Shane Valentine was barely out of the Humanities building before she saw the swordsman, his left hand balancing the right but not doing much more than grasping the pommel. Being the steward of Annandale University--or, she supposed, being a steward anywhere--you get the instinct to inspect passing strangers for lethal weapons as a matter of course. Technically, the right stick in the wrong hand could kill the unwary, but it was more in the carrying than the item in that case.
The sword looked rusty--she could not guarantee it was rust and not dried blood, but both bespoke carelessness--and as long as his arm. The calculus was never tricky. Few people recreationally wielded swords on campus or in Red Hook proper. She would be sure to ask him why he thought he should be the exception just as soon as he was no longer armed.
The man shouted her name--another strike against him, meaning the sword was probably meant for her--and trod closer. The students noticed the strangeness of this, but they did not linger, either because it didn't directly apply to them or because the veil over their perceptions ruled it too weird.
Shane was far from the least durable creature in the area. She still wouldn't like to be skewered to again test that hypothesis, but she assumed she could endure a body blow or two as long as he didn't cut off a limb or her head, which would take some effort.
Shane considered her best options for a fraction of a second--running at the sword so he couldn't swing it was definitely Plan-Y. She settled on reaching to a laden, low wall and hurled a snowball at his head, landing a decent hit to his right ear. She had half expected him to swat it away with the sword, but it didn't move in his defense.
The man lost his footing, slipping on an icy patch, but remained frustratingly upright. The sword did not drop, which complicated matters further. It would have been an easier proposition if she could so easily disarm him. Then they could move onto the next stage of this interaction, where she expected she could leap onto his chest and shove her hands onto his face long enough to read his thoughts and stop him from thinking more until she had a better plan than mild assault.
Shane lobbed another snowball directly at his face. He fell before she could pack a third. The sword still did not leave him.
He struggled to recover himself on the ground without losing his grip on the sword. This gave Shane a few seconds of breathing room. She could run--quite possibly, she should run--but this would only be a small respite. The man with the sword had traced her here, so he already knew too much. Better that she deal with this now than when he found her in the company of her friends.
His clothing had been dirty before meeting the cold mud. It looked as though he had slept in it for a week, a hypothesis his scruffy face underscored. There were holes in the black t-shirt and blue jeans, looking punched there, not torn. He had the poise of a bouncer, thick but not necessarily fat, with a shaved head meant to compensate that its hair grew in a horseshoe. He was not a man who needed a sword to be imposing. He was a brawler, not a fencer, and the muscles of his arms had not come from being a gym rat.
He managed to sit up but had yet to trust his footing on the slushy ground. Why did he just release the sword long enough to stand?
Shane looked at his sword hand. Layers of silver duct tape—fresh over faded and frayed—wrapped around his fingers and the hilt so that he could not release the sword without much effort and likely assistance.
In an instant, he shifted from a threat to her life to a turtle on its back. She took a few steps toward him, reassessing him with every inch.
"Are you going to stab me?" Shane asked mildly.
"No," he said, looking up with squinted, pained eyes. "Not if I can help it, miss."
"We have that in common, then, not stabbing each other." She motioned for his unencumbered left hand. He readily gave it. Shane grabbed his meaty paw with both hands, having no other way to compensate for his bulk, pulling him to his feet with struggle.
He brushed his shirtfront and pants off with his free hand, though it only helped to loosen the most recent layer of dry grime.
"You need help?" Shane asked though it did not seem like too fantastic of a guess when dealing with a duct-taped swordsman.
He nodded. "Steven." Shane shook with left hand, finding the gesture more awkward this way.
"Any last name?" she asked.
"None worth mentioning."
"You know who I am."
"By reputation," he replied, "the way you know these things."
"I hope I live up to it," Shane said. "Or maybe I don't. I have my detractors."
Ordinarily, she would take him to some setting where she had a supernatural advantage--the Hardscrabble Diner or the White Rabbit--for interrogation. His sword presented issues of conspicuousness, limiting her options. She could slip out of other people's notice, but he was going to attract unwanted attention.
"Do you pinky promise you won't try to cut my head off if I take you somewhere more private?"
"Miss," he said, "I am asking you for help. You aren't good to me dead. And, the way I hear it, killing you would be more trouble than this fucking sword. So, no, I am not going to hurt you."
With a small reservation, she brought him to the campus chapel, one wall of which was scorched white. It was not a perfect sanctuary, and the sacredness did nothing helpful for Shane, but no one else would be here for hours.
"You got keys?" he asked when they were before the door, which did not yield when he jerked it.
Shane pulled out a keyring plentiful enough that could have served as a mace. "I have stolen keys to all the worthwhile buildings. I've suggested that they put the same locks on everything to save me trouble, but I can't convince enough people at the same time. Maybe I just need a magic key."
Within, Steven put some distance between them, walking around the perimeter and gazing up at the stained glass windows without obvious contemplation.
It wasn't much of a chapel, but the number of students who used it for worship at any time could fit with room to spare. Beneath were tunnels Shane did not care to visit again, so she knew how much larger it was below than above. A tiny whisper in her brain reminded her that if he got violently sassy with her, she could probably pen him down there if she was fast and clever, which tended to work out for her. She had also gained the instinct of knowing each nearby cage, mundane and magical, that might be useful, though she was still learning every being who might need caging.
Shane stayed near the exterior door, though not out of any sense of fear. He held the sword tightly by dint of the tape but with no love. It twisted his wrist, and his grimace might attest to how uncomfortable this was. His left hand came up to grip his elbow to support it as he raised it to lay it against his left shoulder, his taped fingers near his heart. His face eased, though Shane granted he had the sort of face where a grimace had carved its home long ago. He had to be more than twice her age, late forties to fifties, but exhaustion coated him enough that preciseness was unwise. Cleaned up, he might lose half a decade.
"I appreciate you trusting me," he said, though Shane hadn't trusted him more than she would any base person. She did afford him more than she would give to a man with a sword in general, but the duct tape took some of the sting from the weapon.
She stepped closer to him, leaning against the back of one of the pews, his posture of fatigue begging for relief. She subtracted the dry maroon from the blade, the speckles of mud when the snowballs knocked him down, and noted the glinting black of the pommel. Shane had briefly owned a sword (an angel's gift--more of a trick, as these things went), so she had read up on them. His was a bastard sword, the proper child neither of a one-handed nor two-handed sword. Too big for the former, too hard to handle as the latter. Being forced to hold it by tape couldn't have helped its heft. She didn't have the knowledge to estimate how much the pommel counteracted the weight of the blade. Even with muscles restorable to ease with a thought, she wouldn't have enjoyed bearing it for more than a minute.
It might have been a beautiful sword in a museum, cleansed by a curator and kept behind safety glass. Even so stained, it was not ugly in the subdued light of the chapel.
"I can skip asking all the obvious questions if you prefer," she said, "and you can, I hope, just answer them in one go. Exposition dump me."
He lay the sword against the pew so she could better inspect it, but she didn't see much more given closeness. There was no pitting. The edge was keener than it might have been given its state. She touched it out of obligation but could gain no occult knowledge from it. Most swords were incapable of human thought and thus outside her direct influence.
"I found the damn thing in a box. Shipping crate. Just it in there, all alone, so I took it."
"There are already ginormous holes in your story," Shane said, "but we will put those aside for the moment. I hate to derail a narrative."
He sniffed, looking at her between heavy lids. Without ceremony, Steve slit his wrist with the sword edge as though his flesh were cutting the metal, not the opposite. Shane jumped toward him to stop this, then backed off as his skin bloodlessly knit together.
"So that's what that's like for onlookers," she said, having pulled a similar trick a few times to expedite a difficult conversation. "You heal."
He sighed with the wet mucilage of annoyance. "Wouldn't that be a treat?" he said with derision. "The *sword* heals. As long as I'm holding it, I don't think it knows the difference between it and me. Punches are like breaths. Bullets and knives go through me."
"You let it go, and you no longer heal?" This didn't seem too bad to her. Most people didn't heal immediately, and they did okay.
He slowly shook his head. "I let it go, and every fucking papercut I've gotten since I touched the damned thing comes back. And some very bad men with very big guns have made clear how much they would like this sword."
"Ah. It's not so much a matter of papercuts, then. You weren't guessing about the bullets."
"I let this sword go too long, and I'm the worst carpet stain you've ever seen."
Duct tape might not have been the most elegant solution, but Shane couldn't fault Steven's ingenuity.
"Whose sword is this supposed to be?" Shane asked.
"You know," Steven gruffly said, "I didn't think to ask."
"And who asked you to steal it?"
He raised an eyebrow, his mouth hard. "Didn't say someone asked me to steal it."
"You don't ask a lot of questions," she said.
"It usually keeps me out of trouble." He rubbed the sides of his eyes with his free hand. "Not so much this time."
"I swear I am almost done with the basic questions," said Shane.
He looked her over. "I'm guessing that's a lie."
Shane nodded. "You give too few satisfying answers, so I am going to keep asking. Unless you'd just let me touch your head a little bit. It could just be your hand, but your head seems better."
"What's that going to do?"
"I can peek at your thoughts," she said, "if you are more of a thinker than an orator."
"No go. Ask your questions."
One side of Shane's mouth twisted. "You said someone told you about me?"
"We'll get to that. Ask your question."
Shane liked mysteries, and perhaps it was unfair to want all the clues up front, but he was the one who asked for help. "Where were you supposed to bring the sword once you found it?"
He gestured broadly.
"Honestly, helpful," she said. "Someone in Red Hook contracted your services to get a sword here for reasons you do not fully understand--"
"Didn't ask."
"--But you, for very sensible reasons, are not inclined to release the sword to your client."
"That's about the gist of it," Steven said. "You get this thing not to kill me if I let it go, and I am only too happy to get rid of it."
"Some people would like a sword that made them functionally immortal," Shane said.
"In my experience," he said, "most people are idiots."
Shane brushed her finger over the blade. The texture was not of something so important or potent, but Shane was evidence that the outside and inside did not necessarily match. "How much was this worth to this person?"
He sucked his teeth. "You know it's not as simple as that."
"Few things are. So, not money."
"Not so much." He tensed his jaw, the stubble protruding. "I'm not a man who has much use for money."
"When's the hand-off?" she asked.
"Three days."
"Where?" Shane asked, growing tired of dragging this out.
"I'm supposed to throw it in the Hudson River by some garden."
"I was picturing something more clandestine. You are going to meet your employer there?"
"Have to," he said. "She's a mermaid."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
