Tacit’s heavy coat, packed with ammunition, holy relics, lanterns and oil, weaponry, gauntlets, iron provisions and stakes, hung taut from his immense frame, tight across his shoulders, pockets bulging, the fabric of the coat so stretched that it seemed it would never return to its former shape. Every imaginable tool, apparatus, symbol and weapon had been stowed somewhere within, buried in a pocket or slipped inside a fold of the coat. The Inquisitor clinked as he walked, every footstep seeming a little bit heavier than the last.
Sister Isabella watched from the outskirts of Fampoux, her arms wrapped tight around her waist. Tacit stopped and peered into the grey skies of morning, taking in the light, as if it might be the last time he saw it. He looked back over his shoulder, to the frail dark figure in the distance. He raised a hand and held it aloft until the figure returned the farewell. He felt something he hadn’t felt before. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. It made him feel mortal, and where he was going, feeling mortal was not a good feeling to have.
He bowed his head and vanished into the yawning black of the lair.
Tacit was surprised that the stench from the passage wasn’t greater. It smelt cleaner than most werewolf caves he had visited, sweetish, with only the vague scent of rot in the air. He removed a small lantern from a deep pocket and, with a click, it sprang into life.
Bowing as he went due to his height, Tacit stepped forward, his senses alert to the smallest movement, the lightest of noises. His right hand he held out to the side of him, his fingers wide, almost like a counterbalance to the rest of his bulk, ready to spring forward, to move sharply to the side. He felt his revolver knock against his thigh and the silver bolted crossbow against his rib cage. There was no need to draw these weapons yet. The wolves would be sleeping, slumbering in human form. Daytime was the only time one could attempt an extermination. Night assaults on werewolf lairs weren’t called ‘Hombre Lunatic Assaults’ for nothing. They were carried out in only the most urgent of cases.
Tacit stopped and bent down. The ground here was churned, not the pathway cut by a multitude of wolf paws but by a body that had fallen and had struggled back to its feet. The sides of the pathway showed where it had floundered. Tacit reached up and felt the lip in the ceiling of the cave. There was a residue of blood on it. So the British had come this way and unleashed the creatures. Tacit shook his head and cursed. Mankind’s inquisitiveness. It would be the death of us.
The passage turned to the right and then widened to a cavern, deep and widely cut. The stench from this cavern was greater than in the corridor and quickly Tacit saw why, a multitude of bones, piled high and cast about the floor, gnawed and snapped open for the nutritious marrow inside. But there was an even greater stench coming from the way beyond, like an animal’s cage uncleaned for a thousand years. Its smell stuck in his throat. It came from the dark yawning archway beyond. Without hesitation, Tacit raised the lantern and stepped towards it.
It was a wide and well trodden tunnel. The cavern through which he had just passed was an outpost, he guessed, a place to gather to listen to the village, or perhaps somewhere where the villagers would bring offerings and sustenance to the clan. It was well known that people living close to wolf clans would bring them offerings as a way to appease them, to encourage them to look elsewhere, an ineffective ruse to try and deflect their hunger. Tacit shook his head disdainfully and strode on. Little did people know that when their rage came, wolves would look for food wherever their senses told them food was to be found. No offerings would, or could, appease them, not in Tacit’s opinion. Leaving offerings was as effective as telling a circling shark that you couldn’t swim.
The passageway ran downwards, curving down, down into the chalky earth. There were ruts in the ground, up and down where wolves had passed for countless decades, maybe longer. Tacit went slowly, knowing that a slip might be fatal, his hand on the wall, his feet feeling his way forward. The passage began to level out, turning slowly around to the right. Now there were corridors, running off from the main passageway, giving the underground network a labyrinthine feel. Tacit stuck his head down each he passed and sniffed, but each time he turned back to the main corridor and continued along it. There was a strong smell of excretion and evisceration down these side passageways, in part oddly familiar. Whilst the wolves were monsters, they were still part human. Tacit was heading where the air was less rancid, the stench less foul. To the heart of their clan.
There was a cry from the tunnels ahead, a lonesome mournful cry, full of pity and sorrow. Tacit stopped and listened. He wondered if they knew he was coming. When he fought werewolves during daylight hours before, often they would lie down before him as he executed them one by one, as if relieved that the end had come. It gave Tacit no joy at giving them their final relief. In many ways he felt he was betraying his Church by ending their curse ahead of God’s allotted time. But increasingly, the worry that the truth behind the existence of wolves, that they’d been created by the Catholic Church’s meddling, might somehow find its way out into the wider population, had caused the Church to make executions a necessity to keep the wolves’ secret remaining just that. Secret and unspoken. The problem was the Church had been so busy throughout the many centuries it had cursed and condemned that the werewolves were so many.
The Inquisitor walked on, but now his hand was on the handle of his holstered gun. Just in case.
Ahead the passageway stopped and opened wide into a vast cavern. The heart of the clan. Tacit could see a multitude of shadows moving within it, wretchedly thin and foul looking figures, slinking away from the lantern light, broken and desperate souls weeping and creeping away as the Inquisitor entered. Had Tacit had a heart for the putrid creatures, he would have wept at their pathetic existence. As it was, they filled him with loathing and revulsion as he stood at the doorway of the passageway and cried, in a voice darker than pitch, “Hombre Lobo! My name is Inquisitor Tacit! For your crimes against the church you have lived out your pitiful wretched existence down here in the bowels of the earth. I am here to end your suffering. This sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it. Consider this your redemption!”
A few of the figures howled and cried out, slapping themselves about the face and body, whether in joy or torment Tacit did not know. But the Inquisitor was surprised. He had expected more of a reaction from the clan, knowing that their end was nigh. Instead, most stared at him in silence, with their hollow, grey eyes, staring, unmoving. Suddenly one of the figures drew itself out of the crowd, more wretched and broken than any of the others. He looked as old as the hills and rotten within his very soul. He limped forward and kneeled in the very centre of the hall, his head bowed, as if awaiting his execution.
Tacit’s eyes flittered around the cavern. He sensed a trap. The silence was too great, the wolves’ subservience too apparent. He took out his silver revolver and held it up, the cylinder facing the wolves, to show he was armed and armed appropriately. Silver was the only weapon of use against the wolf, silver like that of the moonbeams which so confounded them in the dead of night. One or two of them again wept at the weapon’s appearance, but the rest sat and eyed the Inquisitor with a melancholy quiet.
For several moments Tacit held the gun in the air, waiting for anything which confirmed a trap, a reaction, a muttering, a sudden movement. But all the massed wolves, thirty or forty of them, sat staring at him, unmoving.
“Hmm,” muttered Tacit, and for once he was at a loss. But there was nothing else for it. He stepped forward towards the human wolf kneeling before him. He lowered the revolver at the rank head of the creature and cocked the hammer.
And it was then that all hell broke loose. From every angle, the wolves leapt. Tacit turned and fired twice, two wolves cartwheeling backwards, dead in the air, then ground under foot by the hordes of others bearing down on him. Within the maelstrom of bodies, Tacit’s lantern was lost, darkness enveloping him. He struck a figure square in the face, breaking his jaw and sending him sprawling. He got a thumb into an eye socket of another and dug deep, pressing through the eye ball and into the brain beyond. But there were too many hands on him, hard fingers groping and striking, pinning him down. He butted another figure in the nose and sent it reeling backwards but, unable to fight against the tide of wretchedness, his limbs were spread and his face was pushed firm into the rancid dirt of the cavern. And then a hard sharp object struck the back of his head and everything went black.