"Yes, Javin. You may check Cheyne's drawing of the marble wall. He sketched this area late yesterday evening," Muni replied, his face inscrutable.

Javin shook his head. "That won't be needed."

Javin trusted Muni more than he did himself sometimes. They had worked together for years, traversing the huge continent of Almaaz in search of Javin's burning ambition: to find the fabled Collector. Back in Argive, Javin had become convinced that old Sumifa was the final resting place of the man who had been chief mage to the ancient artificer Mishra.

The climate of this region was deadly hot and the politics treacherous. The true nature of the dig had been kept secret, Javin giving out to the Fascini, Sumifa's royals and their courtiers, only that he wished to study the architecture of old Sumifa, the ancient buried city known and shunned for its mysterious abandonment long ago. The Fascini had not cared. They never had believed there was an old city. After all, no one had ever found it before. And archaeologists were just diggers, and diggers were just treasure hunters to them, whatever their reasons. As long as they gave the standard half of what they found to the city's coffers, and didn't stir up the locals against Fascini decrees, the court turned a blind eye.

Javin had brought with him only his foster son, Cheyne, who had traveled with Javin to every site he had dug in the last ten years, and Muni, who spoke every modem language in Almaaz, even some that didn't have words, and told the truth in all of them.

Javin nodded, and Muni brought his crew around him, asking for two volunteers to go down into the room to bring up the body. Finally, Rij and Hadi stepped forward, drawing their long, curved daggers from their hips. Disdaining the ropes, they leapt into the dim chamber.

"Pay these men double today. Give those two double that. Only make sure they stay quiet. Keep everyone else on the site down by the other side of the wall. Business as usual. And ask Zu to bring Cheyne up from the eastern perimeter. I told him to sketch the olive press walls today until we opened this room," muttered Javin.

Muni's crew had been handpicked and worked the most sensitive areas in the dig, but Javin knew that even they would have a hard time with this discovery. Sumifans were notoriously ancestor conscious, and a corpse, especially a fresh one, would send their officials into a frenzy of ablutions and liturgies and sudden new decrees forbidding further excavation on the site. If word got round to the city fathers that there had been a body, even the fragrance of his money wouldn't keep them from closing him down. Javin

knew he was right on top of finding the old Collector's grave. And when he found the Collector, he would find the thing he really searched for.

For years, Javin's colleagues, all eminent scholars, had mocked his theories of where the old mage's grave really lay. Most of the experts believed that the stories of the secret societies and an Armageddon Clock and the fabulous wealth supposedly buried with the Collector or with the Clock were pure folktale, rehearsed and embroidered as local mythology by the primitive Sumifans. Others, who gave the Collector's story any credence at all, thought that the grave must be in the Chimes, a place largely associated with the Borderlands, a place more or less divided from the rest of Almaaz by a mysterious curtain of light held to be located beyond the desert and past the ore kingdom in an isolated mountain range. But the exact location of the Chimes was not recorded in either current memory or on an ancient map. Not that it mattered. Certainly, no one of any respectable academic standing thought the stories were worth acting upon.

favin knew otherwise. He was the last living member of the Circle.

Recently, in a dark corner of the stacks of Argivia's oldest library, Javin had made a discovery that had sent him to Sumifa, against his greatest personal wishes. While cataloguing some old shards, he had found some scrolls packed inside a pottery jar made by the Sarrazan elves. The scrolls had mentioned details of Old Sumifa and the Collector in their stories, and the ley lines measured correctly for where Javin had begun to dig weeks ago. If Javin could but find the old mage's grave, then his writings, specifically the Holy Book of the Confessors, supposedly the original sacred text of his order, would surely be close by also.

There was a chance that Javin would then be able to accomplish what he had been trying to do all his life: find the Armageddon Clock and somehow disarm it. The secret of the Clock had died with Samor, and all through the hundreds of years since, the members of the Circle had passed down to their sons or daughters the mission of destroying it. But one by one, they had all been murdered, or disappeared with absolutely no trace.

The mages of the lost Circle, though their deaths had been as different as their personalities, all shared the same killers. They were the victims of the Ninnites, once their brethren in magic, now their sworn enemies, pledged to the service of a mysterious dark prince. The Ninnites, too, searched for the secrets of the fabled Clock, believing it to be the marker for inestimable wealth and power.

For the Circle, and for all of Almaaz, Javin believed, time was running out. When Javin was gone, there would be no one else to take up the search, no one, at least, who believed that the Beast of the Hours-supposedly a hideous, angry cockatrice, a creature even the Collector had not known how to fight-was what really awaited any who found and opened the Clock. The Ninnites had done a convincing job on the locals as well. Any Sumifan would scoff at the idea that anything but the treasure of the famous Collector was hidden with the Armageddon Clock.

And then there was the matter of Cheyne.)avin knew that if the dark prince, the Raptor, as the scrolls had called him, ever found the young man, Cheyne would be as dead as this corpse in the ruin.

He hunched down to inspect the body Muni's men had brought up. Plainly, the man had been murdered. Not a neat job: the corpse's throat had been cut, the jugular vein slashed with three parallel gashes, almost like claw marks. Almost like the favorite method of the Ninnites.

Javin bent to look at the back of the unfortunate man's head, brushing away a lock of dark hair from just behind his left ear. No mark of the double crescent. The man had not been part of the Ninnites, so this was not an example of the order's extreme discipline. But then why would the two-thousand-year-old renegade cult murder a modern-day Sumifan citizen? If he had been a common thief, Javin thought, there appeared to be nothing of value in the little room, and the man looked to have had no time to steal. Clutched in the corpse's stiff, whitened hand, Javin found only an ancient Sumifan family totem, like the hundreds they had already unearthed around the site: ganzite, inscribed with symbols from an Almaazan tongue older even than the ancient city. Hardly worth dying for.

Or killing for, he puzzled, laying it aside. Javin covered the body again, knowing little more now about the man than before.

Muni shook his head, anticipating Javin's unspoken thought. "He looks familiar, but I do not know him." The other crewmen repeated the same answer one by one as Javin questioned them.

The unknown man displayed the features of the majority of native Sumifans: dark curly hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and a strong, lean jaw. He appeared to have been about sixty, but if he had been a shepherd and spent much time in the weather, he could have been much younger. They called this place the anvil of the sun, and for good reason. One crewman suggested he might be part of the nearest nomadic tribe, but Javin dismissed that possibility immediately.

"He must have come from the city. Look at his clothes." Javin pointed to the man's flimsy shoes and thin shopkeeper's robes. "He wasn't ready to spend any time out here in those."