The Scholomance (81 page)

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.”