The Golden Shield of IBF

by Jerry Ahern; Sharon Ahern

  Her name was Liran and they jokingly flirted with each other whenever time and circumstances would permit. She hitched her dress up well above her knees and made a deep, mock curtsy as Erg’Ran rode past. Without trying hard, Erg’Ran viewed what Liran had intended for him to see, the neckline of her dress quite conveniently cut for a spectacular view. “What say you, old friend who can’t keep his eyes off me?”

  “I say that it is good to be alive, my pretty friend, and I wish that you were as yet unmarried and my vision were keener still!”

  “What a thing to say, Erg’Ran!” Gar’Ath protested. For all his brashness in battle, his swordedge-keen tongue in the face of his enemies, the young swordsman embarrassed easily when it came to women.

  Some few of the female warriors, Liran one of them, had brought along children and a husband to care for them.

  There were a handful of lusty, large-bosomed camp followers ensconced here along with the Company. Most of the horses from the encampment behind the Falls of Mir had made the trip, but a few had been lost along the treacherous mountain passes. All of the weapons and the tools with which to fabricate more had survived, along with the bulk of the supplies.

  The Company of Mir was at its best and greatest strength; and, discounting willing hearts, strong swordarms and glorious truth of purpose, miserably suited to do battle with the Horde of Koth.

  They turned their horses up along a gentle rise leading to the first of the terraced gardens. Bounding out of her tent to greet them—Gar’Ath in particular—was one of the most beautiful women Erg’Ran knew. Her name was Mitan, and Mitan was K’Ur’Mir. Rightwise, the long-haired girl had the magic, but she was a warrior to the bone. Mitan was clad in brown leather the color of her hair, jerkin and a skirt, the skirt barely long enough to be called one.

  Her arms were bare, legs bare above turned-down knee boots. The cured pelt of a bar’de’gri was draped from one shoulder over her back, cinched between her breasts with a length of slender chain.

  Erg’Ran took his old eyes from Mitan and cast a glance toward Gar’Ath. Gar’Ath’s face was flushed, his eyes nervously flickering from side to side, trying to avoid contact with the liquid blue eyes staring up at him.

  “Gar’Ath! Erg’Ran! Was there, indeed, a great and memorable battle?”

  “We could have used your swordarm with us, fair one, and your smile!” Erg’Ran told her honestly. He felt a grin cross his lips as he looked over at Gar’Ath riding beside him. “Isn’t that true, Gar’Ath?”

  “Yes.” And Gar’Ath’s mount sprang ahead at his urging.

  Erg’Ran looked down at Mitan. Hands on her waist, magnificent mane of hair tossed back, she was laughing. Erg’Ran shrugged his eyebrows. “Persist, girl!”

  “That I will, old friend!”

  “To be young again,” Erg’Ran murmured, riding on. Beside Gar’Ath once again, their horses climbed to the first terrace. Behind them they heard the crowd call out epithets to the Sword of Koth prisoner who rode at the column’s center.

  Ahead of them lay the old summer palace, visible in its full glory at last.

  It was, in fact, a castle of considerable size and, in the old days, great glory.

  In its construction, the castle followed the contours of the rolling hill on which it was set, the series of outer walls deceptively low by comparison to the overall height of the keep within.

  Each wall rose some seventy spans high, surmounted by defensive positions at the very top, below these well-designed arrow slits on a suspended walkway. The walkway was cut from the same stone as he walls and the upper defensive positions, thus reinforcing the wall’s strength.

  Each wall was constructed in the same manner and there were three successive walls ringing the keep.

  In the days before the coming of Mir, and long before the old summer palace was enchanted, many a deadly battle was fought on the beaches leading up from Woroc’Il’Lod’s frigid surf, or taken before the walls. Yet, never had the walls been breached.

  The walls stood as they always had, but their presence was unnecessary to the summer palace’s defense.

  Flowers, in as profusive extravagance and diversity of passionate color as one could wish, lay in unconstrained beds everywhere along the first terrace, abutting the pathway along which they rode and mounting toward the second terrace onto which they’d shortly climb their horses.

  Erg’Ran shrugged his shoulders out of his heavy cloak, draping it across the pommel of his saddle. The air was pleasantly warm, perfect, just as it always was. The thinnest wisps of cloud floated within an otherwise flawless blue sky. Birds soared effortlessly overhead.

  Erg’Ran and Gar’Ath led the dwindling column onto the second terrace. The cascade of flowers flowed past widely spaced trees, towering Ka’B’Oos, slender pines and graceful willows, their perfect order overwhelming in its simplicity. A few pavilions were erected on the second terrace green, the command tent among them. Bin’Ah would bring the Sword of Koth prisoner there. Despite the interrogation in store for him, the villain would be unharmed. Had Erg’Ran or any of the others wished otherwise, such would have been impossible on these grounds.

  They ascended to the third terrace, the outermost of the three walls on one side, the lower terraces and the encampment on the other. The terrace terminated abruptly. Gar’Ath slowed his mount and Erg’Ran rode ahead, guiding his horse with a gentle tug of the off rein, turning the animal into the narrow throat which was the only means by which to enter the keep.

  Erg’Ran passed the first wall. Had guards been needed here, they would have commanded the narrow passageway easily. It was said that a handful of determined warriors could fend off an army from these walls, and in antiquity such might well have been the case.

  The tattoo of steel shod hooves against flagstone would last but briefly, as Erg’Ran and Gar’Ath were all who remained of the column.

  Past the third wall, they reined in at the entrance to the courtyard. Gar’Ath swung a leg over his pommel and hopped down. Erg’Ran dismounted, but with considerably less grace and greater effort. He began to walk, carefully, leading his mount behind him. The flagstones, as with any uneven surface, played havoc with his peg leg, making it easy to trip.

  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 d
efenses, 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.