The Makers of Light Read Online Free PDF

Factory Warehouse District, a place of the real world, of the fading world. He had walked some of these streets today. And yet, there were little streets that he had not seen, little corners where the darkness was denser and somehow seemed to try to pull him away to a place he did not want to visit.
    " A place of the Lost Ones, " any place like this. " Unsafe. Treacherous. Unreal, " was written in the Mentors' books, and Dominick had believed it. Or wanted to. "Bring the lost ones back," Maxim had said today. Had the old man realized his words' double meaning? What was the meaning of any words that came from Maxim's mouth?
    The Lost Ones, the primeval evil, the Master's own enemies. Those who, if allowed, would leech the world until the world was no longer, until all that was left was a shadow, an illusion, an eternal nothing that still suffered because it remembered that it had been something before. Dominick did not know much about the Lost Ones, for even knowing was too dangerous, even for a Mentor. Mentors knew about minds. They knew that even thinking of the wrong path, of the unreal path, even dreaming of it was in a way walking where one should never walk. You could become lost in your own mind. You could become lost in a dream.
    Dominick clenched his jaw, ignoring his leg's new complaint, in no way willing to demonstrate to these two that he was in pain. He coughed, though, the effect of the cold water in his other boot working its way up his body. He felt dizzier, dark shapes flashing before his eyes, but he was unable to focus on them. Perfect. A fever was exactly what he needed while he did not even know where he was going. Or, while he knew that he was going to Maxim's dark, devastating forest.
    Oh, well. Dominick blinked, trying to chase the dark shapes away. He did not know the forest, but he did know that Gerard might have cronies behind the next corner, with more knives than Dominick could manage.
    Who were the people he was blindly following? Where were they going? He had a way to check, even though a Mentor never used it for personal benefit. But it would not be personal only. He was here for them, he was here to save them from their own folly. He was their Mentor now, whether or not they knew this or wanted it.
    Dominick narrowed his eyes, not daring to close them fully, his thoughts concentrating on what lived within his left wrist. Then, suddenly, his elbows hit a stone wall, his head snapping back to avoid collision at the last moment. The couple and the narrow street they were walking on were suddenly gone, while far behind him, not where he had last seen it but still visible, was the Factory.
    Somehow he tore his thoughts away from his wrist, despite the detector's wild vibration and the pain it caused him. Somehow he managed to think not of the Factory, but of darkness, of the green-eyed girl, and seeing things better left unseen. Somehow, he saw them again, but not before the detector threw at him bits of the girl's mind. Not before he received Mentor's information again—information that one only found on the thorny path, now wrenched from the thorny path and tainted with something wilder.
    She did not know where they were going, herself. She followed the boy, or at least she made herself believe that. The boy was at the top of her mind—her husband, her master, for she was a concubine and not a wife. He had to be there, she thought, for these were the rules, the laws, and she had never been a rule-breaker. Oh, she had broken rules in her mind, and she had been whipped for aberrant thoughts, certainly—who had not been?
    But these were the rules everyone broke. She had until recently been more interested in men and clothes than in the Master, and it was aberrant but it was also normal. In her thoughts, she had never transgressed deliberately. And now she was a concubine and did not have to worry about the Master any longer. Gerard was her only responsibility, while He and their betrayal of Him was