Jon Hale’s chest slammed against the slanted oak reading-ledge of the raised notary desk just as the advancing wall of white mist ate through the brick chimney-breast three feet to his right.
Beside the corner of the lectern, Master Mason Marris Gault and Marta Harl, the baker’s wife, stood frozen arm-in-arm—Marris with her iron stone-hammer still raised to defend the town’s deed, Marta with her work-gnarled fingers resting on the edge of the oiled goatskin cover where she had pressed her brass sewing-thimble into the fiftieth square of red wax two hours ago.
“Hold fast, Marta—he’s at the desk!” Marris Gault’s last spoken words from a heartbeat before the freeze still hung like a fading chime in the amber air around her head as the whiteout tide washed over the two women, bleaching woollen shawl, iron hammer, and braided grey hair into silent, weightless light between one blink and the next.
Only the slanted oak top of the notary desk remained solid for one final heartbeat in the eye of the storm—and sitting square in the center of the wood was Object #14: the thick, eighteen-inch cylindrical roll of the Bound Common Charter, wrapped in its protective flap of oiled goatskin and heavy with five rows of ten stiff red beeswax citizen seals hanging from its lower margin on braided linen cords.
