Thief of Time

description on the little map inside the lid. Look.”
    “And you think that will impress anyone?”
    “Please. Things should be done properly.”
    “Oh, give it to me, then!”
    Mr. White advanced on Lu-Tze, ax raised.
    “It is forbidden to—” he began.
    “ Eat…oh, good grief…Eat…‘a delicious fondant sugar creme infused with delightfully rich and creamy raspberry filling wrapped in mysterious dark chocolate’…you gray bastards!”
    A shower of small objects pattered down on the street. Several of them broke open.
    Lu-Tze heard a whine or, rather, the silence caused by the absence of a whine he’d grown used to.
    “Oh no, I’m winding dow…”

    Trailing smoke, but looking more like a milkman again, albeit one that’d just delivered to a blazing house, Ronnie Soak stormed into his dairy.
    “Who does he think he is?” he muttered, gripping the spotless edge of a counter so hard that the metal bent. “ Hah, oh yes, they just toss you aside, but when they want you to make a comeback—”
    Under his fingers, the metal went white-hot and then dripped.
    “I’ve got customers. I’ve got customers. People depend on me. It might not be a glamorous job, but people will always need milk—”
    He clapped a hand to his forehead. Where the molten metal touched his skin, the metal evaporated.
    The headache was really bad .
    He could remember the time when there was only him. It was hard to remember, because…there was nothing, no color, no sound, no pressure, no time, no spin, no light, no life…
    Just Kaos.
    And the thought arose: do I want that again? The perfect order that goes with changelessness?
    More thoughts were following that one, like little silvery eels in his mind. He was, after all, a horseman, and had been ever since the time the people in mud cities on baking plains put together some hazy idea of Something that had existed before anyone else. And a horseman picks up the noises of the world. The mud-city people and the skin-tent people, they’d known instinctively that the world swirled perilously through a complex and uncaring multiverse, that life was lived a mirror’s thickness from the cold of space and the gulfs of night. They knew that everything they called reality, the web of rules that made life happen, was a bubble on the tide. They feared old Kaos. But now—
    He opened his eyes and looked down at his dark, smoking hands.
    To the world in general, he said: “Who am I now?”

    Lu-Tze heard his voice speed up from nothing: “—wn…”
    “No, you’re wound up again,” said a young woman in front of him. She stood back, giving him a critical look. Lu-Tze, for the first time in eight hundred years, felt that he’d been caught doing something wrong. It was that kind of expression—searching, rummaging around inside his head.
    “You’ll be Lu-Tze, then,” said Susan. “I’m Susan Sto Helit. No time for explanations. You’ve been out for…well, not for long. We have to get Lobsang to the glass clock. Are you any good? Lobsang thinks you’re a bit of a fraud.”
    “Only a bit? I’m surprised.” Lu-Tze looked around. “What happened here?”
    The street was empty, except for the ever-present statues. But scraps of silver paper and colored wrappers littered the ground, and across the wall behind him was a long splash of what looked very much like chocolate icing.
    “Some of them got away,” said Susan, picking up what Lu-Tze could only hope was a giant icing syringe. “Mostly they fought with one another. Would you try to tear someone apart just for a coffee creme?”
    Lu-Tze looked into those eyes. After eight hundred years you learn how to read people. And Susan was a story that went back a very long way. She probably even knew about Rule One, and didn’t care. This was someone to treat with respect. But you couldn’t let even someone like her have it all their own way.
    “The kind with a coffee bean on the top, or the ordinary kind?” he said.
    “The kind without the coffee bean, I think,” said Susan, holding his gaze.
    “Nnn—o. No. No, I don’t think I would,” said Lu-Tze.
    “But they are learning,” said a woman’s voice behind the sweeper. “Some resisted. We can learn. That’s how humans became humans.”
    Lu-Tze regarded the speaker. She looked like a society lady who had just had a really bad day in a threshing machine.
    “Can I just be clear here?” he said, staring from one woman to the other. “You’ve been fighting the