Lyrec Read Free

journey, but no one had been going this way from the tavern where he had spent the previous night. Tandragh was at the end of a road that led nowhere else, and Tandragh was small. If the finest maker of cymrallins had not lived there, the minstrel would not have been going there, either. And so, alone, he chose to work on a song. It would be a love ballad, he had decided. The first line— “Your face, more soft than cat’s fur, my love” —was evidence of this. It was a line he had worked on for well over an hour. The rhythm was as he wanted it, but the imagery felt a tad forced. Nonetheless, he chose to keep it for the present.   He was not the most renowned of composers in Miria. His magic tricks (for he had performed as a magician since his cymrallin had been stepped on) were little better.
    With his mind so bound up in the fundamentals of song, the minstrel was slow to react when the brightest of lights he had ever seen suddenly flared before his face and the air in front of him seemed to solidify. It struck him, and he stumbled back, clutching at the polished hilt of his sword.
    The sounds of the forest grew to a roar, and then vanished in a thunderclap. A gust of wind like winter’s breath poured over him. The light grew larger, took shape, became a huge silvery globe floating above the ground. The globe contained some dark shape that moved but was obscured from identification by the metallic sheen of the globe. The globe itself did not mirror its surroundings; it reflected ripples of sheer white folded against black, the way a deeply shadowed drape might appear.
    All of this—the light, the globe, and his awareness of it—took place in seconds. The minstrel turned to flee and came up against a second sphere. With a shriek he backed away. The second sphere was smaller than the first and was deformed by holes and lumps on one side as though hot wax had been poured over it. The minstrel looked back and forth at the globes, then cried out, “Gods! I’m in the presence of gods!” He fell to his knees and averted his eyes so as not to be struck blind.
    The larger globe shot out a white tendril that coated the minstrel from head to foot with a glossy clear sap. It trapped him, bowed down, paralyzed, between thoughts, between breaths, between moments in time.
    The second globe, too, attached a tendril to him.
    The first globe began to alter. It compressed, its perfect roundness disappeared. The living form within it stretched out, filling in the changing portions of the globe like molten metal in a mold. There came a sound—a crackling, hissing, white-hot sound. The globe thinned and elongated further. Its sides began to ripple, and a roughly humanoid form appeared within it. The silver mold redefined itself, first expanding, then contracting; and with each set of “breaths” a new feature emerged beneath the silver: first arms and legs, then feet and hands. A torso was carved out, then clothing upon it. The very top of the figure stretched out to each side and became the brim of a hat.
    When all else had been defined, the area beneath the hat was still blank. Images, impressions drawn from the minstrel’s mind, flickered across the silver surface, each face lasting for a split-second, instantly replaced with another and then another face until, at last, a set of eyes remained, and then a mouth, a nose, a beard. When the face had been sculpted, a silver human statue stood beside the minstrel. Reflected on its features still was a place that was not the forest. The sculpted being did not exist here yet.
    The silver began to shrink away and everywhere that it retracted, colors—material and flesh—appeared. Brown leather for the hat, and the darker brown fur of a jerkin; a maroon shirt with loose sleeves; black leggings, shiny black boots, and a heavy black cape that was chained to the jerkin. The face was square-jawed, the dark beard trimmed close. Had the minstrel been able to look up, he would not have known