The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set

by Tarn Richardson

  He flicked his eyes left and right, mapping out the route the Father had stumbled from the antechamber just ahead. He guessed Andreas had been unbalanced, stumbling mainly to the left. Tacit predicted that the Priest had lost his left arm.

  “And the body? It’s in the crypt?” Isabella asked.

  “Yes, in the crypt,” the Cardinal replied, his eyes falling to the dark archway to the right of where they stood. “I’m sure that will reveal everything.”

  The cool of the crypt wrapped itself about them as they descended the first few steps into the darkness below.

  “I’m surprised that the Vatican still remembers us here in Arras,” the Cardinal said, feeling his way into the gloom with the help of the stairwell wall. There was a lantern hanging on a metal hoop at the bottom step some fifteen steps below. He retrieved it and fumbled in his pocket for matches with which to light it. “Sometimes one can feel so very far away, especially during these times, what with the war.”

  “Arras is very much within the thoughts of Pope Benedict,” Isabella assured him, reaching across and offering to light the lantern for him.

  “That is good to hear,” Poré replied, accepting the Sister’s offer. She struck the match and held the small flame to the wick till it caught, whilst Poré said, “I didn’t know if the war had drawn the Pope’s eye to other places besides France? Already the conflict is so broad and wide.”

  Sister Isabella handed the lantern back to him. “Not in the least, Cardinal. Benedict feels greatly for the peoples of France. The Mass for Peace in Paris in a week’s time is of particular poignancy to his worshipfulness,” she added, with a gentle smile.

  The Cardinal took back the lantern with a nod of appreciation. “It’s the least the Church can do,” he said gently. “I am proud to have had a small part in its realisation. Having secured the services of Cardinal Bishop Monteria to help lead the planning of the event, surely we have a greater opportunity to achieve our goals.”

  The flicker of amber torchlight caught in Tacit’s face, revealing a doubting sneer upon it.

  “You don’t share the view that the Mass for Peace is a good thing, Inquisitor? That the power of prayer can achieve great things?”

  “A massed prayer or massed armies facing each other?” replied Tacit. “I know which my money would be on.”

  “We have attracted the attention of Britain’s foreign secretary!” Poré retorted sharply.

  Tacit yawned and thrust a fist across his nose. He thought it strange that a bitter, radical Cardinal like Poré should share a vision with an arrogant old man like Monteria and for them to then work together to try and achieve it. Tacit made a mental note to visit Monteria after his assignment in Arras to ensure the Cardinal was not getting above his station.

  “The Mass will take on extra significance with a Cardinal so senior within the Church,” remarked Isabella, breaking the rising tension between the Cardinal and Inquisitor, but also genuinely impressed that Poré had recruited one so highly respected within the Church as Cardinal Bishop Monteria to help plan the service.

  “If the power of diplomacy fails to halt this dreadful and bloody war, perhaps the power of prayer will have more luck?”

  “We certainly hope so,” said Isabella.

  Poré caught the lack of interest shown by Tacit, staring into the depths of the crypt, and took the hint. “Shall we?” he suggested, before squeezing past the pair of them and into the gloom of the passageway.

  The tunnel leading into the crypt was tall and broad, with walls smooth as marble and china white. Such was the wall’s finish that it possessed a sheen like glass.

  “These are incredible tunnels, Cardinal,” said Isabella, impressed at their size and finish, brushing her hand along them as they walked.

  “It’s the chalk rock,” replied Poré, waving the lantern light to indicate the white stone. “Very easy to mine and work. Arras is built on it. The whole region is. There are tunnels under Arras which go on for miles and miles, some dating back to medieval times. Used for the storing of goods during the rich times and people during the less favourable.”

  Isabella swept her red hair behind an ear. “Are they still used?”

  Poré shook his head. “The ones beyond the city’s limits, no, but the ones directly under it most definitely. People have been using them during barrages on the city. As you can see,” he said, knocking the stone with the flat of his hand, “they’re solid. As good as any shelter.”

  “So, was there anything which suggested Father Andreas might have had any enemies?” Isabella called after the Cardinal, who was walking the tunnels ahead of them at a fair pace, his gown rippling between every urgent stride. “Anyone who might have had a grudge against him or the Church?”

  “No, nothing,” Poré replied, as he hung the lantern on a nail on the wall and unlocked the rusted iron gate to the main crypt. “Father Andreas always seemed so … complete.”

  The gate creaked open on heavy hinges and the Cardinal led on, holding up the lantern so that as much light as possible penetrated the path ahead. The further they walked the colder the air became, till their breath turned to mist in front of them.

  “He was a good man, Father Andreas,” Cardinal Poré continued, peering back as if to assure them of his words. He turned left into the blackness of a side passageway. “I cannot believe anyone would wish him dead.” He stopped at an open doorway and turned to face them both. “But then again, there are some who are unable to control their actions.” He said the words with the raise of an eyebrow and tone in his voice, clearly meaning to leave some impression on the visitors from the Vatican.

  With that, Poré looked towards an ornately carved archway, its rim a mesh of interconnecting stone strands. He turned, as if he was about to say something, but deemed whatever it was he was going to announce, unnecessary. He stepped to one side and gestured for them to enter the room beyond.

  On a slab in the centre of the room was laid the body of Father Andreas, the sweet aroma of death hanging around him in the cool air. The Cardinal followed Tacit and Isabella in and hung the lantern from a hook in the ceiling so that the room and body were as fully illuminated as possible.

  Tacit looked down at the body. He was suddenly aware of the growing dull ache of a headache etching itself to the left side of his brain. He needed a drink. He pinched the side of his head and eye and rubbed hard. The dead Priest’s skin had taken on a vague pearl sheen and the skin around the face had tightened as one would expect in a body so freshly deceased. He peered over it, breathing in the cool air, trying to detect anything within the smell of cadaver which might provide evidence the Church would have undoubtedly missed.

  Tacit peered fiercely but not for long. Significant blow to the head, destroying left eye socket and removing eyeball in the process. Wound caused by clawed hand or talon. Significant strength required to tear skin and – he peered in towards the Priest’s yellowing head – partial skull bone.

  He looked down to the Father’s chest. The gaping wound in it was made all the more dramatic by the tearing of the cassock robe through which the clawed had ripped. Well, that’s the killing blow, Tacit thought to himself. He looked over at the left arm and was delighted to see it was missing.

  “Anyone else witness the attack?” Isabella asked, noticing Tacit’s vague pleasure at something. It was the first time she’d seen him show anything approaching satisfaction since she’d met him. “Did anyone see his attacker?”

  “No. Father Andreas was alone.”

  “What about any other Priests?”

  Poré lowered his head and shook it. “No. No. It was the end of Mass. Everyone had left.”

  “Including the choristers?” Tacit asked, looking up through his hooded eyes.

  “Choristers? How’d you know about them?”

  Tacit shrugged. “Saw their cloaks hanging up in the antechamber. Besides, it’s a church service. You have choristers.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” the Cardinal r
eplied hesitantly. Tacit’s eyes drilled into him. “The choristers, they left after Mass. The head chorister, he left a short time before the attack. Thankfully just in time, so to speak.”

  “You have spoken to the boy, then?” Sister Isabella asked, gentler in her questioning than the Inquisitor.

  “Uh, yes, the boy says he saw nothing. Which is good. Would have been awful for him to have witnessed ... to witness a werewolf attack.”

  Tacit’s eyes narrowed on the Cardinal. “It’s not a werewolf attack,” he growled, looking back down at the body.

  Tacit was surprised to find the Cardinal chuckle thinly. “Not a werewolf attack?” he retorted, closing his eyes and shaking his head, as if Tacit had muttered an obscenity in front of him. “So, how else would you explain this?” he asked, raising his hands to indicate the wounds on the body. “No normal human could have—”

  “Not a werewolf,” Tacit repeated forcefully, his nostrils flaring.

  The Cardinal lowered his gaze onto the black-clad Inquisitor. “Inquisitor Tacit. There’s no need for us to be quite so coy. Let us not play games. I know of the cursed ones and unlike some of my colleagues I am not afraid to utter their name. Hombre Lobo! Werewolf!” He almost shouted the words, so that his voice echoed through the labyrinth of tunnels. The Cardinal’s eyes blazed with a fire.

  Isabella leaned across the body towards him, her voice almost a whisper.

  “Cardinal Poré, you have been warned about uttering such things openly by the Holy See.”

  “And I am not afraid to utter them here, within my Cathedral!” he called back, as if delivering the final lines of a sermon. “I know the history of the Church, what has gone before, what has been and what has been created by it. So let us put aside our little game of denial. Let us not talk falsely or in riddles. I know of this . You do not need to shield me from such things. We both know what it is.”

  “Not werewolf,” Tacit spat back, in a voice as hard as iron.

  The Cardinal scratched at his forehead, rubbing the flat of his hand backwards into his short cropped hair and folding his arms. “So, Inquisitor, how else would you explain—”

  “Murder.”

  Poré scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed, his hands dropping to his sides. “Very well, call it murder if you will! But that is exactly why I say it is a werewolf attack. Look at the wounds!”

  But Tacit shook his head, his face darkening like the shadows of the crypt. “This is murder. Intentional. Werewolves don’t act with intention. Werewolves attack to feed. Consumed by hunger and rage. They don’t set out to murder. They set out to fulfil their bestial desires, to satiate the insatiable.” He looked down at the poor figure on the slab. “And they don’t leave much behind when they do. Certainly not this much.” He looked up under his eyebrows, passing his eyes from Isabella to Poré and then back again. “Someone took on the form of a werewolf intentionally to kill the Father, but they’re not a true wolf, not Hombre Lobo.”

  Tacit stood back from the body and bowed his head, as if in a final act of respect for the fallen Father. Then he turned and vanished into the dark of the outside passageway. “Murder,” he called back assuredly, as he traced the path back to the steps.

  Poré and Isabella caught each other’s glances, whilst Tacit’s footsteps were lost into the depths of crypt tunnels.

  “And send for the chorister,” they heard him call. “I want to talk to him.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  07:46. TUESDAY, 13 OCTOBER 1914.

  THE FRONT LINE. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  In the growing light of day, the British soldiers scurried forward through the trenches, blackened by drying blood and littered with remains dashed and discarded in the haste to escape. In places, the blood and mud formed sticky cloying patches of crimson, which clung tightly to soldiers and trapped misplaced boots, as if trying to drag the individual down into the cursed depths below.

  Ahead of them the low sprawling village of Fampoux lay, powder blasted into grey and black, the trees all burnt and smashed away so that only shattered stumps remained. The tallest building in the village, the church, had been broken clean in two, one half blown over the surrounding houses, the standing half tilting to one side so severely it looked like only the slightest of breezes would bring the whole lot tumbling down.

  The soldiers could make out lines of quaint little houses standing in long rows along the outskirts of the village, no wider than half a mile. Cafés and shops encircled small squares, all now smashed or damaged by shells or dissected by a web of trenches.

  Litter and filth were everywhere, over the fields and across the road down which the soldiers marched. Bits of machinery and broken tools could be seen wherever one looked, but strangely, the vast cannons and artillery units, concealed behind ridges or driven into the depths of shrubbery, appeared undamaged, abandoned in the Germans’ haste to leave. Flapping papers floated and tumbled across the landscape on the breeze now slowly picking up.

  There was also a sharp smell of coal smoke which embraced the soldiers as they drew into the fabric of the village, a clinging acidic stench that clung to nostrils and the backs of mouths. The only sound was that of the soldiers’ boots crunching and kicking in the rubble as they passed through it. Even the guns had fallen silent. A noisy crow took up its squawking from the roof of a crumpled terrace, the walls emerging from the ground like the bones of a dinosaur regurgitated from the earth.

  Major Pewter drew his horse to one side and watched his men march past. Occasionally a soldier would call out to him with good wishes and he would acknowledge them with a stiff hand.

  Every now and then a dog would bark, the noise punctuating the severity of the silence. Nothing else stirred, save for the occasional creak of a broken shutter or the knock of a door swinging free on its hinges.

  Pewter could barely contain his joy. A mile or two to the north the British, French and Germans were locked in a bloody impasse, mired down in trenches and the dirt of the Arras Salient, whilst here he was walking into German territory without even firing a round. They would write about him in despatches, of that he had no doubt. He often imagined himself a Colonel, in the dark of night when the shells had finally fallen silent. It was all very well commanding a company of men but he aspired to more. Goodness knows he was capable of handling more than one hundred odd men.

  An oval-faced child pushed forward from a shamble of buildings on the main thoroughfare. He had ears that stuck out too much and dark eyes which seemed too close together. But it were his teeth which caught the attention, a broad set of immaculate looking teeth, beaming from between his cracked and dirty lips. He appeared head to toe covered in dirt and dust and he carried with him a torn dusty union jack flag which he shook energetically as he stepped forward towards the approaching troops. He let one corner of it drop and raised a small clenched fist of victory.

  “Vive la France!” he called. “Vive la Grande-Bretagne!” showing his delicious white teeth.

  The appearance of the single welcoming child gave the village a now haunted feel. The desolation and silence within it was profound.

  “What have you found there then, Lieutenant?” Pewter called down from his saddle.

  “Something the Germans have left for us, I suppose?” replied Henry, studying the board. “A message.”

  “Oh, and what would that be? Terribly sorry for causing all this trouble, Tommy?” Pewter laughed a high pitched haughty laugh.

  “Beware the moon, Tommy,” Henry read off the board, looking around him and then back at the sign. “Wonder what they mean by that?”

  “Probably some sort of empty threat,” the Major replied, sitting up in his saddle and looking east. “Giving us a clue as to his next attack. Probably planning night-time barrages.” He admired the troops marching past him. “Chance’ll be a fine thing. They’ll have a hard time levering us out of Fampoux, the fools. Nevertheless, no harm in being prepared. We should set up a defensive perimeter around the town, just in case Jer
ry decides to take a pot shot at us.”

  “I’ll pass the order down, sir,” Henry replied, looking back at the sign. There was something about the way it had been written, the scrawled letters scratched into the wood in haste. “Beware the moon, Tommy,” he said again, his hand to his chin.

  “Yes, beware,” spoke the boy, who had sidled himself alongside. He placed a hand on Henry’s side. “Beware the moon,” he said, his eyes very serious.

  Pewter stood up in his stirrups and peered down on his soldiers. “Goodness me, Frost!” he exclaimed. “Do you know what?”

  “No sir.”

  “I didn’t think this war was going to be quite this fun,” he chirped, before turning his horse and searching out a building in the village still standing that was suitable for one of his rank.

  TWENTY-TWO

  14:03. TUESDAY, 13 OCTOBER 1914.

  THE VATICAN. VATICAN CITY.

  Cardinal Bishop Casado jumped the moment Bishop Attilio Basquez’s shadow fell across him whilst he sat in the atrium of Old Saint Peter’s Basilica, his head having been bowed in deep thought.

  “Bishop Basquez,” he called in greeting, looking up and meeting the cold of the man’s eyes with a smile. “You made me jump!”

  “Troubled with your thoughts?” the sly Bishop asked.

  “Troubled,” replied Casado, nodding contemplatively, “but not with my thoughts. These are troubling times. For us all, even here within the safe walls of the Vatican.” He peered around the shadows and dimly lit crevasses of the pillared atrium. “Old Saint Peter’s Basilica. I often come here to think. It grants one a reflective ambiance to suit one’s mood.”

  The dark-haired Bishop briefly followed Casado’s eyes to look about himself but he quickly put his attention back onto the Cardinal Bishop.