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A soft nose nudged her forward and Rose’s reaching hands soon found cold stone. The limestone of the cliffs formed her ceiling, but, as she followed the surface, she found an opening. Cave or tunnel, this was what the Badger had dug down for.

“Thank you,” Rose called back. “And thank the others for me.”

But already the Badger was gone, and silence her only answer.

Chapter 8

The Library

“Tools to make tools to make tools…”

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

A man stands in his gallery, and along the wall, hammers are arrayed, ordered from the smallest to the largest. The biggest of them all, the first hammer, is a beast, nine feet in length, its haft bound in leather for the first yard, and where the iron lies exposed, it is set with runes. The head is as large as four anvils. No one could wield it. And yet our man, in his leather apron with his arms huge and bare, seems as if he might.

He walks the length of the hall, passing the tools of his trade. At the far end the hammers shrink, down past the reflex-testing hammer, the piano hammer, down past a hammer as tiny as the eponymous bone in the ear, the malleus, down to hammers invisible to sight, down to a hammer that might strike a single atom from its place in a crystal lattice.

Our man is a smith. All who work with tools are smiths of some flavor, but he is the Great Smith. He works with hammers, for a hammer stands behind most every object ever crafted. Before a microchip is fashioned, the silicon must be mined, the germanium, perhaps a dash of something rarer, lanthanum, neodymium, dysprosium?

“Time to tackle time,” the Great Smith says. “What hammer would you recommend, Dalion?”

Dalion inclines his bronze head and draws his metal wings closer. He knows that the Great Smith is not interested in his opinion. The Smith fashioned him, so in a real sense, Dalion’s opinions are the ones that were given to him. “Might it depend on what you wish to do with time, sir?”

“I wish to break it, of course. Nothing that is preformed can be improved without first breaking it.”

“Perhaps…” Dalion looks toward the far end of the gallery. “The large one?”

Chapter 9

Rose

Rose followed the lightless passages, hearing all the time the drip-drip-drip of water into water as she slid and stumbled over smooth but folded stone. At times it seemed she passed through spaces large as cathedral halls, and at others she patted the walls with both hands to keep her head from striking them.

The larger voids where her footfalls echoed grew scarcer, and the tight passageways more frequent. As she advanced, Rose became increasingly convinced that she was no longer alone. Sometimes there were two sets of echoes or three, or the delay felt too long. She discovered that the emptiness of the dark might be terrifying, but that the idea it was not empty was even more so.

The Badger had left her, but the worm would not let go so easily. She was in its territory now, in the interstitial spaces of creation, the places where the serpent on its belly can outpace the swiftest gazelle. Sometimes the noises she half heard, half imagined behind her were not footsteps at all, but the slither of scales over rock or the soft, slimy undulation of yielding flesh.

Before her legs grew tired, she was crouching, moving forward while bent double in some sections. She advanced on her knees, no doubt shredding her skirt, as the way narrowed further.

When Rose had burrowed her way to the Riverbank, it had been thoughts of the Muse that had pushed her forward and given her courage. She wished to see beyond the horizons that the Muse deemed safe. She wanted to escape the garden. A prison, no matter how beautiful, is still a prison. She sped past obstacles, fearful that the Muse would find her and bring her back, but also not scared of being trapped in dark places because…the Muse would find her and bring her back. Well…“not scared” would be overstating her bravery and her confidence. She had been scared, but nothing like she was now.

“Dash it all.” Rose wished she knew better curse words, but between the garden, Miss Havisham and her other chosen guardians, and, more recently, the folk of the Riverbank, Rose had yet to be equipped with language robust enough to express her current feelings.

It came to Rose then that, although the worm had not been pursuing her for long, she had for her whole life had a sense of being in flight from something. A man had come calling at Satis House one day. The aging porter whom Miss Havisham employed in a number of roles, including doorman, had announced that a Mr. Smith was waiting at the main entrance. Miss Havisham, who, armored in her tragedy, flinched at nothing, flinched then. She had told the porter to bid Mr. Smith be on his way and described him to Rose as a tiresome man of appalling bluntness. The porter had returned from his mission to say that he had barred the entrance, but that the man had been most vexed at this refusal and had vowed to return with the Great Smith to hammer on the door.

Rose’s exit from Miss Havisham’s home had followed hard on the heels of this incident, and she had never stayed in one place again as long as she had with the old lady in her wedding dress.

Cold water dripped onto the back of Rose’s neck in the blind dark of the fissure that held her.

“Dash! Dash! Dash!” Rose needed whole new words, and lots of them, to do justice to the idea of wriggling herself further into the ever-shrinking entrails of the cave system without any guarantee that the wet and twisting walls would deliver her anywhere or even allow her to reverse once she had jammed herself as tightly as she could into their depths.

She may have been written rather than birthed, but Rose decided that the circumstances that had put her on a different side of the page to her mother did not mean that she was any less real, and more specifically, didn’t mean that the terror that now gripped her could be any less visceral than that experienced in the world where her hardships were mere words on paper.

Squeezed in the airless depths, and increasingly unable to inflate her lungs, Rose lacked the ability to cry out. Instead, she pressed forward. The fear of what lay behind her, of what was advancing on her thrashing heels, proved greater than the worry that she might wedge herself into a crevice from which there would be no retreat, and that would, in the blind fathoms of the Earth, keep hold of her until there was nothing left to hold.

When she passed through the neck, the skin-scraping, rib-squashing eye of the needle, Rose had no way of knowing that another, wholly impossible narrowing did not await her. But the fissure opened up, broadened, and finally yawned sufficiently for all fours to become knees and then a crouched walk from which she slowly straightened.