The Golden Shield of IBF (19 page)

Gar’Ath volunteered, “Let me take your animal’s reins, old friend.”

“That I’ll let you do, lad.” Surrendering them to the younger man, Erg’Ran continued across the courtyard, toward the three broad, low steps leading to the great iron studded wooden doors. “Leave the horses; they cannot stray.” The stones were well worn at the center where Erg’Ran climbed the steps, their surface polished by uncounted generations of heavily booted men at arms and fair ladies in graceful slippers.

The doors opened as Erg’Ran reached them, just as he’d known that they would. “See! I told you the Enchantress’d be here, lad.”

Erg’Ran passed through the doorway, Gar’Ath beside and a little behind him. Once through, the doors closed again.

Quickly, Erg’Ran and Gar’Ath crossed the length of the wide entrance corridor and toward the great hall beyond. Torches suspended in brackets along the flanking walls lit their way.

To the side, there rose a great flight of stairs which, if followed, would lead to the very highest chamber, the keep’s tower. “I hope she’s not up there. That’s a long way to climb with a peg instead of a foot.”

They would know in a moment, of course. If the doors at the end of the corridor—identical to those which had just opened and closed for them—were to open, the Enchantress would be beyond them.

The doors to the great hall opened outward, like arms outstretching to bid them enter. Torches burned from the walls, and great chandeliers fitted with lit candles were pendent from the vault above. The fires were magical, and there was no smell of smoke.

Outstretched on a bier of sorts at the center of the great hall lay the Champion and, beside him on the flagstones, asleep, Erg’Ran imagined, knelt the Enchantress.

Gar’Ath touched his balled fist to his forehead, invoking the courage of Mir.

Erg’Ran merely stood and stared.

The hair brush moved to her will and Eran was mildly surprised that she possessed the magical energy with which to command it. Even her second-sight was less than it should be. “Too much, too soon,” she chided herself, staring at her image in the magnificently framed mirror before which she sat. It was something she used from time to time in her magic, but more often solely for its more mundane purpose, to see herself.

Not yet fully recovered from controlling the Mist of Oblivion, it was vain stupidity to do what she had done on Arba’Il’Tac. The magical energy required to transmute images graven by time into stone into animated specters moving at her will sapped her magic to the lowest level it had ever been since her own return from the other realm. And, that was a very long time ago, in one way, a mere instant in another.

There was, in her present, weakened state, no way for Eran to determine whether her use of the beasts against her daughter and the Company of Mir had met with any degree of success. Experience had taught Eran that she should anticipate otherwise, plan accordingly. If she found herself happily surprised with the deaths of Swan and the others, well and good. If her pessimism proved warranted, however, she would be ready.

“Brush. Cease!” The hairbrush returned to its tray on the dressing table before her mirror and Eran stood, the gold-and-black brocade robe she wore falling open, her body naked beneath it. There was a chill in the air of her apartment at the very highest part of the very highest tower of Barad’Il’Koth. “Fire. Warm me!” The flames which flickered in the great hearth burned brighter, hotter.

Eran was tempted to go, to renew herself. She was tempted, but she resisted. That there might be some other power greater than herself, one on which she was dependent, the taking of which she craved utterly, posed a danger more grave even than Swan, Virgin Enchantress, Daughter Royal, Princess of Creath.

And, yet, the one peril was inexorably bound to the other.

Eran shrugged her robe from her body, her hair cascading veil-like over her shoulders, her breasts. She slipped beneath the quilt, willed the candles to extinguish themselves into darkness. She was very tired, and there was much to do on the morrow.

There was light. It had been the blink of an eye, yet simultaneously longer than that. Alan Garrison saw light. He wanted to see Swan.

In the next instant, there was darkness and a familiar voice howled with pain.

It was his own voice, and the darkness became darker...

Gar’Ath touched his clenched fist to his forehead so rapidly, so vigorously that Erg’Ran could have mistaken the motion for a punch had he not known better. “Easy, lad.”

“But, Erg’Ran, sure you saw that, heard that!?”

“I heard it, lad, heard what you heard. And I saw what you saw.”

“It’s a dead body and it moved!”

“Then, consider this lad. Since dead bodies don’t move and we just saw the Champion’s body move, the Champion cannot be dead. It’s only logic, lad, isn’t it now?” But, indeed, although he wouldn’t say this to his young swordsman friend, for all that Erg’Ran knew of death and life, the body lying atop the bier was dead. If there was life somehow returning to that body, the young girl who knelt beside it, hands touching it at head and heart, strange words issuing from her lips, was the instrument.

Erg’Ran shook his head. There was magic that should not be done, and not because it was intrinsically evil. Such magic should not be employed because of what might happen to the one who used it, whether used for good or ill. He knew such evil first hand, knew how innocently it might begin.

He would not disturb the Enchantress; it was enough that she knew that they were here. If she required their services, she would inform them. If she wished them to leave, she would notify them of that desire as well. Hence, there was nothing to do but sit and wait until something happened.

There was a beautifully carved wooden bench running the length of the near wall, perhaps originally placed there as a convenience for those who had come to the castle in generations past seeking an audience with the reigning Queen Sorceress.

Erg’Ran caught Gar’Ath’s eye. With a jerk of the head, Erg’Ran started toward the bench.

“The Enchantress is doing it again, Erg’Ran!”

Indeed, the Enchantress had once more begun to move her hands over the Champion’s body, once more begun to utter strange words in the Old Tongue, the rhythm of her speech almost that of a chant.

Perhaps the Enchantress did not realize the danger to herself; more likely, she was well aware of the hazards intrinsic to such magic and chose to ignore them because she cared more for the Champion than for herself. “She’s a brave lass, the Enchantress.”

“What do you mean, old friend?” Gar’Ath whispered back.

A story was a good way in which to while away some time, and Gar’Ath had never asked him concerning the trading of a flesh-and-blood foot for a wooden peg. All the young swordsman knew of it was that Erg’Ran had chopped the foot away himself.

“There’s danger to the Enchantress, lad, danger in the magic that she uses. Before you were born, Gar’Ath, before the Queen Sorceress was what she is, when she was a beautiful young woman, she was very much like our Enchantress in many ways, in other ways not like her at all. But Eran was not evil.”

“Hrmph! I believe that as much as—”

“That you’re watching a man you thought was dead being reanimated?”

Gar’Ath smiled, laughed softly, perhaps at himself. “Fine then, Erg’Ran, what changed the Queen Sorceress to the foul thing she is today?”

“The magic, lad, in the way that she no longer used her magical energy as you might use a sword or a smith’s forge or I might use a book or scroll, but instead became enslaved by the power, possessed by the magic rather than possessing it,” Erg’Ran said. This was neither the time nor the place for any more elaborate an answer than that. So Erg’Ran hastily picked up the tale he’d intended to tell. “It was after Eran had changed, become the woman that she is today, using her magical energy for evil rather than good, it was after she gave birth to our Enchantress.

“We came into conflict, Eran and I, when it became quite apparent that Eran wished to wipe from the face of Creath the K’Ur’Mir, essentially all the K’Ur’Mir save herself and her daughter. I realized that if she were so determined, there would be no way to fight her because of the power she could wield. But I realized that there might be a way in which her magical powers could be rendered ineffective to sufficient degree that many of the K’Ur’Mir would survive, despite her efforts.

“It was her plan, you see,” Erg’Ran continued, “that the blood line should be exterminated except as it served her purpose, that the only surviving women to possess genuine magical abilities in Creath would be herself and a daughter whom Eran would raise to be little more than an exceptionally gifted Handmaiden of Koth, but never a threat to Eran’s power.”

“What was this plan of yours, then?”

Erg’Ran gestured about them. “You’re sitting in it, lad, breathing the very air of it.”

“The summer palace? It was you who—”

Erg’Ran nodded. “And, as a result, incurred the terrible and considerable wrath of the Queen Sorceress. You see, lad,” Erg’Ran told him, “I realized what Eran realized, only a half-step behind her. If all of the K’Ur’Mir were to concentrate their magical energies as one, not even Eran’s magic could have been more powerful. With each one of them that she destroyed, the potential for that to happen became less and less. And that’s how the summer palace came to be the one haven in all of Creath where Eran’s evil has no power, and we are safe.

“As you know,” Erg’Ran continued, his hands searching about in his robe for flint and steel, “what happened was that as each of the K’Ur’Mir died, the last of their magical energy was used to cast the selfsame spell. The summer palace was picked because of its defenses, its command of the terrain, its access to Woroc’Il’Lod. We had no way of knowing how truly effective that combined magic would be, that defenses would not be needed. As the magical energy intensified here, Eran realized what was happening and dispatched the Horde.

“It was decided that the K’Ur’Mir should concentrate their presence in one location, here, where already the magic was building. That seemed the sensible choice. Only a very few of the K’Ur’Mir— Mitan’s mother and father among them—stayed back to fight with magic and sword alongside those who had no magic. They were brave, as Mitan has come to be, but those who set out for the summer palace were brave, as well. I was asked to lead them here.” Erg’Ran gazed at the ceiling, at the walls, shook his head, sighed. He struck a spark, began to light his pipe. “We never made it, as you know.

“The superior numbers of Eran’s Horde engaged the K’Ur’Mir while our company was still too many lancethrows distant from the summer palace to be within its magic. Had we made it that far, there might have been a chance. We did not. There was not.”

“I’ve heard many a tale of the killing,” Gar’Ath murmured soberly.

“Yes, lad, killing. It was not a battle. That’s why, since those bloody days, the chalk cliffs overlooking Woroc’Il’Lod have been called Dinad’Il’Rad. The magic of the K’Ur’Mir stood for a time against Eran’s magical powers, but despite the magic the women used, with each one who died, the magical energy here increased, and the magical energy to combat Eran and the Horde on Dinad’Il’Rad decreased. It ebbed until there was no longer any possibility of holding out. Still, no one gave up. Eran’s magical powers finally overcame the surviving K’Ur’Mir and the Horde swept over all. We’d set up improvised redoubts, dug trenches with both magical energy and sweat and muscle. Cavalry rolled over our position, then infantry followed. Swords flashed, bows were fired, spears were hurled. Male, female, young or old, there was no difference to the Horde’s steel. Blood flowed in rivulets that morning, puddled round our feet.

“Those K’Ur’Mir who were not killed in the rush were put to death, cruelly,” Erg’Ran told his young swordsman friend. His own voice sounding odd to him, Erg’Ran went on anyway. “I’d taken a spear in the shoulder and a mace split my helmet and didn’t do very much good for the thick skull underneath it. When I awoke, madness ruled. I saw more use of the disemboweling hook that day than I ever want to see again, lad. The smoke from the burning flesh on the pyres where the bodies of the K’Ur’Mir were being burned was thick enough to make you choke, and if you hadn’t been crying already because of the carnage, the smoke alone would have brought tears to the eyes.

“And I thought that was what Eran had planned for me, the hook for a long, slow time, then skinning me until unconsciousness ended her pleasure, then the flames. But I was mistaken. I had never seen Eran so exhausted, her magic so depleted. But apparently she’d saved enough of it to deal with me.
In those days, you see, she’d already begun transmuting men into lesser animals, beasts that could do nothing but dumbly serve her will. This was the fate that she chose for me. That’s how I came to chop off my own foot, lad.”

Gar’Ath’s eyes hardened and he swallowed several times, his J’Lag bobbing up and down visibly in his throat.

Erg’Ran told him the rest. “Eran told me that I’d be sickened by my fate when the change began, and she wanted that, for me to see what I would become. So, she started the transmutation with my left foot. If there’d been guards holding me, they might have been changed, too. So I was just supposed to stand there. In the same instant that her guards released my arms and she started to transmute me, I jumped for the nearest weapon. I was pretty agile in those days, a young lad like yourself, Gar’Ath.

“I was well fast enough to grab the axe that I carry to this day. Took it right speedily from a Sword of Koth captain. Had to kill him with it.” Erg’Ran shrugged. “That’s what took the time. You see, lad, I was a wee bit too slow for Eran’s foul magic. It had already begun to transmute me. My left foot was drawing up into the cloven hoof of a gar’de’thu, the big kind.”

“So, you hacked it off with the axe?”

Erg’Ran nodded. “Only thing I could think of, but there was the little problem of bleeding to death. I let swing with the axe, severing my foot with a single blow. I knew, from my studies, that I’d be dead within a few blinks of the eye from the loss of blood. Unless, that is, I could seal the wound. There was only one way for that. With all the speed I could muster, I jumped for the nearest of the pyres.