The Golden Shield of IBF (12 page)

Shifting her train, Eran lowered herself into her throne chair, her fingernails tapping against the armrests. The only other sound in the vast hall was the labored breathing she had given Moc’Dar in order to make his slightest effort even more painful, so that even in rest he could never rest.

Her voice low, even, Eran began again. “The Virgin Enchantress, Daughter Royal, Princess of Creath has defied me for the last time. Rather than lift the spell under which she masked the accursed Company of
Mir from the Horde, she chose to transport herself to another realm and return again with a supposed champion from that world.

“This creature she has taken in thrall is not of you, but will appear like you. He relies on a magical weapon which kills with tiny tongues of fire. Without it, he is the equal of no man here. Soon, my magical power will render his weapon useless against you.

“My daughter and the unnatural creature which accompanies her as a familiar even now march on Barad’Il’Koth. With the bastard followers of Mir fighting beside her, the Virgin Enchantress naively hopes to unseat the ruling blood of the K’Ur’Mir, for she is not fully of the blood and she knows it and envies me.”

Eran stood. Moc’Dar must be peeking at her feet, she thought, amused, because his pitiful excuse for a body shuddered.

“I charge all officers to go forth to seek out and destroy the Company of Mir, destroy them utterly. I charge you further that you should go forth and seek out my daughter, the Virgin Enchantress, and assault her by all means of force and guile to bring about her death and doom. And the foul creature with her—kill him if you must, but better reward to the officer who brings me this creature alive that I may make another toy with which to amuse myself, as I have done with Captain Moc’Dar. All this I charge you do, under pain of incurring my terrible wrath!”

Sweeping her train behind her, Eran started down from the dais, with a snap of her fingers bringing the cowering once-man Moc’Dar to heel.

“Almost there, lad,” Erg’Ran remarked to Gar’Ath, who rode beside him. They were riding a track and just passing the miller’s hut, and soon their small band would be at the Falls of Mir.

“If the fighters left behind have not themselves been forced to flee, behind the Falls there could be welcome rest, old friend.”

They rode side-by-side at the rear of the column, the Virgin Enchantress and her champion at the column’s head. The other survivors from the previous night’s fight on the track in the wood, the shackled and bound prisoner, and the body of their fallen comrade were all at the columns center.

It was just after dawning, the sky more grey than black. The large flakes of snow were falling steadily and softly.

“It’s a long way yet to Barad’Il’Koth, Erg’Ran. If I don’t make it—” Gar’Ath started to say.

Erg’Ran stopped him in midphrase. “You’ll make it if any of us do, lad. It’s the Virgin Enchantress I’m worried over. She is the one they most wish to kill, Gar’Ath. Her champion strikes me as a good lad, and he’d give his life for her, as would you or I or any of the Company of Mir. But there are dangers of which Swan is unaware and must remain so for a time, at least.”

“What sort of dangers, old friend?”

“I can say nothing of it now, lad, except to tell you this. Her mother—curse the Queen Sorceress—was once, like Swan, an innocent girl.”

“Are you saying the Virgin Enchantress is in danger of becoming like her cursed mother! That’s madness, Erg’Ran,” Gar’Ath charged.

“Madness there is, lad, but not in my words, but in power.” And Erg’Ran struck his heel and the stump of his peg to his mount, urging the animal forward...

“When I was little, sometimes my mother was very good, loving. I remember that, and I try to believe they are two separate people,” Swan told him, her horse close beside his. She was a better rider, Garrison knew. By the same token, if he did stick with her, doing this Champion thing, all the way to Barad’Il’Whatchyamacallit, his horsemanship would have plenty of opportunity to improve. “I want to believe that I can still love my mother who was while I fight against the evil of my mother who is. Do you understand what I mean, Al’An?”

He considered her words, thought about them very hard, then said, “I think that I can understand what you mean, but only to a point. We’ve all had people we liked or loved who had traits that we disliked, or maybe despised. For that to be the case with a parent would be very tough, Swan. How about your dad?”

“Dad? Oh, my father,” Swan said. “I never really knew him. I have a few memories of his voice, his touch, the way his beard felt rough. But then he was gone.”

“I’m sorry that I asked, Swan.”

“No,” she told Garrison, “it’s all right, Al’An, because I wish for you to know these things.”

“Did your dad, uh—”

“I was told that he died, but now I know that he did not. It is very possible that he lives still, at Barad’Il’Koth.”

“Then, your mom and dad are still together?”

“I don’t think so,” Swan responded. “Tell me about your mom and dad, Al’An.”

Garrison shrugged his shoulders. “Not much to tell, really, except they’re nice folks. Always pushed me to be practical, which I resented a lot more then than I do now, but I still resent. They loved me a lot, and still do. They were pretty young when I was born. They were in college. Usual thing for those days. Met, fell in love, got married, she dropped out to help pay his way through school, then got pregnant with me. They always told me that they intended to have a baby then. Kinda hard to imagine a pair of twenty-two-year-olds, wife working a full-time job, husband working a full-time job and going to school full time, going into his senior year, deciding suddenly to have a baby. She had to quit work and he got a part-time job to try and make up for the money they lost with her income gone. You know how it is.”

“No,” Swan said, the expression on her face totally honest. “My mother was born Princess Royal, as was I. I don’t know about my father, but my mother never wanted for anything that she desired, except more power of magic. I never wanted for anything, except to have my father with me and for my mother to cease to be evil. College is a learning place?” Swan asked.

“For some people, anyway.”

“We learn from our elders, and then from books and scrolls and by trying things.”

“Kind of the same thing for us, but it’s a little more formalized, more structured.”

“Within a day, my magic will be fully restored, Al’An. Will you stay to fight beside me?”

“Dropping the other shoe, huh?” Garrison replied.

Swan smiled, then glanced down at her feet. “I wear boots, not slippers, and I have dropped neither boot.”

Garrison glanced at his wristwatch, a black-faced Rolex that he was given when he’d graduated law school. “I’ve noticed something, Swan. Time here, it moves differently than it does where I’m from. I caught it that when that Mist of Oblivion thing ate up your castle and nearly got you with it, it was nighttime, and more or less a full day had passed between then and the time you and I arrived here.

“But,” Garrison continued, laying his argument, “when I met you at DragonCon, I got the impression that you’d arrived only a little while before I got there myself. That seems to make me feel that what was a day for your world was only less than half a day for mine. And my watch.” Garrison shot the cuff of his bomber jacket and raised his arm from beneath his cloak so that she could see what he meant by a watch. “Sometimes, I can look at it and the sweep second hand doesn’t move, and sometimes the minute hand seems to be spinning. My body’s telling me that it’s been a day and a half at least since I’ve eaten anything—remember you promised me a meal?—but here it’s been less than a day. That doesn’t make any sense at all, unless I’m nuts and my watch is broken. It’s like time moves whenever it damn well pleases here, or stops for the same reason.”

“It is different, I’m sure. I’ll try to formulate an explanation, if I can.”

“Don’t worry about it, Swan. The point I was so belaboring is an answer to your question. If I stay and help you fight, I might be gone from my world for an eternity, or I might have been gone for a couple of minutes. Heck, I mean, a hundred years could’ve gone by where I’m from and I wouldn’t know it. So, I’ll make you a deal.”

“A deal, Al’An?”

Garrison nodded. “Yeah. I’ll help. You know I can’t refuse you. If that kiss in the snow under the Ka’B’Oo this morning meant half as much to you as it did to me, then you know why, too.” My God, Garrison thought. She was actually blushing! Garrison cleared his throat. “But, if I go back, when I go back, when, if, I don’t know. But you’ve got to try to get me back to DragonCon just when I left it, because I could never explain what happened here and I’d wind up getting put away in the laughing academy.”

Swan seemed to consider his words, but before she could speak, Garrison blurted out, “And, no, that’s not a school where they teach you to laugh. It’s a place for people who’ve lost a grip on reality, maybe gone nutso.”

“Like ‘nuts’ that you said a moment ago. People would think that you were sick in your mind.”

“Yes, exactly,” Garrison said.

“I can try, and that is all that I can honestly promise, Al’An, but I hope that you choose not to go.” She leaned out of her saddle, reached across and held his hand.

“I
hope I don’t, either. And, under the circumstances, an honest promise is all I can ask for.”

Swan smiled at him, withdrawing her hand. Garrison reached across to her, taking it back...

In one of the stories Alan Garrison had read or seen in his youth about Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, the outlaws were sometimes known as the “Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.” This was because their hideout was behind a waterfall, in the hidden box canyon beyond. As a kid, he’d always wanted to go there, ride in behind that waterfall. When, as an adult, he learned that there really was such a place, between being a good FBI agent and being a good son and being a good boyfriend to various and sundry girls he’d never had a steady relationship with, there wasn’t the time to go there.

As their horses mounted the steep, narrow rock ledge and started to pass behind the cascade, Garrison found himself humming Elmer Bernstein’s theme from
The Magnificent Seven.
It was the wrong movie, but it was the only appropriate-sounding Western movie music that he could think of.

Gar’Ath rode beside him now. Erg’Ran had told them as they approached the Falls of Mir—who was this Mir guy?—that, “It is best that the Champion and one other go ahead in the event that danger or carnage lies beyond. Gar’Ath has volunteered to accompany you, Champion.”

“It’s Alan, all right? Yeah, I’ll go.”

So they went ahead, a quarter mile or so, Swan, Erg’Ran and the others well back with the prisoner. There would have to be time to interrogate this Sword of Koth badass, and pretty soon, Garrison reminded himself.

“The style of fighting that you used with your feet, Champion. I liked it. I’ll make an offer I’ve never made before to any man.”

“What’s that, Gar’Ath?”

Gar’Ath shot him a broad smile. “I will teach you every secret that I know as concerns the use of the blade, if you will teach me your fighting style.”

Garrison considered the offer for what it was, at once a great compliment and a great opportunity. He’d read about swords all of his life, examined them, but never learned how to fight with one. On the other side of the coin, Garrison had just seven rounds left in one of his SIG .45s, eight in the other and only two spare magazines, for a total of thirty-one rounds. The little Seecamp .32 in his right front pocket was another seven rounds with no spare magazine. “You’re on, compadre.”

“Compadre?”

“A great man of action in my world used to use that word a lot, and he said other things like, ‘Listen up, pilgrim.’ Like that.”

“So, we’re agreed then. Here’s my handclasp on it!” Gar’Ath extended his hand, and Garrison his, but Gar’Ath’s fingers closed on Garrison’s forearm with a powerful grip. Garrison did the same.

They started their horses behind the Falls of Mir, the murmur that had been the sound from the rushing water building rapidly to a roar.

Gar’Ath freed a shield—round, much like a Scottish targe, with a center spike emerging from a center boss—from lashing thongs which bound it to his saddle. The shield slipped onto his left forearm, his left hand holding the reins of his mount. Gar’Ath then drew his sword. It was plain looking, in the sense that it was devoid of ornamentation, but beautiful nonetheless. Its tip came to a spear point, the almost three feet of blade with multiple fullers starting only a few inches back from the point and running the blade’s length to the fist-long ricasso just forward of the guard. The guard itself was wide and spanned a little under a foot from end to end, the quillons drooping slightly, terminating in circular lobes large enough to have been a man’s finger ring. What Garrison could see of the hilt beneath Gar’Ath’s fist was brown leather covered. The ribbed pommel was about the size and shape of a plum, designed as a skull crusher.

“You may care to borrow my dagger. Your firespitter might be noisy for what work may lay beyond the falls, Champion.”

“I’ve got edged weapons if I need them, thanks.”

Gar’Ath nodded.

The environment behind the falls was extremely cold. The air was filled with a heavy, frigid mist. Ice, thick and slick, covered the pathway and the rock wall beside them. Garrison hoped that his horse felt more confident of the footing than he did.

Garrison slipped his left hand under his cloak and bomber jacket, his fingers touching against the butt of one of the SIG .45s. He had no intention of giving the pistol a soaking in the icy spray unless he had to.

Gar’Ath slowed his mount, Garrison doing the same. Swan had second-sighted beyond the Falls, seeing nothing of alarm, but warned them, too, that her mother might be back to full magical power. If that were true, and her mother’s soldiers had taken the hidden camp, her mother could have cast a spell to block Swan’s second-sight.

Garrison was amazed at his own thinking. He was beginning to accept things like second-sight, spells, summonings. He’d started to light a cigarette about a mile or two before they came in sight of the Falls of Mir and hadn’t even given it a second thought when Swan lit it for him with her magic. She seemed to get a kick out of doing it, anyway.