The Scholomance (38 page)

“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.