Penumbra (Darkling Mage 0.50)

“We should get out of here.”

Vanitas gave a disgusted grunt as he wiped himself off on the remaining piles of rags on the sidewalk. “Agreed.” With another “shing,” he slipped into his scabbard then settled against my body, going limp as I caught him in my arms.

Fucking Meathook. I should have known better. I walked as fast as I could. “What the hell happened back there?”

“Hey, you’d think I’d get a ‘Thank you’ out of it, but no.”

“Thank you. But what the hell was that?”

Vanitas shrugged. “Self-defense? You’re supposed to deliver me somewhere, and I think I’d much rather be with you than with those thugs.”

“Um. Thanks.”

“Nice to have a friend, for once, and not just a master.”

My newest friend, a talking sword. Check that, a flying talking sword. Just last week I was a jobless, mostly aimless loser. How quickly things change.

I remembered the very first thing Vanitas had said to me earlier that evening, so I echoed it. “Same.”

And silence, again, as I hurried towards the comforting incandescent glow of the first chain coffee shop that indicated I was finally out of the Meathook. A voice spoke inside my head again, but it wasn’t Vanitas this time. And the jewel around my throat, the opal I was wearing, it was glowing. And warm.

“Dustin.” I knew the voice instantly. It was Thea, speaking through the gem. And she wasn’t happy.

“Get back to HQ. Now. We need to talk.”

Chapter 15

“Then it just flew. Whoosh! Right out of my hands, and sliced off, uh, the other guy’s hand. At least one of them.”

Herald fixed me with one raised eyebrow, and two very skeptical eyes. For someone in his twenties he put me in mind of a man who’d seen this all enough times to question it. I was just some crazy person rambling to him, and the analytical brain sitting behind those hipster glasses was reading me for everything I was worth.

“Honest,” I chirped out, one last attempt to get him to believe me.

Herald pushed the glasses up his nose and blinked, rubbing his chin. “It’s definitely happened before. It’s not unprecedented. Sentient artifacts can and will form bonds with their users. But for one to fight of its own accord? And it flew, you say?” He swiped his finger across his tablet, scrolling up and down the page. “Nothing in the sword’s dossier says anything about that. We know that it’s sentient, of course.” He scratched the bridge of his nose where his glasses made their indentation, then looked over at the sword in its display case, its new home. “But it doesn’t seem to be talking now.”

“He,” I said.

Herald quirked an eyebrow.

“It’s a he, I think, at least going by what I heard of his voice.”

Herald just stared at me.

“His name is Vanitas,” I said, twiddling my thumbs.

“And it – he – spoke to you telepathically?”

“That’s right.”

Herald scrolled over his tablet again. This was his job, after all, to sort and study all the artifacts, spell books, and enc

hanted relics that the Hounds retrieved for the Lorica. Herald was one of many archivists, and it was clear that HQ needed to hire a full staff of them considering the sheer amount and variety of magical objects that needed cataloguing.

We stood in the central hub of the Gallery, what the archivists called the immense space that contained their department. Radiating outward like the spokes of a wheel were row upon row of bookcases, most containing valuable grimoires locked and chained to the shelves, some holding smaller, precious items behind bulletproof glass.

The central hub was meant for processing, a circular huddle of workspaces and desks designed to accommodate the archivists at their work. Artifacts arrived here before they were thoroughly studied, labeled, and shifted off to their permanent homes in the Gallery, which explained why Vanitas was still in the hub.

“Huh. We didn’t realize the blade had given itself a name. I have a partial history of its owners here, though, and that might explain some of the weapon’s traits.” Herald squinted. “Minor nobles, and even, it looks like, a freelancer, in the original sense of the word.”