Hawk the Slayer Read online

  In a time when the dark clouds of chaos covered the land and the roads were filled with death, Voltan The Dark One rode out …

  Against him stood one man, armed with the legendary mindsword whose blade moved at the speed of thought.

  Hawk The Slayer. The warrior marked by destiny to cut down The Dark One …

  JACK GILL presents for

  CHIPS PRODUCTIONS

  a MARCEL/ROBERTSON film

  HAWK THE SLAYER

  starring

  JACK PALANCE • JOHN TERRY

  Special Guest Appearances By

  HARRY ANDREWS • CHERYL CAMPBELL

  ANNETTE CROSBIE • ROY KINNEAR

  CATRIONA MacCOLL • PATRICK MAGEE

  FERDY MAYNE • GRAHAM STARK

  Executive Producer

  BERNARD J. KINGHAM

  Produced by

  HARRY ROBERTSON

  Written by

  TERRY MARCEL and HARRY ROBERTSON

  Directed by

  TERRY MARCEL

  A New English Library Original Publication, 1980

  Copyright © 1980 by Terry Marcel and Harry Robertson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the publishers.

  FIRST NEL PAPERBACK EDITION 1981

  NEL Books are published by

  New English Library Limited,

  Barnard’s Inn, Holborn,

  London EC1N 2JR.

  Made and printed in Great Britain by

  Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd.,

  Aylesbury. Bucks.

  0 450 05046 7

  LEGEND OF THE MINDSWORD

  There is a tale of a wondrous sword which, it is said, will be wielded by a hero of great valour each time the works of men are threatened with extinction by the forces of evil.

  Cities and empires have long crumbled into the dust. Nothing is left of them but a memory which mourns for lost glory. But the legend of this sword has lingered in the myths and songs of men from age to age.

  Some say it was forged in the bowels of a crooked mountain by Troll-Smiths, long dead, from a metal not of this earth, but from the fused ore of a lightning bolt let fall from the dying hand of a Sky King. Imbued with unearthly power, it needed the greatest magicians and sorcerers of that time to fashion their own thaumaturgical ornaments to control its potency.

  From the secret Land of the Elvenfolk, a hilt that was the golden hand of their noblest suzerain clasped in its metalled fingers the last great elfin Mindstone, a crystalline brain orb whose incredible energy could only be sparked to life by a mind of like convolutions and accord.

  So was it forged to become the mighty Mindsword; an invincible weapon, answerable only to the thought-command of one man and which could give him, some say, the Key to the Ancient Power.

  Since the time of the War-To-End-All-Wars it has disappeared from man’s ken and, so the legend goes, will only reappear when a Hero of Heroes comes to lead the Land out of the darkness.

  This is the first part of the Saga of that sword.

  1

  THE MINDSWORD

  The silver moon slid westwards and hid its face momentarily from the scrabbling wind which thrust in from the North with sleet for fingernails. It dappled the silent forest in silver splashes, etching the tall pines against the sky.

  A lone rider threaded through the moonlit wood, a shadow flickering from tree to tree bringing him closer to his goal. The man, who rode with great purpose, sat tall on his horse, was powerfully built and well over six feet. The upper half of his body was protected by a cuirass of black leather embossed with studs of brass. His night-coloured cloak-coat and leggings seemed to have been woven from fine-spun steel. A skull-fitting helmet of iron followed the contours of his head and forehead, with a peak spearing down to the ridge of his nose. But over the left eye and upper cheekbone a masking piece of close meshed steel had been fashioned to hide that side of his face.

  Where the trees thinned, opening out on to a frost-flecked moorland, he dismounted causing a faint rustle where the pine needles were softly crunched under his iron-shod boots. There was a ghostly glint as a moonbeam glanced off the edge of his sword.

  His movements were furtive.

  He waited for a scudding cloud to obscure the moon, then slipped like a wraith from cover to cover. An assassin of the shadows, he reached his objective.

  The High Keep.

  It loomed above him, a crouching, craggy castle of grey stone. Fitful yellow and red flames of lamps and torches glittered from its mullioned windows. Its great courtyard doors were battened tight and all the other gates likewise, the man knew. The watchmen in the towers and the other vigilants within awaited the obvious assailant. It mattered little.

  He knew the one weakness of the High Keep: the hidden entry in the rocky foundations of the Hall which gave access to the honeycomb of secret passages riddling the ancient stronghold. They were known only to a few and it was not surprising that he was one since he had been born within these walls and spent most of his life getting to know each stone.

  His reason for being here was to kill, if need be, the Liege Lord of the High Keep. He was his eldest son. His name was Voltan.

  Raw shuddering gusts whipped the battlements and the grizzled-haired man shivered back into the shelter afforded by a turret.

  Alaric, the Castellan of the High Keep, stared down at the road which came up to the Hall from the south. It was a beaten stretch of dirt leading into the trees.

  He wished that the young master, Hawk, would come home soon. Word had been sent to him to return but the news which had come back was disquieting.

  They lived in strange times, thought Alaric.

  To think that not so long ago his Liege Lord’s eldest son, Voltan, had also fought by his father’s side in the Northern Rebellion. Now, there was a deadly enmity between the two brothers. They had both loved the same woman but she had chosen Hawk, the younger son. Since then Voltan had made his name a byword for terror and evil.

  Alaric clicked his teeth in annoyance. Nettles of sleet lashed at his unprotected face. With a final examination of the south road, he moved to the small door and narrow staircase which reassured him of the warmth below. He passed along the Great Corridor, pausing to put his ear to the tight-shut studded doors of the Chamber of Gold. Only the Liege Lord of the High Keep could enter within its compass but occasionally the old Castellan had caught frustrating sight of its interior: the flash of beaten gold panels and the weird glow from somewhere beyond his vision.

  For some days now, the old man, his Liege Lord, had spent an unconscionable amount of time in there. Why? There was no way for Alaric to surmise.

  By straining his ears Alaric could just about hear the old man’s breathing. It was tantalising to wonder what he was doing in there and also annoying, but he had other things to do with his time. Down the Long Staircase he checked that the guards were alert in their watch-places.

  Voltan’s bands of raiders had been seen in the vicinity of the Keep within the last few days and although the main entrance was well-battened and the postern gates were over a foot thick, it was a foolish Castellan who did not keep a vigilant eye on such details.

  A sudden nagging thought tugged at his brain. He had almost overlooked one thing. An army of men certainly couldn’t make much use of the Secret Way but one man with a purpose could.

  Alaric hurried to the cellars. Lighting a flambeau, he descended below the level of the courtyard into the deep caves hewn from the crag upon which the Keep sat.

  The Secret Way had been carved in the rock as a final escape route if and when the Keep’s defences were broken down. A past Lord of the Keep
may have also had it in mind as a passage for food supplies during a long siege. That it existed was a reality which, Alaric reasoned, Voltan could conceivably know about.

  He edged past the serried ranks of spiced ale barrels stored in the coolness against the heat of summer. His torch cast long shadows along the many cul-de-sacs; here a forgotten repository for broken hauberks, lances and billhooks; there mouldering leather harnesses gathered dampness from the walls.

  Deep under the Keep was the resting place of prior tenants to the stronghold, the vaults of dead Lords, their wives and children.

  The older Alaric got the more envious he became of the dead and he felt drawn to read the long list of names cut into the walls. This was his history, his antecedence just as much as his master’s.

  He came to the Niche of a Hundred Names and pondered on it. This had been the time of the Pestilence. Virulent and awful, whole families had been wiped from the face of the earth as if they had never existed. Death had stalked the Land for fifty years. As more and more people died, so the land became untilled and burgeoning fields of corn rotted, unharvested. Food became scarce and friend fought friend to survive.

  Chaos had arrived. And had remained to this day, clucked Alaric.

  Marauding bands of vicious men moved from one source of food to another like plagues of murdering locusts feeding on the subservience of the weak.

  Then, insidiously, there were the first uneasy stirrings that the forces of evil were, in some way, being controlled. Subtly, the terrorization and murder became focused against those who still sought for a society of order and honour. No longer did the army of thieves, liars and killers act in a haphazard manner.

  There were rumours of “Black Wizards”. Creatures who lived in the darkness but no one had ever seen one of these “things” and who they were or where they had come from remained conjective, a mystery for the imaginative to unravel.

  Was it possible that they had been born of the Pestilence, had been its cause even, and now controlled those who fought for the legions of Chaos?

  Alaric’s mind was in a turmoil. And the notion that Voltan, the eldest son of his Liege Lord, could somehow have become their willing pawn made his knuckles tighten whitely on the hilt of his sword.

  A rat scuttled in a dirty puddle somewhere off to his left.

  “Voltan! If my sword finds you down here,” he mumbled to himself out of nervousness, “then your bones will have found a fine place to rot.”

  A large shadow moved at the corner of his eye. He heard the purr of a dagger sliding from a shiny sheath. Voltan? Here?

  Alaric’s lips opened in a cry that went unuttered. Gleaming steel poked through his bare throat, stained with crimson. Choking on his own blood Alaric looked oddly astonished as he clawed at the empty air, then fell down slowly to lie motionless on the slimy, cobbled floor.

  Knee-high boots, black as night, nudged the fallen Castellan and a hand pulled the long dagger free. A dark pool widened slowly from the corpse’s head and slivering threads found fissures in the stone to incarnadine.

  Voltan replaced the dagger in its sheath.

  Alaric’s flambeau spluttered on the wet stone where it had fallen, flared and smoked the tiny flame into extinction.

  As silently as Voltan had appeared, so did he now vanish into the tortuous corridors that latticed the aged building.

  In the Chamber of Gold, the Lord of the High Keep stood impassively, waiting. Premonition of this hour tumbled through his mind.

  The room was in the shape of a cross. Its walls were panelled in sheets of beaten, rough gold which glinted dully in the shafts of moonlight which spilled through the slitted windows high up on the walls. Here was the wealth of the Keep. With one exception, there was no other adornment on the walls. Somehow, the exception should have been an ornament of incredible value but instead it was a lacklustre sword whose only strangeness was the odd device it had for a pommel at the top of the hilt: a small, clenched fist made of brass.

  Dominating the room, however, was a square well also fashioned in gold. It seemed to be filled to the brim with a green liquid which had a metallic sheen to it.

  The Pool of Ishtar!

  The Lord of the High Keep stared at it and drew in a sharp intake of breath, for the liquid in the well had lost its metallic burnish and now rippled oilily blood-red.

  The hour was now upon him.

  He knew the signification of the Pool’s changing hue. His own life blood would stain it. Resignedly, he waited.

  The secret door to the Chamber opened and Voltan was there. Swiftly he moved to the main doorway and barred the double doors firmly. He looked intently at his father across the Well.

  “Old man, you have lived too long. Now it is my turn.”

  The Lord of the Keep returned his son’s stare with like intensity.

  “You can strip the walls bare, Voltan.” He spat out the words. “It will avail you naught.”

  “I didn’t come for gold, my father,” answered Voltan. “You know what I came for. Only you can tell me the secret. As a child I heard the rumours and tales and thought about the day when I, as your eldest son, would be made privy to the knowledge. I know it exists. But somehow, you are unable to use it. Why is that, old man?”

  Wearily, his father cast around for a means of escape but Voltan effectively cut off any such route.

  “The key to the Ancient Power was entrusted to our ancestors. I know that,” stressed Voltan when his father did not reply. He gazed into the blood-red Pool of Ishtar. “Has it something to do with this well, old man? Is there an incantation I should know? What is this unknown thing, this enigma? Tell it me!”

  Voltan’s face blazed on the verge of madness.

  In response, his father drew his short sword from his belt. “That I shall never divulge.”

  “Not to me. Is that it, my father?” he cried. His sword, which he had held couched on his breast, scythed in an arc and licked at his father’s blade and sent a jolting pain through the old man’s frame. “Not to me—but to that whelp, Hawk, you also sired. Yes, you would tell him. I can see it written in your eyes.” Voltan’s voice was seeped in bitterness. “All my life, it seems, I have been walking in the shadow of my brother, Hawk.”

  The Lord of the Keep warded off the first flaming blow but Voltan’s savagery swept the short sword from his nerveless fingers and a cutting blow to the shoulder blade forced the old man to his knees.

  “The secret, old man!” said Voltan urgently. His anger was still high. “Tell me and I shall let you live.” He clutched at his father with his free hand. “It is my right as your eldest son. I demand the key to the Ancient Power.”

  The old man’s voice was grey with the taste of defeat. “Voltan, you ceased being my son the day you spilt the blood of innocents. The Ancient Power must never fall into the hands of the Devil’s agents.”

  For a trice, Voltan had a moment of indecision. Then, suddenly, there was a hammering at the door.

  The Lord of the Keep’s face lit with a pale glimmer of hope as he recognised the voice of Hawk.

  “Father? Are you in there? Are you all right?” Hawk’s voice was hard with concern and he redoubled his efforts against the heavy oaken doors.

  Voltan’s sword arm moved quickly and his father uttered a sharp sigh of pain at the mortal blow. “Then let the secret die now,” hissed Voltan as he retracted the blade.

  “Voltan!” The Lord of the Keep was in great pain and each word caused him to grimace with effort. “I curse you this day to die a thousand deaths, and for your soul never to find peace.”

  Hawk’s cries from beyond the door were becoming anguished but the door was beginning to splinter.

  “Too late, little brother.” Voltan sprang towards the hidden recess and was swallowed in the blackness as Hawk burst into the room.

  Hawk was caught between the necessity of attending to his dying father and the desire to avenge the deed. But his father’s drawn and white face forced him to postpon
e his pursuit of his brother and cradle the old man in his arms.

  “The prophecy is fulfilled,” his father gasped weakly. “The evil I spawned will now pollute the land …” He clutched at Hawk’s arm as his son tightened his teeth in despair. “I have much to tell you and so little time, my son …”

  His voice faltered but, somehow, he summoned up sufficient energy from the depths of his being. “Take the pouch from my neck.”

  Hawk did as he was bidden. The pouch had an ancient leathery feeling to it. Some heavy, stony substance lay within its folds.

  “The great sword …”

  The Lord of the Keep lay against the Well of Ishtar and now craned his head in the direction of the weapon. For a moment, Hawk was nonplussed until he followed the angle of his father’s eyes. He strode over to the sword’s resting place.

  As he lowered it from off the wall he felt a strange, magnetic affinity with the great, two-handed sword. He noted the clenched fist pommel but was puzzled by the empty sockets on the hilt. What had they once held? Exotic jewels now lost in the aeons of unrecorded time?

  “Place it between us.” His father’s rattling breaths forced the curious questions out of his mind and he quivered the sword into the floor before him. “Empty the pouch into your hand …”

  A smooth, egg-sized stone, the colour of dull jade, slid into Hawk’s hand.

  “Look into the heart of the stone. Quickly! The coldness of death is in my limbs.” His father’s voice, weak though it was, held a ring of authority.

  Hawk stared at the ordinary-looking stone. As if bewitched, some tiny nucleus deep within it began to glow and then pulse. Brighter and brighter it glowed until the whole egg was a pure energy of thrumming greenness. But the stone was still cold to the touch. No heat emanated from it but its light now filled the whole chamber.

  The stone twitched with its own life-force and, with infinite slowness, floated free of Hawk’s trembling hand.

  It hung suspended in the air, its green glow casting devilish shadows on the faces of the two men underneath. Pulsing stronger than ever, it glided to hang, motionless, above the free-standing sword.