She blushed, which didn't quite fit with the whole barbarian look. It was still rather interesting, even under her fur. Of course, the sword, being a spoilsport, interrupted. "It's a magic suit of armor."

"What, the leather underwear? I always did wonder how any Barbarian Heroes managed to survive..."

She cut in before the sword could. "No. It's...complicated."

I nodded and tried my best to look at her face, attentively.

"Well," she went on, "I guess it was supposed to be a curse, originally. Or a practical joke. Or something I'd rather not consider. It makes whoever puts it on look like a barbarian heroine, and you need magic to remove it. It's ended up being fairly useful for us, though. People take a barbarian with a magic sword more seriously than a street kid with a magic sword."

"Probably cooked up by some wizard to get at one of those annoying warrior types. But," I said thoughtfully, "wouldn't that chafe? I mean, armor's bad enough, and if you can't take it off..."

The sword coughed (how, I don't know either, but), and interrupted. "Returning to the original point, as I said, we need your help."

"Well, really, if you want to get the armor off, I can think of plenty of wizards who'd be glad to help with that, (even if just for the view), I don't see why you need my help."

"Not with that," it sighed, "with recovering an item of ours."

"Oh. So, you want me to steal something for you."

"In a word...yes," the sword said, and continued before I could say anything else, "Don't worry, we can pay, one of us didn't spend all of our share of the money from the Heroing business on ale and whores."

Julia screeched and grabbed the sheathed sword off the table like she was trying to strangle it, and started screaming. "He was NOT a whore! If you ever say that again I'll throw you down the first bloody well we come across!"

I just sat back and covered my ears as the two of them started a verbal catfight. Whoever had made the armor had done well, I could see how red Julia was getting during this. From anger and embarassment, probably. When they were both, at least metaphorically, pausing for breath, I interrupted.

"Girls, are we going to return to the original conversation, or should I start selling tickets?"

The sword muttered something like "I'm an inanimate object, not a girl. Besides, I'm a sword, and swords are much more masculine symbols..."

"I don't even like ale," Julia muttered under her breath, in turn.

But they stopped fighting and were sitting down, or at least resting on a chair, anyway. So we got back to the original conversation. "So, you want me to steal something. Something of yours, that somebody took and you can't get back. Who could take something from a six foot well-muscled barbarian with a magic sword? Can't you just go bop them over the head and take it?"

"Well, ummm..." the sword stalled.

"And what would a barbarian Heroine have that anybody would want, anyway? That wasn't money or something easy to replace like that?"

"It's not mine, it's its," Julia said, "I just wrote it down. It's the one that lost the treatise on theoretical mathematics. Although, it's not really lost, we know who has it. He's trying to claim he wrote it, when we gave it to him to publish."

There's not exactly a huge demand for scholarly books about subjects like theoretical mathematics, outside of some universities and mage...oh smeg. "A mage has it?"

"Well, not a mage, per se..." said the sword, "more like a Mage, with the capital M. And there's kinda a whole umm...university around him. A rather big one. The big one right here, actually. Independent Occultist's University."

I blinked at the sword a few times, until it sank in. "Bombast? You gave it to Bombast to be published. Even being asleep for a thousand years, you should have known better than that."

"Yes, well, it's a bit late for that. Will you help us?" Julia asked.

"Hmm? What, oh, of course! I can't stand him, he has no sense of humor. And so picky about little things (like laws and explosions in his offices and other stuff that any sane person wouldn't stress about). Be glad to help you brighten his day."

Of course, I didn't mention that making Bombast look bad would almost certainly net me some more favors with some of the mages I knew, but they didn't need to know that.