Free The Makers of Light by Lynna Merrill

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