The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set

by Tarn Richardson

  Anything to avoid another moment in the company of that Inquisitor.

  She took another glug of her coffee and rattled the cup into the saucer, rubbing an eye.

  “He drew a revolver,” she muttered disbelievingly, shaking her head and staring into the snaking trails of steam from the cup. “Who does that?” she asked, looking up at the Father watching her with a bored and vacant stare. “Pulls a revolver on a child? A chorister!”

  Father Strettavario cleared his throat and sank his chin into his chest, so that the folds of his skin bunched like a beard of flesh. “Yes, you mentioned, last night. I thought I’d come and see you this morning. You seemed so … what’s the word?”

  “Disillusioned?”

  “No. Revolutionary. I thought you might consider leaving the assessment?”

  “I can’t, can I?” she replied.

  “No,” Strettavario answered coldly, ending any further discussion about it.

  “I’m not revealing anything more of myself to him,” Isabella announced, looking over at the gown she wore yesterday. “I don’t want his eyes on me.” She slunk from her chair and gathered her travelling robe from the cupboard. It covered all but a circle of skin around her neck.

  “He is being assessed. You must.”

  “He’s a monster. Accept my report on him. He’s a pervert. A deviant. He can’t keep his eyes off me. Put that on record. Write that down, go on do it! I don’t need to perform that role any more.”

  “But it’s not true, Sister Isabella,” countered her visitor, looking down his nose at her disapprovingly. “It would be a lie.”

  “Does it matter?” she retorted, brushing at the robe to free it of dust. “You want your report? There, I’ve given it to you. Tacit is a danger to women.” She hung the robe on the door and looked back at him defiantly, her hands on her hips. “And about every other poor soul, as well,” she muttered to herself.

  “Very well,” he said, writing something on the notes in front of him. “But we still need you to assess him regarding his faith.”

  “He has none!” she roared, as if the request was in some way ludicrous, flicking her head dismissively.

  “You can’t say that. Not without a thorough assessment.”

  “But if he had faith, he wouldn’t behave in such an appalling manner. How can someone with faith be such … such a monster?”

  “Actions don’t always indicate faith, be it faithfulness or faithlessness. We need you to continue your assessment of Tacit,” Strettavario continued, his eyes very serious. “He’s engaged on the murder case. We need to see it through to fruition, however that might end.”

  “What about his methods? That poor chorister.”

  “Yes, I know. He went out last night. Beat up some people he thought might have been responsible for the Father’s murder. People he thought might be useful to talk to. Orthodox Christians. Loosened their tongues a little.”

  She shook her head. “Are they all like him?”

  “They have a hard job, Inquisitors. Sometimes it’s hard for them to see the lines between right and wrong. They do the Church’s dirty work. It’s not always easy to stay clean. Of course, we want them to remain hard as iron; it’s needed in their line of work. But it’s our job to make sure they stay untarnished as well, as far as possible.”

  “Untarnished? Well Tacit’s rusted shut,” Isabella hissed, turning to look out of the window. She rested a hand against the edge of her wardrobe. She thought of her mother and her pride when her daughter entered the monastery. She wondered what she’d think if she could see her now, flirting with wayward Priests and dabbling with murderers.

  “You should give him a little slack,” said her hooded visitor. “Some think of him as a hero. Don’t be dispirited,” he said, putting the strap of his bag over his shoulder. “This is when you have the chance to shine, my dear. This is your job. Eyes are on you, important ones too. If you do well with this assessment, well, who knows where it might lead?”

  THIRTY-SIX

  1897. LOZNICA. SERBIA.

  They stood on the outskirts of the settlement, a small collection of tents congregated around a well in the wilderness of western Serbia. As it did before every assignment, Tacit’s heart beat hard within his chest. There too was the sickness in his stomach, the trepidation he always felt. But today he felt something more, something approaching repugnance, a shame at what he was about to do.

  A cold breeze whipped up around them, shaking the walls of grey-white tents and guy ropes of the nomadic settlers away in the distance. The Serbian town of Loznica lay just behind them. Within an hour, the settlement on the town’s doorstep would be razed.

  “Remember, they aren’t like us,” growled Tocco, checking his revolver and then feeling the weight of his studded mace in his left hand. “They’re not normal people. They’re heretics. They drive our faith and our God from these lands. They wish to see their Orthodox ways flourish. They trample our good Catholic name into the dirt. They call our Pope false. We need to send them a message. No mercy. No mercy for the heretics.”

  Tocco swung his arm and stretched his neck to loosen the tightening muscles. He looked over the young man next to him, armed similarly with a mace and revolver. “Forget what they might appear to be. Remember your past,” he muttered darkly. “Don’t forget what they did to you.”

  “I don’t like you reminding me,” retorted Tacit sharply, letting the weapons drop momentarily to his side. “I don’t need to hear. Every time, every time we face an enemy, you remind me. I don’t need to be reminded.” There were tears in Tacit’s eyes. He closed them and immediately he was there in the room, engulfed by the screaming, the men, the stench of their sweat, the wickedness of their laughter. The blood. The blood.

  He trembled and his chest heaved.

  “It’s your past, Tacit,” Tocco hissed, thumping his fist into Tacit’s shoulder and holding it there. “You can’t get away from it. It’s with you. It’s in you. You lived with it. Now live with it. Feed off its anger!”

  A group of settlers from the camp had stepped out nervously to greet them. Tocco raised his pistol and without warning blew the top off the head of the tallest of the men. They squealed and instantly picked up sticks and rocks to defend themselves. A man with a dirty moustache ran up with a branch raised screaming.

  Tacit thought of his mother.

  The rest was easy.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  07:27. WEDNESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 1914. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  Outside Tacit’s hotel room, the morning was bright and clear: a stark contrast to how Tacit felt. His mouth felt like old cheroot rolling paper. Knowing it would be a mistake he opened his eyes, just a crack to peer out onto the new day. The room swirled into a blurred, churning maelstrom of light and grey shapes. The residue of last night’s drinking lurched forwards and then hastily back, turning his stomach. He lay on his back with a hand across his eyes till the nausea passed. It didn’t stay down for long. Tacit had known this sensation countless times, and countless times he’d felt a whole lot worse.

  A long shadow was cast across the square by the Cathedral. A second night had passed without a single shell falling on Arras. Tacit would have allowed himself a moment to consider the possibility that the war was over, but neither his current mood nor general demeanour allowed for such positivity of thought. He gathered himself slowly out of his bed, onto which he had fallen last night, and watched people cross the cobbled plaza, enjoying the first of the day’s sun, snatching conversations as they scurried about their business, colour in their voices and their movements. One day of peace and calm in the city and joy had begun to seep back into it. Tacit didn’t like the sound of joy. It reminded him of sin.

  He shivered and wrapped his arms about himself, rocking back and forth to try and get some warmth into his bones. His eyes fell on the brandy on the sideboard and he immediately stopped rocking. A dry tongue scratched across his lips. Nausea rose within him but anticipation too, anticipation of
tasting the fiery liquid on his tongue. He staggered over and grabbed the bottle, stealing back to the bed and uncorking it. The first gulp made him retch. But only the first gulp. He ran the second glug from the bottle around and between the gaps in his teeth, sucking the liquor to the back of his throat. Already he felt better.

  Tacit turned back to the gloom of his room and took a third, longer and more pleasurable swig on the bottle. If he had been looking out of the window, he’d have seen a darkly dressed Sister striding across the square, past the soldiers and into the building in which he was slowly reviving.

  Moments later, the door to his room tore open.

  “You were well out of line yesterday, Inquisitor!” Isabella cried, slamming the door so hard behind her that a trickle of dust fell from the ceiling beside her.

  “And good morning to you, too,” Tacit replied, turning the bottle in his fingers and lifting it so that the first of the day’s sun caught in the amber depths of the liquid inside. He sat down on the end of the bed.

  “There are guidelines you work within, you know?” the Sister continued, storming to the table and looking hard at the Inquisitor. The veins in her neck were straining against her skin, her face flushed. “Rules you follow! They’re there for a reason, Tacit!” She pointed an accusatory finger at him. “We’re a Christian family. Not a bunch of … of monsters. You broke several of them in that interview, several rules, too many rules, enough to have you removed from this case, from your position with immediate effect.”

  Tacit shrugged. “Didn’t hear you complaining too much at the time,” he hissed. He was too tired for this, too ill to argue over the nuances of his interrogation techniques. “You needed to get the boy to talk. I got the boy to talk.” He slammed the bottle down on the table and staggered wearily to his feet. He exhaled loudly, rubbing a hand across his face.

  “He would have talked.”

  Tacit yawned and looked disinterested. “He talked,” he said, in a tone which suggested the conversation was over.

  Isabella shrieked, her hands and fingers wide, and threw herself down on the end of the bed, her fingers in her hair. “You’re intolerable, Tacit! Do you know that?” she screamed at him, but naggingly knew he’d extracted the information from the child, no matter how dubious his technique. Not that his results were any excuse for the level of violence and intimidation used. She seethed and speared him with her glare.

  The Inquisitor was staring out of the window again, his eyes on a pair of soldiers marching side by side, double time. He watched them pass up the full length of the square and then turn off into one of the side streets. The Sister raised her head from a hand and was about to speak. Tacit spoke before her.

  “This is the way it is with all Inquisitors,” he said softly, and Isabella detected what she thought was sorrow in his voice.

  Tacit looked across at her and noticed she was more appropriately dressed for a Sister today, more so than when she first stormed into his life. He would have been lying if he said he was pleased to see her conform. The full-length brown robe covered her entirely from head to toe, save for a few inches of ankle and a thin semi-circle of flesh beneath her neck. He looked her up and down and scowled.

  “What is it? Prefer me when I’m parlously dressed?” From where she sat Isabella could smell the sweetness of alcohol engulfing Tacit, the dark stubble on his chin. He smelled and looked as rough as dirt. She stood up quickly, giving the impression she wanted to fight.

  He scowled and turned away from her. “In the twelfth century, not far from here, the Roman Catholic Church founded the Inquisition. Its sole purpose was to root out heresy, strengthen the Catholic Church, destroy our enemies, correct the misguided.”

  “Is this lesson intended to enlighten me, Inquisitor?”

  Tacit ignored the question. “Heresy was so deeply rooted at the time that the Inquisitors of old had to work hard and it was not deemed enough simply to isolate the heretic and impart justice upon him or her. ‘No husband should be spared because of his wife, nor wife because of her husband, and no parent spared by a helpless child.’ A rhetoric we have upheld to this day. Root and branch justice, Sister. Root and branch. Within our torture chambers we Inquisitors spread out across the known world in our quest to drive heresy from the world. Within those chambers we bound and gagged, we stripped and we broke the heretics.” He lowered his eyes onto Isabella and said, with relish, “And all this before we even set them upon our contraptions of torture.

  “Once they had been strapped in to whatever contraption we felt appropriate, we used every skill we had learned, passed down from Inquisitor to Inquisitor, generation to generation, to extract information and a plea for forgiveness ahead of the stake’s fiery release. Dismemberment. Dislocation. Flogging. Breaking of limbs. Burning. Beating. Suffocation. Rape. Gouging of eyes. Disembowelment. Drowning, with boiling water,” he added, as an addendum. “Tearing of flesh. Butchery of bodies. Jellification of limbs by beating.”

  Isabella turned away at Tacit’s recital. He caught hold of her and forced her to look at him again.

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand heretics processed. As a rough estimate.” She turned again but Tacit caught her by the jawbone, drawing her back to look, holding her in his vice-like grip. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand over nine hundred years. And still counting,” he murmured. He let go of her and turned back to the window. He filled his glass from the bottle on the table and necked two thirds of it in a vicious swig. “And you reprimand me for pointing a revolver at a boy of twelve?”

  Isabella folded her arms and drew them tight into herself.

  He looked back out of the window, guzzling the rest of the liquor. “It’s alright,” he muttered, a resignation in his voice, something approaching regret. “You get used to it. You find a way.”

  Isabella watched him watch the square. He stood stock still, almost statuesque. She wanted to say something but she felt any words would be too clumsy for the moment. So they stood there in silence, Isabella’s eyes on the Inquisitor, Tacit’s eyes elsewhere.

  “There was another murder,” he said finally, looking over at her. “Last night. Father Aguillard. Same way. Murder, made to look like a werewolf attack. We should go there first.”

  He turned, slamming the tumbler down on the sideboard, striding past Isabella to the door. She caught him by the arm of his coat as he passed. He was solid. There was a weight about him, like stone. Intrigued, she drew her hand tighter around his biceps, forcing her long delicate fingers around it, like an iron anvil, thick and hard. She felt suddenly even more dwarfed by the man, vulnerable.

  “I understand,” she said, looking up into his face, feeling as if a veil had been partially lifted from her eyes. “I understand.”

  Tacit stared straight ahead, but his head nodded a fraction in approval. “Good,” he said. And then he was away, stomping out into the corridor and down the stairs, his heavy boots thumping hard across the wooden floorboards. She watched him go. She thought back to when she stood in the Inquisitor’s Hall of the Vatican, staring up at the young, proud, handsome portrait of an Inquisitor, Tacit when he was a younger man. She remembered the fire in his eye, the vague arrogance about his features, the tight cleanly shaven jaw, the strong nose, the jet black hair. What had happened to him? How had he become the man he now was?

  She recalled the Cardinals’ warning about Tacit before she was given the assignment, about the Inquisitor’s power, both in body and mind. She shivered and hurried after him, tying her cape about her shoulders with quick nimble fingers as she went. She thrust it back across her shoulders, skipping to the stairs to catch him.

  Isabella stood over the body and asked, “How do they know it’s him? Father Aguillard? He’s got no face.”

  Tacit’s grunt could be heard from another room. “He has distinguishing marks. Birth mark on his right outside thigh.” The Sister laid the cloth back over the torn face of the Priest and stepped in the direction of the Inquisitor’s voice. She
’d expected herself to blanch at the sight of the body, ripped and defiled as it was, but after seeing the body of Father Andreas laid in the crypt and having endured the gruff, dismissive attitude of Tacit for only a day, something had begun to harden within her, a new resolve, a determination not to bow or break. She heard Tacit shout, “It’s also his apartment.” She joined him in the bedroom, examining the open window of the room. “Door was locked from the inside. So he came home from Mass, locked the door behind him and was attacked as he stood in this room.”

  “Wonder why he locked the door?”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Tacit replied, his eyes still firm on the window. “If you’re a Father, you don’t expect visitors, or unsavoury ones like the one he got. I wonder if he suspected he was being followed?”

  “What’s the connection then?” Isabella asked, ploughing the fingers of her hands through her hair to tie it into an unobtrusive plait. “Between Aguillard and Andreas?”

  Tacit cleared something in his throat and scratched at his chin. “Doesn’t seem to be one, at least not one I can see. Aguillard had visited Arras in the past, but that wouldn’t have meant he’d met Father Andreas.”

  Isabella looked confused. Tacit explained.

  “He was a travelling Priest, liked to take his sermons into the fields rather than deliver them in the constraints of the cities and towns. But he still had to return to civilisation every now and then to restock and gather new teachings. Whether he and Andreas met or knew of each other, I don’t know.”

  The Sister had been watching Tacit hard. Something about the way he stood, staring eyes fixed on the window, intrigued her. “What is it?” she asked, sitting back on the edge of a chair and folding her arms.