The Black Angel

The Captain dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks. The animal advanced, and the Captain’s shadow fell across the old monk. The horse stopped so close to the abbot that moisture from its nose sprayed his face. The Captain kept his head low and slightly turned away from the monk, so that his face could not be seen.

“Where is it?” he said.

His voice was cracked and hoarse from the screams of battle.

“We have nothing of value here,” said the abbot.

A sound came from beneath the folds of the Captain’s hood. It might almost have been a laugh, had a snake found a way to convey humor in its hiss. He commenced freeing his hands from the gauntlets.

“Your mines made you wealthy,” he said. “You could not have spent it all on trinkets. It may be that you yet have much of value to some, but not to me. I seek one thing only, and you know what it is.”

The abbot stepped forward. With his right hand, he gripped the cross around his neck.

“It is gone,” he said.

In the distance, he heard horses neighing wildly, and the impact of metal upon metal as his men fought to protect the cart and its cargo. They should have left sooner, he realized. His act of concealment might not have been revealed so quickly had they done so.

The Captain leaned over his horse’s neck. The gauntlets were now gone. His fingers, revealed to the moonlight, were scored by white scars. He raised his head and listened to the cries of the monks as they were slaughtered by his men.

“They died for nothing,” he said. “Their blood is on your hands.”

The abbot grasped his cross more tightly. Its edges tore his skin, and blood leaked through his fingers, as though giving substance to the Captain’s words.

“Go back to hell,” said the abbot.

The Captain lifted his hands to his hood and threw back the rough material from around his face. Dark hair surrounded his beautiful features, and his skin seemed almost to glow in the cool night air. He extended his right hand, and a crossbow was placed in his grasp by the gri

“Never,” said the Captain, and the abbot heard the dull report of the crossbow at the instant the bolt penetrated his chest. He stumbled back against the doorway and slid slowly down the wall. At a signal from the Captain, his men began entering the buildings of the i

More time, the abbot thought. We need more time.

His monks and servants, what few remained, were putting up fierce resistance, preventing the Captain’s soldiers from entering the church and the i

“Just a little longer, my Lord,” he prayed. “Just a little.”

The Captain looked down upon the abbot, listening to his words. The abbot felt his heart slow just as the Captain’s men flanked the monks on the steps and entered the chapel, ascending the walls and crawling like lizards across the stones. One moved upside down across the ceiling, then dropped behind the defenders and impaled the rearmost man upon the end of a sword.

The abbot wept for them, even as the cool tip of a bolt touched his forehead. The Captain’s lieutenant, bloated and poisonous, was now kneeling by his side, his mouth open and his head tilted, as though preparing to deliver a last kiss to a lover.

“I know what you are,” the abbot whispered. “And you will never find the one that you seek.”

A pale finger tightened on the trigger.

This time, the abbot did not hear the shot.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the Cistercians of Sedlec were able to commence their reconstruction in earnest, including the restoration of the Church of the Assumption, left roofless and vaultless after the Hussite wars. Seven chapels now form a ring around its presbytery, and its Baroque interiors are decorated with art, although these interiors are hidden from the sight of the public as its restoration continues.

And yet this stu

But All Saints is not as it might seem from the outside, for it is in fact two structures. The first, the chapel, is aboveground; the second, known as Jesus Christ on the Mount of Olives, lies below. While what is above is a monument to the prospect of a better life beyond this one, what lies beneath is a testament to the transience of all things mortal. It is a strange place, a buried place, and none who spend time among its wonders can ever forget it.

Legend tells that Jindrich, an abbot of Sedlec, brought back with him from the Holy Land a sack of soil that he scattered over the cemetery. It came to be regarded as an outpost of the Holy Land itself, and people from all across Europe were buried there, alongside plague victims and those who had fallen in the many conflicts waged in its surrounding fields. These bones at last became so plenteous that something had to be done with them, and in 1511 the task of disposing of them was reputedly entrusted to a half-blind monk. He arranged an accumulation of skulls into pyramids, and so began the great work that would become the ossuary at Sedlec. In the aftermath of Emperor Joseph II’s reforms, the monastery was purchased by the Orlik line of the Schwarzenberg family, but development of the ossuary continued. A woodcarver named František Rint was brought in, and his imagination was allowed free rein. From the remains of forty thousand people, Rint created a monument to death.

A great chandelier of skulls hangs from the ossuary ceiling. Skulls form the base for its candleholders, each resting on pelvic arches, with a humerus clasped beneath its upper jaw. Where delicate crystals should hang, bones dangle vertically, co

There are other wonders too: a monstrance made of bone, with a skull at its center where the host should be, six femurs radiating from behind, smaller bones and vertebrae interwoven with them. Bones mask the wooden support around which the monstrance has been constructed and its base is a U ending at either side in another skull. Even the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms is formed of bone, with a crown of skulls and pelvises at its peak. Those bones that have not found a practical use are stored in great piles beneath stone arches.