The Makers of Light

by Lynna Merrill

  "I am wondering if I am sorry for you, or glad," he whispered, and from the darkness to his left a voice replied to him.

  "So are we all, these days."

  There was no one. Rather, there was only yet another warehouse wall, rough to his touch as he ran his hands over it, since in the darkness his eyes would not tell him much. His hands found nothing—neither person, nor window, nor door.

  There was no one, and yet he had heard her, and he knew her voice. It all fit together, suddenly. A beautiful and melodic voice interweaving with another such voice twenty-three days ago, talking about trees and a hope that trees did not mind the cold; voices full of lure and aberration that he and Maxim had followed like forest-lost peasants, like confused, mindless fools. Dominick stared before himself, even though he still saw nothing, hot inside despite the cold Factory behind him and all the bleak shadows around, hot with anger even stronger than what he had felt in the temple. Burning with something else, something fiercer and hotter, as well.

  "I remember you," he said, softly, his own voice almost a caress but a caress full of spikes and burning ice. "I dream of you, my delectable nightmare. I should have known I would find you here of all places. Don't hide. There is no tired old man with me to slow me down this time. I will find you, whatever it takes."

  "You bastard!" This voice was not alluring, and it belonged to a man, the cloaked figure of its owner suddenly materializing beside Dominick, the man's right hand snapping down with a knife.

  Dominick leaped aside almost at the last moment, his own knife appearing in his hand before he could even think about it, as if of its own accord. So, there was a man this time, too.

  Well, he was more than welcome. Dominick slid on his knee to avoid another attempted blow, his knife missing the man's wrist by a mere centimeter, cleaving the man's sleeve. This was not an old man whom Dominick had loved and deferred to for eight years. Not a fellow Mentor or a Byas woman who confused him with both yearning and aversion. He was a young man, an attacker, someone whom Dominick could hack and slash without thinking; he was a siphon for anger, heaviness, dread, and other loathsome feelings. A welcome man, indeed.

  Somewhere behind Dominick, the woman screamed, and for some reason he jerked his hand to the side, slashing the man's shoulder instead of, possibly, his throat. The man cursed and jumped at him again, and Dominick ducked, then shoved his foot at the man's knee. The man fell, and Dominick kicked his enemy's knife away, then froze still before his boot would have smashed the man's head.

  It took perhaps a fraction of a second, but sometimes a fraction of a second was enough. It had been enough, many years ago, to see his mother's eyes before she would squeeze them shut in wild, witless terror—and enough to see his father's eyes, witless with something wilder and even more terrible, before his foot would meet her head. And again. And again, while Doncho, Pencho, and Trifon shook silently in the corner and did not cry because Father's boys, Father's future men, should never cry.

  It had taken a fraction of a second, years later, to see little Kalinka's eyes when one day she somehow angered him and he hit her. A fraction of a second to see the smooth white skin turn blue and bruised on her face. A fraction of a second for his mother to look at him in the same way she looked at his father—and then do nothing. A fraction of a second for him to take his sister in his arms and decide to never, ever let anyone touch her, least of all himself.

  In the years that followed, Pencho lost an eye, fighting another man for a woman, while Trifon raised a hand to their own father and was never seen home again. Dominick barely remembered his other two, oldest, brothers, but in a village people talked, and no one had much good to say about them. Witless, savage, useless good-for-nothings, all of them. Primeval brutes with no sense of responsibility and control. He was not like them. He had been eight when he had hit Kalinka, but that day he had stopped being a brute and become a man.

  It took Mentor Dominick a fraction of a second, his foot flying towards the young man's head, to know that if he could have been a man while still a snotty little peasant, he would not stop being a man now.

  He still kicked his opponent's head, but carefully, with force controlled and calculated to incapacitate, no more. Not with force fed by mindless anger with his mind a helpless watcher. Not with force meant to destroy for the sake of destruction alone.

  "Before I decide to destroy you, I shall clarify my reasons," he whispered to the silent, crumpled figure, then span back, his knife again at the ready as a voice beside him sobbed, "Please! Please, don't!"

  She was beautiful, yes. Long dark hair framed a sweet, heart-shaped face and a body whose perfection was evident even through the cloak. She had large green eyes, currently focused on his with both fear and pleading. She did look like a samodiva, like a wild, outworldly woman full of danger and allure. But she was not the woman he sought.

  "Let him live. Please! He only wanted to protect me. You are like us. You found the way. Please! Don't start on this path with murder!"

  He made a step towards her, and she cringed but never stepped back. "Please!"

  Her eyes were so green, the color so saturated that he saw it even by the pale, insufficient moonlight. Like Kalinka's eyes had been, although Kalinka's hair had been light, almost white, like his own. This year she would have been sixteen. This girl did not look much older.

  "Calm down," he said, almost gently. "I won't hurt anyone if I don't have to."

  "No! Gerard, no!" She suddenly dashed towards Dominick and then behind him before he could even turn and see the man, conscious again, reaching out with a second dagger. "My love, don't be reckless! He is here! See? He is here. Don't fight! Please, both of you, stop fighting!"

  He was where? Only then did Dominick realize that the black shape of the Factory was not looming in its proper place any longer. A tiny street, a tunnel rather, that had not been there before the attack now stretched behind the couple. They blocked the way, watching him, the man's weaponless arm wrapped possessively around the woman's shoulders.

  "So he is." Gerard's voice, low and hostile. "Come then, Brother. Follow us, for wish as I might, I cannot forbid you passage. But"—he shifted his other hand so that his dagger was clearly visible, obviously having no intent to sheathe it—"Keep your hands off my concubine. Otherwise, I will kill you."

  "Calia." The girl swallowed, her words suddenly coming as if with difficulty. "My name is Calia." She looked away from Dominick and towards her husband. "I have a name, Ger."

  Gerard leaned towards her and kissed her lips, silencing her. "You have a name if I say that you do, darling. Now, let's go."

  A concubine? In today's Mierber? Dominick followed them in silence, these apparitions of a world long-gone, into the darkness and tunnels and empty, roofless rooms of a world hidden inside another world fading. This place still was the Steel Factory Warehouse District, a place of the real world, of the fading world. He had walked some of these streets today. And yet, there were little streets that he had not seen, little corners where the darkness was denser and somehow seemed to try to pull him away to a place he did not want to visit.

  "A place of the Lost Ones," any place like this. "Unsafe. Treacherous. Unreal," was written in the Mentors' books, and Dominick had believed it. Or wanted to. "Bring the lost ones back," Maxim had said today. Had the old man realized his words' double meaning? What was the meaning of any words that came from Maxim's mouth?

  The Lost Ones, the primeval evil, the Master's own enemies. Those who, if allowed, would leech the world until the world was no longer, until all that was left was a shadow, an illusion, an eternal nothing that still suffered because it remembered that it had been something before. Dominick did not know much about the Lost Ones, for even knowing was too dangerous, even for a Mentor. Mentors knew about minds. They knew that even thinking of the wrong path, of the unreal path, even dreaming of it was in a way walking where one should never walk. You could become lost in your own mind. You could become lost in a drea
m.

  Dominick clenched his jaw, ignoring his leg's new complaint, in no way willing to demonstrate to these two that he was in pain. He coughed, though, the effect of the cold water in his other boot working its way up his body. He felt dizzier, dark shapes flashing before his eyes, but he was unable to focus on them. Perfect. A fever was exactly what he needed while he did not even know where he was going. Or, while he knew that he was going to Maxim's dark, devastating forest.

  Oh, well. Dominick blinked, trying to chase the dark shapes away. He did not know the forest, but he did know that Gerard might have cronies behind the next corner, with more knives than Dominick could manage.

  Who were the people he was blindly following? Where were they going? He had a way to check, even though a Mentor never used it for personal benefit. But it would not be personal only. He was here for them, he was here to save them from their own folly. He was their Mentor now, whether or not they knew this or wanted it.

  Dominick narrowed his eyes, not daring to close them fully, his thoughts concentrating on what lived within his left wrist. Then, suddenly, his elbows hit a stone wall, his head snapping back to avoid collision at the last moment. The couple and the narrow street they were walking on were suddenly gone, while far behind him, not where he had last seen it but still visible, was the Factory.

  Somehow he tore his thoughts away from his wrist, despite the detector's wild vibration and the pain it caused him. Somehow he managed to think not of the Factory, but of darkness, of the green-eyed girl, and seeing things better left unseen. Somehow, he saw them again, but not before the detector threw at him bits of the girl's mind. Not before he received Mentor's information again—information that one only found on the thorny path, now wrenched from the thorny path and tainted with something wilder.

  She did not know where they were going, herself. She followed the boy, or at least she made herself believe that. The boy was at the top of her mind—her husband, her master, for she was a concubine and not a wife. He had to be there, she thought, for these were the rules, the laws, and she had never been a rule-breaker. Oh, she had broken rules in her mind, and she had been whipped for aberrant thoughts, certainly—who had not been?

  But these were the rules everyone broke. She had until recently been more interested in men and clothes than in the Master, and it was aberrant but it was also normal. In her thoughts, she had never transgressed deliberately. And now she was a concubine and did not have to worry about the Master any longer. Gerard was her only responsibility, while He and their betrayal of Him was Gerard's burden to bear, as was everything else—as was this dark, frightening place, as was the black-clad, cold-eyed, brooding young man who followed them, as was even her sadness and worry about the friend who had openly rebelled and disappeared soon after that together with the old Mentor. As was the cold Factory, the lack of fire and food, and even the tiny seed of resentment, the one she did not even dare admit to herself—that there was always a master or a Master, that always someone was supposed to rule her and her mind, until she did not even know what her own thoughts were, but she wanted them still ...

  She stared at Dominick now, trembling. "You faded away for a moment," she only said, but he could read the rest on her face. She had felt him. She knew or at least suspected who or what he was.

  Dominick said nothing immediately, his hand and head pounding with such pain as he had not felt since the very first time they had implanted the detector in him. He had entered many minds, felt many thoughts, in the two years he had been a full-fledged Mentor. He had seen people love the Master, fear him, hate him, deny him, claim to themselves that he did not exist while still casting a glance above to check whether he was watching them.

  He had seen people swear to serve the Master or swear to destroy him—but always the Master was there, the image of what they thought him to be dominating their quintessences. Never before had Dominick seen a person immune to the Master's presence and his judgement. Never had he felt thoughts where the Master was present as naught but a comparison to a mere human boy; never before had he realized how shallow the image of the Master lay in people's minds, and how easily replaced it was.

  Or how artificially imposed. Dominick had never seen the mind of a concubine or a concubiner before, for such people were few and rare and not accountable to Mentors but to their husbands or wives only. A concubine was a relic from a distant past of inequality between genders, presently a result of a glitch in Mierber's laws, and the reason for not fixing this glitch for centuries was not explained to Mentors, if a reason there were at all.

  Don't go near her, lest you'd capture her virtue,

  she'd be treacherous, she'd be a storm ...

  What was that now? Some stupid folk song he must have heard in peasantland, which, as stupid folk songs were apt to do, had become stuck in his mind. It went on to say that you could only trust "her" when she was fully yours, that only then would she care for you and your home. Interestingly, in Dominick's memory the voice singing the song was a woman's. What woman in her right mind would sing a song like this? But then, what women, or men, were ever in their right minds? If they were, the world would not need people like him.

  "Brother." Calia's voice, the voice of a woman definitely not in her right mind, but a sweet voice nonetheless, so much like Kalinka's. Dominick blinked. No woman who was not a Mentor had called him "Brother" for years. He lowered his eyes, suddenly, for the first time in his life wishing that he had not invaded someone's mind—that he had not hurt her.

  "Brother, who is it that you are looking for? Who is it that lead you to our place but still makes you doubt, so much that you would fade away and yet come back? No one else has ever come back after fading. Who is she, Brother? What is she to you? Why did you, a man whom I have never met, confuse her with me?"

  " 'Why?' This is a question we do not ask lightly, Sister."

  It was a man's voice, but not Gerard's. Dominick jerked his head back, gripping the dagger hilt once again, and the man raised a hand at him in what looked like a pacifying gesture. An older man, his hair graying, but his body still vigorous and his face stern.

  "This is the one question we do not ask—even from a Mentor."

  Dominick

  Night 8 of the First Quarter, Year of the Master 706

  There were about thirty of them, gathered at what must be the home of a relatively affluent person. There were men and women, old and young, most of them dressed like middle-class commoners, like those who had come to him for Confessions before. Only, this time they were the ones asking questions, and he was supposed to answer and bare his mind and quintessence before them.

  As if they could make him.

  The Order of the Mother. They believed that Mierenthia, the land itself, was alive and that it should be worshiped as the Mother of all living things; that the Master was nothing more than a long-dead human who had defied her. They claimed that one day the Bers and Mentors would fall, and she would be back to save those who had remained faithful to her. Or, at least this was what Maxim had known about them, which was what they had been and had believed in two centuries ago, when the last of them had been caught and burned by the Bers. The other thing Maxim knew was rumors that now, in these times of fading Magic and disappearing order, the Order was once again active and that if you wished to be one of them, you should seek them in the Warehouse District of the Steel Factory.

  Mierenthia, alive. Mentors knew no such thing—but they did know that other things, Lost things, might be alive, and that these should be kept away from the world.

  Few could find the Order, according to Maxim's intelligence, and it was unclear who those few had been so far. It might be just a rumor, Maxim had said. But it was not. In the dark, devastating forest, Dominick had found them himself.

  Even though they had blindfolded him before bringing him here, in this house with soft chairs and flower-patterned wallpapers, he knew that he was now far from the Steel Factory. The house itself was evidence enough
of a better-faring neighborhood, but what was more important was that he could not feel the Factory and the surrounding desperate shadows any longer.

  They watched him now, some faces hostile, fewer faces welcoming, others full of doubt and fear. The hostile ones he understood, for a Mentor knew how people who strayed from the path would still fear the forest and feed their courage with resentment. He understood those who feared and doubted, too. They lived on an edge, looking up to this Mother of theirs, but sometimes still looking up to the Master; now, when they had seen a Mentor here in this place, their tiny safety niche was disturbed and they were confused. Fighting the hostile ones would be easy, straightforward. They would convert back or break. The doubting ones were more of a challenge. As for the welcoming ones—they were the ones to truly beware.

  "Brother." This was the voice of the man who had met him and Calia and Gerard in the shady warehouse lane. It was a soft and quiet voice, but it carried a certain power that made others strain to hear him.

  "A Mentor, or should I say, a former Mentor, amongst us. The Mother's love is growing stronger, then, even in this accursed city of steel, stone, glass, and mortar, even in the temples, the foul fortresses of him who defied her. We are humbled."

  "We," the man said, even though some grim-faced, stiff-bodied, narrow-eyed people did not look humbled in the least. What right do you have to talk on their behalf, Dominick wondered, and then suddenly a realization hit him. How many times had he proclaimed the rejoicing of his congregation at Confession time, in the House of the Master? Had they truly rejoiced at the prospect of whipping?

  But it had been different. They must rejoice, for it was the right thing, and he must talk for them, for the Bers had chosen him to be a Mentor. Dominick knew life and the world better than them all, whereas this man here was just a human like them.