawest a fine line, my bitter sip, twixt reason and rebellion.” His eyes smoldered briefly, lighting up his cragged face goblin-green, but then dimmed. “Speak. I hear thee.”

“No.”

“No?”

“This mountain is full of women who’ll cheerfully be your walking joke, but I’m not one of them. So forget it. I was wrong to come here. Get out of my way.”

“I’ll not be moved until I learn the reason for thy coming.” His smile grew dangerous. “Do not force me to have it out of thee, Mara. Thy mind is not impervious to determined assault and thy flesh is fragile yet.”

“Why did I come?” She affected a hard, bitter laugh for him, her thoughts bristling with a sense of self-recrimination she knew would amuse him. So far, so good. Now it got tricky. “I came because I was restless and bored. I came because I was lonely. I came—”

His eyes and mind sparked at the same time. He leaned back on his heels and studied her, wary.

“—because I found you the least objectionable option open to me,” she went on without pause, and laughed again. “Looks aren’t everything, clearly. I’ll show myself out.” She tried to push past him.

He would not be moved in any part, save for his head, which turned to follow her efforts as she sought a way around him on the narrow stair. There was none, unless she physically climbed over him, and that, she was sure, would only degenerate into a wrestling match she couldn’t possibly win. In the end, she retreated, as they had both known she would, and glared at him.

“Shall thee feign surprise when I say I do not believe thee?” he asked calmly.

“And why shouldn’t you, when you built a damned bed just for that purpose? I’ve been told it’s the done thing here for students who would really rather not sleep on the ground, which I have done now for several days, and if you believe nothing else, you can believe I’m sick of that. And for Christ’s sake, what was I supposed to do while I was here? Stay celibate? Pick up one of these chanting asses so they can try to turn some simple fucking into an experiment in fake magic?”

His expression hadn’t changed, not so much as a flicker of light in the green glow of his eyes. “There are others than I to meet thee, brothers more accessible.”

“That was actually one of your selling points,” Mara said. “I don’t need the whole mountain knowing my business. I thought you might be discreet, since most of these fools don’t even know you exist.”

“Ah.” He contemplated her a few minutes more, his thoughts in unseeable motion behind his eyes, and then he smiled again and opened his arms just slightly. “Shall I disrobe?”

“I said that was why I came,” Mara told him in a voice that dripped ice. “But you thought it would be more fun to tease me. Well now you can laugh at me all the way out the door. Move.”

“Thou art over-sensitive.”

“I’m not sensitive, I’m unforgiving. Move.”

“Is that command?” he inquired, unbuckling his belt.

She glared at him, projecting heat and contempt like walls all around her. “You can make me,” she said. “And I’ll lie down for it, but I won’t be there and when it’s over, you will never see me again. Understand something, demon—”

His eyes flashed.

“—you are my toy on my terms for this game, not the other way around, or I don’t play.”

“Thy toy.” His foreclaw tapped idly at the metal framework of his belt, but did not unfasten it further. “Need I tell thee my thoughts on these terms?”

“You can if you want.”

“I think of tickbirds.”

Her eyelids fluttered, but she managed not to lose too much of her glare to puzzlement, she hoped. “Tickbirds.”

“For I have seen them in bygone days, flown down to the backs of dragons, to feed in safety on one who could as easily snap them up and end their lives. Thou knowest, I think, that thou art prey in this place and so thou wouldst seek out some great dragon to shelter thee, trading thy flesh for my protection.”

“Oh please. Protection from what? You are all the same in here, don’t you know that? I could have what I want out of anyone.”

“Then why seek me?”

“Because I stupidly thought you wouldn’t embarrass me. As you’re determined to, consider the offer resigned.”

“Offer?” His brows rose and this time, she didn’t think his surprise was feigned. “Offer, dost thou say? Thinkest thou that thee might dangle so sweet a prize before me and be safe from the snap of my jaws? Ha! Speak on, woman! Tell me the hook that lies beneath the luscious flesh thou wouldst offer.”

“If I’d known you were this suspicious—”

His hand stabbed out, his pointing claw stopping just short of her eye. “Do not play me for thy fool,” he said, very quietly. “We are neither one of us made for it.”

“Suit yourself. I’m still trying to leave.”

He waited, waited, and slowly began to frown. Suddenly, he straightened up, and there was nothing like that swift, powerful motion to accentuate his size, his breadth, his sheer inhumanity. Again he hooked her by the robe, but she wasn’t sure this time if he meant to steady her or just to snatch her. “Thou art in mine own lair, Mara, in my theater, in my school. In this place, there are only Masters and those who serve. There are no bargains here.”

“I’m not here to strike one, damn it! I have an itch that needs scratching, that’s all. Why are you so determined to see some insidious plot?”

Kazuul grunted and released her. “I wonder.”

“You’re far enough out of the way that I can come and go without attracting a lot of attention, and—” She shrugged one shoulder carelessly as she straightened out her robe. “—you’re not hard to look at.”

He bent his head in mocking acknowledgement. “High praise indeed, from heartless Mara.”

Her jaws clenched. “I’m not heartless.”

“Hm. Long it has been since last I took fleshly pleasure, and perhaps it is true that I have forgotten the ways of courting. Mine overtures could not lure thee in and so…” His green eyes sparked with humor. “And so in ceasing them, I have won thee. Whatever is there in this to suspect?”

“You could suspect that if you hadn’t been such a horndog in the first place, I might have been here sooner.”

He snorted through his nostrils like an animal, then smiled. “Thy offer does intrigue me, as was surely thy intent, yet it remains I do not trust thee.”

“Is that necessary? I’m not proposing marriage.”

“Truth.” His gaze wandered from her face and moved down over her body in a weirdly introspective way. A little lustful, a little appraising, but skeptical also—the look of a man who is promised a top-line sports car for a hundred bucks and a handshake. “And now I have offended thee beyond reconciliation. How very distressing. How shall I win thee back to me?”

“You can begin by stepping aside,” Mara said.

“What, release thee to lure thee back? Nay, that game is played. And won, or so thou wouldst have me believe.” He reached up to run his thumbclaw along her lower lip, gazing meditatively into her eyes. His smile broadened. “Should not we both be benefited by a sampling of delights, each one of the other? And my bed, I warrant, is comfort greater than thy accommodations below.”

“I think you’ve already forgotten whose game this is,” Mara told him.

His teeth flashed in a hard, white line, and were just as swiftly hidden again behind his easy smile. “Then I release thee, in a show of good faith that thou wilt not rashly dart away.” Kazuul backed into the classroom, where he stood to one side of the stairway. He raised his hands to the level of his heart as she came out, and bowed insolently low. “For the mountain is filled with male flesh also. I know I am not thine only potential plaything and I would hate to see the end of thee.”

“Would you?”

He raised his eyes without straightening from his teasingly servile crouch, his expression oddly grim. “More than thou knowest.”

“And so you propose…what? An audition?” she asked, striding towards him. She didn’t do sexy well and she knew it, but subtlety wasn’t Kazuul’s speed anyway. She just held his eyes, cocked her hip, and pulled the hem of her robe up about six inches.

His eyes flickered and finally dropped to stare hungrily at her naked ankle. His nostrils flared. “Thy scent is sweet indeed. One might almost be deceived into believing thou didst desire me.”

“Almost?” She slid the robe up a little more.

He sniffed the air again, growled, and met her eyes with a hard smile that showed the glint of fangs. “That is no perfume of idle allure. Didst thou pleasure thyself before making this approach?”

“Yes.”

“To tempt me?”

She laughed at him and hoped it sounded more genuine than it felt.

“Nay? Pray tell me thy intent. Thy dishonesty is adorable.”

“You make it sound so sinister. It only occurred to me as I was finishing that I’d just really rather have better than my own hand.” The edge of her robe drifted up to her thighs and paused again. “That’s as close as I’m going to get to begging for you, so I hope you were paying attention. Disrobe.”

He looked up sharply.

“You’ve asked me twice now. I’ve thought about it and yes, I want you to disrobe.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Now,” said Mara.

Kazuul straightened up. He took three slow, purposeful steps out of the doorway to center himself in the empty theater’s teaching platform. His hands moved to his metal belt and Mara watched them work the impressive buckle open. He pulled the whole thing off at once and gave it a toss into the nearest column, defiantly naked, defiantly male. His organ, thickened by arousal, was well in proportion to the rest of him, and thankfully did not have any of the spikes or pebbly patches that dotted so much of his skin. She’d been worried.

“Art satisfied?” he asked caustically.

“Not yet, but I’m more hopeful than I was.” Mara stepped up and touched him, first stroking his abdomen—such strange skin, hot and hard, but nowhere near as rough as other parts—then dropping to close around his shaft for a curious squeeze.

“I’ve not given thee leave to touch me.”

“You haven’t ordered me to let go, either. Stop pretending to be offended. The audition was your idea.” His cock twitched in her fist, hardening until she could feel his pulse leaping through into her palm. “Do I get to say what I want?”

“Speak.” Kazuul’s voice stayed even, but not unaffected. “I may consider thy request.”

“I want you to bend me up against that pillar and fuck me hard from behind. I don’t want to see anything. I don’t want to have to move. I want to feel your cock like it’s the only thing left in the world. I want it to hurt when I cum because I wanted it so bad, and it was still even better than I thought.” A drop of clear pre-cum welled up at his glans. She caught it on her thumb and massaged it gently back into the head of him. “I don’t want to be your lover. Just your fist.”

“Pretty bird,” he murmured. “How thou singest.”

“If you’re going to say no, say it quick.”

“There again dost thou presume to command me.” His hand came up fast, nothing but a blur at the edge of her perception, to seize a fistful of her hair. He gazed thoughtfully into her wary face, ignoring her tightened grip on his cock, just smiling. “Yet I am Master here.”

She said nothing, only stroked him.

After a very long span of silent seconds, Kazuul’s eyes released hers to travel down her body and rest on her hand. “How many nights past, dost thou even know, did I come to thee and hear thee cast me out?”

“It was four, and I didn’t reject you, only your methods. Sneaking in to fondle me in my sleep and darting me in the back with subliminal sex-thoughts is not the way to any woman’s heart.”

“Perhaps, yet a gentler way than mine honest wooing.”

“Maybe I don’t want gentle.”

He grunted, then suddenly shoved her around and into a column. Her face struck stone with bruising force. Her vision swam, but her mind stayed clear. She put her hands up, bent boldly, and spread her legs for him. He didn’t undress her, merely pulled her robe up and left it bunched around her hips while he thrust his hand between her thighs and probed her naked folds with his finger.

“Thou art eager,” he murmured. The hand withdrew. She heard him sucking, then rumbling out a smoking purr, he said, “Thou art sincerely eager, else an adroit liar.”

“Why not both?”

“Ha!” He hesitated, and she could feel his breath stirring her hair, feel his thoughts armor themselves even tighter, until he was as blank and cold to her as the rock that surrounded them. “I would be clear on this, Mara. Have I thy will to fuck thee?”

“This once,” she said. “After that, we’ll see. That’s what an audition is.”

“Aye?” The faintest spark of irritation escaped his iron control. Claws dug at her hips, simultaneously pushing her down and yanking her back; she felt a tickle under his left thumb and knew that she was bleeding. “And wast thou so eager to only feel? Move not, give not, love not, but only take? So be it, Bitterness. Take!”

She thought she was ready, she honestly did, particularly since he was good enough to give her such perfect cues. But trying to brace against his penetration was like looking confidently up at a comet and thinking she could catch it in her fist. He tore into her, tore her as she had not been torn even as a virgin, and it felt good.

She must have flinched, must have, his heat was so unexpected and so much more intense driving at her from within. He snaked an arm around her waist, splayed his hand over her back, and held her absolutely immobile as he fucked her. Each battering thrust was a slap in the open air, a shudder in her aching arms, a grunt in her lungs, and heat, God, such heat, deep in her womb. She was tempted to stay and experience it honestly—it had always been easier for Mara to respond to friction than to foreplay—but time was short. She pulled herself away to the Panic Room, and tried to relax there while she dialed up her body’s responses from this unfeeling distance.

In a way, it was the best sex she’d ever had. Hard and fast and just the way she liked it. It skirted the edge of violence, but for all that, he was not trying to hurt her nor humiliate her. She was exactly as she’d asked to be: his fist, and he gave her exactly that consideration and no more. The purity of it—sex without come-ons, passion without poetry—made it easy for her to respond in kind. Soon, she was cumming, seizing on him and snarling her own hoarse harmony to the sounds he made.

Kazuul laughed in curt pants, driving at her even through her spasms. “Truly, thou dost commit thyself to the lie.” He grabbed her hair again, yanked her head back and nuzzled at her throat, fucking hard all the while. “Lie to me again. I savor thy deceptions.”

“More,” Mara gasped, tightening her grip on the column. “Don’t stop yet. Make me cum!”

“Indeed?” he murmured. His painful hold on her hair eased slightly. She heard him draw in a slow breath and let it out in another purr. “Thou art made so readily wanton.”

“Don’t…Don’t flatter yourself. This isn’t all f-for you. Anyone…Anyone would do.” She teased herself into cumming again and made sure he could feel it. “You’re j-just…really damned good at it.”

He laughed, his rhythm beginning to splinter. “I’ll hear thee beg me yet. I’ll hear thy screams at mine every will of it. Now I cum, young one, and thou art mine!”

“You’ve forgotten something.”

Incapable now of speech, he only grunted.

“You forgot I set the rules.” Mara’s arms slid around the pillar in a bear hug; she yanked, simultaneously slapping back at him with every shred of mental will. She felt him stagger as she pulled free and then the hot rush of his semen struck her hip and began to trickle down her thigh. Mara dropped her robe over it and turned around, smiling. “You only get what I let you have.”

He had her by the throat in the next instant, shoving her back against the pillar and roaring into her calm face, but although there was rage radiating out of his mind, there was no murder. If anything interrupted the pure sheet of his wrath, it was the will not to do her harm, and interestingly enough, for so long as his rage lasted, it outlined beautifully the dimensions of his armored mind. So she endured the crush of his anger without complaint, inspecting him closely as he controlled his impulses and cloaked himself in darkness once more. Eventually, sullenly, he closed his mouth and covered his fangs again. “Thou wilt return to me,” he growled, and released her.

“You were good. I’m sure I will. Of course, I may have to hold a few more auditions—”

“This is not a game!” he spat, eyes blazing but body perfectly still.

“You’re wrong there,” she replied, holding that gaze without fear. “It’s just not one of yours.”

He snarled once, then pressed his lips together and stepped back, allowing her to pass him and watching as she walked away.

Mara reached the door and opened it with one hand and a flex of thought. She turned around to smile at him; he still stood by the pillar, his head bent and shadowed by horns, brazenly naked and already semi-erect as he seethed. “It has to be on my terms, Kazuul. If you don’t agree to that, well, the mountain’s full of demons, and one of them surely will.”

His lip curled. He said nothing.

“I’ll just let you think about it,” she said, heading out. “But as far as I’m concerned, it was a very promising beginning.”

She meant it to be a parting barb, but in the instant before the heavy door shut him away, she sensed the churning black of his emotions flare into grudging, but genuine humor. It was enough to stop her in the corridor, suddenly dissatisfied and unsure, but there was no good way to go back in and feel him out better, so in the end, she just went back to her own cell where she sat, replaying the memory and wondering what she could have possibly said that he found funny.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Where were you all day yesterday?”

There was no point in trying the ‘None of your business’ track with Devlin. Like all truly obnoxious people, he was impervious to insult. Like all truly lonely people, Mara didn’t try too hard. “Exploring,” she said, waving him aside on her way to the garderobe in the hopes that he would take the hint and leave her alone.

He didn’t.

“You’re starting to scare me,” said Devlin, trotting after her.

“I have that effect on people.”

“I mean it! You only get ten days without class each year!”

“What’s that to you?”

“Well…”

She stopped and gave him an incredulous stare. “What, you wasted the day looking for me?”

Devlin cringed into the neck of his robe, picking at his sleeve.

“That was dumb,” said Mara.

“I was worried about you.”

“That was dumber.” She went into one of the garderobe chambers. He followed her, hunched and dejected, like a lonely goat in the rain, until she stopped him with a rough shove to the chest. “Unless you have something to say to me, get out. I don’t like having an audience when I take a piss.”

He slunk out into the hall to wait, not even far enough down the tunnel to pass out of her sensory range, which was about twelve feet with all this rock in the way. Maybe it was that, not having complete seclusion while she used the crude privy, that set her inner alarms itching. She saw nothing ominous in the Mindstorm, sensed no watching eyes around her, but she didn’t feel safe. The sound of water splashing into the pit below seemed louder to her ears than it had on other mornings, uncomfortably like a beast thrashing in mire, and it was several minutes before her urine would come. In the meantime, there was Devlin, pacing in the crossroads and wanting to talk to her. That wouldn’t be so bad, if only he had something to say, but all he really wanted was someone to cling to and he would say anything to get that.

When she emerged, he was there, weakly bristling with determination. “I have an idea,” he began.

Mara tapped at him, and to her mild surprise, it was a pretty good one, as well as being one that was bound to make Horuseps happy. “Leave me alone,” she told Devlin, and started up for breakfast.

“But…But I think I can help you find your friend.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“But—”

“Find her and then talk to me!” Mara snapped, turning on him in the ephebeum. “Don’t come crying at me with half-baked schemes and expect me to fall down on my knees in gratitude.”

There was some sniggering at the edges of the room. It was never entirely empty at this time of day, and its two biggest lions—Le Danse and Loki—were only too happy to fix their eyes on a gazelle in distress. Mara marked them and, scowling, grabbed Devlin’s sleeve when he started to slink away, yanking him into step beside her. She wouldn’t leave him alone in their company when they were prowling. She wasn’t a killer.

“She forgives you already!” Le Danse called, and one of the white-robed sycophants quivering at his elbow saw this as a golden opportunity to get on his good side. Leaping up, the man added, “Gratitude is not the only way to get her, boy! She’ll kneel for any reason at all, won’t you, pretty bird?”

How thou singest…

Her step faltered. She rubbed irritably at her temples, as if she could push the memory away. It meant nothing, after all. It was just sex, and like the song goes, just another brick in the wall.

“A bird?” Le Danse asked, amused.

“What else?” the other man called, wanting everyone to hear him now. “A swallow!”

Mara turned around, already lashing out as hard as she could, not a slap this time but a roundhouse punch. Le Danse’s new friend jerked back hard enough to crack his head on the wall behind him. Color spiked across Mara’s mind, and then the man slumped backwards off his bench, saved from a second and nastier impact only because he landed head-first in Le Danse’s lap. He lay still. His foot twitched, but only once.

The silence held for a moment, and was broken by Loki’s horrified giggles. Then there was a general rush of movement as students either gathered around him or bolted out of Mara’s path.

“Is he dead?” Devlin asked uneasily.

“Of course not,” said Mara, walking again. “He may even wake up in a day or two, if someone takes care of him.”

“No one takes care of people in here.” Devlin ran a little to catch up to her, jogged back when she glanced at him, then trotted after her again. “Do you want to hear my plan?”

“I don’t need to.” She went up to the dining room by the back way. Students tended to congregate on the wide stair that led to the Nave, and she’d dealt with them enough already for one day. Lamps flickered and came dully on ahead of her, flickered and died to black behind her. Devlin’s sandals flapping were the only sound and it wasn’t much. His misery hung over the whole of the tunnel, all the thought there was to read.

“What is it you expect me to do with you?” Mara asked finally, fiercely. “Pull the sword from the stone and anvil, bring the tablets down from the mountaintop, and ring the fucking bells for freedom? You knew what you were getting into!”

“So did Connie,” Devlin muttered, and when she glared at him, defiantly added, “People can be wrong, you know!”

I was wrong about this place. Please come and get me.

The ground was canting upward, twisting in on itself as it became the spiral stair, too narrow now to walk side by side. Mara used it to her advantage, quickly moving ahead of him, but Devlin had been in the mountain far longer than she and had adjusted to the steep stairs in ways she could only envy. He took them two at a time behind her, not even out of breath, and slipped in at her side again at the top.

“You’re not my problem,” Mara said, speaking tersely to try and disguise the panting sound of her breath. “For God’s sake, you’ve had eleven years to escape.”

He didn’t answer, but his mind was whirling…eleven years, gone. Eleven years, locked away in this place. This terrible place. Over and over, one thought cut across his chaos: There is no escape but one.

Mara shoved his mind away from hers. “If that’s true, why come to me at all?”

“You’re different,” he mumbled.

“Oh bullshit. What a handy way to free yourself of any responsibility. Just wait for someone different to come along so they can take care of you.”

She turned the sharp corner into the final long passageway, the dining room a circle of golden light and noise at the end of it. The kitchen doors were ajar, but as they approached, a hooked and scaly claw reached out, not a furtive movement at all, but a cold, deliberate one that shut them away from the warmth of the unseen fires and the smell of roasting, unknown meat. The doors were closed, one after the other, just before she could come near enough to look inside, ‘Like vampires closing their coffins,’ she thought, and smiled because there were no vampires in Romania.

“It isn’t funny,” the surly goat said beside her.

“Grow up, Devlin. Learn to deal. Did they say that back when you were around? You brought yourself here. Get yourself out.”

“You’re helping her!” he burst out. “You’re saving this…this Connie person!”

“That’s the great thing about dealing,” said Mara, walking out into the dining room and giving a nod to the Master’s table. “You get to pick who you save.”

And pick the plan by which to do it. Devlin’s wasn’t bad. Mara found an empty place at one of the tables and looked back at the demons. Only some of them were watching her today. The novelty must be wearing off. She sent a thought to Horuseps: **I’ll be joining you in class today.**

His head tipped and he raised his cup to her. ‘Delighted,’ he thought. ‘I had begun to think you immune to my charms.’

**I am. But not to my own desires.**

‘There’s a stirring thought,’ he told her, smiling, unstirred. ‘And where have your desires led you recently? I so missed your smiling face yesterday.’

He was guarding himself well. She couldn’t see very deep inside him without letting him know she was looking, but what she could see made her suspect he already knew. All he wanted was to see her dance.

**I’ve been around,** she told him, shrugging. **Did you want me?**

She threaded suggestion beneath the words, well-hidden by idle curiosity above and suspicion everywhere that he might sense it if he looked, and of course he looked.

‘In every way,’ he thought back. He may have even believed he was teasing, but she could see beneath to the dark soil where her subtle ideas germinated. Her efforts were beginning to pay off already.

Mara broke away and cleared a place at her table, slapping lightly and indiscriminately at the minds around her until she could take a loaf of bread without risking a punch. It was poor stuff to fight over—heavy, dark, and thick with sharp seeds—but better to her mind that the blood-heavy hunks of skinless meat or marrow-rich bones that filled the other platters. Devlin dropped onto the bench beside her, taking advantage of the void as slapped students shrank away, to help himself to the excess.

“So I have a plan,” he said around a mouthful of meat as he stuffed wrinkled fruit and cheese into his sleeves for later.

“Shut up, Devlin.”

He hunched, picked at a moldy spot on his potato, said nothing.

“Do you really want to help me?” Mara asked.

“Yes,” he muttered, at one sullen and hopeful. He looked like the world’s largest toddler, promised a treat if he could behave, at a stage when good behavior was still more or less as thing of fiction.

“Then don’t follow me to class today. I’m serious. I can’t have you with me today.” She could keep her own mind armored easily enough, but that wouldn’t do much good with Devlin psychically bleating out the plan to anyone who could listen. “Promise me,” she said.

“Why?”

Oh, why indeed? As in, why did she always do things the hard way first? Mara reached rudely into Devlin’s head and got an expert hold on the place where suggestions rooted. “Don’t follow me to class today,” she said again, not speaking to him anymore but directly to his brain. He looked a little stupefied when she let go, but only a little. She’d gotten pretty good at stuff like that in the past few years of dealing with her mother.

The bells rang.

Mara got up with the rest of them, clearing a path out of the general crush of students until they all learned to give her room. They didn’t all go meekly. Lions and gazelles, Devlin had said, and it seemed very true now, as so many students cringed away without thinking about it and others merely retreated to a better distance to see her and mark the face of another lion among them. She’d been subtle long enough; it was an intoxicating liberty to push back like this and not have to worry who saw her or what they would suspect.

Intoxication could be dangerous. On the outside, Mara did not drink. Here, she did not revel in her advantage. She simply cleared her path and went on.

She’d left Horuseps in the dining room, and took the most direct route to the lyceum, yet he was there before her when Mara reached his theater. There and standing motionless at the center of his dais, his arms crossed and hands cupping his shoulders, as if he had stood there a thousand years already and could easily stand a thousand more. He smiled when he saw her, long fingers twitching, wanting to relish her surprise.

She’d seen this trick before, but it was still a good one. “Do you teach that here?” she asked, stepping down the risers to find a seat in the front row.

“I? Only Sight. There was a time when we taught the art of Correspondence to our most promising students, but no longer.”

“Were they blinking themselves out of the mountain?” Mara asked, smiling.

“No. Midway through the walls.” And he smiled while she pictured that. “We’ve learned over the years to teach all that you learn here, not all that we know. No,” he said, as the lights of his eyes spun. “I see that you have never been deceived. Forgive my presumption, that I dare to lecture you as though you were any other human.”

There was a joke in that somewhere, and she was the butt of it, but she couldn’t see how. Instead, she said, “I forgive you,” which needled him, so that was all right. “What can you help me to see, Horuseps?”

“Oh, that’s refreshing. Most students have demands, not questions.”

“You already know what I want. How can you help?”

“Help. I see. You want my…help.” Horuseps strolled around to the fore of the dais and trailed his fingers along the rim of what looked for all the world like a tombola, the kind used in bingo parlors to mix the playing balls around. This one was filled with large round stones, shiny as jewels after years of tumbling together. “Sight is not an art in the strictest sense, but it is one of the ultimate powers, dearest, with countless applications. Most students seek me out at one time or another, but few master my lessons entirely. Sight is essential, you see, but it is the nature of vision to be selective. After all, it is Man who interprets what he sees, and Man is flawed.”

“Aren’t we all?” Mara said dryly.

Horuseps shrugged and nodded once. “So how can I help you, my most precious one? Let me think.”

Mara waited while Horuseps posed and the classroom filled behind her. Beneath his mental armor, his thoughts were of her. She could see them now and then, eerily chaste, yet charged with carnality. He saw her as a sculpture—no matter how beautiful, how desirable, she was never to be touched.

Which raised that same old question in Mara’s mind. Why not?

“It is has been said,” Horuseps began, and the room fell silent, “that nothing exists in the dark that is not there also in the light. True, to a degree.” He walked around the tombola and seated himself gracefully at the corner, crossing one chitinous leg over the other and looking very lean, very graceful, very harmless. He smiled, and Mara felt the hot leap of arousal from out in the audience—male heat responding to female attraction. The demon’s smile widened. “Yet more exists than the human eye perceives. This, you have been taught. Proteus, tell me.”

One of the black-robed students stood, staring raptly down at his instructor. It was not lust he felt, exactly, but he responded in that way even so. Power came with a Master’s favor, and Horuseps wanted him. This was another test, that was all, and when he had passed the last of them, he would have her (the anticipation of real sex after all this time, not the clandestine and unnatural fumblings with other students, or the humiliating mountings he had endured under the crushing weight of Master Ruk or Master Nezgulon, but real sex!) and she would give him the greatest magic, the magic she did not show to the weak. He licked his lips and said, “All living things emit the charge of life’s own energy. When perceived, it becomes power.”

“When Seen,” Horuseps murmured, nodding approval, “it becomes Sight.”

This seemed very similar to Malavan’s lessons, Mara thought.

“Of course it is,” Horuseps said, turning to her at once. “There is only one truth.”

“Then why so many arts?” she asked.

“Oh my darling one. How many Christs came out of Galilee? And how many books have been writ of his one true word? Sight is selective. Man is flawed. And you, my dearest, are very young. Sit quietly. Observe. Proteus.”

Mara ignored the snickering delight of those who believed she’d been chastised, and watched closely as lucky Proteus came down the risers to stand beside the false female he dreamed of penetrating. Horuseps trailed his hand over the tombola, then opened it and dropped one of the stones into his student’s waiting, sweat-shined palm.

**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.

“Did you find a clue?” Devlin asked, picking up a cup.

“This isn’t Scooby-Doo, you idiot.”

He flushed, mumbling something about there being clues outside of cartoons, but put the cup down, only to pick up another one.

Under the patternless layers of white and red robes, Mara spied something different, something green. She moved the bedding and there was a book, handmade, much smaller than the ones pieced together in the Library. Connie was braver than Mara would have ever thought to dare that place over and over, scavenging materials for this. She opened it, expecting a diary in her friend’s neat, bubbly letters.

The letters were neat. They were also in columns, in some kind of Asian character. Mara flipped a few pages, frowning, then raised her locket and Saw through it.

There was no pink on the book, no pink on its pages.

“Who are you?”

Devlin shrieked. Mara turned around.

There was a man in the doorway, a man to match the handwriting in the book: neat, orderly, Asian. His arms were full of rolled-up robes, but he didn’t act as though it bothered him to have his hands occupied. His expression was not invaded, precisely, but curious and wary, in a self-assured sort of way. His thoughts were not English, but they were enough to tell her that he felt confident if they should attack him. He had been attacked before, but not often and not recently. Make enough of a mess, and few people will try to succeed where others have failed.

“What are you doing in my cell?” the stranger asked. Then his eyes dropped to the faces in the locket and his whole demeanor changed, drawing inward, becoming even more tightly reserved. “You’re her, aren’t you? You’re Faith’s friend.”

“Her name is Connie,” said Mara. She closed the locket and put it on. “And yes, I am.”

“She never read A Wizard of Earthsea,” Devlin explained.

Neither Mara nor the stranger looked at him.

“She told me you’d come. I didn’t believe her.” The stranger glanced at the neatly-arranged display of cups, then at the one still in Devlin’s hand. “If you want that, you’ll have to pay for it.”

Devlin put it back in a hurry.

“You’ll have to forgive me my rather mercenary habits,” the stranger said, putting his bundle of folded robes on his bed, further thickening it. “In this place, there are only two kinds of people—”

“Lions and gazelles,” Mara interrupted. “Yes, I’ve heard.”

He smiled thinly. “Beggars and burghers, I was about to say. I like your view better. I’m called Venice, by the way.”

“Venice?”

“As in, the Merchant of. I procure things.”

“For a price.”

Venice opened his hands disarmingly. “I’ve never had to threaten a kneecap to get paid. My gazelles come to me. Faith…your Connie…came to me.”

Connie’s colors on the floor, on the walls. Mara felt her jaw tighten. “What was she buying?”

“A cup, at first. Later, a more unusual request. Please, sit.” Venice indicated one of the chairs as he took the other. “There is no reason we cannot conduct our business in a civilized fashion, is there?”

He wanted her to say something hot and defiant, preferably “I’m not here for business,” so that he could tell her it was all business, all of this, all of Life. It was an opinion few enjoyed hearing. It reminded them unpleasantly of the means by which they must pay.

“I suppose not,” Mara said instead, and took a seat. “When was the last time you saw Connie?”

“A fair question. I’ve no idea. I don’t keep a calendar.” Venice frowned, thinking back through days. “Not so long, I should think. Two months, perhaps. The night of our last transaction.”

“Which was?”

“One of my masteries is in Malleation,” he said, tapping the neck of his acolyte’s robe. “My specialty is stone. She asked me to open a portal in the mountain.”

“Is that a common request?”

“No, surprisingly. I’ve heard it only eight times before, but I confess I wasn’t shocked when Faith came to me with that request. This life can be unpleasant for gazelles, as you call them…and short. And Faith was a most peculiar sort of gazelle.” He paused there, inviting questions, but Mara simply sat. He was finding it difficult to read her, which was always nice to hear, and she was far more impressive in the flesh than he’d imagined listening to Faith talk about her. He’d pictured an Amazon of the West, noble, heroic, and as laughably idealistic as Faith herself, not this pale, knife-eyed creature. She looked more like the sort who would eat Faith, not save her.

“A most peculiar gazelle,” he went on, taking back his book and tucking it under some of the robes thickening his bed. “She was…sweet. Polite, at first. Gentle. Determined, but in such a soft, helpless way. We get that kind now and then. Most of them attempt to escape at some point, but very few entrust another student with their plan. The penalty can be severe. Yet Faith came to me. A trusting soul.”

“And you helped her?” Mara pressed, ignoring this last comment, which had been very deliberately and derisively aimed.

“As I say, I’m a mercenary at heart. I make no apologies for it. I named a price and she paid.”

Ten nights in his bed, Mara saw. Ten nights, long after his idle lust was satisfied and all he had left was the pleasure of tormenting her. In his mind, she saw each encounter neatly filed for his revisiting, saw her best friend with shame branded across her desperate face as she performed for his amusement. For now, she did not allow it to bother her, but she kept the memories close. Very close.

“After the last…shall we say, installment?…I took her as close to the outer wall as one can get without passing the portcullis, and opened a passage. I thought she meant to climb down, so I made a ledge for her. She didn’t use it.”

“No?”

“No. She brought out a folded sheet of paper…it looked like an envelope, really…and imbued it with a command. It took her quite a few attempts to speak the Word correctly, but she did it well, once it finally worked. Then she brought out the cup I’d made for her. She’d had someone place an Allure on it. Apollo, I believe. He is the best you’ll find this side of the lyceum, and that was the most powerful Allure I’d ever felt. She tied the letter to the cup and threw them both off the mountain. That was all.”

“When was this?”

“As I say, I couldn’t swear to a certain day, under the circumstances, but it was at least two months ago.”

And the letter sat there for that long in the Romanian weather before someone mailed it? Mara shook her head, frowning.

“I think you underestimate the strength of that Allure,” Venice said, somewhat condescendingly. “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it drew some unsuspecting person from even a few miles away. And at that time of year, there’s always a few pilgrims in the forest, searching for the portcullis.”

“And that was the last you saw of her?”

“Yes, but that’s perhaps not so sinister as it may sound. After all, the first I’d seen of her was only a few weeks prior, and I’m sure she’d been here far longer. Our business was done, you see. There was no reason to continue meeting.” Venice stood up and went to his shelf of cups. He brooded over them a short while and finally took one down, one of his finest, at least in his estimation. Made of many minerals, simply and stylishly ornamented, it stood out from most of his plainer works. He would have asked twenty nights from anyone else, but he offered it to her with a smile. “No charge,” he said.

Mara took it. “Why so generous?”

“Your name has already gained a certain notoriety.” Venice shrugged casually. “They say you’re someone to know.”

“So I’ve heard.” Mara glanced at Devlin and stood up. “You don’t mind, I assume, if I check the veracity of your claims?”

“Not at all,” said Venice, and then his sardonic little smile was stretched into a grimace of shock and pain as Mara ripped her way inside him.

She could have done it gently. Her little taps as she’d listened to his story had gone entirely undetected and had certainly confirmed everything he’d said, but this was the man who’d prostituted her best friend ten days for maybe two minutes of his magic. She let him feel her in him. She made sure it hurt, made sure the shock of it sent unmanning spasms through his bladder, his bowels, and his guts. She made sure it dredged up every despicable act he’d ever tried to suppress, and when she was satisfied with the pain and humiliation and the hell of it, she dragged his most vivid memory of Connie sobbing as she struggled to lie still while he did those…things…and painted it with lunatic clarity over Venice’s brain—brighter and brighter until it was all he could see, all he could feel gouging itself in deeper.

**This was my friend,** she told him, and she told him how easily she could plant a suggestion, if she wanted to, a suggestion that might make it seem like a very good idea if he shaped himself a sharp knife one night and cut his genitals—not off, say, but just, oh, just to shreds. Like a cheerleader’s pom-pom, say, or the long spiral peel off an apple. She showed him how it might be, how he might have to sit for hours in diligent labor to get it just right, how the blood would pool, and how the fleshy ribbons, once dried, might rot. **An easy thing for me,** she told him, **but, if you’ll forgive my mercenary habits, I can’t help but think I could find someone in this mountain willing to pay me for the pleasure of watching you do it. Until then, just think about it. Get some bandages. Make a plan. Because it could be coming, Venice. It could be coming any day.**

She let him go, but the echoes went on. Screaming and scratching at his own eyes, Venice staggered from one side of his pleasant room to the other until finally he found the wall and beat himself unconscious against it. He toppled onto his comfortable bed, his face mangled and bloody, and lay twitching in the grip of even more terrible dreams.

“Mercenary habits,” Mara muttered, opening the door.

“What did you do to him?” Devlin asked, his voice hushed by awe. He’d felt nothing, of course, heard nothing, but had only seen Mara take fifteen seconds to stare a man into what must have seemed a suicidal frenzy. “Is he okay?”

“Of course not. Take the cup, if you want one. He’s not going to care when he wakes up.”

She felt Devlin’s indecision tickling at her, growing less distinct as she left him behind in the cell. Then it broke and he came running after her, carrying not one but something like ten or twelve cups in the bowl of his robe’s lower folds, exposing his hairy legs up to his knobby knees. He flushed when Mara glanced at him, but she didn’t say anything about it. Everyone had a little mercenary in them.

*          *          *

“So what have we learned?” Devlin shouted.

Third-bell had rung and they, like every other student, had followed the ringing to the dining room, where Devlin had enjoyed a brief celebrity among the cupless, but now they were doled out and he was back in her shadow, his lap covered in rolled-up robes, fully a’swim in his delusions of sidekickery.

Mara ignored him. She sat at the end of the central table—in ‘her’ place—where she could see the whole room radiating out before her if her eyes were open. They were not. Her resources served her best when turned inward.

She had checked the diners, as she always did, for Connie’s unique pattern, but no longer expected to find them. No one stays away from food this many meals in a row, not on purpose. She must be somewhere else, like the aspirants in the Scrivener’s service, tended and fed, but unable to leave. All Mara could know was that she wasn’t in the dormitory level and she couldn’t even say that with absolute certainty, owing to the maze-like tunnels and cells. Tomorrow, she would use her Sight and Connie’s locket to search the lyceum, but she did not expect to find anything. The lyceum was every bit as well-traveled as the ephebeum. Connie had been missing long enough for her aura to be rubbed out of existence by the hundreds of other bare feet. She hated to admit it, but the Sight wasn’t proving as helpful as she’d hoped.

Devlin touched her, shook her, trying in his eager way to wake her from whatever trance he believed she’d fallen in so that she could hear his inane prattling better. “I said, we should find out what art she was learning. Maybe her teacher remembers her.”

Having spoken with several, Mara doubted it, but what the hell. She glanced toward the Master’s table and tapped politely at Horuseps. He looked up from his conversation with willowy, bronze-skinned Letha, and raised a brow in her direction. She asked him who taught the art of imbuing objects with commands.

‘There are several,’ he replied. ‘But Master Azkeloth oversees the inexperienced. Shall I make an introduction?’

**Please,** she said silently, raising her cup toward him in a kind of thanks.

He sketched a bow for her, no less graceful for being seated. The lights of his eyes dazzled briefly, and then he smiled at her. ‘Done.’

None of the Masters at the table looked any more interested in her than they had a moment ago, so Mara settled back for a wait. She had only just cleared a platter of peeled roots for her selection, however, when the double doors leading out into the Nave swung open and in walked a demon.

‘My dear Mara,’ thought Horuseps, waving a hand in the direction of the newcomer as he turned his attention once more upon Letha. ‘Master Azkeloth.’

At a glance, he was very similar to Kazuul, with the same exaggerated masculine build, rough skin and bony protrusions, if not quite as physically impressive either in height, breadth, or in the length of his spikes. He had taken several steps towards the Master’s table before apparently being directed toward Mara and now he looked at her with what struck her as a rather strange expression: interest, of course, both academic and intensely sexual, thickly interwoven with the sparkle of casual cruelty so common to the demons of the Scholomance, but more than that, a sullen and much-bullied reluctance to approach. In short, it was the look of man who sees a thing he very much covets…locked away behind unbreakable bars.

At last, the demon Azkeloth started walking again, not toward her but to the Master’s table. Placing a fist quietly on either side of Horuseps’s plate, he bent very low and said a few black-looking words which Mara had no way of making out. Horuseps in turn sent cordial regret to Mara. It seemed Azkeloth’s class was full.

“Bullshit,” muttered Mara, narrowing her eyes. Silently, she observed that every student in the mountain could probably squeeze into a single theater if they had to, and she doubted like hell they ever had.

Horuseps shrugged and spoke briefly. Azkeloth bared his teeth, shook his head. Horuseps filled his cup and repeated the lie. Class was full.

**I’ll allow for twenty,** Mara sent, her temper fraying, **but then I’ll eat every other student I find in that theater.**

Horuseps relayed this, smiling. Azkeloth grunted and looked back at her over his shoulder. Then he shoved himself off the Master’s table and faced her.

The dining room managed a respectfully dull roar as the demon stepped down from the dais and came to Mara. With every stride, his similarity to Kazuul grew, and so did the differences. His eyes were black all across, as black as the eyes of a shark, and yet, still dimly glowing, spilling unnatural shadows down his cheekbones. His body, leaner and smoother than Kazuul’s, boasted fewer and shorter spines, but this was largely due to the fact that several of the most prominent—those sprouting from his shoulders—had been recently broken off. Very recently. They were still dark with blood at their exposed cores.

He was younger, that too became clearer. It wasn’t in his body so much as his mind, which was, like Kazuul’s, that of a lifelong telepath, but not nearly so well armored. No, she couldn’t read it as she could a student’s, not even as she could a demon like Horuseps, but when she tapped at the walls he had built around him, she found a lot of hasty mortar and forgotten cracks. He would be an easy one to break, if she had a little time and a little privacy.

Azkeloth stopped well out of arm’s reach and showed her his fangs in a smile. “My theater is not closed to the students of the mountain,” he said in a voice like gravel. “Tis closed to thee.”

“I was told I would be free to choose any art I wanted.”

“And wert thou not also told that Masters make the laws? Thou hast no freedom but what we allow.”

A hot boast, but there was hunger in his eyes when he made it. Hunger and the resentment hunger breeds when set apart from the feast.

“I’ll meet with you,” said Mara, ignoring the flinching attention this statement drew from the other demons at their dinner, particularly Horuseps, still tethered to her mind. “I’ll meet with you outside of class. I only have some questions.”

Azkeloth’s lip curled—neither a sneer nor a snarl, but only a grimace of frustrated ill-humor. “Tis more than my life is worth to answer them. I’ll not meet thee.” He turned away, all his hidden thoughts soured with spite, spite under one name, one fragment of memory.

Kazuul. Kazuul and the sound of snapping bone.

Mara watched him march himself back to the Master’s table, but her eyes had a way of wandering to the dark dots of blood in the center of his bony stumps. Not a fight, then. A warning. Or a threat, more precisely.

Horuseps was making some sort of apology to her. She accepted it distractedly, thinking. Kazuul. He’d stopped trying to get her attention directly and had instead adopted a more roundabout way of winning her over, namely, he was mutilating his perceived rivals and it had only been one day since she’d last seen him. When that failed to send her skipping back to his arms, what then? What indeed, but coming up out of his den and dragging her off by the hair? Right out of class, if he had to. Right out of her cell, right through the ephebeum.

One day. So much for lengthy courtships.

Last-bell rang. Mara emptied the table of snatching hands with one unaimed mindslap, then took a little bread and a handful of boiled roots to eat alone in her cell. Budding opportunist that he was, Devlin did the same, but he didn’t follow her when she got up and approached the Master’s table. “I suppose he thinks he’s being subtle,” she said, addressing all of them, none of them. “Well, I’ve never been one for subtlety when it comes to sex and I don’t find interference endearing.”

None of them said anything, not even, ‘What are you on about, crazy lady?’ They watched her, sipping wine, wary of expression.

Mara turned her eyes on Azkeloth, sending threads of suggestion and desire undetected beneath every word: “I’ll be in my cell tonight. I’ll leave the door open. I have questions. You’ll have an hour for every one you answer.”

Horuseps looked at her, at Azkeloth, at his cup. “Oh for the days of youth and charmed stupidity,” he murmured.

Azkeloth’s staring eyes sparked and narrowed. His face darkened, grew hard. He shoved himself back from the table and stalked away without speaking to her.

“This is a dangerous game you’re playing,” Horuseps went on, idly swirling the contents of his cup. “All the more for that you cannot possibly appreciate the true objective.”

“My objective hasn’t changed,” said Mara.

“Oh my dear. You are making things very difficult for us.”

“Then give me what I want and I’ll leave.”

Zyera tittered behind her hand, earning her half a smile and a pat on the thigh from Horuseps, who then drank the last swallow of his wine, set his cup down, and stood up. He leaned over the table without touching it—a pillar of alabaster and onyx in perfect balance—and said, “I find that I want to see you triumph, o bitter one, if only for the novelty of it. And to that end, I give you this advice: Before you commit yourself too deeply to the win, find out what game you’re playing.” He passed a hand over her hair, tapped the tip of her nose once, playfully, and then left the hall.

So did Mara. If all went as planned, someone would be coming to see her in about four hours. She wanted to get a nap first.

*          *          *

Azkeloth came, of course.

In the middle of all those uncounted hours the other students believed to be night, the demon came to her. He didn’t light the lamps when he came. He made no sound in the tunnel, no sound when he stood outside her door and placed his broad, claw-tipped hand upon it. Mara felt him, his strange, dark mind churning in lust and hate and indecision. She woke herself up and rolled over, staring through the black at the door, at him on the other side.

He had only to push the door open, he thought. No one would know. To this, Mara added the promise of her gleaming limbs (impossible to see in the absolute black of the unlit cells, but desire was not fed by fact), her sleeping eyes fluttering open, and the warmth of her body as he fell over her. There would be outrage, there must be, and there would be struggle, but it would fade in time to grudging welcome as pain succumbed to pleasure. She would be his, she promised, down deep where he could not hear but must respond. She would be his and he, in his eagerness and unchecked lust, would press his naked flesh to hers and open the way for her to break him.

‘So come on in,’ thought Mara, helpless Mara, naked Mara. She lay back down, arranged herself in sleeping innocence, and flexed her mind, waiting.

One minute. Two. She counted out the seconds in the Panic Room, feeding him fantasies just under the edge of his perception. Three minutes. Four.

Azkeloth spat out a sudden breath, a wet and ripping snarl. It was the only sound he gave her. There was nothing more, only the dimming of his hateful, vulnerable mind as he retreated the way he’d come.

No, he hadn’t detected her. And no, he wouldn’t be back. Oh, she could hammer at him for a while, pursue him in the lyceum, haunt him outside his perceptions, and when he finally snapped (and he would), he’d fuck her halfway to death and so much for her grand schemes of possession. Kazuul had a stronger grip on him than Mara could ever forge.

Things could never just go right the first time, could they?

Mara rolled back onto her side and put herself to sleep, still muttering to herself as she dropped off. She needed the rest. She had a big day ahead of her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The bell rang once, rousing Mara from an uneventful sleep. She lay there for a little while, thinking black thoughts of Azkeloth—her perfect pigeon, too cowardly to fly into her trap—and Kazuul, to whom she was the pigeon. Stiff, sore, and frustrated, she stared up into the blackness of her cell and wondered how the hell she was going to deal with him.

Fuck him, of course.

She bared her teeth at the darkness, but found no reasonable argument to levy against that. It was what he wanted…maybe not all he wanted, but Horuseps was right; when he decided to stop letting her resist and simply ordered her onto her back, she’d lose every advantage. Clearly, a surrender was inevitable, and if the terms were to fall under her control at all, it had to be sooner rather than later. Thus far, Kazuul had proved oddly hesitant to simply take what he wanted from her, but his patience would seem to be nearing its end. She had to fuck him before he lost his temper. She wasn’t sure how close he was, but she knew she was right on the brink, so it might as well be soon.

She got up, dressed quickly, and headed out to steal a bath while her fellow students were killing each other over breakfast. One had to look one’s best before seducing a demon.

But to her surprise, the tunnel leading to the baths was blocked. The dark-skinned demon comfortably occupying it was not familiar at first glance, but his face resonated when she sent it back through her own memories. She’d seen him in the lyceum, although not teaching in a theater. Just prowling through the halls. He must be a Master…but why would he come here? He didn’t seem to want anyone. He just stood there, leaning up against the tunnel wall and watching students scurry off to the dining hall with mild amusement scored onto his snouted face.

Mara hesitated, watching him. She couldn’t afford to stop and investigate every unusual occurrence that dangled in front of her. She had been here for days already—days!—and every new face was another distraction keeping her from her friend. She knew this, but the demon’s presence at the mouth of the bath-tunnel felt ominous.

The other students were still hurrying away, rarely giving him more than an uneasy glance before they moved on a little faster. And this was ominous too, because students weren’t supposed to clear the room when a demon was there. They were supposed to stop and wait to see if they were wanted.

Mara began to realize that she didn’t feel just curious about this, she felt dread. She wasn’t used to feeling that, not about anything, and she couldn’t ignore it. It might be safer to head on up to the Nave, wash off in the lyceum’s pool, and keep her focus on Kazuul, but instead, she started walking toward the stranger.

“The baths are closed,” the demon said, craning his neck to watch another woman run across the ephebeum and up the stairs, her white robe hiked high and hair flying out behind her. The demon’s black lips peeled back in a cheerful leer; he hitched absently at his belt. “Move on, girl.”

“When will they be open again?”

He didn’t answer, but grunted out a word unfamiliar to her. Not a Word, nothing with any power to it, just a sound she didn’t know: “Jhost.”

Something answered. Out of the deep shadows of the tunnel behind him, something crawled forward. Mara saw its eyes first—shining greenish-yellow like the eyes of an animal caught in headlights. Then its teeth, what seemed like hundreds of teeth, far more than could fit in even its long skull. They jutted at every angle, black and grey and rotted yellow, dripping drool as it growled at her. Its skin was the same deep red/black of the demon who had called it, so smooth and tight over its lean body that it seemed to shine wetly, as though the whole beast had been dipped in fresh blood. At that moment, in this light, it looked like some hellish, tailless, starving wolf with the fur ripped off, and it was coming for her.

“Ska,” said the demon, and the creature hunched low to the ground, its hindquarters shaking with the effort not to spring. “Now go, else I feed him thy fingers.”

“Is that a hound?” Mara asked.

He finally looked at her. His wide nostrils flared for a sniff. He considered, then pushed himself off the wall and came a step closer, bending low to draw in a deeper breath. His eyes shut while he analyzed whatever it was he smelled on her. Sweat was all she could smell, and it was pretty damn ripe.

“Art Mara?” the demon asked, sounding uncertain.

“Yes,” she replied, eyebrows peaking.

His eyes opened. He studied her some more. “Tah,” he said at last. “Tah haas ja’ni.”

The hound, because that had to be what it was, ducked its long head and cringed back, snarling as it fawned for him.

The demon straightened up. “The baths are closed, even to thee. Go to feast, girl. It shall be opened by meal’s end.”

“But why is it closed?”

“Why? And why else would I be summoned? To clean the leavings of another mortal, slipped of her mortal clay, else our humans pets be forced to bathe in the waters of her last befouling.”

Mara felt that dark weight of dread growing heavier in her chest. “Someone died?”

“Aye, they told me thee had a ready mind, but to see its snap before me truly be an awesome thing. Someone died.” He snorted and looked out into the ephebeum, but it was all but empty now.

“Who?” Mara asked, her stomach tightening. Breakfast was forgotten; Kazuul and Azkeloth, utterly wiped from her mind. It was Connie. She knew it, the conviction as solid and immoveable as the mountain itself. Connie was in the bath, being eaten by hounds. She’d come too late.

“How shall I know?” The demon glanced at her, and his good-natured smile flickered, became a slow frown of concern. “I have sent the stains of her last making below, to be held against the Book where her blood is laid. Her name is recorded there, but I do not know it.”

“I want to see her.”

“Eh?” He looked over his shoulder at the tunnel and his hound raised its head at once, whining wetly, ignored. “Now?”

“Yes. Please,” she added.

He shot her a startled stare, then disguised it by scratching along the sides of his muzzle. “No student shall be permitted to see the final rites of the dead.”

“But it isn’t completely forbidden, is it? I mean,” she went on when he narrowed his eyes at her, “I was at the last tribunal. Horuseps said all the laws and that wasn’t one of them.”

The demon grunted. His hound imitated the sound, crawling closer on its belly, and he reached back distractedly to pat the malformed head. “I will show thee,” he said at last. And smiled. “For that thou didst ask so prettily. Follow closely. Mok ja’ni,” he told the hound, and it skulked forward to crouch in the tunnel’s mouth, bristling and drooling at the empty ephebeum.

It was not a long walk to the baths, not even knowing she may see Connie’s half-eaten body at the end of it. The demon let her set the pace, but her legs moved her on at a ruthless speed. She had time to wonder whether or not to take the corpse away or leave it here in the Scholomance, only that, and then she was there.

They’d turned the water off somehow, and the hounds had been working some time to bail out the shallow pool where students bathed. Now nearly emptied, it glistened in the yellow light of blister-lamps as hounds prowled through the basin, licking and scratching at the rock as they searched for something else to clean. When they saw their master enter, they stopped and fawned where they stood, some rising onto their haunches in a shuffling, whining dance, others rolling onto their backs to expose their bellies, all gazing raptly up at him with love and fear stretching across their wolfish features. The demon ignored them all, watching her instead.

The body lay at the end of a short, wet trail: a lifeless mass in a waterlogged robe, bloated out of all recognition. Three hounds crouched around it, hard at work—not eating, but sewing—making a shroud of her own black robe. They’d drawn her hood and fastened it to her collar already, pushed her arms in through the sleeves and belted her with them, bent or broken her knees and fit her legs inside, and now had only to finish stitching up the hem to complete her death-sack.

It was difficult work for the hounds, with their paw-like hands, and even the way they had to sit looked unnatural on them. Looking at them made her think of a page in a picture-book she’d owned as a small child: the wolf from Red Riding Hood, dressed in Granny’s cap and nightgown, trying to lie still in the old lady’s bed, but for all his effort, looking like nothing but a hungry, drooling wolf. They did not look up when Mara came closer, although she heard them muttering at each other in coarse huffs and growls. Their minds, neither human nor demon, eluded her.

“Ska,” the demon said, and every hound in the room stopped what they were doing at once and lay close to the ground. The three attending to the corpse withdrew, lips stretched in lupine grins, panting and whining as they crawled past their master’s feet and away to the wall, leaving their work unfinished. “Look then,” the demon said, gesturing. “She has been dead half the day. By needs, thou must look deep.”

Mara knelt down in the cold puddle that dripped off the dead woman’s robe and took hold of the pinched, roughly-stitched seam running down the center of the hood. She pulled. Water squished up between her fingers and trickled down to the floor in reddish streams. It was going to be bad. She braced herself, grabbed a fistful of robe over the body’s chest, and ripped the new stitches away to uncover the corpse’s face.

She was quite sure she didn’t make a sound, not even a gasp.

“Thou knowest her,” the demon said, watching her closely. His alarm flared through the Mindstorm, almost but not quite bringing his thoughts into clear focus. “Is it she?”

“No,” Mara said. “It’s not Connie. Just…someone I met.”

She hadn’t been able to get Shaitan after all, it seemed. Mara wondered, had she settled for someone else, or actually tried to do it herself without mastery of the proper art? In any event, the results were the same. Magic didn’t always simply fail when it went wrong. Sometimes it went wild.

Desdemona’s split lips lay slack and open, grotesquely lengthened and now lined with teeth. Mara could see an eye half-opened and dully staring out of the dead woman’s swollen tongue. Her cheeks had split in several places, torn by malignant growths of bone. She’d bled a lot, but not enough to kill her. Mara supposed she’d never know for sure, but she thought it very likely that the weight of her new skull had dragged her down into the bath to drown. Mara looked for a long time. Then she covered it over again and stood up.

“Not the Ka-nee?” the demon asked, his brow furrowed.

“No,” she said, making her way through huddled hounds and back towards the ephebeum.

“Ah.” He smiled, joining her and matching her brisk stride with long, easy steps of his own. “A relief.”

“Is it?” she asked tonelessly.

“I would rather have thee grateful.”

She glanced at him, unsurprised.

He held up his empty hands, grinning. His claws gleamed with reflected light. “I cannot force thee to pay, yet the price I ask is only fairness.”

“Ask?” She stopped walking and faced him. “You’re a Master, aren’t you?”

“And thou, favored of Kazuul. I’ll not touch thee. But I gave thee to look as thou didst will it.” He licked his teeth, still smiling, and lowered his hands. “And I wish a like repayment.”

Mara frowned. “You want to look at me?”

“Unclothe.” One word, hoarse and hungry. His smile never changed.

No, she supposed it wasn’t unreasonable. Inappropriate, maybe, with the lights of the bath burning behind him and corpse water still soaked coldly into Mara’s knee, but really, what was the point of grieving? Desdemona had been Mara’s warden for a day. They hadn’t known each other in anything like a friendly fashion, and what Mara had known about her hadn’t been all that endearing. She’d killed two people, for God’s sake, killed them for money, and then come here looking for eternal youth and beauty so she could continue marrying and murdering indefinitely. What was there to feel bad about?

She’d had the chance to help. She’d turned her back on the woman.

‘It’s not the same as killing her,’ Mara thought furiously, and pulled her robe off.

The demon’s eyes sparked. He exhaled once, slowly, his gaze crawling over her in a way she could almost feel. Then he began to laugh, soft and low, amazement and lust and conquest all mingled together in his smile. She didn’t understand it. She supposed she didn’t have to, but…

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked. She kept her voice steady. She was calm, in control.

The demon shook his head, still moving his ravening gaze over her. “Knowest thou how I am called here?”

“I think you’re Suti’ok.”

“So I am. Born of the tribe Suti, the first descent after Adam.” He brought his eyes up to hers. They were cold, triumphant. “I am less than thou art. Please. Show me thy cunt.”

If he’d said it another way, she would have refused out of hand, but he was so oddly polite that Mara simply found a jut of stone on the tunnel wall to brace her foot on and opened her thighs wide for him. He laughed again—threw back his head, opened his arms, the whole bit. He was the very picture of victory. Baffled, Mara could only wait him out.

“Am I supposed to feel humiliated?” she asked finally. Because if that was the case, she could get angry, but—

“Nay, nay, ‘tis my private pleasure only. Thou art very beautiful,” he added, ducking his head in what was almost a bow. “Dress.”

She did, and noticed that when she did, he actually turned away as if to give her privacy. She could see only the upturned cut of his smile, the blade of his cheekbone, the satisfied glint of one eye. She wished she could read him better, because she really did not understand this.

“Wilt thou keep secret our dealings here?” the demon asked without looking at her.

“If I can. You know that Kazuul’s a telepath.”

“I know thou art also. Aye, he may discover what I have asked of thee,” he said with a shrug. “But I never touched thee. If thou must, wilt thou remind him?”

“Sure, but I think you’re overestimating my control over him.”

“Am I? Dost thou truly need me, fool of Suti that I am, to tell thee that the object of desire ever dominates? Even our hearts. Even his.” He laughed again, nastily this time. “He will lay his throat open beneath thy hand to have what mine eyes have caressed, never doubt it. He would give thee all this mountain to fill the chalice of thy cunt.”

“Why?” She advanced on him; he watched her come, his smile stretching wide and wet with fangs. “There are dozens of other women here, why me?”

“How many uncounted thousands shall there be without this mountain?” he countered scornfully. “Why hast thou love only for Ka-nee, why only she? Ha! But nay, thou must demand conspiracy. Thou wouldst shun our lord’s bed and favor for thy suspicions when thee should fall, aye, fall upon thy hands and be grateful his eye is upon thee, and thee with so much need of him.”

She actually felt the sting of heat in her cheeks. Not much, maybe not enough even to show in this light, but it was there. Grateful. The word was almost foreign to her. Mara didn’t have to be grateful, not to anyone. Mara made people do what she wanted them to do. Mara was in control. Fall upon her hands? She’d sooner fuck a hound than Kazuul out of gratitude.

Behind them, a hound suddenly yelped, and several of them loudly snarled. The demon glanced that way and so did Mara, but she kept staring long after the hounds had settled. She couldn’t see the body from here, but she imagined she could smell it over the wet, mineral musk of the mountain. Desdemona was being sewn into her own robe and maybe it wasn’t the same as killing her, but Mara could have found someone in five minutes to fix her face and it had been too much trouble. Now she was dead. She was dead…and Connie was still missing.

“Grateful,” she murmured, hating the word.

“But who am I?” The demon shrugged again, and continued walking to the tunnel’s mouth. “Only Suti’ok, and pride has ever been my pleasure and my shame. Perhaps I revel overmuch when I see it shine so brightly in others. Thou art beautiful, Mara, and thou hast been uncommonly gracious. Go thy way, and let mine own good favor, feeble thing that it be, go with thee.”

He moved his sentry hound aside for her, making it clear with his direct stare and outstretched arm that he was dismissing her. Mara retreated, but paused at the threshold of the ephebeum and had to turn back.

“What do you do with the bodies?” she asked.

The demon merely gazed at her. “Shall I have her possessions brought to thy cell?”

The suggestion startled her, as much as if it were an accusation. “No!” she said. “I hardly knew her!”

“So? Death is profit here. Should it not be thine?”

The notion repelled her. She started to argue, then narrowed her eyes and said instead, “Where do you take the bodies?”

“For certain, yon unfortunate would rather see her goods in the hands of a stranger than go to those whom she knew well.”

“I want to see the graves.”

He grunted amusement. “There are none.”

“Then where—”

“She was an acolyte in life. She must have other robes, perhaps a larger cell. Her spoils are thine to claim. Shall I gift thee the loan of a hound to track thee to her chambers?”

“Why won’t you answer me?” she demanded.

“Because of this hour, I am thy Master,” he replied, hammering each word home with fierce satisfaction. “And it pleaseth me to defy thee. Now I order thee hence. Go, and remember that I did thee a kindness, and that I touched thee not.”

An urge swelled up in her all at once, the urge to tell him that she could say pretty much anything about whether or not he touched her and Kazuul was likely to believe it. It was an ugly feeling and it left an ugly stain after she crushed it. “You did me a kindness,” she said instead. “Thank you.”

She turned away.

“Humility. Odd, that it pleaseth me as much as pride to see in thee.” Suti’ok followed her out into the open cavern and casually snagged his claws in her hood, holding her. In a low voice, scarcely moving his lips, he said, “I do not mark the living, girl, yet there is no embrace more familiar than that which I share with the dead. Faces change here and scent decays, yet Time has its own sweet flavor that knoweth no pretense. I have not tasted honest youth such as surroundeth thee in many years of handling human meat. If thy Ka-nee were of an age to thee, I know I have not looked on her. Be warned, there are many deaths here which do not merit the personal attentions of the Master of the Hounds.” He spoke his title with obvious sarcasm, then smiled and released her. “The bells are nearly rung and we both have work to be about.”

She stepped back, although her questions hadn’t been answered. After a moment, she remembered to bow, a gesture which made him throw back his head and laugh again. Then he bowed, actually dropping to one knee and sweeping one arm out with painful formality ruined by his hearty, bitter storm of laughter. When he retreated down the tunnel to the bath, the hound he’d left behind him suddenly stood up upon its hind legs, stood up so that it could bow to her too, a punchline to its master’s joke. It laughed, a high and slobbering sound, and danced on its hind feet as she watched it, then dropped to all fours and ran away down the tunnel, still laughing and howling all together.

“Mara!”

Devlin’s mind pummeled her. His hand grabbed for her sleeve.

She shook both off without looking at him. “Go to class.”

“Someone said there was a body!” he said, grabbing her again. “It wasn’t her, was it?”

“It wasn’t her.”

The laughter of the hound shrieked up into a higher register before finally dying away. Mara looked at her arm, but it was smooth and free of fearflesh. She rubbed her eyes instead, frustrated and restless. “Go to class,” she said curtly. “I’m not playing with you today.”

His hurt pricked at her. Mara walked away from him and found a bench near the wall. She sat, tipped her head back, and stared at the ceiling. On the other side of all this rock, Horuseps held sway over the dining hall right this moment, and above him, Kazuul.

He will give thee all this mountain…

Would he really? She’d made a very bad mistake then, focusing her attention on the threat Kazuul represented instead of what he could do for her. She’d been thinking of him as another distraction all this time, a dangerous opponent with a suspicious fixation on her that would have to be dealt with so that she could proceed. He hadn’t left his chambers in years, by his own admission, and so no matter what else he might be to the demons who seemed so in awe of him, he was useless to her.

It had taken several days and Suti’ok’s contemptuous amusement to make her realize that even if he had no direct knowledge of Connie, his authority over the others could open a lot of doors for her. The oversight disgusted her in a way the bloated, disfigured corpse never could.

Be grateful his eye is upon thee…

And she still didn’t trust it. Couldn’t trust it. He had to want more from her than just sex. Plus, he was a telepath, and a far more practiced one than she, so the whole time he was fucking her, he could be using that contact to steal around inside her mind. She couldn’t risk it.

Didn’t she owe it to Connie to try everything? Or was Connie just another woman in the bath, there to be pitied only for as long as it didn’t inconvenience her?

Mara flinched, the idea stinging so deeply, she had to look around and see if it came from someone else. But she was alone here, except for a handful of other students (including Devlin, still hovering at her elbow). The weapon had been too sharp and too well-aimed to be anything but her own.

“Are you okay?” Devlin ventured. He’d seen the flinch, damn him.

“I’m fine,” Mara answered. She didn’t know what to make of Kazuul or his strange obsession with her, and so she made herself set it aside for now. His motivations really didn’t matter. She wanted to understand him only because she’d always understood people, all her life, and now she couldn’t and it bothered her, but—and this was a jagged pill to swallow—she didn’t get to have everything she wanted. She wanted Connie back, as no one’s Pretty Doll and no one’s woman in the bath. For everything else, she was just going to have to settle.

“Are you going to come eat?” Devlin asked, plucking at her sleeve.

She hated to be plucked at, and it wasn’t worth talking to him. Mara reached out and dug her needles into his brain. “Go to class,” she said, and as soon as she released him, he got up and staggered away. She didn’t watch him go. All her thoughts were on Kazuul and they were only delays. She knew she was decided.

It was time to stop screwing around, she thought (without any conscious grasp of the irony). She wanted Connie back and either she was willing to do everything in her power to find her or she wasn’t. Which was it?

“Damn it,” Mara spat, got up, and started walking.

*          *          *

Mara climbed the lyceum unbathed and deep in thought. There were students already milling around on the lower levels, and higher up, she passed an unlit passage where Horuseps at his prettiest and most beguiling played love-games with Proteus. The demon glanced at her and sent a silent greeting as he held the man against his smooth chest, but Mara did not answer his teasing invitation to join them. Then he realized where she must be going, and for a moment, he teetered on the knife’s edge of casting his playmate aside and pursuing her.

But no. Proteus stirred from his fevered embraces, started to look around and see what had stolen his Master’s attention, and so Horuseps seized him before she could be seen. Seized him and pulled him deeper into the dark. She saw his pale face receding, and then he was gone.

‘Be careful,’ he thought at her (the thought came with the secondhand impressions of Proteus fumbling at his/her breast, his mouth crushing his/her lips with kisses, but Horuseps’s thoughts were cool).

Mara kept climbing, and saw no one else. Kazuul’s hall was dark and quiet. The doors that bore his image were shut and sealed. He did not appear when she opened them. He didn’t meet her on the stair, and he wasn’t there when she emerged into his cold bedchamber.

She had missed sunset by just a few minutes she thought, approaching the aerie. There were still a few pale streaks in the indigo skies, but that light was fading. Kazuul had lit several candles. They guttered in the heavy Romanian wind, protected by glass shields as cracked and neglected as the rest of this room.

He was here, she was sure of it. She couldn’t see him or sense him, not even in the Mindstorm, but there was a heaviness to the air, the itch of watching eyes upon her. This time, she waited him out.

Clouds rolled by, losing the last of their linings as the wind blew them into new shapes. There were no stars, and only a musty smudge to mark where the moon must be. The lake at the foot of the mountain lapped at its rocky shores. In the forest, something screamed once. Wolves answered. It was a beautiful night.

“Another audition?” Kazuul growled behind her.

Mara smiled. She turned around. He stood half-in and –out of shadows, all streaks of candlelight, sharp spikes, and scowling mouth.

“I came to be with you,” she said.

“Ha.” He had a cup in his hand. She didn’t see it until he threw it violently away, splashing wine in a wide streak across the floor as the silver goblet itself banged and rattled off into some dark corner. “And how many of my brothers didst thou sample before thee named me champion?”

“Just you.”

He grinned at her, a savage grin, and turned toward the aerie.

“And you didn’t have to break anyone’s bones, you know. I had no real intention of lining demons up and passing out numbers. The whole point of meeting with you is your discretion.”

He glanced back just enough to show her the glow of one green eye, the curl of his lip and one hooked fang. “Not the whole point, I assure thee.”

She waited, but he just stared out at the sky, and she couldn’t even feel the flow of his thoughts much less what they were. At last, she sighed. “I came at a bad time, I guess. I’ll come back later.”

“Hold where thou art, woman.”

“I know you said you weren’t up on modern courting practices, but in another minute, I’m going to be right out of the mood and right out of your door.”

His spikes shifted as he considered her, and then he walked away. She watched him pace restlessly around a long table where the bones of his evening meal still lay scattered over a silver tray, all the way to the aerie. He rested one hand on the lip of the wall and looked down, his every impressive line edged in moonlight, and Mara admired him, even offered up that admiration for him to taste if he wanted, but he did not respond. Eventually, he came back to her.

“To be with me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“In my bed.”

“If that’s where you want me.”

He reached out and put one arm around her, his claws sinking into her back as he pulled her hard against him. His suspicious stare never shifted. “And thou wilt give me every will of thee.”

“No.”

He released his breath in a curt snarl and shoved her away, then snatched her back just as fast and yanked her tight against his chest, enough that she could feel the steady beating of his heart against her ribs. “I am Master here,” he growled.

“Not tonight.” She put her hand on him and his hot stare faltered. He looked down, watching grimly as she traveled the rough plain of his body down to the many layers of his loincloth. “This is my game, remember? Tonight, you give yourself to me.”

“To thee,” he said with clear distrust.

“To use however I desire.”

His growl softened, became something that was almost a purr. The points of his claws sunk into her arms eased, but she didn’t try to escape his grip. When she rubbed her palm lightly over the bulge of him, he closed his eyes. When he brought his hand up to caress her cheek and comb down through her pale hair, she rose up on her toes and kissed him.

His breath was hot and stained by blood, but she kissed him anyway, pushing her tongue in to flick at his fangs, sucking at his lips, biting when he began to kiss her back and accepting his vengeful snap with a throaty laugh. He growled, his teeth still pressed against her jaw, and then he drew back and licked at her, rumbling low under his breath in increasing passion until he moved to kiss her again.

She pulled away, stroking him slowly through his loincloth and smiling. “So,” she said, “do I have your will to fuck you?”

He didn’t smile back. “How mean thee?”

“How much clearer do I have to be?”

“Swear that thou shalt lie beneath me and I am thine.”

“No,” she said, and before the furious roar that stabbed up into the Mindstorm could find a voice in him, she whispered, “I want you beneath me.”

He drew back, his eyes sparking green fire, and now, finally, he smiled. “Shall I disrobe?” he asked, catching the hand that moved on him and bringing it to his lips.

She raised her arms. “Ladies first.”

Chuckling, he took her by the sleeves and pulled the robe away in one dramatic whoosh, unveiling her like a work of art at the gallery openings she used to attend as a child. The robe he dropped indifferently, his gaze consuming her naked body, not so much with passion as with triumph. Only his eyes touched her, and every part knew that burning touch—not just her breasts and pussy and thighs, but all of her, a radiant entirety requiring only him to complete it.

“Now you,” she said, when he moved to embrace her.

“As thou wilt.” He unbuckled his belt and drew the whole thing off, watching her closely and growling victory when she smiled. “Aye,” he rumbled, reaching for her. “Even the look of me doth please thee. Behold the proof that thou art made for my possession.”

“I’ve admired a lot of men in my life.”

“Ere thee came to me.” He flicked his claws, then swept her suddenly up into his arms. He carried her like a bride to the bed, nuzzling at her naked throat. “And now wilt thou learn thou hast known no true man before me.”

“The audition is over,” she said, amused.

“Yet thy game goes on.” He smiled at her, his sharp teeth gleaming, his arms like iron around her. “And thou has sought me out for another turn upon thy board. Ha, I see thy scheming thoughts behind the darkened windows of thy mind. Thou desirest my shadow over thee far more than my cock within thee. Thou meanest to use my name as a torch when thou seekest thy Ka-nee. Didst thou think I could hold thee and never know the truth?”

“You’re still holding me,” she observed.

“I have mine own desires. I shall allow much to achieve them.”

“Even though you think you know I’m lying to you.”

He put his mouth very close to hers, enough that she could taste the blood on his lips when he growled, “Only fuck me, Mara, and lie freely. I care not where my shadow falls.”

He did not simply lay her on the bed, but arranged her, just as though she were another pillow. Mara watched with amusement as Kazuul caressed her. All his attention appeared to be on his hands and on what little flesh lay under them. His thoughts were swirls of erotic imagery—some of it so abstract, she couldn’t be sure of whether she were part of it at all—and his breath came only in soft, animal growls of lust.

“Thou art beautiful,” he murmured, stroking her thigh. He used both hands, shaping her as a potter with clay. When he bent to taste what he was touching, his hands immediately dipped around to cup her buttocks and lift her into his waiting mouth. His tongue, long and muscular, lashed up and into her without preamble. For him, this was probably foreplay. His mouth pressed hard against her as his tongue worked. His growls intensified in volume even as it sank in pitch, vibrating not unpleasantly against her clitoris. He withdrew only after a thorough sampling and then only to say, “Beautiful,” again.

“You think so?”

Kazuul raised his head from the crux of her thighs and looked at her. His eyes were narrow, smiling slits through which his undisguised derision assailed her. “Do not pretend not to know it. Modesty does not impress me.”

“It may astonish you to hear this,” Mara said dryly. “But I don’t spend my days planning ways to impress you.”

His eyes didn’t change. ‘Dost thou not?’ he thought, the words so clear, so deliberate, that Mara knew at once he had shaped them just for her to overhear. He bent again to lick slowly, insolently, along the slit of her sex.

“I know how I look as far as humans go,” Mara continued, idly spreading her legs a little wider to accommodate the demon’s broad shoulders, particularly the unyielding spikes that made them even broader. “It just surprises me that your standards would be the same.”

“Indeed?” He had begun to make his way up her body, but his hands remained low at her thighs. He caressed her there in long, sweeping passes like figure-eights, up to her hips and down again, tender movements made abrasive by his unnaturally rough skin and the occasional scrape of a claw’s edge. His kisses came quite often with teeth, but the little flares of pain only made the pleasure that much greater.

“I can’t imagine you’d really consider me beautiful. Wouldn’t I look better with scales or something? Wings…claws…a tail?” She reached out and gave one of the bony spears jutting from his back a playful tap. “Spikes?”

“Such things are easily amended,” he told her. He slid one hand up and over her belly, and where that hand moved, she could see her skin moving, bubbling almost. Changing, or at least, wanting to change. She didn’t need to look to know he was watching her, ready to relish any squirming sign of unease.

“Is that what you teach?” she asked instead. She reached out and touched the high knot of his black hair and felt it pouring around her fingers like water. So fine. So strange to be so fine, against all those spikes and rock-rough skin. “What you used to teach, rather?”

His tongue dipped into her navel and trembled there suggestively as he moved his hand back to her thigh. “It is Master Ruk who instructeth the newcome students of the Scholomance in the art of manipulating fleshly form,” he said. “If thou wouldst know my specialties, why dost thou not ask?”

“It’s called small talk. I don’t actually care.”

“Nay?” Another of those too-smug smiles nettled at her.

She laughed at him. “Look, I give up. I didn’t come here for conversation anyway.” She gave him a shove and he rolled onto his back agreeably, shrugging in a huge, cat-like motion as he did so that the spines fanned out and lay flat. He was still smiling as she straddled him, still smiling when she took his cock in her hand and pulled it back against her belly, stroking. Her answering smile did not require much in the way of acting to make it hostile. “I think it’s cute when you act like this is a real relationship. I like just one thing about you and no offense, but I could get it from anyone.”

“Aye?” He laced his hands behind his head, his gaze tracking the motion of her arm in apparent unconcern.

“Yes. Well…anyone with a cock. I admit I prefer yours, but let’s be honest here. That could be just because I haven’t seen them all.”

He chuckled. His mind remained completely black to her; his body, completely relaxed. The only rise she was getting out of him was the one in her hand.

“At least I don’t blow smoke up your skirt telling you how beautiful you are. I just take what I want.” She rolled her thumb over the thick head of him and rocked up onto her knees, tilting her hips forward so that he could see how near, how far, he was to what he’d been so aggressively pursuing all this time. He didn’t seem to care now. He shut his eyes, baring his teeth and snarling pleasure. Mara thoughtfully settled back down and watched him. After a while, she reached with her free hand and gave the great spear on his shoulder another tap. “Does this hurt to lie like that?” she asked.

He grunted. “What matter to thee?”

“Nothing, I guess, but I could be persuaded to try another position if you asked nicely.”

“Pain is transitory, young one. As is pleasure. I shall suffer the one to savor the other. The years,” he mused, “have been long and empty.”

“You hopeless romantic, you.” She licked her fingers and moved them in light, tickling gestures all up and down the underside of his cock, riding the quick, hard thrusts of his hips with which he met this treatment. “Fortunately for you, I’m more interested in my pleasure than in your pain. Open your eyes.”

He did, smiling. “Why?”

“I want you to see me putting you inside me.”

She felt his cock twitch in her grip, saw his eyes spark with faint, green light. He raised his head, his gaze dipping to stare with hot intensity at her hand. She gave him a little squeeze, fit the head of him to her, and impaled herself slowly, writhing as she took him in. The sensation was as good as it ever was, good enough that it was easy to dial it up, to fill all her outside-thoughts with it, to let him hear her silent pleasure as she showed him this mask of self-control.

“Thou art home,” he said softly.

“Don’t talk,” she whispered, digging her fingernails at his chest as she bent over him. “I just want to fuck you.”

He touched her stomach as she began to move, just once, as if petting her. That was all. Then he merely watched her. The only sounds were those their bodies made in mating: his broken growls, her coarse breaths. It didn’t take long—a minute, two at most. She came, fucking harder as she dug her nails at his chest, and came again through pure force of will greatly influenced by friction. She bucked off him at once, taking his hot, slick cock in her hand and working him hard, wanting him to see his cum hit her, mark her, wanting him to think she was his.

Rage replaced the complacent lust that had suffused the Mindstorm until this moment, striking her with all the force of a slap. He seized her naked throat in his fist and roared as his semen arced, splashing hot against her breast and dripping down over her belly and thighs. “Thou bitch!” he bellowed.

“Someday, I want to taste that,” she said, very calmly, and he drew back with a frown, his grip easing. His cock, soft and spent in her hand, twitched. “But not today. I don’t like being yelled at and I’m done with you for now.”

“Art thou? And to what gameboard now, thou deceiver?” He showed her his fangs, then slowly lay back on the bed. The hand at her throat opened, but did not remove itself. He slipped his claw under the chain of her locket and pulled it out taut. He studied it, tracing the lacy pattern on its face with the very tip of his thumbclaw. He didn’t look at her, but only at it, and his expression was coldly speculative. “To whose welcome bed?”

Much as she tried, she could not contain the spark of alarm from flaring in her breast, but she didn’t grab for it. If she did that, it was lost. She waited, still straddling him, fighting for calm.

“I have seen this ‘round thy slender throat even at our first meeting,” he remarked, and shifted his eyes to her. “Thou knowest not such trinkets are forbidden within the Scholomance?”

“Horuseps let me keep it.”

“Did he indeed,” Kazuul growled, his eyes blazing, then just as suddenly smiled at her. “Yet how easily I amend his error.” His finger tightened, pulling the cheap chain tighter as he bent close. “Wilt thou beg me for its keeping?” he murmured, his sharp teeth inches from her face.

“Yes.”

His brows lifted. He drew back slightly, his predatory smile broken.

“Please,” said Mara. “Please let me keep it. I beg you, Kazuul. I beg you, Master.”

His brows swept even higher, knotting as they did. The cold, green glint of his eyes shifted to the locket, ridiculous on the hook of his claw. “What is it?” he asked, sounding wary now.

“A gift.”

“Be it blessed?” He cut a sharp glance at her when she huffed out her startled laughter, and then frowned. “No relic then. Hm.” He turned it over, polished it with slow circles of his thumb, and turned it back to its face. “It looks a toy.”

“It is.”

“Yet precious.”

“Please.”

“Tell me how it came to thee and I shall allow thee to hold it.”

“It was a gift,” Mara said again.

“Or tell me not,” Kazuul continued with deceptive mildness, “and I’ll have it off and forever ruined.” He polished it some more, the tendons of his fist creaking like old leathers. “Truth, I suspect I would enjoy that better, yet I shall hold to my word. Whose gift, Mara? What occasion? Why so marked and so deeply remembered? For that, I confess, I understand least. I see a toy, one readily replaced. Sentiment passes well enough from one trinket to another. Better dost thou know than most how supple are mortal minds. Unless it is as the lenience of Horuseps that thou dost treasure it.”

“It was my birthday.”

“Eh?” He looked up sharply, his eyes incredulous slits. “Thou liar! I would know it if thou hadst borne a child!”

“My birthday. The anniversary of the day of my birth.”

He continued to stare and finally sat up, putting her roughly at arm’s reach before slapping his free hand ominously against his thigh. “Who art thou in human reckoning that thou art so honored?”

Mara laughed again, the same breathy, disbelieving laugh that had jumped out of her when he’d asked if the cheap locket were a holy relic. “Jesus Crazy-Horse Christ. Everyone gets to celebrate their birthday! It’s not like they closed the banks for me!”

“I see.” His expression and tone remained guarded. “And so, a closed ceremony, each year to each human.” He eyed the locket. “With tribute paid.”

“Were you ever a child?”

“I?” He wasn’t used to being surprised so often. She could feel a stirring of unease in him, ready to become anger. But he thought about it, and even if those thoughts were closed to her, she sensed a kind of careful sincerity in the way he answered. “So I must assume, having seen those of my kind birthed and suckled. I recall no age of youth. Perhaps…a sibling…” He closed his eyes, simultaneously closing a fist around her locket, and remained silent for some time before shaking his head. “The very stones of that world are surely ash and gone by now. There are no more memories and no children. How strange.” He raised his head and gazed broodingly out the open aerie at the empty sky. “So should reason say my day of birthing wouldst be remembered and a human’s hardly marked even at its dropping. But there again doth Time divide us. We, disdaining all that comes of its passage, and they, dissecting it until naught but names remain. When wert thou born?”

“November 4th.”

“Aye.” He shook his head, still watching the sky. “For certain. Speak on.”

“You know who I’ve come for.”

“Aye, enough I know.” He shrugged and opened his fist to look at the locket. “She gave it to thee?”

“Yes.”

“Was it her only marking of thy birth? The only tribute ever paid thee?”

“No.”

“Yet this is more precious. Why?”

“I know you don’t really care. I know you’re only doing this to hurt me.”

“Then well thou knowest me, and know thou also that there are hurts far worse I could inflict, if I chose. Tell me.”

“She gave it to me—” In spite of it all, her damned voice cracked. Kazuul’s attention was on her in an instant, burning deep. “—so that I would always remember…” She couldn’t do it. Not the truth, not to him. Mara did not drop her eyes or in any way show the lie, but finished simply, “…remember her.”

He stared at her, into her, for a very long time without altering his grim expression in the slightest. At last, he snorted out a single, short, soundless breath that might have been a laugh if only it were repeated. He released the locket and turned away, swinging his legs out over the edge of the bed. He sat there, glaring out the aerie, and finally snorted again, louder this time. “Keep it,” he said blackly, and then threw back his head and laughed, terminating with a snap of his jaws loud enough to make her jump. “Keep it and go.”

“You’re the one who had to know,” she said, her cheeks burning.

“True,” he muttered, and laughed again, an angrier, even more bitter sound. “Keep it all the same. Do we not all hold our store of useless treasure? Do not ask me, Mara,” he said curtly. “Thou hast set in me a dangerous mood. If thou wert to ask, I should be compelled to answer honestly, and it is bound to end badly.”

“What is so goddamned funny?” she demanded, and he heaved an angry, laughing sigh. “You make me…You make me bare my soul to you and then you have the…the goddamned gall to snicker behind your fucking hand at it? Fuck you!” She threw herself off the bed, shaking and hot with anger, and stormed for the stair.

“Thee, Mara. Thou art the horns of my humor. Not thy worthless toy and not the absent calf who gave it, but only thee.”

She snatched up her robe and kept going.

He was there on the dais when she reached the top of the stair, his green eyes blazing out over the jagged features of his snarling face. “I laugh,” he said, coming towards her on all fours like a beast, “for that thou believest thee loves thy Connie.”

She backed up, caught herself doing it, and made herself stop. “What would you know about love?” she demanded. “Nothing!”

“I know it is not she thou lovest,” he said quietly, now face to face. His breath was hot on her mouth. His eyes were cold. “Thou lovest only that she loveth thee, and it is a pale, desolate love.”

She gaped at him, too shocked and furious even to think, much less answer.

“I think thou wouldst love her if thee could,” he went on coldly. “Thou lovest so the idea of love—”

She’d slapped him before she even knew she was going to do it.

“—that thou wouldst give much to have it, even in pretense. Yet this Connie is as close as thee ever came to that Eden, and she only for that she never knew love better than in thee. And that is surely the greatest jest of all, and a miserable worm of a mortal, for it would have to be the most wretched creature—”

She heard a rusty scream wrench out of her and threw herself at him.

“—that ever tried to love thee,” Kazuul concluded, watching her harmless hands scratch and beat at his stony hide. “If pity ever had power to move such as me, I would pity her, this Connie, because thou art all the better friend she has known, and thou—” He caught her railing fists and then cupped her shaking cheek with cruel tenderness. “—thou art terrible.”

“I hate you,” she whispered.

“Thou dost not. And I am terrible,” he added, with a rueful smile. “And truly, what more proof of thy nature do I need?”

She felt his lips on hers, felt them part for him, then yanked herself back and out of his arms. She couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t shout at him, so she slapped him again right across his smirking face and ran for the door, fighting her way up the risers in a haze of rage.

“Thou wilt find her,” he called, his voice booming right behind her. “And thou wilt save her when thou dost, I think. But never thee. Thou art beyond all redemption.”

She fell on one of the benches, stumbled up again, and left bloody smears on the door when she forced it open.

“I told thee not to ask,” he said, his voice receding now. “And such a mood of honesty I have about me that I tell thee now, why not leave her lost among us, Mara? Let her languish where she lies, believing only the best of thee until she passeth out of all reason. Wouldst thou truly have her know thee better?”

But the door slammed behind her then and he did not follow, so that, mercifully, was all.

*          *          *

She ran home, or as much like it as she could, just like any frustrated child will run to the security of her room when pleas and tantrums fail her. In her cell, alone for the moment, Mara took off her locket and wrapped a loop of cheap chain around her fingers so that it could dangle. It spun slowly back and forth, flashing reflected light from the blister lamp in the hall around the dark cell. Mara stared without seeing. She was back in the Panic Room, dialing back her memories to the day, just six days before her twelfth birthday, the day of the orange cat.

Her party had been planned now for three months. It was going to be at Madame Jade’s Tea Parlor, in the city. All the little girls from the right families were invited. Kimara’s party dress, in crimson and gold Chinese silk, hung in plastic in her closet. Today, Mara’s mother had told her she could invite Connie if she wanted to. This concession had been the result of one idle-seeming request on her part about two months back, and a veritable psychic siege ever since. Caroline Warner resisted the idea much more than she ever had any of Mara’s previous mental demands. She didn’t like Connie, who she saw as a filthy, cringing little foreigner, and she hated Connie’s mother, who was all these things as well as noisy and socially awkward. She had tolerated Connie’s presence at her daughter’s previous parties, but the Tea Room was really more of her own idea and she wanted only her own kind of people there. The girls, well, the girls were rather like accessories, no different from a bracelet or a brooch, and Caroline had been looking forward to seeing her well-behaved if strange little daughter among the others, shrill and giggly creatures that they were. Having the Vitelli brat around would simply ruin everything.

Mara did not insist, not out loud. She simply pummeled her mother’s mind under the surface day and night—hourly on the weekends—until her mother wore out and started seeing things her way. Kimara asked for so little, after all. She had only the one friend and it was her own party. Things of that sort. So this morning, an exhausted and smudge-eyed Caroline had poured out her breakfast coffee and announced that if Kimara wanted to bring her ‘little friend and her mother’ to the Tea Room on Monday, so be it. Dress was formal. Mara extended the invitation after school, visiting with Connie at Connie’s apartment, and Connie’s mother (who was rather noisy and socially awkward to tell the truth, and who knew it, which was even worse) had accepted, her large heart gripped by dread at the thought of the malicious old hens who would be at that sort of party with her. She would have to have her hair done, she supposed. And mend the buckle on her good shoes.

Her thoughts had only become more frantic as the afternoon wore on, and so Mara had excused them from the apartment. Now the two best friends walked through the Poho County Arboretum, relaxing in the autumn air.

“We could have gone to the movies,” Connie said. “You never want to do anything fun.”

“This is fun.”

“No one’s even here!”

“That’s why it’s fun.” Mara led the way up the bark-covered path to the hiking trails. She knew them all by heart.

“But there’s nothing to do!”

“Read the information plaques. See if you can spot the peachleaf willow.”

“You are a laugh riot. Have you been told?” Connie reached up and stripped the leaves from an overhanging branch, scowling at nature’s well-manicured glory. “Can’t we sit down at least?”

“Sure. There’s a bench over by the river.”

“Thank God for really tiny favors.” Connie tromped on ahead. She broke off a branch and used it to beat on other trees as she passed them, sending late-summer berries and dead leaves flying. She was wearing an Arbor Day t-shirt. Love your Mother Earth, it said. “You know, if I didn’t like you so much, I’d never come along on these dumb excursions.”

“Your mom thinks they’re educational.”

“My mom—” Connie rolled her eyes and delivered a particularly savage blow to an unsuspecting huckleberry bush. “—thinks garlic is a food group. Besides, what does she know about educational? I don’t even think she graduated high school.”

“She had other things on her mind.” ‘Like being pregnant with your brother Johnny,’ Mara thought, but did not say. Connie hadn’t done that particular bit of math yet, and anyway, if she ever said such a thing, Connie would want to know how she knew and they were still four months away from that night of purple-haired fairies and frank talk of magic. “Besides, neither did Abraham Lincoln. Or Thomas Edison, I think.”

“Yeah, whatever. All I know is—oh my God!”

Mara gave Connie’s mind a tap and saw the dying cat through those eyes before she had to use her own. “Don’t touch it,” she said immediately, and still had to grab Connie’s arm to keep her friend from picking it up. Should have hammered the suggestion in…but she didn’t want to do that to Connie.

“Is it sick?” Connie asked, her eyes huge as she watched the cat gasp and strain.

“Could be. It’s not okay, that’s for sure.”

It was a big cat, orange and white, and it had surely come out the worst in a fight with another animal over the easy leavings of some family picnic. A dog maybe, or a raccoon. Raccoons were a lot more vicious than most people realized. It had managed to crawl here, close to the trail, before its wounds overwhelmed it and so here it lay. As it writhed, the terrible extent of its injuries were revealed—bloody mats, a torn ear, a few shallow bites, and finally, its wide-opened belly. Its teats protruded on either side of the ghastly wound; it was pregnant, but not due. Mara could sense its life and the little lives it carried, but of course, it had no thoughts. Despite the things most people liked to believe about their pets and animals in general, they really didn’t have much in the way of minds.

“Should we get someone?” Connie asked.

“For what?”

“To fix it, of course!”

Mara could not help the incredulous, dubious expression that crawled over her face at that. She looked from Connie’s heartsick face to the dirt-flecked coils of the cat’s intestines and back again. “There’s no fixing that, Connie.”

The cat rolled onto its side, purring in the extremity of its panic and pain. It did not see the two girls who stood over it or hear their booming, giant-like voices. If one of them had touched it, even to try and help, it would have bit. Animals do that, even the pet ones. They couldn’t reason the way people claimed they could. They didn’t love you back.

“I think it’s dying,” Connie whispered.

“It is.”

“Well, what can we do?”

There were tears in Connie’s eyes. Her twelve year-old heart was breaking, just as if she knew this cat, had loved it all her life.

“We can’t do anything,” Mara said. “It has to die.”

The cat yowled, a terrible rattling sound. It took two or three rapid breaths, then one slow one, and then died. Mara felt its mind fade out. The kittens began to at once to panic in their uncomprehending, unborn way. Then they died too, one by one, as Mara held Connie through the storm of Connie’s grief. Fleas jumped off the dead cat. Ants crawled on.

Mara couldn’t quite understand why Connie was taking it so hard. She’d been to hospitals before, and for that matter, to parks and movie theaters and even church, when her mother’s family were visiting. Anywhere there were lots of people, she’d felt people who knew someone who had died or were even dying themselves. This wasn’t the first time she’d shared it, and she seriously doubted it would be the last. It was just something people did. They got sick, they got shot, they got in crash-ups on the freeway or burned up in buildings; people fell off things, like bridges or roofs or ladders; they got things thrown at them, like bottles or bowling balls, and they got things thrown into them, like knives or even a soda straw if the weather was really bad and the wind blew hard enough; or sometimes even got things dropped on them, like big branches or pianos being lifted into apartments. You could go outside and get hit by lightning, or sometimes lightning could come in the house and get you for talking on phone or using the shower. You could get murdered, or kidnapped and murdered, or even kidnapped and raped and murdered. Sometimes sick or sad people suicided themselves by sticking their heads in ovens or cutting up their wrists, and sometimes people who didn’t mean it got dead when they drank too much or used too many drugs. Death happened to everyone, every day, everywhere you looked. It didn’t have to mean anything. When someone died, you just buried them and moved on with your life.

Connie was crying.

“Let’s bury it,” Mara suggested, after groping some time for some comforting thing to say.

Connie picked flowers while Mara found some soft soil under a maple tree and dug out a grave. She lined it with leaves and pine needles, and laid the cat inside, curled on itself so that none of the blood or messy bits showed. She waited for Connie to pet it a few times and then covered it over with dried autumn leaves so that when they filled in the hole, the dirt couldn’t touch it directly. Connie was afraid to see that, afraid to see dirt in its fur and its ears and mostly its eyes if its eyes came open. After the dirt came the flowers and then Mara found a nice big rock with a flat top to use for a marker and that was the grave.

The two girls knelt side by side for a long time, staring at it. Connie’s thoughts were tangled—a collage of cat and blood and grandfather and was it always like that? They said ‘pass away’ and was that like ‘passing out’, because Bobby Tom said you could pass out easy on hot days or if you didn’t eat a breakfast. Could she die if she didn’t eat her breakfast? Could she passout and then, if no one fed her, passaway like Papa Frankie? She remembered him in his coffin and how Mama made her kiss him, his check like wax, lying there. They said he passawayed in his sleep, that it was peaceful, but maybe they just hadn’t been close enough at the end to hear him yowl.

She started to cry again, very softly, and Mara knelt there and wondered what else to do. Hesitantly, she put her arm around Connie’s shoulder, and the other girl immediately swung around and clutched her close, crying hard but in near-silence. Mara patted her, stroked her hair, did all the things that grown-ups do to crying little kids, but none of it made much of a difference to Connie.

So she said, “Look around.”

“W-what?”

“Look around.” Mara tipped back her head, studying the branches above her, that dark leafy lattice eating up the sky, the birds and bugs and everything between her and the heavy West Coast clouds. After a while, Connie did the same, and Mara said, “The world just keeps going.”

“I guess.” Connie let go of her and sat by herself for a while. Finally, she sighed. “You must think I’m dumb.”

“No I don’t.”

“It was just a cat.”

Mara shrugged. “So? I’m just a little kid. I bet you’d feel pretty bad if I died, though. It’s okay to feel bad when things die.”

“Little kids don’t die,” Connie said, but uneasily. Mama said they didn’t, she said, ‘Don’t be silly, angel, you’re going to live a long long time and nothing’s ever going to get you,’ she said that, but—

“Sure they do,” Mara said. “Sometimes. Bad things happen to kids just they happen to grown-ups. Or to cats. But the world goes on. So do we.”

“Like…to heaven?”

“Maybe. Maybe just as other things, I don’t know. I mean, take the cat.” Mara gave the stone over the fresh grave a comforting pat. “It’s gone now, but the bugs and stuff will come along and eat it up, and whatever doesn’t get eaten will turn into good fertilizer for the bushes and trees right here, and they’ll get bigger and be homes for all the animals and birds that eat the bugs and worms and stuff. Everything goes on, see? You, me, everyone.”

That didn’t help, for some reason. Now Connie sat and stared and thought of Papa Frankie in the ground, full of bugs.

“It’s not a bad thing,” Mara insisted, annoyed with herself. “The bad stuff is all the stuff that happens before, like when it hurts or when you’re scared or feel sick, or whatever made you die. That part ends.”

“But what comes after?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows for sure, no matter what they say. But we’ll find out someday and I’ll probably be as surprised as everyone else.” She smiled at that. “Nobody lives forever, Connie.”

“But aren’t you scared?”

“Of dying?”

“Yeah.”

Mara thought about it, very aware of Connie hanging on her answer because she knew Mara would tell the truth. Hell of a lot of pressure to put a girl six days shy of twelve, she thought, but not bitterly. It was just Connie, that was all. “I just want to do it right,” she said at last. “Being dead doesn’t scare me, it’s just what happens. But dying can be pretty bad. I think it’s okay to be scared of that part, especially if it’s a bad way to go, like getting sick, where you end up puking all the time and have to pee in front of people and everyone who sees you just feels sorry for you, like, for years and years. That’s harsh. I’d be scared of facing that.”

“He lost all his hair,” Connie whispered. “And he smelled bad. I hated having to see him. I hated having to hug him.” And she hated worse having to kiss his dead cheek, when all of it was over, because he was passawayed now and didn’t even know it was her anymore. All he had was the last time, when she hadn’t even wanted to be there.

“Nobody knows what to do all the time,” said Mara. “But the world just keeps going on. We might as well go with it, and maybe just try to be better.”

“Like how?”

“Like…” Mara looked at the grave again. “Like be nicer to cats. But don’t, you know, let it take over all the time. It doesn’t help you or the cat to get all crazy when you think about it. It’s dead. The bad stuff is all over, right?”

Slowly, Connie nodded. Then, almost unexpectedly (the thought did precede the words, but only by a second or two), she said, “You don’t think you’re very nice, do you?”

Mara looked at her, lopsidedly smiling. “No, I’m not.”

“You are, though.”

“No, but that’s okay. Being nice is like being pretty. There’s a scale, you know?”

“I think you’re nice.”

“Yeah and I bet Anna Slovak’s mom thinks she’s pretty, but she’s…she’s kinda hideous.”

Connie gasped, then giggled, then scowled. “She’s nice!”

“Mostly,” said Mara, who knew that no one was really very nice, and who would not be a bit surprised when, five years later, the girl everyone described as ‘sweet but shy’ to police and ‘mule-butt ugly’ to each other took a tryout baton and used it to put Holly Hoendekkar in the hospital after a particularly nasty comment at the cheerleading trials. Holly had to breathe through a hole in her neck for a few days. Anna even went to jail for a little bit. But yeah, mostly nice.

“Do you want to go home now?” Mara asked, knowing Connie did, and so she went too, and six days later, at Kimara Warner’s upscale and elegant birthday party, a very nervous Connie in a very secondhand dress gave Mara an eight-dollar locket on a gold-painted chain, wrapped in slightly used paper that had pastel balloons on it. Best Friends, it said on the front, but that wasn’t why Connie gave it to her, not really.

“It’s so you always remember,” Connie said with that shy Connie-smile, “that you have a heart too, and it’s a good one.”

In that moment, through Connie’s eyes, Mara saw herself, the better self, the Mara that Connie thought she knew. She would have given anything, anything, to be that person at that moment. It was the best birthday, the best of any days.

She put on the locket, ignoring the ugly flare of disapproval radiating out from her mother at the grown-ups’ table (where Mrs. Vitelli sat, as nervous as her daughter in her faded cotton dress and freshly-done hair, trying to disguise her churning nerves with loud laughter and horribly inappropriate good cheer). She put it on and kept it on, and no, it didn’t change her, it didn’t change anything, but she wore it just the same. Day in, day out, asleep and in the shower, for twelve years without fail.

Sometimes, she needed the reminder.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Returning to Kazuul had been a mistake. Even Mara made them now and then. And just as she had done on those other rare occasions, Mara did her best to learn from this one and move on. She ate. She slept. She searched the students’ wing of the Scholomance with the locket held out before her and even ventured down into the Great Library’s miasma to lift every aspirant’s hood and make sure Connie was not among them. She tried the labyrinth beneath the Nave without Horuseps, and managed to open most, if not all, of the doors again. The one place she did not go was the lyceum. Looking at the spiraling stair only reminded her of whose theater lay at the top and then she was angry all over again. She didn’t handle anger well and she couldn’t afford to lose her temper with him twice. She’d get over herself in time, but for now, she stayed out of the lyceum.

On the fourth day following her encounter with Kazuul, as Mara’s body slept and her mind hovered in the Panic Room watching dreams, her monitors suddenly registered a hand upon her shoulder. Not a subtle touch, but one that shook her boldly. She woke fast, ready for Kazuul and ready for a fight, and instead saw moonlight in the shape of Horuseps, sitting cross-legged at her side in the tiny cell, not smiling.

“I have just spent every hour since sunrise convincing him not to come down here himself,” he said without preamble. He did not identify the ‘him’.

She didn’t need it identified.

“Let him,” she snapped, sitting up.

Horuseps looked pained. “Precious, you don’t mean that.”

“The hell I don’t! Do you know what he is to me? He’s a nuisance, that’s all! I tried to deal with it by giving in to him even when I knew that was a mistake, and it blew up on me, so fine. I can live with that, but I don’t need the peace and quiet so bad that I’m going to put up with his—”

His what? What had it all boiled down to but a little name-calling? She’d done all the slapping and the storming out. If anyone ought to getting pissy here—

Horuseps waited patiently, his hands folded in his lap. He looked tired.

“I don’t need to put up with him,” she finished, and threw herself back down as violently as she could without hurting herself, rolling away from him. “You can tell him I hope he enjoyed himself, because it is the last fucking he ever gets out of me. I’m through.”

“Yes, and ten minutes after I delivered your message, he would be right here, fucking you until he broke either your bones or the wall. I allow him nine minutes to charge bellowing through the Scholomance,” he added lightly, “and one minute to kill the messenger. Really, darling, I thought we were friends.”

She stayed on her side, facing the dark, fuming.

“Once more,” Horuseps said after a moment. “Meet with him once more. Give him the chance to—”

“No.”

“Think what your refusal means to your search, to your Connie.”

“He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t know anything. He’s useless.”

“His power—”

“I don’t need it. I can find her without him.”

Another short silence.

“You’re just as stone-stubborn as he is. I hope you appreciate that. I’ll be here all day,” he muttered, and sighed. “Precious, I don’t know what you’re expecting, but this mountain will stand up on swan’s feet and fly before he ever apologizes.”

“I’m not interested in his apology.”

“You can’t avoid him forever.”

“Sure, I can. He’s put himself in the most avoidable spot in the whole damn mountain.”

“You have no idea how angry you are making him with every day that passes.”

Mara bolted up, shouting, “He should have thought of that before he called Connie a miserable worm!”

“And so should you,” Horuseps snapped back, seizing her locket and shaking it in his fist. “Before going to him wearing the token of someone else’s love!”

Mara drew back, still flushed and breathing hard, but beginning to be confused as well.

“He has always been first in the eyes of his supplicants. You put your Connie above him even in his bed…How did you think he was going to handle that?” He released the locket with a snap of his wrist. It bounced off her throat and spun, lying tangled over her breast in its cheap chain.

“I’m through with him,” Mara said again, but not as heatedly as she had before.

“No you are not,” Horuseps shot back, biting off each word. “Not for so long as you live by his grace in his mountain! Must I remind you of that? And you, darling Mara, light of my lonely heart, you are a hair’s breadth from finding yourself chained to the foot of his bed until you learn to appreciate him better, which knowing the two of you, is going to take at least a thousand years, and in the meantime, you will lose every hope of ever finding your lost Connie!”

“I don’t respond well to threats.”

“Neither does Kazuul!”

She looked away, pushing her anger down and trying to think. She couldn’t fight him, she knew that. Even if it was just him and not every demon under his command, she could never fight Kazuul. His physical strength aside, he could easily crush her with no more than the power of his mind.

But he hadn’t. Even when she slapped him.

No. She didn’t need him. She could find Connie without—

It occurred to her only then that every resource he had at his disposal to help her find Connie was also a resource he could use to shut her away. The revelation overwhelmed her with frustration and a feeling of helplessness so new to her that she almost couldn’t recognize it, and both together combined to make a churning pit of purest anger.

“I can’t,” she said finally, calmly. “I can’t see him right now or I’ll just make things worse. I’m furious with him.”

“I understand. You’ve no idea how well. And I think I can convince him to wait…if he knew that you were coming.” Horuseps watched her glare across the dark cell. “Are you?”

“Looks like I have to, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What does he expect me to do?” Mara demanded scathingly. “Love him?”

“Probably.”

“After he tells me how incapable I am of loving anyone? After he calls me a…a terrible, wretched—”

“He doesn’t think things through,” Horuseps agreed with a sigh. “He only knows that he wants you…and you want someone else. If you knew him as I do, you’d realize he’s actually trying very hard.” He waited as she seethed, and quietly said, “Shall I tell him you’ll be back?”

Stiffly, she nodded.

“Soon?”

“Sooner than I want,” she said with a tight laugh. “And if he expects me to be happy about it, he’s got a hell of a disappointment in store.”

“Very well.” Horuseps started to rise, then abruptly leaned over and brushed his lips against her cheek. It was a distinctly unpleasant feeling, and she had to fight not to reach up and crush the lingering sensation like a spider. “I know this is difficult for you, precious. I doubt you’ve ever had to capitulate so entirely to another’s will before, and I sincerely sympathize. It wasn’t easy for me either.”

“How often do you have to chase down his women for him anyway?”

“As they say—” He smiled thinly and stood up. “There’s a first time for everything. Sleep well, Bitter Waters.”

He let himself out, and after a while, Mara lay back down and rolled over.

She had to go back. Not today, she knew that already, and not tomorrow either. But soon.

Of course, ‘soon’ ought to be relative to a demon who had lived more than four thousand years by his own admission. With any luck, she’d find Connie and the two of them would be long gone before he lost his patience and sent Horuseps after her again.

Kazuul.

Mara shut her eyes, gritted her teeth, and eventually slept.

*          *          *

The second time she woke, it was to first-bell ringing through the rock. She sat up aching, as she did every evening, and felt a wall at each of her bracing hands, the door right at her toes.

Yet Horuseps had been here, she was sure of it. Her cheek still crawled from his kiss. She didn’t know how he’d gotten in or out, but she knew he’d been here, pimping her out to Kazuul.

All right, perhaps that wasn’t entirely fair. But then again, perhaps it was.

So his feelings were hurt, were they? Her twelve year-old birthday present was too much for his demonic heart to bear when he had to look up and watch her ride him. And three days without her had proved so painful that he had to threaten to chain her to his bed if she didn’t come back on her own. All to win her pale, wretched love.

There was no point in sitting here, making herself angry. She got up, tucked her cup into her sleeve, and felt her way out into the hall to light a lamp. She did not think about Kazuul. He wasn’t worth thinking about.

Bastard.

Mara found an empty room in the garderobe and relieved herself, still not thinking, but as she rinsed her hands afterwards, for whatever reason, her eye wandered back to watch her own yellow stream take itself away through the garderobe’s hole into the cistern below.

It sounded like a fairly deep drop. She remembered thinking that before. And the sound of water falling into it echoed loudly, as if it fell into a fairly wide room. She had thought that too.

Mara wiped her hands on her robe and walked over to the hole, ignoring the stench as best she could. She looked down, but the light from the room’s one blister-lamp didn’t reach far inside. And really, how badly did she want to see what was down there? A long drop? It kept the gasses and the smell under some sort of control. A wide room? So all four sub-chambers of the garderobe emptied into one big reservoir. What did she think, that Connie had flushed herself down the toilet?

Well…not this toilet. Mara prodded at the edge of the hole with her foot, then placed her foot directly over it. With her heel on the rim, her toes could just touch the opposite side. Nothing human was getting down there. Not in one piece anyway, although if someone were dismembered…

But as she stood there, the sound of falling water changed subtly, from the high flat smack of liquid dropping onto liquid, to the dull patter of a solid interrupting mass.

Mara moved her foot and aimed her mind down the hole.

She felt no one.

‘There’s something alive down there,’ she thought, and yes, she could remember thinking that once as well.

“Mara?”

“Devlin,” she answered, still gazing thoughtfully downwards.

“Um…what are you doing?”

“Where does all the water go, do you know?”

“Why would I know that?”

“Why doesn’t it fill up the cistern and overflow?”

“I don’t know. I guess there’s vents, like in the bath.”

“And where is the water coming from?”

“Rain?”

“Every day?” she pressed. “All year? At this rate?”

“How should I know? Maybe there’s a reservoir up top somewhere. Maybe its runoff from an underground river or something. What does it matter?” He joined her at the hole and also poked a sandal at it. “She’s not down there.”

“How can you be sure? Haven’t you ever heard something move down there?”

“Hey.” Devlin turned around and gave her a serious, frowning look. “I heard things moving around in the Oubliette with me too, but I knew I was alone there. Did you know that one of the first symptoms of prolonged confinement is hallucinations? Closely followed by paranoia. It’s this place, okay? She’s not down there.”

His confidence was oddly soothing, no matter how certain she was. She allowed it to sway her for now and followed him out, but as she left, the sound of falling water changed again, as of that large body moving out of the stream.

They took the back stair up to the dining hall, the one that led past the kitchens, with Devlin chattering in her ear the whole way about claustrophobia and caves and people he’d seen go, you know, totally batshit in here, some of them after years of doing okay, right up until they started screaming and clawing at their eyes. One guy he saw actually took a potato—

Mara tuned it out. The kitchen doors were closed, and there was another room she’d never seen. Come to think of it, where were they getting all this food? Not just the meat, but the rest of it? The awful gruel, the grain for the bread, the milk and the rennet for the cheese, all the fresh fruits which the Masters enjoyed well outside of their season? She guessed someone could be using the art of Growth for some of it, but even if true, where was he doing it? There had to be a garden somewhere, perhaps on the outside, and that meant another way out of the mountain.

Mara paused by the last kitchen door and tried to open it. The latch turned in her grip, and then someone took it firmly on the other side and held it. Feeling through the stone was futile. She and the unseen other held their halves of the door and waited.

“We’re not allowed in there,” Devlin said behind her.

Mara let it go, frustrated. “I’ve looked everywhere we are allowed.” She watched the latch rotate back to its former position and then heard the faint click of a lockplate engaging. “How am I supposed to find her when—”

Kazuul. Kazuul, of course. She was supposed to go to Kazuul for permission, and after she’d properly subjugated herself, he might consider it.

“Bastard,” Mara spat, and started walking again.

Devlin cringed back.

“Not you.” She stepped out into the roar of the dining hall and glanced towards the Masters’ table, tapping a lackluster greeting at Horuseps.

His answering thought caressed her without words, preoccupied as he was with his conversation with Letha, but some part of it still held the spark of sympathy she remembered from their encounter in the night.

Devlin dove in at the first table they came to, drilling himself through the throng for a few chunks of half-burnt, half-bloody meat from a nearly empty bowl. Further down the table, another platter heaped with leg bones (or perhaps arm bones; she was not convinced she was looking at an animal’s carcass) rattled back and forth under the battling bodies of at least six grown men. That was all there was for this table, four plates to feed maybe two hundred people. It was like that for all of them…all but the center table, and where half as many students loitered over three times as much food, but of course, the center table was where the lions fed.

She headed over, and they made room for her. A lot of room.

Mara sat, but didn’t touch the meat. The platter set immediately before her held an entire ribcage, cracked open and roasted whole, then stuffed with more meat, most of which clung to smaller shards of unidentifiable bone. It had been picked over pretty well, but there was plenty of meat left, and there were nine other platters behind it, evenly spaced along the table, where black-robed acolytes added to the noise with jeers and cheers and threw their bones at hungry neophytes.

‘You’re not eating,’ came the deliberate thought from the Master’s table. Horuseps had finished his discussion and was watching her. ‘I do hope you’re not expecting a second meal out of me.’

**Do you do this on purpose?** Mara sent, watching students fight at the other tables.

‘Of course,’ Horuseps replied. ‘It encourages competition.’

**It encourages anarchy.**

‘Not at all. Every mother’s child of them is obedient to a Master’s law. But a hungry student is always more eager to learn. It’s a teaching aid, really.’

**And yet you’re trying to feed me.**

‘My dear and most beloved heart, I don’t want you any more eager to learn.’

Suddenly, in the Mindstorm, Mara saw a flash of devious intent. She homed in on it to be certain whoever it was wasn’t coming for her, and using his eyes and hers, was eventually able to see the very young man in his dirty white robe easing up on the center table.

He was good. He fought and scratched and shouted with the rest of them, but it was all camouflage to mask his true intention. Every buffeting shove he earned helped him along his way as he eased inch by deliberate inch away from his empty table and toward the bounty of the other. No one had noticed him yet. Mara did not stare.

Horuseps was thinking at her, politely extending a wordless sort of inquiry since he could not tap for her attention. She gave it to him, but her hesitation had made him curious. She could see the lights of his eyes gleaming out of his silhouette as he searched the room. It took him considerably less time to find the clever gazelle than it had her.

**Don’t let on,** Mara sent as the demon’s eyes gleamed white.

‘Why would I? These are always entertaining.’

The boy had made it as close to the acolyte’s table as a white-robe could get. He paused there, wrestling with the other neophytes as he nerved himself. His goal was the platter three up from Mara, which confused her some. There was almost no one around her and the ribcage within her easy reach was surely a tempting target.

‘Ah, but you, my ferocious one, are guarding it,’ Horuseps thought. ‘And you have a reputation, don’t you?’

**He can have it for all I care.**

‘Firstly, you really have to eat something. And secondly, if you’re so concerned for his success, why not put an end to this impending catastrophe and feed him?’

She looked sharply toward the Master’s table.

‘Feed him,’ Horuseps thought calmly, pouring himself another cup of wine. ‘No one would stop you, not you. Stand up and drop the feast into his grateful hands. It is entirely within your power to change the disastrous course of this tragic play. Who knows? You may even restore his faith in human kindness.’

**I’d never be able to walk in here again without drawing a mob of whining neophytes,** Mara sent, annoyed.

‘True, but they would love you.’

**I’d rather they feared me and left me alone.**

‘Of course you do,’ Horuseps replied, his thoughts like a gentle hand stroking through her hair. ‘Of course.’

The boy at the heart of this silent discussion made his move, lunging without a word of warning over the acolytes at the table.

He caught them by surprise, but the surprise didn’t last, and before he could snap a rib away and run, more than a dozen bodies were on him. They used their hands, they used their stone cups, they used greasy clubs of bone. Long after the boy was down and scrambling mindlessly to get away, they stayed on him, their laughter as indiscriminate from howls as their glee was indiscriminate from hate. Black-robes flew in like crows from the farthest point of the table, abandoning their meal to get in on the beating, fighting with each other for just one kick. One of them climbed up on the table, both hands raised, an incomprehensible sound eating through the Mindstorm as he opened his mouth to shout—

“Enough!”

Silence did not fall, but the roar did subside until there could be quiet. Neophytes, acolytes, and even the struggling boy himself stilled and turned towards the Master’s table, where Malavan reared high, his long foreclaws raised for attack. Contrary to the furious roar of his voice, his lips were peeled back in an unmistakable grin, and his enjoyment was a wash of red across Mara’s senses.

Into the quiet, Horuseps said, “Arts are not to be used in the dining hall. Show some decorum.”

Students eyed one another. The man standing on the table got down, flushed. The lions backed away from their kill and let the boy limp back to his own kind, bloodied but not broken. The noise gradually began to swell again.

‘One of last year’s crop,’ Horuseps told her, looking after the retreating boy. ‘Not a promising student despite his natural cunning. A talent for trickery, no matter how well-developed, can never compensate for intelligence. There’s something wrong with his mind.’

Mara tapped, and it was there: a slight dysfunction of thought, like a sparking wire laid across his ability to concentrate, to remember. Bad enough on the Outside, where letters would never quite make sense as he read them, numbers never quite add up, but here? He would never be able to master an art, never even be able to open a door or turn on one of the lamps. Dumbfounded, she drove deeper, holding her own memory of the Oubliette out before her to resonate in him, unable to fathom how he could have possibly survived it.

Cunning, Horuseps had said, and he surely had that. After a few days, not long at all by the standards of the Scholomance, he had pried a little rock free from one of the walls and sharpened it carefully against the wet floor. Then he lay down where the air was sweet as it blew it through that tiny crack under the door, cut his palm, and gently blew his blood out to pool on the other side. It took some time. He was patient. Someone eventually saw it. Someone opened the door to collect the body. And he walked out.

**Why do you keep him?** Mara asked, pulling these memories back so that she could watch them again, still astonished but also grudgingly impressed.

‘Dear child, it is not for us to judge the worthiness of those who seek us out. We are entirely indiscriminate.’

**He’s a puppy,** Mara insisted. **He can’t learn anything. He’s a tribunal just waiting to happen!**

‘Yes, but it can be quite a long wait, and he is rather an imaginative little puppy. And what would you have us do, heartless one? You who wouldn’t spare him a scrap from your table, you’d have us let him go?’

**I’m not heartless! And why not?** she demanded. **He’s no threat to you. Even if he told everyone he met about this place, no one would believe it.**

Across the room, Horuseps threw back his head and laughed. ‘No human is or has ever been a threat to us, yet we release no one on their own recognizance. They have every one of them come to us, sacrificed themselves and others, broken themselves upon our doorsteps. Who are we to deny them entry after they have suffered so? No, Bitter One, all who knock may enter, all who enter must bide.’

**He couldn’t possibly understand what he was getting into.**

‘None of them do. Precious, you are doing it again, holding us to human standards of morality. Yes, I know the boy is doomed to answer to the hour of the bells, but he chose his path. There are thousands like him in the world, tens of thousands I dare say, with mental defects far more crippling, who yet manage to make their way in the world without seeking out demonic powers with which to destroy his enemies. He accepted the terms of his admission. Stupidly, perhaps, but the same can be said of so many of them. We send no one away without a reckoning.’

**Does that mean you intend to stop me from leaving when I find Connie?** Mara asked. Her inner voice stayed calm, but hard. She wanted him to see steel, and by his sudden, well-guarded silence, knew that he had.

The second bell rang, and still Horuseps said nothing.

**Another time, then,** she sent, as students began their roaring exodus out into the Nave. **But you had better decide what you are going to do about it, because the time is coming.**

‘You sound very fierce, as always, sweetling, but stop and think. Are you really prepared to fight your way free of us?’ Horuseps asked, his silent words pulsing with humor.

**I think the better question is, are you really prepared to have all your groveling students see someone fight?**

Mara got up from the empty table and headed for the door, where Devlin waited for her, somewhat bruised from the breakfast battle. She didn’t get an answer, and she didn’t expect one. She supposed it would probably get back to Kazuul, and then he’d have another reason to want her in chains, but she’d deal with that when and if it happened. For now, it mattered more that the question had finally been asked: What were they prepared to do when she finally had what she came for? They had to think about it, because it was only by knowing what they were thinking that she’d ever be able to plan a way around it.

*          *          *

Mara went back down into the ephebeum, still hungry and now restless as well. She had begun to think there was no point in continuing her search until she had some means of accessing the forbidden areas and there was only one person who could give it. She doubted like hell he’d let her just because she showed up to ask. He was going to know she needed him when she came back and he was going to want to see her crawl first. The time for granting requests would come after the lord of the Scholomance finished the fucking the respect back into her.

Bastard.

She could deal with it if she had to, but she was just too angry to do it now. So she went to the ephebeum. She would take a bath, she decided, maybe wash her robes once the other students took themselves to class, and she would spend her day reminding herself how to be cool, how to be calm.

Unfortunately, it seemed everyone had the same idea. When first-bell rang in the Scholomance, the goal of every student was to get to the dining hall and get fed. That was what made it the best time to find privacy in the garderobe. It was now, after second-bell, that the body’s other needs took priority, and while a person could snatch a bath in the lyceum as easily as here, there was only the one garderobe in the whole damn mountain.

Never mind. She would wait them all out in her room. Sooner or later, they’d all go to cla—

Halfway across the ephebeum, someone shoved her. Not maliciously, but she still had to grab at the neck of Devlin’s robe to keep from dropping and falling under the tromping feet of a few hundred indifferent students. She straightened, a psychic attack at the ready, but the shover was already five steps ahead and worming his way deeper into the crowd, oblivious to her. She tapped at him instead, and felt the young, disconnected mind-print of the boy from the dining hall. He kept his head down and moved fast, trying to lose himself amid all the other white robes. He thought he was being followed.

Was he? Mara moved quickly out of the unprotected open, dragging Devlin with her almost without noticing him. She lost sight of the boy, but sent his image out, hunting for resonance.

And found it.

Loki was at the top of the stairs, making his way down slow, giggling. He was obvious enough, but the obvious threat wasn’t always the most dangerous. Loki was indeed chasing the boy, but just to make him run, not to catch him. Catching him was for—

La Danse sprang out from around a jut of rock and caught the boy in a textbook full nelson. Instantly, the boy set out screaming and struggling, but Danse was bigger, stronger, and had his arms wrenched high behind his back in seconds, his head shoved down right against his chest. Students scattered back from them in a flurry of panic, then came carefully back and began to add their jeers and laughter to La Danse’s as he dragged his quarry out of the garderobe’s tunnel mouth and into the open. He did it slow, making sure everyone had a chance to poke, slap, or spit at his prize.

It wasn’t very violent, but the hostility was shocking, so much more than what she would have thought a fruitless play in the dining hall deserved. They were tearing at him like a pack of a wild dogs, even people who hadn’t seen him make his foolish dive for a handful of acolyte’s breakfast.

This was not a safe place to be.

“Do you know him?” Mara asked, releasing her grip on Devlin’s robe.

He immediately and too casually slid behind her. “No. People don’t really get to know the gazelles, you know.”

“Then why is everyone laughing?”

“Because it isn’t them,” Devlin said. “Yet.”

“A race!” La Danse shouted, grinning like a skull over the top of the boy’s tossing head. “We must have a race!”

Pandemonium. Some of the acolytes quietly excused themselves and left for class, but most erupted in cheers and lunged at white-robes. The neophytes were also sharply divided; some, like laughing Loki, sprang up and joined in the hunt, but most were runners, their panic bright as razor-shine in Mara’s mind.

Devlin slowly sank down behind her. She glanced at him and up again in time to see an acolyte coming at her. Her eyes narrowed. She readied a slap.

But the man paused, recognition stealing the fervor from his little game. He lowered his snatching hands, hesitated a glance at Devlin, then backed up and launched himself at someone else.

“Thank you,” Devlin whispered at her shoulder.

“Get out from there,” she snapped, throwing an elbow into him.

“A race! A race!” Rope belts were removed and captured neophytes dragged to opposite sides of the cavern. At one end of the ephebeum’s central space, the collected neophytes were stripped and bound at wrist and ankle with their hands before them. One of the acolytes gaily produced a small pot of ink from his sleeve and began to paint numbers on the victims’ naked backs. No longer trying to escape, the captured neophytes stood for it, shivering with cold and humiliation. At the other end, an equal number of neophytes were de-robed and stood in a row, penned in on all sides by laughing, jeering students, but left unmarked. They were not the participants, it seemed, although just what they were eluded her for the moment.

“A triathlon, I think,” Le Danse called, striding out into the center of the ephebeum.

Cheers.

“Does this happen often?” Mara asked.

“What else are they going to do, watch TV?”

A good point.

“For the first leg, the worm-race!” More cheers, which Le Danse magnanimously waved down. “Contestants, to your bellies and crawl. It is not so far, eh?”

Not so far. Perhaps three hundred feet, end to end, naked, across a rough stone floor. Mara glanced at the five men marked to compete, but saw no rebellion in them, only anger and defeat.

“The second leg must be…the swallow’s race!” Le Danse bowed to his cheering section, beaming from ear to ear, then pointed to the silent row of naked neophytes held at the far end of the ephebeum. “When you reach your partner, feel free to help yourself to, ah, a little protein drink! As much as you like, they have plenty!”

Roars of laughter. The neophytes in the distance kept their heads bent and their fists at their sides, burning with humiliation.

“It must be to the finish.” Danse wagged a chiding finger at the captive racers being pressed to their bellies before him. “You must show proof to our judges before you swallow or you will be required to begin again. No exceptions! And last…” A dramatic pause while he thought, then Danse threw out his arms, crying, “The piss-race!”

“Are they all like this?” Mara wondered.

“They’re all bad, if that’s what you mean. But it’s never exactly the same race.” And he’d been in several over the years, as a racer or as a hurdle. Even now, he wanted to throw up, just being here.

Shallow basins were produced and passed among the acolytes and their white-robed flunkies, who were only too happy to fill them.

“You may walk, crawl, or slither,” Danse told the bound men generously, “bearing those upon your back, until you return to your starting point. So easy! Unless you drop your pisspot, in which case, you will be immediately disqualified.”

Boos. Jeers. Laughter.

“For the winner? Release!” Le Danse held up his hands to control a disappointed crowd, and once they’d quieted, he cried, “The losers shall be set into stocks!”

Mara half-turned to ask Devlin what the stocks were, but he was cringing behind her again. She took two long steps to the right and hauled him up by the hood of his robe. “Do not hide from these people, you damned fool!” she hissed.

“From race’s end until last-bell!” Danse was shouting, scarcely audible over the cheers. “For the amusement and buggery of all!”

And the fear she felt from the contestants was not necessarily for that, but for the day of class it meant they would miss. One precious day out of the ten allotted each year, when exceeding one’s limit meant a Master’s hand dragging you out of sleep up to the Black Door to the jangling, discordant pealing of the bells. And that, Mara sensed, was half the fun for these jackals.

Sickening, all of it. Mara left, cutting straight across the ephebeum with Devlin in his flapping sandals right on her heels. Her exit delayed the start of the race, but was not loudly booed. More than one person recognized her, it seemed.

“Aha! I didn’t see you there, pretty bird!” Le Danse called. “But I thought I smelled sour cunt. If you like, you and your little pet may take the place of any two contestants you choose, but I warn you, you must restrict yourself to only one partner in the swallow’s race! No fair drinking them all!”

Loki honked laughter somewhere in the crowd.

Mara turned around. “I’ve let this go as long as I’m going to,” she said calmly. “The next time you speak to me, even to wish me a Merry Christmas, I am going to pop your brain like a balloon. It won’t kill you. You want to think about what it will mean for you to live the rest of your life here, entirely at the mercy of others.”

He didn’t believe her, and as the crowd around them ooo-ed and laughed and called mocking warnings, he opened his mouth to call her bluff. And then he hesitated, remembering a certain man in a white robe, the man who had been the first to call her a pretty bird, what else, a swallow. She had turned and looked at him, just looked, and the man had flinched and struck his head and…and had he only flinched? Had he even struck his head? He had fallen into Danse’s lap, he remembered that, and the next day he was still there on the ephebeum floor, stripped of his robe and his hair, until the cold and the damp took him, and then he was just gone.

Someone had even taken his hair…

No, he did not believe her, but there was no point in humoring her either. Le Danse turned away, his arms up, ignoring her. “Let the triathlon begin!” he shouted, and everyone applauded him.

Mara climbed the wide stair to the Nave, and then to the lyceum, until their howling-ape minds and their carnival cheers were behind her.

“Thanks,” Devlin said again.

“You keep saying that like you think I’m doing it for you.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I know you’ve got a reputation and everything. I won’t tell people how you really are.”

Mara thought of the boy stripped and tied on his belly, watching her walk away. “This is how I really am, Devlin.”

“Right.” He winked.

Oh, for God’s sake. Mara walked a little faster, trying to lose herself in the knots of students gathering in the central cavern outside the classrooms. It wasn’t really crowded enough for that, but then, most of the acolytes were below, watching the race.

“Hold.”

They stopped, all of them. Mid-step, mid-word, motionless. Even Mara, in whom the habit had no reason to be ingrained. She looked where the others looked, back down the corridor at the Master coming toward them.

The ground did not shake at his approach, but it should have. That was how he looked, the first impression that he gave. He was a creature of stone, a creature to make stone tremble. It was his size—half-again as tall as the tallest student here. It was his skin—slate grey and pebbled as a heat-dried riverbed. It was his shape—slabs of muscle slapped like clay over four thick legs and a barrel-body, the inhumanly broad torso rising up to a domed, low-browed head.

“Bow not,” he snarled, as students bobbed anxiously before him. “Show to me thy faces. Trial enough it is to teach thee, pestilent ones, I’ll waste no more effort than I must. Hold, I say!” he bellowed suddenly, rearing that massive, saurian body and slamming his black hooves down again hard enough to crack the stone under him. He aimed his hand like a hammer at a cringing man in a white robe, his eyes blazing. “Aye, thee! Uncover thy head and show thy puling face! Ah, so I thought. I’ve had thee already, and so thou wouldst run, eh? Thou wouldst avoid me? Even me?” His voice kept rising, not higher and higher, but deeper and darker, until it filled all the space in the hive-like caverns and in Mara’s head. Sending, he was sending as he spoke, blasting these people with telepathy they weren’t built to receive, just to make them scream and slap their hands over their ears as he came for them. “Now I’ll have thee again, thou craven!” he roared, already diving in to pluck the pleading man off the floor.

There was an unlucky bastard, thought Mara, to have escaped running La Danse’s race only to end up in this demon’s grip. But for what? Whatever it was, it was bad enough that the race below was entirely forgotten. She started to tap at Devlin, but then got a good look at him and left the poor bastard alone. His face was not white with terror, but grey, an awful dishwater grey. His eyes bulged even as he tried to squint them shut. The corners of his mouth dragged down in a ghastly wet-clay mask as he pushed his chin out, baring his face in a rictus of obedience. She didn’t need to know what he was thinking.

The demon just kept coming, dragging the first student with him across the lyceum until he reached a wide ledge on the rounded wall which some of students used for a game-table. There, he threw his victim down, scattering play-pieces and burning candles, and caught another, scarcely looking to see who he took. Breath came out of him in a hard, impatient snort as he ran his eyes over the rest, as if the lack in today’s variety were particularly vexing to him. He took two men in rapid succession, shoved three more aside, and grabbed Mara.

His fingers were iron, each nearly as thick as her whole hand, closing around her waist and crushing the breath from her in an instant. He pulled her up off the ground, already eyeing the others at his disposal, and Mara unthinkingly grabbed at his wrist, as if she actually thought she could loosen the titan grip he had on her. His skin was hot, hot as Kazuul’s, and maybe it was the chill of her own that made him notice her at last. He stiffened sharply and looked at her for the first time.

His eyes were deep under the protruding crest of his slanted brow. She could see only glints of reflected candlelight far back in their shadows. His mouth, though, that she could see clearly: four interlocked mandibles over a black, fleshy maw, clicking in an oddly thoughtful way as he considered her. His mind, dark and deep as any Master’s, iron-bound and locked tight, had achieved a dim translucence through their shared touch; he thought of Kazuul. That infuriated her, knowing that Kazuul had put some kind of mark on her, more so since she was also intensely glad of it.

The demon’s arm lowered. He sat her carefully on her feet.

No one around them moved, but she heard…not whispers exactly, only a kind of group breath, more a sigh than a gasp. It was not a happy sound. It wasn’t surprised either. It was the sound of many people afraid to object who all wanted to very much.

The demon grunted, leaning back over his draconian body. His eyes stayed with her. His hand released its bruising grip one finger at a time, and he flexed them a few times, as if to rid himself of some lingering sensation her flesh had passed along to his.

Then he twisted around, seized a woman from the crowd, and threw her onto the table with the others. Apparently satisfied with this selection, the demon jostled his catches around until he had the first of them. He flipped this one onto his stomach, yanked his kicking legs down to touch the floor, and wrenched the hem of the black robe up, exposing the man’s pale and somewhat flabby buttocks.

She didn’t need to watch this. Mara glanced around, but no one else was moving. Most of them weren’t watching either, but had their eyes shut or their faces turned sickly away. She took a step; Devlin caught at her hand and gave his head a little shake, not raising his eyes from the floor.

The demon spoke a word behind her, something old and impossible to hear clearly. The next sound was a ghastly, crushed grunt, overrode by a thunderous roll of pleasure.

“Enough,” the demon rumbled. “Cease thy struggles. I’ll finish with thee in mine own time as thou must well remember. Nay, I know there is no pain upon thee, so lie thee still and savor the honor I give thee. To me, thou morsel. Here and let me taste thee until I am made ready.”

A woman’s strangled cry of repulsion. His laughter. The purr of ripping fabric. Then licking, mewls, contented hums.

‘That was almost me,’ Mara thought, watching Devlin watch his feet.

“Ah, you humans. So stubbornly set in the mold of your first making.” Heavy hooves slammed atop the table. One man was flung aside, another thrown down in his place. That same word punched through the air again, chewing at Mara’s ears. “Yet your flesh is as malleable as potter’s clay when the way is known. Ahh…see how easily thou givest way before me? And see how raptly thy fellows do bear me witness? If thou couldst but give me half this eye when thou dost sit my lessons, thee could Malleate thyself and spare me the effort!”

Malleate.

Mara’s head twitched towards the ugly sounds behind her. ‘Ruk,’ she thought, and felt again Kazuul’s hand passing over her belly, the way her skin had strained upwards. ‘It is Master Ruk who teaches the art of Malleation.’

Stillness, no longer than a heartbeat, and then the groaning thrusts and muffled grunts resumed. “So thou hast heard of me, eh? Come, then. Come behold mine art.”

Students shifted, eyeing one another, but Mara knew who he was talking to. She turned around.

He had the woman pinned against the wall, her face pressed aside under one splayed hand, her clenching feet dangling over his vast back. His mandibles were fanned open, digging at her soft skin, allowing the split tongue there to freely engage. His foreknees were bent on the tabletop, keeping him just low enough to weigh on the captive student he fucked, just high enough to do no real damage. The back of the man was gone, folded impossibly inward on itself, made into a nothing more than a stretched sleeve for the demon’s grossly swollen rod to move in. The force of each thrust sent fleshy ripples all the way up the man’s spine to his skull.

“Here is power, young one,” Master Ruk said, beckoning. “Gold is trivial. Youth and time…mere illusions. Flesh alone is power, and flesh can be changed. Behold.” He caressed the woman’s arm, then pulled a flap of skin out and reattached it at her hip in a boneless, pink sail. The woman screamed, but even Mara could hear only horror, not pain.

She stepped up and touched the waving sheet of skin, retreating to the Panic Room so that she could see it and still keep track of where Ruk’s arm was as he raised it indulgently over her. Beneath her fingertips, blood vessels pulsed with life. Tiny, pale hairs waved with her breath. The skin was smooth and soft as a child’s. “Could you make it into a wing?” she asked. “A real wing?”

“I?” Ruk thundered laughter and spread his arm wide, displaying the great bulk of him in a playful pass of his hand. “What need have I of winged things?”

“Could I, then?”

He grunted, looking her over again as he took another taste of the writhing woman’s sex. At last, he said, “If the ways of flight were known to thee, thou might easily. The Word and thy will are all. That is magic, true magic.” Ruk reared, drove the captive man beneath him back with a kick, and moved Mara gently aside to take another. Once settled and steadily thrusting, he beckoned her back. “What lessons hast thou taken?”

“None, really. I sat in on Growth once.” She shrugged. “I mastered Sight.”

“Ahh, then thou art skilled enough to make use of me, and still my virgin to despoil. Sight is no true art, child, yet essential to all art. Come closer, and See.”

She was already close enough to hear his flesh scraping on the table. Now she climbed it and stood side to thick, stony side with the demon, and rested her hand on his shoulder for balance.

“Flesh,” Ruk murmured (and it was Mara’s he saw, Mara’s flesh, gleaming white), and stroked the flapping fold of new skin back up into his woman’s arm, restoring it to normalcy. “Flesh is pliant by its very nature. It wishes to be shaped, child. All mankind shall be descended of clay, it is said. I believe it. Place thy hand here, my virgin. I have made it warm for thee.”

Mara touched the woman’s arm. It wasn’t warm, no, but it was soft. Soft… pink… It didn’t look like a real arm at all, but like an arm made out of Silly Putty. When she copied his stroking gesture of a moment ago, she left dimpled grooves in the skin. The woman, her face flattened against the wall with Ruk’s hand over it, couldn’t see what she did, but she had to feel something because she gave out a shrill, warbling moan and slapped blindly in Mara’s direction.

Ruk tapped the quivering stomach to silence her, licked distractedly at the glistening sex, but his eyes were on Mara’s hand. “Wheresoever thy whim leadest thee, so dally,” he murmured. His attention shifted briefly to the object of this lesson and his mandibles came forward for a playful pinch. “And thou wilt lie for it,” he said as she shrieked, “and lie silent, else I am moved to silence thee.”

Mara stroked again, now smoothing at the surface of the skin. She felt at the arm, felt into it, and got a vague sense of how it wanted to look, where bones and muscle and sinew were meant to go. She drew a thoughtful line along the bicep, then erased it and moved to the wrist. She pinched her fingers together on either side of the woman’s wrist, pinched and felt flesh part softly and easily, pinched until her fingertip met her naked thumb. She pinched a hole right through this living person’s body and still bones were sound, flesh and muscle intact, blood vessels whole and undamaged.

Fascinated, Mara drew her hand down the center of the woman’s arm, splitting it in a furrow so as to mimic the shape of the bare bones beneath. The woman sucked in a breath and shrieked so forcefully, she scarcely made any sound at all.

“Seest thou how easily Man is made to suffer change?” Ruk asked, sounding pleased. “Come, thou requirest not a direct touch. Only lay thy hand here and feel thy vessel’s entirety. Carve with thy will and not thy hand. Here, close thy useless eyes. Thou hast Sight. Use it.”

Mara obeyed, laying her palm under his arm against the woman’s jumping stomach. She closed her eyes and, as a spider feels prey by each twitch of her web, slowly brought her target’s body into focus by the quivering sense of each muscle, each vein, each nerve. She Saw the adapted arm, Saw the uneven shape of the bones she’d parted, and willed them to straighten.

Nothing happened.

Mara concentrated, honing her will from a light into a laser, commanding it to cut for her.

Still nothing.

Like a cloud, Ruk’s mind overlaid her own, watching.

“I’m doing something wrong,” Mara said, and was struck suddenly by just how true that was. It was wrong, it was very wrong. What if Connie were out there right now? What if she were out there watching this?

“So often a babe falls before walking is mastered,” Ruk murmured. “Yet the way of the step is not changed. It is only that one must find one’s balance. Thy endeavor is sound. Again.”

Mara flexed, seizing hold of the image in her mind of this poor woman’s hand and willing it to change, demanding it, reaching right in and savaging it into submission. Above her and around her, Ruk oversaw her struggles and shone out a consoling sort of encouragement. He was playing with her as much as the woman in his grip or the man gloving his cock. More than failure itself, being his amusement infuriated her.

She renewed her efforts for him, struggling in his psychic sight and being very visible in her failure so that his eye lay heavily with her and even his mating movements stilled, supplanted for the moment by this new game. Behind the curtain of his distraction, through the hand she still rested on his naked shoulder, Mara stole in and sank a skillful needle of her own into his mind, into darkness.

She went slowly, feeling before her with exquisite care, holding the memory of the half-grasped sound of that awful word before her, humming subaudibly through him for resonance. She touched things now and then, pools of almost-clarity that threatened to overwhelm her control and reveal her to him, but she did not have time to explore them. She followed the subtle quiver of that word through the lightless fortress of his mind, until she found the place where it originated, the place of Malleation.

Mara sank her needle into him, deeply now. She pulled and that same sick, stuffy headache started up, that throb of rotten-tooth awareness she had endured in the Scrivener’s library, when all knowledge came without cost and no room was big enough to hold it. And all at once, it struck her how ridiculously easy this really was, and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why she was trying so hard. There was nothing to it, as easy as drawing a picture with a pen. Just know what you want…and draw.

“Ah, excellent!”

Mara opened her eyes and saw the woman’s hand stretching out, the fingers elongating until they were nearly equal to the length of her mutilated forearm. She could twist them around if she wanted, she knew that now. She could stretch out the skin, hollow out the bones, make it a real wing. If she wanted to. It seemed kind of pointless now.

She looked up at Ruk and Saw the shape he wore beneath, the mold of his making, so to speak. It was not so different from Kazuul’s, really. He’d been handsome once, in a terrible way. Ruk saw her, understood, and smiled at her with the mouth he no longer had, spreading one arm in a generous motion to behold him, past and present, to see what his will had wrought with the power of one Word.

“Tell me,” Mara said.

He spoke it again and this time, Mara listened and made it hers.

“O thou rare and precious gift,” Ruk said, casting his used vessel away and throwing the woman down before him. “I have seen but two of thy heart’s measure in all the years of my life immortal. One wast damned for his ambitions.” He sank himself and grimaced as he filled the womb of the creature now clutching her arm and screaming. “And one, deified.” He pulled back and dismounted the table, waving a hand at the waiting students to dismiss them. “Thou art the third, and that is a powerful number indeed. How honored I am that I have been the first to pierce thy most sacred veil and see thee set upon thy true path. Remember me at thy Fate’s unfolding. Remember Ruk and, to good or ill, go on.”

He bowed to her, his hands together at heart’s height, then turned and left.

The silence was ghastly, the whispers that broke it even worse.

“Mara…” Devlin raised his hand and dropped it again without touching her. He was afraid to touch her.

‘He should be,’ Mara thought wearily, looking down at the woman sobbing on the stone floor. ‘Look what I do when I touch people.’

She knelt. The woman shrieked and pulled away. Mara slapped her without emotion, stepped on her to keep her still, and spoke that intoxicating Word.

All around, students stared.

Mara returned the arm to its normal dimensions and let her go. The woman ran. Gazelles will do that. Mara moved past the silent, gaping figures of her fellow students and went back to her cell alone. The race was still being run. She ignored it. There were worse things.

*          *          *

That night, she dreamt of Connie and what she did to Connie’s arms.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mara woke. She reached out in the darkness and touched the wall beside her poor bed. That was all for a long time. The stone was very cool and hard and rough under her hand. Grounding. Comforting, even, particularly after the nasty spate of dreams she’d had. She could have switched the monitors off and remained asleep, but just knowing what horrific images were birthing themselves in her subconscious made her abandon the Panic Room and wake. She wasn’t tired anyway. She wanted, oh, she just wanted to lie here.

Her fingers drifted over the rock. ‘Close thy useless eyes,’ she thought, and felt the mountain open around her. She Saw her cell through her fingertips, and Saw the space beyond its cramped dimensions. The Word for Malleation poured through her mind. Her lips moved to give it voice, and then the walls rolled back. It was easy, as easy as turning a woman’s arms to wings.

Mara sat up at the center of her new cell. She’d made the walls too smooth and now her breath echoed. She raised a bed beneath her, a bed like Kazuul’s, wide and rounded with a great bat-winged headboard behind her, but it was hard, hard as stone.

And why this bed, she wondered? A flex of mental effort stole the headboard back and squared out some of the curves, but the resemblance remained, at least to her mind. She wanted to go to him, right now. She didn’t trust the urge, but close inspection showed her no tampering in her thoughts, no trespassers in the Mindstorm. She just didn’t want to be alone.

And his bed was soft, not like this stone copy. She remembered suddenly, clearly, how it had felt when he lay her down—the first comforts since leaving home, the first gentle touches. She remembered how he’d arranged her across his tattered bedding, how his hands had rasped across her skin, and the hot ribbon of his tongue slipping inside her.

Right. And then he’d called her a wretched, loveless creature and laughed her out of his chambers. The insult didn’t bother her—all right, it bothered her, but she’d live—but the laughter did. She’d been wrong to give in to him once, and she hated knowing that she had to go back. He had nothing to tell her, nothing to give her. He had nothing.

But oh, his breath on her belly when he called her beautiful…the smoldering heat of his eyes as he lay beneath her, smiling as he watched her ride him.

Her loins throbbed. No, that was too gentle. She cramped with need, her sex already hot and aching, her womb an empty furnace. Mara drew her knees up and stared into the black as she touched herself. Her pussy felt swollen already, silky with dew.

‘I’m restless, that’s all,’ she thought. ‘I’m restless and I need to get laid.’

She put her hands on the bed—her empty bed—and Malleated through it to raise shelves on the wall. She had no books, but she couldn’t think of any other way to make the room look like a room. She could put her cup up there, she supposed. And her comb.

Mara got up and put her robe on. It wasn’t surrender, it was just…well, it wasn’t surrender. She was scratching an itch, that was all, no different than any other time she’d prowled out to find a man and make him take her home. Anyone would do, it didn’t have to be Kazuul…and it wouldn’t be. Not yet. Not until she had to.

The tunnels were empty where Mara wandered. First-bell had yet to ring and all the good and faithful students either slept or did their forbidden skulking more secretly than Mara. Tapping at dreams and fingering thoughts through narrow cell windows, she made her silent way to and from the ephebeum maybe a dozen times, until finally she walked up the center of the wide stair and across the Nave, to sit on a long, low bench before the Black Door.

Her body, stirred by movement, pulsed with need, but one would never know it to look into her eyes, she thought. Her reflection gazed back at her from the Black Door’s polished face, unmoved, untouched by any emotion. The gruesome nightmares that had chased her out of sleep would seem to have left no mark on her, no dark and sunken stare, no gaunt and shaken countenance…only Kimara Warner’s snowy-eyed indifference.

Something moved behind her. She heard nothing, but saw it in the door, something crawling up the ornate stalactite/column at her back. Its eyes caught the sallow lamplight and gleamed yellow. It watched her from its perching place near the vaulted cavern ceiling, then leapt out—a scrawny, sag-fleshed thing that suddenly flattened out into a shape like a shadowy manta ray—and glided across the Nave to land against another column. She heard nothing, not even the scrape of its claws as it faded into the black.

She felt no menace from it, only a watchful hunger. It knew she wasn’t supposed to be here just yet. It knew also about the ache between her thighs, belied by her cold expression. Every breath it took brought it the musk of her aimless desire. Its penis, a black stinger carried at the tip of its lashing tail, curled up between its knobby legs where he could squeeze it. He thought of leaping out again—a stoop, a strike, a struggle—and then stabbing upward between those kicking thighs, and how hot and fine she would be…

Whatever it was licked his palm, rubbing the swelling tip of his poisonous tail, then jumped off the ceiling and soared silently away, to the Library, where prey could wriggle but never run. Not a Master then, to come down and punish her for her bold disobedience, but just another inhuman thing creeping about, like her, without permission.

Mara’s hand stole to her lap. She watched it in the dark mirror of the door as it slipped down to the crux of her thighs. Her fingertips pressed, rested, burrowed slightly, stroked twice, and lay still.

‘I’m lonely,’ thought Mara.

She stood up and walked, not back down into the student’s level and the safety of her cell, but onward, upward, and into the lyceum, where for all she knew, every demon was out and about and eager to call a tribunal.

But none of them were.

The open hive of that central cavern was just as empty and still as the ephebeum below her. Mara climbed the winding path past passageways filled with silent theaters, thinking, ‘Not Kazuul. Anyone but him,’ right up until the very top, and even into the ornate corridor that led to no one else but him. She told herself it wasn’t surrender as she walked past orgiastic carvings all the way to the last twinned pillars where his smiling/sneering face met her over his closed doors. ‘Not Kazuul,’ she thought, and opened them. ‘Or at least, not for Kazuul. It could even be a kind of torture for him, if I want it to be.’

And it was torture, every step. She climbed down the dusty risers and down the drafty stairs in distant agony, tugging at the neck and sleeves of her robe several times as she went, finally pulling the whole heavy thing off just as she came through the hanging curtains of his doorway. The sun was out—high noon, even earlier than she’d thought—and he was on his aerie, comfortably hunkered with half a loaf of dark bread in one hand, smeared with either blood or jam. He ate at leisure, watching the clouds pass over the lake below him, impervious to the bitter cold and howling wind, impervious to everything. She was halfway to him before he knew she was there, and he swung fast, surprise becoming anger becoming even greater surprise.

“Disrobe,” she said impatiently, walking even faster now that her goal was in sight.

He straightened at once, flinging his breakfast without looking at it out into the world, and battled his plated belt open.

“Disrobe,” she said again, angrily, grabbing at the complicated layers of leather and silk and chain, and yanking them away in a single piece as soon as he’d worked out the buckle. She threw it behind her, not caring where it landed or what it broke when it did. She reached up and snatched at the golden clasp that kept his hair back and pulled that away, too. His hair was too fine to catch in it, no matter how rough she was; it fanned out eagerly in the breeze, lapping at her wrist, swallowing her fingers. “Disrobe,” she whispered. He had nothing else to wear.

He bent. She turned her face away. He hesitated, then bit at the side of her throat, two short nips and then a long bite, his breath scorching her skin. She could feel in exquisite clarity the racing of her pulse as his sharp teeth pressed down, as she could feel his hidden thoughts churning behind his defenses.

He lifted his mouth, growled softly, then went to one knee. He bit at her belly, very gently, his teeth scraping at the jumping muscles just below her navel. His hands brushed over her thighs, gently opening her to him. He bit right at the crown of her cleft, his tongue snaking in to rub back and forth across her clit. He growled again. It wasn’t a sound of desire, not before and not now.

Mara fumbled behind her for the wall and found it just at the edge of her reach. Bracing herself awkwardly on one arm, she groped for a horn or a spike or something with the other, anchoring himself to him. She lifted one leg, let him help her find a way to bring it across his spiked shoulder, and rolled her hips forward against his mouth. He growled a third time; his back was tense under her bare foot, as hard as stone.

His tongue knew where to go, what to do. His claws dug at her buttocks now and then, flexing as with impatience or anger, as he pressed himself deeper. He explored all, returning again and again to the chapel of her clitoris to tease it from its silken sheath before plunging deep inside her to drink. He bit six times at her thighs, twice drawing blood, which he licked away. Mara didn’t mind. She came for him like the false tide that lapped at the lake’s shore, rolling in and out by her own will and not by any moon’s direction. Still the cramping insistence of her womb went on.

“Give thyself to me,” he murmured. His voice was tight with restraint, trying to be seductive through a timbre of frustration. “Beautiful Mara, lie beneath me. Open thyself—” His tongue snaked along her sex and thrust once, as deep as he could go, before he withdrew, seething. “—and admit me. I am thine, ever thine. I am thy lord and Master.”

She couldn’t answer him. It seemed to take all her willpower just to keep breathing. She stared at the ceiling, her fingernails digging at his scalp. She hated him.

He waited, breathing hard against her pussy, and each hot pant of air was a punishment.

“Let go of me,” she said at last.

Snarling, his claws clenched on her thighs.

She smacked at the side of his face, shivering at the delicious way her slap had vibrated through him and into her, and he snarled again and released her. Mara backed up, leaned against his wall, and ached.

Kazuul didn’t move. Hunkered low, spikes stiff and menacing, he lay his emptied arm over one bent knee and glared at her, somewhat coarse of breath. A smear of her blood darkened one cheek. She felt the light-headed and mercifully brief urge to lick it off. His teeth were bared, glinting. Between his powerful thighs, lost in shadows with the full sun behind him, his greatest weapon jutted toward her, blackly gleaming at its eager tip.

She told herself she hated him, hated him.

The dull green coals of his eyes shifted. He glared at the locket that hung over her breasts and his curled lip curled further. He looked at her again and the silent snarl faded. He thought, and she could hear those thoughts howling behind their many sound-proofed walls, unintelligible to her.

“I misspoke,” he said at last, spitting the words like bile.

“The hell you did!”

“I mocked thee and she for spite.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

He gave her half a smile then, one bitter with understanding. “Tis ever easier to bite than to make apology, aye, or to hear one.”

He stood up. She stepped back, hit the wall, and came furiously away from it to meet him. He caught her chin in a grip too quick and too tight to be the loving thing it mimicked. She could feel his thumbclaw pushing deep at her cheek, deep enough to threaten blood, if not quite enough to draw it. “Would that I could bite her from thy mind,” he murmured, and bent, his teeth shining. He hesitated. His mouth closed, firm but painless, over hers. He breathed into her. She groaned, fought briefly, groaned again, and kissed him.

There, against the wall with sunlight painting her right side and demon’s darkness at her left, they met in clawing, slashing, snarling, oddly-restrained little fits, interrupted by equally strange patches of mutual surrender. She slapped and gouged at him as he fought his tongue inside her, then arched as he relaxed to feel his claw-tipped hand cupping and kneading at her breast, only to kick and bite brutally five seconds or even ten, before riding the hand he thrust between her thighs to a slow and stabbing climax. She didn’t like him, but she wanted him. ‘Just an itch,’ she thought, reaching between them to grip the searing brand of his erection and feel it throbbing in her hand. Her own sex cramped in rhythm, and it was not sensuality as much as sickness.

“You did this to me!” she hissed, clenching her fist, writhing on his thrusting fingers.

“Have I? Then come,” he snarled into her mouth, into her soul. “Reap of my labors! Come and reap and sow again, but be with me!”

Her hand on him shook. She arched up, grabbing at his spikes for leverage, ready to be impaled, ready to be consumed. She locked her thighs around his hand, entirely suspended, and screamed when she came, screamed like a cat, screamed and stabbed at him with her own savage pleasure. She felt it strike, resonate, and then felt both the hot splash of his seed on her thigh and the hotter roar of his fury. She bit him purely by instinct, guided by that roar in ways she could not, in her throes, decipher. He came again, stabbing right back at her, and back and forth it went, ebbing a little at each echo, until they lay together in a damp heap on the floor, arms and legs entwined but bodies ruthlessly separate, feeling sun and shadow in icy unity, all panting breath and bloody lips.

The first bell rang.

Kazuul’s hand, resting possessively across her hip, turned to claws. He growled softly.

She started to shift away from him, to stand.

With an ear-splitting bellow, he seized her and threw her down on the floor, rolling over her, crushing her, panting into her face.

They stared at each other.

“Piss!” he spat, and flung himself aside, cracking two of his larger spikes without even seeming to notice. He got up and stalked to the aerie, dropping into a fuming crouch as the sun fell out of the darkening sky.

Mara collected her robe on the way out and left him without speaking.

*          *          *

She took a quick bath in the fountain of the lyceum, scrubbing away all proof of the encounter in just a minute or two, then ran down to the dining hall in good appetite. Devlin waved at her from the fringes of the farthest table. She ignored him and went to the central one, where the acolytes were concentrated, along with the most food. They tried—as any scavengers to any interloper—to shut her out, but a Mara fresh from sexual combat was not a Mara easily shut out. Her mindslap blasted half a dozen black-robes to the floor and she reached in to help herself to a stale loaf of brown bread and a crumbling block of cheese. There was meat as well. She left that and sat down at the end of the table to eat.

‘And good morning to you,’ thought Horuseps loudly, in tones that were faintly marveling. ‘Are you quite all right?’

**Shouldn’t I be?**

‘You look as though you’ve taken rather a nasty tumble.’

Mara started to laugh, realized there had been no double entendre in his words, and gave her tooth-bruised arms a thoughtful look. “Malleate,” she said in that ancient tongue, and, oblivious to the shocked quiet rolling out around her, restored her torn and tingling flesh. It wasn’t quite the same as healing, and if the bites were destined for infection, they were now set to be some nasty abscesses, but she looked better and that was the what mattered now. She bit into her cheese. It was hard and tart and wonderful.

Too late, she remembered that arts were not allowed in the dining hall. She swept her mind across the Master’s table, but felt no complaint (surprise from some, both pleased and otherwise, but no complaint), and settled down with her bread. It was still tough, still gritty, still packed with seeds, but good for all that. ‘Hunger is the greatest spice,’ she reminded herself, one of her mother’s many sayings in the days before she’d taken to compulsively nibbling Lunchsnax, and good sex made a hell of an appetizer.

Horuseps sipped at his wine, watching her. ‘When did you learn that, Bittersweet?’

**What?** she asked, distracted, chewing. **Malleate?**

Horuseps set down his cup with a loud bang, one black hand flying up to press at his pale brow. Pain radiated out of him briefly; he looked at her through the slits of his star-studded eyes, his lips pulled thin and unsmiling.

Mara let her bread lower. **What did I just do to you?**

‘You damned near gave my brains a stir,’ he replied, each word riding a wry throb of agony. ‘Magic is will, my dearest one. Mentalism is also magic, of a simpler sort. You—’

He stopped there, frowning.

Mara stood up, ignoring the rest of her breakfast as she approached the table. **You mean all I have to do is think an art at you? Even one like—**

‘Must you?’ he interrupted, pretending almost as much horror as he actually felt.

**I wouldn’t have used the real Word. I just can’t believe it’s that easy.**

‘Mentalism is not ‘easy’, my heart.’ He sat quietly enough while she touched his forehead, accepted her silent and somewhat belated apology with a nod, and then caught her hand before she withdrew it. ‘You never answered me. When did you learn that Word?’

**Yesterday. From Master Ruk.**

‘You went to class then?’

**I met him in the hall.** She reached up to rub her smooth brow, as if she could feel the indelible marks he’d spoken of when he’d tried to explain about truancy in the Scholomance. **Does that count? Am I marked?**

‘Your marks come from a far greater hand, my darling, and they are not for our accounting. But I am so pleased to see you studying, and with such success. There are no easy arts…and Malleation is among the more complex.’ He released her with a wave and she retreated across the dining hall, helping herself to another loaf of bread as she went. She had almost reached her place at the acolyte’s table when he struck again, a question as pointed and precisely aimed as any arrow: ‘Did you cheat it out of another student…or did you cheat it out of Ruk?’

The teeth of that trap were all around her. A lie was risky—sending thoughts wasn’t like speaking words, where lies were effortless—and silence would tell the truth for her. And the truth was terrible, she grasped that perfectly. Masters were set well above the students and there must never be even one of them opened and invaded. She had touched Ruk’s mind, and knew that all his weirdly genuine pride and ghost-pale affection for her would go up like so much flash-paper if he ever guessed she’d been inside him and pulled his art out for her own.

All this flickered through Mara’s mind, fully formed and brilliantly illuminated behind the Panic Room’s walls, in an unstudied instant. Without a pause, she thought back, **Whether you cheat or not, you still win. I told you that once already. I wanted a bigger room. Now I have it. And I want a softer bed.** She sat down at the table and looked at him, meeting his narrow eyes without flinching. **Tell me where to go.**

He didn’t believe her. He was himself too adept at sidestepping questions not to see it when it happened in front of him.

And he did believe her. Thoughts did not lie as easily as words, and she was young, far too young and simple, to deceive him so adroitly in the quiet of her mind.

Horuseps brooded on the dilemma, his long fingers picking his morning haunch of meat into bite-sized shreds which he did not eat. Perhaps she was not so simple, he thought, down deep where he believed he could think freely. Her kind did not breed cleverness, but once in a great while, there could be spawned a kind of dark cunning. The possibility intrigued him and aroused him. He thought of her in his theater, stealing in mere moments what took others years to grasp, what had taken even him many days in the bygone ages of his youth. He imagined her and the hulking Ruk together, bent over some faceless boy in a robe, he pouring power into her hands and never thinking that she might, while his great eye wandered, bring those hands to her lips and drink.

Not a single art was taught here that at least one human did not understand. Horuseps mused on this, dissecting his meat, and thought that she could have them all in a single day if she wanted.

Mara waited, patiently working through her bread. She could have told him she had no interest in pursuing every art. She didn’t see the point. They were useful only here, in the Scholomance, and only as weapons of fascination against other students. Once outside, back in the real world, with Connie, they would all be meaningless. What could she do with Malleation except maybe sit in some basement and sculpt statues for touristy roadside stands? What good was eternal youth after fifty years, when no one on Earth would ever believe she was that Kimara Warner anyway? It was magic, sure it was, and it was good stuff, but at the end of the day, what was magic but a handful of cheap tricks no one else believed in? Unless she wanted to rampage through the streets, Malleating roads and buildings and the bodies of screaming people as part of some quest to rule the world, and it didn’t get much more meaningless than sitting on a skull-covered throne, killing time while the world’s population stared up at you and waited for instructions. All she wanted was a more comfortable cell.

‘Transmutation,’ Horuseps said, breaking Mara from her private reverie. ‘Master Dalziel teaches the inexperienced. After you’ve cheated your way through what he has to offer, I’m sure he’ll direct you onward.’

**Thank you,** she told him.

‘You are always very welcome,’ he answered. And then he clasped his hands into a cradle where he could rest his aching head and look at her while she ate, wondering what she knew, wondering what put that hard little smile on her lips, and wondering who it was she softened her bed for…and if it were he…

*          *          *

Devlin knew Master Dalziel and was only too happy to take her to the proper theater once the bell had rung. In the hive-like front cavern of the lyceum, one mind swelled and shadowed all the bustling clamor of the students. Mara looked up as she followed Devlin up the stairs and there he was, at the very top, his clawed hands all that were visible as they rested heavily on the rails. The rest of him was lost in shadow, but she knew Kazuul was watching her. She glimpsed a dizzying echo of what he saw bouncing back at her as she stared into the heights—the cave spiraling up to him and back down to her, ringed all around with white and black robes in motion.

His mind brushed at hers cautiously, promising even greater pleasures, if only she would return with him to his bedchamber and give him every will of her.

It was disturbing just how tempting a thought that was. Mara ignored him, not even bothering to refuse. The thought lingered, then shut itself away, and the next time she looked up, the hands at the rails were gone, and he was lost back up in the hidden reaches where his lair waited to take him in. And her, surely.

Would she go? She thought so, when this day was done. An hour’s hard surrender to just keep him on his toes, and then back to her own cell, and if she could make him roar again when she left him, all the better. All the better, because she hated him.

But for now, a pointed snub could only soften him toward her when she returned, and lessons were as good a way to pass the time as any, even if the subject matter itself were not particularly useful beyond her immediate needs.

Dalziel’s theater was among the more accessible, reached by one of the first passageways, where it was the first doorway. It seemed surprisingly crowded to Mara’s eye, perhaps more so since each of the twenty or thirty students had brought some kind of prop with them: crudely-cut hunks of stone, dried lengths of split wood, long animal bones (she hoped they were animal), a small number of vases or statuettes. The teacher was himself absent, but not long after Mara and Devlin found a place in the highest riser to sit, he appeared.

Mara’s first thought was that it was another woman, or at least, a female like Zyera or Letha. It moved like one, hips and shoulders swaying in ways even real women had to work at. Her second thought, without prejudice or emotion, was that it was male and simply screamingly gay. Then it came all the way off the stairs into the dais and she thought it might just be a regular straight male after all, it was just a snake. That wasn’t right either, but it was probably closer to the truth than either of her first two thoughts.

He was pale, this demon, the yellowish not-quite-white of an albino python. He stood upright and moved as though he were walking and not slithering, which was all the more impressive since he had no legs. His body dropped down in a thick, ululating trunk to about floor-level, where it diverged into dozens of tails or roots or tentacles, all of them crawling over each other as they pushed and dragged him along, and so he should have slithered, but no, he insisted on moving his hips, on sashaying as close to human movement as he could manage. It was grotesque.

He had arms, two of them, and hands with fingers that dripped off the ends at various points and to various lengths, coiling and curling off his wrists in that same lazy, lavender way that went with the rhythm of his hips.

He had a long neck, very long, and a ridiculously small head perched atop it, somewhat elongated, with two black eyes that wrapped around the sides of his skull almost to meet again in back. He had no mouth, or at least not on his head, but there was a long, bloodless gash on his bare chest that emitted a distracted sort of humming as he moved to the podium, and it was from that gash that his low, reedy voice emitted when he said, “I see new faces, don’t I?”

Of all the demons she had seen, and she knew she hadn’t seen them all, he looked the least demonic, in the sense of evil as physical form. Perhaps for that reason, Mara felt the strongest impulse thus far to beware him.

“Astregon, is it?” Dalziel ran one of this horrible hands thoughtfully along the lips of his chest-slit the way another teacher might stroke a beard. “It’s been awhile.”

Devlin hehe’d nervously and made meaningless gestures. His desire not to be singled out overwhelmed every other thought in the room.

“And you brought a friend. Gracious. I think I know you.” The demon sashayed around his podium and right to the lip of his dais, staring intently up the risers into Mara’s face. He was quiet for a long time, long enough for Mara to feel the pale tendrils of his thoughts slithering clumsily along the Panic Room walls. He didn’t react to the obstruction, didn’t even seem to know it was there. A telepath, but not a good one. Something about his mind felt unfinished…primitive.

“Well,” he said, withdrawing. “I was warned. Come down. Children, begin your studies. Quietly, please, quietly.”

He was turning away, back to his private chambers. Come down? Was this part of the class?

Devlin, as baffled as she, was no use to her. She left him nervously eying the other students and climbed the risers down to the dais. Dalziel had already slithered out of sight. She had to walk quickly to catch up, and she couldn’t help wondering as she did why he had stairs at all when a ramp would be so much easier for him to navigate. She pushed the thought at him, then sent it into him, but he did not respond. His mind flinched and rolled a little, like a freshly-severed tentacle will if touched, but that was all.

“Does my appearance repel you?” he asked suddenly.

“I haven’t been here long. I’m still adjusting,” she replied, prodding at his mind again.

“Ah. I sensed…not discomfort, precisely…but then, I come as something of a shock to many. I am not offended. I know that I am among the least human of all my brothers and sisters. Do you like it here?”

And what kind of a question was that? Too stunned by its audacity to answer right away, Mara instead aggressively tested for sincerity. The demon’s mind wrapped hers, neither attacking nor defending itself, and was impossible to read.

Dalziel hesitated on the stair and looked back. “Are you…I hardly know how to ask…Are you feeling me?”

“I thought you were a telepath.”

“Ah. No. I have some…small sensory skill. No doubt you sense this. But it is more a kind of sight than true mentalism.”

“Like the Sight that Horuseps teaches?”

“Not at all. If I may draw a personally abhorrent analogy, it is as the sight of a serpent, which sees deeper into the light than human eyes. What you sense in me is, I’m sure, what Kazuul calls my crude empathic spark. It is enough to glean the names from my students and keep me from the appearance of ignorance. Appearances are so important here…but I don’t need to tell you that.”

“No,” Mara agreed. “Appearances may not be all that matter, but they’re high up on the list.”

“Quite. Here, my private chambers. Mind the last step.”

The step, which was no more or less treacherous than any other, was easy to mind. The curtain cutting across it was white and filmy, and he’d left several lights burning in the room beyond. Like a gentleman, he moved ahead to sweep the hanging cloth aside. He even bowed, but his eyes remained with her, and his thoughts behind their layers of blind tentacles were anxious.

The room was smaller than Kazuul’s. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. Kazuul’s chambers were truly iconic, filled with so many curtains and pillars and carved stone screens that it was impossible to see the whole thing at once from any angle. But then, he was Kazuul. And this was Dalziel.

So the cavern was smaller, but by no means tiny. It had room enough for the bed, for those long gaming tables, for bookshelves stocked with volumes, not one of which seemed to have a thing to do with arthomancy or the binding of efreet. The walls had a sculpted, almost organic look, all swoops and arches. There was no aerie, but there was a glass window, opaque just enough to admit sunlight if it were daytime, which it was not.

And there was a woman here, propped up on pillows with the blankets around her waist, reading a magazine. She wore a black robe, had her hair elaborately pinned, and did not look at Mara.

“My Star,” said Dalziel, gesturing. The woman turned a page and read, ignoring them. “My harem, if you like.”

Mara stared at her, then at him. She could not imagine how the two could possibly fit together and absolutely did not want to tap at either of them and find out.

“It is an arrangement we have…perfectly within the laws. She takes a lesson each day at my hand, and at the end of ten years, or should she master my art, I’ll have to say goodbye.”

The woman glanced up, her expression of cool indifference marred by even colder anger, but then returned to reading.

“In the meantime, she is here, away from the…” Dalziel brushed his hands over his unblinking eyes fastidiously. “…unpleasantness of her peers. And I have some companionship throughout the dreary daylight hours.” He spread his arms. His fingers dangled like worms. “She’s perfectly free to leave, and she’s not been misplaced, by you or anyone. Star, you’re making me look quite bad. Say something.”

“Something,” said the woman on the bed.

Dalziel sighed. Faint irritation gusted across the Mindstorm and was gone. “Well, she’s in a bit of a mood, but I assure you, she’s no prisoner.”

He might have said more, but stood quietly aside when Mara approached the bed. She had the impression of trepidation from him as she fingered the soft, girly fabrics of the bedding, but neither of them interrupted her. Mara said, mildly enough, “Where did you get the magazines?”

The woman glanced at the demon. Dalziel stroked his chest and said, “Humans bring them here. She likes to keep abreast of things. Recent things.”

“I was under the impression all our possessions are waiting to be returned to us.”

The woman frowned slightly. She hadn’t thought of that.

“Somewhat manhandled,” Dalziel said. It felt like a lie. He knew she was psychic, knew she’d know, and that disturbed him. He hadn’t foreseen the question and that disturbed him even more.

Mara took hold of the blankets and pulled them back all together, all at once. She expected to see a chain, or some other proof of imprisonment. She didn’t, but she stared anyway.

“It isn’t what you think,” Dalziel said quietly.

The woman smirked, turned a page, and ignored them.

She had no legs. No, not strictly true. She had the muscle and the bones, however grossly rearranged they were. She had her skin still, even the rough circles where her knees had been. She had toenails, soft and grossly out of shape, but still there to be seen. She had something…she just didn’t have legs.

“Is this Transmutation or Malleation?” Mara asked, looking at the long, white tubes lying in the bed. Her voice did not shake. She was calm.

“Some of each.”

“This is her lesson?”

“It’s a work in progress,” said the woman dryly. The foot that still had toes—if that’s what those thin, boneless, tentacles were—rippled up and over the ankle of the other, which ended neatly and digitless in a rounded point.

“Did you agree to this?” Mara demanded, and felt again that faint puff of annoyance, from both of them this time.

“He likes to do it with someone like him,” the woman said. She put down her magazine, still with that bitter half-smile, and pulled up her robe, all the way up, so that Mara could see not only the perfectly smooth and denuded patch of skin between her serpentine legs, but the slick and slightly pulsating bloodless slit that opened between her small, mostly vestigial breasts. There was a clitoris at the crown of it.

The woman dropped her robe, picked up her magazine, smiled.

Mara looked at the demon.

“Surfaces changes,” he said. “Far more cosmetic than you might think. Easily restored, when our time is done.”

“And nobody asked you,” the woman remarked.

Mara thought about that. Eventually, she nodded. “I apologize for intruding on your privacy,” she said.

“Of course. I understand—” He took her elbow in his soft hand as he led her to the stair, allowing her to feel that they were not boneless after all, no more than the body of a snake. “—one has a need to be certain. And some of my, ah, lesser-evolved cousins can be, well, unscrupulous when meeting their baser desires. I shan’t name names. But now that you’ve seen her for yourself, I’m sure you’ll be off about your business.”

“My business is in your class today.”

“Is it?”

“Tell me about Transmutation.”

“Certainly,” he said, relief throbbing through his touch. “But first, perhaps you should tell me. What is Transmutation?”

Mara considered it—the word itself, what little she’d gleaned from the students waiting above them with their teaching aides in their hands, the woman’s slithery and distended legs. “It’s turning something into something else,” she said. “Like rock into sand.”

“How marvelously refreshing,” said the demon. “Usually it’s, ‘lead into gold.’ But then, Horuseps told me you had an unusual mind.”

“Horuseps talks about me?” That was an unpleasant thought.

“He came to inspect my chambers recently, and to make an examination of my harem, such as she is.” Dalziel’s oversized eyes rippled in a faceless moue of annoyance. “She’s quite a good conversationalist ordinarily, and can even be charming when she sets her mind to it, but she’s having difficulties with her lessons and doesn’t think she’ll master them in time. She wants me to arrange an extension.”

“You won’t leave her like that if she can’t change herself back,” Mara said sharply, stopping on the stair.

“Certainly not.” He glided on a little further, paused, and came back to her. “Nor will I flaunt the laws of this school simply for that she shares my bed. There are no extensions.”

“How long does she have left?”

“Four years yet. Really, she’s made wonderful progress.”

“Do you think she’ll master it?”

He hesitated, one hand reaching up to stroke at the lips of the gash in his chest. “No,” he admitted. “There are some things she does quite well, if not without effort, and she may be able to speak the Word eventually, but she will never master the art. She lacks the capacity to make connections, and she will always need me or someone like me to make them for her.” He sighed, breath blowing light and sour through his chest into Mara’s face. “Which she seems to feel is only her due. As is so often the case with those who come here.”

He took a few sashaying steps, then paused and looked back again. “Horuseps says you are different.”

“Does he?” Mara felt her lips twisting in a rueful smile, even as she poked in vain at the tenebrous fathoms of Dalziel’s mind. “Well, if he told you I was a good student, he lied.”

“Oh no. He never said that.”

They climbed the stairs in silence and, with the light of the theater at last in sight, Mara gave in to her pricklish curiosity and caught at the demon’s indescribably unpleasant arms. “What did he say?” she asked.

Dalziel’s eyes rippled at he gazed at her. The slit in his chest breathed and finally said, “That I should expect you. That you were seeking a certain human and that it could possibly be dangerous to cross you in your search.”

“Dangerous.”

“Possibly, he said. And having met you, I dare say he’s right. I can count on the fingers of one hand—” He displayed them, squirming in the air. “—how many students have ever touched me of their own volition.”

She released his arm with a frown, and he started back up the stairs.

“A student who will do that, the first day she has seen me in all my repulsive truth, is a student who may do anything. I suppose we’ll see. For now, I see no harm in humoring you.”

“Humoring me,” she repeated, beginning to smile as she followed him into the theater.

“You and, of course, the Master you serve. I’ve no doubt it tickles him to see you so engaged in studies, and for today, you will be my pupil. It is well within my own interests to teach you well. Please.”

He gestured, and Mara stepped up off the dais and climbed the risers to take her seat beside Devlin, ignoring his furtive whispers. If he wanted to know what was down there so badly, he could walk on down and look for himself.

“And now, class, for the benefit of our newcomers…” Dalziel raised his hands, and when he had the respectful silence he was after, turned to face her and Devlin together. “A return to the fundamentals. What would you say is the principle element of Transmutation?”

“Change,” said Devlin promptly, as Mara said, “Relationships.”

They both looked at each other, she quizzically and he with dismay.

“It’s change,” he whispered. “Trans-mute? Get it? Mutation? Change?”

“That may be the goal,” Mara argued, “but what gets you there is how things are connected to each other, I think.”

“And why would you think that?” the demon asked.

“Because you said so.”

Without a mouth and without eyebrows, he looked surprised.

“You said your little friend had trouble making connections, that you had to do it for her.” And while he considered that—and what else he might have let slip, no doubt—she looked around at the rest of the class, tapping at every mind and closely examining a select few. “It’s more than just knowing the right Word, isn’t it? You have to direct this one.”

“One has to direct all of them,” Dalziel said slowly. “But yes, my art requires a certain…dexterity. In the art of Malleation, to which mine is closely allied, one uses the Word and guides its power to the intended finished form. One can illustrate this with gross simplicity as a straight line.” Dalziel held up his arm and spoke the Word. His hand drew up and became a perfectly-formed human one, as pallid and soft as the hand of a drowned man, but human. He closed his fingers, opened them, and they had become webbed. He turned his wrist, and suddenly his fingers drew out long and thin, the webbing between them stretching effortlessly until he had a pale bat-wing reaching out from his body, glowing white where the light shone behind it, enough to see the fine tracery of his veins and the delicate fluting of his thin bones.

Then it shrank back and was his hand again. “The only difficulty,” he said, flexing his limp fingers, “lies in using Sight to direct this force effectively, and to perceive the original form should it become lost to memory. But with Transmuation, one must divide one’s energies and one’s focus, directing each portion to its proper place in a chain linking the first form to its ultimate conclusion. Perhaps you would assist me in a demonstration?”

Mara stood up without hesitation and joined him on the dais. When he extended his hand, she offered her arm at once.

“We’ll begin with something simple. Transmute,” he said, not in the common tongue all the harrowed shared, but in that other one, the language that made Words of power. Pain knifed down into her bones and spread, warming her from within until her entire body felt charged by it, hot and light and not quite there. She felt Dalziel’s mind flare, and as she watched, fascinated, flakes of skin along her arm split away and rose up on fine stalks, sprouting hundreds of pale filaments to either side in a sharply-tapered shape. The burning sensation intensified briefly, almost blinding her, and then was gone, the Transmutation complete.

Feathers. He’d grown a patch of feathers over the back of her arm from her wrist right up to her elbow.

“That is so cool,” said Mara, touching them. They felt soft, undeniably real. She could feel her own fingers from a hundred quivering points where the feathers rooted to her arm. With effort, she found she could even fluff them out or make them lie sleek and flat. Feathers.

“Cool,” Dalziel repeated, and his eyes rippled. “The connection is a straightforward one, invoking only one degree of change. You! Calibos! Would you like to attempt to restore—”

“Wait.” Mara closed her eyes and flexed her mind. The room fell into the blackness of Sight, but through those eyes, she could See her own true arm still whole and unchanged beneath her new growth of quills. “Transmute,” she said, the Word falling effortlessly from her lips. Her flesh burned at once.

“Good gracious,” murmured the demon distantly.

Feathers. Skin. One degree of change.

She could feel the connection well enough, amid countless others all aching to be made, but just feeling it didn’t seem to be enough. She had to put a name to it, had to understand the relationship and make that a part of the will that moved the Word. Feathers and skin.

She remembered from biology class back in high school that feathers were, like hair or scales or fingernails, primarily made of keratin. She seemed to recall that they were different kinds of keratin, but the exact name wasn’t important. She doubted like hell that a four thousand year-old demon like Dalziel knew the word ‘keratin’ at all. But that was it, that was the element in common between both forms, and as soon as she had it firmly in mind, she could feel the Word throbbing to life, anchored to each quill. She tried to see it as Dalziel had described, as links of a chain connecting her current feathered form back to skin, using the concept of keratin as the central tie. Her body, hot with anticipatory power, pulsed brighter in the Sight as she willed the Transmutation.

Her arm itched maddeningly. The feathers quivered, but that was all.

‘Patience,’ she told herself in Ruk’s growling, good-natured voice. ‘A babe may fall many times, but the way of the step is not changed.’

She knew she’d done it right, could feel the purity of the power as it forked out in both directions, the soundness of her connection, but she’d failed to hold her focus. It wasn’t like Malleation after all, where she could use it like a knife and just carve. And it wasn’t much of a chain either, although that was probably the best analogy Dalziel knew here in the mountain. But having attempted it, however clumsily, Mara had a much better grasp of how it worked, and she saw it now as a pipeline. The Word, like a sleeve around the magic, guiding it nowhere but across the connection, magnetizing it to her will. ‘Feathers to flesh,’ thought Mara, not in so many words, but in that pipeworked way, and said it again: “Transmute!”

She didn’t need to watch to know it had worked that time. She relaxed her Sight, let reality and color drop solidly around her, and showed her teeth in satisfaction as she rubbed the smooth, whole skin of her arm.

“But every cell in the human body can be considered to be connected to each other,” she mused aloud. “To stem cells, if nothing else, and stem cells can be anything. I could turn my skin into fingernails, or cartilage…or brains. Or…there’s iron in blood. Do you suppose I could turn my skin to metal? If I—”

She stopped there, because she’d looked up and seen Dalziel’s face.

Ruk had been pleased by her easy mastery of his art, and Horuseps, faintly annoyed but still amused when she walked away from him with Sight. She might have gone so far as to say impressed, but certainly not surprised. She knew that other students had to work for the little goals they reached, but to their instructors, Mara’s prodigious skill with the Words they taught her had seemed merely some clever trick. They weren’t in awe of her, and they certainly weren’t intimidated.

So she was utterly unprepared to see fear in Dalziel’s inhuman eyes, so much so that she couldn’t believe it was genuine even when she looked out and saw it in the Mindstorm. She had to touch the churning snake-ball of his thoughts, feel his dread for herself, before she could accept it, and then she had no idea what to make of it.

‘She is dangerous,’ he was thinking, his fear making even his mind clear to her. ‘More than even he suspects.’

The he was Horuseps (and for an instant, she could close her fist around that memory, could see him as he’d been down in Dalziel’s bedchamber, could almost hear the words he’d spoken, the ones that began, ‘She’s dangerous, son of Dal, and more so because she does not know where…’), but then his mind sank back beneath its primordial protection and she could read nothing more.

“I wouldn’t advise a self-trial,” he said finally. “But if you wish to make an experiment, I will give you whichever assistant you wish.”

Alarm popped in neon flares throughout the Mindstorm until it blotted out every other thought.

“That won’t be necessary,” Mara said, but she could see the pipeline in her mind. Flesh to blood, that was the trick of it, and from blood to iron. It would work best if she worked Growth in there somewhere, to improve the density of the blood, otherwise she probably wouldn’t get much more than a few dull scales. But with Growth, she could concentrate the production of iron at the midpoint of the pipeline and—

Well, she could probably change every damn inch of skin, if she wanted to. Make her own human suit of armor. With eyeballs and teeth.

“He’d suffocate,” Mara murmured, only dimly aware she was speaking out loud. “Iron doesn’t expand for breathing, and I don’t think I could make it…What about bones, iron bones?”

“Also lethal,” Dalziel replied. “Think a moment, how much heavier is iron.”

“He’d be crushed,” she guessed.

“Oh, secondarily, I suppose he would be, but what would kill our hypothetical target is the internal injury caused by having all his new bones rip away from their binding muscles all at once.” He paused, stroking his chest. “It is hypothetical, is it not?”

“I’d never set out to kill anyone.”

“How comforting.” He stirred himself to look around, letting his eyes move slowly over the knots of whispering students in the theater, making her aware of them with his attention. “It will be interesting to see how long your pacifist convictions survive here.”

“I never said I was a pacifist. You could do a lot of damage without killing someone.”

“A true, if heartless, observation. Somewhat less comforting.”

“I’m not—”

“It’s time for you to leave,” Dalziel said softly. “I suspect you have what you came for…and I think my children would feel less threatened if you went now.”

His ‘children’ held very still, staring, some of them even holding their breath as they watched her. Devlin was up there, she remembered, as uneasy as the rest in this moment. More so even, because he’d been there that day with Ruk too, and he knew better than anyone here what she was capable of when her curiosity was piqued.

“Fine,” said Mara, turning away. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Master Dalziel.”

“Was it?” He bent his neck in another of those almost-bows, his eyes never leaving her face. “I only wish I could say the same, although I confess I find you rather less disagreeable than others of your kind. Good day to you, Mara. Do feel free to drop by again sometime…briefly.”

*          *          *

She went back to her cell (alone, ultimately, although she had to chase Devlin off three times before he finally quit following her) and fixed her bed. Turning the rock to sand was easy enough, but she spent a considerable amount of time trying in vain to find a way that would allow her to turn it into something even better—down, or cotton maybe. She could sense some connection existed, but without a way to name it, it could not be harnessed, no matter how much will she put behind her Word. Still, sand was a definite improvement. Once she’d spread her red and white robes over it to keep the grit away, she lay down to try it out and was asleep in minutes.

From the Panic Room, Mara watched her body dream and contemplated her next move. She could think of nothing.

Infuriating. She had survived the trials of the Scholomance, mastered three of its arts, and for what? She was no closer to finding her friend than she’d been on arrival. She wasn’t even really looking anymore, she was just…passing the time.

Where hadn’t she looked? She had searched all the obvious places and Connie just wasn’t there. What did that leave, for Christ’s sake? The mountain was a maze in three dimensions, and any wall could be Malleated. The demons knew more than they were telling her, but nowhere in the stolen glimpses she’d had of their minds had she seen Connie, so what good were they or their secrets?

Kazuul. Kazuul was still good. He owned all the others, and as dangerous an opponent as he was, the fact that he wanted her still gave her an edge over him.

Unbidden, the memory of how she’d gone to him during the day came to mind, and came to life across one of her monitors. Annoyed, Mara snapped it off before the image could show her anything too embarrassing, but now the thought was there and could not be dislodged.

She’d gone to him, all right. No one had forced her up the winding stair or laid in any will-devouring suggestion to make her open his door. She’d gone on her own two feet. She’d kissed his mouth freely. Rode his hand to orgasm after blistering orgasm. She would have sucked his cock if he’d offered it, and hadn’t some part of her wanted him to offer?

He had a hold on her after all. Perhaps it wasn’t as strong as he liked to believe, but it was real and it unnerved her. She’d almost feel better if it was a psychic suggestion, because the alternative was that she’d gone to him…and she didn’t know why. Mara always knew why, always.

And she wanted to go back and she didn’t understand that either.

Lying on her soft bed of sand in her newly-enlarged cell, Mara slept and dreamed and even smiled a little. But in the Panic Room, the part of her that never slept hovered beside the windows to the muted Mindstorm, keeping watch over the dreams that Kazuul dominated and the body that craved even his dreaming touch. She tried to think of Connie, lost in the dark and waiting to be found. She tried to think of the world outside, the real world, where magic was for children’s parties and demons belonged solely to bad horror movies. She tried to think of some connection that could bridge the two, if only her will were strong enough.

“Transmute,” muttered Mara, and covered her eyes.

She just didn’t know what to do.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

She slept until first-bell the following day and woke more refreshed than she’d felt since even before her arrival. She dressed, visited the garderobe and the bath, and somehow picked up Devlin in between the two. He was antsier than usual, now that he had seen firsthand that her mastery of the art of Malleation was not a fluke. He’d heard all sorts of things by now—that she’d possessed Proteus in Horuseps’s class and somehow stolen Sight from him, that she’d been to the rumored Reliquary that supposedly lay at the center of the maze beneath the Nave, even (she rather liked this one) that she’d somehow obtained one of the Seals of Solomon and was using it to control the Scholomance’s demon Masters.

Devlin didn’t know what to believe, but he’d seen enough not to dismiss any of it out of hand. He looked at her as they bathed and saw, not a naked woman, but the thoughtful look on Master Ruk’s eyes as he’d set her back on the ground that day in the hall, the way Master Horuseps always seemed to be staring at her in the dining hall, the subtle tremor of fear in Master Dalziel’s voice when he’d sent her out of the theater. Some people even said she’d climbed to the top of the lyceum and not come back for hours.

He knew that one was true, because he’d followed her once (Mara glanced around, frowning). He’d seen her go up there and because he, like every other student he knew of, had tried to solve the riddle of that place, he knew that there was no other way out. But when he’d crept in to find her, he’d seen only her footprints, some lit blister-lamps, and the sealed doors at the end of the ornate hall, just the same as they ever were.

Mara listened to all this, probing deeper when the whim took her, too restless to pay attention for long. When she got dressed, so did Devlin, hurriedly splashing after her as she went up for breakfast. He skulked in her shadow until she’d cleared her customary place at the center table, then dove in and grabbed at the platters. The other acolytes knocked him away, but he kept his stolen bounty and retreated with it to a safe distance to eat.

Mara watched him as she scraped mold from a block of cheese. One had to admire his ability to take advantage of any situation with such a complete lack of shame.

‘So do rats, dearest,’ Horuseps thought,

**And rats survive where people die.** Mara tossed the cheese to her own personal rat, smiling when Devlin snatched it out of the air.

‘I hope you won’t be offended when I observe you’re not the charitable sort. What do you get out of it, I wonder?’

**His gratitude, for one.**

Horuseps remained a black silhouette with glowing eyes at the Master’s backlit table, but she felt his smirk inside her mind. ‘Yes, it’s always amusing to lord oneself over one’s devoted followers, but what will you do with him?’

Mara shrugged. **It’s useful to me to have someone who knows his way around.**

His eyes flashed once, illuminating his unsmiling face. ‘As well as I do?’

**Don’t be jealous, Horuseps. He’s nothing. He could never take your place in my heart.**

‘It isn’t my jealousy that should concern you.’

But behind that pointed reprimand, Mara was intrigued to detect a genuine thread of envy after all. He was aware of it, even amused by it, and did his best to crush it down deep where he believed she couldn’t sense it, but it was there. He liked being the one she came to when she needed to walk in dark places. To be replaced in this, even in this, by a human galled him.

Mara ate her bread and watched Horuseps stare out across the dining hall at Devlin. He armored his mind, making it difficult to see his thoughts clearly amid the chaos of a few hundred others, but the shadows they cast in the Mindstorm were predatory ones. It was a small thing for a Master of the Scholomance to rid himself of a student, and Devlin was more insignificant than most.

Mara tapped her crust on the table, thinking, then burst out laughing.

Horuseps looked at her.

**You are jealous!** she crowed, sending him careful waves of delight. **I don’t believe it! Not even of Kazuul, who’s actually fucked me—** She breathed a few expert images underneath that thought. **—but of him!**

‘Don’t be absurd,’ he told her, thinking (and believing the thought originated with him) of Kazuul’s rough hand on her white breast, the bestial sounds he must have made with every thrust. He remembered all on his own watching her in her cell, the arching of her naked throat as she came, and the way she’d thought…of him.

He did not forget about Devlin. Horuseps did not forget anything. But he did release the hooks of his ominous interest and dismiss him from the surface of his mind. It was good enough for Mara.

The bells rang. The noise of the dining hall doubled as students engaged their last battles over crumbs and bones, and the drumming of a few hundred feet made their way to the door. Mara waited as she always did for the crowds to thin, picking at what was left of breakfast and smiling at the Master’s table. She made it a point to ignore Devlin, and eventually he, afraid of falling under a demon’s notice in the rapidly emptying room, ducked out and was gone.

“You’ve lost your little friend,” Horuseps observed.

“Have I?” She glanced around, then shrugged. “Just as well. He has his uses, but he tends to cling.”

“A wise strategy. Anything could happen to him outside of your protection.”

“I’m not here to protect him,” she said, and stood up.

Horuseps rose as well, his eyes fixed on her. “Another search?”

“The same search.” She couldn’t resist needling him a little, with his mind so full of her. “Do you still wish me luck?”

He thought about that for what seemed a long time. “I suppose I do,” he said at last, and laughed. “We all want what is in our own interest. My desires may be more selfish than yours, but in my own defense, they’re also more altruistic.”

And on that enigmatic word, he left her, so Mara went out to find Devlin and begin.

*          *          *

They searched the lyceum. Devlin knew all the instructors of higher arts who taught the ways to combine the three she’d mastered. The doors weren’t difficult to open, compared with those of Kazuul or the Oubliette, and the demons within all seemed to know her and expect her. Like Dalziel, they allowed her to descend into their private chambers, where most kept harems of one or two ambivalent women in some form or another.

She sat for a while in the last theater after seeing the two not-Connies hidden away in the lair below, watching without interest as the demon who taught there demonstrated Sight and Malleation by twisting the bones of some hapless bastard on the dais. He was one of Kazuul’s breed; the ladies below, quite human,  had been Malleated to look like Zyera and Letha. His resentment that this was now known seethed through every word of his lesson. “Carve not with thy hand,” he murmured, glaring at Mara as he opened a hole right through the man’s chest. Apart from some understandable queasiness, the man felt nothing. “But with thy mind alone.”

Just as Ruk had told her. And Horuseps, for that matter, who had so often mentioned that Sight was essential to the application of every art. She couldn’t understand why so many students here, who had presumably mastered both, had such trouble with this lesson.

Then again, maybe if she knew how to use Sight properly, she’d have found Connie by now. Mastery wasn’t really mastery here, it was just a word they used to keep would-be wizards complacent in their captivity.

Eventually, the demon decided they’d wasted enough of his time, and with a muttered curse and impatient wave, ordered them all out. Mara stood with the rest of them, but the demon beckoned, and so she stayed behind as the other students filed out. She waited while he sculpted his assistant’s body back into its original form, aware of Devlin pacing in the hall each time the doors opened for another departing student. The demon was aware of him as well, and let her know with a dour grunt and deliberate thoughts of disapproval. Another telepath. Another good one, even.

The demon finished and sent the man away, shrugging into his robe as he ran up the risers, all his human thoughts on dinner. Once the door had shut on him and every other living mind, the demon turned his glare on Mara. “Didst thou not know that Horuseps had laid eyes already upon my harem?”

“I know what he told me,” she answered. “I wanted to see for myself.”

His lip curled ever so slightly. “Thou art securely in our lord’s favor and so thy freedoms are assured, but were thee not so, I would mark thee for this day’s insolence. My bedmates are not for thee to sanction.”

Her first reaction was not a charitable one, but even she could be diplomatic when she had to be. “I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said, inclining her head in a stiff-necked bow. “But since none of you seem to know whether or not you’ve seen my friend, how else am I supposed to find her except to look?”

The demon grunted and eyed her as he put away the other tools of his instruction. Behind the well-armored fortress of his mind, he very deliberately showed her his resentment, his power, and his willingness to do her harm. “My back yet bends to Kazuul,” he said, slamming it all away. “But I will risk even his wrath shouldst thou dare to trespass here again. Go thou, and know my doors are shut to thee.”

She went, feeling his eyes on her like spears at her back all the way up the risers to the door. If he wanted to believe he was scaring her off, she’d let him. She took his warning seriously, but she was also aware that his reasons, such as they were, had not been entirely honest ones. Beneath his calculated anger and disdain had been the faintest shadow of unease, and the lingering echo of frustrated desire. His back did bend to Kazuul, and so he sent her away because he could stand to do it once, maybe even twice, but if had to see her much more than that, not even Kazuul’s will could keep him off her.

She supposed she should feel flattered.

Devlin was still pacing in the hall when she emerged, and his relief at seeing her unharmed was like a hammer straight to her head. “What took you so long?” he demanded, jogging up to join her.

“See if you can complete this sentence. ‘None of your fucking blank.’” She glanced at him, decided he was sorry enough, and said, “Do you know of any more Masters I’m eligible to see?”

He shook his head, staring glumly at his feet. He wished he could think of something to say that wouldn’t piss her off. It didn’t occur to him to just wish she’d be nicer.

“Well, how much trouble am I likely to get in if I just start opening doors?”

“Are you serious? Of course you’re serious,” he amended hurriedly under her withering stare. “But, come on, are you crazy?”

“Is that really so much better than serious?”

“Why would you deliberately do something you know you shouldn’t do, here of all places?”

“Behaving myself isn’t finding her. Has anyone ever been sent to a tribunal for sneaking in to the higher classes?”

“I’m sure they’d start if someone did it a dozen times in one day! How far do you think you can push them before they—”

“Push back?”

“Rip you open, is what I was going to say! What is wrong with you? Why aren’t you afraid of these people?”

“Oh come now,” said Horuseps, gliding out of the shadowed corridor ahead of them with dreamlike suddenness. He smiled at Mara as Devlin bowed nervously. “Whatever is there to be afraid of? And Mara, my darling, where are you off to?”

“Back to my cell,” she answered him, a little surprised by the question.

“No one expects you?”

That was even more surprising. She showed it, raising both eyebrows and lifting her chin. “Who would be expecting me? If there’s a chess club in this place, I’ve missed the meetings.”

He acknowledged the joke, such as it was, with a thin smile and came a little closer. His eyes shifted to Devlin and narrowed. The lights that moved inside them irised small and very bright. He said nothing, but Devlin backed up at once, bowing the whole time in what should have been a comical way if only it were not so terrified. “I do hope I’m not interrupting you,” he murmured, watching Devlin turn and run.

Mara listened the slap of oversized sandals recede, smiling crookedly up at Horuseps. Jealous. Unreal. “Hypothetically,” she said, “how much trouble would I be in if I let myself into all the higher learning theaters, whether or not I’d mastered their arts?”

He looked at her at last and raised one eyebrow. “I swore upon my own immortal life to inspect the harems on your behalf and it was done. Don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you,” she lied evenly. “Not them. No offense, but you took a few days to do it. Someone might have moved her.”

“If that were the case, then this ‘someone’ shall certainly move her again, because no one can make a thorough search of every theater in a single day. And mine, dearest, was far more thorough than yours could ever be.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“It’s not for me to answer. I suppose special dispensation could be arranged…and you know by whom.” He glanced down the passage, his long arms sliding out of their customary crossed position to beckon her to him. “But if you’re in no rush to ask him, perhaps you’d care to accompany me on a small errand?”

“Why not?” she said lightly, and she went, but she had to wonder why he’d eased into the request at all. Touching his mind tonight was like touching an oil slick: she could see nothing of the thoughts beneath, only cloaking blackness and a hint of alien color that stained even the lightest contact. He didn’t even talk to her, but only walked on ahead and a little to one side, his hands resting on his shoulders and a feminine sway to his stride. It made her curious as to how much of his night he’d spent with Proteus.

Horuseps chuckled, proving that even if he wasn’t talking, he was always listening.

“Well?” she prodded.

“I spent my night in lessons, precious. It’s my day I’ll be spending with Proteus.”

“Congratulations.”

He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “I think you may have left a little piece of yourself behind when you were in him. He’s made a number of startling strides since then.”

“So he’s finally mastered Sight, after only six years.”

“Eight, in fact, for he’s had two since his initial achievement to fumble toward success. And tonight, his reward.” Horuseps laughed again, running his black fingers through his long, white hair. “I can hardly wait.”

“So where are we going?” she asked. “Am I lending you a negligee?”

“Did you bring one?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Then don’t be snide. We’re going to the Great Library. There are a number of books I’ve promised to let him look at when he comes to me tonight.” He glanced at her, again smiling. “You see why I’m bringing you and not him.”

“The Scrivener,” Mara said, swallowing the unpleasantness that came even at the sound of the name.

“No one is immune to his effects, yet you have proven more resistant than most. It may take some time to locate the tomes I seek.”

The library was just as she remembered it, seemingly untouched by time. The same hushed whispers and rustling pages, the same hooded figures moving back and forth, dragging their chains behind them, and the same living mass of awful intelligence at its center, overseeing all with his hundred sightless eyes. Mara stood at the railing outside the lyceum’s archway, just staring, trying to acclimate herself to the poisonous atmosphere of the place up here, where it was thinnest. She could feel the crawl of the Scrivener’s thoughts, mindless as beetles chewing into carrion.

“What is he?” she asked, prolonging the descent the only way she knew how.

Horuseps glanced at her, smiling. “An excellent question. One might ask, what are any of us? What are you, young one? What am I?”

“He’s different from you.”

“Are you not different from any other living thing upon this world? Does not one tree bear many fruit? Is not each one distinct?” Horuseps came to the railing beside her. His long fingers curled around the curved stone cap of the banister. He gazed down upon the Scrivener and lights moved in his eyes. “Yes, he is very different.”

“What is he?” Mara asked again, watching Horuseps now and not the object of her curiosity.

Horuseps only shrugged. “He is the same substance as any of us, only set together in grotesque manner.”

“The same. You mean he’s a demon.”

“Your kind as such a strange love of labels.” He started down, forcing Mara to follow. His hands were always moving, graceful as birds in flight, tapping shoulders and waving away the students who always gathered on the steps to amuse themselves with the agony of the harrowing. “It was not so long ago, as time is reckoned, that I have been called by Man an angel. My children yet are…of a sort.”

“Your children?” She put out surprise for him to sense, although the news wasn’t exactly shocking. “Are they…here?”

“No.” He laughed. “Neither are they where your mythologies would have them be. Yet they can be found, if one is persistent.”

“How many do you have?”

“Many,” was his amused reply, but then he stopped again, now on the second-floor landing, to turn his back on the library below and look at her. They were alone, deep in the stink of the Scrivener’s mind, where even sound warped out of truth, yet Horuseps seemed unaffected. “They resemble me, to some degree.”

“All of them?”

“Yes. They are identical, each one to the other, and none of them precisely made in my image. They are only half-demon, after all.” He shrugged one shoulder, and braced his hands on the railing behind him, smiling at her. The openness of this posture came as an invitation. She could feel his expectation of her wandering gaze and so she gave it to him, her eyes moving freely down his weirdly smooth chest to the dark, chitinoid plating of his lower half. “Men believe them to be daughters,” Horuseps said, once her eyes reached his denuded groin. “As there are men who believe me a woman. Or should I say, a female. Labels.”

He wanted her to ask him questions—about these children of his, about their mothers, about his own ambiguous gender—but Mara said nothing. Instead, with a calculated spontaneity, she reached out her hand and touched him.

His mind leapt in surprise, as physical in its way as a slap, but apart from a certain sharpening of his eyes, he didn’t move. He watched intently as her hand slipped over the smooth, glassy plane of his chest, moving slowly downward as each untraveled muscle was explored and marked. His thoughts churned behind their oily cover, thoughts of her, of Kazuul, of other things too tangled and too deep to read in safety.

She felt at his hips, just where he changed texture, and reached up with her other hand to stroke his chest. His skin was hard, like glass. He had no nipples, no indication of womanly breasts. Lower down, his armored parts seemed almost stony by comparison, smooth but pitted and heavily creased along plated seams, intensely unpleasant to feel in human form. At the place where his plates joined along his groin, she could see an aperture, very hard, not long and not wide. Just a slit, really, with an especially pliant ridge along its outline.

His thighs opened minutely. She could see the muscles of his arms tighten as he leaned a little more weight on the rail behind him. Otherwise, he remained motionless. He watched, and so Mara looked up and into his eyes as she slipped her finger inside him.

Light flashed across his eyes, as if reflecting the headlights of some invisible car. Just a flash, there and gone. “How fearless you are.”

“You could always tell me to stop.” She pushed a little deeper. He was warm inside, and wet, and slick, but for all that, it was not like feeling another woman’s vagina. It was more like feeling around inside a stab wound.

Horuseps was breathing just a little faster, or maybe it only seemed that way because his breath had become so hoarse. He watched, expressionless, as she went deeper. Laying her palm flat against him, she waggled her fingers slowly back and forth, seeking the walls of his almost-pussy, and finding what felt queasily like organs instead, floating loose inside him. Something slick and solid bumped her; she just managed to rub her fingertips across it, and no amount of self-control could keep her face from puckering a little as she thought of someone actually fucking this gash, sharing space with all these unknown and inhuman things.

Whatever it was in there pressed on her harder, moving forward like a living creature. Mara jerked her hand back fast, but didn’t step away. She watched in sick fascination as the plated ridge of his slit opened—the lips bulging outward before they parted—and a wet, black bar emerged. Perfectly smooth, slightly tapered, with a bloodless, horizontal groove at the tip, it more resembled an eel than a phallus, and it moved forward with an eel’s cold-blooded and hungry intelligence.

Horuseps moved closer, touched her wrist. She moved her hand back to close around the thing (it was so much better to see it, recognize it, then to feel it in the blind, swimming soup of his innards) and stroke him as he arched his head back and exhaled a long, humming moan. He relaxed, here in the open, the proof of his gender visible only to those moving around in the body of the library, and no one there was capable of noticing or caring. It was still a greater risk than he liked to take, but ah, she was so fearless…

“Why do you let people think that you’re female?” Mara asked.

Horuseps chuckled, his eyes still shut. “I enjoy seeing the looks upon men’s faces when they realize I am not and they are deep inside me, particularly those whose lusts I have cultivated with such care. Proteus has been a labor of several years.”

“A cruel sort of game.”

“I am a demon, dearest.”

“Your kind has such a strange love of labels,” Mara said.

This time, he laughed outright. “With every passing moment, I see better why Kazuul has allowed himself to become enthralled by you. I am not accustomed to this.”

“What, handjobs on the library steps? I should hope not.”

“Envy,” Horuseps corrected, crookedly smiling, “of a brother. Tell me, Bitter One, what is your game? Do you mean us to duel over you? To tear at one another with tooth and claw until we are moved to throw down your lost lamb and so secure your favor? It will never happen.”

“Do what you want to do,” Mara said, shrugging. “I don’t give a damn about either one of you.” She gave his cock a squeeze, using this contact and the hot rush it provoked to steal a deeper exploration of his clouded mind, then said, “But since you bring it up, what would you do for my favors?”

“What would you ask?”

“You know what I’m after.”

Horuseps chuckled, hissed as she carefully slid a fingernail along his shaft, and chuckled again. “The girl? I’ve told you all I know.”

“But you haven’t done all you can. You can go where I can’t, ask questions I can’t.”

“Ha!” His neck arched luxuriantly as she stroked him. He might have been an angel just then, with the light from above pouring down and that smile, that radiant smile, all his cruelty cloaked by pleasure. “A tall price you’ve set on yourself, darling one, and I cannot imagine what you might do to make such a cost worth my while.”

“Oh well.” Mara took her hand away from him and clasped them both together nonchalantly.

His eyes snapped open and his head came up. They stared at each other, and gradually, his surprise darkened.

“I don’t believe you’ve finished with me,” he said softly.

“Oh, but I have.” She met him without flinching, without anger, without hesitation. “Since you’ve made your unwillingness to pay so clear.”

“You are a student here.”

“You gave me no order, teacher.”

He wanted to. That was evident in more than his wetly jutting cock. He wanted her, yearned for her, more avidly than he had done in centuries, but in his mind, thoughts of lust were secondary to those of possession. He would fuck her, yes, but fucking her was incidental. He would have her, that was the important thing. To be his creature, his fascinatingly fearless thing…if only it were not for Kazuul…

Mara moved to the rail and leaned over it, looking down at the library, frowning. Distantly, she was aware of Horuseps eying her flanks, her bent back, as he masturbated himself slowly to climax, but she let those borrowed thoughts drift away ungathered.

Kazuul may be the undisputed lord of the Scholomance, but Horuseps was clearly his prime minister, and while Kazuul had no interest in Connie’s whereabouts beyond using them to keep Mara coming back to him, she still believed Horuseps knew something more. Maybe he didn’t know exactly where she was, but he knew something. She supposed she couldn’t expect him to pit himself against Kazuul on her behalf, but he could be a lot more helpful if he wanted to be. It frustrated her to have to see that potential in him and not be able to exploit it.

“What are you thinking now?” Horuseps joined her at the rail, his pleasures dealt with and his maleness once more secreted away. He rested a hand on her shoulder, a light and impersonal touch, tactilely unpleasant but meaningless. “Is it the Scrivener you study?”

Mara’s eyes had, in fact, been resting on the chaotically pulsing form of the library’s central inhabitant, but only because they had to rest somewhere. Now, however, she did study him. His head swung slowly left to right, from one great bookcase to the other, and his skin rippled with the blinking of his sightless eyes. He made an arm, his flesh drawing in on itself before bubbling out to form the appendage, but he only gripped the surface of his imprisoning desk for a few moments before retracting it again. It could never be easy to look at him, but even this little distance made it at least possible.

“Are you going to tell me again that he’s the same as you?” Mara asked, watching the Scrivener renew his swaying, senseless dance.

“I did not say the same. I said he is of the same substance. In that sense, so are we all upon this world. Even you and I.”

“Was he born here?”

Horuseps looked at her without expression. In his eyes, those ghost-lights dimmed and spun. In his mind, walls grew, dulling the sharpness of his alien thoughts. “Why would you think such a thing, I wonder?”

“Because I can’t imagine you moving him in.”

His caution eased, but did not vanish. “How perceptive you are. Yes, he was born here. He is the son of Zyera, Master of the art of Extraction, although I doubt she would admit as much to you, even if you were to prettily ask. He is an abomination, even unto our own eyes. Yet a useful one. Before his coming, we lost many years in lessons of language before those of sorcery could even begin. Ah, someone is hungry.”

The Scrivener made another arm, or a leg, and this time stepped all the way over his desk. He hovered there, swaying and grunting, and poured himself back inside.

“What does he eat?” Mara asked, eyeing the initiates. She didn’t see anything…wet…down there.

Horuseps chuckled. “I think it is not our Zyera’s disinherited son who hungers. Look there. Not every hopeful graduates his harrowing.”

Mara followed the line of the demon’s pointing hand to the loose ring of robed figures sitting around the Scrivener’s desk. Bent over their separate books, they wrote in silence, and while it was true that they looked a lot like the ones who had been there during Mara’s time in the Great Library, so it was also true that one hooded guy in a red robe looked a lot like all the others. And then Horuseps caught Mara by the chin and gave it a short downwards tug, refocusing her startled gaze lower, until finally she saw it.

They weren’t chained to the tables, these figures. They were free to leave, if they wanted to.

“Some go mad,” Horuseps mused, releasing her. “And fall into the Scrivener’s keeping. He is not entirely mindless, you see. In some strange way beyond our perception, he is aware of them. He nurtures them. Perhaps even feels a kind of affection for them.”

The Scrivener finally made it across his desk. He moved in slow, rolling, humping motions to one of the scribes. His head bent, nuzzling at the figure’s back with what did indeed seem affection. His mouth opened, emitting a swampy sort of grumble. The initiate continued to work, oblivious.

“I find that I enjoy watching the Scrivener care for his scribes,” Horuseps went on as below them, something like a giant fluke or leech poured itself from the Scrivener’s mouth like a tongue, making ghastly little mewling sounds as it probed beneath the aspirant’s hood. “I did not care for my own offspring. When I watch displays such as these, I think of them, my Hori. I feel…fatherly.”

The tongue, or proboscis, or parasite or whatever it was, began to bulge and contract in silence. It looked, Mara thought queasily, like a cartoon fire hose pumping water. The hooded man wrote.

“My Hori are not considered abominations. Nor are they demons, as you would call them. They are simply lesser than I. More than mortal, perhaps, but not much more. Would I feel differently if I were to sire a true demon? Perhaps.”

The Scrivener finished feeding his initiate and stood, swaying and making that awful, boggish purr as his fluke-worm tongue swung back and forth, as animate and alive as an angry cat’s tail. Then the Scrivener bent low and that tongue slipped up under the initiate’s red robe.

“Do you see how attentively he tends his children?” Horuseps asked. “Never do they learn the magic that will extend their lives, yet they can live for many years regardless. And in all that time, never will their loving father allow them to know hunger, to know thirst, to be soiled. He will make himself their mouths, their stomachs, their bowels. They have no minds, of course, but as you can see, it is possible to live quite comfortably without one.”

So it would seem.

Horuseps waited patiently while Mara looked her fill, but when she at last stirred, he raised one arm, gracefully waving her on and extending half a bow. “Shall we, then? Or are there more questions with which to prolong your descent?”

“Isn’t that why people come here?” Mara asked. “To learn?”

“Customarily. But not,” he smiled, “the things you wish to know. Come. Proteus will be waiting.”

Down they went, and she could feel it as they sank into the heady smog of the Scrivener’s mind. With every step, her own retreated, locking itself away from the toxic seep of corrupt omniscience, knowing she couldn’t vacate herself entirely because Horuseps was here and perhaps watching. And so she felt it battering at her, seven billion voices clotted into a single roaring ocean, and did her best not to drown.

“The books I desire will be along that wall,” Horuseps said, and how could he be speaking so normally, when all the world was screaming? How could so much mindless, groaning sound be silent? Mara’s vision doubled, trebled, and came sharply into focus when she caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit to the blood. “As I recall, they are bound in green,” Horuseps was saying, already moving away. “There shall be sigils of Zakath upon their covers. Have you attended Master Uulok’s lessons yet?”

Mute, Mara could only shake her head, her breath burning in her lungs.

“Pity.” Horuseps reached for her, his eyes gleaming, to touch his blackened fingertips to her brow. To her embarrassment, she felt herself shrinking back—the first sensation of contact had been inexpressibly wrong, like being caressed by a blanket of centipedes—but he was already inside her mind, inside where she could feel him pushing through the Scrivener’s storm to close around the make-believe walls of the Panic Room.

“Just so,” Horuseps said, out loud and inside her, and she saw the sigil draw itself in fire behind her eyes. Loops and whorls and hooks, jagged lines and pregnant curves, simple enough to be a child’s crayon-scrawl, complex so as to require a lifetime’s study. She saw it and had to understand it, had to understand what it meant to see the mark and what it meant to carve it lovingly into flesh, to root it to mortal body and immortal soul. She had to see the monsters it was meant to make of the men who desired to know it.

Mara bit harder, drooling blood but taking reason back by the handful. She nodded.

Horuseps smiled at her, his face framed by his horrible hands. His fingers, smooth and brittle as bones, remained pressed to her brow. “Are you certain?” he asked. One thumb moved, following the contorted lines that pain had drawn. “Quite certain?”

In his eyes, he was already fucking her. Here, right here, with sanity like a puddle at her feet, he was in her in ways no one should have to witness, no one should even have to understand. Flesh was no more than a formality; he had impaled her already and he relished the squirm.

Mara bit, dragging herself together to the coppery taste of blood, then heaved her mind back and let it fly at him as a blow. A weak blow, maybe, but they said even a grizzly bear could be stopped by the right slap. “I got it,” Mara said in a hard, even voice as Horuseps flinched back and eyed her. She headed for the shelves, not staggering, but only walking.

There had to be a thousand green covers among the copied books, but it was a start. She looked for spines that seemed freshest, pulling them one by one to check their covers for the hated sigil of Zakath, and turning aside to spit blood whenever the storm took her too hard. This drew the Scrivener, which in turn compelled Mara to search faster, bite harder, so that she didn’t have to be standing right there when the Scrivener ran out that second sucking mouth to drink her fluids off the floor.

She found the first book on the seventh excruciating shelf she searched. By instinct, she opened it. Words became images the instant her eyes fell on them. She vomited, then staggered away with a sick cry as the Scrivener slid eagerly forward. She bumped into Horuseps, whose outer show of concern could not mask his laughing delight when their flesh touched. (o she is precious, precious more than opal in the sun, and see her bend, see her eyes revile me, how I would love to see those burning eyes when I fuck inside her, cum inside her, and lick the blood from her screaming lips)

Mara shoved the book into his hands. “How many more?”

He held up three fingers, consciously or unconsciously imitating a scout’s salute (“We pledge to be true, to God and our country,” and now every thought was a memory, every memory became all memories, and there were so many people trying to share it). He smiled at her.

She went back to work, yanking on unmarked green spines, her stomach still roiling. From the corner of her eye, she saw Horuseps doing the same, albeit at a more leisurely pace, sometimes even stopping to thumb some random volume or read some errant page. He found the next book an eternity later, and she, the third midway down the shelves. The last was still in the stacks, waiting to be filed. Mara snatched it up, her head now ringing as with the sound of a swarm of beetles. Then she ran for the stairs and to hell with him and what he thought.

Clarity came like breaths of sweet air to the drowning. She could actually feel herself pulling free, climbing from the muck into sanity, singularity. The buzzing of her brain subsided; voices receded to whispers and then became dumb. Mara climbed to the third floor landing and dropped there, still breathing hard, to wait for Horuseps. She was vaguely aware of him below, the same way she was vaguely aware that she now knew quite of bit of Mandarin Chinese. She hated the knowledge, this parasite of the Scrivener’s seeding, but she supposed she could learn to live with it. Even use it, if she had to. All knowledge was power, that was the hell of it. All knowledge was power, and power corrupts.

Horuseps appeared, moving with dignity and unnatural grace, the books in his arms. “I thought you’d fled,” he remarked.

“Only as far as I had to.”

“Would it placate you to hear that you bore that better than any other I have known?”

“I don’t need placating.”

“Naturally not.”

The humor in his voice galled her. She straightened up and gave him another of her efforts at a bow. “Am I excused?”

“Of course. I hadn’t realized so much time to pass, so pleasant was your company. They’ll be ringing third-bell soon. Dear Mara,” he said, gesturing expansively to the corridor. “What must you think of me, to starve you so?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said, already moving ahead.

He followed. “Back to your cell then. Where you would be even now, had I not waylaid you, sleeping the sleep of the just and unenlightened.” He chuckled. It was a nasty, skittering sound, made indulgent by imitation and not by nature, but she cut it off sharply with five words:

“Like I could sleep now.”

The demon’s hand closed over her shoulder, closed and pinched hard. He turned her, no longer smiling, into the lights of his stare. “Our students are forbidden to wander the halls after hours,” he reminded her. “Even those fearless ones.”

“I’ll only wander as far as Kazuul’s bedchamber,” Mara told him.

It was a hook, barbed and baited. She felt it when he bit—a thought not of her own devising came to her of her hand dually on his chest and inside him, her eyes staring up at him. She hadn’t realized until she saw herself through his mind just how wild she’d looked in that moment, not calm as she’d tried to seem, but tense and feral, a pantheress about to leap.

“I really hate the library,” Mara said, cutting across the thought as expertly as a surgeon. “But it wakes me up. And since my meeting with Kazuul is clearly no secret, at least not from you, you can guess what I’m after.”

“I would guess comfort.”

She laughed. “From him? Jesus, have you even met him?”

He thought of her hand on his cock, that tight, feline smile she’d worn as she squeezed him, and none too gently. To this, Mara skillfully underlaid her own slightly-moist lips, her tongue across her teeth, the subtle shifting of her body. He immediately saw her going to her knees before him in hungry worship.

“I’m not the only student here with a certain understanding,” Mara said. “Are you going to stop us all? Perhaps you’d like to begin with Proteus?”

Horuseps glanced at the books under his arm, then looked back at her. His expression remained wary throughout. “You are the only student who seeks out her Master for such arrangements.”

“He’s not my Master,” Mara countered, stealthily promising pleasures, such pleasures, from deep beneath her hot denial. “He’s just the guy I go to when I want to fuck.”

His gaze sharpened. ‘Want to…?’ he thought, and the thought was a knife of covetous disbelief.

She pretended to misunderstand and laughed again. “Oh dear, I think I’ve shocked you. Do I strike you as the coy kind? Well, I’m not. I want to get some sleep tonight, and after that little field trip—” She shuddered without having to reach too far for the affectation. “—I can think of only one good way to guarantee it.”

Horuseps said nothing. His mind was alive with possibility.

She pierced it, not stealthily now, a touch anyone could feel if he knew how, and took a bold look at what there was—every position in which she bent, every humiliation, every ecstasy—sorting through them as cards before the shuffle. She gave him exactly the crooked smile he was so wont to give others, now as she released him to armor himself in the wake of her invasion. “You should have asked me first,” she said. “But then, I already know you’re male, and anyway, you look like you and Proteus have a lot of reading to catch up on. I guess this is goodn—”

He dropped the books, seized her. She didn’t see his hands move, only had the faintest impression of being snatched by this impassive, alien thing, but her alarm was manufactured. She was calm, always calm, even as she yelped and slapped once at his smooth, steely arms. She hit the wall. One foot struck a book and sent it scraping over the floor. The motion attracted him; he caught that kicking leg by the thigh and wrenched it up around his hip, slamming himself against her.

“And what game is this, child?” Horuseps inquired silkily. His thrust at her in short, sharp rhythm, each movement more painful than the last as his phallus pushed out between them. He didn’t care who saw them now. The hand that did not have her leg closed in an insolent fist between her breasts and began to pull her robe up in handfuls. “Am I to be another piece upon your board? Oh yes,” he said coldly. “I’ve felt you moving me about according to your whims. I allow it for so long as it amuses me, but that, my dear, my Bittersweet, is at an end.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you? Do you think I fear Kazuul?”

She pushed her chin at him, grabbed his shoulder, and used that leverage to twist her other leg around his hips too, now riding the thrusts he tried to punish her with. “And do you think I’m afraid of you?” she hissed back.

The hem of her robe, gathered at her thighs, rose no further. His erection still pressed solidly against her belly, hot and alive and as weirdly smooth as the rest of him. He didn’t move. His eyes never blinked.

“You fucking pussy!” Mara snarled, and yanked her robe up herself, arching so that her bare pubis rubbed around against his cock. “Take me if you want me! Fuck me now, you coward!”

His wanting leapt, as savage in its own way as any desire of Kazuul’s, but he dropped her. She almost got her feet under her…almost. Her back caught the worst of the wall as she went down, but the pain was in her ankle, flaring bright as it twisted under her. Then she was sprawled at his feet and trying to get back up.

She made it to her knees, decided nothing was broken, then glared up at the demon’s stony face and spat, “I ought to bite you for that!” She took his cock in her fist and squeezed, hard.

Horuseps exhaled in another of those hissing, skittering groans, then snapped his eyes open and backed away.

She refused to let go, instead gave him a wrench to bring him back. “I’m not done with you,” she said, and licked once from his slit all the way up the underside of his cock to the groove at the tip, which she tongued wildly for just a second or two. He tasted awful, acrid and sour as bile. “You’re right, subtlety is wasted on me, but it’s not getting me anywhere with you either. You’ve done more for me than he has. Maybe I’d rather have you.”

His mind was churning now, a haze of sound and color too loud to be identified. He hissed again and slapped her even as his hips twitched.

She fell over, came up with a slap of her own, then began to fist him hard and fast, sucking noisily at his smooth head. His fingers clutched at her hair in another of those spidery lunges. His knees bent as he rocked onto the long balls of his feet. He pumped at her mouth, making sounds in his throat like beetles’ wings, dry and frenetic. He didn’t let go when she pushed, so she hit him with a mindslap to knock him back, then bounced up and turned to the wall, holding her robes high over her hips. “Right now,” she panted. “Don’t make me hurt you!”

His fingers dug at her thigh. That skittering-clicking sound was in her ears, and then he pried her nethercheeks wide and shoved into her ass. She wasn’t expecting that, but it wasn’t as bad as she would have thought. Wet and glass-smooth as he was, there was no resistance, only cramping pain and not even that for very long. His hiss blew hot and broken into her hair and his freakish arms suddenly wrapped her, tight as webbing, pinioning her against his own body and holding her quite immobile while he drove furiously into her over and over.

It was surprisingly good, the way it could be good with Kazuul, the way any sex was good when it was hot and fast and for feeling’s sake alone. Mara went with it, letting her voice mix hideously with his, pretending total oblivion to her surroundings, but always watching from that cool, dark place, always listening to the air and the things that hummed inside it. Horuseps was gone, a drone in his frenzy of fucking, but there were students above and around them, students who had been on their way to dinner for third-bell, now silent and still as they were taught to be while waiting to see if their Master would require another, and there were demons also—Argoth and Letha and others she didn’t know, and soon there was Azkeloth, whose thoughts were made brightest by anger, lust and resentment. Kazuul was not among them, but his name drifted in varying degrees of concern and contempt from mind to alien mind.

Horuseps came with his voice first, shrilling out a burst of sound so piercing it made her ears hurt, not just once but three times, and each time, his arms tightened. At the third, just on the lea-side of a broken rib, she felt him empty into her, a great jet of seed drilling sickly even deeper into her bruised bowels. Horuseps coughed out a huge breath, then grappled violently with her unresisting body before thrusting once more, banging her into the wall with force sufficient to briefly white out her vision. There was a second flooding, this time hot and somehow thicker than before, a vile sensation that made her writhe with painful fullness, which in turn made him fall into a final (and mercifully brief) spate of pistoning thrusts. He let go of her to slash and hammer at the wall with one hand, then threw back his head and shrieked, or at least, made some ghastly whistling noise at very high pitch. The final cumming was explosive, brutal, spilling out of her in torrents as he hammered it to completion.

Then, done. He sagged against her, breathing hard, his grip slackening. Mara glanced down and saw the plates along his hip and thigh flexed outward, spiking off his body like the wings of a beetle, still connected by ropy strands of indefinable wetness. Gradually, they too realigned themselves and lay flat.

Third-bell rang, calling them to dinner. The crowd, such as it was, began to disperse.

“You demon,” Horuseps said softly, without raising his head from her shoulder.

Mara smiled and above them, Azkeloth slapped a student heavily out of his way and stalked from the room.

*          *          *

Kazuul came through the dining room doors without commotion—no throwing them open, no roaring, no crashing things into other things. He walked directly to the Master’s table, bringing a tense silence with him in his wake as more and more students saw him. He didn’t look at Mara when he passed her, but went straight to Horuseps and, with the same silent, easy grace as his stalking step, reached back to one of the long spikes sprouting from his own shoulder and ripped it free in a spray of blood and shards of bone.

Like most of the students in the hall, Mara jumped up. Unlike them, she neither cried out nor bolted from the room, not even when Kazuul stabbed the other demon through the chest, pinning Horuseps to his high-backed chair.

Horuseps didn’t cry out, either. He winced and raised one slender hand to feel at the thing impaling him, and finally cocked an eye up at looming Kazuul. “My,” he said with tight levity. “At least you’re taking it well.”

Kazuul gave the jagged spike a curt twist, seemingly oblivious to the blood pouring down his arm, his chest, his back. He said nothing.

“I am sorry about the whole thing, of course.” Horuseps managed a smile and a strained shrug. “You’ve met her. She has a certain charm. And it was only the smallest offense, I assure you. I did no lasting harm.”

Kazuul wrenched the spike out and stabbed it in again, aiming as for a kidney, if Horuseps had kidneys, and accepting the glut of black fluid his victim coughed into his face without blinking.

The shock of this unexpected assault was obviously wearing thin. One of the other demons at the table, Master Letha, gingerly reached for an ewer and poured herself another cup of wine. Master Malavan took his seat back and leaned out over his claws so that he could see the goings-on for himself. Someone whispered. Someone else tittered in reply.

Horuseps tried several times to speak, and finally raised a hand to cover his whistling chest wound. His voice, what voice there was, bubbled. “Oh, must it always come to violence before forgiveness can be found? Will you not accept my apology, brother?”

Kazuul appeared to consider it. Then he ripped the spike out, yanked Horuseps out of his chair by the throat, and rammed the spike up through the demon’s mock-vagina until his fist slammed into the hard chitin of Horuseps’s outer shell. Horuseps shrieked like a swarm of locusts. Eerily, it was not so very different from the sound he’d made on climax. Kazuul expressionlessly worked the spike back and forth, then pulled it out and dropped it indifferently on the table.

“Apology accepted,” he snarled, releasing Horuseps to a writhing, keening heap on the floor.

Now he looked at Mara, turning his head first, and then all his body to finally face her. His hands flexed, as if longing for another spike in his fist. God knew, he still had plenty. “Thou triest my good humor, woman.”

“Don’t you lay this at my feet,” she snapped, and students scrambled madly away from her. “When did you ever ask faithfulness of me?”

“A fair point,” he conceded, striding toward her in that light, furious way. “Do I strike thee as fair-minded then, truly? Be it so, then I am grossly feebled after these ages of solitude. Thou shouldst know thy place without mine instruction, supplicant!”

Mara turned around. “Have fun with your jealous fit, Kazuul. I’ll be in my room.”

He grabbed her, flung her back to face him, and roared, “Thou art mine!” full into her face. “Mine own! My property! And I’ll have thee back bone by bone if thou dost defy me now!”

“It’s against the law for me to defy a Master of the Scholomance,” Mara hissed, grabbing at his wrist. “Just don’t expect me to obey orders you haven’t given!”

“Now they are given!” he shot back. “On thy knees, woman, and swear to it!”

Letha chuckled and refilled her cup. Malavan crawled onto the table for a better view and was hissed at by someone else. Horuseps, moaning, rolled onto his stomach and pressed his face to the stone floor.

Kazuul seized Mara by the hair and threw her down on her belly, so apparently he did mean it. Tight-lipped, Mara eased herself onto her bruised knees and bent her back to him. His toe-claws dug warningly at the floor before her.

“I swear to be faithful,” she said. Her voice, to her own ears, was unrecognizably hoarsened by anger. If he wanted her to say it nicely, he was shit out of luck.

“Thou art mine.”

One of the demons giggled. Mara started to glare in that direction and Kazuul’s foot came down on her neck, crushing her flat to the floor. “Say it!” he bellowed. “Thou art mine!”

“I…yours…”

He eased up on her, but did not remove his foot entirely. The claws pricked at her through her robe. She could feel the itch of blood dripping down her sides. “Mine own,” he growled.

“Your own.”

“My property.”

She clenched her teeth until her jaws ached. “Your property.”

He took his foot away, but replaced it with his hand, lifting her roughly to drop her back on the bench she had vacated. “I should demand thee submit to me here and now,” he said, glaring at her. “Yet so prettily thou didst bend to me that I give this gift and accept thee at thy word. Do not force me to regret my leniency.” He glared over his shoulder. “Either of thee.”

Horuseps, facedown in his own black blood, raised one hand in a polite wave of dismissal.

Kazuul grunted, eyeing the fallen demon, then turned without another word to Mara and stalked away. Those at the Master’s table picked up their conversations and their cups almost at once. The students, those who hadn’t run, were longer in resettling. Gradually, it penetrated even Mara’s senses that there was fear here that bordered on panic, even still. They didn’t recognize him, didn’t know Kazuul, and to be confronted with a stranger after ten, twenty, or even sixty years had made them all newcomers again.

“Well now,” Letha began, watching over the rim of her cup as Horuseps heaved himself into his chair again. “I do hope that’s an end to it. Squabbling over sweets in the dining room! Shameful!”

“Are you killed?” Zyera asked, toying with strands of his disheveled hair. “I can’t say I’ve never seen him so angry, but it’s been many years.”

Horuseps groaned, but the sound held more theater than pain. The black blood smearing his chest, belly, and thighs certainly looked real enough, but then so did his sly smile. “His years have mellowed him,” he said, wincing. “He let me keep my eyes.”

Zyera tickled his chin. “I dare you to bring the oversight to his attention.”

“Was it worth it?” Malavan inquired, spearing a piece of meat from the platter to take back to his chair. “From what I hear, his vengeance occupied more time than your crime.”

Horuseps gasped laughter, grimaced, and then folded carefully over and pressed both hands to his oozing groin. “Every second. You’ve no idea.” He rolled his head slightly to the left and lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile. “Is it you I have to thank for this hour of humility, dear brother?”

Azkeloth drank his wine.

“I should have known. You never come to the dining hall. Well, if you wished to see me bemoaning my fate and cursing the God that ever put her before me, you’ll never. I would pay, feel free to run and tell him, a hundred times for every sweet and silver thrust I had inside that marvelous Mara. She is, oh, exquisite.”

Demons at the table cast speculative eyes over Mara. Students scattered across the floor level gaped at her in horror or smirked nervous amusement. To leave now would be running; to stay would be performing for them. Her appetite thoroughly crushed, she nevertheless got a grip on her cup. It gave her something to squeeze, anyway.

“Careful,” Letha said, popping a sweetmeat onto her tongue. “Thou art but a word away from the killing wrath of thy well-used seducer.”

“Not half so well-used as I would like. My dear Mara, do forgive me this spot of humor at what must seem to be your expense. It is merely my way of whistling past the proverbial graveyard.” He sketched half a bow, still seated, and winced hugely before straightening up. “You needn’t stay to pay it witness. I would escort you myself, but—”

“He’d only fall on you in passion,” Malavan finished, showing five rows of needle-thin teeth in a nasty grin. “And lose his eyes after all.”

Some of the students joined in the lecherous laughter. Mara got a powerful grip on her cup and said nothing.

“If I were you,” Horuseps said, eyeing her. “I would follow him sooner rather than later. You’ll have to trust me when I say he’s not yet as annoyed as he could be, but it’s no good baiting him.”

“I have no intention of following him,” Mara said tersely.

“No?” Horuseps kept one hand between his thighs, propped his chin playfully atop the other. “The acoustics in this room are quite astounding. I could have sworn witness not five minutes ago that I heard someone with a similar voice declare she was his, his own, his property…words to that effect.”

“I’d swear it to you too, if you ordered me,” Mara countered. “Or to any one of you. It meant nothing to me.”

“Ah.” Horuseps let his strained smile die. He reached up to smooth one of his long eyebrows, smearing it with blood. “Dearest Mara…that is very dangerous.”

“Oh, like I give a damn! Everything is dangerous here!” she spat, shoving her cup away with such force that it fell off the table and shattered. “Attending class is dangerous! Staying in your room is dangerous! Walking the fucking halls is dangerous! This whole mountain is one big coffin full of corpses too stupid to know they’re already dead!”

The laughter stopped, even at the Master’s table.

“Anyone of us could be killed at any time for any reason! So no, Horuseps, I’m not following him. I’m his property, sure, why not? I’m yours, too! And yours, and yours…and you all know where you can find me,” she finished in disgust. Turning on her heel, she stalked from the room, shoving students out of her way if they didn’t move fast enough on their own. She was out quickly, but not before Letha could speak, and though her voice was little more than an intimate murmur, some trick of the acoustics brought her the words:

“I don’t blame you at all, brother. Were I certain that Azkeloth could be engaged elsewhere, I think I’d have a ride myself.”

The High Table began again to laugh. The students, in anxious sycophancy, joined in. And all Mara could do was leave.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Kazuul’s demonstration in the dining hall may not have had its intended effect, if he truly intended it to send her running into his arms, but at least he didn’t compound his error by coming after her again. Or perhaps he’d set out to do just that countless times, but turned himself back, smart enough to know that if he got in arm’s reach of her as angry as he was, he’d kill her. Mara didn’t know and didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, the game between them was over. Unless he showed up with Connie in his open hands, she meant to have nothing more to do with him, or with any of the rest of them. She was here to find her friend, and by God, that was all she was going to do.

For two days, Mara searched the ephebeum for a girl she already knew was not there. She opened every door boldly, invading each occupied cell whether its resident student were at class or not, blasting free every sealed lockplate just in case the uninhabited cell beyond should hide her target. She had to hurt a lot of angry people and she didn’t care about that either.

Using a Malleating touch, she found she could see all the hidden pockets of space around the tiny cells, and she trained herself to use Sight to detect whether the rock had been Malleated before. Of course it all had, but the recent touches burned the brightest, and that was what she used as she went from cell to cell, pulling walls open. She found cups, robes, slippers, candles. She found hoarded food and stolen ewers of unwatered wine. She found six bodies, and dragged each one up into the lyceum for Horuseps to identify, even if they were nothing more than robes and bones. He tried to speak to her at first, but soon simply sent for the archivist’s book and kept it with him. At the end of each day, she returned to her cell exhausted, knowing it was useless but unable to think of what else to do. And on the third day, she ran out of cells to search.

Standing there in the last one, above the unconscious figure of the man who’d tried to stop her from entering his personal space, Mara indulged herself in a few poisonous fantasies mainly concerned with this mountain and a couple crates of high-explosives. Then she walked out into the ephebeum’s main cavern, found a bench, and sat.

There were always a few students milling around here, more now that everyone knew she was poking around in their rooms, but no one came near her. A wise precaution, considering her mood. Right now, it took all of her self-control not to mindslap everyone in sight or Malleate their heads on backwards or…

But she had to be calm now, had to be. Mara had never been the sort of person who dealt with anger well, which was why she worked so hard not to get angry at all. Anger was a useless emotion. It clouded reason and confused judgment, and she didn’t have either one in abundance. She had to keep focus, remember why she was here, and above all, stay calm.

The day must be nearly over by now. It was easy to lose track of time when using the Sight, but Mara’s stomach told her it had been many hours since first-bell and her sorry breakfast of roots and gruel. Too late, in other words, to begin another prolonged search. Tomorrow was soon enough to start over, in the Nave this time, and then…the lyceum again, she supposed.

And after that?

After that, she’d open the Black Door.

For a moment, even her thoughts stilled, as if some part of her were shocked by the idea, but what was there to be shocked about, really? It was the only place left, the only door she could think of that she hadn’t opened.

So, what if she did get it open? She’d be judged, wouldn’t she? She’d be counted towards the Tenth. And even if she survived and the way out were revealed to her, what if Connie wasn’t there? Where would she be but back out of this stupid goddamned mountain, looking for a way back in?

She couldn’t think like this.

Did she really think she could get that door open from the other side? Did she think she could open it at all? Maybe it only opened for demons.

But maybe not. After all, who was stupid enough to want to try?

“Who indeed?” muttered Mara, and stood up.

She climbed the stairs into the Nave as students moved wide around her, tapping at each one by habit, scarcely aware of them. The Nave was noisy, crowded with students fresh from class who waited for third-bell and their second meal. She felt them noticing her, saw their little sparks lighting up the Mindstorm as she passed them by, but ignored them as much as she could ignore anyone.

The Black Door.

She could see herself approaching in the dark mirror of its face, growing pale and grimly distinct one step at a time. The stone was cool to the touch, as smooth as glass. When she flexed her mind into Sight, she Saw nothing; the magic that had made it, unchanged since the founding days, had faded entirely from even this sphere. She willed the door to open, and thought she Saw a flicker of response deep in the hidden fathoms of its reflection, but it did not move beneath her hand.

Mara thought a moment.

“Malleate,” she said.

“You mustn’t do that.”

Sight shattered. Mara pulled back her hand, releasing the Word’s power, but didn’t turn around. She already knew it was Horuseps. “I want to open it.”

“It is forbidden for students to cross the threshold before their time.”

“You never said that at the tribunal.”

“I shouldn’t have to.” He joined her at the door. His reflection was much clearer than hers, as if it gave off its own light. “You think she’s behind it, don’t you?”

“Can you swear she isn’t?”

He gave her a hard, cold stare. “I shouldn’t have to do that either. I have sworn upon my life to you once already. I should think that would merit a modicum of trust now.”

“Sorry,” said Mara. She wasn’t.

“Hm.” His glittering eyes returned to the door. He watched her there, gradually losing his irritation to an expression that was merely thoughtful. “You’re lucky I happened along when I did, precious. Only those whom you call demons may open this door, and of those, only those of the high blood may do it safely. All others are repelled. Violently.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Is the door open?” he asked gently.

She clenched her jaw. “No.”

“Then consider yourself fortunate. Failure may be a bitter wine for you to swallow, but you are alive to swallow it.”

“How nice to know you’re looking out for me.”

Horuseps said nothing, and the longer that silence stretched out, the snottier those last words seemed. Mara touched the door again, stroking her fingertips just once across its glossy surface. She glanced at him, the real him, and not just his reflection. “Are you okay?” she asked.

His surprise was not manufactured. Then he understood, and his next smile was somewhat softer. “We aren’t human,” he said. “Mending our flesh is no more than a thought. And a Word.”

“I really didn’t think he’d do that.”

Horuseps shrugged. “I did.”

“I hope it didn’t ruin your night with Proteus.”

“Proteus.” Horuseps started a theatric sigh and ended with one of his ugly, spidery laughs. “Oh, I couldn’t go through with it. I looked at him…I remembered you.” He made a few passes with his fingers through her hair, then patted her shoulder. “You really need to go to him.”

She didn’t even bother asking who.

“No.”

“Mara—”

“He humiliated me in front of a roomful of people. He can kiss my ass, but he’ll never get it in bed again.”

“Kazuul—”

“Is your lord, not mine.” She glared at the door, seeing it all over again. “He’s done nothing but waste my time. I’m done with him.”

“You can’t—”

Mara yanked her shoulder out from under his hand. “And I’m done with you too, if all you’re going to do is pimp me out!”

Horuseps stepped back, bowing to her in sarcastic servility. “My only desire is to answer your every need. You wish to Malleate the threshold? So be it. You! Come here.”

Horuseps beckoned, and from the uneasy crowd watching them came a familiar man in a black robe. “Venice,” the demon said, patting the man’s shoulder. “A master of Malleation, specializing in stone.”

“We’ve met,” said Mara.

“Have you?” Horuseps murmured, too casually. He drew the silent Venice with him towards the door and pointed. “An opening, if you please. Mara, dearest, you may want to stand back.”

Venice stared at the Black Door without moving as Horuseps removed himself to a deliberate distance. The Nave was very quiet now. After a moment, the man looked at Mara. He hadn’t been sleeping well, she thought, or eating much. He’d lost a lot of that easy, handsome charm he thought served him so well in his business, and now, with his eyes glassy and unblinking and his lips pressed whitely together, he looked like a man pulled too early from his sickbed. Or his deathbed.

“Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear.” Horuseps crossed his arms to rest his long hands on his shoulders. He wasn’t blinking either. “I command you to Malleate that door.”

“Please…”

“Oh, but you like to open holes in rock, don’t you?” The demon’s smile was a razor beneath his sparking eyes. “Show me how it’s done.”

Venice raised his hand and put it on the glossy stone face of the door. His mind was a tangle of wordless fear—of Horuseps, Mara and Connie all torn together into terrible new shapes. He knew he was about to die.

Mara moved back, looking warily from man to demon. “You don’t have to do this,” she said, and even she didn’t know who she was telling.

“Malleate,” said Venice, but there was no will behind it, and the Word was just a harmless sound.

“There are so many worse fates to suffer than death,” said Horuseps softly. His fingers curled over his shoulders slowly, like the legs of a dying spider. “And we are about to explore them, you and I.”

One tear, only one, overspilled the man’s right eye. His hand shook, leaving sweaty smears on the rock. “Malleate!” Venice shouted, and this time, Mara felt it when he pushed that power into the door.

She almost couldn’t see what happened next. An explosion of some sort, soundless, blastless. Venice was thrown back too fast for the eye to easily follow, but he didn’t fall right away. It took Mara a second or two to see the black spears that impaled him, not just once or twice, but everywhere. They held him in place, supported him, gave the blood something to trickle along, but they didn’t kill him. As many as there were, as awful as it was, it didn’t kill him.

Then they exploded again, erupting out of his twitching body like a spray of black fireworks and taking little bits of him away on their needle-like points: a shred of robe, a clot of flesh, one pierced and leaking eye. A third explosion, and they were all so silent, that was the worst thing, it robbed the violence of any reality. Venice, now a mass of black and red at the center of a stone sea urchin, had stopped moving but still breathed, losing bubbles from dozens of openings in his chest, throat, and sides. He thought of Connie again, the way she’d been on the aerie he’d made for her, with the sun behind her hair, and it occurred to him in a confused way that she’d looked beautiful, if only for that moment.

Then the spears withdrew, torpidly pouring themselves back into the Threshold and taking the body with them, until Venice was scraped off against the unfeeling door to land in a meaty heap at their feet, dead.

“How did you know about him?” Mara asked. Her voice was even. She thought that would be hard, but it wasn’t.

“Not from you, if that’s what concerns you. But you really should take care what company you keep. You have rather a knack of attracting companions who can’t keep their thoughts to themselves.”

Devlin.

Mara looked up and into the demon’s narrow smile.

“Calm yourself,” he said, patting her head. “I left your pet scampering freely in the lyceum. It’s not a crime not to report the escape attempts of the past. Merely to facilitate them.”

“If this is your way of telling me—”

“When I want to tell you something, precious, I’ll speak plainly. Subtlety is not among your many talents, as so recently you’ve reminded me. Ah, Master Suti’ok!”

Mara swung around, expecting to see the demon and his hounds just entering the Nave, and instead saw him less than three meters away. She flinched, flared immediately into anger, and swiftly suppressed both. She hated this place, hated not being able to see the minds around her, but her hatred was irrelevant and distracting. She ducked her head in a stiff nod instead.

The Master of the Hounds chuckled and bowed low. His gaze shifted to the mess on the floor. “One of thine?” he asked, brows rising. “Impressive.”

“He’s speaking to you,” Horuseps murmured, inspecting his fingers.

Mara frowned, actually stepping away from the corpse as if to further distance herself from responsibility. “He was Malleating the door,” she said.

“Ah.” Suti’ok turned his wry smile on Horuseps. “One of thine, then.”

Horuseps stroked one of his long eyebrows. “And you’re not as impressed, are you?”

“I’ve seen the trick too often out of thee.” He turned and raked his eyes across the students still gathered by the dining hall doors. “Clear the Nave!” he bellowed. “None may witness the rites of the dead! To thy cells!”

Some of the students retreated, but to Mara’s mild surprise, only some. The greater number merely shuffled on their feet, looking at one another until one of them worked up the courage to say, “But the bell’s about to ring.”

Mara turned on her heel and would have left, but for Horuseps closing one hand quietly over her shoulder. “I don’t need to watch this,” she said.

Suti’ok cast her an amused glance. “Lady?”

“She thinks you’re about to release the hounds,” Horuseps supplied.

The other demon chuckled. “As tempting a thought as it be, no Master is permitted so to slaughter our sheep without our lord’s consent.”

“Do they know that?” Mara asked.

The demons exchanged thoughtful glances.

“Hounds!” roared Suti’ok. “Feast thou on human meat! Te ha’vok! To every moving form, savage!”

The hounds set up an immediate and bloodthirsty baying, and students scattered in mind-blistering panic. Suti’ok burst out laughing, and a few of his hounds, eager to please, gave frolicking chase as far as the wide stair, ripping at robes and biting playfully at hands and feet. They crawled back on their bellies, tongues lolling, and Suti’ok hunkered low to rub their hideous heads and praise them in that coarse, guttural tongue.

For Mara, one hand pressed to her throbbing temple, it seemed an eternity before the Nave fully emptied, but intellectually, she knew it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. And still, Horuseps kept her under his hand.

“I suspect you’ve added some to your reputation,” he observed, looking toward the stair where echoes of fear and pain still wafted up from the ephebeum.

“Me? How the hell was that my fault?!” Something brushed at her fingers. She looked down and saw a hound sidling up close, a rapt and hopeful expression stretched across its skinned-wolf face. She made herself give it a pat. It rolled onto its back at once, displaying its naked belly and throat, and whined pleasure. In its excitement, it had begun to grow an erection, but it wasn’t yet aware of it. She decided it was best to ease away before it did.

“Ska,” said Suti’ok, straightening. He saw the hound at her side and frowned. “Kor’vek!” he snapped, and the hound sprang up, head and tail tucked low, drooling blood on Mara’s robe. The demon called commands, and his hounds leapt away, some running to guard the stair and every other door in the Nave, while others went to work on the body. Suti’ok grunted, then glanced up as third-bell sounded. He chuckled again. “So many empty bellies. Aye, they shall remember who it was stood close when they were sent hungry to their beds.”

“And who it was at my side,” Horuseps agreed, “when the unfortunate Venice was set against the door. How many of them know, do you suppose, that it was Venice who last had dealings with your little lost lamb?”

“I wouldn’t have killed him,” Mara said.

“That isn’t what Astregon remembers.”

“Astregon’s an idiot!” she snapped. “I don’t kill people and I don’t force them to commit suicide by making them mess with a magic door that I know is going to kill them just to prove a point to someone else!”

“One wonders how long you expected him to live with the seeds you planted eating up his brain.”

“My seeds don’t last that long!” Mara said, but she could feel herself frowning. It had been days since she’d spoken to Venice. Days. And he’d looked…awful.

“You may find that your boundaries have shifted, precious. But no matter.” Horuseps smiled at her. “No one forced him to use his arts to open secret escape passages either, but he did, and was punished. And if I can use that punishment to clarify the dangers of messing with magic doors to my darling Mara, what harm does that do, really? As you are so quick to observe, you aren’t here to make friends.”

Suti’ok grunted again, but all his attention was on his hounds. Not the three who worked to sew Venice’s robe back together and not the sentries who occasionally lunged out snapping at late-arriving students, but the rest of them, the ones scraping the meatier remains into a single heap and the ones who crawled along the floor, lapping up blood. The jovial boredom she remembered when he’d cleaned up after the woman in the bath was gone. His gaze raked back and forth, taking a constant count of his charges, but the usual pride with which he viewed them had been dimmed by an unmistakable wariness.

“What do you get out of making my life more difficult?” she asked, holding very still while a hound licked blood from her feet.

“The satisfaction of watching you overcome adversity. Come, Bitter Waters. Leave the Master to his work. The tables are laden and waiting. It would be a shame to waste them.”

“And now you want to feed me? I think you need to make up your mind whether you’re punishing me or not.”

“In all honesty…” Horuseps uttered a peculiar, tight-sounding little laugh as he too gazed at the crouching, snarling creatures that surrounded them. “I just want you out of this room before the hounds realize how dramatically they outnumber us, and that there’s a fair chance three or even four of them could fuck you before their Master could stop them, but yes, you also need feeding. Come away.”

Mara looked at the hounds and saw that several more had drawn nearer to her than the bloody heap on the floor strictly demanded, and even those who still fawned adoringly for Suti’ok kept one feral eye on her. Some were shivering. All were drooling. She glanced once at their Master, but he remained fixated on his hounds. He too had drawn closer to her, and stood in a tense half-crouch, his hands hooked into ready claws.

“At your convenience,” Horuseps said, holding out his arm.

She started walking, unhurriedly, so as not to provoke a pounce, and Horuseps fell into step beside her, resting his hand on her back. “They didn’t act like that the last time I saw them,” she said.

“Fresh blood excites them,” he replied. “Under certain circumstances, we don’t even allow Zyera or Letha to stray too near.”

He neither asked nor wondered where she’d seen them before. There were many deaths in the Scholomance.

Mara looked back. Most of the hounds had stopped working to watch her go. Suti’ok knelt beside one, stroking its bony back and murmuring to it, watching her as well.

“Does Suti’ok teach anything, or does he just keep the hounds?” Mara asked.

“He teaches,” Horuseps replied, steering her well around two panting sentries posted at side-tunnels. “He teaches methods of magical defense against physical attack, but he has a student at the moment, and never accepts more than one. His teaching aides are difficult to control.”

“Is he their father?”

Horuseps took his hand off her back and armored his mind. “Why would you ask?”

“You said they were demon-stock. And look at them.” She glanced over her shoulder again. “They love him.”

“We don’t like to talk about the nephelim, precious.” Horuseps went ahead of her to open the dining hall doors, but paused with his hand on the latch and looked back. “We aren’t proud of them.”

“Suti’ok seems to be.”

“We’re not proud of him, either. Please—” He broke himself off, closed his eyes, and opened them dimmed. “Please,” he said simply.

Puzzled, she could only frown at him at first. “Do…Do you think I’m going to go in there and ask all the Masters about their half-human kids?”

He winced elaborately.

“You’re the only one I’d ever ask,” she told him. “I’d never even ask Suti’ok to his face.”

His melodramatic grimace faded into something less easy to read. “Because you…trust me?”

“Because I can usually tell when you’re lying.” Mara thought about it. “I guess that’s trust.”

He looked at her, motionless. Even the lights of his eyes were still. Eventually, a yelp from a distant hound distracted him. He stared in that direction for a long time too, then finally turned around and opened the door. “I should never have allowed myself to become fond of you,” he said, and went inside.

The dining hall was not quite empty. The other demons who were in the habit of taking their meals among students were already here, sipping wine and eyeing the empty tables below them curiously. The corridor at the rear of the room that led past the kitchens and down into the ephebeum was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t see the hound prowling for trespassers there.

“What hast thou done with our daybreak entertainments?” Letha called.

“I’m afraid I’ve made a bit of a mess in the Nave,” Horuseps replied, leading Mara past the low tables with their platters of burnt and bloody meat. “I do apologize.”

A chorus of good-natured groans answered this, which Horuseps accepted with solemn nods and waves of his hand, but not everyone was playing along.

“What is she doing here?” Malavan demanded, stabbing a claw at Mara.

The rest of the table quieted.

“She’s here at my invitation.” Horuseps came around to the Master’s side of the high table with Mara securely under his hand. “And so, Malavan, if you’d be so kind as to remove yourself,” he said. “We seem to be short a chair this morning.”

Dull red color began to bleed into Malavan’s skin. He speared a piece of meat and dragged it to his plate defiantly.

One of the demonesses—Mara couldn’t tell if it was Zyera or Letha—tittered. Someone else whispered and a deep, gravelly voice muttered back. The air was charged, expectant.

“I see ten long benches standing empty,” Malavan spat finally.

“So you have your pick of them,” Horuseps replied. “Move on.”

Malavan hissed, slammed his two long claws into the table and leaned out over them, throbbing scarlet and shaking with rage. “I was here first! I am always here! I’ll not be moved by the likes of her or you!”

But his fear was louder even than his anger, and Mara could feel his thoughts squirming: He didn’t dare strike at Horuseps, and everyone here surely knew it. How dare he? How dare he oust him from his place and order him away as if he were some human? How dare he do it for her!

Then he spun, and Mara knew it was coming even before his sharp scythe of a claw left the table. He spun and slashed, intending to open her face as he’d done to her warden those many days ago. He’d caught her by surprise then, but she was watching him now, and as fast as he was, Mara’s mind was faster. He’d only just drawn back his arm, filling the Mindstorm with his envious hate, when Mara slapped him.

Slap was perhaps too kind a word. This was a demon, not a human, and she withheld nothing. Everything she had went out along a single focused line, crashing into him like a psychic battering ram.

Malavan flipped over and off the table with one claw still imbedded in the stone. For an instant, that long, bony sword seemed to tremble, and then his weight came down and the claw shattered, sending shards of bone spinning out into the room and leaving a piece nearly as long as Mara’s own forearm quivering straight up from the table. Malavan landed thrashing and shrieking just as the first flares of alarm at his attack began to light up in the Mindstorm.

Horuseps patted her shoulder.

“You!” Malavan’s remaining claw hooked at the tabletop. He heaved himself up, the stump of his broken claw held tight against his chest. It was already healing, new bone gleaming white as it grew from the knob of his finger. “I’ll kill you for that, you clay-born cunt!”

He sprang, even as several demons lunged to catch him, and Mara slapped him again. He landed with a wet smack on the stone floor behind her, staggered up, and fell over again, both fingers twitching.

He lay panting while all the others watched Mara. The Mindstorm belonged to Malavan alone. Every other had shrouded their thoughts.

Malavan kicked once or twice, then rolled onto his knees and dragged himself upright. His arms shook as he folded the blades of his claws in close against his sides and leaned on his knuckles. He spat blood, wiped his mouth, and glared at her.

She waited, ready for him.

“It is forbidden to use arts against a Master,” he said sullenly.

Someone laughed. She was sure it was Zyera that time. The sound made Malavan flinch. His helpless hate ate up a little more of Mara’s senses.

“Mentalism is not an art,” Horuseps said, leading Mara to the demon’s empty seat, there between Zyera and the hulking spike-studded executioner, Argoth. “It’s a talent. Something you wouldn’t understand.”

Malavan watched as wine was poured into his cup and set before her. Argoth picked up the meat in his plate and tossed it on the floor at Malavan’s feet while Zyera filled it again with bread and fruit and cheese. He thought about killing her the same way most people thought about winning the lottery—in a desolate, covetous way. Then he spat more blood, turned around, and limped away.

“Thank you so much,” Mara said, once the dining hall door had banged shut. “I was just asking myself what could possibly be more fun than making a few hundred students resent me.”

“He’ll get over it,” Horuseps said, tickling Zyera’s chin.

“Yes, he seems like the forgiving sort. None of you like him,” Mara observed, feeling around the table. “Why is he here?”

“It isn’t necessary to like someone in order to live with him, precious. Besides, it wasn’t our decision.”

“Why would—”

Argoth’s hand lit high on her thigh under the table. She looked at him. He gnawed on a bit of bone and gazed pensively at the vacant tables where no students were sitting.

“Why would Kazuul bring someone in that he knew everyone despised?” Mara continued.

Argoth’s hand slid up, lightly squeezed.

**What in hell are you doing?** she sent at him.

His mind tapped back at her playfully, but he said nothing.

“There were greater issues at stake than camaraderie. If you want to know which, you’ll have to take it up with him.” Horuseps accepted the cherry Zyera teasingly offered between her lips in a deep kiss everyone else ignored, then delicately took the stem out of his mouth and said, “It isn’t wise to pity him.”

“Who, Kazuul?” Mara asked, and looked at Argoth again as his hand dipped between her thighs. He ignored her, snapped his bone in half to suck at the marrow, and began to rub his finger deliberately back and forth over her robe.

“No, dearest, Malavan. Although I can’t imagine anyone pitying Kazuul either,” he remarked. “And one shudders to think what he’d do about it if he knew…but no, Malavan. His kind is quick enough to prey on pity, and quicker still to take revenge for it.”

“I don’t feel pity,” Mara said irritably, and sent to Argoth, **So this is your last chance to stop what you’re doing.**

Argoth drank wine and began to pull her robe up one handful after another.

“No? What is this strange affection you have for Connie if not pity?”

“She’s my friend.”

“Friend! Every relationship you’ve ever forged has been carnivorous,” Horuseps declared. “You feed on people, you don’t make friends.”

She started to get angry, but forced it back, forced herself calm. “I wouldn’t have thought it was like you to dismiss something just because you can’t understand it.”

Argoth’s naked finger penetrated her slowly. He rumbled out a thoughtful growl, contemplating his cup, and began to move in her.

“I dare say I understand more than you do at this juncture,” Horuseps countered, and Zyera laughed. “But I’ll take your word for it. You love the pitiful Connie, honestly and unselfishly, in spite of her overwhelming ineptitude. But tell me, do you think you’ll remain friends once you’ve saved her from us?”

She leaned out to frown at him as Argoth stroked deeper. “Why wouldn’t we?”

Most of the demons laughed then. Even Argoth chuckled.

“Perhaps I flatter myself that we—” Horuseps indicated the table with a lazy flick of his wrist. “—might make some lasting impression upon our students. But even if she were as heartless as you—”

“I’m not heartless, damn it!”

“—is it so impossible to imagine some small ember of resentment when she thinks that she had to be rescued from her failures by someone like you, who can be so callous about her success? In fact, I should be very surprised if living in your shadow was not what drove her to us in the first place.”

Mara stared at him. “Christ, you’re in a bitchy mood tonight.”

Zyera laughed.

“I just want to know if you’ve really thought about this,” Horuseps said, frowning at the demoness with mock severity over some very genuine irritation. “Your single-minded pursuit of the feeble Connie may seem admirable to humans, but I can’t help but think you’ve failed to grasp the far-reaching consequences. Even the truest friends seldom love you better for seeing them at their worst.”

Argoth removed his hand and licked his fingers. He glanced at her, showing the tip of one fang in a smile, and tapped at her mind again, telling her he knew she enjoyed it, telling her she was just as sweet as the wine.

“I understand,” Mara said mildly.

“Do you?”

“Oh, I think so.” She reached under the table and put her hand unerringly on Argoth’s crotch, boldly cupping the solid bulge of his cock beneath his skirt. He grunted, his smile turning at once to dark surprise, but Mara ignored him and leaned out to lock eyes with Horuseps. “You can’t find her, can you?”

Horuseps twitched one eyebrow, expressionless.

“And you’ve really been looking. Not just where you promised to.” Mara unbuckled Argoth’s belt one-handed, stroked at his mind when he stiffened in alarm, then snaked it deftly out from around his waist and tucked it into her sleeve for safe-keeping. The sound of a few layers of leather falling aside wasn’t anything at all against the sound of wine pouring, knives and claws scraping against plates, and hushed whispers at the ends of the table. Mara wrapped her hand around Argoth’s shaft, feeling it grow even hotter and harder as she squeezed. She began to pump him in her fist, using her wrist mostly and moving her arm as little as possible. “You’ve been looking and you can’t find her either.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Horuseps said curtly. “How would I know who to look for?”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it? You don’t know exactly. That’s why you brought Pretty Doll out to see me, but you’re not about to make that mistake twice after the way I reacted, so now you’re searching on your own.”

Argoth had stopped eating, stopped even pretending to eat. He stared straight ahead, expression grim, hands frozen around his food, as Mara stroked him fully erect.

“And either you can’t find anyone who could be Connie, or you’ve found too many. If I was there with you, we could figure it out right away, but that would mean showing me where you’ve been looking.”

Zyera looked at Horuseps. He did not take his eyes from Mara.

“And you can’t bring them up to see me for some reason, and you don’t want to show me why not.” Mara paused to drink some wine and roll Argoth’s heavy balls over her palm. “So this is your brilliant plan, to see if you can make me mad enough to stop looking as well. It’s a good thing I don’t feel pity, because that’s sad, Horuseps.”

He shrugged with his eyebrows and pinched off a bit of bread, denying nothing.

“I’m going to find her,” Mara said, working Argoth faster. “It doesn’t matter what you feed me or where I sleep or how many angry students you put in my way, I’m still only here for one reason and I am going to find her.”

Argoth tensed and came, spurting semen in a thick flood over his own thighs. Mara wiped her hand on his hard stomach where she figured it would show the most, and brought her arm back up.

“You could be right,” she said, taking another slice of bread from the tray. “She may resent me after a while. She may even hate me. But if she does, it won’t be because I didn’t come for her when she needed me.”

Horuseps swirled the wine in his cup.

Argoth stared broodingly down at the table and through it, his thoughts blackly focused on how to cover himself and conceal this mess before anyone saw it or even suspected it. The wrong rumor in Kazuul’s ear…he’d be a eunuch by day’s end. He tapped at her again, asking for his belt.

**In a minute,** she told him silently. **And relax. I won’t say a word to Kazuul, I promise.**

Everyone else ate. It was very quiet.

“You won’t believe me,” Horuseps said at last. “But I am trying to help you.”

“I do believe you,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s possible for you to help me and yourself at the same time.”

He started to speak.

“I know you’re hiding her,” Mara interrupted. “And now I think you might be hurting her.”

Horuseps closed his mouth. Demons ate and drank and watched them as alarm came quietly back to the Mindstorm from a dozen different minds. Mara felt it grow, shook her head, and looked at Horuseps again.

“I want her back,” she said softly. “That’s all I want. We’ll leave quietly. You can tell everyone you killed us, I don’t care. Just give her back to me.”

“It’s out of my hands, Mara.” All trace of a smile was gone. Horuseps’s eyes were, for the first time, entirely lightless.

“You have to know how this is going to end.”

“I do,” he said, still with that grim intensity.

She sighed and looked at her plate—Malavan’s plate—her appetite buried under her rising temper. For now, she was still calm, but it was a fight she suspected she was going to lose sooner or later. She picked out the fruit and put it in her sleeve for later, smoothed down her robe, and stood up. “I still like you, Horuseps.”

He smiled wanly.

“I don’t know why, but I do. And that’s too bad, because this can’t go on much longer without us becoming enemies. I’m not an idiot. I’m aware that I might not survive that.” She paused behind his chair on her way out and looked down at him, just at him. “But I’m sure I’ll risk it to get her back.”

He reached up to pat her arm, nodding. He kept his head bent, hiding his eyes from her, but through his touch she could feel his thoughts chewing at each other. He wasn’t afraid of her and he didn’t share the wordless apprehension of his fellow Masters, but his mood was a dark one regardless.

“Don’t think too harshly of me,” she said, moving toward the Nave.

That got a laugh out of him. “I could never be angry with you long, my darling. We understand each other too well.”

“That’s a tremendous comfort to me. Oh.” She stopped, brought Argoth’s belt out of her sleeve and tossed it toward him. It landed before the table and lay like a dead snake under the puzzled eye of the demons.

One by one, they turned to stare at Argoth.

“Have a nice night,” said Mara. She turned around and left. The last thing she heard as she crossed into the Nave was Horuseps saying, “When you see Kazuul, tell him I need to speak with him. And don’t wait until after he castrates you. You’ll forget.”

*          *          *

The hounds let her pass at their Master’s command (Mara gave him a bow for his trouble, which Suti’ok answered with bellows of laughter). She climbed down into the student’s wing expecting two things: Devlin waiting halfway up the stairs to meet her, and trouble waiting at the bottom. To her surprise, she found neither.

There were crowds of hungry students in the ephebeum’s front cavern, pinning their hopes on the hounds being called away before the last bells rang, but they didn’t pay her much mind. Oh, they blamed her for missing their dinners, but in an abstract way that was nearly devoid of emotion. The demons did what they did for their own reasons, and there wasn’t a person here who had not inadvertently provoked one of them to violent amusement in some innocent way. So they blamed her, but they weren’t about to confront her.

That eased her mind some. She was confident in her ability to defend herself against any one of them, but fending off a swarm of even the most inept wizards was a daunting prospect.

This group was nicely cowed, however, and too focused on missing dinner to make trouble for her. She crossed the open cavern, casting for the familiar jitters of Devlin’s mind as she reached into her sleeve for the scraps of food she’d taken—he’d done the same for her often enough—but couldn’t find him. Mind by mind, she tapped methodically through the throng, then gave up and just reached out and grabbed someone.

“Where’s Astregon?” she asked.

“Who?”

“That jumpy little pest who likes to hang out around me. Looks like a goat.”

“Oh.” And before he said another word, one image flashed in the fore of his mind: Devlin, dragged shouting into one of the ephebeum’s many tunnels. “Uh, I’m not s—”

Mara silenced him with a mindslap, grabbed back that flicker, and pulled it with her into the Panic Room where she could see every shade of danger in the Mindstorm while she studied it.

Devlin, dragged away. Two men, almost invisible in their black robes, until one of them looked back over his shoulder to laugh at their victim. It was a face she knew, and recognizing it, she understood why no one gave the abduction more attention than their lost meals.

It was Loki. Laughing Loki, La Danse’s ever-present henchman, so she could guess who the other guy was. And somewhere in the maze of cell-pocked passages, there was a race being run.

Mara turned around, rapidly comparing each tunnel mouth to the one in her stolen memory. When she had it, she emptied her sleeve of its distracting weight for the students to dive at and started walking. She did not run. There was a chance La Danse had merely seized an opportunity to play his sadistic games on the first gazelle he’d spied, but she doubted it. No, this had all the hallmarks of a deliberate stab at her, and she meant to answer it. She would stay calm, she would be careful, and she would turn his brain into soup.

The blister-lamps were only just beginning to fade down this corridor, which meant someone had been through recently who knew how to turn them on. They made a fairly obvious trail through the many crossways for Mara to follow, and where the lights ended, the screams began.

Rock absorbed so much sound…she was nearly at the cell before she heard him. His voice was raw, breaking down, and he’d lost the wit to make coherent words beyond the occasional, “Please, stop!” or “God, no!” or a howling effort at her name. He might have been screaming like this the entire time she’d been upstairs, enjoying her Master’s feast and playing games with Argoth under the table. The thought pierced her, and bled out fury. Controlling it left her feeling hot and not quite connected to herself. She was not aware of walking. She only felt that angry heat straining at her ribs and was there.

The cell where they held him was shut, but not sealed. Mara banged the door open, as much to catch anyone behind it as to announce herself, but no one was there. No one was anywhere. The cell had been Malleated to three times its original size, but it was still small enough to see it all at once, and apart from Devlin lying on the floor, it was featureless and empty.

Devlin. They’d stripped him, tied him hand and foot, blindfolded and beaten him, but the game still appeared to be in the preliminary stages. He was more or less in one piece, although someone had been entertaining himself with a few dozen evil-looking stone needles, all of which had been left imbedded in their plaything. They were in his stomach, in the soles of his feet, his scrotum, the tender inner cavity of his elbows, they were in his nipples, his neck, his lips and his gums. Devlin didn’t even know his torturers had left him. With every minute movement, the needles quivered, wracking him with fresh pains as he pleaded to an empty room for it all to stop.

If they hadn’t bothered to stick around and laugh at him, then this had nothing to do with Devlin and everything to do with her.

The anger again. Mara could feel it lunging like a dog on a fraying lead, hungry to bite and difficult to rein in. She drew herself in and looked at the Mindstorm, muted by layers of rock except where Devlin’s fear and agony ate it up. She stepped out into the hall and probed to her limits in both directions, but felt nothing, no one.

Scowling, she went to Devlin and yanked the blindfold off. “Shut up,” she said, before he could do more than suck in a sobbing breath. She got his ankles untied, started to loosen the knot at his wrists, then changed her mind and went after the needles instead. The first one she pulled on broke into a handful of brittle flakes, each one its own razor. She stared at the shards in her hand, feeling again that red eclipse, and reminded herself to be calm.

Devlin let out a rusty shriek, gagged on his own blood, and then screamed through his savaged mouth, “It’s a trap!”

“I’m aware of that,” Mara snapped, plucking needles in quick, impersonal jerks. They bled, and for now she’d let them bleed, but when this was over, she knew she’d better do something for him. Malleate the holes shut, if nothing else, but they were bound to get infected. Why hadn’t she bothered to learn the word for Growth yet? Wait, who was the man Desdemona had wanted to fix her face? Shy-something, she thought. She couldn’t look it up now, pulling needles was too fiddly to risk doing from the Panic Room, but she’d find out and she’d make him fix Devlin up.

She was still calm. Angry, but calm. She believed Devlin when he said it was a trap and she believed that trap was about to spring its teeth on her, but then, she also believed she’d sense anyone coming when they finally rushed the cell and she believed she was a match for La Danse and his laughing donkey.

Mara didn’t have much imagination. Even knowing the cell walls had been manipulated in the past, she was taken entirely by surprise when the rock rolled back on either side of her and she was at once surrounded. They ran at her, not just one or two, but five of them, slamming into reality in a scant second and catching her completely unawares. One massive mindslap could have dropped them, or at least disoriented them long enough for her to run, but she couldn’t slap indiscriminately without hitting Devlin too.

She hesitated, and they were on her.

Mara didn’t know how to scream. The sound she made when the first blow smashed into her was more of a hoarse yelp and she knew it wouldn’t carry far in the sound-swallowing tunnels. Her feet went out from under her with a single expert kick, and then she was tumbling backwards with hands all over her, grabbing her anywhere they could and pulling her into the black. Fists came out of the dark, fists hammering into her chest, her stomach, her face.

The lions had come for her. She couldn’t see them through the barrage of blows, but their minds shouted their identities along with their delight. La Danse and his little laughing friend, one of Ruk’s cock-sleeves from that day in the lyceum, one man she didn’t even know, and Proteus, Horuseps’s pet and reading partner. This was no spur-of-the-moment attack. They had been planning this for days, just waiting for Devlin to wander off on his own so that they could turn him into bait. Behind the Malleated walls, they had brought candles, so they could see her at their mercy. They’d made a wide ledge, just hip-high, against one wall. They’d made spikes on another one.

Dimly, she was aware of Devlin thrashing through the Mindstorm, all pain and panic and impulse. Everyone else was too busy trying to get their kicks in to notice when he snatched the last of the needles out of his feet and got his legs under him. She could sense him hovering at the edge of her perceptions, see the way she looked through his eyes as she fought back against the mob.

Then he ran.

‘That’s how you survive eleven years in the Scholomance,’ Mara thought as rock walls wiped all trace of Devlin from her mind. And she had to laugh, even as the rage welled up and savaged her. She could expect no better from a man with a bunny tattoo.

“That’s enough! That’s enough! What—Where’d that numb fuck go? You were supposed to be watching him!”

“It doesn’t matter. Let him go.”

Proteus, the leader here, stuck his head out into the empty tunnel and then slammed the door on it and escape. He pulled his playmates off her, yanked her head up, and spat in her face. Then he grabbed her, threw her down on the ledge he’d made, and knotted his hand in her hair. She got the breath knocked out of her, started to struggle up, and got slammed down again, face-first, twice in sharp succession. It knocked her out, but only as far as the Panic Room, where she could just as easily force her battered brain to obey her and wake right back up. She wasn’t going to be unconscious here.

“It was your fault,” Proteus was hissing in her ear as she came groggily back around. “She was hurt because of you.”

She? She who? Horuseps was in his mind, Horuseps in Kazuul’s grip, suspended in the air over the dining table with a bony spike stabbed up between the demon’s thighs. His Horuseps, who had laughed at him when he’d come down into the theater that night, who’d laughed and waved Proteus off as if he were a bug, as if he’d never meant anything. Horuseps, who had been fucking this bitch on the library stairs, Danse said he saw them. Danse said Horuseps wasn’t a woman. But this bitch, this bitch was, and she was going to pay for ruining his chance at a Master’s bed.

Mara gathered what concentration she could muster and sent out a mindslap like a pulse in the open air around her. It didn’t feel very strong to her, but it did knock them all briefly back. Briefly. Then the fists rained down, hammering her head into the rock, and one of them, that one of Ruk’s, was screaming, “Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!” and leaping around like a damn ape.

She wasn’t prepared for it. As prissy as that sounded even to her, she wasn’t prepared. Never in her life had anyone laid hands on her in violence. Hell, few enough were those times hands had been laid on her in annoyance, in passion, or even in affection. Here was no demon, no monster, but just a man and that man was strong enough to make her struggles into his game. They meant to rape her and they meant to kill her, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.

Proteus spoke a Word, dragged handfuls of stone up and over her arms, sucking them down into rock to keep her helpless and his hands free. His friends were laughing—Loki’s donkey-like bray cut across her ears the loudest—jostling each other for the best view. Shock gave way to a grossly inappropriate sense of outrage; this couldn’t be happening, how could it be happening, and how could it dare to be happening to her? This storm of sick confusion swelled and swelled and suddenly popped as La Danse yanked her robe up and she felt the chill draft of the caves on her naked skin.

“She’s mine first!” Proteus snarled. “You hear that, you bitch? I’m going to fuck you. He’s going to fuck you. And when we’re all tired of using your whore-holes, I’m going to do to you what your cock-slave demon did to Horuseps.” He banged her head into the rock a few times, as if for emphasis. “I’m going to pound that spike up your cunt so deep, I stab you through the fucking heart! Do you hear me? Do you?”

She thought she would be terrified. Terror was the logical place to go, after all, and there was sure a part of her hedging inexorably into panic, but terror itself never came. Instead, and without a single hitch of transition, Mara fell from confusion into rage.

Not anger. Anger was a far gentler emotion for a far gentler time. Tantrums were had in anger, or shouting fits, or at its extreme, a sudden brawling spat. What took hold of Mara’s heart as her thighs were wrenched apart was black and throbbing, alive in some murderous, cancerous way that frightened her as much as anything happening behind her now. She had always been in control, all her life, even in her sleep. Now that control was gone and the rage swept over her, and as she felt the hot press of Proteus shoving his cock into her, some grotesque mimic of her childhood calm took hold of her and used Ruk’s voice to whisper, ‘Thou requirest not a direct touch…carve with thy will and not thy hand.’

Proteus had her, skin to skin. Mara reached out through that contact and was inside him, easily and far, far deeper than he was inside her. His body moved and she saw every movement, every pulsing vein and floating cell. Her vision swam out of life and color to the empty black of Sight. Mara looked at him and spoke the Word of Transmutation, all her furious will in focus. Bone to blood, would have been her thought, but she did not need thought in that time of pure rage. The will and the Word were all.

Proteus collapsed behind her. She didn’t know it, didn’t feel him go down or even slide out of her. She didn’t hear the jeering of his friends turn to gasps and choking cries. She spoke a Word and the rock that held her become warm. She pulled her hands free, screaming that Word again even as she spun around and slapped. She did not see the face she hit, not before she struck him and not after, when mouth, nose, eyes and open bone were so hideously smeared together and he was down, down and choking on his own mangled flesh for want of air.

Rage. It was all rage, and rage did not burn the way they said it did. Anger burns. Rage sings. It sang in Mara as she threw herself at every movement, every living thing that shared her space. They were not men she killed—Kimara Warner could never kill a man—they were objects of disgust and disease, objects to demand a death. And she was rage, who gave it to them.

They ran, tearing open the door and sprinting out into the tunnel, screaming, scattering. She ran after, quickly saw that she was no match for their speed, and dropped instead, slapping her hands against the floor she made malleable, reaching through it as she had reached through flesh, and bringing the rock itself up in a wave to take one of them down, to fall over him, to crush him in its terrible fist.

Something was wrong. Her heart, beating too fast. Mara staggered, clutching at her chest as pain began to splinter through her, but a man broke from his hiding place in the shadows and rage was on her again. She ran after, chasing him around the muting shields of winding rock until she burst out into the brilliant open field of the ephebeum and he was hers. She lashed out in a Word of Transmutation—blood to salt—and screams became a curtain over every sense.

She attacked them, all of them, every moving thing, and anywhere her hand slapped into skin, she had a Word ready. Ribs burst through eye sockets. Lungs turned to scales. At one point, delirious in the grip of rage, she imagined she Malleated the air itself and drove it like an axe into someone’s skull. Then she stumbled, fell out of her body into the Panic Room and saw it blazing with the yellow light of danger. Her heart, her heart—mygoditsgoingtoburstrightopenpopinmychestlikeameatballoon—and then she fell again, out of the Panic Room and into a thick, black ocean.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It wasn’t like sleeping and only a little like fainting in the library had been. She knew she was in trouble, but could do nothing about it. Eventually she came back to the Panic Room—it sort of bled in around her out of the black, taking on weight and substance over lengths of time she could not grasp but suspected were extreme—but nothing changed, even after it was solidly there and around her. On the monitors, she could see only a vague impression of her body lying somewhere and she had no control over it at all. She thought she might be in a coma.

There was nothing after that, nothing but yellow light in the Panic Room and the Mindstorm and the endless fight to take back her body and make it wake up. She was rewarded now and then with clawing spasms, but that was all. Each one left her with an impression of ground gained in the greater war, however. Only inches, maybe, but even inches could add up. The Grand Canyon itself could be measured if you had enough inches.

So Mara fought, and even if there was no time, she became very dimly aware that she was winning. Gradually, a sense of sound came to her on the monitors. A sense of gravity began to weigh on the arms and legs she could not quite move. She dreamt, off and on, proof of some return to thought. As she railed, she could hear the inarticulate grunts of effort that, somehow, escaped her slack and sleeping lips.

And finally, finally, she dragged herself out.

*          *          *

Mara heaved up from a leaden drift of blankets, her hands clawing at the air and feet kicking sluggishly. Her mouth opened. She yanked in air, heaved it out, and pulled it in again in the first ragged rhythms of breath. It hurt. Her eyes opened, swam shut, opened again and wrestled the world into focus. That hurt, too.

Light, pale and unflickering, cut through the blackness in twin points above her. Green light. Kazuul’s eyes.

He was sitting at the foot of the bed. Perched on it like a gargoyle, his feet comfortably dug into the stone edging and his hands clasped together and carelessly dangling between his bent knees. He watched her fight for clarity without moving, without speaking. His expression was one of the very mildest interest.

Mara fumbled for the edge of a blanket. Trying to shift it brought on a cramping wave of shakes. She dropped back as boneless as a sack of mud and lay sweating on her back. Her mind whirled and fogged, but she refused to let it grow dark on her. When she was sure she wasn’t going to pass out again, she slapped defiantly at the blanket and pushed it off as far as her arm could reach.

“Hm.” Kazuul leapt agilely to the ground and walked past her, out of sight. He pulled the blanket back up as he went. Bastard.

She wanted to ask him questions. Her brain felt clogged and questions were the best way to armor herself out of the appearance of weakness, but she couldn’t think of any. At least, none she didn’t already know the answers to. Where was she? In Kazuul’s private chambers, she could see that. How did she get there? How else, but that he brought her? Why? Hell, he probably didn’t know himself. It was always amusement with these guys. What happened?

What did happen? She remembered the attack, remembered the surge of terrible rage that cut its way into and out of her with such violence, but what happened, really?

“H-how—” Mara croaked, and convulsed in racking coughs.

Something wet pushed into her mouth. A bit of rag, soaked in heavily-watered wine. She sucked and swallowed, coughed again, and spat it weakly out. “How did I get hurt?” she rasped.

“How indeed, thou fool,” Kazuul said tolerantly. “This is what comes of thee tripping idly through this lesson or that without care for content. Magic is energy, young one. There stands the most basic equation, and as necessary to all sorcery as thine own letters are to all thine education. Magic is energy, and thou didst deplete all around thee. All around and all within thee. The last of thy killing will came from thine own breath and body. Fool. That said—” Kazuul dipped the rag in wine and replaced it firmly in her mouth. “—thou didst give an inspiring demonstration of thy will.”

“I didn’t want to kill them.”

“Nay? In that event, thou hast shown catastrophic failure.” He huffed out one irritated laugh and drizzled water across her cheeks with flicks of his claws. “Thine is the path of high magic, Mara. Do not apologize for its use. It shames us both.”

She tried to sit up and couldn’t, then only lay there, gasping and nauseous. “I’m not here…to impress…you.”

“Ah, well I know it.”

That was all for a while. Mara faded in and out, gathering strength in the Panic Room until she dared sink down into her body and try in vain to make it obey her. She knew Kazuul was aware of her efforts, knew he was laughing inside, and could do nothing about it. She was helpless in his lair, a lamb in the grip of an indulgent wolf.

“How many?” she asked finally.

“Didst thou not keep a count?”

“I—” barely saw them. But no, she had given him enough to play with. “No,” she said instead, closing her eyes.

His hand stroked across her brow, caressing her and the mind beneath. “Nine, at ultimate reckoning.”

“N-no!” She tried to open her eyes and couldn’t, tried to sit up and could only twitch once under the torturous burden of the blankets. Nine? “No, that’s not…There were only five!”

“Shall I tell thee the ways in which they suffered their deaths?”

She didn’t want to know, but refusal was a trap, so she nodded.

“He whose bones thou madest jelly, ultimately suffocated under the weight of his fallen flesh. Thou must forgive me,” he added, with a quiet roll of laughter. “There is a certain humor about the circumstance, in that he knew the Words by which his form may have been repaired…if only he had a jawbone with which to speak them. Is that not irony?”

“Technically, I think it’s just unfortunate,” Mara muttered. “For irony, there would have to be…a kind of pun in it…to make a disparity…between his intention and the result.”

“Ah. Unfortunate then, but amusing all the same. Also swiftly demised was he whose blood wast made to salt. Master Dalziel wished me to express his great pleasure, may I add. Salt of flesh shall be a classically-used Transmutation now gone inexplicably out of fashion, and yet one thou didst superbly execute.” He caught himself, then chuckled. “Pun unintentional.”

“I’m sure.”

“One, thou didst glove in rock and crush. Two bled out from the wounds thou didst inflict. One didst thou Malleate in divide from crown to groin.” Kazuul poured himself a cup of something from an ewer and drank, looking at her thoughtfully. “I give that one to thy count, though he lived three days ere he made an end of it. One—”

“I don’t want…to hear anymore.”

“As thou wilt. Many there were who survived thy rage, somewhat less than whole. After some discussion amongst us, it was decided not to interfere, although I am told most have managed repair.” He came back to the bed and gave her another sip of wine. “Thou hast not, I think, many more enemies.”

“How did you find me?” Mara asked.

“I am told that pup that hugs thy heels came howling into the lyceum for aid, risking expulsion for that he dared to be about after the tolling of the last bell. There too, we had discussion. It was decided we forgive him the oversight, this once.”

“Who?” She tried again to sit and this time managed, although the exertion left her shaking. “You mean…Devlin?”

Kazuul shrugged. “I do not mark the names or faces of the humans who come here, thou knowest this. One of the many youths of thy same accented tongue, that is all I could determine.”

It had to be Devlin. Naked and bleeding, with needles still imbedded in his flesh and his wrists still tied together, he’d gone for help. Gone to a demon, no less. After last-bell.

“Idiot,” muttered Mara, and tried to get up.

“Art thou so determined to kill thyself?” Kazuul asked, watching her fight back the blanket. “I might have spared thee these pains and left thee where thou didst lay. Down, Mara. Down and rest.”

“I don’t trust your nursing.”

“Nay?” He put his hand on her chest and pressed her suddenly, violently flat. For a moment, he was Proteus; the illusion was so real that she felt the rough scrape of stone under her face, heard laughter in her ears. Then it was worse, because it was Kazuul leaning over her, relishing every fragment of memory that slipped from her control. “Yet here thou dost remain,” he mused.

“Let me up.”

“Nay.”

“Why not, you fucking sadist? Let me go!”

“Six days and nights, I have tended thee, groomed and washed thee, fed thee sips of life. Six days and nights, I have not pried at the unguarded walls of thy mind, nor taken my pleasure of thy delightfully vulnerable body. Now thou wouldst malign my nursing. I am offended.”

The weight behind his hand was stifling. She tried to curse again, but managed only a rattling gasp.

“Thy heart races. Hammers. Quivers. Thou art weakened, Bitter Waters. Admit thee or no, thou art sore in need of succor.” He leaned close, grinning at her from only inches away, and growled, “Succor of me, o Mara.”

She bared her teeth in a hard, furious sneer, then had to gasp for breath again.

“Because I wish it,” he said, as if she’d asked. He flexed his claws on her breastbone, his eyes dipping to watch the sweat bead up on her flushed skin. “Because thou dost despise it.” He nuzzled at her naked throat, slipped his tongue into the hollow of it, and tasted the skin above her jumping vein. “Because suffering comes in many shades. Thine I do find beautiful.”

Mara dragged in a breath, raised her hands, and shoved them against his chest with a Word. She felt its making like a hammer on her spine. Her vision washed to white and bled in again, dimmer than before, and Kazuul stayed right where he was.

“Again,” he purred, his eyes smoldering.

“…damn…you…” She was sinking, her body numb to her will, sinking into the black. She couldn’t even be sure she was talking, but she thought she was because he laughed at her, laughed and kissed her.

She fell from waking with his breath inside her, and the last thought she had—his or hers, she could not tell—was that his breath was sweet.

*          *          *

Mara lay helpless in the demon’s bed for days without count. She heard the bells, saw day and night interchanged when he had the aerie opened, but could make no sense of either. Sometimes she slept, sometimes dreamed, and at times went deeper than that, back into the black nothing where the fight to regain her consciousness and control had to be waged all over. Every minute she spent in her body was a hell set to the score of her own pounding heart.

She dreaded waking. Kazuul was always there, feeding her sips of watered-down wine, or alternatively, a salty and bitter broth whose primary ingredient she suspected to be blood. When she refused to swallow from the cup he put against her lips, he calmly sipped at it himself, then rolled atop her and passed the stuff from his mouth to hers with all his weight crushing down on her. There was no fighting him. Even as she gathered strength in the Panic Room, she could feel his arms around her, his infernal heat warming her limp and undefended body. At times, she heard him whispering in her ear, felt him licking at her naked throat or combing carefully through her hair with his claws. She could protest none of it.

Gradually, and not without great internal effort, she began to win the battle. Her sleep became a place of rest and not some claustrophobic black prison she could not escape. The drumming of her pulse first slowed, then faded, and finally the yellow light of danger bled itself away from her monitors, showing her only a body in a state of over-exertion. She began to hold the cup when her brought her wine, and to push it away when he brought the broth.

Although still a long way from normal, she knew her strength was returning, and that meant it was time to start planning the next step in her search. She hadn’t seen every part of the mountain yet, but in this state, made breathless by the act of swallowing or groaning with the effort to roll over under her own power, she could not imagine how to go about it. She wanted it over, that was all. She wanted it done. And for the first time in all these years, Mara felt the slow, sour crawl of resentment as she thought of Connie—her first, best, and only friend—who had run stupidly off to this horrible place and then had the nerve to cry for rescue.

The bells rang once. Mara listened without opening her eyes. First-bell. A brand new day. Somewhere below her, students were flooding into the dining room to fight for mouthfuls of food. And soon Kazuul would come with a bowl of broth, and that meant him bearing down on her from above, his mouth wedging hers open, his laughter rumbling against her chest, because she absolutely refused to drink the stuff by choice. For now, she drowsed, too tired to sit up. When the hand brushed at her cheek, she did not respond, laying as one dead across Kazuul’s rumpled bedding.

Only when the same fingers trailed down her throat, did she realize the smooth and graceful touches couldn’t possibly be coming from Kazuul’s rock-rough hands, but she didn’t have the strength to care. The fingers stroked along her shoulders and then down, pushing the sweat-damp sheets ahead of them, baring her chest to the chill air. Someone both sighed and hummed—Horuseps. Identification came as the prickling of fine hairs at the nape of her neck—and the hand slipped brazenly around her breast.

“Mind thyself,” Kazuul growled good-naturedly from somewhere in the room. “Control thy hand, else I have it off for thee.”

“Brute. Tyrant.” The demon’s breath puffed warm against her cheek. He’d bent, snuffling at her maybe, or—

His tongue lit on her lower lip, moistening her chapped mouth with swift, fluttery, hungry licks. Mara did not react, although she did feel a faint and exhausted sort of surprise. Horuseps hummed again, right there into her open mouth, and as gooseflesh crawled along her limp body, he eased his tongue into her and swirled it around her mouth. Mara’s throat clicked, convulsively swallowing, and she gagged a little. Horuseps withdrew, but not far. His fingers at her breast skimmed across her nipple, stiffening it just before he sucked it into his mouth. Mara made a sound, her lips twitching in a moue of sleeping disgust. She tried to roll over and couldn’t, not without waking up all the way.

“I envy you,” Horuseps said, and gave her breast a last wet pull before taking himself and his touches away. “There lies a heady wine.”

“Shalt thou have another reminder to keep thee chaste? I can leave thee a lasting scar if thou must have one.”

“Forgive, I pray you. I am easily overcome by helplessness.” His voice receded as he straightened up, but his hand stayed with her, caressing her in thoughtless, greedy patterns. “It was my fault, Master. Entirely.”

“Aye?” Kazuul sounded preoccupied, unconcerned.

“I never thought they’d band together like that. They never have before. I provoked them.”

“Soonest begun, swiftest done. T’was bound to happen, and I never doubted she would survive it.”

“Nor I.” Horuseps’s slender hand trailed along her belly before coming to rest on her thigh. “She is recovering nicely, isn’t she?”

Kazuul grunted.

“How delightfully resilient she is.” Horuseps slipped the back of his hand up between her breasts, gave her a pat, and moved away, his voice receding. “And how ferocious. Would you have thought her capable of it already?”

“I think her capable of anything in this fool’s pursuit of hers.” Kazuul was quiet a moment, then grunted and added, “I did not foresee the killing so soon.”

“You don’t seem particularly displeased by it, either,” Horuseps observed and no, Mara thought, he didn’t. In fact, the satisfaction in Kazuul’s rumbling voice had been rich enough almost to seem sexual. “Perhaps you give her too much liberty.”

“Perhaps.”

Horuseps waited, but when nothing more was forthcoming, he let out a peal of his uniquely nasty laughter. “Well, so long as you’re aware of it, I must be content.”

“Wouldst thou not indulge so tasty a morsel if it lay under thy jaws? Besides,” Kazuul growled, leaping heavily down from wherever he’d been perching, “’tis not forbidden for students to slaughter one another.”

“Nor to assault one another.”

Now it was Kazuul’s hand upon her, the heat and harshness of his skin unmistakable as he pulled the damp sheet back up to her neck. “All was done for cause of her own defense.”

“Yes. This time. And when it becomes revenge? Or leverage, to seek out her little playmate?”

Silence, but Horuseps laughed sharply. Maybe Kazuul had shrugged.

“Oh yes, it is easy to show lenience when she lies here so pretty and vulnerable, or when she spreads those winsome thighs, but you had best begin to concern yourself, my brother. Her power is growing. This time, it slipped from her control. The next time, it may slip from yours.”

“Thy counsel, as always, has been heard. Now leave me.”

A short pause, and then, somewhat stiffly, Horuseps said, “If my words have seemed at all impertinent—”

Kazuul laughed, low and indulgent. “I forgive them, naturally, as I have forgiven thee. Every court needs its jester, free of the lord’s wrath. Go, brother, and go in my good favor.”

“As you wish, my lord.”

She didn’t hear him leave, but there was a faint crackling sound behind her; perhaps he’d Corresponded. In any case, he had to be gone, because Kazuul came and sat on the edge of the bed. Looking at her, maybe. Maybe not.

In the quiet, Mara drowsed again, falling deeper and deeper toward the thick and recuperative sleep. She had almost reached it when something brought her back. Not a sound, nor precisely a sense of thought, but just some vague and severe awareness looming over her. Mara forced her eyes open; Kazuul’s were directly above her, perhaps two inches away.

She frowned. “This is restful for my heart, right?” she croaked.

He grunted and withdrew. “Thou didst not seem to be breathing.”

“I’m fine. In fact…” She sat up and pulled the bedding back. “It’s time for me to leave.”

“Thou art unwell.” Kazuul gave ground reluctantly, circling the bed and watching her efforts to stand through narrowed eyes. “Wounded pride alone stirs thee. Come, wilt thou follow it from my chambers to thy grave?”

She didn’t answer, knowing her voice would not be steady. She stood, weathered a surge of vertigo, and slowly stabilized. One cautious step led to another. She let go of the bed.

Anger began to edge into his exasperation, coming and going like the light from dying coals. “Mara, thou art not the embodiment of thy stubborn will. Lie back. Have I not made a fitting nurse for thee? Hath not mine hand been gentle?”

Mara made her way to the foot of the bed without stumbling. Her robe lay in a crumpled heap on the floor, no doubt unmoved since the moment he’d stripped it off. Mara stooped, labored as an old woman, and picked it up. It stank. She couldn’t bring herself to put it on, so she draped it over the side of a broken pillar and wrapped herself in the smaller piece of a torn curtain instead.

“Dost thou believe I would not drag thee back?” Kazuul demanded, showing the tips of his fangs. He made an obvious effort to calm himself and tried again, first crouching down and then reaching out one empty hand as to assure that he was very small, very safe, unarmed. “Lie back, my Mara. Thou art yet unwell, and if thou admit it not, convince me. Let me lie with thee, and I shall let thee go.”

She croaked laughter and kept walking. The room twisted around her, sapping the strength from her bones, but not her determination. The curtain weighed a hundred pounds. The stairs towered before her, each step a chasm.

“How canst thou be fit to the rigors of study if thou art not to the rigors of my bed?”

“It’s a risk…” she gasped, struggling upwards. “I’m willing…to take.”

He was waiting at the top, of course, filling the stairway. His mouth twisted as he watched her climb. His eyes, dimly glowing, narrowed with grim satisfaction as she found each shaking step and trembling handhold.

She stopped out of arm’s reach and found a place on the wall where she could lean and catch her breath. She didn’t look at him.

“I might easily prove to be immoveable,” he remarked.

“You don’t want to turn this into a contest,” Mara said wearily.

“Contest? If ever t’was such, ‘tis ended. Thou art mine.”

“Your own, your property, your whatever. I remember, I was there.” She passed a hand over her eyes and pinched hard at the bridge of her nose until her vision stopped swimming. “I lie a lot, Kazuul.”

His eyes sparked. He rose, deliberately towering over her and putting every impressive bulge of muscle on display. His toe-claws scraped ruts in the stone beneath him. His bony spikes clacked ominously together as he rolled his shoulders. “I do not.”

“Oh please.”

“Someday thou wilt see that I have ever spoken truth to thee.”

“And on that day, perhaps I’ll listen to you. Doubt it, though. I’m a horrible cynic, even my own mother thinks so. I’ll probably just focus on what few lies you did tell and reject you out of spite. I’m better at that than humility.”

His lip curled. It wasn’t a smile.

“Are you going to move?” Mara asked. “Or are we going to have it out right here on the stairs?”

“To what effect?” he asked scornfully.

“I can’t possibly put up much of a fight yet, so either you’ll have to let me pass or you’ll end up killing me.”

“Ha! Thou showest thy true intent too easily. Never would thee abandon thy fool’s quest!”

“I’ve been here twenty days that I know of, and God alone knows how many more,” said Mara. “I don’t love anyone anymore. I just want to see you lose. So fuck you, fuck her, and fuck the whole damned mountain.”

He stared at her, his frown growing just at the edges of her perception, like a trick shadow in a painting. His mind touched hers, touched ice and stone, and withdrew, leaving behind a residue of his uncertainty. “Thou liest,” he said finally.

“Yes,” she said. “I told you I did that. But I had you going for a while there. Or is this the lie? Let me go, Kazuul. You know I’ll be back.”

“Do I indeed, thou fraud?” He took half a step back, though. Not enough to let her by, unless she physically climbed over him, but half a step all the same. “Tonight?”

“Not a chance. Not until I’m fit for your ‘rigors,’” she added more gently, and the green fire of his fury dimmed, mollified. “It could be awhile. Don’t push me.”

So much for pacifying him. His wrath exploded through the Mindstorm, hitting her in the Panic Room like a great fist that shook even those long-anchored walls (but didn’t break them, and she supposed he could if he wanted to). “For when it ceaseth to fall in thy favor—!” he snarled, vacating the stairway to slash at a column in the empty classroom. It smashed apart in a heavy cloud of dust and he stalked away to sulk in the debris.

“This stopped being fun a long time ago,” Mara said, limping out onto the dais. “I keep coming back anyway.

He settled moodily on his haunches, glaring at her as he picked through chunks of stone for something large enough to crush in his fist.

“There’s just something about you. Something more than just good sex. I suppose,” she said with a dry smile, “I’m not as immune as I like to think I am to your single-minded pursuit of me. It’s irritating as hell, but still flattering.”

He grunted.

As tired as she was—her health monitor in the Panic Room was already creeping back to a state of high alert and she wasn’t even out of the theater yet—Mara turned around and hobbled back to him. She put a hand on his shoulder, gripping the base of his self-mutilated spine for balance, and kissed him. He flinched away a little, and then came back hard, disguising his surprise with far more familiar aggression, catching her wrist and holding it just a little too tight. “Stay,” he rumbled, doing his best by a smoldering stare which only emphasized his anger, his frustration, and his sheer size. “Stay with me and be mine one night. Thou hast given me but bitter sips. Layest thou before me thy feast and let me revel.”

“I said no.”

He released an ear-splitting roar into her face and let her hand go like he was throwing it at her, then stomped away. He crouched down next to the ruined column and scored at it with his claws, thinking, while she dragged herself up the first of the ten tall steps that led out of his theater. “Thou art a student here,” he said at last. “Thou hast no right to refuse an instructor.”

“Last I’d heard, you weren’t teaching anymore,” she pointed out, and climbed another riser.

“Dost thou defy me?”

A mild question, incuriously asked, but there was a threat in it that he didn’t bother to hide. Mara managed a third stair and then sat on it to rest. He was watching her, his eyes half-lidded, giving every appearance of lazy unconcern even as his claws still dug furrows in the broken stone of what had been a whole column just minutes ago.

“Of course not,” she said. “Give me the order.”

Something flickered in his eyes. The same something, maybe, that made his thoughts move briefly close to the unbreachable surface. She could feel them, even if she couldn’t see them clearly, and she didn’t think he was showing them off on purpose. On the principle that it really was uncertainty and not anger she was sensing, Mara pressed the advantage.

“Go on, then. Say it like an instructor would. You know I can’t refuse you and stay here. You know I’m not leaving without Connie. So give me an order.”

He continued to say nothing. His mind was in motion, circling hers like a snake, and she studied it now in all its dangerous color. In the twisting surface of the Mindstorm, she read only the muted flash and color of the hundreds of students moving about here in the mountain; in Kazuul himself, she could see nothing but the well-built mental walls of an ancient, unpleasant mind. There was something else underneath, something every bit as real, something that seemed sharp and, if not quite desperate, at least honed to a terrible intensity, something he thought was still entirely hidden.

“I won’t let you keep me,” Mara said, and managed a smile in spite of her exhaustion. “But you know I’ll be back.”

He cursed in a language unknown, but vile enough to stab painfully at her brain—a curse in the truest sense, nearly a Word in its own right—and stood up. “Go then. Yet again, I give thee lead over me when I would be far better served to work my will, ravish thee, and leave thee to lick thy wounds on the morrow.”

“You’re a real soft touch, all right,” sighed Mara, turning her back on him to face the risers.

“I am,” he said, directly behind her. He seized her by the waist suddenly and spun her, not around and to him, not dashing her away, but with him in unreal motion as he leapt through layers of space and stone to the ephebeum. He let her drop there and stood over her with a brooding expression as she clawed for the strength to stand. “Yet here I leave thee, among the wolves that did run thee once to ground. Think well, Bitterness, before thou biddest me depart.”

“Mara?”

Her teeth bared themselves and Mara heaved herself up. “I’m fine, Devlin. Goodbye, Kazuul.”

The demon turned a cold and speculative eye upon the unbrushed and rumpled figure skirting out of the ephebeum’s morning crowd. His nostrils flared. His face hardened. “Who is this who calls to thee?”

“Leave him alone, he’s harmless,” said Mara, walking again in the hopes that he would follow, but Kazuul didn’t budge.

“Horuseps was wise to send this pup away before he summoned me.” Kazuul snorted hard, scraping at the ground once with his foot and carving grooves as easily as if he stood in wet mud. “Had I seen the motive behind the mind, I would not have agreed to forgive him.”

“He’s nothing!”

“Nothing, aye. Harmless, I disbelieve it. He is not so obvious as I, yet his intentions are much the same. Dost thou not see with what fumbling, frantic desire he pursueth thy good favor? Here.” Kazuul reached out and callously gripped Devlin’s head in one hand, pushing him towards Mara. “His last night’s memories are yet fresh, like the painting of his seed when his sweat-rimed hand became thee.”

“Leave him alone, I said!”

Devlin, bent as rigidly as a pocketknife in respect to a Master, flushed a deep, splotchy red, too terrified to be angry, too mortified to be anything but. Kazuul’s grip tightened, but then he let go with a curt shove, sending Devlin to the ground in a bruising heap. “Another lost lamb?” asked Kazuul. “Thou hast too great an affection for them.”

“My affection is my business. And you! Am I supposed to think it’s attractive to watch you bully a student around when you know he can’t fight back?” She could feel the rage trying to creep in, but she was too weak to give it a gripping place. She wasn’t sure if that was a relief or not. “Why don’t you go and humiliate all the other guys who ever whacked off thinking of me, that’ll kill a few years. And maybe by the time you get back, I won’t be quite so disgusted by the sight of you!”

Kazuul’s expression remained unchanged and hard as granite for a minute or two more, and that was a very long time to stand and stare him down while the yellow light of impending collapse flashed across Mara’s internal vision. But at last, he glanced down at Devlin. His claws flexed. He started to bare his teeth, and then, with surprising swiftness, turned it into a smile. Contemptuous, perhaps, and certainly humorless, but still a smile. He plucked Devlin off the floor, shook him out of his bow, and set him on his feet. “Thou art only too correct, Bitter One. No man must be blamed for the cupidity that taketh him when woman’s pleasure lieth beyond his reach. Forgive that I made mockery of it.”

Mara tried to huff out a hard laugh and sagged onto the wall instead, breathless and dizzy. She had to get back to her cell. She had to get out of this before she did something irrevocable, like faint again.

“Yet hear the command of thy Master, human called Astregon, and see my beloved to her lairing place. She is not fit yet to be about on her own power, and I shall take it very personally should her health fail in thy keeping.”

Mara tried to shove Devlin away when he came hurrying over, but couldn’t. Her hand slapped against him as limp as paper. That was sickening enough. Worse, he followed Kazuul’s orders with intense sincerity, taking her both by the arm and the waist in spite of her furious struggles, escorting her into the maze with all the ardent concern of a young father taking his bride to the maternity ward for a first and difficult birth. But worst of all was Kazuul’s laughter, echoed in uneasy chorus from the sycophantic student body, all of them a witness to her weakness.

**And never wouldst thou have suffered it,** he thought at her, infuriatingly smug. **Had thee only remained in my care. Thou hast demanded the wage of arrogance. Spend it.**

**You have a hell of a lot to learn about how to seduce a woman,** she sent back.

**And thou, much of the ways of Masters. Thou hast not yet seen my cruelty. Remember that, when thou dost ponder the hour of thy return.**

*          *          *

Cell sweet cell. How could stone walls look so inviting after the devastated splendor of Kazuul’s chambers? Mara sank into her bed and pulled an armload of robes over her against the chill. There were quite a few more of them than she remembered. The monitors were flashing now, but she roused herself enough to mumble, “You’ve been sleeping here, haven’t you?”

“Uh…I’ll go get some water.”

“You’ve got your own place, damn it.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have a real bed. Besides,” he said hurriedly, “I was protecting your stuff. Do you know what people do here to get an extra robe or a comb? You just lie here and rest, okay? I’m taking care of you.”

“Go away, Devlin. I’ll be fine.”

He did, but came back fairly soon, intent on sitting her up and forcing liquid into her. The cold of it was bracing, but the taste, terrible. She’d forgotten how bad the mineral-laden water tasted here. She drank it all, too weak to argue with him, and lay down again, hoping he’d take the hint.

She should have known better. Devlin never took hints.

“Are you sleeping?” he whispered.

She sighed.

“Can I talk to you?”

“Do you have to?”

His hurt fogged the Mindstorm. Mara could hear him picking and scratching at his robe. “I was worried about you,” he said finally. “I guess you’ll tell me that’s dumb.”

Mara gave up and looked at him. “Seeing how it all turned out, I guess I can’t. Devlin, look, enough with this already. It isn’t working.”

His mind churned, lighting from possibility to possibility without any hope. Then (she knew he was going to do it almost before he did, but she still couldn’t stop him), he lunged for her. She got an arm up, but that was all, and she didn’t have the strength to shove him away when he fell on her.

Desperation was not an effective aphrodisiac. He kissed her like a man who hadn’t done it for eleven years, mashing their mouths together with determination, but the only thing pressing against her thigh was his knee. Struggles were exhausting. Mara flexed her mind for a slap, then let it go unthrown and simply waited him out, limp and utterly indifferent. His passion increased to take up the slack, but ultimately, he noticed her total lack of response and his efforts petered out. He sat up, tugging at his robe and finger-combing his hair, staring fixedly into the corner.

“Sorry,” he said finally.

“You’re damned lucky I’m not at my best,” she answered. “I killed the last man who tried that.”

“I love you,” he told her. He might have used the same tone for a confession to murder.

“No, you don’t,” Mara sighed. “You just think if I believe it, I’ll help you escape. I don’t. I won’t. Go away.”

He started crying. God damn it.

That mindslap flexed again. She still didn’t throw it. That she wanted to was an unpleasant enough testament to her character. The man was thirty-four, eleven years gone in the company of demons and those who served them, and he’d spent who knew how many years before that frying his brain in the drug-of-the-month club while he threw himself at whatever whackjob religion took his fancy. He wasn’t a bad guy, which was amazing, considering the circumstances. He wasn’t insufferable. He wasn’t even weak, necessarily (no one lived eleven years in the Scholomance by being weak). He was just scared.

“I don’t hate you,” Mara said, even before he could make the accusation out loud. “I just…can’t carry you. Try to understand that.”

“Understand? I’m supposed to understand? You’re abandoning me here!”

“You. Abandoned. Yourself. Here.” Mara struggled up into a sitting position, grabbing first at the neck of his robe, and then pointing a shaking finger at him for good measure. “And that is exactly what I won’t carry. Your blame. Get this through your head, Devlin: Your failure to think things through back then does not constitute my problem now.”

“I can’t stay here!”

“Then leave.”

“How?” he howled. “How am I supposed to leave? You just walk in here and start throwing Words around like it’s nothing, but what do I know? My problem? It’s my problem? My problem is that I haven’t learned a damn thing in eleven years! I’m growing old here!” He knocked her hands away only to grab her wrists and yank them up imploringly. “Get me out of here,” he pleaded, giving Mara a nasty jolt. “I was wrong about this place! Please get me out of here!”

She flinched, then came back furiously. “Every person I take with me drops my chances of getting anyone out of here at all!”

‘Then take me,’ he thought, but did not dare to say. Mara heard it anyway and stared coldly back at him as he imagined shouting at her that Connie was dead, that it was obvious to everyone but her, that for a woman like Connie to survive even two years here had been nothing short of miraculous in the first place.

“She’s not dead,” said Mara.

He drew back.

“I’d know if she was dead,” she insisted, knowing perfectly well this was untrue and hating it.

And he thought, without fire and only for an instant, of how it would be to find this mythical Connie and kill her, so that Mara would take him instead and leave. No, no one was ever really nice, if you looked deep enough. At least he felt ashamed afterwards, at least he could look at that awful thought and know it was awful.

“You know I can read your mind, right?” said Mara wearily.

He jerked away again, his face flashing white only to fill up again with blotchy color.

“Oh come on, Devlin. All those one-sided conversations I’ve had with the Masters, the way I hit people without moving my hands, the whole thing with Venice…Jesus, man, how unobservant are you?”

“I…I…”

“Relax. I try to hold people accountable for their actions, not their thoughts. I don’t always succeed,” she admitted with a smile. “But I try.

Devlin just sat there, too terrified to run, capable only of thinking that same murderous thought—him stumbling on Connie, throttling her in the darkness—with even less intent than before, but only stupefied horror. It was like watching a man scratch at a poison oak rash until his skin tore open.

“Relax, I said.” Mara settled herself again, shaking out the robes and arranging them over her body. Kazuul’s bed had been warmer, drier, and infinitely more comfortable than her own, but she was determined not to regret her choice. “I know you wouldn’t, really.”

“It just…I…I’m not a killer!” Devlin blurted.

“I know,” she said, and thought, ‘I never used to be either.’ But there was no point in dwelling on that now. She had the whole rest of her life to look back and see where this place had ruined her. “You actually ran for help.”

He hesitated, afraid to claim the truth for fear of it being misinterpreted as a grasping effort to win back her good grace.

“I can’t misinterpret a memory, Devlin,” she said patiently, and he jumped up and backed to the wall.

“You just did it again!”

“Yes,” said Mara. “I’m pretty much always doing it.”

“But…I mean…If you…”

“If I can read minds,” Mara translated, “Why do I bother asking questions?”

He nodded, shock-eyed and pale.

“Because it puts the answers right up on the surface. Just jumping in cold to look for something is the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

“Oh.” And then, by God, the circle closed. “Can you teach me to do it?”

“No.”

“Please? Please! I swear I won’t bother you anymore! I’ll never say another word, just—”

“I’m not saying I won’t this time, Devlin. I’m saying I can’t. I’ve tried.”

“With her,” he said, meaning Connie.

“Yes.”

He was quiet, inside and out. Slowly, he came back to the bed, scratching at his sleeves in that neverending dance of nervousness he had. “Maybe I’ll be better than her. Maybe I have, like, a knack.”

“I think if that were true, you’d have proved it by now,” Mara said, as gently as possible. “The power I have and the powers they teach here seem to have a lot in common. How many arts have you studied, Devlin?”

He dropped his gaze, miserable. He did not count the classes for her, but they spooled out regardless: Growth, Allure, Imbuing, Sight, Transmutation, Malleation, Divination, Entropy, Force, every one of them with an eye towards escape and none with any effect. He had pursued them so stupidly—attending three or even five classes every day for so long that he was now banned from three of them, and one of these was Growth, which meant he would only keep getting older. Until he died in here.

“Please, get me out of here,” he whispered, dragging a knuckled hand against his eyes. “I’m begging you. I’ve been a fuckup all my life and I know I’ll only slow you down, but I can’t stay here. They’ll eat me when you’re gone.”

He believed it. More importantly, so did Mara. Whether she’d wanted him there or not, Devlin had been too obvious a fixture at her side. When she left, her enemies would become his.

And to be honest, if she’d wanted him gone, really wanted it, she could have done it that first day. She hadn’t. She’d kept him, tossing him the scraps of her company like he was any starved and hand-shy dog in an alley, knowing he would never make as good a pet as the one she’d lost, but he would serve to fill the void for now. Easy for the largest part of her to say, ‘So what?’ and act like it didn’t matter, but there was still a piece of her heart that recognized her responsibilities, a piece which had once had the chance to go her entire lifetime without killing anyone and had lost it in a single moment of blind rage.

“All right,” said Mara.

He looked at her without confidence, without faith.

“Yes, I mean it,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll get you out if I can. But don’t get all crazy with it. I’m warning you now, if it comes down to her or you—”

“I know,” he said. “It’s her.”

He was okay with it, too. There was no more ego left in him, no more ambition. Eleven years of demonic tests, dodging lions as he scampered from one impossible art to another, had wrung all hope out of him. He did not see himself as worth saving. He didn’t see a life out there for him if he was. All he had left was the fear of death right now, and all the bad ways there were for it to find him.

Mara fell asleep listening to those doom-filled thoughts. From the Panic Room, she watched Devlin tuck her in, one limb at a time, just as she remembered her many au pairs doing in her childhood before they went down the hall to do the sexthing with her father. When he was done, he crawled onto the bed beside her, careful not to touch her as he eased a corner of one robe out to use as a blanket. He watched her eyes move as she dreamed (that was actually kind of creepy, seeing her own face alone in the Mindstorm), believing now was the only safe time to think, now while she slept.

He was afraid of her. She’d made him nervous for some time, but now there was fear predominant over all. She had become a Master to him, all-powerful, unaccountable to any will but her own. He was afraid of her and with fear came the helpless awe-filled love of any primitive for his unpredictable and pitiless totem-god. He curled on his side at the foot of her bed and wanted nothing in the world, not even escape, more than he wanted to please her, his volcano, his comet, his moon.

His Master.

Well, thought Mara, watching him from the Panic Room. There were worse things to be.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Mara awoke to first-bell with a slight headache throbbing behind her eyes, and a strong erection pressing at her from behind. She gave Devlin a jab with her elbow and he scooted away, mumbling sleepy excuses. She didn’t take it personally. Whatever else he might be, he was still a man and this was morning.

How did she feel? Her monitors in the Panic Room told her she was fine, if a little worn out. Being in the body gave her a much clearer picture of the little aches, pains, and disorientation that persisted, but she knew she was much improved even from yesterday.

“Are you hungry? You want to go get some food?” Devlin asked, scratching at his armpit, mostly as a means of hitching at the lie of his robe. He was hoping she’d go to the garderobe or something, give him a little privacy to take care of himself…and then he remembered she was psychic.

“Plus, it’s my room, asshole!” Mara snapped, making him jump. “If you have to do that, do it somewhere else.”

Breakfast. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to fight the crowd at the table, but the lure of solid food was strong. “And yes, go get me some food,” she commanded, shoving him off the bed with her foot. “And then go to class. I don’t know whether it’s you or me, but one of us is making the other one nervous.”

“I’ll go,” Devlin said hurriedly, and ran from the cell holding his robe up and out from his body like a comic housefrau running from a rat. She listened to the slap of his sandals until the stone passage swallowed it up, then rolled onto her side and closed her eyes again. Tired, she was so tired.

Maybe she really should have stayed with Kazuul. His bed was softer and, suspect broth aside, she had to admit he’d taken good care of her.

Mara didn’t need taking care of. And besides, part of his bedside manner apparently included letting his friends feel her up. The same friend he’d impaled on a spike for taking liberties with her just a few days before. No, she would not be going back to Kazuul to convalesce.

But she would go back once she’d recovered. She still needed him, and anyway…and anyway…

It felt good, being with him. As angry as he could make her, and vice versa, when they came together, it was…well, it was magic. She didn’t always like him and there were plenty of times when she hated him, but when he put his arms around her, she was ready. Even now, half-asleep and too weak to walk to breakfast, she could think of his mouth on hers and feel herself wanting him.

Mara dozed, not in the Panic Room where she could keep watch, but here in her own flesh, feeling warm and oddly contented in spite of her vulnerability. The next thing she felt was Devlin’s hand shaking her awake. He’d brought her two loaves of brown bread and three hard, wrinkled apples, and he insisted on sitting there and watching while she attempted to eat it.

Her stomach, which had for days taken only small sips of nourishment from Kazuul’s lips, cramped warningly after only a few swallows, but she still felt better, stronger, just for having chewed. She told him he could have the rest, but he put it all on the bookshelf, “For later,” as he said.

“Now go to class,” Mara mumbled, tugging her neophyte’s robe up around her shoulders and thinking of blankets, all Kazuul’s blankets.

“I’m not sure I should. You look awful.”

“Best thing for me is sleep and I’ll sleep better if you’re not staring at me. Go away.”

“What if someone comes and I’m not here?” he argued.

“What if someone comes and you are?” Mara said with a snort. “What the hell could you do about it?”

He hunched in on himself unhappily. “I’d never let anyone hurt you.”

“Not if you could help it,” she agreed. “And we both know how unlikely that is. So go to class, Devlin.”

“Later, okay? I’ve been worried about you. I just…” He shook his head, staring fixedly at his feet, knowing it was no use trying to explain. The truth could only sound more and more pathetic. “I just need to make sure you’re all right for a while.”

“I’m fine,” said Mara, but she was falling asleep even as she said it. In another minute, she was in the Panic Room, watching on monitors as Devlin rearranged her on her bed of sand. Again it struck her how gentle he was, and how strange a quality that was to find in someone here. She wondered for the first time where he’d learned to tuck a person in, if he had little brothers waiting for him somewhere in the world…heck, if he had kids. She was right on the edge of waking up to ask, but let the urge drift away. She’d known him too long to start getting personal now, and once she’d gotten him out of here, she was never going to see him again. No doubt that would come as something of a shock to him once he found out, but that was his problem. Even in the Outside, he was going to have to learn to handle his own problems.

But he was right there in the Mindstorm every time she looked up, his concern blown out to three dimensions, surrounding her. He was there to cover her up every time she kicked a robe off, and to feed her bites of bread and hold her cup during her little snatches of wakefulness. He even ran and got her a chamberpot so she wouldn’t have to walk to the garderobe, and he emptied it without complaint. He did everything a devoted nursemaid should do, in fact, except go away, and at the end of the night he was still right there, crawling up onto the foot of her bed like a collie to sleep.

“You can’t live here,” Mara muttered. “You’re going back to your cell tomorrow.”

“Or the next day,” Devlin agreed.

“You’re an idiot and I want you out of here.”

“Goodnight, Mara.”

She sighed. “Goodnight.”

*          *          *

He stayed with her the next day too, but by the third, she was strong enough to drop a psychic seed in his head and make him go to class. It wasn’t quite as comfortable for her without him, but it was quieter and she was beginning to need the quiet.

She was still exhausted, not so much in her body, which had responded amazingly well to the two enormous meals Devlin provided each day (she ate everything but the meat, the origins of which were still questionable), but in her mind, where she had never been weak before. She actually needed to lie there and recover from a simple suggestion, something she’d been doing fairly regularly since she’d been ten. It was embarrassing, but other than that, she did feel better.

She rested for what might have been an hour after Devlin finally left her, and then left her cell, testing her strength with a walk to the ephebeum. It was busy, but not crowded. The first meal had ended and enough time passed to let the students clean themselves up if they wanted to. Now, the steadiest traffic was that which flowed up the wide stair to the Nave, but it came to an uneven stop so that they could all stare at Mara.

Facing into all those eyes, she checked the Mindstorm, but felt no menace, or at least, nothing pressing. There were plenty of people who hated her, but hatred was fine as long as it came alloyed by fear, and most of the people looking back at her had seen her kill. Students killed each other, of course, they killed each other all the time, but not the way Mara had, not one after another after another, slashing her way through screaming people like a scythe through wheat, without any effort, without any remorse. They said she was here to find someone, and most of them had, at one point, wished bitterly that it might have been their own self, but not anymore. No one could possibly be safe who had fallen under those terrible white eyes.

Mara’s tapping mind touched someone then, someone she had never expected to touch again. She homed in on it, frowning into a knot of white-robed neophytes, and at her first step towards them, they all drew apart, mercilessly exposing the very one she needed to see.

Loki looked at her, his hands half-raised, and a terrible rictus of a grin stretched over his strained features. He didn’t look the same at all—she didn’t need a point-by-point comparison in the Panic Room to see that someone had given him a whole new face—but it was him, and the longer she stared at him, the more his nerves tightened until they burst out of him as one of those unmistakable donkey-like brays of laughter.

She hadn’t killed him after all. Mara had only to turn her eyes in the Panic Room and see it all again in the memory monitor: her hand smearing eyes and nose and mouth together and leaving him to choke. But somehow he’d survived.

Mara tapped at him again as he stood there, frozen in her stare, and saw him staggering over the blubbery mass of boneless Proteus in her absence, seizing the spike that had been made to kill her, and plunging the pointed tip into the center of his face where his new skull was thinnest, opening a hole for one life-giving gasp, and then he ran.

It hadn’t been easy to find someone who would repair him, not with La Danse dead, not when everyone knew that he had been with the ones who had tried to take Mara down. Oh, but they’d been falling all over each other trying to be the one to fix up Mara’s friend, and what were a few pinpricks when Loki was trying to breathe through what he was pretty sure had been an eye socket? He’d managed to buy someone eventually, and for the full contents of La Danse’s cell, he had even gotten his face changed, so why was she staring at him like she knew who he was? Even his name was different now!

Mara looked away. She gazed across the open arena of the students’ wing, but the floor was smooth and unstained. She’d given Suti’ok and his hounds a lot of work, but they’d done it well. There was no sign at all of her rage. Nowhere, except in the survivors.

Loki, terrified, laughed again, covering the telltale sound as best he could with both shaking hands. Mara heard, but felt nothing. Let him live. She’d killed five people who hadn’t deserved it; she could let one live who had.

Mara left the ephebeum. She wasn’t alone when she first entered the bath, but she was by the time she’d worked her robe off. They all bowed before they left her, and left whispering.

She supposed she should have expected it, and further supposed it didn’t bother her. She had killed nine people, nine, when only five had attacked her. She owned that now, and she wanted to be sorrier than she was, but she wasn’t. All she could feel was a grim sort of confidence that now there wouldn’t be any more problems, tainted by the very faintest tinge of regret, not so much for the lives she had taken as for how it had changed her. No matter how powerful she was, or how she’d been provoked in her previous life, she had never killed anyone and she’d never intended to. She was not a good person and she knew it, in spite of Connie’s insistence to the contrary, but she was not a killer.

Only now she was. And now she had killed not just the people who had tried to prey on her, but people who had just been standing around waiting for dinner. People who’d never seen it coming. People who hadn’t cut her so much as a dirty glance in all the time she’d been here. And she couldn’t make herself feel bad.

Mara finished her bath, brushed her hair, and dressed in her old neophyte’s robe. Her black one was still in Kazuul’s chamber, she remembered, unless it had fallen off the broken pillar and blown itself out the aerie.

Two people came into the baths, saw her, and bowed themselves out again.

‘I want my robe,’ thought Mara, who had never in her life cared about the clothes she wore. It had nothing to do with the other students or with the cautious way they crept around her, as if she were another demon who would at any moment stalk them for her own cruel amusement. It was all about her robe.

The ephebeum quieted when she came into it. It was nearly empty now. Loki was gone. The few students lingering here before lessons watched her walk by as they would a Master among them, waiting to see if she wanted something before returning to their own pursuits. She wanted to believe that things would go back to what passed for normal here in time, that she would go back to being just another lion, and in the meantime…

In the meantime, she wanted her robe.

Across the Nave and into the lyceum, Mara walked without looking at the students who bowed to her, or tapping at their minds to hear what they were saying when they ducked away to whisper. She climbed the winding stair to the very top, took three steps into the straight-walled tunnel there, and stopped.

The lamps that lined the walls leading to Kazuul’s doors were already lit.

Well, she didn’t really think she was the only person who knew this place existed, did she? Particularly when she had been coming here so often, and she knew people were watching her. It was probably Devlin. He’d followed her here before.

But he couldn’t light the lamps.

‘I’m not going to kill anyone,’ thought Mara, and started walking again. ‘It might be a trap, but I will not lose my temper, even if it is Loki. It’s just as easy to put someone to sleep as it is to—’

To turn their blood to salt. To burst their bones out through their eyes. To catch them, crush them, cut them in half.

Kazuul’s door opened.

Mara stopped again, and watched as bronze-bodied Letha came gracefully into the hall. She was naked—she was always naked, why would Mara even notice that now?—and the slender quills that grew down her belly cut points of black shadow across her sex like hungry teeth. She saw Mara and smiled, her sensuous stride unaffected as she came closer, passed her, and continued on. She didn’t say a word.

Mara turned to watch until the demoness had vanished from sight down the stairs. She stood a moment, not thinking, and then went quickly to the doors and pulled them open. Letha had left no footprints on the dust that carpeted Kazuul’s abandoned theater, but the perfume of her body’s musk still lingered. She followed it down to Kazuul’s bedchamber and tore the curtains open.

He sat at his table, hunched in a brooding way over his cup, and he didn’t look around, only growled, “Away with thee. I’ll give thee no more ear, only the cut of my claws.”

“Jesus, fine,” said Mara.

He snapped around, the cup and its suspiciously thick wine flying. He stared for a heartbeat, then seized the great stone slab of the table and threw it into one of a very few standing pillars, smashing both. “Do not take that form with me!” he bellowed.

Mara tapped at him, making sure he could feel her own true touch, and the rage which howled through the Mindstorm blew out like a candle and was gone. His mind brushed back at hers, but she withdrew and sealed herself up tight. “I came for my robe,” she said.

He didn’t look for it, didn’t even turn his head. He came to her, his powerful mind still stroking gently at the Panic Room’s walls.

“Just the robe,” said Mara, as he swept one arm around her, pulling her against him. She turned her face away when he bent to kiss her, and he, undaunted, grazed his teeth across her cheek instead. She shoved at him; he would not be shoved. “Didn’t you get enough from Letha?” she snapped.

His snarl blasted into her ear, but he swiftly bit it back and tried a smoky purr in its place. “Still the vipers of thy heart. Thou remainest mine own.”

“Your property.”

She drove him back with that one, but not far, and not for long. Then he smiled. “My beloved,” he said, and this time when she turned her face away, he caught her chin and brought her firmly into his kiss. His inhuman mouth forced hers open. His tongue drove into her with violence and then began a lazy conquest. He pressed her against the wall and took from her easily in spite of her feeble struggles. Nothing she did to him had any effect. When he released her, it was with laughter.

“Thou wouldst seem to be recovered,” he observed as she struck a harmless fist off his broad chest. “Didst thou seek me out to test thy strength?”

“All I want—”

“Thou art wearing one.” The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. “For the present.”

“I want that one.”

“Indeed.” Kazuul stroked at her thigh, then began to draw her robe up as he nuzzled fondly at her throat. “Then thou shouldst do away with the first.”

She smacked at his hand. He dropped the robe and his smile and looked at her. Then he seized a fistful of robe at her shoulder, punched a claw through the taut cloth, and ripped it open from her neck to her knees. In two rough yanks, he peeled her free of the sleeves and snarled at her as she stood in its ruins.

“I was using that,” Mara said coldly.

Kazuul picked her up and threw her. She swept through empty space too shocked to cry out and landed in a deep drift of his tattered bedding. She sat up fast and he sprang after her, cutting the air into howls with his leap, towering over her in a black fury. His toe-claws scored at the stone edge of the bed, then he dropped into a bestial crouch and stalked towards her, fangs bared and snarling.

Mara gave inches grudgingly, lying down only as he rose over her, and when his face dominated all her sight, she said, “Sometimes I really hate you.”

“That will change.” He lowered his burning body over hers, pressing his weight atop her as he teased her lips apart with gentle bites. “Admit me, Mara.”

“No.”

He drove the plane of his hand between her knees and cut upwards, effortlessly wedging her thighs apart and settling between them. “Tell me why thou hast come to me,” he growled, grinding his covered hips against her naked ones in short, powerful thrusts. The aged leather and layered silks rubbed on her bare pubis to intense and terrible effect, igniting heat as effectively as if he’d touched a live coal to her, and like a live coal, it hurt. “Tell me truthfully. Tell me thee came to fuck me.”

She tried to laugh at him, but groaned instead, one leg wrapping of its own will around him. “I want my robe,” she insisted, digging her fingernails at his shoulder.

“So thou art desperate to believe, but thou knowest the lie as well as I.” He caught her hand when she slapped at him, bit her palm until she bled, and then sucked slowly at the wound, purring, his tongue lapping and teasing at its lips in a brazenly sexual manner, and God help her, but she could feel an echo of everything he did in her aching pussy. “Thou desirest my bed and not thy garment. Tis in every touch of thee, save the lie of thy lips, yet I shall be thy fool and believe it. Tell me what thou wouldst have of me, o my beloved one. Tell me, and whatsoever you demand, so I shall give thee.” She writhed against his constrained erection and he smiled, thrusting at her even harder. “What shall it be, Bitter Waters? Thy robe…or my cock?”

The thought of walking back to her cell dug at her inexplicably, as sharp as daggers in her gut. She could see the stupid robe when she twisted away from him, see it lying empty on the floor, and for a moment, she felt every bit as limp and hollow as it looked in her eyes.

“I came to fuck you,” she whispered, slapping a hand over her face.

“Ha!” He pulled her wrist away, his eyes burning ferociously into hers. “Again!”

“I came to fuck you!” she shouted.

He reared up, lips stretched in rapacious triumph, to work his belt open, and Mara sat up in the same instant to shove him on his back. He went agreeably enough, growling as he watched her tear his sparse clothing away.

She mounted him with a snarl of her own, bucking him deeper and deeper inside her until he was wholly sheathed and she, riding wildly. Impaled on his blistering heat so fully, she could feel every beat of his alien heart like a hammer inside her, and she rode that too, pulling blindly at his spikes for leverage. He didn’t make a sound when she broke a thick point off one of the cracked ones, only dug his claws into her ass and began to yank her against him in even greater violence.

Why did it have to feel so good? She looked down and saw him beneath her—his head thrown back, his spikes gouging fresh tears in all his bedding, his every muscle standing out in stark relief—and saw a man in the agonies of death, not the ecstasies of flesh.

She hadn’t really seen the men she’d killed, but suddenly, unpleasantly, the two thoughts merged, and it was in that awful instant that she came. Climax like claws ripped through her even as all the frenetic heat of lust turned in a heartbeat to sick horror. She recoiled, kicking and screaming at him, and he opened his bewildered eyes and let her go.

She retreated in a thrash of limbs until her back struck the spreading wings of his headboard and there she sat as he pushed himself up on his elbows to gaze thoughtfully back at her. The candlelight turned his stone-grey skin to the sallow yellow of a corpse, and his eyes were sunk in shadows. He watched her without expression, his mind all that moved.

“What am I doing?” Mara asked. She tried to laugh. It was an even shakier effort than her words. “What am I doing here?”

The hot glow of Kazuul’s green eyes dimmed minutely. He sat all the way up, drawing in his legs and leaning on them in a comfortable manner, utterly ignoring the erection jutting wetly between his thighs. “And where else shouldst thou be? Building cairns? Singing dirges?”

“I killed those people. Why am I…fucking you?” She laughed again, pressing her hands to her head. “I don’t even like you!”

“Good,” he said, with disturbing sincerity. “Like, a pale word of half-felt meaning. I would rather have the red meat of thy hatred than the milky cup of thy liking until I have earned thy honest love.” His head cocked. “How long wilt thou mourn the deaths of those who meant to murder thee?”

“I’m not mourning them, I’m—” She stared at him, thinking, ‘mourning me,’ and that was so ludicrous and baffling a thought that she couldn’t sit with it. She looked around, saw her black robe lying in a heap beside the broken pillar, and swung her legs out over the edge of the bed.

Kazuul caught her shoulder. She stiffened to shrug him off, but then just relaxed and sat there. She hated to think what she must look like, hunched and naked and still flushed from orgasm—sulky and slutty at the same time, and it wasn’t the sluttiness that bothered her.

“I don’t feel bad,” she said.

He shrugged, bone spikes clacking.

“I should feel bad. I should feel bad that I did it, even if I don’t feel bad for them, but I don’t. Instead I’m here…trying to cum my brains out with someone—” She glanced at him, eyes moving restlessly up and down his powerful frame, still wanting him. “—someone who’s arguably the most terrifying living thing in this whole damn world.”

He grunted, neither flattered nor offended.

“I’m not a good person. I’ve known that all my life. I’ve learned to be okay with it, but damn it, I am better than the kind of person who would kill nine people and then fuck you.”

She tried to get up again, and again, he stopped her.

“I don’t want to be here anymore, Kazuul,” she warned him. “You want to finish, you can bring Letha back.”

Now his annoyance stabbed the Mindstorm, but his tone was even as he said, “Thou wouldst yet be with me if thou had not worked thy vengeful will upon thy marauders.”

“That’s awfully presumptive.”

“So what matter their deaths to thee now?” he went on. “Thou art what thou art. Thou owest their bones no apology.”

“It never occurred to me to apologize. Jesus, I need to get out of here.” Mara looked around, but she didn’t mean this room, and he knew it as well as she did. “I think I’m losing my mind.”

“Nay.”

“Don’t you ‘nay’ me, you don’t know a goddamn thing about me! I killed nine people in at most three minutes, and maybe that’s all in a day’s work for you, but it’s fucking new to me! No one sane loses their temper like that!”

“Nay, I say.” The hand on her shoulder patted her twice and removed itself. “Thou hast developed admirable control to fit thy little purposes in thy short life, but thou art become many times more powerful in a sparing handful of days and thy controls have not grown in accordance. Thou art sane enough and thou wilt learn to master thyself once more in time.”

She heard the low clack and rustle as he recovered his belt, felt the bedding shift as he rose. He dressed, showing no emotion at the abrupt end that had come to this interlude beyond a slight tightening of his lips. His gaze drifted as he cinched his belt, and then he took two steps, bent, and came up with her acolyte’s robe. He tossed it on the bed beside her and walked away.

“Why do you let me stay here?” Mara asked. “It can’t be just for the sex.”

“It could, I assure thee.” He kicked at a chunk of stone by his broken table and moved on.

“Don’t insult my intelligence.” She pulled her robe on, wincing at the smell, which was now mildewy as well as rank with sweat. “You know I’m not here to learn anything. You know I’m going to find Connie and take her away with me. I don’t think I can help but upset your perfect order while I’m doing it. Why do you let me stay?”

“Perhaps I do not consider thee a threat.” He crouched down to knuckle through debris.

“That would be a mistake.”

Kazuul straightened up with his dented silver cup in hand and came back towards the bed. “Is it?”

“I’m very dangerous when I want to be,” Mara muttered, and watched him pour himself more wine out of the ewer by the bed. “Ask anyone.”

“How frightening.” He drank, eyed her as he refilled the cup, and then grunted and looked away. “Thou dost remain for that thou hast mine interest.”

She hadn’t been expecting an answer. It made her suspicious and so she laughed at him. “I refuse to believe, after all the years of your life, you’ve found something entirely unique in the way I have sex.”

“So much I could not yet swear to,” he replied, only a little sourly. “Nevertheless, thy words hold a grain of unknowing truth. Tis not how thou movest that fascinates me, but what moveth thou to do so.”

“I told you—”

“Thou hast an itch,” he said for her, smiling. “Thou dost lie with me to ‘scratch’ it. Ah yes. A plausible enough excuse. I pretend to believe it.”

“It’s not always a lie.”

“Aye, that I do believe.” He offered her his cup, drank it off when she shook her head, and dropped it indifferently beside the ewer when he was done. He looked at her for a long time as she sat there and ignored him. “Yet thy will matters little when thou art come to me,” he said at last. “And I let thee stay, Mara, for that thou art mine own.”

She shook her head and stood up. “I refuse to be your harem, Kazuul. You can make me say whatever you want, but as long as you’re stupid enough to give me a choice, I will always choose to walk away when I’m done with you.”

“I could have forced thee to my finish,” he remarked, watching her prove it. “But I let thee have thy flutterings and never called thee fool for it. There was a time when even my hands were unbloodied.”

Her step faltered. She almost looked back, almost.

“I shall refuse to make a harem of thee, Mara,” he said. “I will stand quiet and let thee crawl upon me, tying thy strings where thee will, but thou shalt never move me. I am the master of my lusts and of my rage, and I am master of thee as well. And when I have thee at last, it will be at thy urging.”

“Ha!”

“Aye,” he said grimly, his eyes spilling light in blades down his cheeks. “I could have chains set on thee at any hour, but I need them not. Thou art bound to me already. So go where thou wilt, my bitter sip, and return when thou hast thy heart about thee. I would drink thy howls of rage as readily as screams of rapture, but I will never have thee,” he said, moving away into the shadows so that his voice came back distant and all around her, “save with the whole of thy heart.”

She wanted to laugh at him again, since that was such a patently ridiculous thing for him to say, after all that he had done, but couldn’t. She left him instead, unable to see him in his broken lair, but knowing he was watching her as she walked away.

*          *          *

She traveled back through the lyceum, seeing little, her mood unusually heavy. Looking back at herself was a painful effort. She felt exposed in every unplanned word that she’d let fall. Why had she spoken to him like that, like a…like a child crying for comfort? And why in hell had he answered?

She could trust him only when he was engaged in his single-minded pursuit of her. She could not predict him, perhaps, and certainly could not combat him, but she could trust that everything he said or did came straight from the cock. She liked that. She could control that. It hadn’t upset her to have her clothes torn off or to be flung across the room and into bed, because that was as coy as someone like him could get, but he’d had her atop him, had her solidly in his grip when all it would have taken was a few hard thrusts more, and he’d let her go. To have her flutterings, he said, which served him no purpose at all.

It was a trick. It had to be. A little playacted sympathy to melt her heart and bring her back without a fight the next time. And anyway, he could certainly afford to send her away. He had other recourses, didn’t he?

Mara paused, glancing down into the lyceum’s central cavern and the open archway to the Nave beyond. Then she turned around and went back up the winding stair. Not far, this time. It wasn’t Kazuul she wanted to see. She turned down a passage and walked, checking her progress against her memories, until she made her way to a very particular theater. The door was open. She stood just inside, looking down over the crowded risers to the dais where Letha spoke in exultant tones of beauty and attraction.

The demoness glanced up. Her eyes met Mara’s. She touched a finger to her lips, thoughtful, and then smiled. “Let us speak therefore of sex,” she purred. “The first and purest magic, and one which even Man in his ignorance may share in shadow. Yet if that ignorance be lifted by mine art, aye, even the clumsy couplings of mortal flesh can become a mystery and a power.”

**I have lain with him.**

The thoughts were, if possible, even richer and more sensuous than Letha’s true voice. Mara waited a moment or two, then acknowledged them with a mental shrug. **So have I. Want to compare notes?**

**I have been his eager concubine ten thousand times and heard my name upon his blood-kissed lips. I have felt his body so tenderly a’crush of mine as his breath burned upon my throat, and I have begged him to make ever more use of me.** Letha’s fingers played across her smiling mouth, slipped down to caress her own neck. She spoke on to her students, but her mind was all with Mara, as poisonous in its beauty as the asp Cleopatra clutched to her breast. **What art thou to me? Egg, thou art. Suckling pup. Clay-born creature, undeserving of mine eye.**

**I’m not interested in your eye,** Mara thought back with unveiled scorn.

Letha’s smile broadened enough to show the gleam of her sharp, white teeth. **I could have him back at any hour that I desired it. Every chamber of his ancient heart is known to me, thou plume of smoke, thou ripple over water. We were playing games of flesh when Men yet burned their offspring in homage to the sun.**

**So take him.**

**At any hour,** Letha promised. **For the moment, he desireth thee, and so it is for his amusement that thou art permitted thy free footing in these halls, but he will tire of thee eventually. I have seen his fancies bloom and wither and fall forgotten throughout these ages, and here do I remain.**

It is a difficult thing to lie with thoughts, and all of Letha’s sendings were boldly made, except for this last, which shook ever so slightly with the words, ‘he will tire of thee.’ Mara told herself she didn’t care one way or the other, but still, it made her smile.

Letha saw it, and the colors of her mind sharpened to brilliant edges. **Dare thee not to pit thy contemptible will against mine. Our lord may allow thee to bandy words with him, but I would as soon pull thy tongue as indulge thee. Mind thyself, mortal-born. Thou shalt not long have his protection.**

There was no shiver in those thoughts. Mara felt her smile slip, testing them.

Letha saw that too. Her bronze eyes widened, all innocence and feigned concern. **Why, thou seemest surprised! Dost thou think thee can forever flaunt thyself before our brothers and yet retain our lord’s favor? Or hast thou at last condescended to allow one of these glammar-suckling mortals to lie betwixt thy ready thighs?**

Mara sent only wordless derision in answer.

**Nay? Then who is the human who hath joined thee in thy bed as our lord doth patiently await thy return?** Letha asked sweetly. **I shall have to see if I can make it seem as interesting an account as Azkeloth’s charming tale of thee and Horuseps on the stair of the Great Library. I do hope thy pet recovereth as well once our lord’s ire is spent. Oh, thee he shall speedily forgive,** Letha assured her, stroking one hand lazily over her breasts as her lecture went on for the benefit of the raptly-staring students. **Until he hath tired himself of filling thy woman’s well, he shall never let his hand fall on thee in anger, yet surely thou hast seen with what tender mercy he doth treat his rivals.**

The memory of Kazuul’s spike punching up between Horuseps’s thighs was never far—black blood pouring around Kazuul’s fist as he twisted the point deep in the wound, the shrill-cicada scream splitting the air, and the way he had turned afterwards to look at her, letting Horuseps drop from his fist to thrash on the floor in his own spreading gore. Now she saw Devlin in his place.

Letha waited while the full consequence of this possibility revealed itself to her. Then she smiled again, all her delicate quills whispering like silk sheets as they rippled down her back. **Thou shalt tell him the boy is harmless. I will tell him he is not. And we shall see which of us he believeth best.**

Mara did not answer. She shouldn’t have answered any of it. She shouldn’t even be here. She turned around.

**Thou art in my grip as much as his, never doubt it,** Letha sent, as her lilting voice continued to give unheard praise to the art of Allure. **So down, mortal-born, down upon thy naked back before him. Give him all he doth demand and creep away to the depths before thou dost incur my wrath beyond all mending. I tolerate his fleeting whimsies for so long as they know their place, but I shall not be made the warden of she who seeketh to usurp me without a vengeance.**

Mara swung back. “Do not threaten me,” she said, silencing the demoness and attracting every student’s startled eye. “Or we really will find out who he loves best.”

That knocked the smile off Letha’s lips as effectively as a slap. “Who he believeth!” she said, interrupting her own lecture in clear, golden tones of fury.

For a moment, Mara was confused. She ran back her words—loves—and felt as struck by it as the demoness seemed to be. She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even meant to think it. She needed Kazuul’s favor and protection; she neither expected nor desired his love, even assuming a creature like him was capable of such an emotion.

But the word had a way of echoing in Letha’s increasingly agitated mind, until she turned on her restless, uncertain students with her hands hooked into claws. “Away, thou ravens! Thou carrion rats, thou jackals! Away, or I’ll mar thee so that even Malavan would not have thee!”

And then she was directly in front of Mara, snapping through the space between them in an instant. Even angry, she was beautiful. She could contort her furious features in no way that she was not beautiful. Like the quills that grew from her flawless body, the most grotesque changes could only accentuate her perfection.

The demoness sneered at her in that beautiful way as the theater emptied, and a snap from her molten-bronze eyes slammed the doors and sealed them in alone. Mara could sense her thoughts prowling just beneath the surface of her closed mind, but she kept them quiet in spite of her obvious rage, and her voice was still as sweet and smooth as chocolate when she said, “I suppose thou thinkest that the murder of thy fellow students has made thee mine equal, but I am yet thy Master and ever shall be.”

“I never said otherwise.”

“Nay? Down upon thy knees then, and kiss thy Master.” Letha thrust her chin forward, her mouth twisted in a savage smile. “Tis my command, thou child of crippled Earth, and as thou didst so recently observe, thou art my property also. Kneel.”

‘Never should have come here,’ thought Mara again, not without a rueful smile. She knelt and felt the stab of Letha’s bitter pleasure piercing through the Mindstorm as she bent her back and touched her lips impersonally to Letha’s perfect foot.

“Nay,” the demon purred. “Not there.”

Mara straightened slowly, cocking a cool eye upwards.

Letha smiled at her. The quills that lined her hairless pussy rippled outwards, each black tip shining with clear drops of pungently sweet musk. Her nether lips parted, exposing the gleaming folds of her sex and the bronze pearl that crowned it, every part of her in sinuous motion.

“Kiss me, clay-born,” Letha whispered, as the first drops fell from her quills and hissed tiny holes into Mara’s damp robe. “Kiss thy Master.”

The theater doors opened. “Precious, that I have to see you first in the mind of—”

Horuseps, motionless behind them with one hand upon each door, studied the tableau before him with a thoughtful expression. “Get up,” he said finally, his tone hard.

“I was given an order,” said Mara as Letha snarled prettily.

“I’m giving you another one. Oh dear, we have a dilemma. Shall we take the matter to Kazuul for judgment? Get up, Mara.”

She got up. Horuseps caught her arm in a painful grip and pushed her roughly behind him. He stood and stared for a long time at Letha, but didn’t say another word to her, at least not one that Mara could hear. At length, he pulled the doors shut and then, and only then, did he turn around and look at her. “You’re not out of bed five minutes,” he began.

“I’ve been out of bed at least thirty.”

The lights of his eyes swept upward. He planted one hand firmly on her back and propelled her ahead of him down the winding stair. “Well. You’re as contentious as ever. I trust that means you’re feeling better. How’s your head?”

“Fine.”

He sent her a sharp glance. “No pain at all?”

“A little when I first woke up.”

“Good.” He faced forward again, his thoughts clicking through the air like beetles. “Very good. You saw Kazuul?”

Mara’s jaw tightened. “Briefly.”

“Hm. And then you saw Letha.” His fingers on her back twitched, lightly tapping. He was silent as they crossed into the Nave, but as he steered them toward the wide stair that led to the students’ level, he suddenly laughed. “I think you frighten her, precious. And before you start to feel too proud of yourself for that, you should know that she’s killed his paramours before and he’s always forgiven her. You’re different, but unless you want to stake your life on just how different you are, I advise you to leave her be.”

“You’re just full of good advice, aren’t you?”

“And yet, how strange that no one ever listens to me. Here we are. One of yours, I think.”

They had come down into the ephebeum, and there, centered against the far wall where no one could help but see, his arms and legs sunk into Malleated stone and a spike stretching out his broken jaws, was a dead man. His face was changed and the mind that identified him was cold and gone, but someone had helpfully written the name LOKI over his naked chest.

“I didn’t do this,” Mara said numbly. She looked around, but the handful of students sharing the cavern merely bowed their way quickly out of it.

“Of course not, dearest. They did it for you. You’d rather they feared you than loved you, you said. Congratulations. It isn’t a long walk, is it?” Horuseps released her and rested his hands in their customary place on his own shoulders. “You honestly never saw it coming, did you? But then, it is so impossible to predict the ways in which humans show their worship. They used to kill their own infants on my altar.”

“I didn’t do it,” she said again, found a neophyte peeking out from a passageway, and shouted, “I didn’t do it and I didn’t want it done!”

The student vanished and Horuseps sighed. “But you allowed your eye to fall on him, oh my bittersweet. And they are not the only ones watching to see where your eye falls.” He was silent for a time, watching her stare at the dead man, and then he quietly said, “Everyone knows that you’re sleeping with your most devoted little servant.”

She swung on him, her hands in fists. “I am not, goddamn it!”

“Oh, sleep is all it is, I’m sure, but sleep is damning enough. Kazuul will never be content with anything less than your whole heart.”

She looked at him.

“Get rid of the boy,” said Horuseps softly. “Or he’ll do it for you.” Then he smiled. “It was so good to see you up and about, precious.”

He left her, and she stood staring into Loki’s open, blood-filled eyes until the hounds came.

CHAPTER TWENTY

It wasn’t easy to push Devlin away. He came to her cell and she shut the door on him. He followed her to the dining hall and she refused to sit with him. He shadowed her down every tunnel until she shouted at him to leave her the fuck alone, but he never retreated far. Even when she was in the garderobe, he was right outside. His hurt battered at her mind, but she shut it out. She was doing it for him. He wasn’t her friend, but he was the only real human contact she’d had in this awful place, and she wasn’t about to feed him to Kazuul.

He took it pretty well the first day, assuming it was another of her moods and she’d get over it, but by the third, something close to panic had taken him. Even Mara’s psychic seed ordering him to go to class broke upon that stony soil, and she was forced to stay in her cell while he beat his palms on the door and loudly begged to know what he’d done.

“Would you shut up?” she demanded finally, flinging the door open violently enough to make him bolt halfway down the tunnel.

“You said you’d get me out of here!” he howled, cringing by the lamp. “Now everyone thinks you’re mad at me and for God’s sake, you know what they’ll do to me!”

“I can’t have you sleeping in here,” Mara snapped. “I will get you out. I said so, didn’t I? But that doesn’t mean I’ve adopted you, so give me some damn space!”

He retreated a shaky step, hunched into the neck of his robe, wringing his hands.

“You’re a grown man,” said Mara brusquely. “Stop trying to hold my hand everywhere we go.”

“They’ll kill me.”

“I’m going to kill you, Devlin!” She covered her face, fought down her rising temper, and looked at him again, more calmly. “Okay. I’m going to spell something out for you that I’m sure everyone else already knows. I’m fucking one of the demons.”

“I know,” he said timidly. He even knew who, although Kazuul’s name was nothing but a word to him, an unknown quality made even more dangerous for the secrecy. “But they don’t care. I mean, I know we’re not, you know, that way, but even if we were, they don’t care as long as we don’t do anything that could, um, get you pregnant.”

“That’s what I thought,” Mara said with a grim nod. “But Kazuul cares. He cares and he’s a raging egomaniac, so just back off.”

Devlin shifted on his feet, slowly beginning to uncurl from his protective slouch. “You’re…You’re doing it for me?” he asked hopefully.

“Devlin, I swear to God…”

“I know!” he stammered, showing her his empty hands, raw and bloody from beating on her door. “I know, okay? We’re not girlfriends, but…but we are…I mean, we could be…regular friends. Can’t we?”

She looked at him, and it was right at the tip of her control not just to tell him he meant nothing to her, but to shove it right into his skull. She’d never tried to send to a non-telepath before, but she sensed she could do it. It would hurt him a lot—on a couple of levels, she guessed—but she could do it and he’d have to know it was truth once it was ringing unmistakably in his own mind. He was nothing to her but a convenient navigator, a means to pass the time when she was in the mood for company, and an onus of responsibility she hated having to carry.

He was searching her face, all flyaway hair and hanging robe. Her pet goat.

“Whatever,” said Mara.

“You saved my life.” Devlin hesitated a smile at her. “No one’s ever done that for me. Not even, you know, on the outside, where it doesn’t even matter.”

Mara stepped back and started to close her door again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I make you angry a lot and I can’t seem to help it, but you’re not a bad person, you know? You’re really not.” He groped for something more to say (Mara saw it coming and flinched, hard). “You’ve got a good heart.”

Water dripped steadily somewhere deeper in the tunnel. Her hand stole up and touched the locket through her robe.

“Go away, Devlin,” she said tonelessly.

“Okay. I just…” He thought of hugging her, chewed his lip a little, and then retreated down the passage, nervously tugging his hood up over his head for the anonymity it provided. “Okay. I’ll…I’ll see you around, Mara.”

“Whatever,” she said again, without strength, and shut her door on the sound of oversized sandals.

*          *          *

Mara woke to the tolling of the bells. She sat up slowly, listening to the tangle of them, all crashing together without rhythm or harmony. She’d heard its like once before. A tribunal had been called.

Mara was not so confident of Kazuul’s protection that she did not experience a twinge of dread, but she supposed if she were the subject of today’s entertainment, someone would have come to grab her before they rang the summons. Well, if she wasn’t in it, she guessed she could just go back to sleep, but what the hell. She was already awake. And as much as she did not want to see someone butchered, she did want to know what went on around here.

So she got up and went to the Nave with the rest of them. She didn’t immediately think it odd that Devlin wasn’t sidling up to hang off the hem of her robe. He hadn’t been at the first tribunal either, or at least, she hadn’t noticed him. He didn’t really strike her as the sort who would attend one of these. Gazelles didn’t, for the most part. Eviscerations were the amusements of lions.

So she was not much surprised when she came to the threshold of the Black Door, swept her mind across the clamor, and did not find her irritating little shadow. She was surprised, however, to see that the demons standing at the end of the Nave seemed to be waiting on her. She’d come to expect that sort of thing from Horuseps, but all of them? Zyera? Letha? Dalziel was there, one long arm wrapped twice around a column. Below him, Malavan stood as upright as his body allowed, all his weight forward on the outthrust swords of his finger-claws, craning his thick neck to see her in the crowd. Others she didn’t know well enough to name still watched her with only her face in their minds and anticipation tingling throughout their hidden thoughts.

“What is this?” she asked, as ice took hold of her heart and the fires of rage began to sing down deep in her gut. She couldn’t fight them all, but by God, she’d try.

“An unpleasantness,” Horuseps answered, stroking her hair in a pretense of sympathy. “I had hoped you would not witness it.”

“Liar!” she spat, checking herself just in time to keep from slapping suicidally at his hand. “If you’ve found her, if you’ve trumped up some charge to kill her in front of me—”

“Such a suspicious mind you have. My dear, vengeful young child, we would never arrange a mock trial. We have no need. We can exact whatever murder we desire when the mood is on us. The sad fact of the matter is, your fellow students provide us with an endless bounty of errors to fuel interludes such as this. But set your burning heart at ease, child. Our prisoner is not even female.” He patted her on the head and turned away, raising his hands for silence.

“We have very few rules here,” he said, just as he had said once before. He left Mara, walking among the robed students who bowed before him and enjoying himself as he basked jointly in their adoration and her seething impatience. “And we are careful that you hear them all, understand them all, and appreciate the consequences of disobedience.”

Malavan chuckled nastily, gouging his claws through the rock floor as he watched Mara. Several demons hushed him.

“It is forbidden to defy any Master’s command,” Horuseps was saying calmly. “It is forbidden to remove books from the Great Library without the express permission of a Master of the Scholomance.”

Watching her. Why were they all watching her?

“It is forbidden for our students to indulge in such sexual games as could conceive offspring,” Horuseps said, and turned back toward the Black Door. His eye wandered over Mara’s way. “It is forbidden to linger more than ten years in the study of any one art, and it is forbidden to miss more than ten days each year of lessons.” He finished his stroll and faced out into the crowd with a good, clear killing field between them and the silent students. He rested his hands on his shoulders. “The breaking of these laws,” he said, “is never to be tolerated.”

The doors deep in the shadowed side of the Nave opened and even before Mara heard his voice, all that was Devlin crashed into her mind.

“Human called Astregon,” Horuseps said, gazing into Mara’s eyes, “you are found guilty of truancy.”

“Kazuul put you up to this,” she said, watching the demon—the executioner—unconcernedly drag Devlin before the Black Door. It was Argoth, the same muscle-bound monster who had performed at the last tribunal, only he didn’t look bored this time. He tipped Mara a wink as he dragged his victim across her view, and for an instant, rage blotted out everything, everyone, even Devlin.

Only an instant. Mara turned on Horuseps, not seeing the way his smile had turned to cautious alarm or the flinching movement at his side as Zyera and Letha retreated several steps. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Where is the coward?”

“Perhaps not the proper attitude to take into an audience,” Horuseps murmured, examining his fingers.

“I did what you said! I got rid of him!”

A flicker of something that was not quite sympathy crossed his face. “Then this won’t hurt as much, will it?”

Rage again, there and gone. Mara looked at her hand, half-raised, and lowered it with effort to her side. “If he thinks this is going to hurt me at all, he is dead wrong.”

Kazuul’s powerful voice rolled out before Horuseps could reply: “Pun unintentional, I presume?”

He strode in from the great stair and through the crowd, his green eyes stabbing out from the darkness. Students hastened to bow before him, and he cut an indifferent path directly through them to Mara, clearing his way with brutal sweeps of his bone-bladed arms. He did not seem to hear their screams or feel the weight of the bodies he hooked. When he reached her, he shook off the flotsam at her feet, and snorted when she kicked a flailing hand aside.

“You are very wrong,” she corrected herself, hardly able to speak past the anger chewing her up from the inside. ‘Be cool,’ she thought, and yes, she knew it. Be calm. But the rage wanted to sing so badly.

“Our laws are few,” Kazuul said. “And well-understood.”

“This is bullshit and you know it!” she spat. “He’s a nothing! He’s nobody! Let him go!”

“I? I did not pull him screaming from his lessons and order him to heel at thy shadow.” Kazuul raked his eye across Devlin and the man flinched as if physically burned. “Tis his will alone that hath set this wheel in motion.”

“You were the one who told him I needed taking care of!”

“I did not send him to thy side for all time, I only gave him the word that care must be provided thee one night. One night, after lessons had been concluded and the last bell rung, and still he hath spent every hour seeking thee, knowing well the consequence of his choice!” Kazuul showed his teeth to Devlin in a fierce smile. “He chose, Mara, to lay his hope at thy feet, rather than at mine. And he chose unwisely. Apart of which, thou didst require nursing. Now, had thee remained with me—”

“Oh now we come to it! No one walks away from you, and this is all you can do about it!”

“Nay, not all.”

Rage. She pushed it down, but it wouldn’t go far. It struggled in her chest, a clamber of killing power, coloring everything she saw with an aura of blood-red light. “You want to pick the next words you say to me really goddamn carefully,” she whispered. “What else can you do? Say it, you son of a bitch. Tell me the next time, it’ll be Connie.”

“Thou woundest my heart,” he growled, turning back to face her. “Never would I threaten thy best beloved.”

“What else then?”

“I could speak for him,” Kazuul said. Without taking his eyes from Mara’s, he reached out to cup Devlin’s face in one huge hand; he squeezed, dragging Devlin forward with his eyes bulging over the gasping-goldfish face he was making, to show her. “Because thou desirest mercy, and so well I love thee that I must give it.”

“Love! Mercy! You can’t even say the words with a straight face!”

“Tis all one to me.” Kazuul shrugged, tossing Devlin back into his executioner’s waiting claws, and folded his arms across his powerful chest. “Yet I do recognize the good intent with which thy friend did sunder our laws.”

“He’s not my friend!” Mara snarled.

Kazuul glanced back at Devlin, smiling thinly at the mark this heated declaration left in the other’s eyes, his mouth, his whole body. “Then what matter the fate that befalleth him?”

“Because it’s a damned trick, that’s what matter!”

“Thou hypocrite. Argoth.”

The executioner reached down over Devlin’s shoulder for a hold on the filthy robe, but he did not pull it away. He grinned at Mara, his claws digging in just above Devlin’s scrotum, and tapped a pleasant greeting at her mind. He told her he’d make it quick, if not painless, and he made sure she could hear the lie in his thoughts. He told her he’d save her out a keepsake, if she wanted one. Perhaps a belt.

Kazuul gazed into Mara’s eyes. He was calm in ways she could only pretend at, calm and indulgent, calm and smiling. “The human is truant and this is irrefutable. Argue his reasons how thou wilt, it remains the human is truant. There is a penalty and that penalty is death. Yet it is within my power to alter his fate, and so it is also within thine. He hath spent three nights in thy bed. Come to mine one night only, and I will permit him to live.”

“That’s what this is about?” Rage, and this time, she let it come. “Then kill him!” she snarled. “Go on. You kill him, Kazuul. And when you do, I will turn right around and kill every goddamned person in this mountain!” Mara heard a collective clamor behind her, swung, and roared at them without even seeing them. “On your fucking knees, every one of you!”

They did it, the thunder of their obedience slapping at her ears, fueling her with the need to let go, to open her mind and let the rage all the way out, let it take her and him and all the world. She swung back with an effort to Kazuul.

He wasn’t smiling any more. The Masters behind him faced her with a single shared expression of alarm that was almost, but not quite, enough to penetrate her senses and cool her heart.

“There’s no law against students killing students,” Mara announced. “And I will do it. And when I’m done, I will go room to fucking room and kill all the rest of them. I’ll find Connie that way. How’s that, Kazuul? Who wins then?”

He gazed at her. The fingers of one hand drummed on his bicep. She stood shaking before him, power like a caged thing inside her, howling for release and she let him hear it. She meant it. His mind brushed cautiously at hers; she savaged it away, but not before he saw just how deeply she meant it. There had once been a time when she would have suffered almost anything just to know that no matter what else she was, she wasn’t a killer. But that dream was dead, and one death more or one thousand made no difference. She would kill them all.

Kazuul considered, and the longer his silence drew out, the more anxiety she sensed from the Masters. This wasn’t part of anybody’s plan, but they did not doubt for a moment that she could carry out her threat. Not the Masters and not the students, who huddled on their knees in the same thought-thick stupor that transfixed rabbits in headlights or any student in the malicious grip of any demon.

“My lord, we—” Letha whispered.

“Silence.” Kazuul glanced pensively down at Devlin, who was almost hugging his executioner in the extremity of his terror, but at least he was quiet. “It fascinates me, Bitter Waters, that you offer pleas for thy trinket’s protection, yet would murder for a man’s.”

“Don’t even pretend this is about him. It’s you and me. It’s always been that and all because you think you can hammer me into place—” Rage, fought and mastered…barely. “—but I will not go quietly, Kazuul! Drop it, drop him, or I’ll make you sorry you ever saw me!”

His eyes snapped up to hers, but not because she was shouting. Emotion of some kind seared into her, but it wasn’t anger and that was nearly enough to shock her out of her own. “Not with a thousand deaths,” he said intently. And showed his fangs in a smile. “Yet thou might make me gladder now and then. Look at him, Mara. Look at the boy thou art condemning and tell him the bed where thou hast already slaked thy passions is too great an offense to buy his life.”

Mara glared at him, hating him, but she couldn’t hold his easy gaze forever. Her own faltered, then shifted aside. She looked at Devlin.

He looked back at her, whiter than his neophyte’s robe, with Argoth’s hand a patient knot over his fear-shriveled genitals. His mouth worked, but he wasn’t aware of it, wasn’t trying to speak. He couldn’t even think. He waited with the rest of them, utterly at her mercy.

‘Do you still think I have a good heart?’ she thought distantly, and looked at Kazuul again. “Let him go.”

“Upon condition,” he countered evenly, and held up one claw. “Swear to it.”

“One night in your bed.”

“Aye.”

She shook her head, not refusing, but almost marveling. “You’d kill a man for that.”

“Readily. Wilt thou, to escape it?”

“Let him go,” she said again. “I’ll do it.”

He reached around at once, plucked Devlin from the demon who held him, and threw him nonchalantly at the door. “No student, however well-allied, may break our laws with impunity. Thou art expelled, human. Death alone shall meet thee here upon thy return.”

Devlin, sprawled over the stone floor, slowly rolled onto his hands and knees. He looked at Mara. His mind beat at her like the wings of a trapped bird, but entirely without thought.

“Thou art not numbered among the Ten,” Kazuul continued. He stretched out one claw toward the Door and it opened in absolute silence—a door in a dream. “Freedom is thine, and ignorance. Go.”

Devlin crawled back and stopped, poised right on the threshold. He shivered. He wanted her to come with him.

“Oh get out, you idiot!” Mara shouted. “I was never here to save you!”

He flinched, hard. Devlin stood up, his robe rumpled, the toe of one flapping sandal sticking out past his ungainly foot. He looked at her, his face as stark as the moon against the blackness behind him, and then he turned around and slunk away.

Kazuul crooked his finger and the Black Door shut before Devlin was even out of sight. It seemed to Mara that he’d tried to turn around, that he might have tried to shout—her name blared star-bright in his mind—but then he was gone.

“Idiot,” Mara said again. Her voice shook. Too much anger and not enough time for it to come and go.

“I do hope that’s worked out the way you wanted,” Horuseps murmured.

Mara swung on him, but his back was to her. He stood very close to Kazuul, and no doubt did not know how his words carried.

“Because it certainly did not go according to any plan as I perceived it.”

“All rivers run to the same great sea.” Kazuul smiled at her over Horuseps’s shoulder. “I am contented with this ending.”

She had nothing to say to him, nothing at all. He’d taken Devlin away, ripped him out of her life with no more compunction than a sadistic child ripping the wings off a fly, just to see it hobble around without them. She had no one left now, no one she knew, no one to talk to…only him. The anger was gone, leaving her too tired for words. She thought of her cell—the soft sand and perfect darkness—and started walking.

“Fulfill thy promise, Bitter Mara,” he called. “Show me the measure of thy gratitude for my mercy.”

“Gratitude?!” She wheeled about and stared at him, then laughed in his triumphant face. “I wish I had fucked him,” she said, killing his broad smile in a stroke. “I really wish I had. He was an obnoxious little pest most of the time, but it would have been worth it to see you get his sloppy seconds.”

Horuseps heaved a sigh and passed his hand over his eyes.

Kazuul regarded her for a short silence and then smiled again. It didn’t quite touch his eyes. “Shalt thee renege then? Spit back thy oath to me now that thy pet is well away? No doubt it would give thee perverse pleasure to throw thyself under my claws for pride’s sake, yet I should only pardon thee, and there would we two stand. Nay,” he said, almost gently in spite of his cold stare. “Come to my bed, beloved one. Thee cannot win every battle.”

He took her hand and she did not protest.  She walked beside him when he led her out of the Nave. She didn’t struggle even as he lifted her into his arms and spun her sickeningly through space and shadow and solid rock, to appear instantly in his bedchamber without the inconvenience of walking. But when he placed her on the bed and loomed over her in growling anticipation, she raised one hand and touched his broad, burning chest.

“You can’t win every battle either,” she told him. And then she dropped back to the Panic Room, forced her body into sudden sleep, and switched the monitors off.

“So there,” said Mara, and watched the Mindstorm.

*          *          *

It was cold that finally woke her, cold in shades of high-alert yellow across the Panic Room monitors. Mara returned to her body at once. If the trouble was severe enough to switch the screens on by themselves, she couldn’t afford pride.

To her surprise, she hadn’t been tossed out on the aerie (or over it). She’d been tucked neatly into bed, but her arm had wrangled its way out of the blankets, exposed to the icy wind that blasted in from outside. Her fingers were blue and somewhat swollen, numb to all sensation. She dragged it under the covers, heavy and unresponsive as a lump of wood, and lay with it across her chest until it woke up. It hurt a lot.

Besides that, she thought she was actually okay. It being impossible not to know when Kazuul had done any sort of sex to her, she could say with a great deal of confidence that he had not. He’d just put her to bed. Sometimes she really did not understand him.

Once feeling had returned and Mara was capable of flexing her hand without pain, she kicked the blankets off completely and got up. Her robe was still on the floor where Kazuul had dropped it after so romantically tucking her in, only now it was three times as heavy with winter’s slush. She draped it over the broken pillar again, but doubted it would dry anytime soon. In the meantime, one of the ragged sheets from Kazuul’s bed sufficed as far as her modesty was concerned. She headed upstairs, trying her best to reinvent the toga on the way, but stopped as soon as she reached the abandoned theater.

Kazuul crouched upon the dais, his broad back to her, his head bent low. He didn’t move, not even a half-turn in her direction to let her know he’d heard her. Only the subtle shifting of his longer spikes betrayed his breath. If not for that sign of life, he might have been a statue.

Curious. Mara’s first thought was one of queer recognition: This was surely what she looked like all those years ago, when she was in the Panic Room before it had a TV. No wonder it so unnerved people.

She finished tying off the corners of her toga and walked up to him. Her mind went out ahead of her, tapping at his. He tapped back distractedly. Their two minds twined briefly, like lovers’ hands across a table. She pulled away first.

“Did you enjoy your one night?”

He grunted, still deep within himself.

“Thinking of better days?” she asked, heading for the risers and the door.

He roused as one from sleep. “Better? Nay, but of ages long past. My best days yet lie ahead.”

“How unusually optimistic of you.”

“What knowest thou of my character, child? I am Hope incarnate.” He watched her climb the risers and when she reached the fifth, he said, “We all keep hidden a part of ourselves. For some, a larger part than others. Thee, to make example. Hast thou ever been wholly honest?”

“To Connie.”

“Ah.”

“And you?” She turned around, but the dais was empty. She had enough time for a flare of unpleasant surprise and then his breath was on the back of her neck, his hand sliding around her waist. She threw an elbow uselessly into his ribs and succeeded only in scraping herself against his hard skin.

“To thee,” he murmured, nipping a trail down the side of her throat to her shoulder. “Ever thee.”

“Let go of me.”

“Thou hast no one to return to.”

“Is that what you thought? That I’d throw myself at you just because I had no one else? I’ve been alone most of my life! I’m not afraid of it or you! Get your hands off me!” she snapped, shoving at them.

“Dost thou even comprehend how much of chivalry I have shown thee? And ever dost thou ask for more. Perhaps I am done with indulging thee.” Always, his grip remained gentle, if unbreakable. His biting kisses stayed tender, his voice calm and playful.

“I don’t belong to you, Kazuul.”

“Oh, but thou art wrong upon that point.” He picked her up as easily as a doll and swung her around, first slamming her against a pillar and then crushing his own weight atop her. “Thou art mine,” he growled, nuzzling under her chin as she struggled. “My pet and plaything. Mine own. My property. My bitter wine to sip. Mine alone.”

He kissed her, his mouth closing hard over hers and forcing it wide. His tongue invaded. She bit and he withdrew with an exaggerated yelp, only to seize a fisthold on her hair and wrench her head back. He kissed her again, savagely now, his breath searing her so that she actually choked on it, and this time when he drove his long, pointed tongue to the back of her throat, she didn’t fight. Back and forth, miming the act of sex, he invaded her with his kiss before withdrawing to lick roughly over the leaping vein in her neck. Finally he pulled back, grinning, and she swung her arm and slapped him. The shock of the blow radiated up to her shoulder, but had no effect on him. She slapped again, and cut her palm on one of the short nubs of bone protruding from his jaw. He caught her wrist then, licked the wound, and ground his hips aggressively into her at the same time. He shuddered, sucking blood, then chuckled against her hand and finally looked at her.

“If thou dost escape me now in sleep, I swear thou shalt waken well-used,” he said. “I am no gallant knight to come and go at mine unattainable lady’s urging. When met with an enemy, I conquer. When met with flesh—” He lifted her thighs around him, lunging in close to snap his teeth right before her face. “—I rend!”

“And when met with a harmless idiot of a man, you threaten to eviscerate him and then throw him out of the mountain! I haven’t forgotten that, I haven’t forgiven you, Kazuul, and I’m not staying!”

He laughed at her and kissed her again.

A mindslap hadn’t done much when she’d used it before; a hand slap, even less. Mara reserved her struggles, kicking when she thought it might do some good, as Kazuul slowly settled atop her, but her mind was elsewhere, observing her posture from every angle in the Panic Room, circling his mind for a crack in his defenses, searching in furious futility for some sign of weakness.

But oh, his hands were rough and sure and they kneaded her buttocks, moving her against the solid bulge of his erection the way he wanted, the way he knew she wanted too. His teeth were careful as they scored across her sensitive skin, teasing as much as tasting. He knew he could make her want anything he did and this was precisely what made it torture.

“Come to my bed,” Kazuul rumbled, grazing his teeth across the shell of her ear. “Thou hast been in every way save one mine own. Now I mean to mark thee, to fill thy sweet cunt at last, again and again. I am thy Master. I will take a Master’s privilege.”

She tried to scratch at his thick neck and felt a fingernail break painfully deep. She tried kicking and could only drum her heels against the back of his legs. Kazuul relished the gyrations insolently, growling his pleasure until she finally stopped, and then giving her a little snap as if to get her going again. “Let me go,” she said, only said.

“Thou hast my permission to fight,” he replied, pulling her makeshift toga up around her hips. “For all that thy fight is a lie. I smell the fragrance of thy woman’s flower and thou art more than willing. Welcome me to thee, my Mara. Art thou not wearied of half-satisfaction?”

“Half-satisfaction is still damned generous where you’re concerned.”

“Liar,” he said, unruffled, and swept her legs suddenly up, resting her ankles on his shoulders. “I give thee greatest pleasure only, but greater still remains when I am at rest within thy cradle and thou takest me as a woman must. Come, the mask of thy outrage has been well-torn by days and nights of rapture. Give to me all liberty or give it not, but I shall have thee and thou shalt howl with joy.”

“Why are you even bothering to ask?” Mara snapped as he bent once again to cover her throat with his biting kisses. “You don’t have to ask to use your whore!”

And after everything she’d done to him, that at last struck home.

He recoiled, shocked inside and out, to stare at her. Oh, he made a swift recovery, but when it was there, it was sure for real. He shoved away from her, letting her half-fall down the pillar to land heavily on her feet, and snarled, “How dare thee! If thou didst lay beneath ten thousand men, still thou art no whore! And I have never taken thee as such, nay, nor ever named thee so! Ever hast thou been my precious and most favored, and I have taken nothing I was given and given gladly!”

“I’m not giving it to you now!”

His brows lowered slowly, pulling the smaller of his horns out of place, cutting deep lines of shadow across his face. She began to wonder if she’d pushed him too far. And then she had to wonder exactly how.

“How many more days dost thou believe thee canst bid me dance to thy tune?” he demanded. “Thou sayest these things to stab at me and I am stabbed. Behold, I do bleed!” He swept a claw across his heart, opening a short gash without any sign of pain, only that thunderous stare. “Yet some things lie beyond endurance. I will not always suffer thy fits of whimsy in good humor.”

“This is what you call good humor?”

“Art thou broken?” he inquired curtly as the lips of his self-inflicted wound silently closed. The blood remained, rapidly drying to a dark crust on his thick hide. “Art thou impaled screaming upon mine hungry cock? Or art thou whole and belligerent before me in thy fragile mortal flesh? Dost thou not realize how readily I could take what I desired?”

It was not the first time he’d put the question to her in some form or another, dangling it like a well-baited hook, daring her to bite.

For no immediately apparent reason, Mara found herself thinking of vampires, those pesky old vampires which an Irishman had so firmly rooted in Transylvanian folklore to the ongoing contempt of its native cabdrivers. In particular, she thought of that delicate point of vampire myth known as the invitation. A vampire couldn’t simply enter his victim’s home, they said. He had to be invited in. Once done, he could always return at his leisure, but first, by trickery or seduction, he had to get that invitation. ‘I could take you anytime I wanted,’ Kazuul kept saying, always to the most defiant Mara, all but daring her to cry, ‘So do it! Take me and see what happens!’

Only she never had.

Mara scooped up the hanging swath of her improvised clothing and hiked it high over her waist. With her hand, she parted the folds of her labia and gave herself a good rub, enough to show him moisture on her fingers, enough to let him hear its greedy kiss as well as see and smell. “Take a good look,” she told him. “Because a look is all you get.”

He had, in fact, been looking—a hot, hungry, perfectly frustrated stare—but his eyes snapped up when she said that, blazing so as to stain his craggy cheeks the same sickly green color as his eyes.

“I am going right up those stairs and you can’t stop me,” she said. “I’m going to fuck every man I see for, oh, at least a week. I’m going to work my way through every demon in the mountain. I’m going to start with Horuseps. I’ll probably finish with him too,” she added, letting her toga drop as she headed for the stairs. “He was that good.”

“None shall have thee!” he snarled—really snarled, spitting flecks of saliva and showing the white spike of every fang. “My mark is on thee well!”

“I guess we’ll see, but I’m betting I can make him forget that. I did once.”

He lunged past her, slamming his fist down on the next stair hard enough to crack the stone. “Thou art not above my law!” he bellowed.

“I don’t recognize your law,” she replied. “You were nothing to me but a quick and easy tumble before bed, and what did I tell you in the very beginning?”

Every breath that came out of him was a snarl now, and it hurt her retinas to meet his eyes, but she stared into them anyway and showed him no fear.

“When it stops being fun,” she said, “I quit.”

“Dost thou think thee can but walk away?” He caught her, not by the arm now but by the throat. The power in those hands which had lifted her so lovingly and effortlessly only moments ago was still there, scarcely constrained. “All backs bend to Kazuul.”

He’d taken her voice. She made a thought—Not mine!—and drove it at him like a fist.

He roared, not with pain but with anger, a pure white anger that lit up his mind from the inside and illuminated in absolute detail every brick and mortar of the Fortress that housed him, every shuttered window, every forgotten crack. Mara was in before the battle-cry had finished. There wasn’t time for exploration, but she made good use of what moments she had, sweeping across the alien territory of this long-protected stronghold and out again with every access point committed to memory. He never knew she was there.

“Thou didst tell me once thee desired not a gentle hand,” Kazuul spat, and drove her to the ground. “Thou wilt not have it!” He yanked his belt open, tore the plates and leathers away, and freed the enormous brand of his cock to raise in his fist above her.

Mara reached up and closed her hand over his.

He hesitated, but hardly enough to notice and surely not sufficient to defuse his wrath. Expelling a snarl, he grabbed her hair and pulled her roughly to her knees.

She squeezed, sliding her fist up to the grip just below the swollen head of him, where she latched and lightly sucked. Kazuul hissed in a breath and hesitated again, but his claws remained firmly knotted in her hair, easing only a little as she licked a long, slow maze of whorls all down the underside of his shaft to tongue playfully at his tight scrotum.

“Is this truce?” he grumbled, while she hummed against him.

“No.” Her fist moved slowly up and down the spit-slick length of him. He was hottest where his skin was thinnest; his balls, swollen hard as stone and as heavy, burned her mouth, forcing her to lick in tiny sips. “I’m still really mad at you.”

His claws relaxed a little more. She pulled back, opening her jaws to the straining point to take the entire head of him into her mouth, bobbing awkwardly as she tongued him. She looked up into his slitted eyes, the feral snarl just beginning to wane, and withdrew to massage her face. “Shall I Malleate myself and take it all?” she asked.

“Never!” he said sharply, and then pulled his claws entirely, as if to make up for his tone. He rested his hand just so on her hair and closed his eyes, murmuring, “I’ll have thy truth alone, Mara. Always.”

She went to work, both hands on him and moving in opposing circles more appropriate to grinding pepper, but gentle for all that, while she licked and sucked at his glans. Now and then, she’d pause to knead and roll his swollen balls over her palm, using her other hand to glove his cock and pump it fast, or lubricate the hot shaft with complicated passes of her tongue, but he required little variation. She could feel his muscles tensing. Soon, he was making the coarse, bestial breaths that meant he was about to cum. He tried half-heartedly, once, to pull her up, but didn’t fight her when she closed her lips around his slick head and sucked the cum as it sprayed into her wet mouth. His claws dug at her scalp as she licked up every drop. She swallowed and he swore, vehemently but quietly, then gave her a little push away from him.

“Return to my chambers,” he said, snatching up his loincloth.

“No.”

“Thou art not here as a student of the Scholomance.” He threw her a black, somehow reconciling sort of glare. “And thou art no longer bound to its laws. Thee risks no expulsion under my protection, and no tribunal.”

“I’m not here as your sex-slave either, and I don’t have any other pet goats for you to threaten.”

He spat a curse, then shook his head, his teeth bared in frustration. He dressed, cinching his belt with curt, vicious-sounding jerks, glaring at the wall and thinking too deeply for her to hear. Finally, he said, “Return then, when thy wanderings are ended. Sleep out each day with me, and I shall make no more demands upon thy nights.”

“Oh sure, just sleep,” she said.

“Aye.” He scowled, as if the words came with a taste he’d like to spit back at her. “Sleep beside me in my bed, and I swear to thee upon mine own eternal life that I will take no advantage.”

“Ha!”

“And upon that selfsame oath, I’ll press thee no further for the pleasures of thy flesh, if—” He paced a little away from her, then came back, plainly fighting against his better judgment. “If thou wilt threaten no more to lie with my brothers. Be mine, only mine, and I shall wait upon thy will.”

She gave him a narrow, suspicious stare.

He spread his hands. “Compromise.”

It was a dangerous promise and she knew it, but couldn’t quite see how. She believed all along that his ultimate plan was a little more sinister than just having sex with her, and here was as good as proof. The truth was in him somewhere, locked away down deep with the rest of his secrets, and now she finally had a way in. She couldn’t go mucking through his mind anywhere else but right in the same room with him and she knew it. Wasn’t this her golden opportunity?

She didn’t trust it.

“All right,” she said. “For now.”

He went ahead of her and opened the door. “Go where thou wilt shall be the whole of thy law,” he told her, then frowned. “And obey the given command of the Masters.”

“Every Master, or only you?” she asked.

He hesitated, then bared his teeth again. “Every,” he said at last, and growled as he looked away. “For now.”

He retreated to his chambers then, striding down the risers as easily as if they were stairs and not looking at her again. She heard him swear once, after he was lost to sight, but that was all.

“For now,” Mara murmured, and left him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She tried to miss Devlin, but she didn’t. Neither was she grateful that he was no longer there when she went out, popping unexpectedly around corners when she was trying to pee, or yattering into her ear for hours on end when she walked herself through the uncertain passages and empty caverns of the Scholomance. He was just gone, and when she thought about him at all, it was with a kind of satisfaction that she had managed to keep her promise to him and get him out, mingled with faint outrage at the promise Kazuul had extracted from her to do it. But she didn’t miss him, any more than she’d missed Connie in the days, months, and eventually years after her best friend’s disappearance. She had looked for her, in her own way, and then she had boxed up her things and waited for their removal, and while she had also flown halfway across the world, climbed mountains, and defied demons to try and get her back, it remained true that the world had moved on and Mara had moved with it. She had loved Connie while she was there—her first, her best, her only friend—but she’d shed no tears once she was gone.

Horuseps was right. She really did belong here.

Her days passed now in much the same way as they had before, fruitlessly. The first night that she had returned to Kazuul and approached his bed, she had not spoken to him at all, but when she had slipped beneath his torn blankets, he came at once to join her. She spent her sleeping hours staring fixedly into the body’s monitors in the Panic Room, but he had touched her only once—his hand gently brushing her hair back from her brow—and his mind never touched hers at all. It seemed the promise of an immortal was not the fickle thing of Man after all; she was entirely in his power and he took no advantage. It was unnerving.

When first-bell rang to wake her, he had already repaired his table and laid out a Master’s meal across two golden platters, poured wine into two golden cups. She ignored it and his beckoning hand and went out to search for Connie, hungry.

By the time last-bell sent her back to him at dawn, there was a second chair as well, neither so tall nor as imposing as his own, but harmonious in design, a queenly throne to sit opposite the king’s. She took her food and ate on the aerie, sitting on the floor, her back to him.

Again, he lay beside her as she slept, and again, he touched her only once, this time to stroke her exposed arm before covering it over against the chill. And in the evening, beside the platter set before her untouched chair, she found something new: a gown to replace her much-worn robe. Neither acolyte-black nor neophyte-white, but a soft, shimmering silver, and not nearly as scanty as one might expect a frustrated demon to provide her. The neck was high, the hips concealed, and the skirts full and warm around her legs. A simple cut, but beautiful. Feminine. Regal. She put it on and ate on the aerie again.

But apart from the ominously quiet hours she spent in Kazuul’s company, her nights passed just the same. She wandered—in the lyceum one day, the Nave the next, even the ephebeum again—opening every door she could and searching for recently Malleated walls which might conceivably hide her friend. She interrupted a number of lectures in the advanced study of arts, but the demons within dealt with her respectfully, allowing her to invade their private rooms if she remembered to ask, or just to sit quietly on some distant riser and hear the lesson. She went through all the right motions, but no longer considered it a search. Time itself seemed to hang, suspended, and she didn’t even know what it was all waiting for.

“What do you want from me?” she asked one night, watching the sun set over the snow-capped mountains.

“Thou knowest.” She heard the sound of snapping bone as he tore himself another bite from the unknown roast which was his breakfast. “I mean to lie with thee.”

“What else?”

He grunted, then rose and came to the aerie beside her. “Thou art all I have desired, throughout these empty ages.”

She snorted and threw the rest of her tea out over the rocky slopes. Steam puffed up from the ice where it landed. Some unseen creature above the aerie scrambled away, knocking pebbles loose to tumble down over the mountainside. Far, far below, the lake shimmered in the last light of day, all its edges frosted over, the water at its center as dark and round as a staring eye.

“Believe it not?”

“Was I supposed to?” she asked dryly.

“Tis truth.” He crouched down close beside her, his shadow and hers merged to a single body. “What wouldst thou have of me?”

“So you’re willing to bargain, are you?” She had to smile at him, at the scowl darkening his shadowed face. “Did you think all you had to do was trap me in your bed and I’d be immediately overwhelmed by lust for you?”

“Aye.” He gave her a sidelong glance, sharp and sparking with frustration. “I knew thy will was great, yet did not anticipate thou wouldst deny me so long out of malice.”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve complaining about malice after you sent Devlin to a tribunal just to get him away from me.”

“He liveth.” Kazuul smiled into the dying light, his fangs gleaming in white points. “He liveth still.”

“Sometimes you make me very glad that you don’t know where Connie is.”

“Never would I cause her harm.”

A bitter laugh was her only reply to that.

“Thou wouldst despise me for it,” he said quietly.

“I despise you now.”

He looked at her and into her while she faced the mountains determinedly, answering neither his piercing stare nor the cautious touches of his mind. The sun was swallowed up, the last light taken. She had nothing else to look at and still refused to look at him or meet his sendings.

“Nay,” he murmured, and combed his claws once down her hair. “Thou art not yet so great a liar.” He stood and smiled down at her as the wind gusted. “Shall I show thee a thing?”

“What thing?”

“A mystery I know thou hast often pondered. I’ll say no more. Aye or nay?”

“In exchange for what?”

“To show thee, I must hold thee in mine arms.” His voice dropped to a smoky purr. “Where thou dost yearn to be also.”

“Dream on.”

“I dream not,” he replied. “Thou dreamest of me.”

Something tickled at her cheeks. She realized she was blushing. Mara threw the crust of her breakfast bread out over the mountain and stared straight ahead. A mystery. In his arms.

“I have sworn an oath to press thee not for the pleasures of thy body,” he reminded her. “Though I would savor well whatsoever I am offered.”

She could think of nothing she had often pondered, apart from Connie, and she knew he wouldn’t be taking her there. On the other hand, she had nothing else to do with herself today. She put out her hand without thinking, and his enveloped it at once, before she could pull it back again. He drew her up gently, purring under his breath, and put his arms around her.

To feel him again, pressing close, his heat searing through her clothes, was enough to stir the stubborn ghost of purely physical desire. She didn’t dare look up at him. Her eyes belonged to him all too often. But he felt good. He always felt so damned good.

“Wither?” he rumbled, flexing his claws lightly at her hips. “To my mystery, or to my bed?”

“That’s suspiciously close to making a demand.”

“Nay, for I wait upon thy will.”

“Show me what you have to show me,” Mara said, and then, unwillingly, she felt herself embracing him, her hands scraping over his rough skin to bring her even closer. She could feel the swell of his essential maleness solid at her belly and she wanted to feel it hard against her, hard inside her. Even his scent, as mild and mineral-rich as the mountain itself, stirred her to some kind of longing. “Show me,” she said again, not meeting his eyes. “After that, we’ll see.”

He lifted her, nuzzled briefly and with tense passion at her throat, and then snapped away out of his candlelit lair into full dark and sudden, icy winds. She gasped, and the frozen air stole the breath right out of her again. Mara clutched at his shoulders, choking on cold, then shoved away from him once she realized what she was doing.

Kazuul released her, chuckling, only to catch her again when she stumbled over the ice-crusted snow and loose rock that lay beneath. **Hold,** he warned her. **The moon is not yet risen and thy eyes will yet be weak. Hold.**

“It’s freezing!” she shouted, and doubled over choking again.

**Use the silent voice.** He watched her hop from foot to burning foot with an expression of close interest, then grunted, and pulled her back to him.

She stepped on his foot by accident, slapping at him and shivering almost too hard to see, but his foot was broad and hot under hers, melting the snow and ice away in great craters. She looked sharply up at him. He smiled invitingly. She scowled and stepped on the other foot too, grappling at his spikes for balance as he wrapped one arm around her to shield her from the worst of the wind. He was fantastically warm. She’d known that every time she ever touched him, but here, now, right in the frozen eye of winter, it was even more startling.

**Is this an art?** she asked grudgingly, trying to touch him as little as possible while warming herself against his body. **I’d like to learn how, if it is.**

**Thou surely wilt, with my guidance,** he answered after a moment. **And to Correspond. I suspect thou wilt have some skill at it.**

**I’d rather walk than risk ending up halfway through a wall.**

**Thou hast Sight. I’ll teach thee its employ in all ways.**

**I won’t be here that long.** She squinted into the stinging wind and saw, in silhouettes only a shade darker than the night sky, a forest of bare branches stabbing up from the rock, but the everpresent shadow of the mountainside was nowhere to be seen. They were at the top, in a shallow valley with rock raised up in blunt peaks all around them. **What is this place?**

**Canst thou not guess?**

**I hate guessing games,** she sent irritably, but looked again. There was still no moon, but her eyes must be adjusting to the faint starlight, for she could see the trunks of trees now, dozens of them, and the mounds of other shrubs between them. **Is…Is it a garden?**

**Aye.**

**But everything is dead.**

**Nay, ‘tis sleeping only, as all things do in their season.** He shrugged her up into the crook of his arm and carried her to the first tree. He touched it, running a slender twig through his fingers to its tip, where green leaves suddenly sprouted, pale blossoms opened, dried, and fell away. He cupped the golden fruit that grew and plucked it just as the wind fell enough to bring its fragrance to Mara’s senses. It was warm in her hand when he gave it to her, warm with life, even with ice in a shell around its stem. **Yet a Master’s touch doth awaken,** Kazuul sent, watching her bite into it, **so many things.**

An apricot, sweeter than anything she’d ever tasted from a grocery store. She devoured it in just a few bites, forgetting all about the breakfast she’d only just eaten. Mara looked out over the garden again as she sucked frozen juice from her fingers, and saw movement. Kazuul followed her gaze, grunted, and set her back on his feet.

**What was that?** she asked, trying to find it again.

**One of the reavers.** He must have summoned it, because it came out of the dark on its belly, bristling and snarling, its face pressed to the snowy ground. Kazuul looked down upon it, his arm moving to wrap her more securely against him. **And well out of its hunting grounds it be.**

**Is it…a nephalim?**

**Aye.** He showed no surprise that she knew the word. **Reach not thy hand to touch. My control is limited.**

It was not a hound, but not a man either. Mara was considerably taller, but it had twice her weight, and even in this servile crouch and moonless dark, she could see nothing but the strength and power of its muscular form. Its skin, thick and grey and covered in grotesque growths of bone, camouflaged it perfectly against the stone slopes. If it wasn’t for the hard shudders of its snarls, it would have blended to invisibility right before her eyes.

**They can be dangerous, even to us, and this breed more than most,** Kazuul sent, studying the thing that crouched at his feet with a deceptively detached air. **Wretched, mindless creatures made in mocking image of their immortal blood, cursed with every human hunger, suffering life upon a world that cannot sustain them. They thirst and never quench, lust with seed that rooteth not, consume all and yet starve.**

He crooked his claw. The monster raised its eyeless head, pouring drool to freeze off its jaws like another row of teeth. It slouched away, still snarling, and was lost to the night.

**Adam’s blood doth thin their own, yet to perish taketh a cruel age, and so we use the nephalim in whatever small way they can be used. The reavers, we set low upon the mountain’s crust to devour freely those Men they may encounter, save only those few hours when we welcome approach.** Kazuul’s mind was quiet for a minute or two as the wind howled, but through his touch, she shared the shadow of every dark thought which he kept hidden. **But they are born to starve, and no sooner are their jaws whetted than they are shitting out the blood of their victims upon the rock and howling their hungry rage to heaven.**

**How many are yours?** she asked, knowing it was an offensive question.

**None living,** Kazuul replied, unbothered. **Yet I have sired many in my time.** He grunted to himself and added, **I shall sire no more.**

**Is that why you stopped teaching?**

It wasn’t the first time she’d asked that question. She no longer expected an answer, but to her surprise, he shrugged. **T’was one consideration, if not the most paramount.**

**What was the—**

**Solomon.** The word was a curse in Kazuul’s mind. He bared his teeth, then gathered her up and swept her away through the mountain and into his lair. Just being out of the wind was almost as good as a roaring fire, but Kazuul released her at once and stalked over to the aerie, where he began to pull rock up to close it away.

“Do you mean King Solomon? What did he do?”

“Then thou hast heard his legend.”

“I know a little. I know he came here. Horuseps showed me his cup.”

“Did he.” Kazuul laughed once, blackly and without humor, then looked at her. “The Cup of Solomon. A very pretty prison, was it not? Yet when first Solomon came to me, t’was a harmless vessel for a beardless boy to spin lies over. T’was here, in my school, in mine own theater, that Solomon learned the art of Dominion. Here, with books unknown to human understanding and magics unpracticed in the human world, Solomon summoned one of the great race of djinn. Here, he bound its body into the crowning jewel of his harmless cup and bound its will to be his slave. Thus did Solomon achieve his ambition and depart us.”

Kazuul shook his head slowly, ponderously, as a bull might before it charges. His fangs were bared as he spoke, so that he bit off each word, and his anger, undimmed by millennia, put a dangerous growl in his throat. She could see his clawed hands flexing on empty air, the muscles of his powerful body coiling and tensing.

“The race of djinn was not born of Earth, yet they dwelled many ages among the sons and daughters of Adam. They dwelled,” he spat, “in the kingdom of Solomon, who saw them, coveted their power, and by cruel trickery, summoned all there were and set each one into a mortal prison to be his treasure during his life, to be scattered to the winds and forgotten after his death. They were an ancient race; their fires, the spark of life over countless worlds. Now they are made mad, lost to time and memory, destroyed. Ha. This is what Man does with magic.” He swung around very suddenly, coming towards her with his eyes blazing light, the Mindstorm hot with his rage. “Hath not Man done harm enough, powerless, that I must put weapons into his hands? How many cups did he forge, Solomon the Betrayer, set with the souls of my race, my fire?”

Mara stepped back, watchful, and instantly he turned away, his fury bleeding out of the air.

“Nay,” Kazuul said, staring into the wall where the aerie had been. “I’ll sire no more nephalim. I’ll make no more Solomons. I am done with Man.”

She waited until the last strain of anger was gone before saying, “I’m still here.”

He glanced at her, thought, then smiled thinly. “Thou art woman.”

“You could still get a nephalim off me.”

“Not as thou hast played the game,” he answered archly, but then came back to her wearing his most smoldering gaze. “But if that be your fear, my Mara, fear not. My matings shall set no half-breed stock in thee.”

“You promised—”

“I make no demands, beloved one.” His powerful hands took her in, holding her close against his rough hide, just as if they were at the mercy of the icy Romanian winds once more. His tongue flicked unerringly at the tender skin above the vein in her neck, and he pressed his teeth there playfully, but only for a moment. “Yet well would we both be served by the weakening of thy will. Thou art come alive only in mine arms.”

“I was alive long before I ever met you,” said Mara, refusing to acknowledge the tightening of her skin under his lips or the eager heat leaping to life in her womb. “I’ll be alive long after I leave. I’ll replace you, Kazuul.”

“Nay.” His hand covered her breast, his thumbclaw scraping lightly back and forth over her nipple until it hardened for him. “I have ruined all other men for thee. Thou shalt never clasp one ‘twixt thy hungry thighs save that thou thinkest of me.”

His mind stroked hers, as gentle and as sure as his hand, giving her no words but only little promises of pleasure like kisses on her naked soul. She shivered, but did not move away. “You taught Dominion,” she murmured.

“Aye.” Kazuul tugged at the neck of her gown, growled under his breath at her locket, and then scoured his teeth along the full, firm swell of her breast. “The art of will and its many manipulations.”

“And yet, you’ve never used it against me.”

“Nay, nor ever shall.” He went to one knee, biting at her hip through her long skirts.

“Are you afraid I’ll learn it if you do?”

“I fear nothing that comes of thee.” He mouthed her with growing aggression, his claws beginning to prick through the heavy fabric, and shifted suddenly to draw a deep breath from her concealed sex. He smiled. “I shall teach thee whatsoever thou desirest to learn. Nothing would please me better than to see thee master of mine art.”

“Nothing?”

He looked up at her, stroking her thigh. “There are pleasures of the heart, my Mara, and pleasures of the flesh. And if ‘tis true that the latter be more brilliant in its making, so ‘tis also truth that the former endures. When?” he asked, quietly and with a broad timbre of dark frustration.

“When what?”

“Again, I warn thee to mock me not. When shalt thou come again to my bed?”

“After last-bell, to sleep.”

“I hear the racing of thy heart at mine every touch.” He passed his hand low over her belly as if to prove it, and her womb cramped with traitorous, insistent need. “I smell the perfumes of thy ready cunt. Thou makest a torture for thyself as much as for me.”

“But it is still torturing you,” she said, and shrugged him off. “Call it a pleasure of the heart.”

He growled to himself, still comfortably on one knee, watching her walk away from him.

She made it all the way to the curtain at the foot of his stair before her resolve weakened. Why was she doing this? What did it matter if she couldn’t get anything else out of him but the protection he’d already given her? It was still good sex! Three nights, she’d slept beside him, expecting each time to wake up under him, his prisoner now in every way, but so far, his promise was holding him. She’d almost rather he took what he wanted than be the one who broke first, but it was a hard thing to lie beside him and only sleep. Kimara Warner had very little use for simple human companionship, but she was used to getting sex whenever she wanted it.

“Give her back to me,” said Mara finally, decisively. “Give Connie back to me—”

“I know her not,” Kazuul said, all warmth gone from his tone.

“—and I’ll let you do what you want with me before we leave.”

“I have never seen thy calf.”

“As often as you want, for one night.”

“I know nothing of her whereabouts.”

“I’ll let you cum in me.”

“Enough!” His anger stabbed the Mindstorm and slowly faded. She heard him pace away, growling heavily at each breath.

Mara waited, rubbing restlessly at her stomach while her loins burned and burned.

**I would give thee my blood, my bones, my very breath, and whatsoever thou wouldst ask, so I would give thee,** he sent, his thoughts furious and unwavering, **but I know the bitch not!**

He could lie to her easily enough, even here, but she didn’t think he was somehow.

“I am not built to long withstand temptation,” he snarled aloud. “I have pledged thee an oath and I mean to keep it, but thou art no tickbird, and I, no tolerant dragon to stay my jaws as thou dost pick and pick at me! Think well what thou dost, lest I snap!”

“All right,” said Mara softly. “Then I guess we’re done talking.”

Still, she lingered. It was a good line to storm out on, but she felt no sense of victory. What she did feel, she didn’t know how to name, but she didn’t want to leave him yet.

His hand brushed at her back, then came up to caress the curve of her throat, briefly amplifying his bitterness and desire. “My Mara…”

“No.”

“Aye. Deny it how thou wilt, thou art mine. I, thine.” He growled softly against her skin, then brushed his lips across her cheek, and murmured, “Make use of what is thine, beloved.”

“Stop calling me that.”

He spat a curse in her ear and stalked away. Back and forth, he paced across his chambers, kicking at chunks of stone and slashing at drapes, swearing in and out of understanding the entire time.

“I’ll be back,” Mara said, faintly disgusted with herself.

He laughed reproachfully. “Aye, to sleep.”

“With you,” she reminded him.

He quieted, running his claws abrasively along the left bat-wing at the head of his empty bed. “Aye,” he said. “With the fool who giveth thee lead.”

“Yes, but that isn’t why I keep coming back.” She gave him a shrug and half a tired smile. “At least, it isn’t the only reason.”

“Pretty bird,” he grumbled, and waved her off. “Fly then.”

She went.

*          *          *

“Honestly,” said Horuseps, stacking books on the shelves behind his dais. “One of these nights, he’s going to split you up the middle cock-first, and you, o my delightful child, are going to have the temerity to be surprised.”

His was not the first theater she’d invaded today, but it was there that she’d stayed, and in spite of the fact that she’d mastered his art, he let her. Indeed, after he’d reached the end of his lecture on the energies of life surrounding them on the unseen planes, he’d dismissed his class and called her down to him, alone.

She knew his casual remarks were aimed at prying information out of her, but she talked anyway. It was pleasant to be with Horuseps, she realized. Pleasant to watch his graceful movements as he put his teaching aids in order, pleasant to listen to the easy roll and rise of his androgynous voice, pleasant to feel the knife-edged humor and secret shadows of his vulnerable mind. It was almost like having a friend, which was a nice way to feel, particularly so soon after she’d had a spike run through him three times.

“What are you hoping to achieve?” he asked now, inspecting each of a series of stone discs as he arranged them carefully in a chest.

“I don’t know,” Mara admitted. “Sometimes I think I hate him, not because I don’t know what he’s doing, but because he makes me not know what I’m doing.”

“And sometimes…?”

Mara blew a sigh through her bared teeth and shook her head. “Sometimes I don’t even hate him.”

He patted her head on his way to another shelf.

“I don’t have anything else he wants except sex,” she said, rubbing distractedly at her scalp to take away the unpleasant tingle left by his touch. “But what’s the point of withholding it when I know he can’t give me what I want?”

“Did I hear that correctly?”

“I like sex,” Mara muttered. “I like his kind best. Damn me, I want to be with him.”

“You’re actually withholding it?” Horuseps pressed. “You’ve been sleeping with him all this time—”

“It’s only been a few days.”

“Precious, that is a painfully long time to sleep beside a demon without either fucking him or dying.” He started to brush at the dusty sockets of a hideously malformed skull, then suddenly stopped and swung around to face her, both eyebrows twitching straight out, sincerely astonished. “Good gracious, are you here for advice?”

She looked away, blushing and scowling and unable to answer.

“Oh, the temptation to misuse this power is dreadful.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said furiously. “I know what you’re going to tell me.”

“Do you now?” The lights of his eyes dimmed and fanned out as his smile faded to one that was almost gentle. “There are only two ways to play the game, child: To win, or to lose. You can’t win if you fuck Kazuul and you can’t win if you don’t. Those being your only options, you’ll lose more comfortably if you submit to him.”

“I don’t submit to anyone.”

“I never said ‘Embrace him and rejoice,’ dearest.” He went back to polishing the skull.

“So you think I’m being stupid again,” Mara said, watching his hands at work.

“You have a certain tendency. Look, my darling heart, you admit you want the brute. You admit it gains you nothing to deny him. If you thought about it, you might even admit it is somewhat unwise to continue to bait him in this manner. No, you’ll never find your unfortunate Connie by thrashing in his bed, but neither will you lose her there, so take what you want from him. I hardly think he’ll protest.”

“It’s a distraction.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Kazuul. He’s only trying to keep me in bed so I don’t find Connie and leave. He still wants something from me.”

Horuseps glanced around. “Dearest, it would astonish me to learn that Kazuul ever thought of your poor, lost lamb at all, save as a rival to your affection. In fact, I would venture to suggest that your pursuit of this misplaced human is proving a singular distraction to him. That’s just the way his kind thinks,” he said with a heartfelt and cynical sigh. “If fucking you is all he desires, then obviously, fucking him must be all that you desire. I’m sure it shocks him every time you roll over and go to sleep.” He smiled at her, genially enough. “Now tell me you’re not doing that solely to spite him.”

Mara did not reply.

“I thought so. He’s never really had to woo a woman before, you know,” he remarked, running his fingers along the topmost curve of what appeared to be a rhinoceros horn mounted on his wall. They came away dusty, apparently, and Horuseps frowned as if deeply concerned. “I can’t begin to imagine how he must be going about it.”

“He took me for a sunset stroll in the garden.”

He looked at her again, far more sincerely surprised. “I confess I wouldn’t have thought it of him,” he said, and cocked his head. “How did it go?”

“It was fucking freezing. I thought my toes were going to fall off.”

“Ah.” Horuseps came over to where she sat and knelt down. He lifted one of her feet gingerly (amusement, curiosity, and a curiously gentle desire blew through his touch), inspected it, and began to rub away the lingering burn left by the ice. “Beyond that?”

“He offered to teach me more magic.”

“If only you would…?”

“I’m sure that part was coming.”

“Are you?” he asked, and picked up her other foot. “Kazuul believes in the overwhelming show of force, not devious finesse. You give him too much credit, I think.”

“I don’t think I give him enough.”

“Also true, from a certain point of view. But let me put to you a simple question.” Horuseps looked up at her, not smiling, his hands cool around her heel. “Would you be with him now if it weren’t for your Connie?”

Mara fought down the first word to leap to her mouth without exploring it and said instead, crossly, “If it weren’t for Connie, I wouldn’t be here with any of you.”

Horuseps waited, gently massaging her instep.

“Maybe,” she admitted.

“Even if he had nothing to offer you at all?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Mara scowled and pulled her foot back. “He says he’d never use that Dominion-thing on me, but I don’t know if I believe him. He’s done something.”

“Has he?”

“I…I think about him.”

“Hardly the Killing Curse, my dear.”

“I don’t think about anyone!” Mara insisted as Horuseps stood up to loom over her. “I don’t think about my mother. I didn’t think about my father, before or after he died. I don’t even think about Connie unless I have a reason to. So why do I think about him? He’s done something to me.”

“Oh hush, my darling one, hush.” He bent to lay his hands upon her shoulders, and for a moment, she was afraid he’d kiss her. It took a lot of effort not to cringe, but he only said, “You would never be here speaking to me if you really didn’t know what you were going to do, now would you?”

The question, gently-spoken as it was, caught her entirely by surprise. No. No, of course she wouldn’t. Mara dropped her eyes, confused, and he caught her chin and brought them back up.

“You only want me to tell you to go to him so you can use me to talk yourself out of it,” he said. “I’m sure I could convince you in the end—I’m very good at that—but I won’t. You are what you are, Bitter Waters. You take what you want, and for you, asking for reasons would be like asking permission.”

She frowned.

“I’m glad you appreciate the likelihood of that,” he agreed and, smiling, released her. “So ask not, dear heart. Morality is mortality. Take what you want.”

And then he beckoned beyond her to the first uncertain student to open his doors, inviting him in, preparing his next lesson, dismissing her. Mara retreated to the first ring of risers, but didn’t sit. She watched Horuseps bring the student down onto the dais with him, unabashedly flirting as he listened to whatever difficulty was being described. He’d chosen his next Proteus, it seemed, a handsome and not-too promising old man with a young face who believed he could use his Allure against a demon (he’d heard the rumor that Horuseps was male, but he’d also heard that he was in the habit of letting his favorite students borrow books, and for the chance to read The Fallen Son and Voices of the Flame outside the Scrivener’s keeping, he was not opposed to buggery). Horuseps had no conscience when it came to grooming his next bedmate. Pleasure was a rarity in the Scholomance and it was worth pursuing.

And perhaps it was at that.

Mara left the two of them talking, tapping lightly at the demon’s mind for goodbye and receiving a wordless farewell like a caress in return. She climbed the winding stair to the top of the lyceum, and before she reached the last of them, her body was already alive, as if it were a sentient thing separate from herself that knew what waited for her at the end. The lamps in the hall that led to his door were still glowing, but as abstract carvings became an orgy, they began to flicker and fade, giving cold stone the illusion of movement, and her anticipation grew.

It didn’t have to mean anything. It could be sex for the sake of sex, it could be hers just because she wanted it. He could be a man like any other man she’d ever had, and when it was done, she could sleep beside him again and know that nothing had really changed. She was in control. This was her decision.

She heard his voice before she reached the curtains at the foot of the stair, just Kazuul’s at first, rumbling too low to determine speech. So she stopped, and her immediate impulse was to retreat before she was noticed and thought to be eavesdropping on him in whatever private conversation he was having. Then she decided that anything he felt he had to say in private was probably a good thing for her to know, and she moved forward again. And then she heard the mocha-rich and melodious tones that could only belong to Letha, and for the second time, Mara halted. This hesitation didn’t last long. She came the last three steps to the curtains and through them without attempting to hide herself.

He was sitting on the arm of his throne in obvious good humor, his cup in one hand and the other drumming lightly on the tabletop. He paid no attention to the demoness who straddled him, her slender arms around his neck, her hips moving in graceful circles against him. Letha moaned, long fingers caressing the shell of his pointed ear while her other hand dragged slow across his chest, her palm turned inward so that her short quills gouged him, drawing delicate beads of blood for her to lap at with kittenish pleasure.

Mara felt her eyes narrow. Her gaze dropped to Kazuul’s hip where, beneath the mellow curve of Letha’s enwrapping thigh, the many layers of his heavy loin-skirt seemed intact. She had begun to feel something, but wasn’t sure yet exactly what it was.

“Never did thee offer to let me sleep in thy chambers,” Letha said with sulky sensuality.

“Thou dost not sleep.”

“Be that the only reason?”

“Nay, but ‘tis a pressing one.” He sipped at his wine.

“Can she give thee more than I?” Letha murmured, cupping her breast winsomely as she combed at Kazuul’s hair. “Truly?”

“Aye.”

“Beyond that. Oh my lord, say it not so that I have been so utterly replaced!”

“Thou art.” There was a smile in his voice, even if Mara couldn’t see his mouth through Letha’s head. “Utterly.”

“I am stabbed. I am slain. That mine ancient place could be usurped by such a child!”

“Ancient indeed, first-born. I have had millennia to learn thy simple tricks.” He set his cup aside and put his arm around her, stroking down the long quills of her back before gripping her buttocks, stilling her playful writhing to bring her right against him. “Thou hast never come to me save that thou hast some demand to make.”

“Demand? Request! The humblest request of thy most faithful and devoted servant!” Letha pouted, running her fingertips across his lips. “Surely more than could be said of thy clay-born plaything. Tis she who maketh demands of thee!”

“Never,” he said placidly, moving her against him. “Never once.”

“With words, nay. With the mark of thy lenience upon her, what need hath she of words? Nay, she wieldeth thee as a babe’s rattle! She raileth at thee at her will and thou art made her fool!”

“Mind thy tongue.”

Letha obeyed at once, but chose an interesting interpretation, snaking out a startling length of flexible black to lick at him, twining down his body in serpentine passes until she knelt on the floor, kissing at and stroking her cheek upon the bulge at his groin. “Do not disgrace me so, I beg thee,” she moaned. “Thou wouldest place mine hand beneath her foot, oh cruel master! I, who have loved thee throughout the ages!”

“At thy convenience.”

“At my pleasure.” Letha’s hand caressed the buckle of his belt, then slipped beneath the many layers of his skirts. Her arm began to work. “At thine.”

He rumbled contentedly, smiling even as he said, “Out with thee.”

“Hast thou not vigor enough for two, my lord?” she asked, pouting. Her hand kept moving. He wasn’t slapping it away, either. “Must I smell thee daily on her skin and know only hunger?”

“Slake it with another.”

“And with whom shalt thy hunger be relieved?” Letha countered. “For ‘tis not slaked in thy white-eyed creature. Come,” she purred. He sipped his wine and watched her as she kissed a slow trail down his chest. “Thy pretty bird shall not return to roost for hours yet. Let me tend thee. Therein lieth mine only love. Let me honor thee as thy precious toy doth not and desireth not to do. Should not my love, my service, have some value greater than her cold cunt?”

“Nay.”

“Oh tyrannous lord!” Letha cried, turning her face away as though she’d been slapped. And that was when she saw Mara, and her expression melted at once from tearful entreaty to very mild consternation.

Kazuul looked sharply around in the next instant, warned either by her stillness or by some psychic flare which eluded Mara’s senses. Then he seized the demoness at his feet and flung her away so that he could leap up unimpeded.

She decided she knew what she was feeling after all. She decided it was anger.

“Don’t stop on my account,” she said. “I was just leaving.”

Even sprawled across the floor, Letha’s voluptuous body gleamed with seductive promise. She brushed her hand across her cheek, smoothing away some unseen bruise, and watched without distress as Kazuul stepped over her. He moved toward Mara, and she threw out a mental punch which may not have delivered any damage to his fortified mind, but which did stop him.

“You can have her,” Mara said, not as calmly as she would have liked. “And she can have you.”

She left them, left Letha’s wary murmurs and the answering snarl with its brutal punctuating slap, but when she reached the theater at the top of the stairs, he was there, reaching out to take her arm.

Rage took her at once, and this mindslap did land and even drove him back, if only half a step. “Don’t you touch me!” she shouted. “Don’t you ever touch me again!”

“Mara—”

“Oh, I’m your possession, am I? I’m your property! You can throw me down in the dining hall in front of everyone and step on me! You can ram a spike into Horuseps and make me give you promises while everyone laughs at me! You can mutilate any man who’s ever looked at me, you can even get rid of Devlin, and then you can take yourself off to fuck Letha!”

He drew back, then actually started to smile. His hated smile, his most triumphant smile. “Nay,” he said, not quite laughing. “Lay aside thy woman’s jealousy—”

“Jealousy? I’m not jealous, you son of a bitch, I’m pissed off! I don’t care if you fuck her and every other person in this school, but how dare you, how dare you, cut me away from everyone else in this mountain while you dip your dick with anyone you please! No!” she shouted, slapping at him with hand and head together (and this time, she even saw him wince). “I’ve come back to you and come back to you for Connie’s sake, but I won’t be your dog even for her!”

“My dog is just what thou art at my command!” he bellowed back at her. “To stand when I will it, and heel when I will it, and lie upon thy bitch’s back when I will it!”

Her temper was right on the edge of flying out in killing chaos, and his was nearly a mirror of it, once again lit up and showing every vulnerability with burning clarity. Seeing that, knowing hers must be doing the same, Mara wrestled her emotions under control once more.

“I came here to fuck you just now,” she said, only said. “But you’ll never touch me again. I’ll make you kill me first.”

He recoiled.

She moved past him and out of his theater.

He didn’t follow, but not even the sealing of his doors behind her could muffle his roars or the red light of his rage in the Mindstorm.

*          *          *

She did not go to her cell, knowing that he would only look for her there, or send Horuseps to talk reason with her again. Rage was empowering. She wasn’t ready to embrace common sense just yet. So she did not go home, but deliberately lost herself in the lyceum, drilling herself deeper into the twisting tunnels without paying any conscious attention to which turns she took, until she was well and truly lost.

There she stood, her back against the rough wall, carefully stoking her anger to keep her at a high blaze.

She wasn’t jealous. She believed that. She really didn’t care if he was fucking someone else, and she knew perfectly well he hadn’t been living the life of an ascetic before she’d come along, but his arrogance, his proprietary arrogance, infuriated her well beyond the power of reason. Oh no, he’d make no more demands of her, there was an easy promise for him to make with Letha coming to him every day that she went out. And no, she wasn’t jealous. She refused to give him the satisfaction of that.

A lamp came on in the distance, filling the farthest hook of the tunnel with sickly yellow light. Mara raised her head and watched coldly, drawing back her mind like a bowstring. She honestly didn’t think it was possible to kill him…but she meant like hell to try.

But it was not Kazuul who lit the next lamp ahead of him and stepped nonchalantly into its glow. Neither was it Horuseps, hands raised in conciliatory peace and the light of weary exasperation swimming through his eyes. It was not a demon at all, and not a student.

It was a hound. Skulking low and copiously drooling, it came several steps toward her before it stopped. It growled once, panted, then pushed itself up on its hind legs, forepaws dangling, to howl at her.

“Ska. Ska shu’nodan. Thou pest,” Suti’ok grumbled fondly, unseen. “Thou biting flea. Always thee—”

And then he came around the corner and saw her as well. His broad smile slipped away. He glanced around sharply, then back at her, now frowning. “—to vex me,” he finished in a thoughtful tone. He put his hand on the hound’s neck and it dropped onto all fours, tongue lolling, to grin at her. “Mara. Thou art wandered to dangerous depths indeed. Come. Let me lead thee out.”

“It’s all the same,” said Mara.

“Truth, and yet, shouldst thou encounter some hungering thing, he that would mourn thee may seek someone at fault. It shall not be me. Fool of Suti that I am, low-bred and scorned by my brothers, still I know better than to walk on and leave thee here behind me.”

“I doubt he’ll mourn me long,” Mara said with a hard smile. She looked at him, ignoring the hand he stretched out to her. “What are you doing here, if it’s so dangerous?”

“I? I live here. Just beyond thee and to thy left hand, the first door past the third lamp is mine own.” His muzzle split in a wolfish grin. “I am among those hungering things of mention. Therefore, swiftly go, lest thou attract my ravening eye.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Then thou art a fool.”

“Am I? When you’re so much less than I am? You admit it every time I see you.” And she thought bitterly of Kazuul in the dining hall with his foot on her neck, Kazuul throwing Devlin down before the Black Door, Kazuul in his theater calling her his dog…Kazuul smiling into his cup while Letha slid sensuously down his body. No, she wasn’t jealous, but—

“Bow to me,” said Mara.

Suti’ok leaned back, his light eyes narrowed. He did not speak, but after several long breaths in perfect stillness, put his hands together at the level of his heart and coldly bent low.

“Not like that. The way you did before. On your knees.”

The hound sat, panting as it watched its unmoving master, and when Suti’ok at last swept back his long skirts and lowered himself to kneel, the hound rose up to dance. It laughed insanely while Mara and the demon ignored it, then dropped onto its belly and crawled up to rub its head on Suti’ok’s thigh. The demon placed both fists upon the damp stone floor and bowed low.

My dog…to stand when I will it, heel when I will it…

There was a powerful sense of vindictive pleasure in watching Suti’ok submit, but somehow, she could only think of Letha going slowly to her knees, the ribbon of her tongue trailing down his hard stomach while he smiled.

He made her promise to be faithful. He made her swear it with his foot on her neck and the whole time, he was fucking around. She wasn’t jealous, but she would not be humiliated, not by him, not by anyone. She was Mara, she was always in control…and she’d gone to him for a reason tonight, hadn’t she?

Mara walked toward him, stopping only when the hem of her gown brushed at his knuckles. The gown he’d given her. For all she knew, the gown he’d made for her. Dressing his loyal little dog.

She raised the heavy fabric, stretched out her bare foot, and Suti’ok wordlessly bent still further and touched his brow to her ankle. She could feel his breath against her toes, steady and deep and slow.

He was difficult to read, but one thing was certain: He wasn’t doing this because of Kazuul.

Mara pulled her skirts up around her waist. She didn’t think about what she was doing. Her heart still felt too hot and her mind sunk in some internal mire. She decided it must feel like being drunk, and she could understand for the first time the appeal if that was so. It was astonishingly liberating to be so freed from all sense of responsibility or consequence. Her body acted; she merely watched.

Suti’ok could hear what she was doing, but he did not move. The pale burn of his eyes bored over the floor, making the damp rock shimmer with reflected light. He did not say a word, although he knew that she was bare above him, bare to her belly and filled with rage.

“Kiss me,” said Mara.

She saw his eyeshine flicker, his glance darting left and right, a trapped animal seeking escape. Then he raised his head.

Mara’s neck beneath Kazuul’s foot and Letha pouting on his lap. Morality did in fact begin to pale.

The hound watched incuriously as its master rose onto his knees. Suti’ok touched one hand very lightly to her hip, the other encircled her thigh. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips firmly to the crown of her sex.

That was all. She could feel him breathing, and through his steady hands and unswerving touches, felt his mind leaping without thought, knowing they might at any moment be discovered. Then his mouth parted. His tongue slipped between the folds of her labia, snaking down to penetrate her, and then up again to tease at her clit. He sucked it between his lips with a ragged groan, and Mara shut her own eyes, breathing just a little faster as he serviced her.

Several minutes must have passed, uncounted by either of them. The hound dozed at Suti’ok’s side, whining now and then to protest this delay, but the demon was lost inside his own skin. Every thought that escaped his strange mind was devoted to her—her bittersweet taste, the silken feel of her petals against his tongue, the firmness of the thigh beneath his hand. He moved his mouth on her with great passion, but without urgency, drinking from her as from a cup and savoring every drop.

“Lie down,” said Mara, breaking the trance she held him in.

He dropped back upon his aching knees, passing a hand before his glazed eyes in something very like horror. Now he thought of Kazuul.

“Get on your back,” Mara ordered, and put her foot on his shoulder to start him moving.

He went, not quietly but trying to be, and the hound came up at once to lick his face and shiver adoringly. “Away with thee! Ska!” Suti’ok cried, and slapped his hand across his face, raging, “Would that thee had come at me with daggers!”

Mara pulled her robe off and dropped it. She rested her foot on his chest briefly, feeling each ragged rise and fall of his breath, and then stood astride his arching neck and knelt. He caught her hips, brought her back to his hungry mouth, and ravished her while she undid his belt and brought his rigid cock free. He groaned into her when she took him in her fists and that was the end of his restraint. With every breath that came to him after that, he groaned louder and louder as she sucked and squeezed at him, until he could do nothing but toss on his back and buck up at her, filling even the sound-swallowing tunnels of the lyceum with his haunted, deafening roars. It was not entirely wordless; twice, she heard him bellow in that other unknown tongue, and once, she heard the meaty smack of his fist as he drove his obsequious hound back, shouting, “Away, I say! Away, thou cur! Always thee to vex me!” but the rest was tortured wolfsong.

Finally, she rose up, ready to take him and ride him to the completion she had denied Kazuul, not because she was jealous, but because it was what she wanted and no one controlled her.

“Nay! Pray God, nay!” Suti’ok snatched at her, dragged her back and thrust his mouth against her in something like desperation. His arm cinched tight around her waist. With the other, he plunged two long fingers into her and pumped them fast.

She came, and, “Nay,” murmured Suti’ok, suckling and savaging at her as she slowly relaxed into his grip. “Hold thy killing will, I beg thee…hold…show some mercy.” He worked her to a second climax, a third, and finally, falling back with an anguished grimace, released her to take himself in his fist and join her in the last. Her ears rang with his hoarse howls. The hound, sulking a short distance away, added his madhouse baying to his master’s cries, then came sidling over for praise.

The demon, sweat-slick and thoughtless, reached out to catch the beast before it could insinuate himself between them, but rubbed the thing’s head with despondent affection. He did not open his eyes, even when Mara stood up and stepped away from him to dress, but he did mutter, “He’ll kill me,” in a low and emotionless tone.

Mara adjusted her gown, thinking of Kazuul and Letha. “You all promised not to kill each other.”

“So we swore, not he. And thou art his beloved prize.”

“His property!” Mara spat, and the hound shied back with a nervous snarl. “And never again!”

Suti’ok opened his eyes and looked at her. Slowly, he sat up. He stared for a long time without expression, and then gathered his loincloth around himself and began to fasten his belt. He did it all without speaking to her.

“I don’t intend to tell him,” she said, her cheeks burning.

He still did not reply. He stood up, summoned his hound with a low word, and finally faced her. “I have seen ages enough that the rivers of my youth hath worn great chasms in to the Earth,” he said, “and never have I been used so well…or so cruelly. Thou hast proved thy bloodline beyond all doubt and at last exceeded mine every expectation of thee.”

He bowed to her again, his back stiff and eyes snapping, then called his hound and left her to find her way out alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

She went back to her cell. It was someplace to go, someplace to sit and stare and try to feel nothing. She was there when third-bell rang, sitting on the side of the bed she’d made, and she was there when the bells rang again, warning all the students to return to their cells. The blister-lamp in the hall faded now and then, as irregular in its habits as the shadows that moved across its face. She tapped at it without moving and the light came back, allowing her to clearly see all the nothing surrounding her. Her red robe and all the extras Devlin had brought were gone, and the comb Desdemona had given her that day in the bath, Devlin’s cup, the chamberpot, all gone. Even the Transmuted sand had been scooped out and carried away by some scavenging student or another.

She could Transmute more. She could Malleate herself a new cup, a new comb, and for that matter, a table, a chair, and a statue of Atlas shrugging off the world, but who cared? This wasn’t really her room. She wasn’t staying. Not here, not with Kazuul, not at all.

Kazuul. She’d thought enough about Kazuul. Mara closed her eyes and turned her mind inward before the anger could come back and ignite the embers that always seemed to be burning in her these days. She didn’t want to think about Kazuul, she wanted to find Connie. But one was as frustrating as the other, wasn’t it?

Never mind. She had exhausted her limited imagination as far as the search went, but the search wasn’t everything. She pushed it all aside now and focused instead on the next step, the last step: How to get out.

It was a comforting thought, and if it was less about taking Connie away than leaving Kazuul behind, so be it. At least it didn’t make her angry. She was so tired of always being angry.

How was she planning to leave, anyway? She’d made it out as far as the pblister-lamportcullis before. She could do it again, Malleate herself an opening, and climb down the way she’d come. There might be nephalim on the mountain. If she believed Kazuul, there surely would be, and they’d be the starving, savage reavers. She hadn’t been able to sense it, but she guessed she could kill one. As long as they didn’t overwhelm her—

Mara looked back bleakly to that grueling midnight climb and tried to imagine it again in the snow, every hand- and toe-hold coated in ice, with Connie perhaps clutching at her all the way down, and suddenly a reaver leaping out of the howling wind. Who was she kidding? She’d have two or three seconds to regret her decision as she plummeted to the ground, and maybe a few fragments of dying thought before she went to the place all would-be wizards and orange cats ultimately go.

Where then? Behind the Black Door, presumably, there lay some safe passage down and out of the mountain, but the Black Door could not be opened. Not by her, at any rate. It might be possible for her to tunnel under or around, but Mara was not so unimaginative that she couldn’t picture those black fireworks spraying out of the wall or the floor as lethally as they had from the door.

Perhaps there was a passage leading to the garden from the kitchens. Those doors weren’t much different from the ones on the students’ cells, and she’d only have whoever or whatever worked on the other side to deal with. Of course, assuming she survived that fight and found the passage, where would it lead but up to the top of the mountain, not the bottom? She’d still have the climb to deal with, and the weather, and Connie, and the reavers.

Maybe she could find the source of water that flowed through the garderobe and follow it out.

She thought about that, picturing in perfect detail how it would be to kneel beside the foul opening of the garderobe and Malleate it wide enough for her and Connie to drop through.

Ugh.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe everything dropped into a river and was carried right away.

Maybe.

Why the garderobe, Mara wondered suddenly. Why not the baths? The water poured through that room too, and it was a hell of a lot cleaner when it passed through those vents and away into parts unseen. Why did her mind always go first to the garderobe?

Because of the sound it made, she realized. The water fell into the bathing pool and out through the overflow vents, which sounded like nothing but a channel to take the water away, but what fell out of the garderobe fell into someplace big. Not just a cistern, but a room, maybe. And where there was one room, there could be others.

That was something worth investigating.

She really, really didn’t want to crawl through a latrine tonight. That she was considering it at all seemed to her less of a plan than a rare moment of regret. She’d probably set the Master of the Hounds up to receive a spike through his chest, but that was no reason to jump in a puddle of shit.

Probably. There was an interesting choice of word. There was no ‘probably’ in what she’d done with Suti’ok, no blurring of possible outcomes, no spreading of blame. The whole reason she’d tried to put Devlin at arm’s length had been Kazuul’s possessive temper. She didn’t mind so much using that temper against Argoth for feeling her up under the dinner table, but what had Suti’ok done except turn the wrong corner to find her in a bad mood?

It was the first time she’d ever used sex as a weapon, and for that matter, it was the first time she’d ever aimed any kind of weapon at a man just for screwing around on her. On the contrary, a man who didn’t believe in monogamy was prime meat when Mara went prowling. There was never any annoying clinging-on or awkward attempts at meaningful conversation with that sort, just sex.

“I’m not jealous,” Mara muttered, and no, she wasn’t, but she was fairly annoyed with herself. After all, what difference did it make in the matter of the ultimate goal who Kazuul slept with, as long as he still wanted her? Wasn’t the whole damn point keeping his good favor so that she could find Connie? Wasn’t she supposed to be willing to do anything to keep it? And if she wasn’t, well for God’s sake, what did you call that but jealousy?

“Go away,” Mara said loudly, alone in her empty room.

Horuseps opened her door anyway. He looked around at the cell as he pushed it gently closed behind him, and then he folded his hands and offered her a smile. “You’ve made some changes since last I was here. Very well done.”

“Since last you were sent to extort me back to him, you mean.” Mara gave him a hard stare. “Has he decided to put me in chains after all?”

“He doesn’t know I’m here.” Horuseps seated himself beside her, crossing one leg gracefully over the other in a distinctly feminine fashion. “I doubt he’d approve if he did. You left him in something of a passion, I’m told. I’m sure he thinks you’re apt to leap on the first man you see and take the most petty possible revenge.”

The demon chuckled while Mara stared straight ahead and said nothing, did nothing. The cell was larger than it had been, but was not big enough to smother her silence. Horuseps quieted, ran a finger along one of the seams of his armored leg-plates, and finally sighed.

“We can only be what we are.” He glanced at her. “I said that to you earlier.”

“I remember.”

“It’s very true, you know.”

“Are you going to tell me it’s just Kazuul’s nature to be an unmitigated ass?” she asked sourly.

He looked at her, both eyebrows spiking straight out from his head, and then laughed. “No,” he said finally, still smiling. “I can honestly say that I would never dream of telling anyone that. But neither is it in his nature to refuse or even question the tribute that is offered him. And it is very much in Letha’s nature to offer such tribute, particularly when she feels threatened. She will always use her body before she bares her claws.”

“I don’t care if she fucks him,” Mara insisted, no longer absolutely certain this was true.

Horuseps smiled at her. “Make up your mind, precious,” he said, not unkindly.

“What I care about,” she said slowly, “is that he fucked her.”

They sat together in silence that was not quite quiet. She could feel him thinking about what to say next, stirring through arguments like they were pebbles in his tombola, hoping for one to shine out brighter than the rest. It had to be the truth, that was the unpleasant thing. It had to be the truth, because she was well beyond the point of forgiving a lie.

“Would you like to hear something funny?” Mara asked.

He gave her a cautious look. “All right.”

“From the day I met him, I knew better than to ever be with him,” she said. “When he told me to come back that very first time, I knew to stay away.”

Horuseps shrugged one shoulder and nodded.

“But he kept after me and kept after me…so I gave in, hoping he’d get what he wanted, and even if I didn’t get anything in return, at least he’d leave me alone. And I guess he did, but only because he was too busy mutilating anyone he thought could come between us. That’s a bad sign in any new relationship,” Mara said dryly, and Horuseps smiled. “But I went back to him. I went back so that he could call me names, call Connie names, and run me out of his room laughing at me, and I never should have gone back again, but…you convinced me. You really are good at that.”

Horuseps rolled his hand modestly through the air, then patted her knee.

“So I went back. But I wasn’t abject enough in my devotion, and he was forced to humiliate me over dinner. I never should have gone back after that, and I never would have, if I hadn’t gotten hurt. He seemed to think that looking after me gave him the right to keep me, and when I walked away, he went after Devlin.” Mara glanced aside at her empty bookshelves where Devlin had put her food. There was nothing left now, of course. Not even crumbs. “I don’t care how many days of lessons the man missed, that was still a dirty trick. Was it your idea?”

“Mine? Oh dearest, no. I tried to talk him out of it.” His hand was still on her knee, telling her it was the truth. He rubbed it back and forth in a distracted sort of way, then noticed what he was doing and took it back. “I might have had some success if only you hadn’t let him sleep with you. Honestly, Mara.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“I thought…if I could show him the boy was gone…” Horuseps shook his head. “But you let him in your bed, and that was all the unmitigated ass would hear.”

“So he called a tribunal and he made me choose between watching a man get disemboweled or going back to the man who could think that choice up. And I…I went back to him. I went back and I stayed with him, in spite of everything. And if you look close and squint your eyes…” Mara demonstrated, stone-faced. She wasn’t good at making jokes. “…you can sort of see a pattern forming.”

Horuseps raised his eyebrows slightly, tingeing the Mindstorm with very very cautious encouragement. “Does that mean you’ll be going back?”

She shot him a dark stare. “What it means, precious, is that much as I’d love to tell you he’s made a fool of me for the last time, I am confronted with the inescapable truth that he never made a fool of me without my help. That’s an ugly thing to sit with in the dark for as long as I have today.”

“This is starting to sound less and less like acquiescence,” Horuseps remarked, still smiling.

“I had just begun to come to terms with the idea that all he wanted from me was sex. Well, he can get that from anyone, clearly. He can get it from her.” Mara’s lip curled on its own. She smoothed it out with effort and was calm. “Do you know what he told me when I walked in on the two of them? Do you know what he wanted his last words to be in that fight?”

Horuseps took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I suppose you’d best tell me,” he said.

“He called me his dog.”

The demon raised his hand, made half a fist, then opened it again and covered his eyes. Whatever emotion there had been at the start of that gesture washed itself out in a wave of rueful humor. “No, he neglected to mention that.”

“He made such a big goddamn deal out of my not being his whore so that he could call me his dog.” Mara thought about that, rubbing restlessly at the lip of her empty bed. “That makes sense, in a way. You have to pay for whores. You can kick dogs for free.”

“Oh Mara.” He sighed at her, then reached and brushed the back of his glass-smooth hand against her cheek. “He does want you back, bittersweet.”

“I don’t care,” she said, “about what he wants. I have reached the point where I don’t even care what I want as long as he doesn’t get what he wants, can you understand that?”

“Oh yes,” said Horuseps, almost laughing, but not quite.

“And he says I’m not going crazy, but I have had—I have embraced—the very irrational thought that while I’m still not willing to leave this place without Connie, I would cheerfully make him mad enough to kill me if it meant he’d never get to fuck me again.” Mara shook her head, marveling at these words just as if she hadn’t been the one to speak them. “Have you ever heard of the Stanford prison experiment?”

“No.”

“In 1971, some professor of sociology on the other side of the world used college students to prove that monsters breed in dark places.” She frowned. “There was more to it when Devlin told me about it, but that’s the gist of it. Not exactly shocking, is it?” The lamp in the tunnel began to dim again. Mara watched the light fade through her narrow cell window. “People are so full of dark places,” she said.

Horuseps glanced around. The lamplight flared and shone out more brightly. He looked at her again, head canted, thoughtful. “I’m listening.”

“I know you are. That’s probably the most dangerous thing about talking to you. I’m going to tell you one more thing, and then I’m going to ask you to leave. I could make you,” Mara said calmly, “but I’m just going to ask.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I’m going to tell you about my father,” she went on, “because he has been the thought that kept coming to me as I sat here being angry at Kazuul, and I think I mentioned that I don’t, generally speaking, think about people.”

“You did.”

“My father had a way of looking at women, you see. He didn’t hate them and he certainly didn’t love them, he just saw them differently. He fucked a lot of them, but by the time he got around to fucking them, he almost didn’t have to anymore. He already knew he owned them.

“This was the thing his girlfriends never understood about him,” Mara said, looking back through the Panic Room at the girls—and there had been so many girls—pulled over the years from Cade Warner’s unguarded mind. “Some of them slept with him because they thought he’d advance their careers and some because they thought he’d give them nice presents, but all my father wanted was sex, and he knew he was going to get it pretty much as soon as he met them. They were his dogs, you see, even if he never thought of them in precisely those terms. They came when he called them, did the tricks he taught them, and when he was done, he left them by the side of the road and got himself a new dog.”

“Dear child, no—”

“One of them tried to sue him after she realized she wasn’t getting promoted like she’d planned,” Mara said, watching that stolen memory play out across her internal monitor. “My father destroyed her case in court, and then fired her, and then made sure no one else would ever hire her, and then he had her beat up a few times, and then he never thought of her again. Not with guilt. Not with pleasure. Not at all. She was a dog. She bit him. He put her down.”

Horuseps bent his head. His pale hair fell across his face, hiding his expression from view, but she knew that he was listening. He was always listening.

“Lots of girls told my mother about the affairs,” Mara said, shrugging. “She cried, but she never talked to him about it. She used to hire girls to take care of me, knowing he’d end up fucking them, and when he did, she’d cry and fire them and hire a new one for him. It was annoying to have to live with that, but there wasn’t any point in getting angry at her. In getting angry at either of them, really. He saw them all as dogs, you see. Not just pets, but dogs. Do you know what sets dogs apart from every other domestic animal?”

“They want to please their master,” Horuseps said quietly.

“That’s right,” she said, looking at him. She hadn’t really expected him to answer. “They don’t always know how, but that is all that they do. They want to please their master. And a dog doesn’t care whether he’s a good man or not, just like a dog doesn’t care if you pet it or kick it. A dog will always come crawling back.”

Horuseps started to say her name again, then simply closed his mouth and waited.

“You’re very handsome when you don’t smile,” she told him, frowning into his solemn face.

“I know.”

“Do you think of me often? That day on the stairs?”

“Yes.” The question provoked no surprise in him. The answer was no lie.

“I don’t,” she said, and looked back at the lamp light. “I never thought of my father as a bad person. I still don’t. He was true to his nature, just the way you say. He had hundreds of women during my lifetime, and hundreds more before I knew him, but he never once took a woman and turned her into a dog. They did that themselves. I’m doing that…myself.”

Mara got up and opened her cell door. She turned around, holding it, bringing the lamp in to shine its sickly light everywhere but on Horuseps himself. The demon remained as pale and pure as moonlight. “This is not a calm and rational decision,” she told him. “I’m aware of that. But I’m not going back this time. When I walk out of this mountain, it will be as Mara as not another in a long, long line of dogs for Kazuul to fuck and forget about. I’m ready to die if I have to, but he’s never touching me again. The Stanford prison experiment is over. Now please leave.”

Horuseps sat for another moment or two in silence, his eyes glittering with movement, and then he sighed and stood up. “It’s been a long time in coming,” he commented on his way out, “but that might actually put him in his place. Then again, it might bring him here in a murderous rage. We’ll have to wait and see. But there is just one thing I would like to say, child, and I ask that you hear me out.”

Mara waited while Horuseps bent his head, selecting his words with great care. When he had them, he didn’t look at her, just stood in the passage with water dripping onto his shoulder and lamp light bleeding all around him. He said, softly, “You seem to expect our lord to show you something akin to patience and respect after his lifetime of conquest and devotion, all without the inconvenience of reciprocating it. And when he isn’t abject enough in his devotion, you walk away. And when you do go back to him, it is for sex. Not for the presents he could surely give you, and not for the power he would willingly lay at your feet, but only sex. And so it occurs to me, precious, that you are very much your father’s daughter.”

“Is that all?” Mara asked stiffly.

“Yes. I’ll leave you be, if you like, although you’re welcome to call on me at any hour. I miss you.”

He walked away without ever looking at her again. Mara stood there long after he was gone, and when the blister-lamp again began to die, she let it and just went in and shut the door. She lay down on the hard stone floor beside her empty bed and put herself to sleep. She didn’t think about anyone and she didn’t watch her dreams.

*          *          *

First-bell woke her, just as it always did. She stared up into the absolute black of her cell until the bells rang again, then lit the lamp outside with a thought and got up. She didn’t see the point in searching for Connie, but she had nothing else to do.

She was recognized when she came out into the ephebeum, not with surprise as much as alarm, although they all remembered to bow. Some of them had stripped her cell, after all, but she didn’t try to fool herself into thinking that was why they were all looking at her the way they did. They’d thought she was gone for good when she went away with Kazuul, that they’d only have to avoid her from time to time like any other Master. They didn’t want her living with them anymore. Rejection didn’t hurt…but something did. She went to the garderobe to pee, stood awhile over the hole, and then went upstairs.

The lyceum emptied when she entered, students bowing themselves back into the Nave and avoiding her eyes as they hurried away. Mara glanced upwards as she crossed to the small pool, but the winding stair was empty, even at the very top. She wasn’t sure what she expected, really. It was early yet. Kazuul might still be taking his first meal—

Mara cupped her hands under the icy spray that poured from the wall and splashed water over her face. She didn’t care what Kazuul was doing.

A sharp whine drew her attention. She looked up just as Suti’ok stepped out from one of the tunnels and onto the stair. He glanced down in the worn, incurious way of any man walking home after a difficult day, and saw her. He stopped, and so did the four hounds following at his heels, but the one at his side came trotting forward, grinning nervously and arching its long neck as it came down the steps to meet her. Mara put out her hand just as though it were a strange dog she expected to sniff it. The hound rubbed its cringing face over her palm and then rose up on its hind legs to laugh its high, crazed laughter and dance its strange, shuffling dance.

“Ska!” snapped Suti’ok. “Nodan! To me, thou rogue!”

The four hounds behind him dropped and lay flat. The hound gamboling for Mara merely laughed again, eyes rolling happily in its misshapen skull.

“Always thee,” he muttered, and started stomping down the stairs as his rebellious hound dropped to rub himself back and forth against Mara’s thigh.

“Did someone die?” Mara asked. It was all she could think of to say.

“Aye.” He scowled at the hound who only now came scampering back to him, then at Mara as she too came up to meet him. “But not thy Ka-nee.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aye, for t’was the unfortunate favorite of Letha’s harem. ‘A small matter,’ she said to me, but who would have thought so small a matter to have so much blood in him?” He gave her a sour glance as she fell into step beside him, but that was all. The laughing hound squeezed itself in between them, panting and drooling and licking at one or the other of them as it kept pace. It wasn’t long before Suti’ok thawed enough to stroke its horrible head, and to grumble, “Her chambers, rank with sex and blood, hath required my hand since moonrise. T’was as if she painted it all solely to see me at labors. Such are the amusements of the high-born.”

He said this last without looking at her, but with pointed bitterness. She couldn’t read him, but didn’t need psychic powers to know he wasn’t just talking about Letha anymore.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” she said finally, not looking at him.

He barked laughter at her like a blow. “Nay! What pangs of conscience are these? Thou didst press me to thy will more deftly than any of thy kind before thee. T’was near an honor to be so plied, and for certain t’was a pleasure. Takest thou satisfaction of it, for thou hast learned in so short a time to kill with thy lips…and with thy cunt. Letha herself could do no better.”

That stung. “No one has to know,” she said.

“Tis already known,” he shot back scornfully. “Not even thou art fool enough to believe otherwise, surely. It taketh but one human—one!—whose unguarded mind might carry our tale and t’was carried far.”

“But—”

“‘Where took thou thy clay-born pleasures?’ she said to me.” Suti’ok gave Mara a withering glance. “‘Whose bitter waters didst thou sip, and from what stolen chalice?’ Then she left me to clean the leavings of her envy, and if she did not go then to drip her honeyed poison in our lord’s ear, I know not where.”

He threw an especially black stare at the ground then, and Mara realized they had come to the scene of their shared crime. The hounds, every one of them, slipped aside to sniff and lick along the stone where their Master had lain, but he moved on without stopping.

“Why art thou shadowed at my side?” he demanded, summoning them back with a few curt gestures. “Thou art in no danger, and I would not defend thee from him e’er thou wert.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Mara said, and it may have still been the truth, but it had a mechanical feel.

“Nor shouldst thou be, yet I cannot fuck him to forgiveness, so pardon me that I do not share thy courage. Vraka!” he spat suddenly, sending his hounds skittering back, unnoticed. “I dared to think thee might be different, but thou art proven the daughter of thy line, and I curse the day—”

He stopped—his feet, his words, his thoughts. He stood rigid at the open door of his theatre for a moment, no more time than it took her heart to beat once, and then the Mindstorm came alive like lightning and struck her with all the unreadable force of his emotion. She staggered, catching at her head. He ran, and he screamed as he ran, and the sound was worse even than the hammer of his thoughts had been: “Ah God, let it not be!”

Mara straightened up, her head throbbing with cast-off horror, fear, and pain. His hounds huddled together at the doorway, but none of them crossed the threshold, and even his laughing rebel crouched low, shivering in the intensity of animal confusion that easily turned to attack. Mara stepped forward and Suti’ok let out a wordless, keening howl, and whether they moved for her or for him, the hounds sidled back and lay still. They watched, whining, as Mara moved among them, but she too stopped at the threshold.

She stood stunned, not so much by the sight as by the sound. What she saw littering the gore-slick floor could not have been much worse than what she’d left in the ephebeum the day of the attack—a dozen bodies, maybe twice that, skinless and twisted with the agonies of their death-throes—but it was not until she also saw the demon on his knees, weeping as he clutched one to his chest, that she really knew what she was looking at.

She was pulled forward, feeling no emotion apart from freezing disbelief, her bare feet taking her across the sticky floor to the nearest corpse. No flayed and contorted student after all, but dead all the same, its throat torn open by one deep, sure stroke of a clawed hand. The hound’s jaws gaped. Its tongue, swollen and black, lay like a slug in a puddle of clotting blood nearly the same color as its lifeless hide. Elsewhere in this chamber, Suti’ok wailed and wept, badly unnerving her. Death was everywhere in the Scholomance; mourning, unknown.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and was disturbed to realize she was. She touched the hound and felt it cool and wet as clay, unpleasant to feel.

“Sorry?!” the demon choked, and raised his head to stab at her with his eyes. “Thou art sorry? What is the blood of nephalim compared to thine enjoyment? Nay! Thou hast had thy game of me! I’ll give thee nothing more and no forgiveness!”

“I didn’t know—”

“Lying bitch!” He struggled to his feet with the body hanging from his arms. “Didst thou think he would come for me as he did for Horuseps? Nay, how could he stab me deeper than this? Than this!” He looked down at the dead hound he held and folded over onto his knees again, pressing his face to the bloody gash in the creature’s side and sobbing.

Mara backed away, unable to combat this battery of grief and pain. She’d never known how to deal with that, even when it came from humans. To feel it now in demonic force was an assault upon her senses. She owned this too, every bit as much as she owned nine deaths in the ephebeum, but by God, she wasn’t going to own it alone.

She started out walking. She started cool, calm. She started that way, but there was blood on her hand where she’d touched the dead hound, blood on her robe where she’d knelt beside it. She walked faster and faster with the stink of death in her nostrils and by the time she was halfway up the lyceum’s spiral stair, she was running. She ran, even down the unlit stairs to his bedchamber, returning to Kazuul as blind by rage as she’d been on leaving him, and when she reached the bottom, she seized a chunk of stone from the doorway, made it malleable even as she pulled it free, and threw it all in one furious movement.

The stone sailed across the cavern and cracked into Kazuul’s shoulder as he stood brooding out of his aerie. He whirled, roaring, blasting her with psychic shockwaves powerful enough to knock her sprawling, but then saw her and drew back, confused.

“You son of a bitch!” she shouted. “Do you think I’m impressed? Do you think I’m scared?”

He glanced back at the rock she’d thrown, baffled but restrained, and came a step towards her.

“Don’t you touch me! You’re a thug! You’re a murdering thug!” She yanked another missile out of the floor under her hand and threw that too. He slapped it aside, his head cocked, frowning. “You think you can scare me because you can kill his children!?”

His eyes dropped to her hand and flared. He came for her fast then, seized her wrist, and licked once at the bloody stain. His grip tightened. He spat, released her, and was gone in a bang of imploding air.

Mara gaped at the place where he had just been standing, then scrambled up and raced back out the way she’d come. She couldn’t catch him, she knew, and couldn’t stop him even if she could, but neither could she just walk away from the events she kept stupidly setting in motion.

Down through the lyceum, shoving students out of her way, Mara ran. The sound of Suti’ok’s howls could no longer be heard, not even when she could see the lights of the killing chamber. She burst in, certain of what she would see, and saw instead Kazuul kneeling beside the same dead hound she had. Suti’ok was still there, cradling the same limp body, watching with silent tears streaming from his eyes as Kazuul inspected the wounds.

Mara stopped again in the doorway, breathing hard from fury and exertion. They must have heard her, but neither demon spared her a glance, and she backed up, unsure of herself. Kazuul’s hand was at the hound’s neck, and his hand was much, much bigger than the marks left from the killing claws. One of the survivors brushed at her hand. She patted it without thinking and the other three pressed up close.

“What would thee have?” Kazuul asked finally.

“My sons, alive again!” snarled Suti’ok. “Nay? Then give me blood for blood, one death to answer every unearned death around me!”

Kazuul grunted and let go of the dead hound’s neck. Its head smacked wetly back onto the floor and he stood up. “What within my power?”

“Within thy power? Nay, within thy whim! Offer just what thou wouldst give, naught! I know better than to expect justice for the low-breed from thee!” Suti’ok spat, and groped to pull the dead hound more fully into his arms. “Whenever have I protested the offenses in which I am mired? How many centuries have I swallowed the souring of high-born insult and never vomited it out at thee? Thou hast made my sons hounds and set me among them for the sin of my bloodline, to wallow with them in blood and ignominy, and now! Now I have not shown enough shame to suit thee and so thou wilt murder them to teach me humility!”

“Thou wert not the target of this attack.” Kazuul looked Mara’s way, his expression dark and distracted. The hounds pressed themselves to the ground and slunk away. “Dispose of thy dead. Tend to thy living. Take no further vengeance in this matter.”

“I’ll take it and be damned to thee!” roared the other, tears dripping from his wolfish jaws like drool. “Let my accursed line end here if it be so much a burden to thee! I did not offer thee my oaths to see my sons made prey for the high-born!”

“Thou hast served me well all these years,” said Kazuul calmly, walking toward Mara and the door. “Trust me now to serve thee.”

Suti’ok bared his fangs furiously at Kazuul’s back, then looked around him, beginning and ending with the body in his arms, and his hatred crumbled. Kazuul caught Mara’s arm in a hard grip as the other demon’s sobs rose up to fill the air. They left him weeping, his clawed hands gently moving over the dead hound’s face, trying in vain to close the glazed and bulging eyes while the surviving nephalim came to press their shivering sides against him and add their voices to his howl.

Kazuul did not speak to her, not one word as he climbed three levels of the lyceum and then turned aside. His grip was molten iron, burning through her robe. His step was quick and sure. He was not in the Mindstorm. He was calm.

Letha had two students with her upon the dais, amusing herself by watching them pit Allure against one another. Flushed and straining and struggling to hold on to heterosexuality, the two men battled motionlessly and in silence, the only ones who failed to notice when Kazuul burst in through the open doors and gave Mara a shove to one side. They remained staring glazedly at each other when Letha looked up and saw him.

A thousand emotions crossed that perfect face. Not one of them was guilt. She settled on an expression of lazy indifference and watched through cat’s eyes as Kazuul descended the risers. “My lord,” she murmured, and smiled in welcome.

He slapped her.

Students got up and streamed very quietly out the door, all but the two upon the dais, ignoring and ignored by everyone.

“Serpent of the tree!” spat Kazuul, and slapped her again when she tried to speak. “Obscene stain! Unclean thing!”

Letha’s lips were bleeding. She stared at the smears this left on her trembling fingertips—like drops of pure silver over her bronze skin—and then at him, in shock. “Whenever didst thou make law it were forbidden to slay nephalim?”

He thrust a claw to her face, very close to her innocent eyes. “Mind thy words, or blood for blood, I’ll feed thy own, newborn and bleating, to the hounds thee left living.”

It was not possible for Letha to pale, but she grew very quiet all at once, all affectation gone from her posing. She stood small in Kazuul’s shadow, her beautiful quills flat to her body, and watched him pace around the staring students and back to her again.

“A cunning ploy,” he said, calm once more. “One I was never meant to see. Never would the son of Suti dare my chambers to cry the evil to my face. And never didst thou imagine she would.”

Letha’s gaze flicked to Mara, stabbing at her for a split-second of hate.

Kazuul smiled coldly. “Aye. Straight to me. To revile me for my murderous will, as fearless in her fury as thou wert craven.”

Letha blotted her lips, shrugged one rounded shoulder. “I throw myself upon thy mercy, o master, as I perceive ‘tis useless to protest in the presence of thy pet.”

“Again,” said Kazuul, his eyes narrowed, “or I shall give thy fate unto the hands of Suti.”

Letha sent another furious, fearful glance toward Mara, and then, shivering under Kazuul’s steady stare, she lowered herself to her knees. “My apology, lord.”

“Lower. On thy belly. Show me the scales of thy true form, viper.”

Her breast heaving, Letha bent and finally lay flat. The acoustics of her teaching hall brought her broken whisper easily to Mara’s ear, one word: “Forgive.”

Kazuul studied her in silence as time crawled and the two students stared each other down. At last he crouched, his claws relaxed between his bent knees, his head on one side. “If I must lose one,” he said quietly, “I would rather preserve the faithful low-born than the treacherous high. Hear me very well.”

“I hear thee, master,” Letha whispered.

“I will cast thee out into this changed world.”

“Forgive, I beg thee.”

“I will never have thee back.”

“O my beloved lord, I have offended thee and do repent.”

“To wander, as the mother of thy line was cursed to wander, or die as she ultimately died, the slave of Man.”

“I pray thee, forgive the foolish and indifferent act of thy most loyal servant.”

“Thou hast killed my last affection for thee,” said Kazuul and stood. “Make apology to him whom thou hast harmed, and manufacture some sincerity for if he demandeth it of me, he shall have thy half-born daughters from this day onward. Aye,” he said, as she clutched at his ankle with a wail. “To slake his throat with blood or to catch the dead seed of his surviving sons, I care not. They are nephalim and deserveth my love no better than their duplicitous dam.”

Letha shrank back, shivering, and Kazuul kicked her outstretched hand away. “Forgive!” she cried as he walked away. “Upon my hands, I beg thee! I beg thee, o lord!”

Kazuul took Mara by the arm again and brought her with him out into the hall. The theater doors closed behind him at his gesture, cutting away Letha’s pleas. He stared straight ahead for a long time and finally faced her. “Why didst thou assume t’was my vengeance?” he asked quietly.

Mara pressed her lips together and shut her mind to him.

He looked away. “So.”

“Am I supposed to fall upon my hands next?” she asked, feeling her face burn. “Or do you want to wait until there’s another audience before you step on me?”

He said nothing. He was calm.

“I’m not sorry,” she insisted.

He reached up wordlessly and carved a line across his heart. Blood poured, slowed, and soon stopped, but he left the stain on his breast. It gave her no pleasure to see it. If anything…it hurt.

“Return to me,” he said at last.

“Why should I?”

“I forgive thee. I forgive even the son of Suti.” He shut his eyes briefly, opened them without expression. “Return.”

“And if I don’t?”

A hint of frustration marred the careful quiet of his mind. “Did I not keep every trust to thee? And didst thou not swear to me thy faithfulness?”

“I was as faithful to you as you were to me,” she shot back.

He spat out a snarl, started to stalk away, and then rounded on her and came back. “T’was not my bidding brought her to my chambers!”

“Well, you sure weren’t bidding her get her tongue off you either! I came back to you, Kazuul, and you let her put her hand up your skirt, so don’t you talk to me about faithfulness!” Now it was her turn to walk away, and just like him, she swung around after only a few steps to shout, “It would have been Malavan if I could stomach the thought of him! It would have been anyone as long as it wasn’t you!”

“Thou art mine,” he said, burning his stare into the wall above her head. It was not an argument as he said it, not a weapon, but an implacable statement of fact. “Lie down where thou wilt, thou art ever mine.”

“Watch me walk away,” she hissed, and spun around to do just that.

There was a flat snap of collapsing air behind her and suddenly he was in front of her, catching the neck of her gown in his fist and pulling her violently forward into the light of his furious eyes. “Thou art mine,” he said again, softly and with dangerous intensity. “I am thy lord, thy mate and Master! I am the sovereign god of all this mountain! Thou hast not a breath upon thy lips nor free thought behind thine eyes thou owest not to my benevolence!”

“Ha!” she shouted. It was the best she could do.

His lip curled. He released her with a shove. “Thou hast sundered mine oath to thee,” he said. “Yet I do forgive thee, and press thee not for what easily I might take. What further proof wouldst thou have of my love? Return to me.”

“Never!” Mara shouted, vaguely aware of how ridiculous that had to sound against his quiet voice, how she had to look facing up against this hulking, bone-studded, utterly self-assured demon. There were lights flickering all over the Mindstorm now; students and teachers together coming out of their theaters to watch this lopsided melodrama play out, and still she could not control her stupid mouth. “Get yourself a new dog!”

He thought about that, his toe-claws gouging at the ground. Then, warily: “Demandest thou…some apology?”

The offer struck her like a slap. “I don’t believe anything you say,” she managed, backing away from him.

“I have been too long in my solitary habits,” he said, advancing on her. “Forgive me, o my beloved. Say that thou dost forgive, as thou art already forgiven. I cast out words I do not measure, but I would not hurt thee for all this Earth. Not for all the kingdoms of Men nor even the love of God.”

“Shut up!” she shouted. “Shut up with that! Just stop it!”

Kazuul stopped. He stood tensely, watching her shake on her feet and glare at him, and then, slowly, he lowered himself to one knee. Students crept closer, demons drew back, and Kazuul only knelt and reached out his empty hand. **Return,** he sent, piercing her rising panic with his calm, determined thoughts. **I shall forsake all others if thou wilt only return.**

His open hand mesmerized her, eclipsing all other sight, all other thought. His open hand, and how it would feel wrapping around her own. His strength, his heat, his stone-rough skin. His forgiving hand.

Mara’s bare foot struck a jut of rock. She stumbled, stared at him, then turned and ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

He could have found her if he wanted to. She kept away from her cell, and never stayed too long in any one place, but she always seemed to come back to the lyceum in the end. She could have called it her search, but she knew better. She’d run from him and now she was hiding, and as much as she hated herself for both, she knew he could have found her easily. But why should he pursue her when all the mountain was his trap?

Too often during that long day and the day that followed, she found herself at the foot of the winding stair, searching the heights of the lyceum with her eyes and her mind, but he was never there. He tortured her with his distance, tortured her with the memory of his damned hand. Nothing he’d done yet had been half so chilling, and she didn’t know why. All she knew was that it didn’t feel like just forgiveness in that outstretched hand, it felt like finality. She could step up and meet him shout for shout in even the worst of his rages without hesitation, but she shrank from him quiet on his knees, and she feared his open, empty hand.

And still he left her alone.

When last-bell rang on the fifth day, she went to her cell to find a deep drift of furs and blankets waiting in the middle of her bed, as well as a golden platter overfilled with roasted hawk set in a ring of glazed fruit and stuffed with fragrant bread and onions. Never in a thousand years, Horuseps had said, so she supposed she knew who she had to thank for fine food now…but the fruits were apricots.

It didn’t matter. She was hungry. She ate and then she slept. She dreamt of Kazuul and Connie both, and woke not knowing which one she wanted anymore.

There was a new gown laying across the foot of the bed when she woke, and pot of tea beside her on the floor, still warm if not still steaming. And her cup, the cup she’d last seen sitting before her throne at Kazuul’s table, waiting beside it. Mara dressed, drank, and left her cell.

The dining hall was predictably filled with noise. She let it lead her in as far as the doorway, where she stood and watched students shove, slap and throttle each other for a handful of cold, greasy gruel. She realized in a distant way that it didn’t even disgust her now, no more than watching pigs at a trough. It wasn’t like looking at people, not even starving or desperate people. They were different somehow. Or she was.

‘Welcome,’ thought Horuseps. She saw his silhouette raise a hand and beckon to her. ‘We’ve saved out a seat for you.’

Malavan’s seat, he meant, empty since the night she’d first stolen it, but that had been a very different night.

**Everyone will see,** she sent, and felt the demon smile inside her mind.

‘Would we be showing them anything they have not guessed for themselves?’ he asked, his thoughts like gentle, stroking fingers. ‘You ordered them to their knees for you, precious, and they knelt. You can never go back among them now. Come, and take your place among us.’

She knew it. She’d had days walking to and from her pillaged cell to feel their watchful eyes and unquiet thoughts, their human dread of an inhuman thing.

Connie would feel the same way, eventually.

Kazuul wouldn’t.

Mara retreated, one hand gripping at her head as if she thought she could reach in and pull her confusion out. She walked, not seeing where she was going or who she passed, until she looked up and found herself halfway up the winding stair in the lyceum.

Halfway to him.

“No,” she said, because if she didn’t say it, she was going to shout it. There was no psychic seed in her, no demon’s trick to bring her in under his dominion. There was no reason for her to be here!

She made herself turn around, plunging blindly into the tunnels that opened off the lyceum’s central cavern. She knew she’d go if he came to her again, but she wasn’t so far gone that she’d go crawling back.

Not yet.

The tunnel was empty, dark and still. Her questing hand found a blister-lamp bulging out of the wall. She lit it with a tap of mental effort and took her bearings, such as they were. She could see only two theaters as the passage stretched out into blackness, and both doors were closed, either against the hour or against students of insufficient skill. She was alone for the moment, alone with its sickly yellow light.

She had nowhere else to go, nothing to think about. It was easy to become fascinated by its not-so steady glow, by the shadows that seemed to drift inside it, by the sheer incongruity of its very existence. She approached it, touched it, and was again vaguely repelled by the weirdly plastic feel of its bulging surface, by the elasticity it seemed to have when she pressed on it just a little.

What were these things anyway? It was one thing to say, ‘Oh, it’s magic,’ but she’d been here long enough to know that even magic followed rules. Nothing—with the possible exception of the Masters themselves—was truly supernatural, even in the Scholomance. However fantastic things seemed on the surface, they were all rooted in reality. So what were the lamps?

If they only glowed, she’d have never paid them a second thought. She was familiar with the concept of phosphorescence, even knew it could a natural property of certain minerals, so why not here? Magic would then explain how those minerals could have been collected into a single lump, focused as it were, and shaped for aesthetic appeal. End of mystery. But the lamps didn’t just glow, did they? They were dark where the halls lay long empty or unused; they gave off warmth, but only a little; they flickered.

It was the flicker that bothered her the most. That deepset, arrhythmic flicker, caused by the shadows moving just under the surface, not often and not always in the same way. She tried to puzzle out just why this bothered her, and saw only the slow opening and closing of a dead man’s mouth.

Second-bell rang, ending the breakfast meal. The hall stayed empty. There were never enough students to fill it. Unless, she supposed, they were all called out of classes to watch someone graduate. Or die.

Alone, unwitnessed, Mara stroked the ugly swell of the blister down to where it met the darker rock. She ran her fingers along that seam until she reached the underswell of its lowest point. There she picked at it, glanced once more at the empty tunnel, and finally spoke the Word of Malleation and pulled the rough stone back like wet clay.

There was more of the blister underneath. She guessed she wasn’t surprised. There would have to be a rim of sorts under the rock in order to anchor something of the lamp’s size, to keep it from dropping out and landing on some hapless student’s head. The parts of the lamp meant to be buried did not glow, but it was the same sallow color, had the same sick-smooth texture. All of that, yes, but the shape of what lay beneath was not a logical extension of the round bulge above it. Rather, it was a lumpy mass, wrinkled, distended, and thickly creased down the middle. She found the edges at each side, but the bottom of the thing just continued downwards into rock, gradually tapering and smoothing, but always with that central groove at the point of symmetry. Soon, she was on her knees and still searching for the place where it ended. It—

Mara’s mother had taken her on many outings as a little girl, in part because her innate indifference to those around her made her seem quite polite and civilized to the sort of people her mother associated with. When other little girls had gone on playdates for tea parties, or tried out for soccer, or just gone to the movies, little Kimara had been dressed in scratchy, miniature cocktail gowns to attend theatrical debuts and gallery openings.

It was a gallery opening she remembered now, filled with up-and-coming artists whose work often defied description, yet which was still somehow easily criticized and priced. Mara, left to her own devices, had gone quietly around the room, studying each piece on display as she sipped her ginger ale, and had been quite taken by a series there—a string of black-and-white photographs of commonplace objects, magnified out of all recognition. This colorless rainbow, a fingernail. This ocean of alien pods, the inside of an orange slice. She’d looked so charming there, with her little fluted glass and her serious frown, that her mother had offered to buy her one, and Mara chose the last of them: a heavily-shadowed mesa rising over a pock-marked and hostile landscape, which had in fact been an erect nipple. When the artist, whose bitter commercialism appealed to her precisely because he didn’t bother to disguise it, asked her what she liked best about the piece, she’d honestly answered, “It’s ugly,” a reply which made print in the next day’s Arts & Leisure section of the city newspaper, and which caused the artist himself no small amount of private joy.

That print still hung in Mara’s bedroom and she still studied it upon occasion, and found new ugliness to ponder, and that print was what she thought of now as she realized she was looking at the grossly distended chest and belly of a man, a man whose shrunken genitals and dangling legs were exposed by her curiosity, while his arms and face remained gloved in the enclosing rock, a man whose beating heart and torpidly drifting blood showed only as a flicker through the lampshade of his skin.

“What have you done?”

Mara stumbled back and was shouldered roughly aside by a squat, powerful body. Malavan threw her a scathing glare as he spat out the Malleating Word, doing what he could to knuckle the rock more or less back into place with his two, over-sized fingers. The harder he worked to restore the cave wall, the clumsier his efforts appeared.

“Where is she?” Mara asked hoarsely.

“Little fool! Get back to your—”

“Where is she?” She grabbed him, yanked him away from the lumpy mass of leg and stone he was attempting to marry, and shook him in the air. His teeth snapped together on his own tongue; blood sprayed her face in sputters. “Where’s Connie? You take me right to her, right now, or I’ll kill you!”

His fingers were too long to get at her crushed up close like this. She could feel his limbs battering at her shoulders, but the distraction was negligible. He kicked at her, toe-claws tangling in her robe and shredding it open. If they’d been longer, or perhaps only sharper, the moment would have come to a swift and nasty end. As it was, Mara swung him around and beat his squawking, draconian head against the wall beside the petrified man’s glowing belly until he stopped. Malavan opened his mouth—Mara felt the Word he meant to shape flashing star-bright in the instant before he spoke it—and she closed it for him without thinking, smearing his features together into a mute, grotesque muddle. She did it while screaming Connie’s name at him. She did it without a Word of her own, but she would not realize this until much, much later. All her attention was directed on Malavan, on beating the truth from him. She did not know that people were pouring into the halls, drawn by the commotion. She did not know anyone at all was there until the hand closed around her throat.

Another caught Malavan around his scrawny chest, prying them apart as impersonally as if they were squabbling dogs. Malavan was then flung to the ground and Mara given a good, crisp shake.

“Kill her!” Malavan sprang up, carving at his face with both fingers to make a bleeding mouth for this strangled command. His skin was blotching up with crimson, putting his emotions on display for anyone to see. “Crush her! I’ll eat her guts!”

“Thou wilt do nothing, thou worm,” Master Ruk said calmly. It was his hand, Mara realized, and when he saw that she knew him, he placed her on her feet and released her. “Thou knowest well our lord’s law.”

“She struck me!” the smaller demon shrieked, shiny red and actually pulsing with the intensity of his rage. “She made blood in my mouth! My face! She used arts on me! Kill her! Kill her or I will!”

“So it may someday pass that all the worlds are made barren, save for Man and lessers such as thee, vermin. Until then—” Ruk swung one elephantine foot and knocked Malavan solidly into the wall. “—know thy place. Mara, child, no student may ever strike a Master.”

“Where is she?” she shouted at him. “Where is Connie? Don’t you lie to me!”

Ruk glanced at her hands, drawn into fists and raised against him, then reached out in a distracted manner and smoothed stone over the exposed legs of the dead/alive man in the wall. “Thou hast misunderstood the import of what thou hast seen.”

“Don’t you bullshit me, I’m through! Give me my Connie!”

Ruk heaved a breath that almost seemed a sigh and lifted his gaze away from her. “Leave us, all of thee,” he said meditatively, and Mara was very vaguely aware of a shuffling sound as the hall emptied of what few students had been drawn by this outburst. “And thee, worm. Lick thy wounds elsewhere.”

Malavan hissed, running both claws rapidly over his face. He could shape it no better than he could the wall.

“Leave,” Ruk rumbled, now fixing a narrowed and faintly-glowing eye upon his fellow demon. “Or I will finish what she hath begun.”

Malavan limped off, muttering threats and sneezing blood. Ruk watched him go and when they were quite alone, he turned back and gazed at Mara from his great height, unmoved by her anger, thoughtful. Then he reached out, took her wrist, and bent to touch her hand to his brow.

Contact brought her to him, and deeper still, because he had opened for her, opened wide, so that all his unnatural honesty came screaming out of him. “Demon, so humankind hath named us, yet we are not of the making of Man’s great enemy. We know no devil, have dwelt in no hell save this of our own devising. Souls are of no value to us, nor virgin blood, nor hearts, nor hope, nor flesh of any kind. Yet one of ten we claim and this even thou hast agreed to.”

“I don’t care!” Mara tried to yank her hand back, but Ruk held it fast in his grip, holding her to him, pinioning her with truth. “Take me to Connie, right now!”

“Those we cull serve the Scholomance,” he said, gazing into her hot, furious eyes. “In this way, in many ways. All who enter here accept this price.”

“You tell me where she is!” Mara stopped struggling and dug her fingers in like claws, binding her will to him and honing it for attack. “Or I’ll kill you!”

He did not flinch. He didn’t doubt her, either. “Thou hast seen how few daughters of the line of Adam come to us. I would have marked it if such a one had passed the threshold in recent years. There have been none in the three prior to thy coming. If she entered here within that time, then here, surely, she remains.”

He was telling the truth.

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?”

“Just resting.”

“Ah.”

He was quiet. She could feel his gaze lying warm over her, feel his thoughts like gentle touches across her shuttered mind. In those touches, she felt nothing of the Scrivener, or Malavan, or anything at all except her and how she was here, she was beautiful, and she was his.

“Do you forgive me?” she asked sleepily.

“Aye,” he answered, and bent to press his hot mouth to her naked throat. “For thou art returned, and so do I readily forgive thee, aye, and even he.”

It took her several long seconds, fading in and out, before she understood him. She laughed a little, as much as that hurt. “Not for that.”

His drew back, confusion rippling through the Mindstorm. “What further offense hast thou?”

She laughed again and closed her eyes. He leaned against the bed beside her, gradually becoming lost again in the sight of her until his mind came back to enfold hers, caressing and consoling her. “But I guess I am back.”

“Aye.” Satisfaction added thunder to even this quiet voice. “To thy lord and master.”

“I want a bath,” she said, and looked up at him calmly. “Draw me a bath, Kazuul. We’ll make love in the water.”

His brows rose. “Make love?”

“You can pretend it’s fucking if you want,” she mumbled. “We both know better.”

His brows slowly lowered again. “Is this not confession that thou dost love me also?”

“I love,” said Mara, “the idea of love. Isn’t that what you said? But I’ll never have it and never truly understand it. I’ll only have heartless sex with you and slumber parties with dumb little girls who wish they were magic. Let me go, Kazuul. Draw me a bath. We can fuck in that nice warm water and both of us pretend that it’s still a game we’re playing and I’m never going to kill you.”

He was quiet. His hand continued to rest easy on the headboard. His thumbclaw stroked slowly up and down the skin below her bound wrist.

“It’s almost over,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Aye,” he said quietly.

“Then let’s make a memory. It doesn’t have to be all bad, does it?” She looked at him. “It’s good to see you,” she said, and meant it so much it hurt. “It’s so good to see you. Draw us a bath.”

The green of his eyes could never be warm, but it could be calm. Mara lay quiet in that glow, not tense, not conspiring, but just quiet, inside and out. She wanted him to see her sincerity when he looked inside her mind, but he never did. He only touched the bed and pulled her bindings back into the headboard. He bent and kissed her—a strange, awkward sort of kiss, close-mouthed, almost chaste—then turned and walked away. He looked around at his chambers, heaved a toppled column out of the general debris, and began to knead it out of shape.

Mara rolled onto her side and shut her eyes. She remembered the effort of that little movement being devastating to her the first time she’d landed herself in Kazuul’s care. Now it gave her no more than a momentary dizziness, perhaps an extra-loud thump in her chest, and that was all. If she’d wanted to, she could get up and leave right now. She’d probably only need one rest on the way out, one more night of good sleep, and she’d be back to normal. The next time she killed someone, she probably wouldn’t even black out.

Kazuul worked, minutes or hours, she didn’t care. She heard him moving broken stone around, heard water trickling and then pouring down, heard his voice in low rumbles of arcane speech now and then, but eventually he returned to her side. He gathered her into his arms without bothering to see if she were even awake, and carried her across the room. She heard his feet splash into water. A moment later, warmth enclosed her. He eased his grip, setting her afloat in a hot pool. Her robe soaked up the heat and then lay heavy over her, clinging to her hips, breasts, and belly while exposing her legs more and more. Candlelight glittered in the water, reflected ripples up over Kazuul’s chest and onto the ceiling. It was very quiet.

Mara closed her eyes, relaxed, let her arms and legs do what they wanted. It had been a long time since she’d done this: just been in her body. Every sound seemed overloud, clarified. Every small sensation—the chill of wet cloth over her nipples, the lapping of water at her sides, the tickle of the fine hairs along her brow—all of it, so perfect, so fundamentally necessary. She was not unaware of Kazuul sharing her bath, but he, like every other minute detail of this moment, contributed to its perfection.

Her head tapped up against the side of the bath. Mara reached back her arms and anchored herself, then stretched out a foot, seeking Kazuul. She found his thigh, hard and budding with bone, and followed it up over wet layers of leather and metal to the solid slab of his stomach. He cupped her heel, let her flex her clawless toes against his skin, then moved it aside and stepped between her legs, spreading them wider as he pushed her robe up around her hips. He bent, holding her lightly in the weightless space of the bath, to suckle at her breast, drinking from her waterlogged robe.

It struck her like lightning, overwhelmingly erotic for no obvious reason. Certainly, he’d mouthed her before, and while pleasant, it had never been like this. But now, adrift in the dark womb he’d made for her, seeing his mouth work and hearing his strong, steady swallows, Mara let herself go to electric arousal.

Her back arched, pushing her breast into his mouth. Her knees bent, not locking around his hips, but cradling him between her thighs. The water skinned between them, intensifying each touch, amplifying each sound. It was good and it was gentle. It was almost like real love.

Kazuul began to move, rubbing hip to hip in long, slow strokes, miming the act of sex in every way save the most essential. The rough leather and shaped metal of his loincloth, made slick and warm in the bath, became her lover. She moved with him, welcomed every shiver and bloom, and thought of nothing but what was here and now.

He moved down, kissing and tonguing at the curve of her ribs, the cup of her navel. Down, into the water, submerging without a sound and only a brief dance of waves. She opened her eyes, but saw only candlelight. There wasn’t even a shadow to suggest him, nothing but the tangible truth of his mouth pressing at her sex, his tongue flicking at her clit before sliding deeply into her. And oh, it was good, it was so good.

Her legs rested on his shoulders. Her bare feet stayed flat and gentle upon his back. She could feel his muscles bunch and coil as he toyed with her. She left her eyes open, watching light play water-games over the ceiling, and came without artifice or sound. Again. Again. He didn’t need air if he didn’t want it; he breathed only her and breathed deep. She kept her hands on the rock behind her, made no demands, gave no guidance, and came for him.

**Am welcome?** he sent to her, kissing her inner thigh.

**This once,** she sent back, stroking her foot down his back. **Just this once, make love to me.**

Last-bell rang, resonating in the water like whalesong. Kazuul rose up, kissing and biting his way back to her breasts as he worked himself free of his sparse clothing. She heard the subdued clank as his heavy belt fell to the bottom of the bath and then his hands were sliding under her hips, tilting her up to receive him in one long, powerful thrust. Water splashed in a hot tide over her chest, falling in streams over her throat. He growled once, contented, and set a slow, purposeful rhythm. Each stroke rocked her up against the side of the bath, but the abrasion was not entirely unpleasant. She let go to reach for him and he shifted her fully against it, pinning her, suspending her. She wrapped her arms around him; he mirrored her. Scarcely moving at all, he ground into her, shaking the water around them in tiny, furtive laps. Now and then, he stole a nip from her jaw or her neck, but mostly, he just rested his chin on the crown of her head and rumbled his growling sounds of pleasure. The thumb-sized growths of bone budding along his sides perfectly cradled her. The small horns curving down from his jaw fit easily around her head.

Mara snaked a tendril of will out between them and sank it into him, unnoticed. His mind, even now not entirely unguarded, was as still and peaceful as her own. He thought of nothing on the surface, remembered nothing, and intended nothing but to be here, to savor this, to have what love his kind were allowed, now, and pour himself into her womb at last, completing them.

Mara came again, sighing. She turned her face into the hollow of his throat and hugged him just a little tighter. He growled her name. She nodded, an acknowledgement he could feel, and kissed the skin above his pulsing vein. Then she ripped her way into his mind, paralyzing his will, and took his body for her own.

For an instant, she was him, deep inside her, and she was her, wrapped fast around him. She moved together, and the sensation was dizzying in its beauty, the poetry of its perfect unity. Then she pulled out, gripped his/her cock and came in a short splash into the bathwater. She let go then—too tired to hold on anyway—and fell back into only her body as Kazuul retook his with a roar and leapt free of the bath, water boiling to vapor in the air as it fell from his body.

She sagged back, looking up at him, at the light dancing in ripples over his body, at the fury and the fire in his eyes. “I know what you want,” she told him wearily. “And you know what I want. But it was almost like real love. Thank you.”

Then she let go of the stone lip and sank down into the water. Her hair floated up like beds of kelp, like mermaid hair, like torn curtains in a demon’s lair. The water was warm and deep and quiet. She dozed, thinking of Connie. He left her alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

She stayed with him longer than she had to and neither of them talked about it. It had taken days to recover from the attack in the ephebeum, and she could remember spending much of it falling in and struggling out of the empty blackness of coma. This time was easier. Once awake, she never entirely lost herself again. She could watch the sun move across the sky when Kazuul had the aerie open and count the days as they passed by. She ate the food he brought her (all but the meat), drank whatever was in her cup (all but the broth), and felt herself grow steadily stronger. She could have left him on the third night, but she stayed, and when she sank down into the blankets to sleep on the fourth dawn, he came to the bed and lay down beside her.

“I’m leaving you,” said Mara, her eyes closed.

“Never,” he murmured, brushing the loose strands of her pale hair back from her brow.

“Tonight.”

“Thou art as much mine as I am thine. Thou wouldst as soon sever from thine own limbs.”

She didn’t argue with him, but just withdrew to the Panic Room and watched her body succumb to sleep. It was going to be tonight. She’d had time enough to think about it as she pretended convalescence, and she thought she knew where to go. She thought she’d known for some time. She looked into the monitors and saw nothing but her sleeping self, free of pain or frailties. She was ready and it was going to be tonight.

There was no time in the Panic Room unless she counted it herself. She rested, watching dreams in the monitors and her own sleeping face in the Mindstorm as Kazuul watched her. His thoughts were, as always, completely closed to her, even when he brushed his hand across her skin, but suspicion had a way of bleeding through even his self-control and she sensed none of it now. As close as he ever came to peace, he was there. And she was ready.

Mara rolled her body over without waking it up, turning it into the hot mountain of Kazuul, lying beside her. He grunted when she brushed against him, but let her stay close. After a deliberate span of time had passed, she pulled herself away, and as predicted, he dropped an arm around her and brought her back, nipping gently at the high curve of her shoulder. She gave him a few minutes to watch her sleep, then used their shared touches to creep in through the cracks in the fortress of his mind, stabbing herself deep into his brain. His bellow of alarm came out as half a second’s gurgle, and then he sagged limp and heavy as a corpse, snoring.

Mara came conscious and heaved his arm off. She found her gown on the floor and dragged it on, testing at the sleeping demon without bothering to look at him. She wasn’t sure how long he’d stay out and she didn’t trust him to have a sense of humor about it when he finally came around. It didn’t matter, really. She’d be gone by then, with any luck. Gone with Connie. Ten feet out of the mountain was probably further than he’d ever go to get her back. They’d be safe.

But she looked back from the stairs. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t like there was anything to see. Broken columns, tattered curtains, an empty bath, and a bed where Kazuul slept his unnatural sleep. Still, she lingered.

No amount of distance or nostalgia could ever make this place pleasant to recall, but even she had to admit it wasn’t all bad. The horrible parts vastly outweighed the rest of them, but here at least, there was a kind of acceptance for what she was. She didn’t have to hide it. She could, in fact, play with it, study it, push it to its limits. She’d never have that again and she supposed she’d miss it now and then.

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.

She felt damned.

Devlin flailed on top of her, choking and clawing blindly, until a second creature slammed into her from the side, its teeth savaging her shoulder. Mara dropped into the fetid swamp and came up retching in a tangle of fighting, snarling monsters. A third banged into her from behind, knocking her into a monster’s bucking back and nearly into Devlin’s snapping jaws. The third pounced again, crushing her in the middle of the mess, humping hard at her even as he savaged her robe in his effort to get at her flesh.

Mara lashed out in all directions with a mind-slap, to no response. They ignored the physical pain of combat and they ignored her. All their thoughts were red with blood. Nothing penetrated.

A Word. Mara made the monster under her hands malleable and pulled his upper jaw over his head, cementing his skull to his spine. She shoved him down into the muck. With no mouth to close, it filled itself with cess in a single sick gulp and dropped away, madly thrashing. Now she fell forward, driven down by the pumping, biting weight of the thing on top of her, kicked and battered by Devlin as he hunted for his adversary. ‘His power, not mine,’ she thought, and tried to focus. Blood to salt, she willed, and reached back to slap a hand against the thrusting flanks of the monster that rode her. It was her Word, but his energy that fueled the Transmutation, and he scrambled away in the next instant, ripping up the air with animal shrieks. The others fell on him in a frenzy, leaving Mara to stagger up and away, both hands before her, searching for the wall.

She tripped over the dead thing she’d drowned and went down again, came up puking so violently she nearly blacked out, and folded onto her knees. Furiously, she ducked to the Panic Room, pulled herself back to consciousness, and dropped back into the body before it lost its balance. She came to in time to see a monster slam into her, see the teeth that closed over her face. “Bone to blood!” she screamed, and the bite that should have taken her eye and opened her skull instead became a sluice of hot, coppery gore. The creature dropped, mewling. Mara climbed over it and banged into the wall at last. She could hear the fighting sounds turn to feeding and could only hope that was it as she worked her way noisily around the perimeter, because she didn’t have it in her to turn around and look.

Her head smacked stone before her hands found the jutting lip of rock that marked the threshold. There were no stairs. Even from the Panic Room, it was impossible to chin herself up. Mara stripped away the saturant weight of her queenly gown and tried again. She got her arms up and her breasts, badly scraped, then hung there, gasping. One of her kicking feet brushed the slimy back of a prowling creature, but it passed on, fed now and complacent. Nevertheless, its unexpected pressure gave her the adrenal boost she needed to heave herself up onto the landing, where she huddled small and panting, until her pulse slowed to something approaching normal.

A door. There was a door. She touched it, found it dead/alive like the doors in the Oubliette, and ordered it open. Light rushed in, and like every other hero ever to escape Hell, her eyes rolled back and she looked behind her.

Devlin floated face-down in the cesspit, still weakly undulating the best he could without bones, the brown tide of swampy shit slowly closing in over that white, happy, cheering bunny tattoo.

Mara tumbled backwards into the room behind her and kicked the door shut on the horrors of that place. She wasn’t going back that way and she didn’t care anymore what the alternative was. Even lost and suffocated in the heart of the mountain would be better. She’d get over it someday, she guessed—she got over everything—but right now, today, there simply better be another way.

Light, golden and guttering, surrounded her where she lay on the floor. The lamps of the Scholomance, responding to her presence here, came to life, revealing more of the simple room she inhabited. She stared around at it dully as she gained her feet. A part of her had hoped for floors tiled in human bone, perhaps walls pulsing with veins, and writhing tentacles dripping down from the ceiling—the true face of the Scholomance, in other words, the blackened bones beneath the flesh. But if anything, things were plainer here, with straighter edges and brighter light. It looked disturbingly sane, far more so than the school above her.

But there was a series of shallow pools cascading in a fountain down one side of the room, and a little dish of perfectly recognizable soap beside it. Doubtless there was always some backwash when the demons threw another monster into the cesspit. Mara limped over and began to wash, leaving scummy footprints behind her to dry on the stone. There was no sound but the playful splash of water. In the Panic Room, no flash of color interrupted the murky clouds of the Mindstorm. She would seem to be alone. For now.

Her skin scrubbed raw and red with cold, Mara replaced the soap and moved away from her bath. Almost directly across from her, on the other side of this well-lit space, was a wide stairwell leading up into darkness. She tried to think of where it must lead in relation to the garderobe beside her, but all she could picture was the Black Door. She could go up and look at it to be sure, but standing here, realized she didn’t need to. It all made no difference now.

Several tunnels led out from this chamber, none of them marked in any special way. Mara chose the one nearest to her, leaving a sudsy puddle on the stone where she’d had her bath. She could have Malleated the floor up to swallow it, and perhaps she should—she hated leaving so obvious a trail behind her—but her power was finite, and the end wasn’t yet in sight.

The lamps continued to light up as she moved into the tunnel, illuminating the passage to a deeper and deeper degree, until it seemed impossible to her straining eyes: miles long and still growing, a funhouse reflection, pocked with seemingly hundreds of narrow doors shut against her. Cell doors, with slivers of windows to ventilate them for their unknown prisoners.

Mara went to the first of them, feeling through it as best she could. Something was in there, sure, but like the creatures of the cesspit, ‘something’ was the best that she could do. She took her pulse, found it slightly elevated but essentially okay, and put her hand on the dead/alive door, bracing herself for a fight. It opened readily at her command, and Mara looked inside.

A face floated in the darkness, a face just at eye level, staring back at her. Naked breasts and a moon-white torso hovered in the black.

“Connie?”

No response. The mind within was no louder, no more aware than the door itself.

Mara shifted to one side, trying to let a little more light in around her. She thought at first the person in the cell might be wearing boots and gloves, then realized the person was as naked as she herself. The illusion of clothing was due to the fact that the person’s arms and legs were sunk in stone. Neither was she—for it was definitely a she—standing up as she’d first appeared. Instead, she’d been suspended atop a kind of cradle, her hips and back supported, her thighs spread wide. There was a pisspot between them now, but that clearly wasn’t the primary reason for her position. The woman was pregnant.

Mara eased a step inside the cell and reached out a hand to touch the hard-swollen belly. Something inside moved. Squirmed. The woman’s eyes slowly blinked but did not focus. She was gone as far as she could go while anchored here in stone.

How many cells were there?

Mara backed into the hall and looked again at double rows of doors stretching out to eternity. Realistically, she knew the depth of the hall to be deceptive, that there could not be more than a hundred, maybe two hundred doors, and certainly she had no reason to suspect a pregnant prisoner behind each one, but—

She moved on wooden legs to the next door and opened it on a swollen stomach and pendulous breasts. It wasn’t Connie either, but neither was it wholly human anymore. The fundamental factor, the living mind, the human soul, had been shut away as effectively as the incubator it inhabited.

No heaps of skulls. No writhing tentacles. But the true face of the Scholomance was just as ugly as she’d imagined.

Mara ran to the next cell. Then the next. And the next. Soon, she was careening wildly from one side of the hall to the other, ripping open doors and staring into the glazed thoughtless eyes of the woman trapped inside. She wasn’t really seeing them by the end, just their bellies. She didn’t tap at their emptied minds so much as stab at them with Connie’s name, demanding an answer that never came.

She reached the last door and stood shaking, nearly as numb to it all as to the chill of the mountain. They didn’t allow fornications between students. That made sense. They had to be sure, had to know the baby was their own if they were going to take the trouble to care for its mother. Because they were cared for, clearly. The skin she saw was smooth and free of sores, glowing with good health and excellent nutrition. They took away the hair, of course, hair being a nuisance to keep brushed and clean, but they did care for the body. Because it was making a baby for them.

She was still standing there, locked in these thoughts, when the hand closed gently over her shoulder.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Is she here?” Mara asked hoarsely. She did not look around. “Is this what you did to her?”

“I’ve no doubt we tried if indeed we brought her below.” Horuseps released her and stepped around to pull the door softly shut. “But is she? I honestly do not know. I’ve looked for her in my odd hours…so many of us have since your arrival…but there are a thousand doors, young Mara, and the faces behind them are not always what they should be. We have come to suspect she was caught out of her cell after-hours, brought here by one of the nephalim…precious, she could be anywhere.”

“This is the point, isn’t it? Every woman comes here.”

“Yes.”

“And every man feeds the school.”

“Yes.”

“There are no graduates.”

“No. Well, a handful, now and then. To keep our rumor alive. Solomon. Rangard. Von Brukenthal. No one of consequence.”

“One out of ten.” Mara shook her head. “What was the point of that? Why not make it free?”

Horuseps shrugged. “Humans have a tendency to disbelieve in the things which come without cost, even as they covet them. The idea of risk was essential to the lie.”

“Well, Connie’s leaving.”

“Yes.” Horuseps sighed and returned his hands to their usual resting place on his shoulders. “We’re all agreed to that.”

“And so am I.”

He gave her a crooked smile and said nothing.

Mara put her back to the wall and half raised her hands. Anyone looking at them might believe it a pose of badly-acted horror, but Mara was not afraid and this was not a defensive posture. “I really don’t think you can stop me, Horuseps,” she said.

“I’m quite certain I can’t,” he replied, still smiling. “In fact, I’m well aware that you could kill me without either hesitation, effort, or remorse. But you are not leaving this mountain, my dear, and truthfully, it is for the best.”

“The best?” Mara laughed, a high and humorless sound. “I’m sure you think imprisoning all these women and murdering all those men is for the best too!”

“It is.”

She laughed again. She had to. The opportunity to kill him hadn’t come yet.

“I’ll admit it’s only best for us, but then, we are no different in that regard from humans.” The lights in his eyes swung out into a starry ring, then drew together in a tight cluster. “Humans, who believed it was best the that other eleven tribes who shared this world should be eradicated so that their dominance might be assured. So great was this belief that they felt it best that there be a Devil named as our creator, a great master of purest evil, so that the religious hatred stirred against us never be allowed to die. Even today, five thousand years after the dissolution of the Twelve, the name of Horuseps is unknown and I am only ‘demon’. Demon! Who but Man in his arrogance would dare to name another disparate to the love of God?”

“You’re pretty sanctimonious for a guy who is mutilating, raping, and murdering people.”

“I haven’t always,” he said quietly. “But now I am the last of my tribe and my children are impure. I have not seen another face like mine in better than three thousand years. I think that I am doomed, young Mara, but perhaps I am wrong. There are seventeen females here seeded of my matings. I will not let loose even one of them while a chance remains, however slight, that I shall see another Horuspex.”

“Are you afraid I’ll tell your secret, is that it? You think if I leave, I’ll bring a new Crusade on you?”

“No.” He paused, his head tilting to regard her from a new angle. “No,” he said again. “But will you walk with me, child?”

“Where?”

“To the Hall of the Twelve.”

“Why?”

“Would you leave without seeing everything?”

“You’ve already said I’m not leaving. Why should I walk with you to my prison?”

Horuseps turned away as calmly as if she’d given enthusiastic agreement, and after a moment, her heart burning, she did follow him. He led her back down the hall, across the outer chamber, and down another stair, and when he reached the bottom, he raised his hand. Light came at once, from hundreds of lamps whose arms and legs and slack, dead faces had never been concealed, evenly spaced along a door-lined corridor that stretched out seemingly to the horizon. He glanced at her, started walking.

Mara approached the first door.

“They’re all the same,” Horuseps said, his voice floating back at her in echoes as he walked on.

She opened it anyway. She opened all of them. In every dull pair of eyes, she looked for Connie; in every stuporous mind, she searched for recognition. There was never any response, not even the faintest flicker from even one broken mind. Horuseps got further and further away from her at his same unhurried pace, until at last she stopped opening them and moved to catch up.

He put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t shrug it off.

“Are they all here?” she asked at last.

“In this corridor? No. It is only one of eight, although,” he said with a little wave, “we have only just begun to stock the eighth.”

“Stock.”

“Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as simple as looking for the newest acquisitions in the newest tunnel. They get moved around some, you see, as one or another of us take an interest, and they’re rarely put back where we find them.”

“How many are you keeping?” she asked.

“All there are. We do not allow them to die of age until their wombs have been exhausted. Those you see here have not been proved and likely never will be.” Horuseps shrugged. “Not every woman can carry our seed. Others might conceive of one of the Tribes, but not another. We really aren’t sure why this should be.”

“So you pass her around.”

“We do what must be done.”

“What happens then?”

“The breeding is difficult. Many terminate themselves unborn. Many more are born dead. Of those who draw breath…” Horuseps shook his head, fingers twitching on his shoulders. In his mind, he saw the black-eyed, white-skinned Hori, his children. “The Scholomance has stood more than three millennia, dearest one. We have seen eighty-two, true-born. The rest, all human or nephalim, useless to us.”

“I meant the women. What happens to them?”

“Ah. The women.” Horuseps gestured and opened a door without stopping. The blonde inside stared vacantly back at Mara as she passed. “If they are proved, if they can conceive of us, they are moved to the quickening chambers and bred to exhaustion.”

“Or to death.”

“If you knew their fate, why ask?”

“You deserve to be damned.”

His eyes flashed, bright enough to leave scars of color over Mara’s vision. Softly, he said, “If all there were within this mountain were to die, all this moment, all at once, still it would be less than Man himself kills in even one of your countries, on any given day.”

They reached the end of the hall and still no Connie, but here at least was another stair leading down, another place to look. Mara left the demon’s side, marching on ahead.

“There were twelve tribes who came to Earth in the first days,” said Horuseps behind her. “Man was neither first nor last, neither greatest nor least, yet he alone wrote the books of history. We are the broken tablets, The Lost Eleven, the tribes Man scattered. There.”

The stair opened and the lamps lit on a wide, perfectly round room, set with eleven symmetrical alcoves, with the stair to pair the odd man out. In each recess stood a stone statue in the shape of a different demon, and at the center of the room, taller than all of them, a man made of rock polished to a high silvery gleam, beautifully formed, his face lifted to the vaulted ceiling. Mara turned back, but Horuseps blocked her way, grimly staring her down.

“I don’t care about any of this,” she snapped. “All I want is my friend!”

“It costs you nothing to listen.”

“It doesn’t gain me anything, either!”

“So sure, are you?”

Mara snarled out a sigh and stomped down into the Hall. “Fine. Educate me. Hurry up.”

Horuseps bent low, courteous even now, at the end of it all. He waved to the first statue. “First to enter Eden was Lilith, progenitor of the tribe of Letha. Our Letha is all that remains.”

Mara dutifully looked. The statue did resemble Letha somewhat, about as much as she herself resembled the Statue of Liberty, except that there were a lot less teeth on the statue’s breasts and belly, and the long quills flowing down her back were more delicate, graceful.

“Then came the tribe of Golgotha,” said Horuseps, moving her firmly on to the next, where the spike-studded image of a Kazuul-like demon glared back at her. “Of whom many descendants linger on here, in the mountain. The tribe of the Horuspex followed after, and after them, the tribe of Zyeer, and of the Ochali. They were all made separate of each other, each to their own form and their own nature. Then came Adam.”

Mara looked again at the human sculpture standing at the heart of all these demons. Adam’s face, washed with reverence and adoration, gazed into the light of a blister-lamp. His hands, raised in worship, had been shaped with an eye for detail she would have thought could only come from a loving craftsman. Or, she supposed, a hateful one.

“After him, the lesser tribes: the Suti and the Shen, the Uulok and Belial, the Dal, and of course, the Malavanon. The world was big enough for all of us.” Horuseps seemed transfixed by his own image in its dark recess. He walked where Mara walked in the room, but his eyes were always on his stone copy. “I’ll not say there was peace between us, but certainly there was no war. We drifted apart, each to our own pleasures. We wandered. We made kingdoms. We found Gates where Adam’s line had opened them and we traveled across whole worlds. All was well with us.”

They ended up before the stair again, facing the silvery statue of Adam. Horuseps kept his hand firmly around her arm, but otherwise seemed calm, even very slightly pleased, as if her ill-tempered and impatient reaction were the very best outcome he could have hoped for…better, even.

“Fine,” she said now, tugging vainly at his enclosing hand. “I’ve seen it. I’m enlightened. Let go.”

“It was Kazuul who foresaw the inevitable end of things,” Horuseps said, not without a certain sense of irony. “And as most of our kind either fled to the presumed safety of other worlds or fought and died in the God-wars of Man, he gathered together his scattered tribesmen and conquered them. A necessary delay, for what he was about to put forward would require unwavering support and loyalty in the face of a shocking proposal: the building of what was to become the Scholomance.”

“What has this got to do with anything?” Mara exploded.

Horuseps patted her head as if she were nothing more than a little dog, barking about his ankles. “And while his people labored under the monumental task he’d set them, Kazuul set about a great journey, a quest if you will, to bring together in one place as many of the Eleven as could be found, and safely preserve them within his haven. It took many years, and many battles, but he refused to end his search until he had secured them all, even if there were only one—” His fingers stroked along his shoulder as he gazed at his statue. “—to be found.” He was quiet a while. “He suffered many wounds.” Another pause, a little longer this time, his manner introspective but never quite still. “I owe that great whoreson my life,” he said at last, still in the same serene tone.

“Horuseps, damn it, where is Connie?”

“Patience, sweetling. One small moment more. The greatest ages of all Creation are made up of the smallest moments.” He smiled at her, but wearily, then took a breath and went on. “When he had gathered all that remained of the Lost upon Earth, he brought us to this place, at the time the most isolated and inhospitable to Adam’s kind. He made us a mountain and a place of our own, and he made himself lord over it, and required that we all recognize his right to rule over us. Then he gave us three laws, and made us swear upon our own immortal lives to adhere to them, and we did, every one of us, and from that day unto this one, every true-born that comes to us has sworn as well.”

Mara swung around and tried to leave. He stopped her, his hand catching at her arm and shooting a warning bolt of pain deep into her bones, even as he bent his head in apology.

“We swore that we would never kill one another,” Horuseps said. “We swore never to use arts against one another for any reason. And we swore never to take a woman born of the Lost Tribes save by her consent. Even Kazuul made that promise, at Letha’s behest, else she and Zyera refused to join him and be made brood-sows for all the mountain’s lusts.”

“And how many humans did he force to take their place?” Mara demanded. “To service you and your poor, persecuted tribes?”

“None, at first. That was my idea,” Horuseps said calmly, tightening on her wrist when she jerked away from him in surprise. “And it was many centuries in coming. As for Kazuul, well, perhaps he believed that more of our kind would come when they heard of this place. I give him the benefit of that doubt, although none ever did. But between the two of us, in all honesty, I don’t think he ever gave the matter of breeding much thought. For his tribe, females just had a way of materializing before the strong and whatever else he may be, he has always been one of the strong. And when there were no females readily at hand, still there were always humans, and for a time, they were content to throw their daughters at us to keep us off their cattle, and I’m sure he made good use of them, and I’m sure that there were young.

“Can you not understand how it was for us?” Horuseps asked with a kind of exasperation. “Can you see that we never ate the fruit of Adam’s tree, we had never left Eden in our hearts? We did not mark the difficulties of breeding nor the quality of our offspring, but in innocence believed we could do what we pleased and never perish. We had been saved, and now, surely, our young would come again.”

“Through humans.”

“It was necessary,” Horuseps said.

“If you say so.”

“Our tribes were, as were all the civilizations of the age, profoundly male-dominated. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we have only Zyera and Letha, each the last of her kind.” He glanced toward the first statue. “Letha was quite right to fear subjugation. There were many, in those first years, who fell to the oaths they had forsworn.”

Mara felt a frown tickling at her lip in spite of her growing impatience with Horuseps and this whole stalling tactic of his. “Zyera…” she said. “Mother of the Scrivener…I assumed his father was human, one of the students here…but I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

“Very good,” Horuseps agreed with a nod. “It was Master Ochalis. It had to be tried, my dear. Everything, you see, had to be tried. But the result, the Scrivener…no, child. Further efforts to mingle the tribes were expressly forbidden by our lord and master, and we did not object very much. Humans are not the best solution—”

“But they’re the safest.”

“Yes! You do see!” In his excitement, one of the demon’s clutching clawless fingers popped through Mara’s wrist and stabbed down, scraping jarringly against her bones. He withdrew with a bow of apology, licking his fingers while she slapped a hand over the wound. “Or perhaps you don’t. I’ll try to make it clearer for you. God made the high tribes first, you see, and made us all differently.”

“You son of a bitch!” Mara hissed, trying to knit her damaged meat together.

“Then came Man, God’s favorite child, who may indeed have been made in His image, but whose image was greatly augmented by our gifts. For each king of the high-born gave at their Creator’s command to the clay of Adam’s birthing. Letha gave the pleasures of flesh, Golgotha gave strength and earthly power, the Horuspex gave intelligence and the ability to anticipate beyond the moment, and each of them gave something, but only to Man, not to one another.”

“What—”

“In the ages following Man’s birth, God set the lesser tribes upon the world, and built each in corrupted strain of Man’s making. The Suti, born of that pride which has perverted into disdain for all others. The parasitic Shen who devour the host that loves them. The vacuous, indolent Uulok, feeding upon the labors of others. And so forth, but all of them, these lessers, all were made of Adam’s line, Adam’s sins.” He swept one arm broadly back, his hand clenching in empty fury before the silver figure in the center of the room. “So are we all spokes of his wheel,” he seethed. “Denied our full birthright, denied the world we were promised, denied even the love of God, and now this. We are denied our continuation, but we will have it back and we will have it of the children of Men! The connecting line that God drew between him and every one of us, we will use to breed new life back into the Broken Tribes!”

“Why are you telling me this?” Mara asked, now rubbing at the blood left on her undamaged skin. “I couldn’t care less what you do here.”

“No?”

“In three thousand years, you said it yourself, you successfully bred, what? Eighty kids?”

“Eighty-two,” Horuseps said softly. “True-born.”

“So I imagine you’ve got quite a ways to go before you raise an army to take over the world or whatever the hell you’ve got in mind. As for the students you’re keeping, you know what, they should have known better than to expect a demon to give them a fair deal.”

“So true.”

“But I am for damn sure leaving and I’m taking Connie with me, so if you’ve got a point to make in all this, you’d better get to it.”

Horuseps pursed his lips slightly. “Again,” he said, “and for only the second time, you disappoint me. I truly believed you’d guess on your own.”

“Guess what?” she demanded, at the end of her patience. “I swear if you don’t start talking straight—”

“You healed your arm.”

“What?”

“You healed your arm.” Horuseps nodded at the bloody smear drying on her wrist. “How?”

She looked at it, baffled, than at him. “I made it malleable, of course. What in hell—”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“You didn’t…Weeping, creeping Christ, man! Make sense!”

“I did not hear a Word,” said Horuseps, enunciating very clearly.

Mara started to object and then stopped, confused. Had she said one? Horuseps waited, examining the nail-less tips of his fingers as she stepped back to the Panic Room and dialed through the last few minutes. She saw his finger punching down into her arm, saw herself staunching blood, mending veins and tendons, sealing skin. She never spoke a Word.

“No doubt you think this is nothing unusual,” Horuseps said when she returned. “That with true mastery of an art, every student achieves the ability to recite without consulting the page, so to speak. Not so. As I told you at the very beginning, magic eludes the human mind.”

“I’m not…not getting you.”

“It isn’t the first time, either. Stop and think. I’ll wait.”

Mara merely stared at him, shaking her head in spurts of uncertainty and frustration.

“No? You’ll have to take me at my word, then. But it’s true.”

“It doesn’t mean anything!” she insisted. Her stomach was starting to cramp, cold and hot at the same time.

“Oh yes. Yes, it does.”

“I’m just better at it than they are!”

“You’re better at lots of things, I imagine. No doubt you’ve grown accustomed to that as well, never given it a second thought. Perhaps you’ve just assumed it’s all due to your skill as a mentalist.”

“It is!”

“Mentalists come here, my precious. All the time. A little sip of power whets the appetite so, and what you call telepathy, although rare, is not unheard of in Adam’s line. His children have degenerated some, but he is still one of the high-born. You, my darling heart, are no mere mentalist. If you ever really stopped to think about it, you’d have suspected long before now. But you’re not very imaginative, are you?”

“Wh—What are you…”

“And you don’t get sick, do you?” Horuseps lifted up a lock of her fine, pale hair. “Or easily tired. You’ve never cried, not even as an infant. Not when sad, not when in pain…not even when grit dares to abrade them. Your strange, light eyes make no tears.”

“I know what you’re going to tell me!” Mara shouted, slapping his hand away.

“I mentioned, didn’t I, that some of the children that come of us are human? Not many, not often. Like opposite ends of our dark spectrum, demon and human, with nephalim as the broad ribbon between us. Ah yes. But I don’t believe I mentioned what we do with them.”

“And it’s a lie!”

“We let them go. We’re really not so monstrous as all that, you know. We let them go, we let them grow…and children do so love to wander…”

“You’re wrong!”

“Blood doesn’t always stay thin, it would seem.”

“I know what I am!”

“Sometimes it only recedes.”

“I know!”

“Like the tide.”

“You shut up!” she screamed, oblivious to the power streaming out of her in forks of dark fire, oblivious to all but the rage. “You’re lying to me!”

“And sometimes, apparently, the tide comes in again.”

Mara roared and hit him. She didn’t have to move to do it. She didn’t have to speak. Horuseps flew back and hit the statue of Adam, snapping it in three pieces. He landed hard in the middle of them, oozing black blood from a dozen cracks in his chitin. He was laughing.

“You really must learn to control that temper,” he said, sitting up. “Ah, but you are young yet. So very young.”

She spun around and there was Kazuul on the stair behind her. He caught the hand she swung at him, slapped aside her spear of thought, and turned her forcefully around. She fought him every step as he dragged her to the center of the room. He did not speak, but merely kicked Horuseps aside and shoved her face-down over the gleaming mirror-like surface of Adam’s chest.

Her reflection snarled back at her with his calm face and burning eyes behind her. Her reflection…

Her eyes were glowing. Her open mouth glinted with the points of fangs. She saw herself as she had been in the eyes of the murderous pilgrim at the foot of this mountain. He’d believed then she wasn’t human, that he lay with a demon. ‘We are not human,’ Horuseps kept saying, looking right at her, and ah God, they had never lied to her, there had been a thousand terrible truths even from the first day!

In panic, Mara turned her Sight upon herself and Saw—as with the true shape Ruk yet carried beneath his monstrous husk—the real Mara that had always hidden, dormant, enshelled by humanity. Something in her tore, like the skin of a bitten apple, impossible to unbite, as power grown vast and beyond her control bound itself that true form and ripped it from the inside…out.

Mara screamed, ignorance shattered, as bone exploded through her skin in dozens of tiny, bloodless thorns. She grabbed one blindly, ripped it out, and immediately doubled over, shrieking agony.

“Little fool,” Kazuul growled, not unkindly. “It will only grow back with greater pain. Rail as thou wilt, thou canst deny thy nature no more than thou mayest pluck down the sun.”

“I’m human!” she groaned, tearing out another spike. “I’m human, I am!”

“No longer. Once thee might have hidden in thy mortal disguise all the years of thy life and even shared a mortal death in ignorance, yet thy fate wast sealed the hour that ever thou didst enter here. Thy heart hath devoured thy flesh, and now thou art wholly Golgotha.” He turned her around, ignoring her struggles, and forced his mouth over hers in a kiss she, however hatefully, did ultimately return. “And thou art mine,” he rumbled, releasing her.

She didn’t run. She wanted to cry, but her eyes stubbornly refused to make tears.

“Tis not so great a change as thou fearest,” Kazuul said. “And I shall ease what can be eased to soothe thy way.”

She looked at him.

He held out his hand to her, his eyes gently burning. “Come, my Mara. This mountain is all my lair and every door shall open at my command. I shall give her to thee, as freely as thou didst enter here, if thou wilt only stay.”

Her breath caught, but she didn’t seem to need it…not like she used to. She stepped back, seeking Horuseps in a turmoil of confusion, but found him merely smiling up at her from where he sat on the floor, one arm tossed casually across his knees. His mind was open to her now, open and clear and welcoming. He called her sister.

“Mara.”

The demon’s hand, outstretched.

“Only stay,” she said. Her voice hardly shook at all. She was cool. “And you’ll find her for me.”

“And restore her. And see her safely set down among her people.” His arm showed no strain, no sign of ever falling empty. “If thou wilt give thyself to me wholly.”

“To a Master?”

“To a mate. To be mine own. To take me for thine.”

Every door, open.

“When?” Mara whispered.

Kazuul considered her without smiling, without triumph, without lowering his open hand. “When thou hast seen thy friend away and know me to be honest. When she is safely laid in her mortal life and all memory and ambition for this place is gently ended. When thou art content to give and give without regret, beloved.”

“I hope you’re fond of long engagements,” Horuseps murmured.

Neither of them looked at him.

“I told thee once,” Kazuul said. “I’ll have naught but thine own self, thy truth, and the whole of thy heart.”

Was this what it came to? Her life for Connie’s? Her freedom? Her humanity? Mara squeezed her eyes shut, grabbed at a horn and tugged, but not hard enough to pull it free. Her breath scoured through her lungs, hissing out through the bared fangs of her mouth, but they were not sobs; she could make no tears.

“Until then, come. I shall uncover her, make well her fragile mind, deliver her to Adam’s realm, and ask no vow upon thy life to seal thy promise. Mara, come,” he said, not without a dark compassion. “The hour is late. And when we are done and thou art returned to my chambers…I’ll draw thee a bath. Beloved. Come.”

She shuddered once, her hand still pressed to her inhuman brow, but then she lowered it, let his enfold it as they both knew it always would, and followed him away.

*          *          *

“M-Mara?”

“I’m here.”

“I can’t…I can’t move.”

“Just relax. I’ve got you.”

“I was dreaming, wasn’t I?”

“Yes. It’s over now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I missed you.”

“I know that too.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Just relax.”

“Mara?”

“I’m here, Connie.”

“I want to wake up now. Please? I want to go home.”

“Soon, honey.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I love you.”

“…”

“Are we still friends?”

“Always, Connie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Just rest.”

*          *          *

The found her on the roof of a hospital in Bucharest: a young lady, unconscious, naked, with a child’s gold-colored locket in the shape of a heart clutched in her hand. She received the best care, better by far than her situation warranted, but all those who touched her felt the same illogical and overwhelming desire to nurture and care for her, beyond all cost, beyond all reason. She slept for three days and woke without memory.

She spoke only English. The American Embassy was contacted with photographs and fingerprints. In ten days, her family arrived. They said her name was Constance Vitelli. They took her home. No one spoke the name of Kimara Warner to her, not then, not ever again. That came when they touched her, too.

But she dreamed sometimes, and the dreams were like the tides: they receded for days, for weeks, sometimes for months, but always rolled in again. In her dreams, there was a room, like a control center of some sort, where the walls were all glass and concrete, and a terrible storm full of colors and voices raged outside. Inside, there was a girl, a few years older than she herself (because she was always a child in these dreams, always trapped at the bosomless, freckled age of eight), and they sat on the floor together and talked, the way that children do. In the dreams, the other girl looked sad, even when she smiled, but Connie was always so happy to see her, always hugging on her and crying when the time came for her to wake up.

But the dreams always washed away in the morning, and as the years moved on, that tide came less and less. For Constance Warner, who had no history, the dreams became her only childhood, and the older girl, her only friend. It seemed sometimes that she only drifted through what was left of her life, looking for something she couldn’t remember, wishing for power that didn’t exist, and waiting always to wake up dreaming.

Years later, cleaning out the closets after her mother’s funeral, she found a photograph of herself at some childhood birthday party, where she sat centered in a sparkly hat, surrounded by brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, grandfathers…and one young, unsmiling girl with ice-grey eyes: the girl from her locket, the girl from her dreams. She asked everyone she knew, everyone she could think of, but no one seemed to know who she was and the same expression always seemed to sink down over their faces when she asked them—a lost, sick, confused expression that made her feel a little guilty just for asking, as if she were hurting them somehow. Eventually, she stopped asking, but she never stopped wondering.

She found six other pictures eventually, and framed them all. She carried them with her through all the cheap little apartments and government housing she inhabited, as a kind of talisman to keep the dreams coming. She had them with her when she was taken to the senior care home, childless and alone, the last of her family, just an old woman who stared out the windows all day and had less to forget than the other old women, but who forgot it all anyway.

There was only one tired young nurse with her in the room the night that old Miss Vitelli died, roused from her magazine by the old women mumbling in her sleep, as she so often did. “You were my best friend, Mara,” she said in her quavery way, as the nurse heaved herself up and came to check on her. “I loved you.”

And taking the ancient, delicate hand to check the fading pulse, the young nurse heard, or thought she heard, a thin sound, like a breeze through the last leaves of autumn: “You were mine, you know, my one and only. I loved you the best that I knew how.”

“I’m so sorry,” the old woman whispered as the nurse stared bewilderedly around her in the dark.

“It’s all right.”

The pale-eyed girl in all those cracked photographs seemed to stare at her, stare at her. She’d never liked to look at them. There was something really creepy about that kid.

“Are we still friends?” asked the old woman, making the young nurse jump a little, her skin breaking out in gooseflesh.

“Always, Connie.” And the voice was right there, almost, sneaking up through her fingers where she carefully pinched the old woman’s wrist, whispering not in her ears but in her brain. “Always. Just rest.”

Then it was over and Constance Vitelli lay silent in her spinster’s bed. With a pounding heart and shaking hands, the young nurse tucked the gnarled hand with its ancient, worthless locket still clutched inside like a rosary underneath the blankets and pulled them over the wizened head, then hurried from the room and never told anyone about the voice she did not hear or why she’d deemed it necessary to snatch up those old framed photographs and throw them out into the dumpster so immediately. The old woman was dead, and when the time came to record such things it was recorded only that she’d gone peacefully, in her sleep. The old woman was dead, and on the other side of the world, Mara of the tribe of Golgotha lay down in the bed of Kazuul, lord of the Scholomance, and welcomed him at last. It was not the love that Men feel, but like the child they began that night, it was still a true thing, and it endured.

THE END

September 2008 – November 2009

Table of Contents

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- Also by R. LEE SMITH:
- DEDICATION
- Copyright
- CHAPTER ONE
- CHAPTER TWO
- CHAPTER THREE
- CHAPTER FOUR
- CHAPTER FIVE
- CHAPTER SIX
- CHAPTER SEVEN
- CHAPTER EIGHT
- CHAPTER NINE
- CHAPTER TEN
- CHAPTER ELEVEN
- CHAPTER TWELVE
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
- CHAPTER FOURTEEN
- CHAPTER FIFTEEN
- CHAPTER SIXTEEN
- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
- CHAPTER NINETEEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY
- CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE