The Clock Winked (The Sagittan Chronicles Book 2)

©

Ariele Sieling 2013

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the author. The characters and situations are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Ariele Sieling.

www.arielesieling.com

This
book is dedicated to my
two wonderful grandmothers:

Bernice Tozier
and
Dorothy Sieling

and
to my late grandfathers:

John Tozier
and
Gary Sieling

The monotony was unrelenting. A slight fog, napping street
lamps, and the occasional person shrouded in a long coat and gloves were all
that punctuated the utter dullness which began the day. The odds of anything
changing were actually quite
high,
however, because
the moment you begin to appreciate tedium is the moment it rapidly disappears.

The wooden sign over the small shop creaked.

Then the bell rang.

This particular bell rang so infrequently, that the young
and rather uncouth William Oliphant, XXXIV, esquire, looked up, utterly
surprised. The bell which hung on the door to his little book shop never rang.
In fact, he had so few customers that one afternoon he thought he was being
robbed and nearly called the police—until the gentleman set his stack of
purchases on the counter and offered to pay.

A vaguely familiar face looked over the counter at him.

“Hello,” said the boy. “I'm here to start my internship.”

“What?” Oliphant swung his feet off the counter and dragged
himself out of the low, comfortably stuffed chair which he kept behind the
counter. “I don't... I didn't... what internship?”

“It's me, Uncle Will,” the boy insisted. He pushed back a
lock of blond hair that seemed to fall over his eyes purely out of spite.
“Auvek.
You agreed to give me an internship when we were at
the family reunion.”

Oliphant blinked for a moment. The family reunion, if he
could remember correctly, had been large and awful. He had been forced to talk
to hundreds of relatives whom he had never met or heard of. Half of them wanted
to take over his shop, and the other half wanted his secret stash of really old
wine. Luckily, he had been drunk for the large majority of the event, and
didn’t remember much.

Auvek, on the other hand, remembered the family reunion as
delightful fun—unmet cousins, opportunities for employment, and lots of games.
The Memphis Oliphant line (anthropologists) had even brought a giant, green,
juicy fruit from Earth—the inside was red! And it was absolutely delicious.

Oliphant sighed. “You’re the one, with the… the blond… with
the mam with the flower—”

“She had flowers on her dress,” Auvek offered. “And she
asked if I could intern here, and you said yes.”

“Okay, okay. I remember. You can start now. But there won’t
be any lazing about. It’s all about hard work here!” Oliphant hit the counter
with his fist. “Come learn how to use the cash register.”

“Oh, I know how to use a cash register,” his nephew said
eagerly.

“Good. Then come sit behind the desk while I go... do work
at the house.”

“Where should I put my things?” He gestured to his
suitcases.

“Um, just throw them behind the desk for now, until I find a
place for you to sleep. I'll be back later. Oh, and what's your name again?”

“Auvek,” the boy stated.
“Auvek the
thirty-seventh.”

“You guys are already up to thirty-seven? I'm only the
thirty-fourth.” Oliphant turned and wandered towards the door. He slapped Auvek
on the shoulder with one hand and pushed open the door with the other. “Breed
like rabbits,” he muttered as the door swung shut behind him.

Auvek didn’t even have a moment to look around when the bell
rang again. “I’m back.” Oliphant stated. He stalked up to Auvek and stared him
straight in the eyes. “Do. Not. Steal.
Anything.”
He
tapped his finger against Auvek’s chest. “If I catch you stealing or looking or
thinking
about stealing, I will tear
you to shreds and blacken your name and the name of your entire line! So don’t
even think about it.”

“I won’t!” Auvek put his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“I would never! I couldn’t, I don’t think, without you noticing. This is your
shop after all.”

Oliphant nodded brusquely. “Excellent. I will be watching
you, little nephew-cousin-relative-person.” He turned and sauntered back
through the door.

Auvek turned and looked around the shop. Bookcases stretched
out in every direction, overflowing with books of every shape, size, and
colour. Against the wall behind the desk, stacks of books rose precariously
from floor to ceiling. He began to walk through the aisles. The dirt that
covered every flat surface severely diminished the dark elegance of the red
dokomaya wood from which the bookcases were built. Upon close inspection, it
appeared that a small tornado had glided through the front door, carefully
picked up each bookcase, and upended it onto the floor, whereupon a legion of
mice had come and placed each book back at very least on the shelf, but not in
any particular order. Some of the books lay on their side; others stood; still
more lay diagonally, upside down, and in all manner of towers and sculptures.

As he moved deeper into the forest of dusty shelves and
recalcitrant literature, the aisles narrowed slowly and columns of books began
to appear on the floor, stacked precariously and occasionally resting against
the bookcases. Here and there they lay open, their pages naked to the world; a
few ripped pages lay quietly on the floor, shoved awkwardly into books, or
kicked back into corners.

A tall door hid in the darkness where the lamps had died.
One of the lights bzzzt on and off.
Auvek reached forward
and pulled on the handle. He heard a crash as a heap of books came flowing from
the room. It was both a gold mine and a landfill: the overflowing coffers of a
tyrannical and intellectual overlord. Auvek jumped back from the avalanche and
shook his head.
A hoarder overlord, maybe.
This place
could definitely use some work.

Making his way back to the front desk, Auvek reached out to
straighten a book here and a book there, and began to plot the mess's demise.
He began by sitting cautiously in the overly comfortable chair behind the desk
and digging through the shop's comprehensive computer system, which detailed
every book which had ever been purchased or sold.

Three hours later Oliphant wandered back into the shop.

“What did you do?” he demanded. His eyes narrowed as he
caught sight of the heap of books in the back of the shop. “Did you open the
door? How many times have I told you not to open the door?”

Auvek looked up, nonplussed.
“Never.”

“Well you should've known!” Oliphant replied sullenly as he
surveyed the mess behind the bookcases. “It would be a lot cleaner if you had
just not opened the door.”

“I'll clean it up,” Auvek said.

“You had better.” Oliphant sauntered towards a different
door, which Auvek had not opened. “At least stay out of this one. You haven't
been back there, have you?”

“No,” Auvek replied, typing rapidly as he spoke. “I'm just
closing out the last two years.”

“Closing out?” Oliphant scowled. “What's that?”

Auvek stopped typing and looked up. “It means calculating
how much money has been lost or earned in the last two years. And you're
supposed to do it every day.”

“Ah.” Oliphant replied. “Well, have fun with that, math
nerd. I'm going out to dinner. Don't leave here until you've finished cleaning
up that mess in the back. Bye.”

The little bell dinged, and Oliphant was gone.

Thirty seconds later the bell rang again.

“I caught you!” Oliphant exclaimed.

Auvek hadn't moved from his seat. “Caught me what?” he
asked.

“Going into...” Oliphant scowled, glaring at Auvek sitting
casually in the chair behind the counter, “the room. Well, don't go in it.”

Once again, the bell announced the closing of the door, and
Oliphant was gone.

Auvek stood and stretched. He looked around at the dark room,
and began to work. Step one: open the door. Step two: open the windows, if
possible.

Clouds of dust exploded from the shades. A stream of
sunlight bounced off the swirls of dirt that fluttered erratically through the
air. The bell dinged.

He spun around. A girl wearing a loose tank top and jeans
stood at the entrance looking around. She was slightly shorter than he was and
had tanned skin. “This place is dirty,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She held
her shoes in her hand. “I've never been in here before, but I've walked by a
thousand times.”

“A thousand is a lot,” Auvek replied.

“Look at this mess.” She stepped forward and turned into one
of the walkways. “It looks like an avalanche back there. Or maybe we had an
earthquake and I didn't feel it.”

“We're sort of in a transitory bit.” Auvek turned and looked
at the shelves.

“Meaning you
don't
know where
anything is.” She laughed, a very odd sort of sound that reminded Auvek somehow
of rain.

“Can I help you find something?”

“I'm looking for legends about the clock that kept time for
ten thousand years.”

“How about I spend a few days searching and give you a
call?” he asked, partially joking but mostly serious.

She laughed lightly. “I'll help you look, at least for a
little while. What's your name?”

“Auvek.”

“I'm Bronwyn.
Nice to meet you.
Worked here long?”

“About three hours.” Auvek walked over to the heap of books
flowing from the back room and sighed. “How do you clean up a mess when you
have nowhere to put the mess while you're cleaning it?”

“Have a sale?” Bronwyn suggested.

His head spun to look at her. “You're a genius.” He hopped
over a stack of books and peered at the bookcase closest to the front of the
store.
“Fifty percent off this shelf.
Well, in a
minute, after I've removed anything of actual value.” His eyes skimmed the
titles.

“Monsieur Lebouef,” he heard Bronwyn say.
“Worth
a hundred, easily.”

“Lebouef is hiding in this pile of rubbish?” Auvek
exclaimed. He reached out and removed the book from the shelf. “And here is
Standoffish!”

“We should make a pile of really valuable books and you
should lock them up. Or sell them.”

Twenty minutes later, Bronwyn stood behind the desk next to
a pile of books, peering over Auvek's shoulder at the computer. A list of
authors stretched down the screen.

“Look at that price!” Bronwyn exclaimed, pointing. “If you
sold these books to collectors, you could make a mint!”

“Easy money!”

“Easy money by coincidence!”
Bronwyn added.

“What is going on in here?” The bell dinged and Oliphant
burst through the door. He had been gone nearly three hours and the shadows
outside were beginning to lengthen.
“A girl in the shop?”

“Just cleaning,” Auvek replied, barely looking up from the
screen. “This is Bronwyn.”

“Hi.” Bronwyn waved and turned back to the computer.

“Looks worse than when I left. It had better be clean in the
morning. I'm going to Uncle Joe’s. Don't wait up.” Oliphant spun on his heel
and left the shop. Auvek shook his head.

The bell dinged again as Oliphant stuck his head back
through the door. “Remember, I'm watching you, little relative.” Then he was
gone.

“Who was that?” Bronwyn asked.

“Uncle William Oliphant, the thirty-fourth. My mom calls him
an idiot of massive proportions.”

“Isn’t Uncle Joe’s the tavern on Fifth Street?
As in Joseph Oliphant’s tavern?
In the
middle of the afternoon?”

“Yes.” Auvek nodded, his lips pursed.

“I see.” Bronwyn nodded slowly. “And you have to clean this
up, by yourself, by tomorrow?”

“That sounds about right.” Auvek sighed and looked around
the shop.

Bronwyn looked around and then glanced at her watch. “Well,
I'll help!”

“I can't pay you.”

“You can give me a book or two that I want.”

“Deal.”
Auvek stood up abruptly.
“We'll start the sale in the morning. Anything cheap, like paperbacks,
children's books—nothing collectible—and anything that looks like an
over-produced piece of trashy fiction can go on the front shelf. We'll make
some boxes, too, that we can put on the sidewalk, of books that we want to get
stolen.”