The Scholomance (47 page)

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.”