Author's Note: I ended up splitting the rough draft of Chapter Five in half—this installment was originally going to be much longer, but instead I'll save the rest of it to be the next chapter. Sorry about the long delay, but after I knew I had completely blown my self-imposed deadline of having this all done by Halloween, it just didn't seem so urgent (although I still know where I'm going with the plot, believe it or not).

Chapter Five: The Clash of Steel

The upside of seeing Batgirl take on eight cutlass-wielding pirates was that Sergius finally got a chance to see her fight for more than a few seconds at a stretch. The gleaming lights of the huge chandelier suspended from the middle of the high ceiling made sure he got a good view of the entire spectacle.

One man, wearing a virulent green headscarf above the obligatory eyepatch which at least one member of any pirate crew was presumably obliged to sport, slashed horizontally with his cutlass—Batgirl ducked under the slash, swept Eyepatch's legs out from under him, and then her right hand did something to his neck while her left hand grasped the hilt of the cutlass he had dropped as he frantically tried to break his fall. Then she parried a red-bearded man's cutlass with her new acquisition while one of her feet knocked the breath out of a woman with long blond hair closing in from another direction.

By then, the four pirates who had been guarding the other door were arriving to reinforce the two still standing. It didn't seem to matter. Batgirl whirled away, her captured cutlass gleaming as it caught the light, and the pirates began spreading out, presumably hoping to outflank her until they could slice at her from six directions at once.

Sergius had worried that he might need to slam the door in a hurry if one of the pirates decided to go for the easy target first while the others confronted the difficult one. It didn't happen. Apparently the baddies wanted to make sure the hard target was down before they worried about the small fry.

Sergius couldn't fault their priorities. If he were in their shoes, he'd be more worried about the superhero too. And he couldn't help thinking that with so many pirates, all it would take was one lucky slash or thrust to score a serious wound and handicap Batgirl, and then she'd finally be a sitting duck for a mass assault. The law of averages probably made it vanishingly unlikely that she'd be successful in evading every blow aimed in her general direction . . . but it was pretty clear that she either didn't know that or refused to worry about it.

Watching what happened over the next minute or so, Sergius was strongly reminded of an old pop song: "Poetry in Motion." Batgirl was like that, although violent motions weren't exactly what the songwriter had envisioned. Never a wasted move, never starting to do one thing and then awkwardly changing her mind in the middle, never freezing from indecision; each move seemed to follow naturally from the last in a constant flow of graceful interaction with the pirate crew, as if she were merely dancing around the floor in a series of perfectly rehearsed interactions with a chorus line hired to make her look good.

"Dancing" was the apt word, he decided—the slender girl was always at the center of things and yet never impeded by anyone's feeble attempts to force her to stop moving.

Slashes were parried or else whistled harmlessly through the spot in the air she was no longer occupying; sudden lunges flew past her torso without so much as snagging her clothing; one black-cloaked pirate's attempts at leg sweeps only served to fill the suddenly-empty space between the floor and her feet; and yet wherever she went, her own strikes and throws were timed perfectly, as if each pirate had been sternly ordered to move along a certain path just in time for a portion of his anatomy to intercept Batgirl's hand or boot or elbow or knee converging on the same spot from a different angle.

She never drew blood with her cutlass, though—Sergius decided she viewed it as a defensive tool only. Sometimes she slashed with it and was parried, but it always seemed to turn out that this still brought her closer to whatever she had really wanted to do, either to the person parrying or to some other pirate who'd foolishly assumed her attention was entirely focused on the other guy at that moment.

It was as if the director of an action flick had solemnly told a gang of stunt men to put on a good show, but as they valued their paychecks, be sure to pull their punches and make sure they never bruised a single square inch of the leading lady's ever-so-delicate flesh. But Sergius knew better—those blows weren't pulled or misaimed; those cutlasses weren't blunted metal or painted cardboard; Batgirl simply refused to bleed for the pirate crew's enjoyment! It was becoming quite clear—if it had ever been in doubt?—that their intentions for this battle were remarkably irrelevant!

Not that any of the baddies were actually voicing any intentions—nor anything else at the moment—and that bothered him. (Not enough to make him try to quiz them about their taciturnity, however.)

At last this end of the ballroom was carpeted with the unconscious bodies of buccaneers, and Batgirl paced around, delivering, few last strikes against a neck here and a neck there before she was completely satisfied with her handiwork.

Sergius wiped his forehead as he realized it was finally over. This stage of it, anyway. Batgirl seemed mildly amused as she looked at him and asked, "You were . . . worried?"

"At first. No matter how fast you are, you're still flesh and blood, and that looked like awfully sharp steel flashing all around you. I mean, Batman probably would have parried the cutlass attacks with unbreakable batarangs, but you didn't have any defensive weapons to work with." (Sergius was guessing The Spook had confiscated her utility belt in order to handicap her—if so, it didn't seem to be making much difference.)

Batgirl raised her eyebrows and twirled a cutlass with her right hand by way of silent rebuttal to his last comment.

"Well, sure, you've got that cutlass now, but you didn't when the fight started."

"Close enough."

Sergius needed a few seconds to work that out. "Are you saying that, as far as you're concerned, giving these clowns cutlasses and then letting you fight them was virtually the same thing as giving you any cutlass you wanted?"

She gave him a thumbs-up.

Sergius sighed. "And the fact that there were eight pirates, all intending to kill you with their nice sharp cutlasses before you could confiscate one and start parrying the other seven, didn't matter?"

Batgirl shrugged; obviously she saw no reason to fret over such trifles as eight-to-one odds.

Sergius was starting to get some insight into how her mind worked—or at least, as a writer, he liked to think he was. If he continued this line of questioning, she'd probably find a way to point out that all eight pirates had never been positioned to strike at her simultaneously, so it hadn't really been eight-to-one odds at any given moment, so why worry? (He made a mental note to have the hero of his next novel say something similar.)

Coming from some people, such a nonchalant attitude would have meant they were secretly quite proud of their victory, but feigning modesty so as to give the false impression that they did such things several times a week with nary a twinge of fear. In Batgirl's case, he didn't think she played such games—or worried about what anyone else thought of her courage, for that matter.

Perhaps she somehow knew he was giving up on this line of discussion before he could even say so. Perhaps she figured further chatter could wait until she was sure the room was secure. Perhaps she just plain lost interest. At any rate, Batgirl spun away from him, further into the ballroom, and started moving across the empty space in the middle toward the long table festooned with dishes at the far end.

Something was nagging at him, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Was it the way The Spook had stayed silent since they entered this room? The possibility of Batgirl stepping on some artfully concealed trap in the wooden floor? Just general suspicion that things had been too easy so far? Or—

"The chandelier!" he shouted.

Before he finished the fourth syllable, Batgirl had glanced back over her shoulder at him—then she moved, dropping her cutlass and doing a back handspring very fast indeed—just as the chandelier groaned and came crashing down where she had been a moment earlier, making a horrible shattering noise, with stray bits of glass flying every which way. Somehow Batgirl already had one hand yanking her cape up to protect her head in the nick of time as she landed on her feet, and when she turned to face Sergius she was already shaking off glittering fragments the way a dog would shake off water after an unwanted bath, but he didn't see a single drop of blood to suggest anything had so much as scratched her face. The rest of her should have been adequately protected by dark leather. He'd been far enough away that he'd gotten off unscathed—especially since Batgirl had been between him and the crash site.

"Thanks," she said simply, then pointed at the shattered ruins. "You said . . . shandy. . . ."

"Chandelier," he said, and then repeated it carefully, twice, until he saw her nod as if to say: Got it now. "Wait," he added as a thought struck him. "If you didn't know that word before—how did you know what I was trying to warn you about? I didn't get far enough to tell you which way to move, or to guard your face from flying glass, or anything."

Batgirl opened her mouth—then shut it firmly and cupped her left ear with her hand, a signal which could mean I can't hear you—or, he realized suddenly, Someone else can hear us. (The Spook, for instance.)

"Oh," Sergius said, thinking furiously. "Right. You saw me starting to point. You're quick on the uptake!" (He hadn't been pointing at anything, but he might have in another second or two, when it occurred to him. Possibly The Spook would believe this hasty improvisation.)

She'd looked at him when he yelled, just a fleeting glance—and she'd somehow divined that he was currently worried about something above her even though he hadn't named it or gestured toward it. Without hesitation, she'd gotten out from under, just as he'd hoped she would. But until she saw him, she hadn't known where the threat was?

A tenuous theory about the limits, and thus the possible nature, of her occasional "mind-reading" stunt began to percolate in his brain. (Not that he had the slightest intention of voicing his new theory when The Spook was eavesdropping.)

Batgirl winked one eye at him, so fast he wasn't quite sure he had seen a wink at all. Then she said, possibly to change the subject more than anything else, "Yes. You knew—how?"

"Because I read a lot of genre fiction and call it 'professional research.' See a lot of movies, too."

She frowned slightly, giving him a level gaze which somehow suggested he'd better not think he was going to get away with calling that a full answer.

Sergius hastily amplified his reasoning. "The chandelier. I didn't really notice it when you were tussling with the pirates, but it's a common prop in one of the hoariest clichés in the book. If there's a big, highly visible chandelier in certain types of fiction, then it always falls at a dramatic moment! Otherwise, why emphasize its presence in the first place? Depending upon just what tone and genre the writer is going for, the chandelier either acts like a flyswatter and kills someone, or else it barely misses and provides an excuse for everyone to scream their heads off at such a close call! Gaston LeRoux dropped the chandelier on a woman's head when he wrote The Phantom of the Opera almost a hundred years ago, and the schtick's been imitated ever since! Even by me!"

Her face told him the Phantom reference had been completely wasted on her. He quickly moved back to the main point. "So don't let yourself get caught beneath any other chandeliers tonight, and be sure to yell at me or something if I absent-mindedly start to break my own rule, okay?"

"Okay," she said agreeably.