The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set

by Tarn Richardson

  And then the memory flashed across Tacit’s skull. With his hand still wedged tight beneath him, he felt with searching fingers inside a pocket, his hand closing around a small container. Quickly, and as carefully as he was able, he drew out the glass container of the demon’s breath he’d taken from the exorcism in Perugia years ago. With the last of his failing strength, he levered his arm up beneath his chin and crushed the glass in his hand, shattering its fragments over the surface of the water. At once, the possessed contents hissed and squealed free, running over and around the puddle. As soon as the evil gaseous spirit touched the water, it froze it in an instant. Tacit groaned and fought the forcing hands no more. His face thumped hard against the solid ice of the frozen puddle.

  Shrieks of disbelief and anger exploded in the cavern.

  “Witchcraft!” one cried, leaping from thin yellowed foot to thin yellowed foot.

  “Accursed Catholic magic!” another called.

  “It is the mercy of the Lord!” one wept on seeing the puddle turn to ice in front of him. A cacophony of shouting, howling and crying shook the foundations of the cave. Figures sprang for doorways, whilst others threw themselves down on the ground, their faces buried in the grime of the lair.

  Tacit took his chance. He threw himself backwards, now easily casting the distracted and desperate creatures from on top of him. He roared like a wild thing at the astonished and bewildered clan, appearing to grow like a bear before the wailing and weeping creatures, circling desperately in pain and anguish. Their scheme to curse the Inquisitor for the rest of eternity had failed. Some lay down and refused to move, accepting now the Lord’s judgement upon them. Some still had some fight in them, filled with a rage and torment unlike any they had known before. They circled and snarled at the Inquisitor, waiting for their moment to attack. If they could not bind him within their clan, then they would now have to satisfy their rage by ripping him limb from limb.

  As they closed in around him, Tacit ripped a bag from his coat pocket and threw it onto the smouldering fire, shrinking down as small as he could go on the ground, his back turned. Seconds later, an almighty explosion shook the cavern, blasting shrapnel to all corners of the room. A million fragments of scorching hot silver ripped through the cavern.

  Pain tore into Tacit’s back and buttocks as the silver bomb exploded. He ignored the need to cry out and stay crouched to protect his wounds, instead leaping to his feet, the revolver and crossbow drawn. Around him was a scene of bloodied smoking devastation, the vile bodies of the human wolves ripped and pulverised by the deadly explosive. Bodies and body parts scattered the floor, headless, limbless, dead eyed and despoiled. There was a whimpering and a gurgling from shattered throats. Pallid chunks of flesh lay quivering against walls, blackened and burned from the explosion, like bully beef turned out from soldiers’ meat tins. Several figures still shook and stumbled about the cavern, stunned and deafened by the blast, staggering blindly, eyes blown from faces, feet feeling their way in the darkness.

  The detonated silver, deadly to these creatures, would eventually kill all those caught within the bomb’s blast, but Tacit was never one to leave any job half-finished, to leave anything to chance.

  He aimed the revolver and blew the head off one of the wolves. He turned and killed another. A female wolf whimpered before him. The silver round blew a hole through her ribcage and she slumped lifeless to the ground. He turned, just in time to avoid the full impact of a tottering blow from Baldrac, the left side of his face utterly blown from his head. Tacit inserted the barrel of the revolver into the wound and blasted out what was left of his brains.

  Two wolves turned and bolted for the archway, their natural instinct for survival overcoming their desire for release from the misery of the curse. Tacit shot one in the back of the head, tumbling him down in the dirt. The other was caught behind the heart and slumped into the wall alongside him, dead.

  Tacit loaded six more sliver bullets into the barrel of the revolver and cocked it. A tall gangly figure leapt at him. Tacit caught sight of him out of the corner of his eye through the grimy light of the cavern. The crossbow pinged and the bolt thundered with a sickening thunk through his eye socket and lodged firmly in his brain. A wolf on the ground reached up at the Inquisitor as if to ask for release. Tacit struck the poor creature to the side and blasted a red hole in its temple. Another crawled away from a huddle of bodies and the Inquisitor stopped its movement with a bullet in the rear of its skull. He stepped with rapid feet, wading between the bodies, his keen eye watching for movement, for any signs of life that remained in their carnal murdering hole. He put four remaining wolves out of their misery. It was ironic how after he had been warned by Angulsac of his Church’s lack of mercy he showed the repugnant creatures exactly that in their final moments.

  Tacit turned, two rounds left in his revolver’s cylinder, and surveyed the cavern. Death hung like a thick fog over the place, silent and complete. Movement caught his eye from the far edge of the cave where there lay a mass of bodies, dashed and bleeding from the full force of the explosion. Tacit stepped over, reloading the revolver from the bullets in his belt. He looked down. It was Angulsac, the wolf who had tried to bring him under his own curse.

  Tacit stared down at him, a vague smudge of satisfaction across the Inquisitor’s face.

  “You asked if I would stumble from the path,” said Tacit, pushing the cylinder back into place. “Who says I already haven’t?” he asked, raising the barrel of the gun to the forehead of the matted grim-faced being. “You’re a doomed and finished race from another time, wolf,” Tacit hissed. “Don’t worry, your time is nigh. Your suffering will one day end.”

  “Do you really think so, Inquisitor?” Angulsac croaked, blood pouring from the wound in his throat. “What do you see, Inquisitor? Do you see a wolf or do you see a man, a man cursed by your Church’s evilness.”

  “I’ve heard enough of your sermons, wolf,” replied Tacit, cocking the weapon.

  Angulsac laughed. “You’re too late. The truth will out, Inquisitor. All around you, your kind are turning. The downfall of your Church and a new age for mankind is nigh. Watch for the signs, Inquisitor. Watch for—.”

  The revolver exploded in Tacit’s hand. Angulsac’s brain exploded across the mound of churned and torn bodies behind him. Tacit opened his aiming eye.

  EIGHTY-NINE

  08:34. FRIDAY, 16 OCTOBER 1914. FAMPOUX, NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  Henry took Sandrine’s hand and led her from the doorway of the house. She had dressed, finding herself a pair of blue-grey pantaloons and shirt, over which she wore a shawl. Henry had changed into clean fatigues. A new shirt and trousers. They smelled of lanolin and polish. He left his old clothes in a heap on the floor. His abandonment of order thrilled him.

  They looked set for a journey back to civilisation. Henry watched Sandrine gather together the few things she wanted to take back with her, including the dress she had carefully folded and put to one side when Pewter had come upon her. He adored her, even though he still understood so little. The fact that she was willing to share her secrets with him was not lost on Henry. She had opened her heart to him. There was no question he would give his heart to her.

  As he sat in the silence of the house whilst she was changing, so much more began to make sense to him, her strength of mind and body, her determination, her passion and her drive. He could never imagine meeting another like her. She was bewitchingly unique. They said nothing as they walked from the house down the street, their heads bowed, as if in silent procession to church. Sandrine didn’t even turn to bid her home goodbye. She had long ago left her childhood home, in every way.

  Henry’s mind was still a mass of questions and fears, but there was no time to consider them now. Fampoux was lost. Soon the Germans would learn the news of the British defeat, or their disappearance from the village, and they would come upon it with their strengthened units. Henry and Sandrine had to be away – better to travel lightly and quick
ly and be assured of their escape rather than weighed down with unnecessary items from the past. For all that history and violence and terror was behind them now. He would mourn his men for the rest of his life, but only the future lay before them. Its unpredictability was enticing.

  All Henry had brought with him from the house was the unit’s diary, tucked under his right arm as he walked. Whilst Sandrine had been changing he had written up his final entry. He’d left nothing out. He’d not been sparse with his details. The wolves, the method of their creation by the Church, the devastation, the fall of Fampoux. He breathed deeply and contentedly as he closed the cover of the book, his last act as an officer in the British Expeditionary Force. His gun, his packs, his iron rations, all his standard issue, he left behind at the house, the only trace of his ever having been in the village.

  “There is nothing for me here now,” Sandrine announced, as they stepped away with urgent strides.

  They reached the junction where the street turned onto the main road. Away to their left they could see the desolation of the trench, quiet as the grave. Beyond no man’s land, along the line of trees and built-up earth, which marked the line of the German trench, figures like ants in the distance could be seen gathering and preparing for an assault with urgency.

  To their right, climbing the slight incline to the apex of the sweeping hill, was the vast network of the British support trenches, ominous, silent and grey black.

  “We’ll never get through them,” Henry warned, shaking his head. “Not that way.”

  All his optimism now drained out of him, all his hope had come to nought in that moment, in the realisation that there was nowhere they could go. To the east, they would come upon the Germans. Henry would be taken as a prisoner of war, perhaps even shot and discarded in an unmarked grave. Sandrine, he wished not to think what might happen to her in German hands, whether she allowed the rage to come upon her or not. To the west, they would arrive in the support trenches, be processed and interrogated. Henry would be posted to another unit, if lucky; more likely he'd be shot for desertion, for leaving his post, suspicions being raised as to how he could have survived, to have been the last one out of there alive. To the north and south they would be caught up within the warring fronts of both sides, their fates no different, no better than going east or west. “It’s desperate, my darling,” he said, shaking his head.

  She turned and stroked her fingers through his hair and kissed him gently. “Nothing’s truly desperate. Not after you’ve lived as long as my kind have,” she replied. “Come on!”

  They hurried back into the tangled depths of the ruined village.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see!” Sandrine called, tugging him by the hand.

  But at the next turning, they shuddered to a dead halt.

  Up ahead stood Sister Isabella, her legs astride the middle of the grey-white road, her hands extended around a silver-coloured revolver pointed directly at the pair of them.

  “It’s you!” Sandrine hissed, letting go of Henry’s hand and dropping back onto her haunches like an animal about to spring.

  “It’s me,” replied Isabella hollowly. The revolver trembled in her hands.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Does it matter?” Isabella asked, gently unclamping and clamping her fingers on the grip.

  Henry raised a weary hand. “Please!” he said, stepping forward with both his hands raised. “Please! Let us go!”

  “Be quiet, Henry!” Sandrine hissed, her eyes firm on the Sister. “Are you going to try and take me?”

  The revolver wavered in Isabella’s hand. Her finger whitened against the trigger. She closed an eye, focusing on Sandrine’s heart. She felt the pressure of the trigger. One more little pull.

  “No,” Isabella then said, and let the gun drop to her side.

  “Why?” Sandrine asked, standing again and facing down her opponent.

  “Just tell me,” Isabella asked, raising her hands and the gun lifelessly in front of her and then dropping them to her side. “Did you kill them?

  “Them?”

  “The Fathers?”

  Sandrine hesitated, as if confused by the question. “No.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You lie!”

  “It’s true. I don’t know who killed Father Andreas or the others.”

  “Then tell me, Sandrine, tell me why?”

  “I only know why I did what I did, no matter how small my role.”

  “That will suffice.”

  Sandrine chuckled. “Peace,” she said, and then her tone darkened. “And revenge.”

  “Peace and revenge?” the Sister scoffed. “By the killing of two Priests?”

  “Like I said, I do not know who killed them, or expected them to be murdered,” replied Sandrine, turning to Henry who watched her closely.

  “But you still think the killing of two Fathers, two peaceful and kindly Fathers, will grant you the revenge you so sought and in doing so bring you peace?! I should shoot you now and put you out of your ignorant misery.”

  “You think this is about the killing of two Catholic Fathers?”

  “But you said—”

  “I said peace and revenge. I did not tell you the means or indeed when such a thing shall be achieved.”

  “So, the deaths of the Fathers—”

  “Enough of the Fathers!” cried Sandrine. “Sister, if you were provided with the opportunity to both achieve peace on earth and salvation for your people, would you not grasp such an opportunity, no matter what the cost?”

  “Every life is sacred.”

  “Yes, but what is the deaths of two when set against the salvation of millions? An everlasting peace? What better goal can there be for mankind?” Isabella shook her head, but there was the hint of admiration in her eyes at Sandrine’s vision. “You really believe you can achieve what you say?”

  But Sandrine was no longer looking at her. Instead she was staring at Henry, whose manner had changed to surprise at what he had heard. “Yes,” she said finally, “I want to end these terrible wars, both of mankind and against my people.” And finally she turned to look at Isabella. “Don’t you think there’s been enough killing?” Something caught Isabella’s attention. Sandrine and Henry followed her gaze to the horizon. Germans, a vast band of grey and black massing in the distance, coming towards Fampoux.

  “The war,” said Isabella. “What’s this got to do with it? With you? With the Fathers? I have to know.”

  “You will see, Sister. You will see.”

  “I must know.”

  “Be prepared for disappointment. Your Church will need to learn to cope with disappointment from now on.”

  “Meaning?”

  Sandrine raised an eyebrow indicating that the Sister would have to wait. That only time would tell.

  And now Isabella suddenly chuckled and looked away. She shook her head, peering about the ruins and rubble. “I wish you luck,” she said, striding forward and past the pair of them.

  “Luck?”

  “If it is peace you seek, then may all luck go with you. And you should go yourselves,” she warned, “the Germans will be here any minute.”

  “Tell me,” Sandrine called after the Sister. “Why didn’t you kill me? Just now?”

  Isabella stopped and looked back. “Like you say, it seems to me there’s been enough killing.”

  NINETY

  1909. NAPLES. ITALY.

  Tacit filled a jug from the pump and drank long and deeply from it. He felt spent and burnt from the merciless sun but he had also never felt so empowered and alive, such utter contentment in his life. Beneath the relentless heat, the harvest had grown fine and strong, the finest Mila had ever known on the farm, or so she had said two nights before, whilst they lay naked in each other’s arms. A surge of joy struck him quite unexpectedly as he drank, and he smiled and shook his head, draining the remains of the jug in a final lo
ng draw.

  “What are you looking so pleased with yourself about?” demanded Mila playfully, stepping into the kitchen. He lunged forward and took hold of her in his arms, lifting her off the ground as if she were a child, enveloped in his vast strong arms.

  “What are you doing, you fool?” she laughed, giggling and batting at him with her hands.

  He kissed her behind the ear and shook her gently.

  “Careful!” she warned, eventually wriggling free of him and reaching for the safety of the kitchen side.

  “What is it?” asked Tacit, wrapping himself around her and kissing her neck again. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?” she replied, turning in his grasp to face him and kissing him gently. “Nothing’s wrong, Poldek.” She put her hands to his face and kissed him again. “I’m pregnant.”

  NINETY-ONE

  08:44. FRIDAY, 16 OCTOBER 1914.

  FAMPOUX, NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  “Come on,” cried Sandrine, dragging Henry into a narrow side street, so ruined that they had to climb over piles of collapsed walls and roofs to get through it. “Let’s go!”

  “Where are we going?” asked Henry.

  “The tunnels.”

  They slithered and staggered over the mounds of broken masonry and stones, all the time listening for the approach of the Germans, for the whine of their shells, the sharp bark of their rifles. But they heard nothing, cocooned within the tumbled ruins through which Sandrine led them.

  She pushed him left into a short cul-de-sac and suddenly stopped, dropping to the floor of the road. “In here,” she called, lifting a stone to the side with ease. A dark square tunnel was revealed, leading downwards into the black, a ladder running down one wall. “Down here,” she said, pointing to the tunnel.

  “What’s down here?” Henry asked, ominously.