The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set

by Tarn Richardson

  Sandrine was standing in the middle of a small wrecked bedroom, furniture dashed and shattered around the room, the walls and floor covered with darkened dried blood. Every surface, every wall was splashed with the gore. Henry swallowed and stepped slowly up behind Sandrine, wrapping his arms about her. She turned and buried herself into him.

  “Poor Alessandro,” she wept. “Poor, poor Alessandro.”

  He kissed the top of her head and held her tight through her sobbing.

  “Henry, is everything I touch cursed?”

  He soothed her gently and rocked her in his arms. “No, of course not!”

  “This horror, will it never end? Will we ever be free of it?”

  “Yes, it will end. Tomorrow we leave Arras and everything behind us.”

  NINETY-EIGHT

  1910. ROME. ITALY.

  Cardinal Adansoni had frequented some inauspicious places in his time: brothels, bars, places of ill virtue. But the tavern in which he found himself was by far the worst establishment he had ever known. There was a man laid across the main path through the inn, face down in the thick dirt of the tavern floor, unmoving. For all Adansoni knew, he was dead.

  Vomit, excrement and blood seemed everywhere within the place, the landlord too traumatised, lazy or drunk himself to attempt to clean up. The smell was obscene, rank and fetid, like a seeping cloud of rancid flesh.

  Adansoni put his handkerchief to his nose and shuffled gingerly forward.

  He stepped over the prostrate body and continued to work his way through the place, ducking under oddments, heavy with dust and grime hanging from the beams above, peering around corners in the hope of finding him. How he prayed he wouldn’t find him. Not here, not in this place.

  And then he saw him, and it broke his heart, as it had twenty-one years ago when he laid his eyes on him for the very first time.

  Alone and weeping, drunk out of his mind in the darkest, most remote corner of the tavern, the man Adansoni used to call ‘‘gallant’’ sat broken and ruined.

  “It’s me, old friend,” he called, stepping closer. Tacit barely acknowledged him, fumbling blindly for his glass. “May I sit with you?” Adansoni asked. He waited for an answer which never came.

  Tacit stared unseeingly towards the figure and guzzled the drink in his glass clumsily. Finally, Adansoni gave up waiting for his request to be answered and sat down opposite him. The stench off his old acolyte, despite the smell of the tavern, was atrocious.

  “It’s me, Poldek,” the Cardinal said, leaning forward and touching his arm. The touch on his arm seemed to spark activity within Tacit and, at once, he sat up and tried to focus on his visitor.

  “It’s me, Poldek,” he continued. “I am so sorry, Poldek.” Adansoni removed his hat and placed it on the table next to him, ignoring the vomit and other detritus into which it was set.

  Tacit peered at him inanely, but slowly a semblance of recognition seemed to register with him. His eyes narrowed and then widened in his head, as if trying to comprehend, to remember.

  “Ad …,” he muttered quietly. “Ada … Adan …,” he persisted, trying to form the words on his tongue. “Adansoni?”

  “Yes,” replied the Cardinal, tears in his eyes. Tacit shuddered and a bubbling of air escaped from his lungs. “It is me, Poldek. I have come for you.”

  Adansoni was aware of crying but he refused to look, turning his eyes firmly to the table. Only when Tacit spoke did he raise them and put them on the pathetic figure.

  “They … they killed her,” he wept. “They killed my love,” he roared. “They killed my love and my child!”

  “It was the Orthodox,” replied the Cardinal, his eyes firm, making sure Tacit heard and understood. “They’d been moving north, burning farms, looting wherever they went. Taking everything they could find.”

  Tacit leaned his head back and wept, strains of spittle lining his lips like a mask.

  “We caught them, Poldek. We caught them. They’ve admitted to everything and have been charged. The punishment was carried out over the last few weeks. They’ve all been hung.” Adansoni noticed how dry his throat had become, how his mouth trembled. He swallowed painfully. “They suffered,” he said quietly, bowing his head.

  Tacit sobbed, closing his eyes, his head still turned to the ceiling. “She was everything to me,” he said, his sobs becoming howls of pain. “Now I am nothing!” he roared, so loud that all heads turned in his direction. “Nothing without her!”

  “The war goes on, Poldek,” replied Adansoni, his cold words charged with passion and belief. “The war goes on. People come. Lovers go. But nothing really changes. Our loved ones? Our friends? They touch our lives briefly, like stones skimming across a pond. We will see them in the next life, of that there is no doubt. All that really matters is the war, the war against our enemies, those who wish to wrong us. Those who have wronged us, like those who have wronged you.”

  Tacit had stopped howling now. His head had sunk onto his chest, his body shaking, his dark eyes locked on the Cardinal.

  “Take up the banner again, Poldek. Make your war on those who have dared to take away everything that you thought you held safe. Make them suffer. Make them suffer double what you have suffered, every single one of them. It is your fate, Inquisitor. It is your fate.”

  And slowly, like a gathering storm, the figure seemed to grow large in the chair in which he sat. “You want a war on our enemies?” Tacit growled, suddenly fierce, his eyes wild. “I’ll give them a war.”

  NINETY-NINE

  MIDNIGHT. SATURDAY, 17 OCTOBER 1914. PARIS. FRANCE.

  They stood in the cold dark of midnight on the streets of Paris, the Inquisitor and the Sister, their eyes set on Notre Dame. The train had made its slow and painful journey south to the capital without incident or delay. An hour and a half after leaving the train, they stood before the immense gothic Cathedral.

  “Do we go in now?” asked Isabella.

  “No, we’ll never gain access at this hour, at least not quietly. It’ll all be locked. We wait until morning. First thing. Mass is at eleven. We have plenty of time to take Poré before he causes any more trouble.”

  Isabella nodded and surreptitiously moved a little closer to the Inquisitor.

  “So, any ideas where are we staying tonight? You usually have something up your sleeve.”

  “I know somewhere, but you might not like it.”

  Isabella laughed and pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders. “Tacit, it’s fine,” she said, turning her large brown eyes onto him. “After a week with you, I’m learning to lower my expectations.”

  PART SEVEN

  “If my house were not right with God, surely he would not have made with me an everlasting covenant, arranged and secured in every part; surely he would not bring to fruition my salvation and grant me my every desire.”

  Samuel 23:3

  ONE HUNDRED

  09:00. SATURDAY, 17 OCTOBER 1914. PARIS. FRANCE.

  The Sister and Inquisitor entered the Parisian Catholic residency building as the clock struck nine in the morning. There were no guards, no security, no measures to impede their entry.

  “I thought we might be stopped,” said Isabella, scurrying alongside the black-clad Tacit, as he paced across the white marble entry hall.

  “That’s good. He clearly thinks he’s clear. And no one else is involved. Just him. You,” Tacit asked abruptly a passing Priest, who appeared to have an air of superiority and importance about him. “Do you know who is staying in the apartments at the moment, and where?”

  The red-gowned priest looked his questioner up and down in surprise and shock, correcting the skull cap on his head. “I do,” he retorted, “but you’ll get no such information from me, I can assure you!”

  They bundled him silently, secretly, into a side room and Tacit effortlessly broke his wrist.

  “Next time it’s your neck. Where’s Cardinal Poré?”

  “You sure you didn’t hit him too hard?” asked Is
abella, as they reached the third floor and skipped through the door to the long corridor at the end of which, they’d been told, was Poré’s apartment.

  Tacit scowled and unholstered his revolver from his belt, checking he had all six silver rounds in place, just in case. “One thing I know, Sister, is how hard and where to hit people if you want them to stay quiet for a while, or permanently.”

  They reached the door to Poré’s suite. Tacit knocked, Isabella thought surprisingly lightly for the Inquisitor, and a voice called from within.

  “Father Gugan, you may come in. It is open.”

  Cardinal Poré was bent over his table with his back to the door. He didn’t look up but finished signing his letters as the Inquisitor and Sister stepped inside. Only when he heard the lock of the door click shut did he turn.

  “Tacit!” he hissed. “How did you …?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Cardinal,” Tacit growled, powering forward towards him. “Your little game, it’s over.”

  Poré staggered to his feet, his chair falling as he pushed away from it and the desk to put some distance between himself and the hulking Inquisitor. “How could you …?” he stammered. “Where …?”

  “We know everything, Cardinal,” Isabella warned, reaching down and picking up the chair, inserting it neatly and precisely at the desk. “Your allies are slain.”

  Poré eyes boiled in his skull. “The girl! She talked!”

  Isabella sat on the edge of the desk, her arms crossed. “It doesn’t matter how we know. All that matters is we know.”

  “What in God’s name are you up to, Poré?” demanded Tacit. The Cardinal stumbled away from him, his eyes looking furtively about the room for an escape. He staggered over to the window, but it was locked and the fall from it too dreadful to consider. “For centuries we’ve fought to conceal the truth of Hombre Lobo, of their existence. Why now? Why reveal it at all? What’s to be gained?”

  “What’s to be gained?” cried Poré, working his way around the room, his back pressed tight to the wall. And then a semblance of control gripped his face. “Instead of asking that, Inquisitor, why not ask yourself what could be lost?” He reached the door and tore at the lock. Isabella waved the key at him and his shoulders slumped in defeat. “We stand on the precipice of humanity any moment,” he began, limping forward into the room towards the pair of them, “falling headlong into a war which will engulf the whole of the world. Do I need to remind you that this war has been sanctioned, one could even use the word encouraged, by our very own Pope, Pope Pius X?”

  “Pope Pius X is dead, God rest his soul,” muttered Tacit.

  “What does that matter? For he was one of the architects who helped set in motion the wheels of war which have since swept across Russia, Austro-Hungary, Serbia and France. Such was his hatred of the Orthodox Christians that there was rarely a moment when he did not contrive to plot their destruction.”

  “You watch your tongue, Poré,” seethed the Inquisitor, drawing himself into a shape to spring at the Cardinal.

  “Come come, Inquisitor, I know you share our Pope’s dislike of that misguided group as much as many within the Catholic Church. Indeed, I do not doubt that, if you were Pope, you too would be inciting the Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary to ‘chastise the Serbians’ for their heresy against your rule and our faith. Didn’t you know, after the assassination in Sarajevo, Baron Ritter, the Bavarian representative at the Holy See, wrote to his government saying that, I quote, ‘The Pope approves of Austria’s harsh treatment of Serbia. He has no great opinion of the armies of Russia and France in the event of a war with Germany. The Cardinal Secretary of State does not see when Austria could make war if she does not decide to do so now.’”

  Cardinal Poré’s eyes flashed and he gritted his teeth, hissing, “There, there in the Pope’s very own hand was the sign given for Austro-Hungary to act and so draw the whole of Europe into a bloody war the likes of which the world has never before seen!” He thrust a finger accusatorially at Tacit, before wiping his hands on his gown and dragging the chair away from the desk, sitting himself down in it. “You don’t mind if I sit, do you? I am rather incapacitated,” he said, indicating his leg. “Of course,” he continued, from the comfort of the chair, “to speak out at such actions, at such wickedness would have brought me condemnations and undoubtedly a visit from from the Sodalitium Pianum or one of your fellow Inquisitors. It was only when he died and Benedict XI succeeded him, a Pope of kinder tones with a more determined desire for peace within Europe, that I felt I could dare to talk and share my thoughts, and so begin to put my plans into action, to attempt to undo the horror that the Catholic Church had sanctioned.

  “And I found that I was not alone in such thinking. Many came forward when they heard me speak in secret council and dialogue, and together we agreed to create a plan which would not only stop the conflict but turn back the tide of evil which we have fed too often and for too long.

  “For nearly a millennium, the Catholic Church has fought against the tide of heresy and depravation in its own chosen way. With some there is corrective therapy, namely torture, to draw confession from the accused. With others, more intensive and longer-serving methods need to be applied, such as full excommunication. I do not need to labour the point, Inquisitor. After all, you are famed for your work in upholding the integrity and the honour of the banner of Catholicism.

  “In our time, in order to ensure the prosperity of our faith, the imposition of our values and our beliefs upon the wider populace we have done – I am sure even you will agree, Tacit – some terrible things. We have also created monsters, the sorts which are spoken of only in hushed voices or with vile repugnance, told to children to keep them silent in their beds at night. Of course, these monsters we have made, we encourage that they be ridiculed in public to keep them as nothing more than a fancy, make believe for those outside the Catholic circle of knowledge.

  “Those rooted deep within the Church have achieved, with the help of authorities and governments, an excellent job in keeping our dark past and creations a secret and our current clandestine activities exactly that. Secret. You for one, Inquisitor, are an excellent example of how we have manipulated the truth to suggest you and your kind no longer exist and yet, here you are, carrying out your own Inquisition, in flesh and blood, unless you are an apparition. Are you an apparition, Tacit?” the Cardinal asked, with a cold smirk.

  “My patience is running thin, Poré. Get on with it.”

  “Should the truth of these creations ever become public, should the activities and knowledge of the Church’s meddling, both past and present, carried out by Inquisitors, Priests, Cardinals and the Holy See, ever be made public, then, well, it would be the end of the Catholic Church as we know it, perhaps even of the faith itself.”

  “So that’s it! You wish to destroy the Church!”

  “My dear Inquisitor, have you listened to nothing? The Church is not what concerns me. But its potential destruction certainly did appeal to those poor beasts you discovered outside Fampoux. It is a shame they will not see their wishes be made real. No, I have a greater target in my sights. A way to end this and all future wars, for mankind to focus in on itself and set itself to the task of defeating far darker and more insidious creatures, darker than men’s old black hearts, if that is at all possible.”

  “The wolf pelt.”

  “And at last the penny drops. Or does it? You have a vagueness about your eyes. I think I should explain further, so you are fully in the picture. The destruction of the Catholic Church is only the first step to achieving an even greater goal.”

  “The wolves! They gave the wolf pelt in exchange for their prize, the end of the Catholic Church.”

  “Peace and revenge!” cried Isabella.

  “A very neat way of putting it, Sister.”

  “The woman, Sandrine Prideux, she took the pelt from her father.”

  “Indeed, and she in turn gave it to Father Andreas.”

/>   “Who you murdered.”

  At this, Cardinal Poré’s head slipped forwards onto his chest. He drew a trembling hand to his face to hide tears which had come suddenly to his eyes.

  “I did,” he said, at length. He turned away, but almost immediately turned back to face them. “I am not a monster!” he cried, clubbing his fist against his chest. “I am not a monster,” he said again, softer this time, almost like a plea. “I did what I had to do.”

  “Yes! Murder another of the cloth,” hissed Tacit.

  The Cardinal raised an eyebrow. “And you would never do such a thing would you, Inquisitor?”

  Poré stepped slowly over to the window and looked out on the bustle of Paris below. “Yes, I killed Father Andreas. He worried so much about what he had done, what it would mean for him. He couldn’t tell me of his concerns, of course. He’d tried to, the day he died, but I knew anyway. I knew his fears without him telling me them. Eternal damnation he feared, eternal damnation for what he had done, what he was planning to do. Whilst he could appreciate the larger picture, he couldn’t tear his mind from the consequences of his actions. I knew he was a liability. He had to be silenced.”

  “You’ve no right to sit in the house of our Lord,” Tacit growled.

  “There is only one God, Inquisitor. As long as we have a faith, I am sure he does not mind at whose door we pray.”

  “You’re worse than the heretics that I have processed in the Russian mountains of Sayan!”

  “And your temper needs watching, Inquisitor. It will get you into trouble one day. Just like Father Aguillard.”