Clay Feet

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

After a decade of trying to get a statue of Mercury for her museum’s antiquities department, Harper finally succeeds. But then the statue arrives—broken—and a spectacular forgery. Her boss—impressed—calls the statue the ultimate forgery.

Harper wonders if she, too, should appreciate the forgery—until the statue starts talking.

“‘Clay Feet’ is…[filled with] clever dialogue and interesting questions about the intersection of the classical world with the modern.”

—The Good, the Bad, and the Unread

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Mar 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386706106

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

Book preview

Clay Feet

Clay Feet

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing

Contents

Clay Feet

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About the Author

Clay Feet

It’s broken, Harper said. She still held the metal pry bar in her right hand. It took all of her discipline to keep from swinging the thing at the museum staff.

The crate’s top lay on the storage room floor, straw and packing materials scattered everywhere.

But Harper wasn’t looking at the packing materials or the crate itself. She was looking at the statue inside. Mercury’s winged helmet tilted jauntily on his stone curls, looking more like Robin Hood’s cap than the armor for the Messenger of the Gods.

His helmet isn’t supposed to be like that, she said, and his feet! Look at his feet!

The rest of the antiquities staff looked. Mercury’s feet, which should have been stuffed in winged shoes, had melted onto the crate’s bottom.

Harper dropped the pry bar onto the stone floor. The clatter did not make her feel better.

This ancient statue of Mercury was supposed to be the heart of their new antiquities collection. Harper had negotiated for it for the last decade. She’d even flown to Rome to meet with Italian authorities. Like so many other countries now, Italy wanted its precious antiquities inside its own borders.

Lately cries of theft had reverberated all over the world—whether it was old thefts of Egyptian tombs (which benefitted places like the British Museum) or Nazi thefts of Jewish art, which then got sold (without enough provenance) to newer museums throughout Europe and the United States.

Technically, Harper had gotten the Mercury on loan, but the loan was permanent, so long as the museum made annual lease payments that amounted to more than her entire salary.

The hat Harper could repair, but the feet—how was she going to explain the feet to the Italian government? How was she going to explain the feet to anyone? Marble didn’t melt. Marble lasted