They watched the Cardinal draw the Concluding Rite to a close and with it the service. The congregation rose and slowly gathered themselves and their belongings together, shuffling out of the Cathedral. There were mutters of dismay as people drew open the doors and became aware of the falling artillery barrage spattering the far edges of the town, the Cathedral having masked much of the sound with its broad and high walls. Hats and capes were hurriedly donned and worshippers bustled out to their homes beneath a fiery sky.
Tacit and Isabella waited until the final member of the congregation had left before they wandered slowly towards the ambulatory and antechamber into which the Cardinal had disappeared. Tacit’s heavy boots on the tiled floor drew Poré out to investigate.
“Inquisitor Tacit,” he called, with as much warmth as a stream in December. “Sister Isabella. I trust you are both well?”
“Better than some,” spat Tacit, rubbing a hand under his nose.
“Yes, I have heard about Father Aguillard.”
“Did you know him?” asked Isabella, looking for somewhere to rest herself against and realising that her tired limbs would have to hold her up a little longer.
“I did,” Poré replied, sounding more dismayed than when he revealed the final moments of Father Andreas’ death. “Whilst he travelled much, he was a frequent visitor to Arras. I knew him well.”
“Any enemies?” Tacit enquired.
“And here we are again, Inquisitor!” hissed Poré in reply, any sign of dismay dropping from his manner in an instant. “Asking the vagrant question of enemies!”
“You have any better suggestions, Poré?” Tacit growled, squaring up to the Cardinal. “You got any light to shed on what’s happening here?”
“You’re the Inquisitor,” the inscrutable Cardinal replied, looking down his nose with a disdain which secretly delighted him. “However, it seems that I alone have my Lord’s blessing.” The Cardinal waited for either of them to enquire further as to what he meant by such an perplexing comment. But when they said nothing he continued. “It seems that Father Andreas or Father Aguillard were not the sole names on our murderer’s list.” He said the word ‘murderer’ with scorn.
“What do you mean?” Sister Isabella asked.
“I mean, Sister, that I was attacked by the beast, this very lunchtime. And, yes, I say beast, for that is what I saw with my own eyes. Hombre Lobo, Tacit! Werewolf!”
If, with that address, the Cardinal had intended to draw some reaction from the Inquisitor, then he was sorely disappointed. Tacit scratched the side of his head and looked to the shadows of the Cathedral.
“So, I can see you’re still not convinced?” Tacit didn’t even give the question the honour of a reply. “So, you doubt the words of a Cardinal do you, Inquisitor, standing here, before you? You accuse him of lies when you doubt his words.”
“I doubt my eyes.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, you must be an apparition then, Poré. If you’d met a true wolf, there’d have been no escape.”
“How did you escape?” Isabella asked, more to defuse the mounting argument between them.
Poré turned his eyes to the antechamber. “See for yourself. I locked myself in the chapel. The beast savaged the door but was unable to penetrate the rock.”
“Quite an escape then?” Tacit said, in a tone heavily laden with sarcasm as he lurched in the direction of the side room.
“You mock me, Inquisitor! At least I’ve been able to see who our murderer is with my own eyes, which is more than you’ve been able to do! An Inquisitor?” the Cardinal spat, wandering a few steps behind Tacit and Isabella as they examined the gnarled and scarred stone. “Pah!”
Great claw marks ran the length of the doorway, the stone gouged and disfigured as if it was soft clay. But the stone had proved sufficiently deep and hard to deter the beast from getting to the Cardinal on the other side.
“Perhaps we’ve not seen the murderer, this is true,” said Tacit, turning away from the door after the briefest of looks. “Or perhaps we have? I’m not sure. But we do have a name.”
The Cardinal raised an eyebrow and looked at him from behind his hooded eyes. “A name, you say?”
“Sandrine Prideux.”
“Who?” he asked, with an exhausted tone.
“Do you know her?” Isabella replied.
“Sandrine Prideux? Of course I don’t know a Sandrine Prideux!”
“Are you sure?” Isabella pressed.
“Never heard of her. Who is she?”
“The woman who visited Father Andreas the day he was killed,” growled Tacit, his eyes throughout on the Cardinal. “She lives in Fampoux. Anything you can tell us about her?”
“Like I said, I don’t know her.”
“She seemed to know the Father’s brother,” Tacit continued.
“Fascinating.”
“Knew him well.”
“Well? Well, what?” retorted the Cardinal, his manner now one of disdain and boredom. He stifled a yawn. “Inquisitor Tacit, I heard you were good. I now wonder if you are responsible for your own publicity?” He played with the threads on his cassock. “You come to me with the name of a woman I have never heard of and tell me she was a friend of the Father’s brother?”
“I never said friend,” hissed Tacit.
“What is this? Some sort of joke? And you expect me to be appreciative of your work here? Inquisitor! We have two Fathers who have been killed by a werewolf and a Cardinal who, by good fortune and sense, is lucky to be alive. The case is clear and simple. If you choose not to look at the basic facts that is fine, but don’t come to me claiming you’re in the middle of a detailed murder investigation when you have no details, no evidence and with nothing more than a name of some unknown woman!”
Tacit could feel the blood pump behind his ears. He recalled a similar feeling when his work eradicating a coven of witches in the Ukrainian town of Lutsk had brought derision from the local Priest, who claimed the Inquisitor was performing witchcraft himself. Tacit took the blasphemous Priest to a dry well and dropped him down it. To his knowledge, the Priest’s body was never found. Tacit shot forward and took the Cardinal by the scruff of the neck, the collar of his cassock cutting into Poré’s neck, bulging veins. The Cardinal’s eyes burned in his head. Isabella cried out, her hands on Tacit’s wrist, pulling him away.
“Oh yes, Inquisitor,” hissed Poré when released from Tacit’s clutches, pulling his cassock straight against his body. “You’ve quite shown yourself to be the man you are. No wonder they’re saying things about you.”
“If you didn’t want an Inquisitor in your midst, why did you invite one?” Tacit seethed.
“What do you mean? Invite an Inquisitor to an already troubled city, especially one like you? Are you quite mad?” Poré almost spat the words. “Do you honestly think I would give myself the trouble of inviting one of your kind into my midst?”
Tacit stared across at Isabella and then at the Cardinal from the corner of his eye.
“No, I don’t understand either?” Poré lamented back, spotting Tacit’s perplexity. He shook his head and rubbed his shorn scalp with the flat of a hand, regaining a little of his poise and finesse. “Your coming here was not of my doing.”
“So, if you didn’t want an Inquisitor sniffing around, why so vocal?”
“Vocal?”
“About a werewolf attack, Cardinal? You seem awfully keen to press for their involvement here in this case.”
“Because unlike you, Inquisitor, I look at the facts before me and make a judgement instead of creating a fantasy to allow me to play the big man.”
Tacit looked ready to spring towards the Cardinal, but Isabella was prepared this time and set herself between the pair of them.
“Well, if that’s so, Cardinal,” Tacit hissed, fighting against Isabella, as she forced him from the Cathedral, “then I hope you’re ready for your own day of judgement.”
The Sist
er manhandled him onto the central aisle. As soon as his boots touched the hard stone, he instantly turned and strode from the ambulatory, as if the aisle was a river sweeping him away. Poré called after them as Tacit vanished into the gloom of the building and out into the city. “My day of judgement, Inquisitor? It seems someone already planned it, but it would appear it is not yet time for me to be judged. Perhaps, Tacit, it should be of your own judgement that you take greatest care?”
FORTY NINE
1899. THE VATICAN. VATICAN CITY.
“Poldek!” Georgi cried, the moment he saw Tacit enter the main hall. He leapt from his table and bounded over to him, engulfing him in a bear hug. “Poldek! It’s good to see you again! Satan’s curse, I thought you were dead!” He laughed and slapped him hard across the shoulder.
“Georgi!” Tacit replied, holding onto his friend’s arms. He shook his head, as if reacquainting himself with the sight of his old friend. “You think I’m that easy to get rid of, eh?” He made to slap Georgi in the face. Georgi glanced the gentle blow aside and they wrestled each other lightly, pulling and tugging like children. “Where’s everyone else?” Tacit asked eventually, holding his friend at arm’s length to look at him. “Claus? Leon?”
At once Georgi shook his head and sat back down at the table. “We’ve lost many good friends, Poldek.”
“What do you mean? Where have they gone?”
Georgi pulled the cup of coffee towards him.
“Ivan?” asked Tacit cautiously. Georgi looked into the black depths of his drink.
“We’ve not heard from him. For months.” And then he turned and looked at Tacit fiercely, tears in his eyes. “We thought we’d lost you! Damn you, Poldek! Where’ve you been?”
“I lost my master. It’s taken me all this time to get back,” Tacit replied, grimly. He sat down on the bench next to Georgi, both revolvers at his side thumping against the wood of the table. He removed them and placed them in front of him, Georgi’s eyes flashing at their terrible beauty. Tacit ran the dirt from his hair.
“I never expected it to be like this,” Georgi said, lifting his eyes from the weapons to stare across the hall. “Never thought it would be so hard. Never thought as to what they would want us to do, what they would want us to become.” He looked back at Tacit. There was something different about his friend, a reluctance to talk, to confide, as if a line had been crossed with him, an emotion forever excised. “Are you okay, my friend?”
Tacit nodded and picked up his master’s revolver, feeling its weight.
“What are you going to do now, then?” Georgi asked, sweeping up his coffee and putting the scalding liquid to his lips.
“Now?”
“Now that you’ve lost your master?”
“Nothing,” Tacit answered, teasing the chamber of the revolver free and spinning the cylinder with his fingers. He snapped it home. “Nothing changes, Georgi.” He put his dark eyes onto his friend. “The battle still goes on.”
FIFTY
18:20. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14TH, 1914.
FAMPOUX. NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.
They huddled together in the cave for warmth, filthy and wretched in the foul dank gloom. September had brought a chill to the day’s end and a dampness in the air. They’d allowed themselves a meagre fire, but didn’t risk stoking it too high for fear that the smoke might reveal their location to a passing soldier. Of a night they need not fear but during the tormentingly long hours of daylight, they knew they were vulnerable.
Throughout the years they had sought refuge in the darkness, these pale and sallow figures, deep below where their prey walked, cast out by civilisation, terrorised by flames, fearful mobs and ignorance. For years, too numerous to count, they had eked out a meagre existence, entombed within a prison born of a curse and their enemies’ fear. They were the damned, the once great now fallen, the ones cursed to walk the pitiable line between darkness and light, always longing, yearning for life, longing for salvation, craving for a final meal to satiate their hunger and thirst for a last time.
A longing always conducted at the mercy of the moon.
“Can you hear them?” asked Angulsac, referring to the sound of the soldiers digging nearby.
It was not his birth name, the name his mother had given him when he was pink and small and perfect. Too long ago it was that that name had been used, too long ago for its recollection, those days now beyond reach, like an itch unable to be scratched. It had slipped from time and mind just as the moon each morning countless times behind the horizon. Now he’d taken the name decreed by the clan, Angulsac, ‘Waning of the Moon’ in the tongue of the true wolves.
“I hear them,” replied Baldrac wearily, shivering in the gloom despite the layers of cloth bound about him.
During daylight, Baldrac preferred to sleep but at this time his hunger gnawed at him like the incessant cold, a cruel and constant reminder of what he was, what hateful thing he had become and also what he desired beyond anything else in order to help find respite from the pain. Only by being the monster he so despised could the monster rest, embrace the troubled and hateful portion of death that was sleep.
“From the west,” Baldrac croaked, trying to clear his parched throat. “The British.”
“They are coming,” Angulsac said.
“The Germans, they have abandoned the village,” Baldrac spoke quietly into his rags, as if to himself. Beneath his layers of cloth and threadbare fabric, he was naked, stinking and scarred by an endless lifetime of dirt and filth. Once he wore clothes of finery. Now rags were his clothes, the same as many of the clan chose to use. There was little point in fitting oneself in the attire of those who walked above in the sun. With the coming of the moon, their transformation would be sudden, their clothing ripped asunder when the curse was unleashed in flesh and fur and rage.
“I wonder if they will listen to the villagers?” a white haired woman, who went by the clan name of Calath, asked, shuffling a little closer to the fire to urge some warmth into her gnarled fingers. She was drawn and emaciated, half starved. Once, many years ago, she was beautiful, with the ear of kings and a host of lovers. But she was too beautiful for the liking of some and was cast down with a curse upon all of her house. Now no lover would be drawn to her fetidness, not even those she shared the underground hovel with.
“They are men,” Baldrac spat, drawing the rags a little higher around him. “Foolish men. It is not in their nature to listen, to understand. Once they learn of us …” He let his words trail off with a shake of his head.
“We were men once,” a shivering figure called from the back of the cave, shrouded in shadows.
“I wish them no ill,” Calath continued.
Angulsac laughed bitterly. “I wish them no ill either, but neither did I the Germans, or the French, or any who have trodden upon our paths. The moon is a cruel master.”
Baldrac coughed hard in his tight, rasping chest. “Men are foolish,” he said, spitting the ball of phlegm he’d brought up from his leathery lungs. “They will scoff when they are told of us. Nothing will change, not even when the moon climbs and we venture out amongst them.”
“Perhaps our princess will convince them?” Calath asked, summoning a little hope within her voice.
“She was unable to convince the Germans. What makes you think she will be able to convince the British?” Baldrac drew his feet inside the folds of cloth and nestled himself into a ball inside the mass of rags.
“She will have completed her task by now,” said Angulsac, staring into the measly flames of the fire.
“Perhaps she will come to us?” Calath replied, urgently. “With news?”
“News?!” Baldrac barked back, suddenly enraged. “It is not news I wish for! It is food! Food to sustain me through the night so I need not hunt for it!” He trembled and shook as he spoke, caught in his anger. “Ah! The torment! When will it end?!” he cried out, his voice echoing throughout the cavern network.
“Easy, Baldrac,” urged Angulsa
c, his eyes heavy on the fire. “If she comes, then it will be with news and perhaps a little food.”
“A little food is not enough though!” the wretched man spat back. “There is never enough food! For a whole month, since the war has come to these lands, we have been without our sustenance brought to us and have had to search it out like the vermin that we are!” He spat in the dirt and threw himself into a ball by the side of the cavern.
Out of the reach of torchlight, more figures could be seen stirring, a lamentable band of creatures, pallid and filthy. The raised voices had awoken them. They retched and cursed, coughing up their misery and the stinking foul residue of last night’s hunger frenzy, knowing soon that the madness would return again, once the moon climbed in the sky.
Angulsac drew his rags about him. “I know we need food, but also with news then perhaps our journey’s end will be a little closer. Until then, let us try and rest.”
“Rest!” cackled a voice from a dark corner of the cavern. “How can we rest when we know the moon is climbing? What good is rest when soon we know we will be beyond all hope of rest?”
“If she doesn’t come, I trust the Germans have given the British good warning,” Baldrac growled, laying himself down against the hard rock floor for sleep that he knew would not come. “Because my hunger is terrible and already I feel my rage match it.”
The soft crumbling cascade of soil and the noise of slipping shoes on damp mud drew their attention from the smouldering fire and their infected, troubled dreams. Angulsac was the first to face the intruder, low on his haunches in an instant, taut like a coiled spring in the middle of the dark and stinking cavern.
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