Read "Figures of Earth" by James Branch Cabell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"But I cannot understand," said Freydis, on a fine day in September, "how it is that, now the power of Schamir is in your control, and you have the secret of giving life to your images, you do not care to use either the secret or the talisman. For you make no more images, you are always saying, ‘No, we will let that wait a bit,' and you do not even quicken the ten caricatures of the image-makers which you have already modeled."
"Life will be given to these in due time," said Manuel, "but that time is not yet come. Meanwhile, I avoid practice of the old Tuyla mystery for the sufficing reason that I have seen the result it has on the practitioner. A geas was upon me to make a figure in the world, and so I modeled and loaned life to such a splendid gay young champion as was to my thinking and my desire. Thus my geas, I take it, is discharged, and a thing done has an end. Heaven may now excel me by creating a larger number of living figures than I, but preeminence in this matter is not a question of arithmetic -- "