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  THE SPELL OF VENGEANCE

  had been cast upon Etienne Navarre, Captain of the Guard, and the beautiful Lady Isabeau by the evil Bishop of Aquila. Etienne and Isabeau must wander the wilderness, always together yet always apart—she a hawk by day and restored to herself only with the setting of each day’s sun; he a wolf by night, transformed once more into human form at break of each day’s dawn. This eternal spell is their punishment for daring to love after the evil Bishop had already chosen Isabeau for his own.

  Then, suddenly, Etienne receives an unexpected sign of hope in the person of Phillipe, a young and cunning thief . . . and Navarre knows he must seize this fearful opportunity to free them from the Bishop’s diabolical spell—or bring them death . . .

  Warner Bros, and Twentieth Century Fox present

  MATTHEW BRODERICK

  RUTGER HAUER • MICHELLE PFEIFFER

  A LAUREN SHULER PRODUCTION

  A RICHARD DONNER FILM

  “LADYHAWKE”

  LEO MCKERN • JOHN WOOD • KEN HUTCHISON

  Story by EDWARD KHMARA

  Screenplay by EDWARD KHMARA and MICHAEL THOMAS

  and TOM MANKIEWICZ

  Music Composed and Conducted by ANDREW POWELL

  Photography by VITTORIO STORARO

  Consultant TOM MANKIEWICZ

  Executive Producer HARVEY BERNHARD

  Produced by RICHARD DONNER and LAUREN SHULER

  Directed By RICHARD DONNER

  CHAMPION OF THIEVES . . .

  Phillipe sat back on his knees, gaping at this unexpected rescuer, with his fierce, golden-eyed hawk and his magnificent black war-horse. He held a gleaming broadsword in his free hand, and the cold blue eyes that shone in his shadowed face were as distant and threatening as the land of Death. Phillipe tore his gaze away from the silent figure and looked back over his shoulder at the guardsmen who’d been pursuing him.

  The two men sat on their horses, momentarily frozen with awe. At last one roused himself and said, “Clear the bridge. The man’s an escaped prisoner. We’re taking him in.”

  “On whose authority?” the stranger asked at last.

  “His Grace, the Bishop of Aquila.”

  Only Phillipe saw the fleeting, involuntary twitch of the stranger’s mouth that might have been a smile. Then the war-horse lunged forward, the hawk rose shrieking into the air . . .

  Copyright © 1985 by Warner Bros. Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Photographs © 1985 Warner Bros. & Twentieth Century Fox.

  All Rights Reserved.

  SIGNET TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN CHICAGO. U.S.A.

  SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSIC, MENTOR, PLUME, MERIDIAN and NAL BOOKS are published by New American Library,

  1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

  First Printing, March, 1985

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For “Billy and Duff”

  C H A P T E R

  One

  At sunrise the rider in black was waiting on the hilltop far above the city, as he had waited there the dawn before, and the dawn before that. He shifted in his saddle, cold and weary, watching the sky brighten and the gray morning fog lift from the valley below.

  As the mists parted, he saw the crenellated towers of Aquila Castle break into view, fleetingly golden, like a glimpse of heaven. For a moment the sight made him ache with longing. Only for a moment. He smiled mirthlessly at his own inability to stop believing this vigil would someday have an end, or show him an answer.

  Below him now the rest of the ancient city emerged from the fog. Aquila had been a thriving town since Roman times—it still bore the old Roman name, which meant “Eagle.” But the Middle Ages had confined its cramped houses and twisting, narrow streets inside grim walls of stone, surrounded them with a moat of black, sluggish water fed by an underground river.

  The fields outside the city gates were nearly as bleak. Autumn had come early this year, after a blistering summer with almost no rain. The year before had been no better. By now the fields had been harvested of whatever poor, drought-stunted crops had survived. This year’s harvest would scarcely have fed the already-hungry people of Aquila through the winter, even if their Bishop had not raised taxes again, to keep his own storehouses and coffers full. The specter of famine haunted the dreary streets of the city. But while the Church Militant ruled, the people paid, and starved.

  Only the cathedral, lying at the city’s heart, still kept its ethereal beauty in the full light of day. High windows of colored glass and countless silken pennants turned its saint-lined walls and vaulted ceilings into a vision of paradise—the closest most of the worshipers gathered there for Mass would ever get to heaven on earth. The Bishop promised them their reward in the next world, while he enjoyed his now.

  The gaunt, candlelit faces of the citizens of Aquila gazed impassively toward the altar, resigned to their prayers. Organ music filled the vast space above them and overflowed into the streets, reaching even the watcher on the hill.

  The Bishop of Aquila stood before the ornate altar, a severely resplendent figure in his white brocaded robes. He chanted the Credo of the Mass in a high-pitched, toneless singsong that was more a warning than a promise of redemption. The worshipers mouthed the obligatory Latin responses, meaningless words they had memorized by rote. If any of them had dared to look directly at him, they would have gazed uneasily on the contrast between the richness of his clothing and the unhealthy pallor of his angular features. He was a tall man, well into middle age, with a face that showed the signs of years of self-indulgent living, and glittering eyes as pale and unforgiving as ice.

  He turned toward the two altar boys who stood waiting beside him; they held out a jewel-encrusted golden chalice for his blessing. He had told his congregation that this was the Holy Grail, and in his mind it was beautiful enough that it should have been. He had paid enough for it that it should have been. He was a man with a highly refined appreciation of beauty.

  He held out his beringed hand to the two boys, glancing down at the ring as he did. It was solid gold, so large and heavy that it fit only on his thumb. Its plain, massive setting held a perfect emerald the size of an olive. The ring alone had cost him a small fortune, drawn, of course, from the wealth he had squeezed from the faithful in the name of God. But God’s needs were neither as worldly nor as expensive as his own.

  As the boys kissed the ring and backed away, a dull crack, like the echo of a shot, rang through the cathedral. The Bishop glanced toward an unshuttered window. The dangling legs of three bodies swung silently from a gallows, just outside Aquila Castle across the city square. Organ music swelled around him again, and he turned back unconcernedly to the Mass.

  Meanwhile, out in the square, a small crowd of Aquila’s less devout citizens had gathered. They goggled up at the limp, hanging bodies of three thieves who had abruptly made their own peace with God. The four guardsmen who were in charge of bringing out more prisoners for execution stood warily among them, waiting for further orders from their captain. Their crimson-and-black uniforms stood out in bloody contrast to the drab, patched clothing of the crowd.

  Marquet, the Captain of the Guard, was a brutal man with a dark beard and eyes as hard as his disposition. His blunt, heavily muscled body looked as if it had been born to commit mayhem and violence. Marquet had been their leader for two years, since their former captain had been charged with treason by the Bishop and outlawed, for reasons none of them clearly understood. Their old captain had been a man they respected and admired, and they had served him well. Marquet was neither—but he was feared, and so they obeyed him equally well. But as their lives and the lives of everyone in Aquila
grew harsher under Marquet’s heel, the guardsmen muttered blackly that someday their former captain would return and claim his revenge. Marquet heard the whispers; and, fearing the same thing, only grew uglier-tempered.

  Now Marquet looked up at the gallows, smiling in satisfaction at the swinging bodies—three wretches who had been caught stealing grain from the Bishop’s storehouses. On his helmet golden eagle wings, the symbol of his rank, winked in the sunlight as he nodded. “That should give them a bellyful,” he murmured. The Bishop had made him captain because he could be counted on to carry out the Bishop’s orders unflinchingly . . . and to enjoy his work. He turned back to his lieutenant. “Jehan! The next three.”

  Jehan saluted and led his men away across the stone-paved square toward the dungeons of Aquila Castle. Entering an underground passage, they circled down and down the narrow, slippery steps cut out of solid rock—the single, heavily guarded entrance to a prison they had come to know far too well in recent months. The air grew danker and fouler as they descended, and they began to hear the moaning of the prisoners down below.

  The dungeons lay in a vast hole carved from the bedrock on which the castle sat, as deep and inescapable as the pits of hell. A gridwork of wood and iron divided the chamber into a honeycomb of countless cells and cages, all with a clear view of the dungeons’ instruments of torture. Jehan shouted as the guardsmen reached bottom. The head jailer came lumbering toward them with a torch in his hand, a ring of iron keys jangling at his belt. “Why don’t you build a bigger gibbet?” he growled. “Save me some bother down here.”

  “At least you’re just visiting,” one of the guards said. He held his nose. Jehan snorted. The jailer led them along scaffolded corridors past cell after cell. The moans and cries died away as they passed; ghostly faces shrank back from the mold-slick bars. The prisoners cowered in the darkness, still believing there was something worse than the living death in which they now existed.

  Jehan stopped before a cell in the deepest recesses of the pit and peered through the grate, searching with sudden eagerness for the gallows’ next victim. He remembered this particular prisoner; he had heaved him into the cell personally. The young thief who was about to hang had made fools of the Guard for months, eluding them time after time, before they had finally captured him. Jehan looked forward to watching the slippery little rat swing.

  Jehan stared through the lattice of bars. It took his eyes a long moment of blinking to adjust to the gloom on the other side. He held his breath; the stench of human waste and sickness was overwhelming. As his eyes adjusted, he made out two ragged figures propped against the far wall. One of them stared fixedly ahead, as if his mind had fled this hellhole, leaving his body behind. The other prisoner hummed a tuneless song, murmuring unintelligibly under his breath. Even in the darkness, he knew that neither of their gaunt, filthy faces was the one he wanted. He pressed against the bars, searching every corner of the cell. There was no one else in it. “Phillipe Gaston?” he said, puzzled. He turned to the jailer. “Wrong cell. I want Phillipe Gaston, the one they call the Mouse.”

  The mumbling prisoner began to sing audibly, “The mouse, the mouse . . . has left our house . . .”

  The jailer held up his torch and peered at the almost unreadable scratches on the cell door. “One thirty-two, sir. This is it.”

  “He’s run away,” the prisoner sang, “no mouse today . . .” He giggled, gesturing across the cell with a bony hand.

  Jehan pressed against the bars again, looking harder into the shadowed corners of the cell. This time he saw the open drainage grate. Jehan gaped in disbelief. The hole was no more than one foot square—surely no adult human being, not even that scrawny, half-grown wretch Gaston, could have escaped through it. As he watched, a small rat scurried up out of the hole and across the reeking cell floor.

  “. . . to stop the pain, he’s down the drain . . .”

  “Shut up, you idiot!” Jehan snarled. He looked back at the jailer. “Open the door!”

  The jailer fumbled with his keys, unlocking the door with frantic haste. Jehan and the guards pushed into the cell. “What happened to him?” Jehan demanded roughly.

  The singer gazed up at him with mindless calm. “I just told you, gentle lord.” He gestured at the drain hole. “I tried to escape myself, but I couldn’t fit.” He smiled, holding up his hands. “So since he still lives, you can kill me twice.”

  Jehan turned away, seeing nothing but the face of Phillipe Gaston, who was not there. He shoved his guardsmen toward the door furiously. “Search every sewer! Every drain! Find him, or Captain Marquet will hang you in his place!” And maybe me too, damn him. He listened to their frightened footsteps retreating down the hall. He glanced one last time at the drain hole. “Incredible,” he muttered. With a curse of frustration, he left the cell.

  C H A P T E R

  Two

  Far beneath Aquila Castle the drain hole opened on another world—a world even more forbidding than the castle dungeons. The sewers of Aquila had begun with the town in Roman times, as the skilled engineers of the Empire took advantage of a natural system of caverns lying beneath the early settlement for drainage and waste disposal. Once the sewers had been part of an orderly, structured plan, like the city itself. But they had been left to fester and decay through the centuries since the Empire’s fall, as the city had spread out over the plain above them in a completely random and uncontrolled way. Now they were an unfathomable maze wormholing the underground beneath every building and street—another world, but one which no sane citizen of Aquila had any desire to enter.

  That secret, subterranean world lay waiting in eternal silence, disturbed only by the occasional squeaking of rats, the drip of effluence, and the distant rushing of water. But now its dark peace was broken by new and unexpected sounds. The grunts and gasps and scraping noises were faint at first, but they grew louder, until they echoed from the drainage hole into the empty tunnel below. Suddenly an arm thrust out of the hole into the open air. It waved wildly up and down, in astonishment and triumph. After the arm came part of a shoulder. Then the rest of the lithe, small-boned body of Phillipe Gaston emerged, piece by piece, like a newborn child. Wriggling and twisting like an acrobat, the young thief dragged himself free of the drain at last and dropped to the floor.

  He sat gasping for breath, hardly noticing the stench as he filled his lungs completely for the first time in far too long. He looked back at the hole with a kind of disbelief, and a small crooked smile pulled at his mouth. “Not unlike escaping Mother’s womb, really,” he murmured. “God, what a memory . . .” He looked away again, shuddering. His skin was scraped raw, the rags of his clothing were slimy with filth. His fingernails were torn and bloody from clawing his way down the drain. It had taken him hours to force his body through, hours that had seemed like years. The drainhole had not dropped straight into the sewer, but had doubled back on itself like a snake. Time after time he had thought he was hopelessly trapped in some elbow or coil of its intestines. But he had no other choice except to keep on struggling, and in the end he had won free. He had escaped from the dungeons, and the good citizens of Aquila would never see him again . . . if he could just find his way out of their sewers.

  He crouched where he was, slowly looking around. The immensity of this underground world awed him. He had often been in cities the size of Aquila, but he had never been in the sewers of one; in most of the cities he had seen, the sewers simply ran down the middle of the street. At least the darkness was not complete—dim light shafted down through countless drain openings from the world above. His eyes, used to the gloom of the dungeons, had no trouble seeing.

  The first thing he saw was a human skeleton, embedded in the black sludge an arm’s length away. He jerked back with a startled cry. The yellowed skull grinned in empty mirth. He answered it with a rueful grin of his own, and studied the skeleton speculatively. “Six foot two, eh?” His voice rang dimly in the tunnel. He stood up, stretching his own small body t
o its full height. “An ideal height for passing through the gates of heaven, my friend. But you see where our Lord in His infinite wisdom has chosen to deposit us.” He gestured around him, looked up at the dripping ceiling suddenly. “I’m not complaining, mind you,” he called out to heaven. “Just . . . pointing things out.” He shrugged. He had what he liked to think of as a personal relationship with God; it was a comfort to know that the Lord was always listening to him, even if no one else ever did. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful when his prayers were answered, even by this mixed blessing. He sighed and began to walk, his feet squelching in the ooze.

  Far above him, but not as far above as heaven, the Bishop’s Guard were filling the streets of Aquila in search of their escaped prisoner. A squad entered the belfry of the cathedral at Marquet’s order and pulled the heavy bell ropes. For the first time in years, the cathedral’s enormous bells sounded an alarm through the city.

  Within the cathedral, Mass still continued. But as the bells pealed out, filling the vast hall with their sound, the worshipers looked at each other in astonishment and fright. The Bishop turned away from the altar, his impassive face suddenly taut with concern. He glanced over the heads of the standing crowd and saw Marquet. The Captain of the Guard stood near the rear of the cathedral, in the doorway to a private chapel. The golden wings on his helmet flashed in the light as he nodded urgently.

  The Bishop went on with the Mass, his singsong recitation more ominous than before.

  Down below, Phillipe the Mouse crept through the sewer caverns like his namesake, crouching low until his back ached as he squeezed through a narrow passage into another vast subterranean chamber. He straightened up at last, out of breath, his back muscles pinched in a spasm. Grimacing, he wiped his filthy face on his filthy sleeve and squinted back the way he had come, then ahead again. He saw nothing but the same patternless maze of treacherous tunnels and caves, the same black, reeking pools and streamers of fungus stretching to infinity. For a moment the thought struck him that he might actually have died, and gone to hell.