Georgi chuckled and filled his second cup of wine. He put down the empty jug and leaned on his elbows, peering hard at his friend.
“Considering the success of our first assignment together, Poldek, and our first night in a tavern after, how many days is it? ... eight? ... you really are quite dismal company this evening.”
Tacit sniffed.
“So what’s wrong?” Georgi continued, taking up his goblet but not drinking.
“Wrong?”
“Wrong. With you? Face like Cardinal Konstantinov,” he said, referring to the irritable Cardinal from Bulgaria whose face resembled a scowling backside.
Tacit chuckled at the comment and shook his head. He necked his wine and thrust his cup down on the table. “Any more?” he asked.
“Jug’s empty,” Georgi replied. “You want another?”
“I do.”
Tacit’s partner and friend caught the attention of the barmaid and she brought another jug over to their table. Tacit filled his cup immediately and sat back in the shadows.
“Got a bit of a thirst on tonight, Poldek?” suggested Georgi.
Tacit ignored him. “How many witches have you killed?” he asked, draining his goblet and nursing it in his lap.
Georgi raised his eyebrows and wondered, wrong-footed by the question. After a moment searching he said, “I have no idea. Not many. A few. The correct answer would probably be ‘not enough’. Why do you ask?” He brought his drink to his lips and sipped.
Tacit shrugged, leaned forward and reached clumsily for the jug, showing the first signs of heavy limbed drunkenness.
“Would you believe anything a witch told you?”
“Depends what it was they told me,” Georgi shot back, winking. “Here, let me.” He lifted the jug and poured a broad stream of wine into Tacit’s goblet. “Again, why do you ask?”
Tacit shrugged again and took the drink, thanking him. He looked across the tavern.
“Best not to worry yourself, Georgi. How many of us are there left?” he asked, drinking again but this time more leisurely.
“From our original thirteen?” Tacit nodded without looking at him, as if drawn by the other scenes in the tavern or unable to look at his friend. “I don’t know. Petr went north. We’ve not heard from him in over six months.”
“Five,” Tacit growled in answer, almost upending the goblet into his mouth so wine ran either side of his lips, down his black cassock. “There’s five of us left, Georgi.” He turned his eyes onto his friend. “More than half of us killed.”
“We’re Inquisitors,” Georgi replied. “We know the dangers. We’ve always known them.”
“I thought only monsters could behave in such a manner.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Georgi laughed, but it was more in an attempt to lighten his friend’s mood.
“That those who command us, who send us out, can act with such little care.”
Tacit’s melancholy had begun to make Georgi uncomfortable. He snatched up his wine and sat back, eying him cautiously.
“And our superiors? What do they say?” Tacit continued drowsily, as if reading from a script. “Nothing. They say nothing but draw up the next assignment. They’re killing us, Georgi. They’re killing my family all over again.” There was silence between the pair of them. “Do you ever see lights?” Tacit asked his friend – now looking as sullen as Tacit with the drift of the conversation.
“Lights? What do you mean, ‘lights’?” he replied testily.
“Exactly that. Lights, all around you?”
“God, Poldek, are you drunk? Course I’ve not seen lights all around me! Who has?!”
“I have. Or I did. Once. No, that’s a lie. I saw them when I was younger once before that, before I’d joined the Inquisition. Just before I joined. And then once afterwards, when … when my master had been killed and I was left all alone.” He stared, as if hypnotised by the knots of the table, with his unwavering eyes. “They’ve not come to me since. Never. Not for over three years now. When they came to me it felt like I’d been touched by the Lord God himself. I felt his power and his greatness. I’d never experienced anything like it before. Such power. Such warmth and belonging.” He drew a filthy nail across the grain in the wood of the table and made a mark. “I can’t help but think I’ve been abandoned by him. That he knows my thoughts. For cursing our superiors. For questioning their judgement. For raging at them for killing us, one by one.” Tacit drained his goblet. “That God knows my weaknesses.”
FIFTY-NINE
22:28. WEDNESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 1914.
THE FRONT LINE. FAMPOUX. NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.
“Can you hear something?” Private Dawson asked, standing from the divot he had dug into the trench wall to act as a rest. He craned his ear to the sound. He listened for several moments, those around him looking on with growing trepidation. Suddenly, his face, illuminated by the patchy moonlight, brightened and he said, “There! Can you hear that? What is it? Is that singing?”
All of them gathered in the trench and listened hard. Between the distant thump of shells and the wind rustling the grasses of no man’s land, one by one they caught the sound that Dawson had first detected. Singing, “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles”, drifting like a fog over their lines. It was beautiful and moving and terrible, all at once bringing home the aching honesty and pointlessness of the two enemies’ rivalry. The British soldiers stood in reverent silence, their heads bowed, listening to the harmonic voices sounding like a choir from beyond the grave, so very distant, the voices alien and strange, but bound up with such warmth and humanity.
A little way along the line, a couple of Tommies started singing a retort to the lush, ghostly sound, with china chipped voices and high pitched warbles. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.” They sang with faltering gusto, and all along the line, the song was picked up, bit by bit, man by man, until the entire front sang the song back at the Germans, as if a riposte of melody to match the musical foray from the enemy; sung not to spar with them, but to share the moment and the camaraderie, their troubles forgotten when a simple thing like the human voice had the power to overcome distrust and hatred of each other.
Eventually both lines of singing subsided and a cheer went up, first from the German lines and then from the British at the end of this war of melodies, this little battle of songmanship. With that, the cheers and the laughter were promptly extinguished by Sergeants on both sides storming down the trenches demanding silence and diligent focus on the hundreds of yards of no man’s land between the rival trenches.
A tense tranquillity once more suffocated the peace of the place. But not for long. All at once, a tumultuous cacophony of explosions broke forth from vast German guns away in the east. Like the thundering birth sounds of some beast unleashing itself from the very bowels of hell, the heavy artillery tore into life, casting their rain of death upon the British hunkered down in their trenches.
Along the British lines, shells fell with wicked rapidity and deadly precision, dirt and dust; flaming iron and mangled flesh, cries and shouts, smoke and cordite cast about the wide front that they had thrown up. Wire and mud was blasted into the sky, showering and whipping those caught beneath as it fell. Everything turned to orange and red as the shells landed, blinding and disorientating with their glare.
There was no hole for Henry within which to hide. His time and dedication spent preparing Sandrine’s house against an unseen and unknown – and for all he began to suspect, non-existent foe – now seemed a futile exercise, as he clapped his hands to his ears and hunkered down tight to the trench’s floor. Every inch of his body seemed to tremble and shake, every sinew was taut and sense utterly shattered. If he had been able to hear he’d have heard his men roaring near him, clamouring for the barrage to stop, praying for a higher power to help them make it through the carnage and let them live for one night more. Nearby Sergeant Holmes stuck his head between his legs and waited for the
end to come, however that might be.
Sandrine had begged Henry not to go. She pleaded with him and had hung onto him like a wife bidding farewell to a husband leaving for war. But he could not abandon his men. The order had been given that all were to man the eastern trench outside the village. And whilst his heart wished not to go forward into the trench, there was never any question that he would not.
There appeared to be no end to the barrage. Even in the cool of the night, German artillerymen stripped to their vests with wiped brows and drenched clothing as they worked rounds into the vast and terrible barrels of their cannons. Such was the fury of the onslaught that the earth shook and tumbled from the walls of the trenches, partially covering Henry as he lay at the base of one of them. He pulled himself clear of the fallen dirt and crouched on his haunches, his fingers in his ears, his head cowed. So it was that he never heard the first sharp bite of rifles being fired, he never saw the enemy when they first appeared.
It was the movement in the trees which first drew the British sentries’ eyes, a wave of grey, lit by the multitude of flares shot high into the darkening sky, spiralling downwards like slowly falling stars. Movement in front of the trees suggested that there was something alive within the wood, some four hundred yards in front of the British lines, away to the right of the main German line. Suddenly the grainy movement of grey condensed and became more precise, crystallising into the muddied blue of uniforms, German uniforms, a vast army of Germans materialising out from the woods and from the spell which had been their rousing song ahead of taking to the battlefield as a legion of death.
Out of the trees they came, beneath the sharp luminescence of British flares, trotting at a slow but steady pace, packed shoulder to shoulder, so tight not even a bullet could pass untouched, an immense river of them, surging with assured and steady pace over the distance of no man’s land towards the British lines.
Once out of the shadows of the wood they moved quicker, adopting an odd unnatural gait across the undulating fields of the land, not running but not walking either, an awkward middle speed which both perplexed the British defenders in the trenches, as it did the attackers in the open fields.
All along the British lines roared orders drove men to take to their positions on their trench walls. Sergeant Holmes threw himself alongside Henry and pushed a cartridge into his rifle with trembling fingers.
“Bloody hell, Lieutenant,” he cried, finally fitting the magazine into place. “This is bloody it! This is bloody it!”
SIXTY
1904. TIRANA. ALBANIA.
Tacit followed the lead of the other Inquisitors and sank to his haunches in the long grass. He drew a hand across his face and rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes. He swatted at a fly and surreptitiously sipped at his hipflask. Dawn rose behind them. Tacit felt rough and unhinged. He’d not slept for days, tracking the clan of heretics as they made their way over the border into Albania. The Inquisitor squad was biding its time, waiting for the most opportune moment to strike.
Tacit knew this was it.
He stowed the flask and grimaced as the liquid burned inside him, sparking his senses into some sort of focus. When he was younger, adrenaline would have fired him up for his task ahead. Now he felt as lumpen as the bodies which would soon be piled up on the banks of the river at which the deviants had gone to pray.
Antonio looked across at him and winked, kissing the signet ring on his right hand. It had been a gift from his father when he’d first been accepted into the Church. He wondered if his father would be proud of Antonio still, the charming boy from Padua near Venice, whose party trick was eviscerating enemies with his bowie knife.
A series of clicks sounded down the line, the signal that the attack had begun. The squad leader had given the nonconformists long enough to finish their prayers. He wasn’t a complete monster.
The crack of a rifle sounded and Antonio’s eye was ripped from his face, throwing him backwards into the long grass. Instantly Tacit gathered him into his arms, holding the shuddering young man, as he looked down into his one dead eye. An inane mumbling bubbled from Antonio’s lips before he fell silent.
Tacit laid him gently on the earth and closed his lifeless eye with his fingers. Then he rose, like an elemental explosion rising from the bowels of the earth, and thundered into a run, screaming and roaring towards the hordes of heretics waiting for them on the river bank.
SIXTY-ONE
22:34. WEDNESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 1914.
THE FRONT LINE. FAMPOUX. NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.
A volley of shots rang out across no man’s land from the approaching German army.
“Bloody bastards are hopeful!” cried Private Dawson. “They think they can hit us from here?!”
A vast wall of German infantry had appeared in the clinging grey dusk of no man’s land, a grey-blue smudge against the horizon and fading light.
“They’re not firing at us,” replied Henry, peering up and over a sandbag with the periscope, directly in front of his firing position. “They’re shooting into the air, as if to warn us!”
“Warn us?! Do they think we don’t know they’re coming?!”
And they were coming, jogging now through no man’s land, their rifles turned towards the sky, firing off rounds in a show of bravado and strength.
“Stay your ground!” growled a Sergeant from the ranks, pacing the trench behind the line of soldiers. “And when you get the order, don’t you stop shooting till every one of those bastards is dead. Do you hear me?”
“Can we start shooting then, sir?” came a dispiriting voice from somewhere in the line.
“No you cannot shoot. You do not shoot until you hear the order. Is that understood?!”
Now the Germans were gaining ground on the trench, two hundred yards away, the sheen from their badges and belts catching the glare of the fizzing flares above. They lowered their rifles and fired as they ran, their rounds buffeting the ground about the trench and whizzing through the air above it. The British soldiers crouched down into their trenches and firing holes and watched with ever growing fear and trepidation.
“Now can we shoot, sir?” someone cried imploringly.
“If I hear another request to fire, I will rip the bloody balls off that man!” roared the Sergeant. “You wait for my order, you bloody riff-raff.”
Now the Germans were running, not a sprint, but a steady pace, cantering over the ground, one hundred yards away, a massed wall of bayoneted rifles and young Germans, looking to tumble into the waiting British lines and down onto the Tommies. And they were firing. Rounds peppered the ground before and beyond the British line. Every now and then, a British soldier would snap back, crumpled into the back wall of the trench.
Seventy-five yards. You could make out the eyes of the enemy, dark pits in white, ashen faces, drawn into stern frowns. Their hands worked furiously over their rifle bolts, shooting from their hips towards the British lines.
Fifty yards. The German soldiers seemed so close now that the British could simply reach out and touch them. The edges of their bayonets glinted.
All of a sudden, from along the entire British front, the cry of the Sergeants took hold. The infantrymen lining the walls needed no more than the merest of nods from their superiors before their rain of death was unleashed. The British fired and the call was given to move to ‘rapid fire’. The approaching Germans stumbled and fell like pins in a skittle alley, man after man, set after set, the following lines climbing over the bodies of the fallen without hesitation to continue the suicidal advance forward.
There seemed no end to their number but greater still was the stock of bullets possessed by the British. For what seemed an eternity the British lines fired, for so long and so ruthlessly that the wooden casings of the rifles grew too hot to hold and soldiers rested their stocks on the trench lips as they fired, or gathered cooling soil and grass into their hands to act as a padding against the heat. Wave after wave of them came, scrambling over the dead and the dyin
g to continue their grim pursuit forward.
“They’re bloody off their trollies!” roared Private Dawson, inserting another magazine. “What do think they can do? Walk through bullets?”
The ratta-tat of a machine gun sounded from somewhere and a vast swathe of German soldiers crumpled, the line behind them collapsing moments later. A wall of Germans now lay in front of the British lines, a hundred yards into no man’s land, a wedge of bleeding quivering flesh, grey and black and crimson.
From the woods there suddenly came a second wave, shoulder to shoulder as their predecessors had done, moving with slow steady strides over the ground, firing a warning to the heavens as if to announce their arrival and then, as they drew closer, firing towards the trenches with more rapidity and running with fleeter feet. Once again the British rifles replied and the German lines fell. The wall of dead and dying grew taller and broader still, until it became a great surging torrent of death sweeping the entire length of this part of the front. But still the Germans were not done. Another wave came, and was broken as before, followed by another, and then another, and then yet a following wave, each time broken and despatched before the wall of dead was ever breached.
“Fritz is a bloody madman!” cried Holmes, shaking his hand and cursing, after burning it on the stock of his smoking rifle.
“Or his officers are as cruel as ours,” Henry replied, setting down his rifle and rubbing the dirt and grime out of his eyes. “This is sheer bloody murder.”
Eventually, finally, the attacks faltered. The Germans stumbled uncertainly backwards and then fell back altogether, broken in a blind racing panic.
“Alright, lads,” Sergeant Holmes cried. “Hold your fire.” He climbed up onto the observation plate and peered over the sprawling mass of trembling, moaning bodies to the line of desperate Germans in flight, far off across no man’s land. “Good shooting lads,” he called, hopping down and brushing his hands clean of mud. “Taught bloody Fritz a lesson there. No doubt about that.”
The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set Page 24