Cardinal Black

by Robert McCammon

Near the peak of their ascent they could see the black beams of the roof and another huge hole where a portion of it had given way. Then they were at the top, in a circular room with more loopholes in the walls…and both Matthew and Devane were struck to silence because in this realm of Satan they were not the only bodies here.

  The child was—had been—maybe six years old. A boy fair-haired, fair-skinned, now nude, the brown eyes still open in shock, the wrists and ankles bound by twine, the flesh around the gaping wound in the chest dark blue with the violence of the cutting. Upon the child’s forehead was another cutting: the inverted Devil’s Cross that Cardinal Black was so fond of inflicting upon his victims. On the floor there was a sheen of dried blood and a clay bowl with the charred remnants of what Matthew knew had to have been the child’s heart. Around the bowl were several burned candle stubs stuck to the floor. And upon the walls…

  “Hm,” said Devane, a sound of judgement even from one so damned as himself.

  Upon the walls were strange symbols scrawled in the child’s blood. And not just a few, but an outpouring of communication to the cardinal’s deity. Through his daze of revulsion and the sickness in his stomach Matthew recalled that Black was of a freakish frame, being extraordinarily thin and stretched to the height of six-five or thereabouts, his face and long-nailed hands also stretched to disturbing dimensions. With that height Black had been able to reach the top of the walls, and so there too were the symbols—thousands of them, it seemed, overlapping, bleeding together, running down in gory rivulets, a mad novel from a demoniac author, a paean of devotion to the father of Mother Deare’s ‘father’.

  “Steel yourself,” Devane said, when Matthew turned away to breathe cleaner air through a hole in the wall. Devane stood over the body. “Interesting,” he said, as one might remark while looking at a crushed insect. “Human sacrifice to Satan,” he continued. “Quite a fellow who’s got that book of poisons.”

  “A fellow? Is that all you have to say?”

  “I don’t mourn the dead, Corbett. They have left a troubled world. And while this to you is a terrible sight, I have seen worse. You might also, before this is over. It might be your own heart cut from your chest while you’re still alive.”

  Matthew was about to reply—to say what, he wasn’t sure—when he realized that through the hole admitting cleaner air was also the sight of a village at the bottom of the cliffs, nestled against the sea. “I’m looking at Adderlane,” he said.

  Devane pushed him aside. The spyglass came up.

  “Well?” Matthew prompted.

  “A Welsh fishing village, a harbor, some fishing boats and poor hovels…not much else, and no activity I can see.” He moved the glass’s view further out toward the ocean. “No mortar ship in sight. Nothing out there. I think they’re long gone.”

  Matthew had been afraid of this; he released the breath in a hiss between his teeth, biting down also on the flare of panic that jumped up within him.

  Devane closed the spyglass with a sharp pop. “What’s the plan?” When Matthew failed to respond: “You do have a plan, don’t you?”

  Matthew again did not answer, because he had none…neither answer nor plan.

  “I see,” said Devane, both silkily and flatly. “We have come this way—myself following your wishes, as I vowed to the professor—to find a dead end, and no further plan in mind. Which was your responsibility, I believe. And here I thought you cared enough about the girl to really help her…but I see I was mistaken, and—” He stopped, because Matthew had turned away from his view of Adderlane, his cheeks had reddened and he had heard as much as he could stand to hear.

  “My plan,” Matthew said, grasping at whatever straws he might find in his windblown brain, “is to ride down to that village and find out exactly if they’ve gone or not, when they left and how they departed if indeed they are gone. You can’t tell for certain by looking through that glass. I intend to know, not guess.”

  “You intend to ride down there to your death, is what,” Devane retorted. “But I say Cardinal Black and his gang are gone. There are no boats in that harbor big enough to carry more than two or three men, and if you’ll recall one of the men we captured told us that Black’s people were soon to be moving out by coach, horse and ship. The ship has evidently already sailed, and with it I’m sure Cardinal Black and the book you’re wanting.”

  For an instant Matthew thought he felt the entire watchtower swaying. In desperation he reached out to touch a bloodied wall and keep himself from pitching to his knees.

  “A sad sight,” said Julian Devane. “And I had assumed you were so smart.”

  Matthew lifted his own cool gray eyes to Devane’s colder gaze. “I’m going down to that village. Come with me or not. I release you from your vow.”

  “Oh, certainly! But you’re not the professor, Corbett…so you cannot release me.”

  “Suit yourself. I’m going.” Matthew dared not give another glance at the child’s corpse, for he indeed did intend to steel himself for the task ahead and he felt his foundations turning to

  wet paper. He got out of the circular room, down the series of staircases and out of the damned watchtower. They went to the horses in silence, untied the mounts from the thicket in silence still, and with Matthew in the lead they trotted toward Adderlane and whatever the fates held in store.

  four.

  It was not much of a village, but it faced a decent harbor where seven or eight fishing boats were docked at a wharf, nets were hung up to dry and sails were stretched out in the process of being mended. Evidently, Matthew thought, Adderlane’s fishing routines had been interrupted by the visitors and were yet stalled by the shock of having Cardinal Black in their presence.

  As Matthew’s and Devane’s horses entered the single dirt road between the unpainted houses, first one and then another and another of the folk began to cautiously emerge, some holding axes, shovels, and whatever else could be used as weapons. A group of a half-dozen men came out of a larger structure that might have been a meeting hall. Two of them held muskets that took aim at the new arrivals, though one musketeer looked to be near eighty and the other a boy of about fourteen, both of them almost quivering in their boots.

  “Hold your fire!” Devane commanded, in a voice that must’ve resonated from one side of the village to another. “We’re friends, not enemies!” he said. And added: “Not like your last gang of visitors.”

  The boy’s musket lowered a few inches but the elder’s stayed fixed. “You say!” the codger growled. He had a face that made the stones of the watchtower appear smooth, and his wild white hair was a snowy forest in chaos. “Who the Devil are you and what are you wantin’?”

  “Information only,” Matthew spoke up. “May I dismount without being shot?”

  “Watch ’em, Eurig!” said one of the other men who was armed with a pitchfork. There was a grumble of assent, and a brown-bearded man with huge shoulders stepped forward to take the musket from the boy and steady its aim at the horsemen.

  “Step down!” Eurig decided after another few seconds. “Easy, like!”

  Matthew did, and so too did Devane, who took up a position well behind the young—and in his estimation—idiot.

  “Your village was raided in the last few days, yes?” Matthew prompted.

  “Raided and ravaged. Those men…they weren’t human, as we know humans to be.”

  “Especially not the tall one, the one in charge,” said the bearded gent with the second musket. He had a voice like a saw on granite. “They called him Cardinal Black. It was a blasphemy, is what it was.”

  “Agreed, but they raided another village a few miles further down the coast last night,” Matthew said. “We’ve come from there.”

  “The place that’s sealed and guarded like a fort.” It was a statement. Eurig’s thick white eyebrows went up. “I suspect nothin’ good goes on there.�
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  “Point well taken, sir…but other matters are pressing. When did Cardinal Black leave, and by what means?”

  “The early hours after midnight, by that big ship they come in. Twelve of ’em went with him. The other six left in two coaches.”

  “There was a second ship, anchored further out to sea?” Matthew asked.

  Eurig nodded. “One just as big as the other. That one out to sea left last night and didn’t come back. Black and most of the others rode out after dark but they left five men here with guns and everybody was herded into Caffrey’s barn. Then we heard the thunder and I figured it to be cannonfire ’cause that ship looked to me like a man-o’-war. We all watched the other ship go, and thank God. Lord be praised they didn’t kill more than three of our folk.”

  “Killed them? Why?”

  “Chose three at gunpoint the night they got here: Brennan Owain, John Lyles the school teacher and Kendall Griffin, a goodly woman and mother to four children. Shot ’em down by the wharf and rolled their bodies on over. Rolled ’em over so we’d have to drag up what was left to have a Christian burial. That ‘cardinal’ said it was to show they would kill everybody here if we tried to fight ’em, or if any one of their men was hurt.” Eurig at last lowered his musket. “Some couldn’t watch it, but I did. Me and Gregor.” He glanced at the bearded man. “Tell ’em what they done to the bodies ’fore they rolled ’em.”

  “I already know,” said Matthew. “Cardinal Black cut a Devil’s Cross in their foreheads and likely spoke some kind of a ritual over them. Is that correct?”

  “My boy!” a woman suddenly screamed beyond the knot of onlookers. “My boy! Lord God, my boy!”

  Through the group pushed a woman maybe in her late thirties, but gaunt and hardened by her way of life and circumstances, her hair already streaked with gray and her eyes swollen by tears. “My boy!” she cried out. “Where’s my Gavin?”

  Another man, about her age and just as time-worn, had been right at her heels and now he grasped at her arm but she shook free and cast a look of horrible imploring at Matthew and Devane. “They took my little one! My Gavin! Where’s my boy? Please…can you find him for me?”

  “Ariana, come on,” the man said, trying to be of comfort, but she was having none of it.

  “My boy!” she shrieked, and this time the fresh tears streamed down through the gullies of her face. “Oh Lord my boy!”

  “SHUT HER UP!”

  The voice behind Matthew was not Devane’s…or, at least, it was not the Julian Devane he had known to this moment. His shout had been one of an unnerved man calling out for something Matthew could not yet understand…whatever it was, it was much more than demanding a desperate woman cease screaming for her son.

  “My Gavin, my boy!” she went on, a keening cry. “Please help me—”

  Suddenly Devane shoved past Matthew. He had the four-barrelled pistol in his hand. “Shut her up or I will!” he shouted, his voice ragged and a look of sheer panic on his pallid face. She instantly went silent. “Put down that musket!” he told Gregor. “Do it now!”

  Gregor hesitated. Matthew saw Devane’s finger start to curl around one of the sets of triggers. Two balls at this range would be sheer murder.

  Devane had put his sword back into the scabbard at his side. Matthew grasped the handle, drew it out and had no choice but to step between Devane and Gregor and, striding forward with absolute foolish bravado, place the point of the sword under Gregor’s chin.

  “You heard him,” said Matthew.

  The musket dropped to the earth.

  “Gavin!” the woman shouted to the wind. “My boy! Come home! Please come—”

  “Your boy’s lying dead up there in the watchtower!” Devane shouted back. His voice cracked, and it was a few more seconds before he spoke again. In those seconds Matthew heard the woman draw a terrible breath and he thought he could drive this sword through Devane and sleep soundly for it. “Dead!” Devane went on. “They took him up there and killed him! So one of you fine men go get him and bring him home for the lady, won’t you?”

  No one moved or spoke. Matthew saw Gregor wanting to go for the musket so he kept the sword where it was. Eurig didn’t try to raise his gun; he was slope-shouldered, weary and beaten.

  “What?” Ariana’s voice had become a ghost of a whisper. The wind moved her hair, and that was all that moved. And again, even more agonized: “What?”

  “Take her away from here,” Devane said to the man at Ariana’s side, and this time she allowed him to lead her, stumbling and silent in her grief, off the street.

  “You’ve seen the body?” Eurig asked after the woman had gone.

  “We have. Now I’m asking some questions,” Devane said, and he kept the pistol at his side as he walked past Matthew and stood almost face-to-face with the old man. He had quickly regained his composure, but Matthew still heard a strange weakened note in his voice. “The two ships. What flags did they fly?”

  “Royal Navy. And sure I know the white St. George’s ensign when I see it.”

  “What direction did the ship carrying the cardinal go?”

  “South,” said Eurig. “Hardly any lamps on her, but I marked it.”

  “Why did that bastard kill Gavin James?” another man in the group of villagers asked. “What were you doin’ up at the tower, anyway?”

  Devane ignored him and kept his focus on Eurig. “How many masts on the ship?”

  “A three-master. Runnin’ full sail when they set off.”

  Devane’s gaze moved past the old man toward the wharf. He tapped his chin with the barrels of his pistol, and Matthew could see the gears working in his brain. Matthew already knew: Cardinal Black and twelve men, headed south in a triple-masted ship flying a Royal Navy ensign of the white fleet…it would be impossible to tell where they were headed, and yet…

  Devane voiced it before he could: “I wonder where a stolen pair of large ships might find anchorage. And Black’s not solely behind this. As incredible as I find it to be, he had to have help from within the shipyard to get those vessels. I’ll wager someone with high authority is backing this entire enterprise.”

  “Little good that wager does us,” said Matthew.

  Devane turned upon him. “Are you a gambler?” He went on without waiting for a response. “Strike that. Of course you are, or you wouldn’t be standing here. Well, Corbett…if you wish to at least try to concoct a decent plan of action, we’re to take a sea voyage.” He stalked onward, parting the onlookers with a wave of his pistol. Matthew was torn whether or not to keep the sword at Gregor’s throat; instead he picked up the man’s musket and carried it with him to follow Devane to the wharf.

  The dark sea sucked and gurgled around the old pilings and the boats tied there groaned in their sleep. Matthew could smell a generation of fish brought up in the nets that hung on their wooden drying racks. Some of the boats at rope were nothing more than oversized barrels outfitted with rowlocks. Two of them, though, were larger than the others, about twelve feet in length with a single mast, but both of those looked to have been beaten nearly to death by a sea insulted at their presence.

  “Wreckage, one and all,” said Devane. He gave a heavy sigh. “Can you sail? No matter, I can.”

  “I can hold my own. What are you thinking?”

  “Black gave time for Mother Deare to meet him at the tower, as they’d planned, but when she didn’t show he knew she wasn’t coming. Therefore it was time to take his book and his men and leave. South takes him away from Wales. The only thing to do is set sail and follow.”

  Matthew nodded. He understood Devane’s meaning. The two Royal Navy ships would be difficult to hide. Black must have a place already set for him…a secluded cove or harbor that could only be discovered by sea. The only course possible would be to try to find it. And there again was the pressure of time and Matthew’s feeli
ng that indeed in this gamble the cards were against both himself and Berry. But still…it had to be played out, for there was no turning back.

  Devane spent a moment inspecting both of the decrepit single-masters. Matthew joined him when he returned to the group of men, who had advanced upon them but not raised their makeshift weapons. Devane walked past them and retrieved his saddlebag, and then he looked about in search of something. Seeing the village’s well he took from the bag the small clay jug he had already uncorked several times during the journey but had not offered a drop of water to his companion. He said, “Fill this up,” and tossed it to Matthew. While Matthew reeled the well’s bucket up, Devane put the saddlebag over his shoulder and, pistol still in hand, walked back to face old Eurig.

  “We’re taking the boat with the mummified pig’s snout nailed to the mast,” he announced. “I assume that’s someone’s idea of a good luck charm?”

  “Nossir, you ain’t takin’ my boat!” cried out a slim and wiry fisherman with close-cropped gray hair and a face as dangerous as the axe he held. “That’s my livin’!”

  “Consider the trade,” Devane said. “Our—”

  “To Hell with you!” His eyes fierce, the man lifted the axe and stalked forward.

  At the well Matthew jumped with the blast of the double pistol shot.

  The man went down, the axe lost as he was grabbing for his right thigh. Blood had exploded from the wound and spattered some of the men who stood behind. Devane stood in the roiling blue smoke watching the man writhe on the ground, his face expressionless.

  “Best tend to him,” Devane said to no one in particular. Then: “Matthew! You done?”

  “Did you have to do that?” Eurig scowled, as Gregor and a couple of the villagers bent down to pick up the groaning man and carry him away. “It was a damnable thing!”

  “I have no time to argue. He was too stupid to realize we’re leaving a pair of fine horses and tack as payment for his boat. And if anyone raises an axe to me,” said Devane, “he is as good as dead, so if that fool survives he can count himself lucky…even without the pig’s snout.”