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“There he is,” Hanna whispers, nodding at a gangly man with thinning, gray-brown hair and a pinched face standing at the end of the room. “Let’s agree right now that the swords should go for about, oh, I don’t know. I wish I had a phone so I could Google resell prices on swords. They’re rare, aren’t they?”
“To this world, yes. Back in Tuonela, all in my army have one. How much do you think they’re worth?”
“It’s more like how much money do we need? A couple of thousand at least. Should you do the talking, or should I?”
“Do you speak Finnish fluently?” I ask.
“No, but most Finns speak English better than I speak Finnish,” she says under her breath as we approach. The man gives us both a startled look, eyeing us with suspicion. “On second thought, you do the talking. Men like him are always going to rip off a woman.”
“No one is ripping you off,” I growl to her, but she gives me a look that says I might be taking her words too literally.
“Good day to you, human from Finland,” I say to the man, speaking Finnish. “We have swords we need to…pawn.”
The man squints at us. “You have what?”
“Swords,” I say, placing them on the glass counter with a loud clatter. “The finest swords you’ll ever see in all the Upper World. I await your fair offer.”
I cross my arms and stare at him. The man taps them lightly with his dirty nails, not looking the least bit impressed.
“I’ll give you five hundred euros for all three swords,” the man says with a sniff.
“That’s preposterous!” I cry out, nearly slamming my fist into the glass counter.
The man raises a brow at my reaction. “It’s just a bunch of swords. The metal is worth something, but that’s it.”
I gasp, leaning across the counter to stare him right in the eye. “This blade is dual-hardened in the fires of Vipunen’s cave, made from the finest of Tuonelian steel, and smithed by the giant himself! The pommel is cast from the bronze crown of a fallen god. Each one was created for the soldiers in my Army of the Dead.”
The man stares at me for a moment, as if I’m the one acting strange and irrational.
“It’s a Viking replica sword,” the man says with a tired sigh. “The real one is from the eleventh century, from an archaeological dig not far from here, hanging in the museum in Helsinki.”
“These swords are from no centuries,” I tell him. “They are timeless. They are infinite. They are godly.”
“I’ll give you six hundred for them if you throw in that mask.” He jerks his chin at the top of my head.
“What is he saying?” Hanna asks me, tugging at my shirt.
“He’s trying to cheat me,” I say to her.
I narrow my eyes at him.
You cannot cheat a god, I think, the words burning through my veins, enough that I feel the silver lines of death faintly pulse.You can only submit to them.
“You will give us our asking price,” I tell him, deliberation behind every word. “You will give us five thousand euros for the swords.”
The man goes stiff, his mouth clamped together, his eyes taking on a blank quality. It’s like all the lights inside his head just went off.
“What did you say?” Hanna whispers to me. “What happened?”
But then the man shakes his head slightly and blinks. “I will give you your asking price. Five thousand, was it?”
“It was.”
I reach out my hand to shake on it.
He’s about to shake mine, but Hanna quickly grabs my wrist and pulls my hand back. “Let me shake on it,” she says with a loaded look at my hands, and I realize I haven’t put my gauntlets back on. I step back quickly and grab my gauntlets I had tucked into the back of my pants, slipping them on while Hanna shakes the man’s hand.
He still seems a bit dazed as he goes over to the cash register and pulls out the money, counting it.
