Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Fence who would have preferred if you hadn't brought the real thing
"Oh, this is remarkable," Hashi breathes.
A Clock-of-Life is a spectacularly magical artifact, and serious collectors have been known to get a little out of hand and arrange murders in their competition to acquire an example. Clocks-of-Life are the work of the most dizzyingly remote echelon of archmage, and liches, and nobody else.
Hashi's never seen a real one, of course, so few people have you'd be statistically defensible in saying nobody. They are liberated from the surviving works of a very dead lich-or-archmage, or a living one, if you insist on an extremely short and storied life. They are traded among the very richest, most vicious and unhinged, class of collector. New examples surfacing can practically trigger small wars.
Fakes abound. Good fakes are prized almost above the real thing, because they take monumental skill to convincingly construct, and are also actually possible to own.
This is...a good fake.
"See how the magical shimmer, inherent in the metal of these parts of an original, has been duplicated with a certain metallic paint? Its shine derives from its quality of never entirely drying, and careful handling is needed to ensure no fingerprint or stray hair ever mars it."
Fern has, of course, handled it with perfect care.
"The subtle enhancing illusion on the paint's surface is woven into an overall body of illusory enchancements, which are placed under a master illusion which sums and distorts the magical signature of the piece to resemble the intensity and type of a true example."
Hashi's voice is breathless. It's too good. It's much too good. A stolen fake of this calibre will have an outrageously angry owner baying for it; Hashi can't fence this, not in this city, not this decade. But the piece — the consummate effort this theft undoubtedly took; this is the apex of the courtship of escalating thefts that Fern has shyly proffered, that Hashi has cruelly lifted her nose at. This is unignorable. This is remarkable.
Hashi wants the stupid, glorious thief so badly. Just once, she tells herself. Before Fern gets herself thrown into a hole so deep and dark that even the key to it will never see the light of day again.
She takes the monocle from her eye. Sits back.
"You're going to meet me in the back bar of the Raised Natomy at the chime of eight," she says deliberately, and squarely locks gazes with the thief for the first time; Fern shivers. "I will buy you a drink."
The thief licks her lips, and Hashi gives her a full, flushed, predatory smile that sees her stuttering and stumbling her way out of Hashi's office.
At seven, Hashi goes to put it away safely before she changes into a nice dress.
At seven, Hashi notices the flakes of never-drying paint, somehow baked into dryness and gently falling off; reflexively screws in her monocle to frown closely at whatever mistake the forger made.
At six minutes past seven, hand shaking, she uses a dry, soft-haired paintbrush to push the rest of the flaking paint off the Clock-of-Life, its enchanted glimmer going with it; to reveal the metal beneath, still shimmering. Shimmering so-subtly differently, but conspicuous to her trained eye; a certain quality to the motion of the colours, like the lazy inertia of habour chop between wallowing hulls. The oily bloom of the hues.
At twelve minutes past seven, the paintbrush drops from her nerveless fingers. She frantically contemplates the months of sadistic seduction that led to this; the slow cultivation, the worming hook of desire that built up to bringing this magnificient thing, to seal her acceptance of anyone saying I've brought you a Clock-of-Life.
The patience. The bait.
The magnitude of some unknown's desire to destroy her.
It is a quarter past seven, there is a genuine Clock-of-Life upon her desk, and it is far too late to run.