Shane called her confederates Roselyn Jacobs and Clive McKenna. When she requested they bring a tarp, Steven narrowed his eyes at her, his eyebrows hooding shadows over his eyes. She assured him it was necessary, and he was good enough not to question why, though this was his nature--infuriatingly so because this process of saving his life could have been abbreviated if he knew how to answer a straight question.
She met them in the basement of the art building, which was for storage and little visited by students. The cellar had cool concrete floors. She found one with a drain in the floor and a sink if it came to that.
Shane was prepared to assure Steven that Roselyn and Clive would help, but he did not ask. She chose to believe this was because he trusted her process.
When they arrived, Shane filled them in on what she knew and a chunk of what she suspected. Steven nodded that she had not missed any of the germane points but didn't expand on them.
Roselyn stood a looming six feet, nearly the same as Steven, but the nature of their height contrasted. He seemed squat with subdued danger, a prizefighter years past his prime but still able to one-punch the unwary with a haymaker. Roselyn moved with confident poise, unintimidated by a man in need of a shower or the blade he wielded with obvious discomfort, her natural hair beneath a deep red scarf, which Shane thought made her look like a pirate captain.
Clive was another matter, shuffling in uneasily, as one might when confronted with an unknown man holding a considerable weapon. Clive had been an amateur paranormal investigator in college (nights and weekends and whenever he wanted to spook a date) and took to the world's truth easily, but he still had a sense of self-preservation around the supernatural. His faded Army surplus satchel contains silver implements that Shane could not clock as necessarily artistic or technical.
Roselyn circled, appraising his clothes and the sword. He only moved to make this easier and showed no embarrassment as the subject of her scrutiny. Her nose wrinkled once behind his back, acknowledging that his natural odor had ripened after a few days without hygiene, but her expression otherwise betrayed interest but no conclusion.
Clive, as was his nature, was less circumspect. "How far can the sword go before you start to die? Is there a sphere of influence?"
Steven cocked his head, his neck cracking. "I haven't wanted to figure that out."
Clive tapped on the sword, though Shane couldn't tell if this had diagnostic value or if he was only being annoying. The latter might contribute to the former.
"As long as it touches you, you're fine, right?" Clive asked. "Gripping it is a choice?"
His eyebrow fractionally raised. "What's your point, junior?"
"We can design you something so you can walk around without waving a weapon at everyone, is the point," Roselyn said with just enough harshness, given that they were trying to help him, and he was not making himself the easiest to want to help. Fortunately for Steven, likeability was not a prerequisite for her help.
Roselyn didn't need to consult Clive to realize what they had to do. They had years in this world at each other's side, occasionally in the other's bed, and knew their place. Roselyn was a consummate artist; Clive was barely her inferior in this but far more technologically adept. He had designed and built a camera that could detect daemons, something that somehow escaped anyone else's abilities, though it was not as though he could submit it to the patent office.
Steven scratched his right temple with the edge of the sword, a gesture which caused Shane's friends to wince.
"Is it all at once?" Clive asked. If you let it go, do you immediately turn to pudding, or is there some grace period?" He looked at the tarp and then at the drain, understanding Shane had already considered that.
"It happens in order," Steven said. "Everything done to me, in real-time, as far as I've noticed. I haven't let it go far."
"So," Clive said, "you might be okay for a little bit? I wouldn't envy it, but you hold the sword again, and it reverses? It must if you've tested it at all."
"They shot me in the head pretty soon after I stole it," he said. "They shot me other places first. Then they shot me in the head again. I'm guessing that first headshot about did the trick."
"How soon?" Roselyn asked.
"Give it seven minutes before something would probably kill me," he said. "Less before it's going to make me start bleeding out."
It was a narrow window, but it was enough delay that they could work without much pressure.
"It's going to hurt like a fucker," he reminded them neutrally, "so let's not get too generous about your artistry."
Roselyn sent Clive to get materials while she started measuring.
While they worked, Shane nestled in a corner under an unshielded light and consulted her diary, a conduit of occult knowledge, though one that had a grudge against her. As long as she kept her request factual and informational, it likely wouldn't suggest she drink lye.
"Could you give me a list of magical swords?" she asked, stroking its spine and the pressed flower on its cover. She paused, seeing it was not instantaneously compliant. "Please?" she added as obsequiously as her pride would allow. She would not beg a book in which she had once written twitteringly of kissing a woman called Girl.
Like any disease, it was not enough to note symptoms--though this was not an insubstantial aspect of a diagnosis--but to establish the causal agent. The sword, obviously, but this was only a receptacle, a hunk of metal--and no elegant one, at that. This might have been an asset to Shane. A pretty weapon could have more belief invested in it and would thereby be so much more pain in the ass to neutralize. The difference between Excalibur and some enchanted Ginsu knife was the same as Godzilla and a gecko. Shane could handle the metaphorical latter. She might even be able to best a Komodo dragon, but she wouldn't want to face down a fire-breather without Aerogel armor. Shane wasn't sure what that would be in this metaphor.
In the plus column, it is possible no one cared about the sword aside from the people who wanted to kill Steven for it--occupational hazard--and the world would not miss it if Shane had to toss it into a volcano (in short supply within a two-day car trip--she did not exist enough to have a valid passport--but Shane could find a forge or foundry that would probably suffice in a pinch). In the minus, she did not know the sword's nature or curse, so it would not be so simple as to stab it into a boulder and right the balance of the world. Regrettably, magical swords were legion in myth.
The sword had to get in that shipping crate, and someone would have had to beach it on the shores of Newburgh--maybe a high sea tide could drop it there, but the Hudson hadn't adequately flooded in some time. If one didn't take mortal damage while holding the sword, one might not notice what it could do. Transporting it might not be a problem then, but Shane would have Clive check for any reports of people in the area obliterating as every injury found them in sequence. Most people would not have Steven's presence of mind to hold on to the sword when the bullets flew, though, so they might have either abandoned it or succumbed to the first hit.
A presence in mythology did not necessarily mean a sword did in the real world. Fiction still existed in a world of magic, but it behooved her to begin with the premise that some author had been inspired by a sword they had seen.
The sword did not blaze with fire, which counted out angelic weapons and Dyrnwyn. It was intact, excising a number more since magical swords seemed to like shattering. Holding it did not make him king of England to the best of Shane's knowledge, though it was not Excalibur or Caliburn (depending if it was the sword Arthur yanked from a rock or received from the Lady of the Lake). Shane got excited when she saw King Arthur had another sword, Marmiadoise, which he inherited from Hercules (eventually; there were countless generations between, and a king who didn't like Arthur). While powerful--it was forged by Vulcan, which would add zhuzh--Marmiadoise was more about doling out unhealable wounds rather than keeping its wielder intact. Also, that sword's handle was made of dragon bone (she had seen a dragon's bones in crime scene photos; they didn't look different enough to be fancy). Once Roselyn cut Steven's hand free, it seemed too austere and wooden, too unlike bone of any sort.
Galatine, Gawain's sword, might make the possessor immortal under sunlight, but Steven made clear this was insufficient.
Hrunting, Beowulf's sword, was mighty and infallible, but it didn't work in water, so she didn't see its use to a mermaid.
Steven's sword didn't swing itself--or swing much that she had seen but he might merely be tired--so that eliminated the mech-kladenets of Russian myth.
It was a bastard sword, which was a relief. That eliminated katanas and scimitars, probably limiting Shane's search to European magic. Her book could translate, true, but she couldn't trust it wouldn't elide some nuance that would be useful to her.
It didn't make rainbows when it was swung (disappointing). It bore no inscription, no matter how Huginn and she searched. Aside from the black stone on the pommel, which could have been obsidian or basalt, which seemed only decorative, it had no embellishment. As much as it could be, it was a builder-grade sword.
The problem with swords is that they were primarily meant to hack things up. Yes, one didn't want to be hacked up in return, so it was not bizarre to lay such a curse on it. Still, mythology was not rife with magicians who would neglect to make a mortal weapon more mortal. Shane considered it was the product of a wish to a djinn, who were apt to play trickery when granting a request. The Fair Folk were anything but when it came to deals, though Shane felt they would have picked a prettier weapon for their mischief.
Shane had almost lost herself in her research, about to excuse herself to actual tomes in the cage beneath the library, when Clive announced, "We are going to see how long it takes for Steven to die. Did you bring a poncho? The first row will get wet."
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.
