The Makers of Light (33 page)

Dominick had not thought much about nobles, before; it was usually useless for a Mentor to think of the ones whose quintessences he could not control. But he was not a normal Mentor any more. He resisted a sigh as well as a sudden need to sit down and rest, despite the dirty floor. The world had suddenly become bigger and its weight much, much heavier.

"They do put their lives in danger. Whether it is for us to live in peace, I do not know, but perhaps your friend might tell us," he said, standing straight and still.

Mark intervened then. "Perhaps the Mother can tell us all we need to know, so that we do not need to seek humans we would rather avoid."

Dominick almost laughed. He wished the Mother would truly do that; he would then be talking to her and not to these two.

Katrina put her hand on her husband's arm. "Mark, our Brother would not hear the Mother even if she screamed in his ear; he is so determined to mock her and reject her, to seek what he would by himself. He does not believe in what he cannot touch and see, which is perhaps why he ran from the Master. If he did run—but he should have, for otherwise he would not have found the way here. Well, Brother, if you cannot rely on faith alone, if you are too restless to sit and share our prayer, if it is reckless, false-hearted people, Science and Magic on your mind, I have a test for you. My friend walked a dark way to get to this Qynnsent lord, her Science, and a life of glamor—and the lord walked it with her. It is a way they should have never walked, let in by someone who, had he been true-hearted himself, would have never let them in, amidst something they should have never disturbed. Now, Brother, do you dare walk this way, yourself?"

She was staring at him almost as a Mentor would, and he stared back, never letting her, wittingly or not, skillfully or not, invade his quintessence. A Commander of Life and Death—he should have known they wielded more than a fancy title. He should have known, but he had not, for obviously it was not something for Mentors to know. And now there was yet another dark way for him. Had Maxim known about it? Perhaps he had; the old man had a knack of knowing things, though he seemed to not have accumulated a habit of sharing them. Damn him! Damn this healer woman and her gloomy husband, too, and most of all, damn Linden!

"Dare? Are you asking whether I dare walk your dark way, or if I would care to walk it? There is a difference, Sister."

"It is not my dark way. It is the dark way of she who heals when none other can, even if she will not heal always."

She blinked fast at that, her husband taking her hand, then she stared at Dominick again.

"Nowadays, she heals even less often; she is whimsier, perhaps angrier than she ever was, and the bonds that are holding her are, like all else in our world, growing weaker. Growing weaker faster than they would have—because of my so-called friend and that heedless lord. They did something to her, I know they did, even though she will not tell. Linden." She spat the name. "Linden and that man—that ruling-class leech of honest people's sweat and pain. They chose to invade, to uphold their own selfish good, if good it were, to the detriment of all rest, when good, purehearted people would have sacrificed themselves. Like others are doing even now."

Like you are doing, yourself? What are you sacrificing?
Dominick did not ask her, his own anger quelled a little by hers. She was attacking something again, like she had ever since he had entered the room with the statue—be it him, Linden and her lord, Calia, or even her husband, Katrina was targeting someone all the time. Like a dog she was, an angry dog whose sole aim was to bite and not let go until it tore flesh from the bone.

* * *

Inside the Healers' Passage, Dominick suddenly knew that this quality of hers was what had made him know how to talk to her and convince her in his words—it was what he wanted from her, too. So, talk to her he did.

"So can you do it, Katrina? Can you control your own thoughts? Can you focus on yourself and what you can do for the world instead of fearing what lives in your own head? Can you be an adult who needs no authority figure in some basement, a temple, or in the skies to tell her what is right?"

His words were aimed at the darkness, where he felt her presence and heard her ragged breaths. She was actually breathing quietly, if not calmly, but it was strange how stronger some sounds were in this place. It was as if they did not even come from outside of him; as if he felt them in some other way. He wanted out of here as soon as possible.

"Katrina, I am sure you can."

She said nothing, for a time. Then, when he was finally starting to doubt his words and their effect, wondering if perhaps he had not gone too far too quickly—if he had not scared her enough to truly leave him here—she came.

"You are right," she said as he felt her close enough to touch, which he carefully avoided. "Mentor, I do not need you—or anyone—to tell me my thoughts." She took his hand again, hers trembling slightly even though she tried to hide it. "Thank you, Dominick. For your words. I will do for the world what I can, and you—you have passed my test. I will tell the others you can be relied on."

No, you will do more than that. You will follow me from now on.

That she would, and he had passed a test, indeed, but not a test of her making. A test of his own—to not only save his life from this dark Passage but to convert his first human, and to lead. Perhaps for the first time in this woman's life someone had told her to think for herself—and she was so deeply shaken that she would
not
think for herself. Not entirely. She burned with too much fervor to leave enough space for thought.

Dominick knew what one such as her wanted the most—to throw herself, with all she was and all she had, at a belief or a cause—and he had just presented her with a very powerful belief, a belief worthy of her. The belief that she was her own mistress was a great gift—and she would follow him who had given it to her. And, in the future, when she inevitably doubted, he would be there to reassure her belief in herself, which would strengthen her belief
in him.
She was his now, and so her husband would be, and perhaps Calia and Gerard and others who listened to her.

It had started. There were now those in the Dark Forest with more hope for redemption than they'd had the day before, and the thought was exhilarating. Dominick almost made a step in the Passage on his own, both his mind and body active, eager to move on—fool, he had just almost made a stupid mistake because of fervor and lack of thought.

He should be much more careful. This was the Healers' Passage and he did not know the way.

"Lead on, then, Sister," he said, as calmly as he could, and she did.

Dominick

Night 30 of the First Quarter, Year of the Master 706

That night it took him long to fall asleep, restlessly shifting in the narrow bed, in the tiny one-room apartment that Maxim had given him the key to. Perhaps it was because of the paint on the walls. It was white-hued, but a matte, fading white, so much unlike the fresh white of the Temple and his old apartment in the Mentors' Dormitory. It was peeling, too, revealing mold along the corners. Mold. Decay. Even the Moon of Wind, presently in the sky, looked blurred through the dirty window.

Dominick stood, wet a handkerchief with water from the not-too-clean glass on the wornout nightstand and tried to clean the window. It did not work. But right now he could not find a better use for his time and did not have motivation to look for one.

He could not go back home. He was a Mentor no longer, so he could not return to the building beside the temple, where Mentors, at least those without families, liked to settle. And it had truly been home—first to a little boy who lived in a small room attached to Maxim's apartment, and later to a young Mentor with an apartment of his own. The only home he had ever had—for the sagging little hut in Balkaene that he had been born in was just that, a place to be born in, not a place to cherish. It was not
his
place—and this tonight was not his place either.

He threw the handkerchief away and sat on the edge of the bed. It screeched, like it had not done earlier. Had he broken it? It was an old bed. He shifted, and it screeched once again, and a moment later someone pounded on the other side of the wall.

"We're trying to sleep here! Be quiet, wretch you!"

Humans. Too many of them. The building was in a neighborhood only slightly better than that of the Steel Factory, not in a slum, but almost on the edge of civilized respectability. It had many entrances, floors, and hundreds of apartments, all cramped together like the cells of a bee hive, all with paper-thin walls and peeling paint and stairwells that, even though they did not lack steps, stacked sharp and stale odors in the corners.

It was full of humans who saw not a Mentor but a strange, black-clad young man. Was he a gullible one to trick for money or food or even simply for sport? Was he one to rob openly? By the looks some of the disheveled inhabitants gave him, he knew they had thoughts of that kind. Others ignored him, some of them perhaps honest people too entrapped in their own worries to notice one more stranger in the gray apartment house.

He did not want to know what their worries were, and he did not want their transgressions, either. There were too many people. Even without using his broken and painful detector, he could still sense the swarm of lives and countless thoughts, his thin, dirty-white walls his sole barrier and protection.

The bed screeched yet again, and he hit the wall with a fist in response to a new surge of punches and dirty curses from the other side. It was stupid of him. The result was that he now had paint flakes all over the sheets. It had started snowing outside, but he could not see the snowflakes well, the smudged narrow window a barrier to both light and the darkness of the night.

Yet, the room had a darkness of its own. Dominick had been to the Healers' Passage twice today, encountering darkness of a nature that no human could face without fear—and yet, in a way, at this hour he found it more difficult to face the confined, weary little darkness of smells, flakes, and human thoughts and shouts here. One could brace himself for a preternatural, hostile darkness—but this here was supposed to be his new, or at least temporary home, and somewhere along the way he had learned that home was where you could bring down your defenses.

Right now Dominick needed them up more than ever before.

He stood again and dressed, then locked the door from the outside and descended the dusty, worn-out stairs. At least they were made of stone and, whatever happened to Magic or the world, were still holding, for stone had that habit. Dominick had a lingering suspicion that if the stairwells started to break, there would be no one to repair them, and he did not even want to think what would happen to this swarm of humans then. Swarm. So he was comparing them to bees again, and he had not thought about bees in many years. Bees meant spring and summer and Balkaene—buzz and birdsong, sunflowers, creeks, and the green whisper of trees.

Dominick shook his head. Some of these things were aberrant, and for years he had taken care to not think of them with any good will. He did now know them too well, anyway. He had known them from the side, seeing them but touching them rarely, envying the shepherds who took to the cool, green hills every spring, going as high, and as close to the mountain as Mierenthian humans ever could. For him and most others from his village, however, there was the lowlands summer with its scorching heat—heat so dense that it was visible in the air, blurring the sight of endless, backbreaking crop fields. He could feel the heat even now, amidst the falling snow of a cold and dark narrow Mierberian street—until the sweat on his forehead started to freeze.

He halted from what a moment ago had been a brisk stride. Where was he going, anyway? It was not safe, walking alone and clueless in the night. There were poor people in this place who might kill him for naught but his clothes. There was a lord, as well, who might come for him for other reasons.

He would not have met the lord so soon but for Katrina and her test. The test had been for Dominick to walk first in the Healers' Passage with her and then inside the walls of the nobles' Fireheart by himself, even though both the Passage and the walls were places for Commanders of Life and Death only.

She wanted him to bring back information, she had said, from the Science Guild gathering that he had talked so anxiously about earlier. He did not know why she would have him do that. Did she not find it dangerous to let him in that place, where she was vehement that Linden and her lord should never have been in? But he went, because he was angry and confused—and thus made yet another step into the Dark Forest.

The first thing he heard in the Healers' Passage was a song, but he ignored it. Tried, at least, even though the melody attacked his mind with a vehement force—or rather, it was no melody at all, but something that somehow managed to wake all the sadness he had, all his doubts and worries.

But a Mentor knew how to deal with those. At least, Dominick knew, and even though lately he had let his doubts loose, it had been his own choice, not some melody's. So he guarded and controlled himself, and he felt the healer woman's guiding hand grip his wrist more tightly every minute. Was she, too, assaulted by the melody? Or was he the reason for her unease—had she expected him to succumb to whatever dwelt in this Passage?

He would not and did not, but when they passed the Inner Door and came inside the walls of the Fireheart, his feet and legs were suddenly so heavy that he could not make another step. At the same time, they were too weak to support him, so he leaned on a wall, his hands on his temples and his eyes closed. After a minute of trembling, during which the woman did nothing, he could stand by himself again.

"Well." Katrina had lit a single candle on the opposite wall. So, normal, wall-entrenched fire reached at least this in-between place. Dominick wondered why she did not carry a mobile light; she had let it slip that such existed. Perhaps it was a part of her test. The current tiny light cast sharp shadows along the woman's black hair and made her pale face sharp as well, giving an almost predatory quality to her features. Like a
samodiva
she looked, but not a
samodiva
in a beautiful, enchanting guise of body and face like her two friends. This one was like a
samodiva's
true nature, beauty hinted of but most of it shed, the sharpness having surfaced—she looked like a
Byas
who would heal or kill at a whim.