Cardinal Black

by Robert McCammon

  Slowly, Hudson lowered the knife; there was no sense in stabbing the man in the heart for two reasons: Professor Fell had no heart, and his own death would be immediate and equally senseless. Anyway…he was still hungry, and he was going to force himself to eat. Keeping it down later might be a different kettle. “You mean to tell me,” he said, his throat dry, “that only Matthew and one other man have gone on a raid? How many men does Black have?”

  “Many. We killed a few and caught a few. But…many remain, I suspect.”

  “Gone three days? And not a word?”

  “I wouldn’t expect a letter anytime soon,” said Fell. “The post out here is not dependable.”

  Hudson came so close to overturning the table that he broke out in a sweat and saw a few black spiders running across his hands.

  “We made an agreement,” said Fell. “If I let Matthew go to bring back the book, he agreed to find for me a man for whom I have been searching many years. I believe that man is somewhere in Italy. Who he is and what he has that I desire does not concern you.” Fell’s chin lifted a fraction, as if defying Hudson before the other man could object or question. “It is my sincere wish—hope—that Matthew does indeed find Cardinal Black, and that he and Julian can wrest that book from him and bring back a chemist to produce the antidote for Miss Grigsby. When—if—that happens, I have agreed to return you and the young lady to New York, and Matthew will be free to act on my accord.”

  “A great plan!” said Hudson, with a steaming dollop of sarcasm. “Well, what do you know about this Cardinal Black?”

  “He’s a demoniac and has so far murdered a score of people. His mark is leaving a Devil’s Cross carved into the foreheads of his victims.”

  “Oh, is that all? Didn’t Matthew take a Bible to beat his brains out with?” Hudson wrung his hands to make the spiders whirl away. “Lunacy!” he nearly shouted. “That boy’s no match for a murderous demoniac!”

  “Really?” Fell gave a short, sharp laugh, though his expression remained grimly solemn. “That boy has bested the gang of men I sent to New York to create a school for future talent, he caused the death of Tyranthus Slaughter, he finished off the Thacker brothers and destroyed my home and most of Pendulum Island, he stole from me the very valuable Minx Cutter, and the Devil only knows what else he’s done…and you say the boy’s no match for this Cardinal Black? Bite your tongue, sir! I say again…bite your tongue!”

  Hudson had heard a quaver in Fell’s voice. Perhaps it was as vitally important to him that Matthew return, as much as it was vitally important for Matthew to provide an antidote to Berry’s decline. Hudson had the thought also that Berry was not the only one in decline; if this Cardinal Black had turned Mother Deare against the professor and dared to strike Fell so directly, then it seemed other sharks in the sea were smelling the blood of a weakened old man.

  Hudson took a slug of his wine that emptied the glass. Weakened or not, right now Fell was in command. “What am I supposed to do while we’re waiting for Matthew to come back?”

  “You’re to mind your manners. We’ll put you to work rebuilding the structures that were damaged, if you’re willing. Such effort will secure you a decent bed and some privileges that I have yet to decide upon.”

  “And what about Berry? How do I know those two won’t…you know…take advantage of her condition?”

  “Nash’s wife needed a replacement for her unfortunately deceased daughter,” Fell answered. “I understand it greatly benefits her own state of mind. I can also assure you that Frederick may be many things but he won’t do what you’re thinking. I’ve already broached that subject with him and told him that—mayor of this village or not—he is risking his head if I get a whiff of impropriety…and I have others checking on her, you may be sure.”

  “I don’t think I can be sure of any damn thing,” Hudson said, with as fierce a scowl as he could conjure.

  “Well…I thought you might have that attitude.” Fell reached into an inner pocket of his robe and brought out two small cards. He held them up so Hudson could see the fingerprint impressed in dried blood on each. “Do you know what these are? I’m sure you do, working with Katherine Herrald as you have. As I told Matthew, I have intended to send these to two people both you and he know—Gardiner Lillehorne and Minx Cutter—for their transgressions against me. The reality is that I presently have no messenger to spare to get these on their way, and I have—as you realize—more important matters on my plate. Therefore, as a gesture of good faith—” He didn’t finish the sentence, but instead held first one card and then the other over the flame of the nearest taper. When the flames had consumed the blood cards nearly to his fingers he dropped the charred remnants into his soup bowl, where they hissed like little snakes.

  “What say you?” Fell asked.

  Hudson thought about it for a moment. God help Matthew out there in the wilds…and with one of Fell’s killers at his side, too. Time was of the essence for Berry…but how the hell was the boy—no, the man—going to get that book of potions and a chemist away from a murderous demoniac—Satanist, to be exact—who had gathered a gang of probably like-minded deviates?

  Damn, he thought. This was not just a pickle, it was the whole barrel.

  But at the moment, in these circumstances, there was only one utterance that made sense.

  Hudson held his glass up and said, “Pass the bottle down here.”

  three.

  3 Days Previously…

  In the distance, many miles away, stood a line of blue-hazed mountains. For several hundred yards around Fell’s village the land was an unsightly morass of dark gray bogs streaked with brown and yellow, patches of knee-high grass likely hiding quicksand pits, and a few scraggly wind-sculpted trees reaching up as if for mercy from the brutal earth. The road that stretched from southeast to northwest was no more than a hardly recognizable track across the ground. Ahead, in the direction the two riders must travel, the track curved into forest.

  They had gone only a short distance when Julian Devane reined his horse in and turned the animal to block Matthew’s progress.

  The purple knot above Devane’s right eye had receded somewhat but the mottling of bruises had merged together to form a dark patch across his left cheekbone, both painful memories of the violence of Cardinal Black’s raid on Y Beautiful Bedd. Devane’s mouth curled when he said, “You’re well aware that this is a suicide mission, are you not?”

  “I’m aware it’s a mission,” Matthew replied. “I don’t consider it suicidal.”

  “Then you’re a bigger idiot than I suspected. And here you’ve dragged me into it!” He reached into his black cloak with an equally black-gloved hand and brought out a pistol that had four short barrels, two atop two, and double triggers; obviously, Matthew thought, the sword that Devane wore in a scabbard at his side did not possess enough deadly power to suit him. “Should I kill you now or later, and tell the professor this was a fool’s errand?” came the question.

  “It should be later,” Matthew said calmly. “The guards up on the parapets could likely hear the shot from this distance.”

  Devane urged his horse forward until he was side-by-side with Matthew. The sun faded;

  the ironwork of clouds had arrived.

  “Hear me well, Corbett,” Devane said. “I don’t like you, I don’t like this damned circumstance you’ve gotten me into, and if I somehow survive it I will make you pay. But I will do this to the best of my ability, because I’ve given my word and I abide by that rule. I have killed many, and most of those deaths I enjoyed dealing out. If I have to kill you, I will…and you have my word on that. Understand?”

  “Without question,” said Matthew.

  “I am the bad man,” Devane said. “Just so you know.”

  Again without question, Matthew thought, but he remained silent.

  Then Devane put his gun away and wh
eeled his horse toward the northwest. Matthew gave his mount a flick of the reins and followed behind, his resolve ready for both saving the woman he loved and meting out justice to the killer behind the deaths of his brother and sister Black-Eyed Broodies, as he’d vowed to a lost friend. He was wearing black leather gloves the professor had given him, but he was always aware of the tattoo of a stylized eye within a black circle, embossed between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, reminding him that he was the last of the Broodies, and for the kindness they’d shown him—rough kindness, but kindness nonetheless when he needed shelter and friends—the loyalty oath he’d taken was not to be shrugged off and tossed aside like an old cloak.

  They went on along the road, the good and the bad across the ugly landscape.

  It was hard for Matthew to concentrate on the task ahead, because of Berry’s condition, but concentrate he must because of her condition. If he had his druthers he would kick his horse into a gallop to get where they were going, but his sense of logic told him it might very well be galloping into a trap, and getting killed so soon on Cardinal Black’s trail would not bring Berry back from the land of the lost.

  It was equally difficult to keep his own heart from galloping. He knew their destination, from what Cardinal Black had said to Mother Deare before commending the souls of both Matthew and William Atherton Archer to the Devil: I will meet you at the tower. And then information was added by one of Black’s men taken during the raid: he thought it was a medieval watchtower in the forest about a half-mile this side of Adderlane. A place, the man had said, where Black went to commune with Satan.

  Matthew had to determine himself to relax in the saddle, because his mount was feeling his demons of demand and was jumpy under the bit. He pulled his gray cloak tighter around his neck and shoulders, for with the disappearance of the sun behind the vault of clouds the air had chilled. He knew it did no good for him to mentally pontificate about the future of this mission and the results of failure, and therefore he had to concentrate not on the moments ahead but upon the moment at hand.

  Take Julian Devane, for instance. Matthew was curious about how any sane man wound up in the employ of Professor Danton Idris Fell. “What’s your story?” Matthew asked, and waited for a reply that would seem as chilly as the wind.

  It was a long time coming, and indeed was laced with ice: “None of your damned business.”

  “I thought it might be beneficial to know who I was teamed with.”

  “A fool teamed with a fool,” Devane said. “Now shut your mouth and give me peace.”

  Peace, Matthew mused, was likely the one thing this man could never find. For all his criminal tendencies, Devane carried himself with an aristocratic air. One could tell a man’s bearing—and education—by the way he sat astride and handled a horse, and Matthew was certain from his observations that Devane did not come from the school of the gutter. Under that rakishly tilted dark green tricorn was a brain, and not simply one that served as an automaton for the professor or had been for the recently deceased Mother Deare. No mere henchman was Julian Devane, and again Matthew wondered what the man’s history was. He figured Devane to be maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, only two or three years elder than Matthew, who had turned twenty-four the previous May, which seemed eons ago here on the eve of 1704 and was not recalled as a very merry month. Since his adventure in the Carolina colony concerning the River Of Souls, time had been both a whirl and a disturbance. There was of course a period in which his memory had been lost until he had awakened on a ship bound for England as both a “servant” and a prisoner to that hideous Prussian swordsman, Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren, and the Devil must be lamenting that man’s arrival to muddy up the pretty red walls of Hell. Then it was into Newgate prison for Matthew, his association with the Black-Eyed Broodies and the avenger Albion, and now…

  Now this.

  He watched the line of forest grow closer across the windswept, yellow-grassed moors. There was nothing to do but to allow his horse to move toward the future at what was for him a plodding pace. He was no stranger to the dangers of whatever the future might hold; as a member of the Herrald Agency and in New York a “problem-solver” he had already survived many dangers to arrive at this moment in time. Matthew was tall and slim, with a lean, long-jawed face and cool gray eyes that held hints of twilight blue. His thatch of thick black hair was protected from the wind and cold by a dark blue tricorn; other presents given to him by Professor Fell were a pistol and a powderflask in a holster at his waist, along with an ivory-handled dagger that had belonged to Albion. Matthew’s pale countenance bespoke his intellectual qualities of reading and chess-playing, both of which had aided his educational progress from his upbringing in a New York orphanage. One lasting mark of his journey through an uncertain and certainly demanding life was a crescent scar that curved from just above the right eyebrow into his hairline, the reminder of his nearly fatal encounter with a bear four years ago.

  A few lengths ahead, Devane’s horse moved at a steady walk. Matthew mused that the man wore his black cloak like an emperor’s tunic, and his polished black boots were equipped with sharp little spurs. Devane was blonde-haired and handsome, with a chiseled and clean-cut face, and Matthew knew from their first meeting that Devane could be boyishly charming when he wasn’t puffed up with the villainy that he seemed to like to wear as much as the green tricorn. There was a story in Devane, but whatever it was, Matthew thought that it was well-hidden and well-protected.

  The horses went on. The wind shrilled around the riders. The road—such as it was, really a track through the grasses avoiding the belchy bogs—curved toward cliffs overlooking the turbulent sea, and then entered the darksome woods.

  Beneath the gnarled branches of interlocked trees the two riders continued onward, the already-meager sunlight further cut to a gray haze. Crows cawed from a distance; that, the thump of the horses’ hooves on the dirt, and the occasional keening of the wind were the only sounds. Devane trudged his horse forward, the gloomy forest closed in, and Matthew grappled again with the gnawing feeling that time was the enemy as much as was Cardinal Black.

  After the passage of nearly two hours—enough to make Matthew’s tailbone sore and move the sun like a smear across the sky—Devane suddenly reined his horse in and quietly said, “There.” He pointed toward a narrow break between the trees. Matthew could see against the slice of solemn clouds a stone watchtower perhaps sixty feet tall, set upon a forested ridge another fifty feet up. “A mile or so to the base of the ridge, then maybe another half-mile,” Devane calculated. Without a further word he urged his horse into a walk, and Matthew flicked his mount’s reins and followed.

  From time to time Matthew caught sight of the watchtower through the trees; the structure had a conical roof turned ebony by the elements, and set in the stone sides at different elevations were small loopholes from which could be fired arrows or ancient hand cannons. It looked to him like part of the roof had caved in and a section of stones had given way and fallen out about forty feet up, but otherwise it was still a formidable defense position. Of signs of life there were none…which worried Matthew more than seeing Black’s soldiers manning the loops.

  Their horses left the forest road for a rougher trail up the ridge. The watchtower loomed nearer. Matthew noted that Devane had brought his four-barrelled pistol out from the folds of his cloak and held it across the saddle in front of him, his hand upon the ugly weapon like the touch of a priest’s blessing on a child’s brow. Matthew had no doubt the gun had more than once been Julian Devane’s salvation.

  Further along they came to a wall of rough stones about five feet high, wracked by time and nearly enveloped by brown weeds and thorny thicket. They were nearly under the watchtower, and yet had seen no movement other than the scurrying of a hare and two deer bounding away side-by-side. An opening in the wall was wide enough for a single man to pass through, but not a horse.


  Devane swung himself down, his hand still on the pistol. “We walk from here,” he said, and reaching into his saddlebag that contained the supplies of ammunition, flints, pieces of dried and salted fish and beef wrapped up in waxed paper, he withdrew a spyglass. He opened the glass to its optimal position and aimed it up at the tower. After a moment of study he closed the glass but kept it in hand. “Tie your horse up,” he directed. And then: “Ready your pistol, you might need—” He stopped, because Matthew already had it out, and readied.

  They secured their horses in the thicket. With his pistol at his side Matthew followed Devane through the opening into another area of overgrown brush, yet there was a path of sorts through the tangle. Here and there stood piles of stone rubble and the occasional single slab that indicated the foundations of whatever had once stood here. “Quiet,” Devane cautioned, though Matthew was making no noise. They wound their way through the ruins, still climbing. Presently the land straightened out at the top of the ridge and there before them, surrounded by chunks of stone that had fallen from the time-worn tower, was an open doorway.

  “All right,” said Devane, as if speaking to a spirit of protection Matthew could not see. He entered the tower, with Matthew two paces behind.

  The dank interior offered a staircase, the risers worn thin and smooth by ancient medieval boots. Up and up Devane and Matthew climbed, passing several platforms from which the loopholes could be defended. The wind churned within through gaping holes in the walls, the one at forty feet large enough to fit a carriage if a carriage could be hauled by winged horses.