by Terry Marcel
The hackles on the nape of Hawk’s neck bristled as the metal fist on the pommel stiffly and jerkily unclenched and stretched up its brazen fingers to salute the orbstone. Now, the jade egg drifted down into the brass palm and the hand slowly closed to imprison the gleaming magic in its grasp.
Of a sudden, the green throbbing ended and the stone returned to its former, prosaic self, dull and lifeless.
“The last elfin mind-stone,” whispered his father. “Think of the great sword in your hand and it will be so …”
His voice slipped as he remembered the day when his father had stood in this selfsame room and shown him the secret. And the dismay when he failed to strike life into the elfin mind-stone until his father had confided in him how seldom this had been accomplished. The Lord of the Keep’s eyes clouded as he looked at his younger son. Pride mingled with awe as the realisation of what Hawk had effected flooded his mind.
“The mindsword is now yours, my son.” A trickle of blood escaped from the corner of his dry lips. “The Ancient Power …”
But his voice now failed him and that awful strain on his energy finally gave way. A shudder racked him. His jaw slumped; he was dead.
Hawk removed his short, travelling cape and draped it over his father’s head. He was drained of sorrow. Instead, a burning need for revenge filled his very being. He focused all this intensity on the great sword.
With an incredible immediacy, the mind-stone, held by the brass fist, incandesced and the mighty sword flew faster than any human eye could witness into his right hand.
It lay there like an extension of his self. He felt the blood in his veins race down his arm and by some strange osmosis, seem to course along the length of the blade. Dullness fled from the metal and a new keenness sparked as if the sword had been magically honed.
He brandished it aloft.
“Voltan, I swear you will die by this sword.”
2
THE ONE-HANDED MAN
The glittering sword sliced down like a butcher’s cleaver. Ranulf flung up his left forearm to ward off the blow but its tremendous force jarred him backwards into a deep ditch.
His vision cartwheeled slowly. Tongues of fire speared up from blazing huts and shelters made of rude reeds and wattle to wash the night sky with a lambent glow.
The world was a nightmare of disconnected sounds and images. Screams of women and children were swallowed up in the gibberish bellows of blood-maddened looters. The flaming pyre they had made of the small village glinted dully on their rusty, iron caps and the scarred leather of their battle-jackets.
And then time itself fragmented.
Stabbing pain and burning. A delirium of agony and nausea, spiralling down into a darkness that made his belly heave.
Ranulf had no way of telling how long he had lain in the ditch. The sky had an orange cast from the fires which still burned. Acrid smoke tumbled over the bank.
The fingers of his left hand pushed futilely against the ooze at the bottom of the ditch until he realised that he no longer had a left hand. It had been severed at the wrist.
He retched violently. But even as his body shuddered, a part of his brain was stupidly wondering if he would ever find the missing member.
The sight of the fleshy stump made his gorge rise. He clumsily tore a clout from the tatters of his overshirt and bound the wound. It ached savagely and the ghost fingers felt as if molten liquid ran in their phantom veins.
A swift crashing of horses through the tall reeds warned him that he was still in danger. He dragged himself from the mud, up the low bank and crawled towards the shelter of a birchwood copse. The spiky furze tried to forbid his entry but Ranulf paid the thorns little heed as he blundered on.
Panting, he fell against the bole of a tree. As he leaned forward, the weight of the crossbow on his back swung heavily about his shoulders. He removed it from its harness and it lay mockingly at his feet.
It had all happened so fast. The night-riders had swept into the village at dusk. Their leader had demanded that his men be fed. A giant of a man, he sat astride his destrier, his black cloak-coat wrapped about him like a bat’s wings. There was the gleaming hint of a metal vest beneath and he held, couched against his breast, a drawn sword. His head was encased in a skull helmet and as his features moved out of its shadow, the left side of his face was concealed by a moulded steel mask which, somehow, seemed part of the living flesh.
The Elder of the village had been apologetic. Their grain store was nearly empty and they had barely enough corn to feed their chickens. “The soil is poor hereabouts, Lord,” the Elder had reproached himself. “And our livestock few.” A quaking house-carl had offered the little they had of rough-baked bread and had stood there for what seemed an eternity with arms outstretched, holding the oblation. Almost casually, the Dark One had made a quiet signal to one of his men.
The house-carl’s head had bounded from his shoulders as the sword scythed through the air. The flopping trunk stayed upright, bread held aloft, for an awful moment.
“You and your kind will remember this day,” the Dark One had hissed. “Henceforth, you will always see that there is food aplenty for my men. From now on, you will know my name.”
Sanity had ceased. The raiders had become infected with a berserker rage.
Ranulf remembered now why the crossbow had stayed slung across his back. Why he had never fired a bolt.
With awful clarity he saw again in his mind’s eye the white-haired Elder try to dodge the rearing hooves of the oncoming animal. His ineffectual rush to save him. The flash that arrested his attention and the sword slicing down and the grinning face in the gloom beyond.
Ranulf drew in a jumpy breath. He had panicked like some callow, unlicked pup. A man of his age. And experience. A veteran of six campaigns in the Northern Territory. He swallowed hard on the bitter bile. He hadn’t even cocked the weapon.
A twig snapped. He whirled around and the sudden movement made the blood rush hotly to the severed wrist. His world spun sickeningly. The raider was alone and only twenty paces from where he stood.
Burly in his battle gear, his sword hung loosely by his side until he caught sight of the veteran. Piggy eyes flickered from deep-set eye sockets. Slowly, with stertorous breaths, he hefted the blade and moved forwards.
Ranulf fumbled with the crossbow. Always, it had been like a part of him. Each piece of it had been made by himself, fashioned in the long hours of campaigning. The scraping and polishing of the bone shank; the fining of the cross-arm. And the unique mechanism which drew the string and loaded the short bolt from a clip into the firing groove. It was his. It had never failed him. It had responded to his touch eagerly.
But now it was a cumbersome weapon. A useless device which needed a man with two hands to control it.
With deliberate tread the attacker approached and raised his sword into a striking position. For a second time, Ranulf was facing death in the shape of sharpened steel.
But the raider’s movements were strangely sluggish. He began to rock. His mouth opened but the voice was a wordless roar as he pitched forward on to the wet earth. Deep in his back was a rough-handled dagger.
At least one peasant had had some measure of revenge, thought Ranulf.
Reharnessing the crossbow to his back, Ranulf moved deeper into the wood. Each step taxed his strength. He was losing blood and his blurred vision made him stumble into objects which jarred pain along his injured arm. Often he would fall but some inner voice urged him to his feet and journey on.
Thankfully, the forest thinned and opened out into a natural amphitheatre. Dimly, he could discern the outlines of a large building and, almost blind, he staggered up the path towards the great double doors under the entrance porch.
The Monastery of Caddonbury was a stone-set, octagonal structure, thick-walled and buttressed to withstand the most powerful assault. Its eight, vaulted arches squared off into an elevated tower whose bell would only toll again when peace came to the Land. H
ere, the Sisterhood of the Holy Word prayed for salvation from chaos and gave sanctuary to those fleeing its adversaries. But it was a bitter truth that as the fugitives from evil increased; conversely there was a decrease in the number of quiet refuges.
Ranulf pounded on the massive doors. The echoes ebbed into a silence so deep that he slid down dejectedly on to his knees on the flagstones, thinking that the place was deserted. He suffered a long heartbeat of despair until, with tantalising slowness, the doors creaked open and the white face of a novice nun peered through.
“It’s a man,” she whispered superfluously to the companion who had now appeared beside her. “I think he’s hurt,” said the other.
Surprisingly strong hands raised and bore him into the soft-lit interior. Ranulf’s consciousness kept lapsing into tiny black pools of nothingness.
He lay on a table and listened to the busy rustlings of homespun robes around him. Idly, he traced the arching line of a rafter to the high ceiling.
“Sister Monica, help me remove these rags,” said a new voice. It held a note of authority but there was the gentle strength of age contained in it.
Eyelids flickering, he tried to focus as hands unwrapped the bloody clouts from around the stump of his injured arm.
A woman dressed in a wool-robe of rough woven grey stared down at him. Her linen wimple made a vignette of her face. She was much younger than he had guessed. There was a certain restless quality in her otherwise gentle features and her eyes mirrored no inner emotion. Rather, they had a cold, distant and impassive sheen to them—no doubt disconcerting to those she administered. She now swayed back, the skin tightening whitely on her face.
“God in Heaven! His hand!” she said faintly.
Hers had not been the first voice he had heard, Ranulf realised.
Sister Monica threw a hand to her mouth involuntarily. “Where are the fingers?”
“Left on some battle field with the rest of the hand,” said the first voice, matter-of-factly.
The speaker’s face danced at the edge of his vision. She was dressed sufficiently different from the other woman to suggest that this was the Abbess herself, although Ranulf had a very hazy idea of the hierarchical order of the Sisterhood of the Holy Word. Lines of patience were pencilled on her brow and her frank gaze gave her not only authority but paradoxically a surprised innocence.
“With the help of God and a sharp knife, we may yet save the rest of the arm from infection.” The Abbess sighed deeply and turned to Sister Monica. “Now do pull yourself together,” she ordered bluntly.
The last thing Ranulf remembered for quite some time was the icy touch of the knife.
It seemed to Ranulf that he slept a troubled sleep through one, long, endless night. Each brief awakening was to experience excruciating pain. Each agitated dream recalled the torment of his missing hand.
He struggled in his own private hell for four days until the agony abated and became a dull ache. The bitter irony was the sudden twinge of pain he felt every now and then in fingers which no longer existed.
The sisters clucked and brooded over him. Even the Abbess sat and fed him broth. All except the enigmatic Sister Monica. She managed to remain aloof, ordering others to tend to his needs but never allowing herself to come into personal contact with him. Was it his maleness which made her keep her distance? Whatever it was, his presence in the Monastery somehow threatened her stable routine, her notion of cloistered life, her devotion to holy vows.
“Come, Master Ranulf, it is time for you to eat.”
The Abbess broke in on his light dozing. She carried the plain wooden bowl over and sat by his pallet. A tiny window filtered grey daylight into the tiny cell he lay in.
He waited for her to spoon the nourishing liquid into his mouth as she always did and waited in vain.
“Come, Master Ranulf. Eat.”
There was a twinkle in her eye and the veteran lay puzzled for a moment until he divined her intention. Awkwardly, but with great care, he cradled the bowl in the crook of his handless, left arm and supped with the right. He finished the soup without spilling a drop.
As the Abbess retrieved the bowl, she saw his eyes stray to the crossbow standing in the corner of the cell.
“Yes, Master Ranulf,” she chided him. “You’re thinking that if you can manage a bowl of soup, you can master the crossbow once more.”
Ranulf made a weak denial.
“You were delirious for a long time,” she reminded him. “And you spoke of many things. Terrible things. Now your arm has healed, no doubt your mind is full of revenge.”
He tried to disclaim her remark but she gave him a knowing look. “What happened, my son?” she asked gently but firmly. “Talk it out loud. It will ease your bitterness.”
Ranulf raised his freshly bandaged arm and looked at it. Quietly, he told her what had happened, trying to put into words the images which had been burned into his brain on that terrible night; of his grief for those who had been hacked down; of his undying hatred for those devils who laughed as they did the deed. And of his guilt for running away and saving his own neck. He was sobbing as he finished his account and the Abbess stroked his remaining hand.
“What sort of man would kill innocents?” she asked eventually.
Ranulf stared at the crossbow. He saw the face of the raiders’ leader etched starkly on the whitewashed wall. A wolf’s head cased in iron, the menace of the hidden eye-socket and cheekbone. The susurrant voice of a snake.
“You and your kind will remember this day,” said the death’s head image in Ranulf’s mind. “From now on, you will know my name.”
He turned to look at the questioning face of the Abbess.
“His name is Voltan, the Dark One.”
3
VOLTAN, THE DARK ONE
A bank of black storm clouds settled over the forest and chilled the air with the fine tang of a mountain climate, momentarily silencing the minute scuttlings and scurryings of small creatures. The greenness of the underwood darkened with a deeper viridescence and quickening wisps of mist-haze coiled and uncoiled through the briars as the temperature dropped.
Across the tree-topped horizon, a bolt of lightning zigzagged from a leaden sky. Caught for an instant in the glare was a man in black, cloak-coat flying in the wind which had suddenly whipped up from nowhere. Thunder followed quickly, grumbling and deep.
Voltan stabbed his sword at the heavens, haloed by the increasing storm.
“Wizard!” he screamed above the thundersquall. “Help me, Wizard. Remember our bargain. You promised all in return for my swordarm.”
Voltan began to revolve his head slowly as if assailed by some inner pain. A keening wail issued from his lips as, by degrees, he slumped to a kneeling position, fumbling with his free hand to remove the iron helmet which now seemed to be like a torturing band of metal around his head.
The mouth of a cave yawned before him, a black gaping hole in the massive limestone scarp which upthrust from the forested bedrock. A pulsing red phosphorescence glimmered in the opening, beckoning him to enter. Stumbling, he passed through a fine mist which danced in the entrance. The darkness of not-being blinded Voltan for an instant before his sight was restored.
He edged past oozing stalagmites which guarded the way in like dirty teeth. At the dim end of the cave was a smooth wall, spherical, formed from a thrumming, scarlet substance which seemed to lack solidity as it rippled and shifted but always retained an ovoid shape. The cave sloped upwards to fuse into it. Voltan kneeled before it.
As his vision cleared, he watched as a hooded figure appeared from the darkness—a tall, spidery creature cloaked in a flowing mantle of black and gold. Deep within the hood of its cowled head there blazed twin orbs where eyes should have been and in the amber glow a darkened green chitinous face revealed itself in high relief. Claw-like hands on which only three bony fingers could be seen, poked out from the folds of its robe, talons for fingernails which luminesced as the hand moved.
“The pain! It gets worse. Each time it gets worse.” The whispered words jerked from Voltan’s tortured throat. “Surely your power can cure this torment.”
He had removed the steel mask from his face and, moaning, he raised his head piteously to face the hooded figure. Where once an eye had been was a blackened socket and the skin on the upper cheekbone was flaking, oozing and festering.
The Wizard did not speak but withdrew a dark, opaline crystal from the depths of his robe. Multi-faceted, it had the shape of a cone and the hooded figure carefully aimed the sharp apex at the exposed face. Fire boiled in the crystal and there lanced from the pyramidal point a stabbing flash of energy which flared over the putrid flesh. There was no heat in the welding flame as it blazed for one brief instant but the scream that was wrenched from Voltan’s lips was horror-riven. He writhed on the floor and then was quiet.
“Kinsman Voltan,” said the Wizard, and its voice had the dry, stridulant quality of an insect. “Your broken face will not pain you for a while. But you will need the use of the crystal again.”
Voltan fingered the mutilated flesh on his face with an explorative touch. It was no longer weeping with open sores but had a glazed, moulded feeling to it. Yet he knew it had a loathsome aspect and the knowledge made his body tighten with a hate he could taste. He re-donned the iron helm and pulled himself up on his feet. Splay-legged and strong again, he faced the mantled figure.
“The Land is almost ours,” rasped the Wizard. “But there is one who stands between us and the final victory. The one who is your brother. Hawk!”
Hawk. Always Hawk.
A trap would have to be laid. Something so simple that not even his prudent, younger brother would suspect it. The ideas which flitted through his mind came so naturally that when the realisation flooded over him that they were being put there by this creature in some wordless, soundless way, he had a moment of revulsion for being manipulated so easily. He remembered the first time the Wizard had shown this facility for implanting thoughts in his mind and how he had felt unclean and screamed his rage. But that had been before the promise.