Alexander awoke beneath a damp white cloth, an angelic sound trailing through the air like strands of gossamer towed by horseflies. He sat up and yanked the kerchief from his face.

The room was wooden and featureless, as was the bench where he found himself. At a small table in the corner sat a woman coaxing songlike vibrations from a tarnished golden bowl.

"Where am I?" asked the Rapier, unsure he believed himself to be there at all.

The woman could not be bothered to reply, or meet his gaze. The song tapered off into silence and then…

"He's awake!" she called shrilly. Someone approached, clomp, clomp, first on dirt, and then floorboards, until the door flew open with a CRACK against the wall that housed it. There in the doorway stood the Baron, as big as life and twice as cruel. He turned his barrel chest (and generous barrel stomach) and ducked slightly to enter the humble domicile.

"Wells, wells." The Baron tented his fingers. "You had quite a bump while you were trying to escape, didn't you, Garbage Boy?"

The woman made herself scarce, shelving her singing bowl and politely excusing herself to tend to her herb garden. The Baron loomed over Alexander, inches from his face. His content, jowly grin swung like the fatty underbelly of an old sow. His breath was like pickled smoke. Alexander reached up to feel a cloth bandage wrapped around his head—wet.

"You thought you could drop from my tower unharmed," reported the Baron, matter-of-factly. "You nearly paid with your life." The Baron reached beneath his belt, concealed almost fully beneath his roll of waist pudding. Alexander's heart broke when he heard another sound, like an inanimate object singing, beautiful and impossibly far away. It was the SHING of a polished rapier pulled from its sheathe.

"Now you'll pay for it with a life of service." Alexander's heart sank further. The globe-spanning adventures that were still rolling through his mind like a zoetrope shadow-play had been no more real than a sable-feathered swan. He was, and had always been, a Garbage Boy—and tomorrow, Leslie and the Baron would be wed.

The Widow Breckenshire had been most effective in distracting Napoleon's guards long enough for Alexander to make off with the fabled Scrolls of St. Dionysus, which pointed the way to Galileo's reverse observatory. At the bottom of that cold stone shaft, he had recovered the fabled Arithmoscope, a brass, telescoping contraption that tracked the movements of the stars against the rhythm of the tides to predict the most likely location of the Equinexus, a hypothetical point in space and time where it was said the very fate of the universe would unfold before those with the eyes to notice. It was a fate with which Alexander felt irrevocably entwined.

The past few months had been a blur of brandished blades and billowing banners. How, he wondered, had he been able to reach the depths of the Amazon jungle on horseback, only to pursue old grudges in England mere days later? What did Tesla mean when he said that "alternating currents run parallel," before disappearing into the luminescent fog that hovered around his property like a deteriorating memory?

Alexander scoffed, defensively. Whatever seemed cryptic about his recent adventures, he knew who he was. He was the Roguish Rapier. As he approached the Equinexus, he gripped his sword hilt, a brief and tactile comfort in a world turned soft and pliable, like a child's wax crayon bending in summer sunlight. He expected another ancient temple at the coordinates, or perhaps a well-defended fortress. It was none of these, and less—a tiny log cabin, no candle in its window, situated lifelessly in the wooded darkness. His reserves of patience and caution dwindling, he dragged the door open across its dry, dirt floor.

Naturally, he came upon a figure sitting in the darkness, long and lean, a mantis made of shadow. It sat, bent and crumpled in a plain, wooden chair.

"Lincoln," said Alexander, unsheathing his blade with the metallic SHING that readied his mind for similar sharpness. "I should've known."

Lincoln leaned inward to light his signature pipe, the menacing slopes of his wizened face briefly illuminated by the match as he primed it with a few puffs, then shook the match into a whiff of sulphur and reclined.

"You've been away, Alexander," he spoke knowingly, in the melodious baritone you might expect from an oak tree, were it cursed with one of those dreadful American accents.

"I've been looking for Leslie…for the Baron. I've been all over."

Lincoln seemed to smile, almost imperceptibly. "Have you now?"

Suddenly, the floor buckled beneath them, fracturing like a sheet of ice beneath the thundering hooves of a rhinoceros. Cracks of light shot through the earthen floor rapidly, a spider's web of sunlight, shining so brightly that they hurt to look upon.

"What magic is this, old monster?" Alexander's blade wavered at the ready, but even in his panic, he knew that no rapier could stop an earthquake.

"No magic," the Great Emancipator shouted over the din of snapping logs and rumbling ground, donning his signature stovepipe hat as he rose. "You're just going home."

The floor gave way in a geyser of gold-white light and silence—and like that, the world was gone.

Napoleon's latest slice of frothy arm cake was a powder-pale beauty identified only as The Widow Breckenshire, although she didn't speak the King's English so much as she seemed to yank it through a hastily hand-dug gully beneath a wrought iron fence. As such, she and others in the retinue grew comfortable with her silence.

The Roguish Rapier was masked, as always, but in a different sort of mask, for this was a masquerade ball, and one must appear inconspicuous, even amid the buffoonery of France's aristocratic overbelly. His mask was tarnished gold (befitting a hero on the run, he supposed subconsciously), with a long birdlike snout he had comical trouble negotiating his punch glass around. When Napoleon (the glouting cad) finally excused himself to refill his shrimp goblet, Alexander saw his chance, and sailed effortlessly over to the pale widow with the silent grace of a schooner skirting a cloud of lilac mist.

"We've met before," he whispered, and she feigned an unblinking incomprehension, doll-like in its frustrating beauty. He tried again.

"I am looking for the Scrolls of St. Dionysus. A mutual associate told me that I might find them here. One 'Wild' William Hickok?" This time she could not contain the recognition riling beneath her eyes. Almost imperceptibly, she cocked her head toward a staircase, like the invisible, if unmistakable, tick of a minute hand. The stairs were guarded by large men in the skins of actual wolves, raiment that marked both their ferocity and the occasion. Alexander sighed.

"Is there never a way to do this quietly?" The widow shrugged, and Alexander drew his blade.

Alexander pried the breathing apparatus from his cheeks and trudged up onto the sand, shedding the seawater like a duck prematurely pulled from the wine cask. He shuddered, shaking flecks of driftwood from the folds of his tattered tunic. Navigating the underwater channels into the hidden cavern was no easy feat for an armed musketeer. He'd owe his sword a good polish when this was all over.

The walls glowed coolly with the writhing light of skittering phosphorescent salamanders, but Alexander was distracted by a different beauty: the treasure. The opened chest was beached just yards away and brimming with golden rubies, just as Nikolai Tesla promised on his dying electric breath. Alexander steadied himself and caught his breath.

"Not so fast!" someone brayed from the shadows. The voice was high and cowardly, like a whinnying dog stuck atop a ladder.

"Well, if it isn't Barthélemy, the Baron's sniveling apprentice!" snapped Alexander, reflexively swashing out his gleaming rapier with a sound like a pizza cutter being dragged across a marshmallow. Barthélemy leapt from the shadows, armed with the twin blades the Baron had bequeathed him for skewering starlings in his night quarters.

The treacherous apprentice struck—KASHWANG! Alexander parried with his single blade, but Barthélemy was a fury of spiteful steel, KERTANG! PRAKOW! Barthélemy dove and childishly swung at the Roguish Rapier's ankles with a SWOOMPSH, missing as the dashing bladesman hopped and grabbed a low-hanging stalactite and, with one fluid movement, locked his heels together and kicked them into Barthélemy's forehead with the force of a thunder-spooked mule.

Barthélemy reeled, landing impotently in the sea mud. The Roguish Rapier smirked and released the stalactite, landing deftly on the wet sand with a satisfying plop. Barthélemy reached for his dropped blades, but Alexander kicked them out of reach with a flick of the toe tip.

"Now," said the Roguish Rapier, "We talk like men."

Previously in The Roguish Rapier: Alexander, the castle's put-upon and oft-orphaned garbage boy, escaped certain death at the hands of the boorish Baron by reinventing himself as the masked swashbuckler known only as The Roguish Rapier. Now in pursuit of the cowardly Baron and his kidnapped ladylove, Leslie, he traverses the globe with the accompaniment of his noble white steed, Snuff.

Chapter 13: No Room at the Inn

The wooden, hand-painted sign for the Sleepy Hayloft Inn, faded by time and weather, swung in the night breeze like a clown on the gallows. It was a quaint little inn, one that Alexander knew well from his days as a travelling pewter-beater's apprentice spoonsmith.

With a dropped matchbook from the inn his only clue to the Baron's whereabouts, Alexander knew that the cozy abode would contain either salvation, or an untimely demise. Alexander tied Snuff to the bicycle rack and stepped in cautiously, his fingers tracing the hilt of his gleaming rapier.

Inside, the inn was rustic and bare, only visible in sparse, overlapping pockets of faint candlelight. Behind the counter stood a hooded man with a face cloaked in shadows. The mysterious man chuckled to himself softly over one of the satirical woodcuts of the day.

"Have you a spare room?" inquired Alexander, shrewdly.

"You'll not be staying long," replied the figure, casting off his hood. Beneath it was a green cap, complete with feather, and the preening, pointed face of the narcissistic lout known to all the world as—

"Robin Hood!" said Alexander, the words tumbling out of his mouth like sour marbles. "I should've known my old rival would be tied up in the Baron's machinations somehow. How is he paying you?"

"Handsomely," replied Robin Hood, stroking his gorgeous moustaches with delicate fingers. "But for the chance to put you in the ground, old chum, I'd have done it for free."

Both men drew their blades, and lunged.

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Previously in The Roguish Rapier: Alexander, the castle's put-upon and oft-orphaned garbage boy, escaped certain death at the hands of the boorish Baron by reinventing himself as the masked swashbuckler known only as The Roguish Rapier. Now in pursuit of the cowardly Baron and his kidnapped ladylove, Leslie, he traverses the globe with the accompaniment of his noble white steed, Snuff.

Chapter 12: Legends of the Hidden Temple

The Amazonian jungle air was as thick as warm butter, but not as thick as the hanging vines that continually blocked their way. Alexander slashed his rapier through the foliage as he made his way through the jungle on foot, leading Snuff by the bridle and stopping only intermittently to observe the Baron's fading tracks or permit Snuff to eat a butterfly.

"The Temple should be just a few kingsyards ahead," said Alexander, "If the medicine man that gave us this map wasn't selling me an old boot." Snuff snuffed, as he was wont to do, especially at Alexander's habit of dropping faux anachronisms.

With a final slash of the rapier, sharp and gleaming as a falcon's tooth, Alexander cleared the last of the brush. Suddenly before them was the temple's entrance, the doors gilded in burnished gold like the iPod Nano of minor rapper and character actor Xcalade.

"What art must have gone into crafting this remarkable place," said Alexander, breath hushed by wonder, "and what fitness." He paused, none too unaware of the Baron's penchant for traps. From a cautious distance, he tapped the doors with the tip of his blade. Snuff snuffed warily. A voice emerged from behind the heavy golden doors—booming, boastful, and indeed, Baronish.

"Well, well, if it isn't the Garbage Boy," projected the Baron from his sniveling hiding-hole. "A long way from the castle, aren't we?"

"I have sworn to end you, Baron," replied Alexander coolly, but the trap he feared was already sprung. The ground crumbled beneath Alexander's feet, sending him plummeting into a pit of sandy brick that could only have been designed for one purpose—tournament combat, where glory goes to the fastest and strongest, and the eye of Olmec judges all.

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Fresh from his skirmish with the Baron's armed guards, the Roguish Rapier turned on his heels, cried, "En garde!," and brandished his blade at whatever entity had the gall to creep up behind him. Then, with an exhausted chuckle, he lowered his weapon and crouched, half laughing, half catching his breath, his hands braced upon his knees.

The deep, breathy presence behind him was not another antagonist, but the same haggard gray horse who had woken him after his plummet through the stable roof. To survive a fall from such a great height was surely a sign. Could this second encounter, bathed in the afterglow of the Rapier's victory, be a sign as well, perhaps of a rich partnership and even greater heights to come?

Alexander removed his mask and bowed before the noble beast, very nearly curtseying, for the freedom of the mask and the exuberance of dueling now coursed through his veins as strongly as any foreign wine.

"Will you do me the honor of becoming my faithful steed?" The horse looked at him with mild disinterest.

"Your silence speaks well to my inquiry, which is to say that it does not object!" Alexander pulled his mask back on, an act of professional courtesy, now that they were to be partners. "And what, might I ask, is your name?"

Perhaps by way of reply, or perhaps coincidentally, the horse snorted out a blunt, wet gust. Alexander appeared intrigued.

"Ah, Snuff, is it? Very well, Snuff. We've not a moment to lose. The Baron thinks he can lock away those he loves and hates alike, like... playthings."

The Roguish Rapier slashed his blade quickly through the air, as though signing his name to a contract soon to be written in blood.

"Let us end the game."

"Yah!" cried Alexander, his wooden broomstick slicing through air thick with his own bravado. At first, the two armed guards he faced were too stunned to speak, as this masked ragamuffin swiped at them with fearless abandon, armed only with a wooden rod. The gruffer of the two guards raised his rapier to parry the blows and found his own voice in its hiding spot beneath his outrage.

"He can't take bofe of us!" he said in his greasy, boorish tongue. The Baron preferred his guards too inept to plot or scheme, and the men he recruited from the local taverns were skilled perhaps in brawling, but not with a blade. Alexander darted back, feigning retreat, and the second guard lunged forward with a thrust that might have been fatal from a speedier man. But Alexander stepped aside with a trickster's grace, and his opponent's blade found itself embedded in a wooden beam, stuck.

"Poor luck, old sport," said Alexander, as he cracked the broomstick over the dazed swordsman's helmet with a sound like that of a milk mule kicking over a tin pail. The guard reeled back, arms flailing comically, toppling into a bail of manure-matted hay.

"Enjoy your downtime, my friend!" smirked Alexander at his fallen opponent. Bracing one foot against the wooden support beam, he yanked the fallen guard's rapier free, evening the odds in both weapon and number. He redirected his focus upon the remaining guard.

"Ooevah you ahr," gurgled the guard in his fecal dialect, "the Baron'll have yor hide."

"My name is of no concern to you louts," piped Alexander. "But when the Baron asks who handed you your breakfast this day, you may tell him you faced The Roguish Rapier."

With that, Alexander rapped his opponent's knuckles like a child's, causing him to drop his own sword and go fleeing, unarmed, from the stables. Alexander picked up the discarded second rapier and watchedin satisfaction as the brute scurried. The battle won, Alexander was perhaps due some down time of his own.

It was a comfort short lived, however, as from behind, he heard another presence, a heavy breathing and an exhale like a wet cough. He spun around, blade in each hand, to see who lurked while his back was turned. Who he saw was both a surprise, and not.

The stable door creaked open like a miser’s lockbox as two armored men entered, both bearing rapiers polished to a gleaming white. The dancing blades cast ominous glints even in the sparse moonlight pouring through the Alexander-shaped hole in the roof.

"Step wise, guv," said the more foul and verbose of the two clanking guards. "The Baron promised four farthings to the man what brings 'im the garbage boy's head."

Alexander watched from above, clinging to the rafters. He couldn't help but be insulted by the piddling bounty the Baron had placed on his head, but times were lean and loyalties cheap. His only weapon, the old broomstick, was now tucked under his arm, but it would take a skilled hand to pit it against two proper thrusting-swords.

"Mebbe, if we find 'im," the vile thug continued, "the Baron'll invite us to the wedding an' lettus ‘ave a dance with that pritty thing'a his." The words hit Alexander like a clod of warm mule leavings.

Even if he humiliated the Baron by somehow escaping unscathed, Leslie was still vulnerable to torture or worse. The Baron was a prideful man and would go to abominable lengths to have his revenge. Alexander would need to do more than survive this one fight. He would need to disappear entirely.