It had been a hard climb and Tacit noticed how Inquisitor Tocco was out of breath by the time they reached the summit and the yawning black of a cave. Tacit followed his teacher’s way and threw down his pack alongside Tocco’s, his eyes drawn to the dark shadows of the cave mouth.
“Do you know what lies inside?” the Inquisitor asked mischievously, setting himself down on a rock and checking the position of the sun away to their left.
Tacit swallowed and shook his head. He knew whatever it was would put up a fight. It seemed to Tacit that whatever they visited in their line of work, wherever they seemed to go, there was always something to fight, something to destroy, to extinguish, to remove from the world.
“The children of our faith,” chuckled the Inquisitor, drawing out his small bottle and taking a short sharp sip from it. He scowled and put it back into the inside pocket of his jacket, laying his head back on the rock and catching his breath. His eyes rolled in his head and for a moment Tacit thought he’d fallen asleep. “Hombre Lobo,” he said suddenly, laughing wickedly. Heavily, he lifted his head and thrust it in the direction of the cave. His hand was in his pocket and from it he pulled his revolver. He checked the mechanism and ensured the cylinder was full of silver coloured bullets. “Werewolves,” he said, looking up and seeing that Tacit appeared puzzled.
“‘Children of our faith’?” Tacit asked. “What do you mean?”
The Inquisitor sneered. “Of course you wouldn’t have been told, it’s one of the closest guarded secrets of the faith.”
“At the very beginning,” began Tocco, sweeping the dark of his hair from his forehead, “when the Inquisition was in its infancy, when its laws were first being drawn up, the Church’s enemies being recognised and its methods planned, it was quickly realised that some of the fiercest laws should be kept aside for those who failed most grievously with their faith. The ‘fallen deviants’ the Church called them, the ones who were once mighty within the Church, who were respected, revered even, before they lost their way. To our wise fore-fathers, they were thought of as the true sinners of the Church, for they had sinned in the very presence of God.
“Excommunication, casting them from the Church, was felt not enough for those who had benefitted and taken so much from the Catholic faith and repaid it so badly. Only divine retribution was considered appropriate for these damned ‘monsters’, these high ranking Catholic officials, lords and ladies, people of power, all of whom had long taken succour from the Church and then turned their backs on it when they were replete. Not only were they were cast out of the Church, but they were cast out of society to live till the end of days as the monsters they had become, forced to live their pitiful lives under the shadow of night, no longer able to venture out beneath the glare of daylight and God’s warmth, forever tormented by the desire for flesh, just as they had tormented the Lord with their greed for riches and power.”
“This is terrible,” muttered Tacit, his mouth wide. Tocco shrugged. “Do they still cast these people out in this way, still create these beasts?”
Tocco shook his head. “No. The mystics of the Church, those who hold the long forgotten knowledge and rarely venture from their libraries deep in the belly of the Vatican, they were the ones who devised the method. And, as far as I know, such rituals have been ripped from the pages of their tomes. None know how to perform the rite and it is unlikely that we could repeat their methods if we tried today.” Tocco chuckled coldly, showing chipped teeth. “But then again, why would we want to create any more of them? We spend enough of our time trying to destroy them.
Most often they gather in clans, those cast out by the most resolute of Catholic edicts far from civilisation and the mob’s persecution, together in packs plotting the downfall of those who had ensured that their own downfall had been total.
Of course, there are so many who have sinned in this way in the past and our masters of old were determined when ensuring that justice was total regarding these fallen deviants. Soon we had a problem of our own making, so many werewolves created by the Church, so many cast out by the faith, cast out by civilisation, bringing their own terror and rage to the populace near to where they settled, often in large groups, always wicked and always hungry at night. And, of course, perversely threatening the reputation and even the survival of the Catholic Church by their very existence.”
Tacit understood what Inquisitor Tocco was insinuating but waited for him to continue. “If the existence of Hombre Lobo, and how they came into being, was ever revealed, then …” He looked up at the last of the sun and blinked. “We’ve long stopped creating their type, but whilst the last of them still exist within the world, we’ll keep exterminating them.”
He slapped his thigh and stood up enthusiastically. “Hence the reason we are here. To clean up our masters’ dirty work. Remember,” Tocco said, pulling his pack onto his back, “your generation is our future. You are one of the keepers of our faith, the protectors of our ways. We look to you to uphold the faith, Tacit, and bring damnation to our enemies.” He slapped Tacit hard on the shoulder. “The world within which most people live is a falsehood. We control its secrets. We manage the direction of our faith, our Church and the way the world turns. We keep the faith strong, our prospects good and our enemies weak.”
He stood and took the small bottle out of his coat pocket again. “And after everything else, we go to war.” He toasted the sun before sipping from the bottle’s lip. “When you think about it, after nearly two thousand years, really very little has changed,” he said, before turning to face the cave with his revolver in his hand.