“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 circula
r 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.
Gar’Ath didn’t seem to have anything to do with magic, a “what you see is what you get” kind of guy. He leaned over from his saddle, his voice a loud whisper and still barely audible over the noise of the Falls. “If you’d hold the reins of my horse, I’m of a mind that it might be best to reconnoiter on foot, Champion.”
Garrison liked him, despite the fact that he persisted in calling him “Champion” and despite his haircut. Gar’Ath’s dark brown hair, wavy and full like a woman’s, was grown almost halfway to his waist, the sides bound back by a leather thong knotted at the nape of his neck. Garrison could just see some guy with the Bureau showing up for duty sporting a haircut like Gar’Ath’s. The look on Matt Wisnewski’s face would be worth a few weeks’ suspension without pay and a reprimand in the personnel file.
As Garrison took the reins of Gar’Ath’s mount, the swordsman flicked his cloak out of the way of sword and shield, shooting Alan a grin, and started forward along the icy pathway.
Garrison’s hand tightened on the butt of the pistol he held.
After a moment, Gar’Ath came running back, leaned up toward Garrison in the saddle, his voice barely audible. “There’s a small band of Ra’U’Ba roaming about in there, looking for information they can sell to the Horde. Our lads that we left behind may still be up in the rocks. We must act, and quickly too, Champion.”
Garrison bent low in the saddle in order to hear better. “I’m missing something, here. Who are the, the, the whatever you called them?”
“The Ra’U’Ba are not like us. You’ll see, but we must be very silent, lest they hear us. They communicate with one another over great distances by using their minds alone. And, they can use their minds to block themselves from the second-sight. That is why the Queen Sorceress suffers them to live, because they are the best spies, almost undetectable.
“When one of them discovers a bit of valuable information,” Gar’Ath went on, “he tells it to another by mind alone, even if that other is an incredible number of lancethrows away. Distance matters not at all to their minds, Champion. If one of them should see one of our Company, the Horde would be informed almost instantly, and troops dispatched at once. That is why they must be dealt with one at a time and quickly. This is not work for your firespitter, Champion. Trust me there. Ready the edged weapons of which you spoke. The Ra’U’Ba are tremendous fighters, heavily armed and hard to kill unless you know their one weakness.”
“Let me guess. You don’t know what that one weakness is, right? Shit.”
“What?”
“G’Urg.”
“Aha! G’Urg. I do know the weakness, but it’ll be easier to show you than tell you, Champion. We’d best leave the horses here.”
Alan Garrison dismounted. His hands began fishing in his pockets for his knives. “Telepathic mercenary spies who are terrific fighters. Wonderful,” Garrison groused...
At the end of the pathway behind the Falls of Mir was a steeply sloping downgrade. There was less snow here, as the canyon beyond the Falls was sheltered from much of the wind. Angling along the downgrade was a road of sorts, snow covered but still discernible.
Prowling about on the canyon floor were creatures looking for all the world like heavily armed mutant humanoid monsters from some cheap horror movie, but with better makeup and weirder costuming. Either that, or they were a cross between a gargoyle and a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The Ra’U’Ba stood at least two heads taller than the average professional basketball player.
Unless the one closest to them, which Garrison could see in the best detail, just happened to be particularly ugly, calling the Ra’U’Ba “grotesque” would have been a compliment. Spiked horns grew from the sides of their otherwise humanlike heads, the horns curled forward like those of a bull, but not quite that distended. Their ears were more pointed than the ones Leonard Nimoy used to wear. From his vantage point, Garrison would have sworn that they had three eyes, two dark and one yellow, the yellow eye between and slightly above the other two near the center of the forehead.
Their hands—six long fingers each—were easily large enough to palm a basketball while still holding a hotdog and a drink cup. The Ra’U’Ba were obviously jointed oppositely from humans at both the elbows and knees; merely watching them motion with an arm or walk a pace or two was nightmarish.
Their bodies rippled with muscles superimposed upon muscles; not even Arnold Schwarzenegger had calves like they did. With long tails balancing enormously powerful-looking torsos, the Ra’U’Ba gave the appearance of walking on three tree-trunk-sized legs.
If the Ra’U’Ba appeared physically formidable, they also looked sartorially ludicrous. Naked from the waist up, barefoot, the only garment any of them wore was a skirt. These were nearly knee-length and of a color most reminiscent of vomit. The skirts obscured their thighs and the roots of their tails.
Their skin was reptilian, covered with grey-green scales, but since they were nearly naked they had to be warm-blooded creatures, considering the ambient temperature. Admittedly basing his observations on limited experience, Ra’U’Ba armament seemed to Garrison as bizarre as their physiology. Great shields, the size and general rectangular shape of those used by the armies of Ancient Rome, all but covered their backs like the shell of a tortoise. Helmets hung from each shield, the helmets peaked in the style of feudal Japan, but hinged in order, he assumed, to accommodate the horns on their heads. Built into the helmets were metallic face masks, these almost as terrifying looking as their real faces.
Baldrics, overly wide, were crisscrossed from each shoulder to the opposing hip and blades the size of broadswords were carried high in the frogs. A belt of similar width girded each Ra’U’Ba’s midsection, suspended from or attached to it various other weapons—short-shafted axes with wickedly broad heads, daggers and shuriken-like throwing stars, only much larger than any Garrison had ever seen.
Gar’Ath leaned toward Garrison, his whispering more easily audible beyond the roar of the Falls. “We must lie in wait and take them quickly lest their minds tell the other Ra’U’Ba what we are about.” Gar’Ath returned his sword to its sheath and drew his dagger.
An automatic folder in each hand, Garrison was as ready as he would ever be. That wasn’t very ready at all. He’d never sneaked up on somebody with the intent to kill, nor certainly had he ever used a knife to do harm to anyone. Like any cop who took his survival seriously, he carried knives not only for ordinary and extraordinary chores,
but for last ditch self-defense. He had practiced with the knives, developing a kata or technique for use of one on its own or both together. Rehearsed as a series of martial arts moves in front of a full-length mirror, the routine looked confident, intimidating. Holding the knives, preparing to confront a heavily armed living adversary, Garrison felt no confidence at all, and intimidated rather than intimidating.
Some Champion, he almost verbalized.
Gar’Ath was on the move, creeping forward through the snow, weaving his way along the boulder-strewn downslope. Alan Garrison caught up and stayed beside him. Garrison had counted three of the Ra’U’Ba, and three horses, too. He wondered how something with a tail that long and large could ride a horse? Maybe the tail was jointed at its root and could sling to one side or the other, or rooted high enough to hang out behind, over the saddle’s cantle. If he kept concentrating on something else, he might be able to slow down his breathing, control his heart rate.
Garrison and Gar’Ath stopped behind a pile of broad, flat rock slabs, snow accumulated several inches high. He and the swordsman were only a few yards from the nearest of the Ra’U’Ba.
This would be a waiting game, like marking time in the predawn over too many cups of coffee, the word yet to be given that it was a go to serve arrest warrants on a heavily armed group of suspects. But the word always came, no matter how long it took. The biggest problem was always nerves, because there was so much time to think about what could go wrong, like getting killed or crippled, or doing something stupid and causing someone else to be hurt or killed.
Swan hadn’t magically made him any heavy winter gloves. Garrison only had the thin shooting gloves that he always carried in the pocket of his bomber jacket, kept there for emergencies. Despite the cold and the thinness of his gloves, Garrison’s hands perspired. He stripped away the gloves, to better handle the knives.
The Golden Shield of IBF Page 10