Read The Makers of Light Online
Authors: Lynna Merrill
"You shall marry one, one day," she had said, "and you should learn how to look and how to act as his lady. You should study that very carefully. You shall marry a High Lord, I should say. Won't that make you happy?"
"No," Merley had said truthfully and received a glare, even if it was not a slap this time. Fallon rarely slapped, but her glares were in a way no less painful. "Mommy," Merley sobbed, "why are you asking if you do not want me to tell?"
"I am asking for the right answer!" Fallon screamed, and that was the day Merley decided that "
right answers
" were something as slippery as her bathtub, and that everyone seemed to have her own. Of course, she was too young to know how to say anything but "I won't marry any stupid High Lord, and I won't ever be a proper lady!" and receive another slap, as well as a threat that Mother would tell Father about Merley's outburst. And since proper ladies never had outbursts, Merley made sure to have many in the days to come.
She could not plan a single menu, and she knew about dresses less than the servants she had once had. The Bers' plain robes had indeed come as a relief to her. And since a lady had to always know the everyday goings of her House intimately and control them with a subtle, confident, dainty hand, Merley had made sure to never learn how to keep control of even her own room.
If she ever knew what exact clothes to put on, she usually could not find them in her wardrobe at all—but she could sometimes find there books that had been lost for days, toys, or even food she had thought she had eaten long ago. Her thoughts, too, would often jump where they would and not where her teachers, Bers or others, said that they should. And like today with Brighid, Merley would sometimes talk or act on naught but an impulse.
Yet, in the last thirty days she had somehow slipped into organizing Darius's tower and even Darius's thoughts. Merley stared at the teacup. She had stood to once again fill it for Darius. Somehow, without even noticing, she had changed.
Merley handed the cup to her master and took one for herself. His eyes off the handkerchief now, Darius cast a brief look towards their uninvited guest and seemed for the first time to notice her cupless state. Merley tensed, as behind his pince-nez his eyes suddenly seemed as sharp as they had been the day Merley had first met him. However, he simply nodded, as if to himself, then sipped his tea.
"The world is fading, you say, Adept Brighid." His voice was mild, but his eyes had not lost the sharpness. "I am afraid that it is not."
The benevolent, even if slightly bored expression that had stayed fixed on Brighid's face during the whole exchange between Merley and Darius flickered for the briefest moment—the only sign that it was perhaps fake.
No one ever liked to be ignored, and perhaps a woman used to swooning attention to both herself and her words, from Bers and crowds alike, liked it even less. She had taken care to not show it. Now she awarded a motherly, almost condescending smile to even Darius, despite his status and his age. Indeed, she acted as if the most the likes of him and Merley could do was amuse her, and yet she must have some important need for the likes of them, for she was here and enduring.
"Please continue, Adept Darius," Brighid said quickly, smiling yet again.
"This is what I was going to do, had you not interrupted me." His voice was still kind, with no trace of judgement or irritation, and still the eyes were like shards of blue glass. "Adept Humanist, look out the window and tell me what you see."
To Merley's surprise, Brighid, who was nothing like the newly-made acolyte who had been asked the same thing thirty days ago, did look through the window.
"Mountains," she said in a voice that still sounded amused and yet not entirely.
"How about inside the room, right before you?"
"The table? Is that what you mean?"
Darius started adjusting his pince-nez, at the same time tracing a wizened finger along the table, itself one of his metalworks. "Does it look faded to you? Do the mountains? And is all of this not the world?"
"The world is still here," he continued before Brighid could do more than half-raise her eyebrows, his voice both kind and instructive, as if talking to a problematic and yet beloved child. Merley remembered a nurse from her childhood who had talked like this, even though Merley's own mother never had.
"The mountain is still there, and the table, made of metal from that very mountain, is still here, as are my clocks, which still work—and will, I dare say. None of these things have faded, Adept Brighid. What might have faded is the exact way of turning mountain into metal that we are used to, the method, or—do you remember this word from when you were an acolyte and studied Artificery yourself—the algorithm." He finished with his pince-nez, which was now fastened higher up his nose but would slide back in a few minutes. "But an algorithm, Brighid, is not the world."
"I remember the word. It meant '
a set of rules describing how to solve a problem
' according to Adept Zanador"—Brighid shaped a quick sign of benediction with her fingers—"may the Master bless his quintessence in its final rest. I have a very good memory, Adept Darius. You would be surprised at what things I can remember."
The last might have been a threat to most humans.
"Ah, you should write all those things down while you are still young," Darius said, wistfully. "I regret not having done that myself, for memory becomes fickle as the years pass."
"An algorithm, you say." Brighid's eyes bore into Darius's, his like clear ice, hers like a dark abyss made of black stone from the Sunset Lands, swallowing the light. Merley wondered which ones were more dangerous. "Isn't it strange, Adept Darius, how the word seems to be associated with Artificery and other such fields claimed by their practitioners to be precise and factual, fields that often deal with non-living things—while it is Humanism and the so-called soft fields where we have to solve problems on a daily basis?"
Once again, Merley spoke before stopping to think if she should. "Why would you need the word, a word about rules? You acknowledge
no
rules—you ignore them all," she snapped, even as Darius said mildly, "I have not taken possession of this word, Adept Brighid—or of any other. You are free to use it."
"Unfortunately, there are rules that I do acknowledge, Merley." Brighid sighed, and it was not an exaggerated sigh such as the ones she had demonstrated to the Temple Square crowd. "Rules that I cannot ignore. If I could, I would simply snap my fingers right now and have the world—or its algorithm, call it whatever you wish—be as it should be. But I cannot do that, so there must be rules that cannot be defied. At least, I have not yet learned how to defy them. As for the word '
algorithm
' itself, Adept Darius"—Brighid shook her head—"thanks, but I do not think I need it."
Brighid stared outside the window. "The algorithms are changing, you say, and not the world itself, but then what
is
the world? A mountain and a table? What is a mountain—grass, and stone, and metal? Trees? Animals? All of those together? What is a table? I see four metal posts and a board, but if I use the words '
four metal posts and a board
' to describe what I see, the word '
table
' itself will be redundant. So, is there a table? Is there a mountain? Or is it not an algorithm
in our minds
that makes a table out of the posts and board, and is this not truly everything that there is to the world ..."
"Do you want to learn an algorithm for making tables, then? Is metalwork the reason for your visit, Adept Brighid? If it is, please let me know what exactly you want. I tire of long, circumventing explanations."
"No! This is not what I mean! I already have an algorithm inside me! We all do!" Darius's mild question seemed to have interrupted Brighid's flow of thought, and now she stared at him, shocked by her own uncontrolled shouts, all smiles and fakeness gone. "The
concepts
are inside us!"
Darius returned her gaze, his once again mild. "Imagination is a wonderful thing, but I am afraid it is not enough for working with metal, Adept Humanist. It might be possible that everyone has the potential to learn, and yet not everyone learns how to make things that work. For that, you need skill, and you need practice of both your mind and hands to acquire skill, and you need concentration—"
"Adept Darius, we, ourselves, are the algorithms that make the world. We humans, but especially we Bers. Our minds are what makes the world, and without them there is no world to speak of, only unconnected parts. True, it matters much that we know how to turn mountain into metal—but even more than that it matters how humans look at us, and how they look at the world, and what world they truly see." Brighid was talking as if she had not even been listening to Darius but was responding to a few non-connected words of his that she had overheard. To be fair, Darius was doing the same thing with her.
Suddenly Merley understood. They had no common language, the Artificer and the Humanist. They might as well have lived in separate worlds—his a world of tiny building parts and clockwise precision where humans never mattered, hers of words and images that grew inside humans and needed humans to matter or even exist. His world needed only fire, Magic, and metal, and there were consistent rules of how to bend these things to an Artificer's will. In her world, humans themselves were the materials, and the rules of how to bend them to her will must change with every individual, since humans had wills of their own.
About the world Darius and Brighid talked, and yet they did not see the world, for each of them had taken a part of the world and buried his or her self so deep in it that it seemed to be
the whole
world—and yet, it was not.
"You are both wrong," Merley said, quietly, and were these other adepts, perhaps they would have both jumped at the presumptuous acolyte. These two only looked at her expectantly, and Merley suddenly knew that whatever their worlds were, there was something both of them shared. Whatever their reasons, they both had the clarity of thought needed to listen to one whom they were not obliged to listen to but who had something to say.
Such people were dangerous and only one of them was a friend, but the thought of that was just a small thought amongst many. It fled away when Merley suddenly jumped from her chair and rushed to the window. A tiny flickering light had risen where the Sun had set—a light that was not a star, for even now it was moving through the sky. Merley watched it until it was gone, just a little light above the many lights that had started glowing down in the city, and yet a light different from all else—and Merley did not know how she knew that, but it was very important that she could see both it and them.
"You are both wrong," she whispered, almost to herself, as she slowly walked back to the table and took
A History of Metal Making,
its bulk suddenly solid and reassuring in her hands, even though it had been heavy and burdening earlier when it had not offered her the answers she had sought. Answers about how Magic worked, to questions asked by the Qynnsent lord and the water witch lady. Merley had told them that knowing how Magic worked did not matter; she had even shouted at them, and yet after that she had spent days amongst crumbling pages and imagined dust, seeking—seeking what? She had not known. Did she know, now?
"You are both wrong," she said, once again, "because one world is
not enough.
"
Darius said nothing, and Merley could read nothing on his face, but Brighid laughed with the motherly laugh that she had forgotten to use during the last few moments. It was as if Merley's words had just now jerked the woman out of the strange mood she had been in, that of showing true emotion by quarreling with Darius.
"My dear," Brighid beamed at her. "Those words would have warranted a visit from the Bers if you were not a Ber yourself."
"You are visiting, aren't you," Merley murmured.
Brighid smiled once again, with a hint of something like affection.
"But a Ber you are, and I say that you have the right to say such words if these are the words that would save us all. Yes, perhaps this is exactly it ..." She was lost in thought for a moment, then smiled yet again.
"But I have not yet told you what I came for. Time has come for the world's algorithms to change so that the world itself would not fade. What say you, Acolyte and Adept Artificer, of working on a device that no Artificer has ever worked on before?"
END OF EXCERPT
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