“Is it your understanding,” Erg’Ran asked quietly, “that this ancient sorceress of whom you speak and Eran are the only two sorceresses who have used a man of your realm thusly?”
Goodman’s shoulders shrugged beneath his robe. “I think so. She never mentioned anything else.”
“Swan is the only child of your union? Correct?” Erg’Ran pressed.
“Yeah. I’m sure of that. Leastwise, I got a wonderful daughter,” Goodman said, touching his daughter’s cheek. Swan kissed his fingertips.
“Would you have any way of knowing if the ancient sorceress had issue by her union with the man of your realm?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Eran would have mentioned it, probably.”
Erg’Ran looked at Garrison, then at Swan. “Do you both understand my meaning?”
Garrison understood it, had started to understand its basic premise—and cooperate with it—as they’d started toward the keep’s upper story where Lieutenant Peter Goodman was held prisoner. When Garrison spoke, he looked at Swan. “If Erg’Ran is implying what I’m inferring, then with you being half of Earth and half of Creath, and having magical energy beyond what you’d had, if you and I were to—”
Swan blushed as she lowered her eyes.
“Hey, fella! Wait just a darn minute there!” Goodman snapped. “You can’t talk that way in front of—”
“I’m certain, Pe’Ter, that Al’An meant no disrespect at all to your daughter,” Erg’Ran declared. “He cares for her deeply. And I mean no disrespect when I say quite truthfully that they would already have been lovers in the most ardent sense of that term had it not been for the prophecy which mandated that your daughter, my niece, remain a virgin until she had found the origin of her seed. And... sir, in finding you, she has found that.”
Alan Garrison looked at Erg’Ran, wanted to say something. He didn’t know what. He could have told Peter Goodman that Creath was just like Earth; if you took advice from your brother-in-law, you could never go wrong. He could turn Goodman on to some great swamp property deals in Florida, too. At last, Garrison thought of what to say and simultaneously said it, without considering the import of his words. “Are Swan and I being used, or about to be?” It came out badly, and especially so since he’d addressed the question to no one in particular.
Swan raised her eyes and looked at him, her glance a dagger in his heart.
“Look,” Garrison said, addressing everyone in the room as he began again. “Swan and I love each other. I know that’s no different now than it was yesterday. And, tomorrow, we’ll still love each other. If we don’t get out of here quick, all the magical hailstones in Creath won’t keep Eran’s people from getting through that doorway. Your wife, Lieutenant Goodman,” Garrison announced, looking at him, “evidently came up with some spell that prevents the chemicals which comprise the priming compound in my cartridges from interacting. She had your gun, right?”
“My .45, yeah.” Goodman nodded.
“So, my guns are useless. All we’ve got between us and the bad guys in the black cowboy hats, Lieutenant, is a magical hailstorm outside the door and time that’s running out.” Garrison looked at Swan. “If I helped, do you have enough magical energy to get us out of here?”
Swan got up from where she’d knelt at her father’s feet. “I don’t know, Al’An.”
“That’s better than a no,” Garrison said, smiling at her. He turned his eyes to Peter Goodman. “Sir, are you positive that you can’t leave here?”
“Pretty positive, fella.”
“Will it hurt to try?”
“I suppose not.”
“Then, we’ll try, if you’re agreeable.”
Goodman stood up and took his daughter into his arms, but spoke to all in the room. “If what I think you folks are talking about is what I think it is, maybe my daughter has the potential to unseat Eran, to defeat Eran’s power with power of her own. And there’s a sure way to help that and help me at the same time.”
“How?” Garrison said.
“You guys try getting me out of here. If you can’t leave with me and can leave without me, I want a weapon. A dagger’ll do. Get my drift, gentlemen? This can’t go on, and even indirectly, I’m not going to help Eran to destroy my daughter. If you can’t get me out of here and out of Eran’s reach, then I’ll get myself out of Eran’s reach, permanently.”
“Father! No.” Swan gasped, her hands touching gently at Peter Goodman’s face.
“Your father has wisdom and courage,” Erg’Ran told her. “It would appear that many of those fine qualities which I and others find so evident in you, Enchantress, at last reveal their source, their origin.” Erg’Ran placed his clenched fist over his heart. “You have the courage of Mir, sir, and his wisdom as well.”
“I can’t believe this!” Swan declared. “We’re talking so easily about my father taking his own life! That’s insane!”
“Look, honey,” Goodman began, his hands gently holding Swan’s shoulders. “Sometimes, we’ve gotta face reality. If I didn’t realize how beautiful and fine you are, I’d maybe think that you were kind of figuring that you were the one getting hurt. Finally find your father, right? And you can’t spend more than a short while with him. But I realize it’s me you’re trying to protect. Gosh, honey! Being with you would be the swellest thing. No kiddin’! And, maybe your magic can get me out of here. But being trapped here to be an instrument of your mother’s evil isn’t a life. I’ve lived more since you walked through that doorway, Swan, than I have since 1944. You gotta believe me, honey. You’ve just gotta.”
Standing perfectly erect, Swan slowly rested her forehead against her father’s chest and wept.
Alan Garrison looked away, walked to the doorway, opened the door and peered into the passage. The accumulation of hailstones had reached epic proportions, several feet high at the far end of the passage, and at least a foot high in front of the doorways within which the Sword of Koth and the Handmaidens had taken refuge.
Mitan’s hands still orchestrated the flow of ice pellets from within the vortex. Bre’Gaa had his bow partially drawn and an arrow nocked. Gar’Ath, his sword in his right hand, was, at that moment, withdrawing his dagger from the body of the Sword of Koth soldier.
Garrison announced, “It’s Swan’s father, a man from my realm named Peter Goodman. We’ll all be attempting to leave using Swan’s magic. Be as ready as you can be when I give the word.”
“Aye, Champion. It’s a bit cold here, anyway.”
Garrison smiled at Gar’Ath’s flippancy. Alan Garrison had learned the lesson well that those who laughed in the face of deadly danger were either idiots or those comparative few who were brave enough to stand fast despite the fact that they realized their lives were on the line. Gar’Ath was one of the latter.
Garrison stepped back inside.
He was not shocked, but he was moved. In that very instant in which Garrison looked at Swan and her father, he saw Swan withdraw her dagger from its sheath at her belt and hand it to her father, to use if he must. This was courage and love unlike anything which Alan Garrison had ever witnessed.
“You’re the finest woman I’ve ever known,” Peter Goodman declared to his daughter. “I couldn’t be a prouder father, Swan. Let’s see what happens.”
Swan nodded, but did not speak.
Garrison walked toward her. As he passed Goodman, Goodman asked him, “Hey, buddy. You smoke?”
“Yeah. A little.”
“Got a cigarette? I haven’t had a cigarette since 1944.” Alan Garrison smiled, reached into his clothes and pulled out the pack. “Camels, huh?”
“Have the pack.”
“One’ll do me, fella. If I make it out of here, I can bum another one. If I don’t, one’ll be all I’ve got time for.” Swan looked away. But, as she did, her father’s cigarette lit. “Good trick, honey.” Alan Garrison watched Goodman as he brought the cigarette to his lips and inhaled. Never had Alan Garrison witnessed someone
enjoying a basic physical pleasure more deeply. Goodman held the smoke in his lungs for a very long time, it seemed, then exhaled slowly through his nostrils. “That tastes great! And I went a lot longer than a mile to get it!”
Garrison clapped Goodman on the shoulder, saying, “I like you, Lieutenant.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, son.”
Alan Garrison nodded.
Goodman inhaled again, exhaling smoke as he said, “I think we should do whatever it is we’re going to do, Swan.”
Swan reached out and took her father’s hand in her right hand, Garrison’s hand in her left. Garrison’s flesh tingled, and he felt strange. “If the touch of a single man of Earth can increase my magical energy,” Swan said, “then the touch of two men of Earth, both of whom I love, should be all the greater.”
“Erg’Ran! Get the others!”
“I am doing so already, Champion!” Erg’Ran called back.
“I am still very weak,” Swan informed them. “I looked out my father’s window. What I plan is a wind summoning spell, and that the wind can carry us down safely into the courtyard. From there, I fear, we’ll have to make other plans.”
“That should be good enough,” Garrison said lamely. He hoped it would be, anyway.
Mitan and Gar’Ath entered the chamber, followed a moment later by Bre’Gaa. “He’s a big guy!” Goodman exclaimed, looking at Bre’Gaa. “You’re Gle’Ur’whatsit, right?”
“As you say. And you are the father of the Enchantress. I am honored to meet you.”
“Pretty well-spoken guy,” Goodman said to anyone listening.
Garrison reminded himself that Peter Goodman was a product of another generation, a time in which people were labeled and categorized by their appearance even more than they were in succeeding generations. At any event, this was neither the time nor the place to discuss such philosophical and social concerns.
Swan released Garrison’s and her father’s hands. She walked to the window. “Al’An. Please hold me.”
Garrison snatched up his Golden Shield of IBF and walked over to stand behind Swan, putting his arms around her, the shield on his back.
He felt a gentle tremor through his body as Swan made the window glass disappear. Swan addressed them all. “If I am able to summon the wind, it will envelop us and lift us from here. Do not fight its force, but be one with it.” In the next instant, Garrison felt the draining sensation which he had felt before, but this time more intensely. There was a sudden coolness on his right cheek, and a freshness to the air that he had not felt before.
Looking beyond Swan into what appeared to be a post-dawn sky of cool, deep blue, Garrison witnessed clouds, stirring oddly, moving progressively more rapidly even as he watched them. Tiny wisps of Swan’s hair, which had worked their way loose from her waist-length braid, teased his face.
Goodman said, “Time to lose the cigarette.”
Erg’Ran urged, “Stay close together, my friends.” The window opening’s height suddenly concerned Garrison, and he tried gauging whether or not he’d have to duck his head. Unable to tell, and realizing that so much depended upon the height at which the wind would move them, he abandoned the thought. He’d duck if he had to.
The clouds Garrison had been watching were moving with astonishing rapidity. Garrison felt air circulating rapidly around him, around all of them as they waited, huddled near the open window. He glanced across the chamber and toward the doorway. Ice still lay everywhere beyond the doorway and along the passage, but it would not keep the Sword of Koth and the Handmaidens back much longer.
The wind whistled now, strong but somehow not violent.
Swan’s hands stroked the magical energy in the air with a gentle grace, unlike the violence there had been in her hand movements when she conducted the wind which had carried their ships away from the cyclonic wave.
Garrison felt—heard—what, under normal circumstances, he would have attributed as a vagrant wind gust. But, it was something more, something else. He felt his body and Swan’s being gently lifted from the chamber’s stone floor, the moving air surrounding him imbued with a physical substance unlike anything that he had ever experienced or imagined.
They were moving, closer to the window, rising, higher off the floor. Garrison looked at Goodman. The wind carried Swan’s father as well. Garrison almost sighed with relief.
The wind on which they rode rotated ever so slightly, and Erg’Ran was the nearest to the window as the wind lifted them through. Garrison, despite the exhaustion against which he fought, almost laughed. The skirts of Erg’Ran s monkish robe were suddenly thrown up by the wind, exposing the older man’s bare white legs beneath. By the wildest stretch of imagination, Erg’Ran’s image wasn’t even remotely similar to that of Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway air vent.
Mitan was the next through, her greatcape swirling above her, an impish smile on her wide, sensuous mouth. She held Gar’Ath’s hand, his hair caught up in the wind, masking his face for an eyeblink. But, as he turned, Garrison saw Gar’Ath’s eyes on Mitan, and they too smiled.
Bre’Gaa, the next through the window and into the open air, howled with laughter, shouting, “I am like a mainsail of the Storm Raider! The wind fills me! Ha!”
Garrison felt his own body being drawn through the window, and he made the mistake of looking down. “Holy shit!” Nothing was below him, save for the cobblestones of Barad’Il’Koth’s courtyard, and those were at least a hundred and fifty feet straight down.
Garrison’s arms were still folded around Swan; in the next eyeblink, she was through the opening, her cloak floating around her like a superhero’s cape, her braid caught in the wind as well.
Looking back toward the window, Alan Garrison saw Peter Goodman, his body about to be drawn through the opening, mere millimeters from it. There was a bright burst of yellow light, the same flashbulb effect there had been when Swan broke her mother’s spell at the doorway into the chamber. But the light did not dissipate this time, and Peter Goodman was violently hurtled back from it, broken out of the gentle grasp of the wind.
“No-o-o-o!” Swan shrieked in anguish, the wind falling away from around them.
“Your father wouldn’t want you to die!” Garrison shouted to Swan as they began to tumble downwards. Garrison still held her, their bodies turning and twisting, plummeting toward the cobblestones below.
The wind which had abandoned them rushed around them, lifted them higher and higher, higher than they had been before. Garrison saw within the chamber, through the open window, the barrier of light still there. But, beyond the light, Garrison saw Lieutenant Peter Goodman.
And, Garrison saw Moc’Dar, racing into the chamber, a wedge of Sword of Koth and Handmaidens in his wake. One of Moc’Dar’s men reached for Peter Goodman; and, there was the flash of dagger steel in Goodman’s hands, blood spray as Swan’s father severed the Sword of Koth’s carotid artery.
Lieutenant Peter Goodman stepped back, looked through the window opening and made that kind of rakish, devil-may-care salute that soldiers always saved for civilians, then blew a kiss with his left hand as his right hand drove his daughter’s dagger into his heart.
Swan saw it. Her body went rigid, then limp in Alan Garrison’s arms. Again, they began to tumble downward, to their fate all but abandoned by the capricious wind. Garrison heard Erg’Ran’s voice shouting, “Mitan! Only you can save us now!”
Swan was either dead or unconscious.
Their bodies spiraled downward. Garrison caught a glimpse of Mitan, her hands flicking outward, her body suddenly upright. Still clutching Swan against him, Garrison tumbled past Mitan, the cobblestone courtyard slamming toward them.
In an eyeblink, the motion of their bodies stopped, Garrison’s stomach ceasing its downward motion a nanosecond later, the remnants of the meal which he had consumed before leaving for Barad’Il’Koth fighting upwards into his throat.
Garrison looked at Swan, her body like a rag doll’s, but her eyeli
ds fluttered.
Garrison breathed, swallowed.
They hung suspended in the air, the wind erratic, but supporting them. Fifty feet or so below, a handful of Horde of Koth regulars were spilling into the courtyard. Soon, there would be more.
Garrison looked toward Mitan.
Her hands moved erratically; Garrison could feel their motion in the wind which surrounded them.
Garrison looked down again. Below, another two or three Horde of Koth had entered the courtyard, and one of them at least held a bow.
A few seconds later, an arrow vectored toward them.
“Mitan! You’ve gotta get us down!” Garrison shouted.
“I don’t know how!” Mitan cried back, desperation clear in her voice.
Garrison looked down at Swan, her eyelids fluttering again. She was incredibly beautiful, beyond any hope he had ever had of a woman who would be in his arms, his. “Swan. Swan?”
Swan’s body moved almost imperceptibly against him. Tears flowed from her eyes as her lids raised. “My father, Al’An!”
“I know,” he whispered. Then Garrison looked up. There were Sword of Koth in the open window above them. It wouldn’t be long before one of them got the brilliant idea to go find his bow and arrow set and have some fun at target practice.
Another arrow whizzed up from below as Garrison looked toward the courtyard. Like the first, the wind blew it off course and it fell away.
“Swan?”
“I can’t, Al’An.”
“Your father died for you, not because of you, died so that you could live and wouldn’t have to die. You know that. Mitan’s keeping us up here, but she can’t control the wind to bring us down. You have to, or we’ll all die.”
Swan turned her face away, but nodded slowly. Her arms, which had hung limply at her sides, rose, and her hands seized the wind. “Release, Mitan!” Swan cried out.
There was a faintly perceptible drop in wind pressure, then it rose, evened out, and—slowly—they started downward.
More Horde of Koth were venturing into the courtyard. There were at least three archers. As if Swan read his mind, she said quickly, “I have very little energy remaining. The wind will repel their arrows, but once we are—”
The Golden Shield of IBF Page 37
