Teri McLaren
Claria brought out a tightly wound ball of waxed linen cloth and unwrapped it as she recovered her breath.
Then held it again.
When she turned back the last of the linen, an exquisite little clock, its bottom a carved wooden music box, its golden overlay a series of abstract lines of some sort, lay gleaming in the folds of the cloth. Claria tipped it over carefully in her hands, feeling the smoothness of the ancient wood.
"What is it?" Vashki was clearly disappointed.
"It's a chroniclave. A musical clock. I saw one once when I was a child. They don't make them anymore, no one can carve the gears," said Claria. The music works chimed and tinkled as she turned the chroniclave upside down, looking for the maker's mark and the winding key.
There was nothing but an Old Sumifan glyph, and that was fairly scribbled-no, burned-into the wood. Like a small fingerprint. The same as the one on- Claria's thoughts raced back to the totem the handsome young man had just walked out the door with. The handsome young man bound for the Borderlands. The one she would probably never see again.
"Well, that old pack rat," said Vashki, interrupting Claria's revelation. "Who would have thought Kalkuk had anything like this? Claria-it isn't the treasure, but you are rich! Look, its hands are made of gold! This has to be worth-"
"Hush, Vashki, I hear someone at the back door again. Maybe it's them," she said hopefully, "come back for something else." She wound the linen back on loosely and laid a half-finished parchment over the little clock.
"Perhaps," said Vashki, unconvinced. Og had been bound, after all, for a raqa stall. And the knock was not right. She set her bottle of polish on a bench, freed the crowbar from the crate, and started cautiously for the door, bar in hand.
She almost made it. The old door, full of dry rot,
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burst inward as if a sand squall had hit it full force, and knocked Vashki to the floor, snapping her arm like a dry twig. She lay within a few feet of the alley- almost to safety. Two dark-robed men, one waving a burning torch, its acrid smoke swirling in the air, charged into the shop, armed with throwing disks, hooked daggers gleaming at their belts.
"Where is the foreign man? Where does he go?" barked the first, his kaffiyeh thrown across his face to muffle his voice. With her good arm, Vashki swung low with the crowbar, tripping the one with the torch. The rear of the shop suddenly blazed up as sparks from the fallen torch found Vashki's broken bottle of polish.
"The front! Now!" Vashki screamed, crowbar still in hand, as the second man bounded toward the counter. Claria snatched up the chroniclave and bolted through the front door, billows of black smoke and at least one assassin following her.