The Makers of Light (3 page)

"Damn you," Dominick murmured, and Maxim laughed.

"So are you a murderer, boy? Would you believe my answer, whatever I said? That night, I had my back turned to you often enough; I could not have seen all. Tonight, you stood with a knife raised above my bed. Did you try to kill me? Only you can know for sure. Did you see a
samodiva?
Ask your own eyes."

Damn Maxim thrice, he was not lying. Playing with words, yes. Withholding information, certainly. But not lying at all. Dominick was not the one, at least not the only one, trying to kill Maxim twenty-three days ago. That much he could infer from the old man's ambiguities. But he had thought about killing Maxim tonight, and perhaps that, in itself, made him a murderer.

Damn the corrupt, iniquitous Militia woman. Couldn't she have done her job properly with him? Damn the little Balkaene peasant and his stone. Even without the stone and its visions, the boy had reminded Dominick of too many things he had been trying to forget for eight years. Damn the Ber woman, too—the angry, beautiful young woman who looked like a
samodiva
herself, who had taken the stone from the peasant boy and let him go even before Maxim had awakened to say none was guilty. She could not just let a boy go like this. She had a responsibility! Damn them all, they all had roles in society and life, they all had a duty to the Master's world, and none of them fulfilled it properly!

Dominick had thought that he had been fulfilling his, for eight years. Apparently not, considering today.

"Old man, can't you see if I am guilty or innocent in my eyes? Can't your detector tell you?" Can't
you,
at least, be a proper Mentor?

"No. As I already said, we have become too set in our ways, and that, my boy, is our greatest fallacy. The world is changing, but we are not keeping up. Come here."

Dominick did, and listened to the old man's words.

Many hours later, he left Maxim's room, and set towards what Maxim had called "
the dark, devastating forest.
"

Dominick

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

It was not a forest, not in the physical sense, but it was dark, and not only with the darkness induced by mere lack of light.

Lack of light there certainly was. The Sun had set, the last twilight fading before the approaching night. The few rusty metal pylons, some of which still clung to the tarnished and broken glass of lanterns, bore witness to light long ago gone. But more than that was amiss. It tugged at Dominick's mind and quintessence as if with cold, slimy fingers, and he shivered with more than just cold.

Someone was not doing his or her job, Dominick tried to think. It was a familiar, mundane thought, and he clutched to it, wielded it like a whip against fears that a grown man was not supposed to feel. Someone, the City Executive responsible for the public affairs of this neighborhood, should send a maintenance crew to paint the pylons, install new glass for the lanterns, dry the muddy, sometimes knee-deep holes in the street, replace the broken cobblestones, gather the stinking trash, and put a roof over the gray, dilapidated warehouse that loomed over him like a headless beast.

Of course, the City Executive's work would not be enough. Glass, even clean, new, shiny lantern glass—even unbreakable glass—was just a beautiful material that let light in and out but never made light. Light came from fire, from the firepipes, and in a place like this the firepipes were dead. Dominick forced himself to walk further, as a gust of wind pulled the hood of his cloak, tousled his hair, and proceeded to batter the warehouse's walls until they groaned. It was a question of time that the place would die, too.

The other question was, would that time be enough?

Dominick stopped where the street was crossed by another, wider street, its cobblestones even more used and broken, tracks of ox carts imprinted in the mud. A crossroad. According to Balkaene superstitious balderdash, a place soaked in wild Magic, and haunted.

At least, he had thought this to be superstitious balderdash. He wondered, now, as he stood alone, and darkness more corporeal than any darkness had the right to be pressed at him. For some reason, every temple of the Master was built at a crossroad. But not every crossroad had a temple.

Dominick shivered again, pulling the black cloak tightly around himself and the hood back to his head. A black cloak—a civilian color—and he wore black boots and gloves and trousers, too. He was so black that he almost blended with the darkness, and he felt ... different somehow from this morning's man in a brown Mentor's robe. That man might have vandalized a temple, but that was between him and the Master only; he would have never connected the peasant gibberish about crossroads to holy temples without even thinking that he deserved a whip.

But that was
that
man—a confused man, overcome with emotions, a man who thought that whipping or breaking temples was a key. A man who would wake drenched in sweat, the Mentor's detector torturing his hand, because a beautiful
samodiva
haunted his dreams. This man, now, the man in black, was calm. He blended with the crossroad's shadows like a
mor,
the detector in his hand still and silent, even though it had not been silent for many days.

Just a piece of cloth, a Mentor's robe, but shedding it seemed to have shed something more than that. For two years Dominick had been a Mentor—one of the youngest Mentors ever, for he had passed the Mentor's Trial and become a master and not an apprentice straight after his Judgement. For two years, he had met no trial but people's dirty thoughts and dreams as shown to him by the detector, treating them, successfully or not, with mere whipping. But mere whipping, as Maxim had said, was a path whose end Dominick had reached. It would not do, breaking temples. The detector could not lead him further. Further ahead, there lay the uneven ground where people got truly lost and he was their only hope; further ahead lay a place full of trials where he had to walk in shadows and walk alone.

It was liberating in a way. One who walked the dark forest should not fear crossroads. And he would not run from the
samodiva
any more. One who did not fear crossroads but haunted them like a shadowed
mor
had the right to
seek
her.

Somewhere in the sky something croaked, the voice shrill and harsh and lonesome; then a dark, dense shadow passed through the crossroad, just as the yellow moon peeked from behind a storm cloud. Dominick's hand darted, gripping the empty air where his whip had been, then settled on the dagger hilt. A bird. It was just a bird. But a bird was one bird too many so close to a Factory.

So, the Factory was dying, too. When it had been strong, wild beasts would have kept well away from it. Wild beasts, humans, even plants—none thrived in proximity to massive Magic. But now even the smell, the pungent smell of what steel was before it became steel, which would have permeated the air so close to the Steel Factory in the Factory's good days, was weak and almost imperceptible.

Dominick walked on the wide road for a while, his right leg, not yet fully healed, throbbing as he stumbled through unseen holes and puddles. The City Executive should—He shook his head, the forced rational thought fleeing as a hundred meters away from him a tall, indistinct shape darker than even the darkness loomed into view. The City Executive could do nothing.

He turned and walked to the crossroad again, the Factory's walls now a constant presence, shadows pressing at his sight and mind even through his back, shadows dark, almost corporeal, heavy. He had been close to Factories before, and each time he had left as soon as possible, for the Factories seemed to reach out towards him.

Reached out with hot, suffocating fingers towards him who called himself a Mentor and thought that a name and a title would shield him; reached towards him who refused to see that even a Mentor was in the end small and powerless, no more than a human; towards him who would one day learn that a creature small and powerless was small and powerless whether or not it knew it. Him who would burn
.

Dominick stumbled in yet another puddle, his brows damp with sweat despite the cold, his breaths fast and shallow. Muddy water sloshed around his boot, then found its way inside the boot, cold and biting. Cold. He stopped, his heartbeats slowly calming, the Factory's shadow suddenly less palpable on his back than ever before. He turned to look at it again—tall, dark, shapeless, looming above him like a dying giant who had not yet toppled but whose shadow still weighed with the memory of strength and threat. A giant still, and yet a cold, empty shape.

"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.