Chapter 37: The Mirror Shield

The Knights crept through Gerudo Fortress with Jiro the carpenter trailing behind. If Nabooru had been correct, they were nearing the second and more heavily guarded of the three cellblocks.

Jiro licked his lips. "Sure there's no food hidden in those rags? Haven't seen a crumb in days."

Glamis poked the man in the back with the tip of his sword. "Silence."

Arswaine and Daphnes stopped as the corridor came to a tee. Pressing themselves against the left-hand wall, they gestured for the others to do the same. Seconds later, a Gerudo carrying a long wooden pole with a curved blade on its tip passed by.

Daphnes smacked her forehead with the hilt of his scimitar. The woman blinked twice but remained conscious. Daphnes swung again to finish the job and, with Arswaine's assistance, pulled the unfortunate woman back into the corridor.

At a nod from Glamis, who had been watching for other guards, the four of them took the right-hand branch of the tee, but before they had gone much farther, another Gerudo came out of a side corridor, some thirty feet distant. Seeing them at once, she spun around and sprinted back the way she had come.

Arswaine rushed after her, and the others followed in pursuit, casting stealth aside in order to catch her before she alerted her comrades. She managed to stay just out of reach, and her course circled back on itself so that it was impossible to tell her destination at first. Finally, she broke off and headed in one direction.

"I don't know how long I can keep this up," Jiro huffed. "The only exercise I've had lately is a beating or two."

Arswaine brought them to a halt as they came to the edge of the cellblock. They had lost sight of the Gerudo, but she had certainly passed this way.

"I will go," said Daphnes. "If they wait in ambush, the rest of you may yet escape."

"No." Glamis jostled his way forward. "My absence at the battle would make less of a difference than yours, Daphnes."

Arswaine held up a hand. "No man is unimportant in this."

"Heck." Jiro pushed his way between Arswaine and Daphnes and stomped into the cellblock. "What's a few more days in a Gerudo dungeon?"

The others followed more cautiously while the carpenter looked around the room. His eyes fell on the two prison cells, identical to the pair in the first cellblock. As before, there were no guards immediately present.

An atrocious snore greeted them from the rightmost of the two cells. Jiro grabbed the bars with both hands and dropped to his knees. "Shiro!"

Glamis peered over the carpenter's shoulder. Like Jiro, the man in the cell had a bushy brown mustache and a thin vest dangling across a broad chest. "Your brother?"

"The name gives it away, eh?" Jiro laughed. "Snored like a pig since he was four."

Daphnes, still carrying the key to the first cellblock, tried it on Shiro's cell and found that it worked there as well. Jiro yanked the door open, rushed in, and shook his brother awake.

"Jiro?" Shiro coughed loudly, his voice dry from lack of water. "How'd you get here?"

"Come on," Jiro said, helping his brother to his feet. "They're getting us out of here."

With Shiro stumbling beside his brother in a daze, the five of them moved toward the farther exit, which would take them to the final cellblock. They had almost made it when the guard they had been chasing reappeared just beyond the doorway with three of her comrades.

Shiro swore. "Looks like they're getting us in more trouble than we were to start with."

Daphnes veered to the left to secure the door they had entered through—but that way, too, had been blocked by Gerudos. The three Knights traded glances and surrounded the two carpenters, swords at the ready.

The guard they had chased spoke first. "You must have thieving skills worthy of the Gerudos to have released these men."

"I would consider your words an insult," said Arswaine, "were it not for the intention behind them."

"Surrender may spare you the more severe penalties of our law."

"We would die before abandoning our purpose."

"Very well." The woman smiled, drawing her scimitar and pointing the blade at the Knights. "Take them."

Link knew something was wrong when he saw Nabooru's shoulders tense. She had led him from the ground floor of the Spirit Temple to the second floor without encountering so much as a rat. But something was making her uneasy.

He watched as she sniffed the air. "What is it?"

"You have killed, but you have never smelled death?" She looked at him. "Breathe in."

He did. All at once, the acrid odor in the air reached his nostrils, and he gagged.

Her mouth hardened into a thin line. "That is the smell of flesh burning. Human flesh."

The farther they went, the worse it got. Link swallowed when they turned a corner and came to a stairway. The ceiling, now only a few feet away, rose to a height of some eighty feet by the time the stairway ended, leading into a cavernous shrine at the heart of the temple.

The fire burned on an altar less than thirty feet beyond the stairs, but they couldn't see what was in it. Breathing hard, Nabooru descended the stairs and approached the flames. Link followed discreetly until suddenly Nabooru threw down her scimitars and fell to her knees.

"Muhjah!"

Link made no attempt to silence Nabooru's grief, though if Koume and Kotake were near, they would surely have heard the scream. Glancing at the fire, he saw the remains of a human being lying on the grate of the altar.

Nabooru's tears stained the ground at her feet. Again, she screamed. "Why, Muhjah?"

Torn between his respect and a sense of the danger they were in, Link helped her back to her feet. "I'm sorry," he said, struggling to hold her up. "She must have been beautiful."

Slowly, her muscles relaxed so that he could let go of her without worrying that she would fall again. She closed her eyes and nodded. "Muhjah…was my closest companion for many years. There was a time when I thought if anyone could be trusted, it was her."

"But?"

Her voice, though broken, had begun to seethe with anger. "To trust her with my doubts would have been to risk everything. After the conquest of Hyrule Castle Town, we did not share the friendship we once had. She was always on some service for Koume and Kotake. I hated what had happened to her, but I have kept the memory of our friendship alive in spite of it."

Navi brushed the Gerudo's shoulder. "Why would they want to kill her?"

Nabooru wiped her eyes, though fresh tears continued to roll down her face. "She failed them. They ordered her to Lon Lon Ranch to buy or steal horses, because it was controlled by a man who served Ganondorf. Instead, she and the other warriors were repulsed, and the owner of the ranch renounced his claim, returning it to the man he had stolen it from.

Two distinct thoughts occurred to Link at once. "Will they attack the ranch?"

"They will attack when Ganondorf's army leaves Hyrule Castle Town, but not before. The ranch was a small holding, so Ganondorf would not take vengeance in such a case unless he could do it without distracting from his plans for Hyrule itself."

Link held his breath. Muhjah was one of the women in the barn, he thought. They killed her because I stopped their plans.

Navi whispered in his ear. "It's okay. It's not your fault, Link."

"There is another reason they may have had in mind when they killed her," Nabooru said.

Link nodded and picked up her scimitars for her. "To get to you?"

Nabooru clenched the scimitars until the skin on her knuckles turned white. "They wanted to let me know how easily they could control my heart. They will not get the results they expect."

A growl brought them back to the present. Link brought his sword up and groped for his shield, but Nabooru was already in action. A half-human shape had slithered out of the shadows behind the altar. With both swords spinning, she lunged at it, and the clang of steel echoed in the shrine.

Link saw it was a lizard with human form, like those he had seen in the Fire Temple. Nabooru flicked at its right wrist with both blades at once, cutting off the sword hand so that the dagger and the hand fell together. The creature reared back with a roar, exposing its neck to a jab that punctured its windpipe, killing it instantly.

"Come," she said, turning away from the altar. "There will be many more behind it."

The three Knights held their position around the carpenters and waited for the Gerudos to come at them. Four guards came at once, two from either side.

Arswaine fought the two on his side while Glamis and Daphnes held off the others. In seven years of captivity, it had been difficult to maintain the level of skill they once possessed, but Nabooru had let them out of their chains on occasion to practice with her, teaching them all the techniques of her people.

While the Gerudos were focused on the Knights, Jiro waited for an opportunity to assist. Finally, when one of the guards turned her back on him, he reached out and yanked her left arm back so that she screamed and spun on him with her sword sweeping down on his head. At the last possible moment, he grabbed the wrist of her sword arm and struck her forehead with his.

"Sorry," he mumbled as she crumpled to the ground, out cold.

Daphnes had defeated his opponent and turned to assist Arswaine. Three more Gerudos rushed forward to fill the gap left by the two on the ground, and Daphnes was forced to turn back and face them. Jiro snapped up one of the swords dropped by the woman he had hamstrung and gave the other to Shiro.

For the first time in as long as they could remember, the brothers fought for something more than food, wine, or the sight of a Gerudo woman. Somehow, the courage that gave them made up for lack of discipline. Side by side with the Knights, they managed to beat back wave after wave of guards until the room fell silent and thirteen Gerudos lay unconscious at their feet.

"We must hurry," Arswaine said, his face bloodied by several shallow cuts from a scimitar. "The sound of our combat will not have been canceled by these walls."

"We're not leaving until we find Ichiro," Shiro said.

Glamis muttered under his breath. "Shiro, Jiro, Ichiro...Sabooro?"

Navi screeched. "Why are there so many?"

Nabooru guillotined yet another Lizalfos—her name for the humanoid lizards—and shouted, "The witches are responsible for the monsters as much as Ganondorf is. If they die, these may die, too!"

Link cut down a Stalfos, one of the walking skeletons he had encountered in the other temples, and shouted back, "Are you sure you know where we're going?"

"Yes. I've known this temple since I was a child!"

They broke away from the clutch of monsters and sprinted up two stairways through a door leading into a smaller chamber used for ceremonial functions. Here, spears, poleaxes, and shields decorated the walls, and a red carpet running the length of the floor ended at another doorway.

"What's that?" said Navi.

Blocking their path to the other doorway was a gigantic suit of armor ribbed with spikes and reinforced with thick iron plates. Link shuddered when he saw it. The battleaxe it held in its lifeless arms might have felled the Great Deku Tree.

Nabooru barreled straight towards the door as if the suit wasn't there. "The witches can bring almost anything alive with their magic. Once, a villager who found his way here thought he could take the armor apart and sell the metal to buy food."

Link glanced behind them to make sure the monsters hadn't caught up with them yet. "What happened?"

Instead of a reply, Nabooru grabbed the battleaxe by the middle of the handle and sprang onto the shoulders of the suit. The moment she touched it, the suit trembled and awoke with a grumble of its iron joints. Finding a prowler on its shoulders, it swung the axe, missing Nabooru completely but embedding the blade in a pillar bordering the carpet.

Nabooru hooked her legs around the neck of the monstrosity and held on until it lifted the axe again, then she drove her scimitars into its faceplate and left them there. The suit, with a squeal of straining metal, collapsed at the knees and landed on its face, its helmet split in several pieces on the ground.

Ignoring their stares, Nabooru collected her scimitars and headed for the door, which had opened on its own when the suit collapsed. "You see they can also use their magic to keep doors locked. There are places here you would never get to without knowing how to solve their traps!"

Link grimaced. "Remind me to thank you if we make it out!"

"Wait here." Nabooru rushed through the door onto a balcony exposed to the moonlight, a sheer cliff overlooking the desert. A box rested on the edge of the cliff, but Link didn't notice what was in it, if anything, because the monsters had suddenly barged into the room in a chorus of howling and wailing.

He spun around to face them. "Nabooru?"

There was no answer.

Navi raised her voice to its highest pitch. "Nabooru?"

Any reply was drowned in the cacophony.

The two of them shouted her name in unison. The monsters were almost upon them.

A beam of moonlight entered the room from behind them, reminding Link of the erratic reflection he saw occasionally when light bounced off the Master Sword and hit a wall. This was far more intense, however.

The beam swept from side to side. Some of the monsters collapsed to the floor, clutching at their faces, while the rest milled about in confusion. Link dared not turn for fear it would have the same effect on him. After several had fallen, the survivors fled, leaving him to wonder.

"You can look now," they heard Nabooru say.

Link found her already standing at his shoulder, holding up the object she had claimed from the box on the cliff. It was a shield. Except for the rim and the back of it, both of which were blood-red, the surface was a luminous silver, as reflective as glass.

"The Mirror Shield is one of the Gerudos' sacred artifacts," Nabooru explained. "It has been in our possession for thousands of years. Some say it was a gift of Din to one of our ancestors. Others say it fell from the sky. One thing is certain: when Koume and Kotake learned of its existence, they locked it away and forbade anyone to touch it."

Link swallowed. "Why?"

"You have seen that it reflects concentrated light. I believe the reason the witches fear it is that they are afraid it will also reflect their magic."

"If you knew it was here, why didn't you use it before now?"

"It would have been foolish to attack them on my own. Even if I had killed them, Ganondorf would have taken revenge for their deaths, not only on me, but on all the villages. Now that we have some hope of defeating him, a reprisal before we can meet him in battle is far less likely."

Link smiled and ran his hand over the shield, murmuring "A gift of Din…"

Once again, OOT veterans will have picked up on numerous additions and changes to the plot in these chapters. Actually, the gist of what happens is the same as it is in the game. Four carpenters are freed from Gerudo Fortress, and Link enters the Spirit Temple to grab the Mirror Shield. The difference is in how all of this comes about. Things would have gotten really, really tedious if Link had gone with the group to rescue the other carpenters and THEN gone on to find the Spirit Temple and wake the final Sage. And don't forget that in the game, Link has to travel back in time again to beat the temple. Nixing the trip back in time and using the knights to help get both tasks (the rescue and the shield hunt) accomplished at once allows us to move the plot forward at a much more rapid pace.

At this stage in the story, when we're hurtling towards the final battle with Ganondorf, I'm afraid including all of the details from the game in a linear, straightforward fashion would have provoked one giant YAWN from the majority of my readers, especially those who aren't as familiar with the game.

I wish I could share the reason why I chose to end Chapter 36 the way I did. Let's just say it's inspired by one of my favorite moments from the official OOT manga. I can't elaborate without giving away one of OOT's biggest plot twists. Yeah, I know that at least 95% of you have played the game through at least once or have been exposed to this twist in one way or another, but hey-for the two of you who haven't played the game, I'd rather not spoil it all for you.

BWA HA HA HA.

See you again soon!