Oliver zipped his leather jacket and pushed his hands into the pockets of his khakis as he turned left off Offenbachstraße and walked along Sibeliusstraße into a small community of houses set behind green gardens. The air of a September morning in Munich was chill, but it had not yet cooled enough to drive the lunchtime diners at the cafe down the street indoors. Half a dozen locals were gathered around a pair of tables that had been pulled together, sipping from dark bottles of beer and steaming cups of coffee as they carried on an animated discussion about the upcoming football match. Several tables away from the group sat a young woman with brown hair cut short over her ears, dressed in a tight red knit top and bleached bluejeans. She was bent over a sheaf of sheet music, idly tapping out a melody with her fingertips on the glass tabletop. 

Oliver approached the woman and rapped on the tabletop with one knuckle to announce his presence. The woman started and looked up at Oliver in surprise, then smiled and made to stand, saying, “Herr Lucas?”

He gestured for her to remain seated and pulled a chair up to the table for himself. “Miss Evelyn Marby, I presume,” Oliver said, speaking in German.

She nodded, then said, in a clear British accent, “Yes, I am she. And you would be Oliver Lucas.”

“Yes. You speak English well,” Oliver replied in English.

“Thank you. You speak German well enough, though clearly as an academic, not a native speaker.”

Oliver raised an eyebrow as he cocked his head to the side, examining Evelyn Marby again. It was true that he spoke German with stiff formality and a strong Berlin accent, owing to his learning the language in college and primarily using it to translate ancient texts, rather than speaking it aloud in conversation. He had, however, not expected such forthrightness.

Evelyn laughed and extended a hand to him in greeting. “I have offended you. Sorry about that.”

“No need to apologize,” Oliver said, taking her hand and giving it a friendly squeeze. “You just caught me off guard. It’s true though, my spoken German is terrible. I’m more of a scholar than a poet, you might say.”

“There is no shame in that, Mr. Lucas. Far too many style themselves poets, to the suffering of our ears.” Evelyn squared her sheet music and tucked it away into a heavy plastic folder that had been hidden away under the pile. “I am told that you wish to see what remains of my father’s collection.”

“That’s correct. An associate put me in contact with your father’s lawyer when he learned of Mr. Marby’s death. Speaking of which, allow me to offer my condolences.”

“No need, Mr. Lucas. You have never met me before and you did not know my father.” She waved the sentiment away with a flick of her wrist and raised an arm to summon a waiter. “I will simply be pleased if the scraps that remain can be of use in your research.”

Oliver nodded and glanced up as a waiter appeared. Evelyn switched back into rapid German, heavily accented with the tones of a native of the southern mountains, and requested her bill. While they waited for it to arrive Oliver said, “You mentioned that only part of the collection remains. May I ask what happened to the remaining pieces?”

“Certainly. My brother sold them.”

“Ah,” Oliver breathed, nodding solemnly and making no effort to conceal his disappointment. He had traveled far to see the collection that Evelyn had inherited from her father and it was frustrating to think that a crucial clue, one that had eluded him for a decade, might have been sold off.

Evelyn laughed and pulled a long, slim wallet of red leather from her back pocket.   She began plucking Euro coins from a slit in the side of the wallet and laying them on the table as she said, “Do not worry, Mr. Lucas, we have not sold them to some private collector who will lock them away where academics like you can never get to them. If the information you seek is no longer present in the collection, I will gladly instruct my attorney to request that you are granted access by the new owners.”

“That’s good to hear, Ms. Marby,” Oliver said. He stood, pushed his chair back under the table, and gestured for Evelyn to take the lead.

She rose, gathered her belongings, and guided Oliver through the thicket of tables to the wide sidewalk that ran along both sides of the street. As they reached the sidewalk and turned left down the narrow street she said, “What exactly do you study, Mr. Lucas?”

“The origins of myths. I am currently writing a book about the emergence of European folklore, specifically how the religious beliefs of ancient peoples transitioned into folk tales as traditional beliefs were subsumed and overridden by the burgeoning Christian religion.”

Evelyn broke her stride and turned to face Oliver on the sidewalk, face contorted in near exasperation. “Please do not tell me you’re here looking for more fuel for the fires of religious arguments, I really have had quite enough of that.”

Oliver shook his head vigorously and waved his hands in denial. He had expected that the daughter of Dietrich Marby, collector of Germanic artifacts and noted promoter of a return to the ancient Nordic religion, would be more likely to trust him if he claimed to be working on a project compatible with her father’s beliefs, but he seemed to have misestimated her own feelings on the issue. Fortunately, he seemed to have correctly judged her esteem for academics. “No, no. I assure you that is not my purpose. Honestly, Ms. Marby, this is entirely an academic work. I have no agenda.” Oliver drooped his shoulders in shame and looked past Evelyn for a moment, then looked directly into her eyes with all the sadness and frustration a failed academic could muster and said, “Even if I had an agenda, this is going to be published by the university press. I doubt that many people will ever read it.”

Her face remained hard for a moment as she held his gaze, then Evelyn gave him a conciliatory smile and laid a hand on his arm and gave it a slight squeeze. “No, I apologize. My father was man of great passion and his beliefs drove a deep cleft through our family.”

Oliver nodded and gestured for them to continue walking. As they did, Evelyn explained, “I do not wish to explain everything, as it has no bearing on your research and some of the reasons are quite private, but suffice it to say that as my brother and I grew older we became disenchanted with our parents’ belief that the ancient Norse religion was still relevant. Eventually, after we both had moved away, we each found our own paths.” Evelyn’s voice trailed off and they walked in silence for about a minute, paused at a corner, then crossed the street to stand at the gate of a small house that was mostly hidden from view by a thick growth of untrimmed shrubbery. A high wrought iron fence separated the garden from the road, broken only by a pair of whitewashed brick columns that supported an ornate garden gate and mailbox.

“I’m sorry to hear about your troubles,” Oliver said, leaning against the column with the mailbox atop it.

“Do not concern yourself. I should not have allowed my private matters to interfere with our dealings,” Evelyn said. 

She sighed and rested the sheaf of sheet music on the other column, then extracted a brass key from her front pocket. She inserted the key into a large lock set into the gate, turned it clockwise, and frowned. She turned the key counterclockwise and the lock emitted a heavy “clank.” She shook her head and tuned the ornately wrought handle, but the gate remained shut. 

“Is something wrong?” Oliver asked.

Evelyn shook her head and turned the key again. The lock clanked and this time, when she turned the handle, the gate swung open silently on well oiled hinges. “Es ist nicht,” she muttered. “The lock, it just seemed to have already been open. Perhaps my brother forgot to lock the gate after supervising the sale.” She picked up her sheet music and stepped through the gate, then waved for Oliver to follow her.

Oliver did so, pausing only briefly at the gate to run his eyes over the lock. It was well oiled, but the metal was old and worn, making it impossible to tell whether the lock had been picked without a more thorough examination. Don’t worry so much, he told himself as he hurried to catch up with Evelyn.

The garden path meandered around several overgrown holly bushes, skirted the edge of a garden bed bursting with herbs and flowers, their heads turning brown as the grip of autumn tightened around them, and ended at the whitewashed wall of the house. A door was set into the wall between two curtained windows, the wood of it painted bright red and the three angled window slits showing a dark room through thick panes of rippling glass.

When he reached the door she held out her sheet music to him and Oliver accepted the folder, holding it for her while she replaced the gate key in her pocket and extracted a smaller, more conventional house key. Evelyn smiled at Oliver and inserted the key into the lock. She turned it and frowned.

“Nicht gut,” she growled, shoving the door open and continuing to mutter incomprehensibly to herself in German.

Oliver was about to suggest that they wait outside and call the police, or at least call her brother to verify that he could have forgotten to lock both the gate and the house door, but before he could say anything she strode into the house, still muttering. An uneasy feeling started gnawing at Oliver’s gut. He followed Evelyn through the doorway into the dark entrance hall, wishing that he had been able to bring a gun with him. Unfortunately, he had not been able to acquire a German firearms permit and it had seemed unwise to risk smuggling a gun into the country on what he had anticipated to be a short and uneventful visit.

“The collection is in my father’s study, just up here,” Evelyn said, pressing a switch on the wall to turn on a ceiling fixture. The yellow light of a dim incandescent bulb oozed through decades of nicotine tar on the thick old glass of the ceiling fixture to illuminate a narrow hallway with wood paneled walls which led to a dark staircase at the far end. A stained oak bench sat against the right-hand wall under the wooden pegs of a coatrack. The air was dry and redolent of old tobacco smoke and dust.

Oliver closed the door and followed Evelyn towards the staircase. As they proceeded down the hall they passed closed doors on either side, each leading, Oliver presumed, to a different room of the house. He had seen this type of architecture before in old homes, especially in cold regions. The layout isolated each room from the others and from the draft of the door, allowing for more efficient heating of occupied rooms. Generally Oliver admired the ingenuity of the design, but at the moment, with the suspicion that someone might have broken into the house and could still be waiting for them, he would have paid to be walking through an open loft apartment. They reached the staircase and Evelyn pressed a second switch to illuminate the steps leading up to the second floor of the house.

“I am sorry for the condition of the house,” she said, glancing over her shoulder as she reached the tight landing at the top of the steps. “My father lived here alone for nearly ten years after my mother died and he came to be as obsessed with pipe tobacco as with ancient religions. The housekeeper e-mailed me more than once to complain.” She smiled wanly and turned to open the heavy oak door at the end of the landing.

The door swung inwards and Oliver caught a glimpse of a deeply shadowed room, the walls lined with wide shelves and the center of the floor occupied by a large desk or table. Then a dark figure exploded from the doorway. 

A tattered black robe billowed from the figure as it slammed into Evelyn, knocking her back towards Oliver. She slammed into him and they both nearly tumbled down the staircase, but Oliver managed to grab the railing with a single outstretched arm. Sheets of paper burst into the air and fluttered down like leaves in a strong wind as the intruder whirled around and planted a sharp kick in the center of Evelyn’s chest, knocking her away from Oliver and sending her careening down the steps. The figure froze for half a second and seemed to glare at Oliver from beneath the deep cowl of its cloak, then let loose an unintelligible scream of rage and threw itself at Oliver. Half fallen and unbalanced at the edge of the top step, Oliver was unable to evade the initial flurry of blows. Three solid blows hammered into his ribs and a brutal kick would have shattered his kneecap if the railing had not torn free of the wall at just that moment, dropping Oliver to the steep incline of the steps.

The missed kick threw the figure off balance. It thudded awkwardly against the wall of the landing, regained its footing, and leapt over Oliver’s sprawled body to land on its heels halfway down the staircase. It skidded to the bottom of the steps and came to rest beside Evelyn, who was just tottering to her feet, her arms flailing loosely and her eyes unfocused.

The figure grabbed the front of her jacket just under the chin and slammed her against a wall. Its hooded face arched over her and Oliver heard the whisper of a rasping voice. The hand loosened on her throat just enough for her to whimper a response.

He rolled to his feet and launched himself down the steps, driven by an urge to go defend Evelyn from the cloaked figure. It wasn’t until he was already half way down the steps that he saw the edge of the blade glinting beneath the tattered cloak. He acted on instinct, twisting as he fell so his feet slammed into the figure’s legs, knocking it over and away from Evelyn. The blade scored a deep gouge into the floor as the figure toppled, righted itself, and raised the gleaming blade to thrust it down into Oliver’s chest. 

Oliver rolled out of the way just in time and the blade sliced through the leather of his jacket and across his right shoulder. Evelyn let out a choked scream and threw herself at the figure. She clawed at his face and kicked a knee into his groin. 

The figure roared and swiped upward with its sword, the tattered sleeves of its cloak billowing like the wings of an angel of death. Oliver kicked upward before the blade had completed its path, slamming his booted foot into the depths of the figure’s cloak. The figure gasped and stumbled backwards, its sword blow swing wild and cutting deep into Evelyn’s hip, rather than slicing her in half. Before it could recover, Oliver rolled to his feet and slammed his right fist into the shadowed cowl. He felt his knuckles sink deep into a rough face that felt as if it were wrapped in bandages. The figure screamed in agony and dropped its sword as it stumbled backwards and collided with the paneled wall. Oliver struck out again, hammering it in the face with his left fist. It lurched to the side and Oliver’s next punch cracked the wood paneling beside its head. 

The cloaked intruder shoved Oliver away with a roar. Oliver landed heavily on his rear and slid across the varnished wood. As he came to rest he felt the warm leather of the sword hilt under his fingers. He leapt to his feet, brandishing the sword at the figure. It froze, chest heaving, hot breath rasping out in painful gusts as it regarded Oliver, then it spun about and launched itself towards the door at the end of the hall. It ripped the door open, turned, silhouetted by the bright daylight outside, and glared back at Oliver and Evelyn. It gave one last unintelligible roar and spat a gob of dark blood at the floor between them, then turned and ran out into the garden. 

Oliver spun away from the doorway to see Evelyn laying on the floor, groaning with the effort of repressing a scream. Her hands were clenched over a deep gash in her hip, but the blood still poured out between them to soak the fabric of her jeans and spill onto the floor in a widening pool.

Oliver turned away from her and shoved open the nearest door, revealing a sparsely furnished living room. That might help, but it was far from optimal. He turned away and strode to the next door, pulling his cell phone from a pocket as he went. A glance assured him that it had not been destroyed in the fight. He kicked the next door open as he thumbed 112 and pressed the call button to summon the local emergency services. He held the phone up to an ear and surveyed the room he had just entered, doing his best to ignore Evelyn’s agonized screams form the hall behind. This room was a kitchen. The stove and refrigerator gleamed with the slick steel of modern appliances, but the remainder of the room was classic rustic European, down to the large pine table at the center of the room, covered with a dark green tablecloth.

A female voice came through the phone on Oliver’s ear, speaking German with the practiced calm of an experienced emergency operator. Oliver thumbed the speaker phone function and said in German, “A woman has been injured at 7 Sibeliusstraße. Get here fast.” 

He slipped the phone into the pocket of his jacket and ripped the tablecloth from the table. He ignored the measured voice of the operator demanding more details, trusting that Evelyn’s screams would be sufficient proof for the operator to send an ambulance, and strode back into the hallway. Evelyn still lay on the floor in the middle of a widening pool of blood. Oliver snatched up the sword and hurried towards Evelyn. Her eyes went wide as he hefted the blade, but she quickly relaxed as he smiled at her and began slicing the tablecloth into strips.

“Move your hands,” he said in German, prodding at Evelyn’s arm with the flat of the sword. 

She hesitated for just a moment, then complied. Oliver laid a folded strip of cloth over the wound in her hip and ordered her to press her hands to it again. She did so, wincing as she applied pressure to the cut. Oliver spoke to her in German as he continued to fold the strips of cloth into bandages and pass them to her, “This isn’t actually that bad, compared to what it could have been. A blade like this could have done some serious damage. There’s a lot of blood, but that’s just because the wound is deep, maybe to the bone, It isn’t pumping out of you though, so I don’t think there’s any arterial damage.” 

His words seemed to calm Evelyn and before long she said, through gritted teeth, “You are surprisingly calm about this situation.”

Oliver shrugged. There was little point in maintaining his cover at the moment, especially after she had seen him fight off the cloaked figure and calmly administer first aid to a sword wound. “I’m not exactly what you would call a pure academic,” he admitted. “In fact, I haven’t worked at a university in nearly fifteen years.”

“You could have fooled me,” she said in English. 

Oliver grinned at the joke and shrugged before passing her one last bandage. “That’s good. Keep that sense of humor and you’ll be back on your feet quick. You’re going to need a new copy of that score though,” he said, spotting a blood soaked page of music resting at the foot of the steps. 

Once Evelyn’s wound was bandaged sufficiently that Oliver was no longer concerned that she might die of blood loss, he stepped closer to the open door to better examine the sword in a bright shaft of daylight. The blade was about two and a half feet long and only two inches wide at the hilt. The flat of the blade ran straight until an inch from the end, where the two razor sharp edges cut inward at a forty-five degree angle to meet at a wickedly sharp point. The blade was forged from a grey metal that had a dull, almost mottled appearance, except for the glittering edge and a series of angular runes that were etched into the flat of the blade. These gleamed as bright as the cutting edge, the glimmer of reflected sunlight against the surrounding matte grey metal making the runes seem to burn with a twinkling silver and gold fire. Oliver rested the flat of the blade against his left palm and opened his right hand to reveal a grip of wrapped leather. The stained brown strips twisted in tight spirals of mahogany, stained a deeper brown in places with what Oliver imagined to be the blood and sweat of a hundred battles, from the cross guard to the pommel. Both of these were crafted of the same flat grey metal as the blade.

“That looks like a very old sword,” Evelyn remarked. Oliver glanced away from the blade and saw that she had pulled herself into a seated position, leaning against the splintered paneling of the wall. 

“Yes. I believe it is,” he replied. He rested the sword on the floor and pulled his phone out of his pocket, ignoring the shrill demands of the emergency operator that he reply to her requests for information, and began photographing the sword from several angles. He was careful to capture close shots of the runes on both sides of the blade, as well as an image of a mark, whether a rune or battle scar he could not say for sure, on the end of the pommel.

Oliver finished his photographs just as the wail of sirens reached their ears through the garden. He ended the call and put his phone away, then looked up at Evelyn and said, “I don’t suppose I could convince you to say this is your family’s sword and the intruder attacked you with it?”

She looked back at him with her mouth wide open, her head shaking mutely back and forth. She raised a trembling hand and pointed it towards him. 

Oliver looked down and cursed. The sword had disappeared, replaced by a shimmering haze of silver mist.

Oliver looked back to Evelyn and shook his head. He had no idea who the cloaked figure was, but it was painfully obvious, to him at least, that it had not been the sort of person who would leave a trail for police to follow. The more he thought about it, the more Oliver was beginning to suspect that the intruder had been waiting for them. He waved away the mist and slid towards Evelyn. 

“What did he ask you?” Oliver asked her.

Evelyn started at the question and looked at him, her mouth moving in quiet jerking motions.

“He’s gone, Evelyn. He’s gone and the police will be here soon. Just tell me what he wanted to know and maybe I can stop him from coming back.”

She looked at him with pleading eyes, “How can you?”

“Like you said, I’m no academic. Let’s just say that I’m in the business of finding very special artifacts, and at times I’ve crossed paths with people who wanted to hurt me. So far, I’ve always come out on top. Me, and the people I care about,” Oliver said. He tried to give her a reassuring look, but doubted that it was effective.

She shivered and pulled her arms tight around her body, looking away from him and up the damaged and blood spattered stairway. She winced, though Oliver could not have said whether it was because of her bandages or the memory of the fight. The sirens grew suddenly louder and Oliver knew they would not have long until she was taken away in an ambulance. 

He laid a land on her shoulder and spoke softly, “Please.”

She looked back at him and said, “He asked where my father’s collection went.”

Oliver nodded, encouragingly.

“He wanted to know about the Wagner folio.”

“Did you tell him where it went?” Oliver asked.

She nodded. The sirens had reached their apex and Oliver could just hear the sound of shouting voices beyond the screen of garden foliage.

“Tell me, please.” 

“I sold it, to the collection of Schloss Neuschwanstein.”

Next Chapter: Recovery