The Makers of Light (7 page)

In the Firemind, Adept Weyli taught Artificery interspersed not with tiny clocks and mountain metal stories but with social venom and gossip. Her students were likely to achieve positions of Firemind power, rather than wander off to unsavory responsibilities in the country like Darius's few were apt to do. "
Weirdus,
" Merley had heard some acolytes call him. They knew nothing, the accursed fools. She already loved the kind old man and even his remote, gray old tower, and she could almost love Brighid herself, for serving him as punishment for Night 11 and Morning 12, for Merley's latest and greatest defiance.

Merley

Night 11 and Morning 12 of the First Quarter, Year of the Master 706

Merley spent Night 11, like many nights before, out on the walls of the Novice tower. The moons glowed above the Acolyte tower across the narrow path. Specks of light collided with its gloomy windows, scampering, escaping with the wind like a rain of flames and flickers, as if the moons had decided to send messengers to the world. She suppressed the urge to close her eyes, extend her neck from the cranny in the Novice tower wall she was hunched in, and feel the wind.

It would be unwise; she could be seen. Besides, the wind would just slip beside her, fleeing with no trace of light.

There was an old aberrant peasant song that said one could catch the wind that flew by her lonely window, and fly with it herself; that she could run across the land to freedom and to her special someone.

Oh, really, fly where? To whom? It was a silly folk song, but it had become stuck in Merley's mind, its simple but pervasive melody pulling strings it was not supposed to pull. A Ber should not be affected by the trifling entertainments of commoners. A former lady of Mierenthia's peerage should not be affected by them, either.

Merley had tried to fly away, before. Now the furthest she could fly was to that dour gray building across the street, at a few steps distance. Not literally fly, at that, for even the bodies of Bers were in certain ways restricted like those of mundane humans. She could at most jump, hoping that the path was narrow enough for her to overcome before Mierenthia would suck her downwards—before the towers would swirl together with the wind to make her fly in the only direction she did not want to fly in. She dreamed of falling, sometimes. It was probably inevitable for someone who spent the nights crawling along the towers' walls.

Merley shifted her body slightly, to allow her bent left leg to stop being numb. The moons were fading, and far to the east the sky was milky and pale, with the mountaintops glazed in pink. As if, far there beyond Balkaene, old Slava's morning feast of milk and rose petal cookies had suddenly spread up to the sky for the world to see. Or, at least, for Merley to see.

Merley closed her eyes, her heart beating faster than it had a moment ago, her mind barely controlling her hand to not slam into the wall. If it did, she would fall. She blinked back her tears. Mistress Cook Slava, one of the few people in her father's House who had dared befriend her, was lost to her forever. Had been, like everything from her old life, worthy or not, since her sixteenth birthday more than a year ago.

May you be blessed with the Master's fire and light,
Merley thought to the wind, as if it could bring the words to both Slava and the mountains, even though it blew the other way, towards Mierber. Well, right now it might be good to try to bless Mierber, too. If she did not, if she let sadness and anger rule her here and now, she might lose her tricky balance and prove Henna right that her "
overly fervid
" personality would bring her "
inevitable downfall.
" Henna would not even appreciate the irony. Besides, Merley would never prove her right, in anything!

She should go. Soon Henna would be on her way towards the Novice tower, her yellow robe swinging around her hips in that special movement of hers, her feet dragging on the ground. Merley winced at the thought of the sound. Henna was not a sick woman. Everything from her cropped gray-brown hair and sharp eyes, to her ample hips and the inevitable rod in her hands emitted rigidness and health. Henna did not need to drag her feet, like that wrinkled old man yesterday morning had, his hands trembling, his eyes darting wildly left and right, bent twofold with the weight of his firebucket.

Merley crept out of the cranny, her right foot trying a protruding piece of stone while the fingers of her right hand slipped inside a crack in the wall. Her body shivered. It sometimes did when she climbed, the air inside her stomach floating to form a pulsing cloud, pushing up and pushing out, whispering that if she released her hold she could walk to the sky. She paused, taking a deep breath, then coughed as dust sprinkled her throat. So much dust. The building was buried beneath centuries of it, with stones and cracks that seemed to have been there forever, but never changed.

The moment she took control of the air in her stomach, the wind tugged sharply at her robe, so Merley had to flatten herself against the wall. The teachers said that air was treacherous; that the wind might caress her cheeks but in its dark, elemental heart, it still dreamed about destroying her wall and her world.
Their
world.

If it could, the wind would bash the tower walls until the whole tower was scattered into pieces, they said—gradually, stone by stone, or at once, in a flurry of mortar and torn scraps. Water would drench the walls until they decayed, and the soil of Mierenthia itself would engulf them. Air, water, and the soil where wildlife grew and thrived—only fools and reprobates did not fear them. Unlike fire, they were hard to command; like fire, they were terrible if unbound.

The wind howled, harshly, just as Henna's unmistakable figure appeared on the path. There was someone else with her today, but Merley did not know who, for she dared not look further. She flattened herself even closer to the wall. She preferred to not watch Henna and her companion, for somehow people always felt her eyes, even if they could not see her--and those down on the path
would
easily see her if they but looked up. "
Byas
eyes," an old servant woman had once said, and Merley's father had ordered her beaten for it.

The wind howled again, its voice a lonely lament amidst stone and faint morning light. Merley shivered, the stone wall hard and chilly to her breasts and stomach.

" ... from Balkaene," a voice drifted to her ears. "They said it attacked a man."

"Good." Henna's voice, hard as always, but today almost content.

"Others say the man attacked first."

"It does not matter. Anyway, it will die. I will ask Adept Brighid just in case, but I know what she'll say ..."

The voices subsided as their owners passed further away, and Merley clutched the wall even harder, panting, every breath a pain.
Careful, careful now, do not fall.
Why was she so affected? They were going to kill something, but was that truly news? Senior Bers did kill. They just did not talk about it in front of her.

The wind howled again, and she shivered. Like a
halla
it howled, full of anguish, like a wolf out of Slava's stories, alone, its head raised towards the glowing moons ...

It howled yet again, just as what looked like a bird with its wings folded appeared far in the sky—and for the first time in many days Merley ignored the flying wagon that was her main reason for climbing walls and towers. Her eyes were fixed on the Generalist tower, instead. Far to the right, where this tower stood, and downwards towards its basement, something had howled in misery while the wind had not blown at all.

Slowly, she crept further, passing the slit between the stones that—if she crept sideways—was just narrow enough to lead her to the loose stone. The loose stone opened towards what days afore might have been a chimney, and it in turn climbed down to the broom closet beside her room. She had wondered about that chimney, sometimes. It was cold and had been cold for perhaps decades or even centuries, yet something must have once burned in the present-day broom closet. What? Or who?

Whatever it was that howled raised its voice again, stronger now that she was closer to where the two towers met. A tear fell on Merley's hand, tingling. How could she have confused it with the wind? If she closed her eyes, she could feel it—hard, tainted stone walls enclosing, encroaching, crushing its quintessence, while grass, soil, green rustling leaves and mountain faded. Faded ... Blurred ...

Merley jolted her eyes open. Then she crept. A cobbled path ran between the Novice and Generalist towers, a narrow path, not at all wide like the street that separated the Acolyte tower from the novices who watched it every day and dreamed. No one ever dreamed about the Generalist tower, save in nightmares, and Merley almost felt sorry for its tall, dark, gloomy frame, where narrow windows watched her like empty eyes with dreams long ago shattered. But she was only
almost
sorry, for the howl came at her again, even clearer. Did no one else hear it?

Well, so what if they did?

She had reached the corner between the path and the street, where the tower's stone was most exposed and was currently not dusty but wet and slippery, weatherbeaten. Merley ran a hand along the edge, trembling. She had come to this spot only once before, for it was too perilous to walk the night so close to the teachers. It had not been wet and slippery before. What Ber tower, what tower of the Fire Masters, ever was? "
There are edges, treacherous edges that creep up to us, of a world full of deceit and menace ...
" Teachers' words, and for the first time in many days they rang somewhat true. This here was a tower's edge. A water-drenched piece of tower where water had never come before, or at least had not come for centuries. Merley felt another tear creeping and almost laughed with the irony of it. She was shedding water because she was almost sad, almost sorry that the tower could not withstand water any more.

Her thoughts returned to the prisoner. No one—no Ber—would care for a lonely, howling creature out from a world they knew not or else feared. They would be too afraid or too potion-afflicted to even look. To even think.

Well, she was not potion-afflicted. And as for fear ... Merley took a deep breath, and then, before she'd had a chance to think and possibly dissuade herself from the notion, extended a leg beyond the building's corner, shifted her knee so that her foot was underpinned by the wall, and shoved herself away.

She flew, for a moment. Then, just as the ground rotated, as the wind laughed at her face and something inside her screamed that the space between the towers was not
that
narrow, her hands gripped a ledge on the Generalist tower's wall. For some time, she just hung there, her lungs fighting for air, her eyes blurred, the rest of her body numb. Then slowly her feet found the crevice she had seen from the other tower, and as the creature howled again, she crept.

Along the wall she crept, and down an old, dead chimney, and then she did not creep but ran, for the chimney ended in a dark little chamber attached to a dark corridor with many doors and, behind the doors, whispers.

No, no voices. Please, no voices.
She heard voices, sometimes, when she was sad or angry, voices humming, ticking, rippling, rising and falling, blending in a cloud of indistinct, exasperating noise that permeated everything.

"Cover you ears, little one," old Slava used to tell her when her father could not hear, old Slava who was her only confidante in this matter as in many others. "Cover your eyes at night when things walk better left unseen, cover your ears and mouth when things talk better left unheard and unanswered." But still Merley heard the voices, and she heard songs, too.

They were unwelcome, songs and music, here in the stone-walled heart of fire and its wielders, for songs were emotional, disruptive elements from the common world, and also a breath of a world much more subtle and perilous. Yet, things sang, mindless of the Ladies and Lords of Fire's will. The wind sang when it rushed towards the walls, and the walls sang in response when, at double Fullfire-Moons, the stones awakened. Water sang, even in the pipes, and soil sang when tiny shots of flowers and grass nudged their heads out to greet the Sun—and cried when heavy boots and metal hoes crushed them.

There were no flowers and grass and trees in the Mind. Only fire, Ber fire, tamed and chained like an ox in its plow. But Ber fire sang, too, and its song could wrench a heart away and break it.

She could hear them all, sometimes, when her heart was open and the world turned to shadows and blur; she could hear them now, and it hurt her.

So, she sang to herself, like she sometimes would, a song about a child sleeping in her cradle. Eyes like stars the child had and a sweetest face, and the singer of the song prayed that the child slept in peace, that the wild dreams were kept away, and that "
they
" blessed the child and never took her.

Merley did not know who "
they
" were, the ones the prayer was for. Someone, a woman she did not even remember, had sang this song to her long ago. She must have been a nurse Merley's parents had chased away before Merley could remember her face, a peasant woman perhaps, for the song was simple and yet imprinting. The song had soothed her, then, and it soothed her now as she hummed it in her mind, chasing away the other songs and the whispers.

But the howl never went away. The creature was crying, calling. Calling
to her
now, its voice in rhythm with her steps. So, she ran, hair and the black robe flapping at her back, creating wind where perhaps wind had never been, awakening the stale, old air from its dark slumber.

It called to her again when she leaned against the massive iron door of its prison and shoved it open just enough to squeeze herself inside a room full of blackness. It called, but this time the call was not a howl but a snarl, yellow eyes glaring at her as sharp teeth flashed with the reflection of her tiny conjured light, a chain clanging as the animal tried to charge at her.