By the Sword

    The old guy had his cane by the handle again; he nonchalantly stepped over Aloha like he was so much refuse. The guy had style.

    "I know that, Jack."

    Jack nearly tripped as he stuttered to a halt and turned.

    "Why'd you call me Jack?"

    The old man came abreast of him and stopped. Gray hair and beard, a wrinkled face, pale eyes.

    "Because that's your name."

    Jack scrutinized the man. Even though slightly stooped, he was still taller than Jack. Big guy. Old, but big. And a complete stranger. Jack didn't like being recognized. Put him on edge. But he found something appealing about that half smile playing about the old dude's lips.

    "Do I know you?"

    "No. My name's Veilleur, by the way." He offered his hand. "And I've wanted to meet you again for some time now."

    "Again? When did we ever meet?"

    "In your youth."

    "But I don't—"

    "It's not important. I'm sure it will come back to you. What's important is now and getting reacquainted. I came out here tonight for just that purpose."

    Jack shook his hand, baffled. "But who—?" And then a sixty-watter lit in his head. "You don't happen to own a homburg, do you?"

    His smile broadened. "As a matter of fact I do. But it's such a beautiful night I left it home."

    For months now Jack had intermittently spotted a bearded old man in a homburg standing outside his apartment or Gia's place. But no matter what he'd tried he'd never been able to catch or even get near the guy.

    And now here he was, chatting away as casually as could be.

    "Why have you been watching me?"

    "Trying to decide the right time to co

    "Why didn't you just knock on my door? Why all the cat-and-mouse stuff?"

    "I doubt very much you like people knowing the location of your door, let alone knocking on it."

    Jack had to admit he had that right.

    "And besides," Veilleur added, "you had more than enough on your plate at the time."

    Jack sighed as the events of the past few months swirled around him. "True that. But—?"

    "Let's walk, shall we?"

    They crossed Central Park West and headed toward Columbus Avenue in silence. Though they'd just met, Jack found something about the old guy that he couldn't help liking and trusting. On a very deep, very basic, very primitive level he didn't understand, he sensed a solidarity with Veilleur, a subliminal bond, as if they were kindred spirits.

    But when and where had they met before?

    "Want to tell me what's going on?"

    Veilleur didn't hesitate. "The end of life as we know it."

    Somehow, Jack wasn't surprised. He'd heard this before. He felt an enormous weight descend on him.

    "It's coming, isn't it."

    He nodded. "Relentlessly moving our way. But the key fact to remember is it hasn't arrived yet. Relentlessness does not confer inevitability. Look at your run-in with the rakoshi. What's more relentless than a rakosh? Yet you defeated a shipload of them."

    Jack stopped and grabbed Veilleur's arm.

    "Wait a sec. Wait a sec. What do you know about rakoshi? And how do you know?"

    "I'm sensitive to certain things. I sensed their arrival. But I was more acutely aware of the necklaces worn by Kusum Bahkti and his sister."

    Jack felt slightly numb. The only other people who knew about the rakoshi and the necklaces were the two most important people in his world—Gia and Vicky—plus two others: Abe and…

    "Did Kolabati send you?"

    "No. I wish I knew where she was. We may have need of her before long, but we have other concerns right now."

    " 'We'?"

    "Yes. We."

    Jack stared at Veilleur. "You're him, aren't you. You're the one Herta told me about. You're Glae—"

    The old man raised a hand. "I am Veilleur—Gle

    "Gotcha," Jack said, though he didn't.

    So this was Glaeken, the Ally's point man on Earth—or former point man, rather. Jack had thought he'd be more impressive—taller, younger.

    "We must speak of other things, Jack. Many things."

    There was an understatement. But where?

    Of course.

    "You like beer?"

    "An interesting turn of phrase," Veilleur said, pointing.

    Jack glanced up at Julio's FREE BEER TOMORROW… sign over the bar. It had hung there so long, Jack no longer noticed it.

    "Yeah. Gets him in trouble sometimes with people who don't get it."

    They were each halfway through their first brew—a Yuengling lager for Jack, a Murphy's Stout for Veilleur. In the light now Jack could see that Veilleur's eyes were a bright, sparkling blue—almost as striking as Gia's—in odd contrast to his craggy olive skin. He watched him pour more of the dark brown liquid into his glass and hold it up for inspection.

    "All these years and I still don't understand why the bubbles sink instead of rise."

    Jack knew the answer—someone had explained the simple physics of the phenomenon to him once—but he didn't want to get into it now. No sidebars, no amusing anecdotes. Time to get to the point.

    Julio's was relatively quiet tonight, leaving Jack and the old guy with the rear section pretty much to themselves. An arrangement Jack preferred on most occasions, but especially tonight.

    Probably best to conduct discussions about the end of the world—or at least the end of life as anyone knew it—without an audience.

    He glanced around the bar with its regulars and its drop-ins, drinking, talking, laughing, posing, making moves, all blissfully unaware of the endless war raging around them.

    Jack envied them, wishing he could return to the days, a little over a year ago, when he had shared their ignorance, when he thought he was captain of his life, navigator of his destiny.

    No longer. No more coincidences, he'd been told. Instead of steering his own course, he was being pushed this way and that to serve the purposes of two vast, unimaginable, unknowable cosmic… what? Forces? Entities? Beings? If they had names, no one knew them. Nothing so simple as Good and Evil. More like neutral and inimical. Forces that humans in the know had dubbed the Ally and the Otherness—although Jack's dealings with the Ally had caused him only pain and loss. He'd learned he could trust it as an Ally only so far as his purposes were in tune with its agenda. If their purposes diverged, he'd be dropped like last week's Village Voice, or crushed like a fly against a cosmic windshield.

    The man on the far side of the table had answers Jack desperately needed.

    "So you're the one I'm supposed to replace."

    Veilleur shrugged. "Should the need arise, someone is going to replace me. You aren't the only candidate."

    "I'm not?" Dare he hope? "Could've fooled me."

    "You are a prime candidate—perhaps the prime candidate—but there are backups out there."

    "Swell. I sound like a replacement part."

    "In a very real sense you are. Don't think of yourself as anything more than a tool. You're not. But you became a tool that stood out among the other tools when you caused the death of the Twins."

    Jack closed his eyes, remembering the gaping hole in the Earth that had swallowed a house and a pair of very strange men.

    "I was only defending myself. It was them or me. I even tried to save them at the end."

    "But you were the proximate cause, and that shifted the mantle of heir apparent to you."