Tacit was aware of a stinging pain in his head and the smell of wet coals in his nostrils. He could feel the damp of earth on his cheek and forehead. His mouth was dry, fouled with the metallic taste of blood. He grunted and tried to move. Hard fingers and hands held him down. He opened an eye. There was a fire in the middle of the cavern around which the filthy pallid clan of human wolves had congregated, watching the Inquisitor from a distance. When he stirred there was a hooting and crying from the assembled.
Bony fingers caught hold of his hair and pulled his head up from the ground, almost breaking his neck by the severity of the tug.
“So, the Inquisitor awakes,” Angulsac muttered, stepping forward from the throng of gruesome white bodies, more like maggots with limbs than the men they must once have been. Angulsac’s matted black hair hung in lank clumps down his neck, across his shoulders, his wretchedly thin face drawn tight over his skull. “So good of the Church to have sent us one of its Inquisitors to bid us greeting. Tell me, Inquisitor, does the Church send you in regret and shame or anger and rage?”
Tacit spat dirt from the corner of his mouth and stared on, silently.
“Speak when you’re spoken to,” called the wolf holding Tacit’s head back.
“Seems to me,” Tacit hissed, “the only ones with anger and rage are you. You should consider my presence a blessing. A gift. I offer you redemption and escape from your captivity, from your pain.”
Angulsac laughed and a few wolves laughed with him, but there were others who hid their faces or turned away. “We have no need of your redemption, Inquisitor!” Angulsac hissed.
“Then would you prefer to be left as you are, wolves, never at peace within these cold caverns of earth beneath the accursed moon?”
“What sort of a question is that, Inquisitor? Of course peace from our madness is desired. For countless years we have lain here in the darkness or stalked beneath the moon, half mad with our anger and our shame. For too long we have been forced to live an existence more wretched than any sentence for a crime in the land of man. And for what, Inquisitor? And for what, tell me? For turning away from the Church, for turning our back on the Lord?”
“The most wretched of sins!” Tacit roared back in defiance.
“So wretched that our very being was accursed from that day forward, unable to live, unable to die, unable to love for fear of what it might bring – only filled with hate.”
“If you turn from the good Lord then you can expect nothing more than hate to be brought unto you!”
“Turning from the good Lord? The good Lord, eh? So good that he would curse his flock in such a way, so good that he would enforce damnation upon all who turned from his path.”
“There is only his path,” Tacit muttered.
“Only his path, you say? Yet, you sound none too sure yourself.” Angulsac stole forward, crouching down on his knee so he was but a spit away from Tacit. The Inquisitor could smell the stench of him, excreta and blood. “Tell me, Tacit, now that you see us as we are, as poor unfortunates, now that you yourself are forsaken by your Lord and left amongst us, the fallen, tell me, do you still believe there is only one true path?”
Tacit didn’t reply. Instead he tested the weight which held him down. Someone was on his legs, another on his back, as well as the creature holding his head. Difficult odds to free himself, but not impossible with the right manoeuvre.
“I …” Tacit began, but Angulsac spoke across him.
“It is there in your eyes, Inquisitor. I can see it. Doubt. Doubt as to your own Lord’s path, his salvation, his love. Look about you,” said the wolf, standing and holding his hands wide. “Look about you, Inquisitor. Look about you and ask yourself if you feel the shame of the damnation that he has brought down upon us, upon you, upon your Church. For every action in the name of your Church, there is a reaction of pain, of hate and of heartbreak. When you curse to uphold your Church’s laws, you tear open another hole into the world of lawlessness that you and your Church are creating.” Angulsac turned and stared hard at the Inquisitor. “For too long we have suffered whilst you and your fellow Inquisitors and Cardinals have tried to wash your hands of the horror you have created. No more. The time has come for the truth to come out. You ask why we wish no redemption from you? Because we wish to stand witness to the downfall of your faith. The end is nigh for you Inquisitor, and all of your kind! But before that it is high time that the Inquisition tasted the pain and revulsion that we feel every day of our waking lives.”
Angulsac dug at the ground with his foot, churning the earth aside to form a large footprint in the dirt. He turned to another within the clan and nodded. The figure, a woman, bent double with age and disease, came forward with a bowl clutched in her claw-like grip. She handed the bowl carefully over to Angulsac, who, after looking briefly at Tacit, sank to the ground and poured the water into the print.
“Bring him!” Angulsac commanded.
Unease gripped the Inquisitor, as hard as the firm hands which held him. He knew the ceremony. He knew what it was they were planning to do, to turn the hunter into one of the cursed and hunted. Tacit fought against the hands which held him but their grip was unyielding. They half carried, half dragged him to the lip of the puddle. Tacit well knew what drinking from the puddle would mean, a curse set upon him, forever casting him under the power and control of the wolf whose footprint it was he drank from. Under Angulsac’s control he would be a whipped and pathetic dog at the foot of his master, thrown the carrion of his master’s night time hunts, forever tormented. He wrestled and thrust like a fish on a line, freeing a hand momentarily. Just enough.
“Hold him!” Angulsac cried, and more bloodless bodies piled on top of him, his hand wedged tight beneath him.
Angulsac lowered himself down so that he was mere inches from the Inquisitor’s face.
“So, Inquisitor,” he hissed, “this is when you stumble from the path of your Lord and find yourself on another very different one. Let us see how walking in the shadow of the moon fares with you after having stalked the shadow for so long?”
Angulsac looked up and nodded. The hand which held Tacit’s hair now ushered his head downwards, pushing his face towards the surface of the water. Tacit fought with all his might, but the hand, whilst wretched and shrunken, possessed all the strength and force of a werewolf’s, full of sinew and wrath. Tacit grimaced, fighting with every ounce of his might to keep his lips from touching the surface of the puddle. But, bit by bit, the strength in his neck weakened and his face lowered ever closer towards the surface of that insipid pool.
And then the memory flashed across Tacit’s skull. With his hand still wedged tight beneath him, he felt with searching fingers inside a pocket, his hand closing around a small container. Quickly, and as carefully as he was able, he drew out the glass container of the demon’s breath he’d taken from the exorcism in Perugia years ago. With the last of his failing strength, he levered his arm up beneath his chin and crushed the glass in his hand, shattering its fragments over the surface of the water. At once, the possessed contents hissed and squealed free, running over and around the puddle. As soon as the evil gaseous spirit touched the water, it froze it in an instant. Tacit groaned and fought the forcing hands no more. His face thumped hard against the solid ice of the frozen puddle.
Shrieks of disbelief and anger exploded in the cavern.
“Witchcraft!” one cried, leaping from thin yellowed foot to thin yellowed foot.
“Accursed Catholic magic!” another called.
“It is the mercy of the Lord!” one wept on seeing the puddle turn to ice in front of him. A cacophony of shouting, howling and crying shook the foundations of the cave. Figures sprang for doorways, whilst others threw themselves down on the ground, their faces buried in the grime of the lair.
Tacit took his chance. He threw himself backwards, now easily casting the distracted and desperate creatures from on top of him. He roared like a wild thing at the astonished and bewildered clan, appearing to grow like a bear before the wailing and weeping creatures, circling desperately in pain and anguish. Their scheme to curse the Inquisitor for the rest of eternity had failed. Some lay down and refused to move, accepting now the Lord’s judgement upon them. Some still had some fight in them, filled with a rage and torment unlike any they had known before. They circled and snarled at the Inquisitor, waiting for their moment to attack. If they could not bind him within their clan, then they would now have to satisfy their rage by ripping him limb from limb.
As they closed in around him, Tacit ripped a bag from his coat pocket and threw it onto the smouldering fire, shrinking down as small as he could go on the ground, his back turned. Seconds later, an almighty explosion shook the cavern, blasting shrapnel to all corners of the room. A million fragments of scorching hot silver ripped through the cavern.
Pain tore into Tacit’s back and buttocks as the silver bomb exploded. He ignored the need to cry out and stay crouched to protect his wounds, instead leaping to his feet, the revolver and crossbow drawn. Around him was a scene of bloodied smoking devastation, the vile bodies of the human wolves ripped and pulverised by the deadly explosive. Bodies and body parts scattered the floor, headless, limbless, dead eyed and despoiled. There was a whimpering and a gurgling from shattered throats. Pallid chunks of flesh lay quivering against walls, blackened and burnt from the explosion, like bully beef turned out from soldiers’ meat tins. Several figures still shook and stumbled about the cavern, stunned and deafened by the blast, staggering blindly, eyes blown from faces, feet feeling their way in the darkness.
The detonated silver, deadly to these creatures, would eventually kill all those caught within the bomb’s blast, but Tacit was never one to leave any job half finished, to leave anything to chance.
He aimed the revolver and blew the head off one of the wolves. He turned and killed another. A female wolf whimpered before him. The silver round blew a hole through her ribcage and she slumped lifeless to the ground. He turned, just in time to avoid the full impact of a tottering blow from Baldrac, the left side of his face utterly blown from his head. Tacit inserted the barrel of the revolver into the wound and blasted out what was left of his brains.
Two wolves turned and bolted for the archway, their natural instinct for survival overcoming their desire for release from the misery of the curse. Tacit shot one in the back of the head, tumbling him down in the dirt. The other was caught behind the heart and slumped into the wall alongside him, dead.
Tacit loaded six more sliver bullets into the barrel of the revolver and cocked it. A tall gangly figure leapt at him. Tacit caught sight of him out of the corner of his eye through the grimy light of the cavern. The crossbow pinged and the bolt thundered with a sickening thunk through his eye socket and lodged firmly in his brain. A wolf on the ground reached up at the Inquisitor as if to ask for release. Tacit struck the poor creature to the side and blasted a red hole in its temple. Another crawled away from a huddle of bodies and the Inquisitor stopped its movement with a bullet in the rear of its skull. He stepped with rapid feet, wading between the bodies, his keen eye watching for movement, for any signs of life that remained in their carnal murdering hole. He put four remaining wolves out of their misery. It was ironic how after he had been warned by Angulsac of his Church’s lack of mercy he showed the repugnant creatures exactly that in their final moments.
Tacit turned, two rounds left in his revolver’s cylinder, and surveyed the cavern. Death hung like a thick fog over the place, silent and complete. Movement caught his eye from the far edge of the cave where there lay a mass of bodies, dashed and bleeding from the full force of the explosion. Tacit stepped over, reloading the revolver from the bullets in his belt. He looked down. It was Angulsac, the wolf who had tried to bring him under his own curse.
Tacit stared down at him, a vague smudge of satisfaction across the Inquisitor’s face.
“You asked if I would stumble from the path,” said Tacit, pushing the cylinder back into place. “Who says I already haven’t?” he asked, raising the barrel of the gun to the forehead of the matted grim faced being. “You’re a doomed and finished race from another time, wolf,” Tacit hissed. “Don’t worry, your time is nigh. Your suffering will one day end.”
“Do you really think so, Inquisitor?” Angulsac croaked, blood pouring from the wound in his throat. “What do you see, Inquisitor? Do you see a wolf or do you see a man, a man cursed by your Church’s evilness.”
“I’ve heard enough of your sermons, wolf,” replied Tacit, cocking the weapon.
Angulsac laughed. “You’re too late. The truth will out, Inquisitor. All around you, your kind are turning. The downfall of your Church and a new age for mankind is nigh. Watch for the signs, Inquisitor. Watch for –.”
The revolver exploded in Tacit’s hand. Angulsac’s brain exploded across the mound of churned and torn bodies behind him. Tacit opened his aiming eye.