I just finished reading the
Revised Nightworld.
It seems to me that Glaeken's first sword might never have been
used before it was stolen. How he came to be friends with the
Dat-Tay-Vao yet never obtained the stolen sword in the First Age
nor the necklaces until sending Jack to Hawaii is a mystery.
The katana (aka the Gaijin Masamune) was forged from a dirk made
of meteoric metal and augmented with earthbound metal according
to
Black Wind and according to
By the Sword, the metal "had fallen
from the sky in a blaze of light" (p. 96) and this dirk is neither the
First Sword nor the Second Sword so often referred to but perhaps
the dirk mentioned in "Demonsong." The katana presumably only came
to be included in the reforging of the First Sword in
Nightworld
because of the transformation it had undergone after the events of
Black Wind as detailed in
By the Sword.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZlbunNpe4mkC&pg=PA96
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I was startled to see the katana
only mentioned once in the
Revised Nightworld (on page 327), when it
was enumerated among the things to be sent to the smallfolk, who had
been previously mentioned in "Tenants" and
The Dark at the End.
[URL="http://books.google.com/books?id=OFDWqAmVI_AC&pg=PA327"]http://books.google.com/books?id=OFDWqAmVI_AC&pg=PA327
[/URL]
I was reading the
Revised Nightworld while at the same time re-reading
the original version in order to see the differences (because I had
read the Adversary Cycle 15 years before reading the Repairman Jack
series), and since
Black Wind is my favorite Secret History of the
World Book, I looked forward to seeing the katana in the
Revised
Nightworld. Maybe during all that comparing, I forgot to jot down a
note pertaining to another mention of the katana? If not, there's
just that one sneeze-and-you'll-miss-it mention on page 327.
I also thought I'd be encountering the yeniceri and the Oculi again
in the
Revised Nightworld, but that didn't pan out. I loved the last
three pages of the
Revised Nightworld, though, and am thankful for those.