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“Not all the books though,” says the Smith.
“Every book humanity has ever written.”
“But not all the books…”
“The rest, in which mankind’s contribution is a raindrop in a storm, can be had too. A little negotiation and—”
“That’s a trap and you know it. You seek to mire me in lesser knowledge. You dilute secrets with lies, drown truths in useless fiction! Stories—I’ve no need of stories!”
“A story can be more powerful than a fact. There are truths—”
“The Library itself. That is the book I wish to open. Its secrets are not contained on its shelves.”
“This is true.”
“And so, I will break it and learn them. Discover how it works.”
“I am not here to stop you.”
The Great Smith hefts his third hammer, a fearsome weapon, a battle maul, its steel red with the memory of a thousand battles. “What are you here for then?”
“I am timeless. I am here because I was here, because I will be here. I see the cradle and the grave.”
“Ha!” the Smith barks. “There is no grave for me. I have engineered my way past death.”
The assistant inclines his head again. “There is no grave for you.”
“You…” The Smith wrinkles his broad, bronzed brow. “You are different from the other assistants.”
“I am Yute.” The slightest of bows, and in the half-light the Smith thinks that perhaps this assistant is not the porcelain white of the others, but ivory. A shade away from their perfection. A narrow shade—but even so…
“Why are you here?” the Smith asks. “Speak plainly.”
“We speak only because we spoke. Because I opened myself to hear you. Because I have yet a toe in time’s river and where my fellow assistants pay you no heed…I care.”
The Great Smith strikes. For reasons he cannot understand, or does not want to, a rage has seized him, and he must give it vent or burn in its fire. He strikes such a blow. One that has never rung out so in this dark jungle. His hammer lashes out, and a great weight of iron impacts the assistant’s narrow chest.
The Great Smith cries out as the shock of the blow vibrates through his hands. The rebound tears the hammer from his grasp, and a black pool swallows it. The assistant stands unmoved, as if he were a tree…though surely a tree would become splinters and sap under such a thunderbolt of iron.
In the silent moment that follows, there is a single cracking sound, as if thick ice has fractured. But the assistant’s chest shows no mark upon it.
“I…I broke something!” The Smith, defeated, looks at his hands, inspecting for damage.
“Only my heart.” The assistant places his palm to his chest. “So much knowledge…and yet…to a man with a hammer…everything still looks like a nail.”
The Smith looks up, the fierceness back in his eyes. His barrel chest inflates. “I got you!”
“You did!”
“Will you die?”
“Yes.” Yute gestures outward with his hand, and the Great Smith disappears. “In a thousand years.”
Chapter 13
Rose
With the sparkling, venom-green shoes on her feet, still warm from the corpse of their previous owner, Rose felt capable of great strides. She escaped the Tin Man’s importuning in one step that blurred the countryside into a greenish-brown smear and set her down amid hills that she hadn’t even seen from her previous position.
