I grabbed hold of the parcel, glared at it for a moment, then ripped the wrapping away, tearing the brown paper and snapping the knotted string. I had to see it. Had to see what no man had seen for centuries. The legendary sword, Excalibur. King Arthur’s sword, from the Golden Age of Chivalry. The scabbard turned out to be six feet and more of tooled leather, with Celtic markings and designs, and a whole bunch of symbols from a language I didn’t even recognise. The foot-long hilt of the sword seemed to have been fashioned from a single piece of bone, polished to a fine dark yellow sheen. I brushed the last pieces of torn paper away from it, and the scabbarded sword lay alone on my table, in my kitchen, like an unexploded bomb, or a warning from history.

“That ... is not just any old sword,” said Suzie.

“No,” I said absently. “That’s Excalibur.”

“What?” said Suzie. “You mean the Excalibur? As in King Arthur? What the hell is that doing here? Hold everything. You knew what this was all along, didn’t you?”

“I was told the sword had come into the Nightside,” I said. “I never thought it would end up here.”

“Excalibur,” said Suzie. She sounded honestly impressed, which wasn’t something that came easily to her. “Damn ... Aren’t you supposed to draw it out of an anvil, set on a stone? I mean, something as important as this, it shouldn’t just turn up in the post. Where’s the mystical significance of that?”

“This is the Nightside,” I said. “We do things differently here. Somebody wanted to make sure I got it; and this was the best way of sneaking it in, under the radar.”