It had taken Cardinal Poré several hours to calm the chorister and an hour more to calm himself after what had taken place in the Inquisitor’s lodgings. He had never seen anything like it. He knew Inquisitors were cruel and harsh, but Tacit’s behaviour was beyond anything he would ever have expected, even from their bitter kind.
Once the shaking had worked its way out of his body and he’d tried, and failed, to understand how and why Tacit had done what he had, there were still errands to run and people to see. Only now, late into the afternoon, had Cardinal Poré found a moment to rest. The war had taken its toll, not just on those at the front line but also on those in the nearby towns and cities, caught by the seemingly wanton barrages cast their way. There were so many in his congregation who needed help, a prayer for safety, or simply a kindly word from someone who perhaps could make some sense of the madness which had been thrust upon them. Not that Poré chose to make sense of what had befallen their nation. Instead, as his eyes turned increasingly to the east towards the sounds of war and the plumes of smoke rising from blasted outposts and abandoned homesteads, he found that the grim resolve was growing ever stronger inside him.
Poré was willing to give all succour who wished it, but right now he needed just a moment’s rest in the quiet of his residence close to the Cathedral of Arras, a moment of peace and reflection, before continuing with his endeavours amongst the population of his city.
He took a little water and sat with his sad eyes upon the city before him, his mind turning from Tacit and the chorister to the many drawn faces he had looked into that day, reliving the touch of their trembling hands as he’d taken hold of them.
But nothing, not even their horror etched into their faces, could remove the image of Tacit or the outrage of his behaviour from his mind. A hatred began to catch within him, fuelled by a memory from long ago. He recalled the cruel regime under which he himself had once served, for just a short time when a boy; a terrible time of harsh voices, physical and mental abuse, the stench of leather, blood and soot, coloured only with black and flame and horror. He closed his eyes in an attempt to silence the sneering ghosts of his past, but doing so only worsened his torment, the shriek of wicked things in the dark places of the world rattling within his mind, remembering how he sobbed at his eventual expulsion from the Inquisition, the inhuman taunts from his inquisitorial teachers as he was sent from the school, the shame which forever followed him in those years after.
And then, some time later, when the Inquisitors appeared at his home calling for his mother and father to go with them, their plaintive cries of resistance, his tear-drenched pleading for them to be saved, the sharp sting as a subduing truncheon fell across the back of his head. The darkness which flooded in after he’d been hit, pulling him down into an endless blackness; he had never recovered or returned from it.
So many voices he could never silence. So many questions. Had his failings to make it as an Inquisitor led to their arrest? Had his actions, or inaction, tied his parents to those ghoulish instruments of torture? Had they been made to confess? If so, what did they confess to and what had been done to draw the confessions out? Had their torturers used fire, blades or blunt instruments?
How had they died?
Poré never discovered the charges which had been placed against his parents. He had never been given the chance to see them again, once they had been taken that day.
Their loss drove him to the very edge of madness and beyond, an overwhelming sense of responsibility and shame which, in turn and with time twisted and writhed into anger and hatred, and to the sworn promise to his dead parents that one day he would take his revenge upon the Inquisition and the faith which had created it.
Wrath bristling within him, he snatched up his scarlet zucchetto skull cap from the desk beside him and stormed from the room.