Free Hexad: The Chamber by Al K. Line Page B

smell of steel, old carpet and the lingering hint of waxed furniture were threatening to send Dale into a sneezing fit at any second.
    "Wow. They certainly were a little haphazard with their collections, weren't they?"
    "Before the owner handed the place over to The National Trust, as he couldn't afford to run it any longer, he'd spent all his money continuing to collect just about anything he took a fancy to. It had been the same for generations. Each owner was kind of eccentric and they simply collected things. Not much of a system to it as far as I remember reading." Amanda hefted a sword that thudded dully into a thick hide of what looked like a stuffed boar that had been in serious need of a haircut before it met a rather unfortunate end. "Damn that's heavy. Don't think I will be using anything like this."
    "Be careful, a lot of this stuff might fall apart in your hands, or have a nasty surprise." Dale wandered around the room, checking out the various antiques. Some of the most prized possessions were under glass, but the room was clearly far from ready to receive visitors. It seemed that after the home had been closed, and The National Trust stopped spending money on an attraction that had never succeeded from day one, the room was being used more as a storage area for items that would eventually all be sold off to try to help to maintain the actual structure rather than it's contents.
    So swords were piled against walls, crossbows of all description were laid out carefully on the floor ready to be repaired or sold as is, and there were even a number of shields, not to mention a large area dedicated to more recent weaponry and other assorted paraphernalia from the Second World War.
    Dale was attracted to a lot of it — it was amazing to see the changes over the centuries when it came to weapons from different countries, although most of it was definitely British in origin.
    He could just picture the latest owner of such a strange collection: all tweed jacket, receding chin and clipped upper-class accent, lamenting the fall of the British Empire and doing what he could to make sure at least some of that bygone era and what it produced still had a home.
    Now all it did was gather dust, waiting in the shadows to be sold off to the highest bidder, put on display to impress their friends and acquaintances, all functionality forgotten — just another way to show off wealth.
    Dale and Amanda wandered around the room, picking up clubs, strange looking curved machetes and all manner of short-handled steel blades from the colonial past. Dale thought he recognized some things from their travels to places like the Philippines and India: older versions of everyday knives and functional equipment they had seen away from the tourist traps they loved to explore given the opportunity.
    Eventually he settled on what he was sure was a parang chanting. The weight felt right and the smooth-as-glass dark wooden handle felt amazingly reassuring. The chopper was about fifty centimeters long on the blade, was convex on the cutting side, concave on the back, sweeping forward to a curved point. This was an Indonesian, or maybe Bornean chopper used like a traditional machete as well as making a very versatile weapon. Dale cut through the air in long arcs, getting a real feel for the simple yet deadly tool, feeling perfect balance in terms of the weight of the handle and the center of gravity that lay close to the blade's tip.
    There was even a wooden sheath with leather straps, although he was sure the straps would have been a later addition. It was old, but it was sharp. Very sharp. As he slid the strap over his shoulder he reached behind his back to check how easy it would be to get it in a hurry, then adjusted it a little tighter so it rode higher up.
    "Perfect." Dale easily reached a hand back and grabbed the warm wooden hilt, pulling the parang over and in front in one easy motion.
    "Careful, you'll have someone's eye out with that. Pretty