Page 61

The Smith tilted his head in acknowledgment.

“I was just a baby!”

“Progress requires sacrifice, Miss Penrose. Much of the medical knowledge that saves millions today was gained through the suffering and sacrificing of individuals.”

He took another pace. Clearly judging whether he could lunge and catch her before she found her way into a book.

“Progress should remember what it stands on…” Rose met the Great Smith’s eye and was pleased to see a moment of hesitation in him, though she was damned if she understood what threat she could offer the man. “We’re so busy looking up that we don’t remember what lies beneath our feet…”

“The hot heart of the world. Molten rock. An iron core. That’s what we’re standing on.” The Smith tossed Hannah’s book aside and took his sledgehammer in both hands. “Don’t try any of your tricks on me, child. You were crafted for a purpose. I know how to use you.”

The Earth might be a bubbling soup of fire far below them, but the power that Rose had in mind was closer than that. The power that was so constant that, like the hum of traffic, she cut it out of her thinking.

The Chimney Woman’s book had been forbidden by a curse, and only the Muse had been able to circumvent it before Red had shattered the magic and taken its evil on his own head. The Antler Man’s realm had stood open to any traveler. Only in this world, the one it was written in, did it require the additional effort of excavating through the foundations of Hannah Cooper’s former cottage.

There were no wards, no fences, no warning other than the age and strangeness of the thing. The Antler Man hadn’t feared the Muse, though there was a measure of respect in whatever understanding they had come to between them. He had given Rose two “gifts” on her final visit to his circle of stones. He had given her a slap, and years later it had been that slap that had reawakened her from a terminal sleep amid the poppies. His first gift had been a warning: do not return. A warning and the threat of consequence.

Rose reached for the Antler Man. She reached down through floorboards, through bricks, through foundation stones, through rubble, through soil dark with sunless centuries. She reached for a slim, river-smooth stone no longer than her arm from elbow to fingertips, a stone that might have been rolled beneath the ice of a yet earlier age when mammoths walked the length of Wright Street. She reached down a thousand years and carried on stretching, grasping past more centuries, more, another, one more…and clasped the stone.

Along the stone’s length the Antler Man had carved half a dozen long lines, and from each of those, scores of shorter lines jutted out to the left and to the right, bunched with meaning. Ogham script. Whether the stone had been fashioned close by or carried across some sea in later years didn’t really matter. The Antler Man’s world went with the stone. And in the moment Rose touched it, she was sucked into an ancient night where nothing she knew was true.

Chapter 28

The Great Smith

The girl fell into the ground as if it no longer existed, and for a moment the Great Smith stood, held in the jaws of surprise.

“Foolish child,” he rumbled.

There had to be a book hidden down there. It was the rational explanation. A cellar filled with stock for the shop perhaps. He reached within himself for the protocols he would need to follow her. Spells, that’s what the witch would call them. They weren’t spells. It was about patterns and resonances that sparked a necessary phase transition.

Much as he resented the lost time in traveling to this place, and the necessity of sullying himself with fiction just to recover a misplaced tool, there was still an appeal to the hunt. Chasing down a quarry. Something primordial, from before the age of reason.

He held his hammer before him as a focus. As soon as he initiated the process, he could feel it, the girl’s destination. A book but not quite a book. Something old and potent. It felt like a dead end—she’d trapped herself. He would have caught her in any case, but here it would be sooner rather than later.

Even so, he hesitated. The challenge in the girl’s eyes had given him a moment’s pause—the resolve there. But this was different. There was, in the power beneath his feet, a promise and a threat. In the days before he took up the hammers from his predecessor, set aside his name, and wrapped the mantle of the Great Smith about his shoulders, he would have called the feeling in his bones…fear.

As the Great Smith he stood beyond such trepidation. Superstition and made-up worlds had no hold on him. He held dominion over the tools of man, be they bronze, iron, or steel. No sword, bullet, or explosive projectile could hurt him. He would turn such implements to his own ends.

The Great Smith completed his transition and dropped into the world of whatever book awaited him. He landed squarely at the center of a circle of standing stones. Night-dark forests advanced to the east and west, faint glimmers picked out a sea to the north. The starless sky held a distant promise of dawn. A cool wind tugged at him, licking at his arms, flapping his apron. The air carried a rumor of woodsmoke.

“Come out, Rose.” His command fell among the stones, unanswered.

Slowly the Great Smith advanced on the largest of the stones, an irregular slab as tall as he could reach and as wide as he could spread his arms. The circle comprised nine such stones in all, the remaining eight slightly smaller. Even in the dark, he could tell it had stood here a great many years. Long enough for several of the stones to lean out of true. Long enough for the weather to have left its mark.

“Rose!” The idea of chasing the child through the night angered him. He could follow her trail easily enough, but he had made her, and she should obey his will. She would, once he had his hands on her, and he would teach her the consequences of wasting his time. “Come here!”

A dark shape flickered between two of the stones, there for a moment then gone. The Great Smith raised his hammer, holding the haft across his chest. He reached for the threads of this story, the narrative that would narrow his search and connect him to his prey.

“What trickery is this?” He could find no strands of story. None at all. He turned, slowly, seeing twice more a shape flit across the gaps between the stones. The same person? Possibly. Though they would need to be fleet of foot. “Bring me the girl. That’s all I want.”

Silence, save for a distant drumbeat, regular, like the beating of a heart, there and gone, there and gone, carried on the wind.

“I am the Great Smith, here under the authority of the Order of Smiths. I demand that you give me my due.” He stepped to the side and swung his hammer with all his strength, striking the largest of the nine stones dead center. He had expected the megalith to fly apart. No normal hammer would do much more than leave a dent, but the Great Smith’s third hammer had leveled buildings in a single blow. Instead, a crack ran through the stone, top to bottom.

A figure threw itself between the two most distant stones, racing toward the Great Smith, his cloak flying behind him, the predawn catching a glimmer from the sword raised above his head.

The Great Smith puffed between his lips, making a dismissive gesture with the fingers of one hand. The man—it was a man, though his hair was long and wild—covered the ground in a dozen strides and swung. The Smith might have blocked the blow on the haft of his hammer, but instead he let it land. The blade fell upon his neck, and such was the Smith’s compact with the works of man, with the technology of forge and furnace, that neither its weight nor edge could harm him.