The Fallen (22 page)

“As I said, he is the best we have.”

“Really?” asked Adansoni, a devious light in his eye.

“Tacit is good, but he's reckless. He makes mistakes. And the moment he does, he's a dead man.”

“We should never have simply imprisoned him after the Mass for Peace,” muttered Korek. “It was a mistake. We should have killed Tacit, there and then.”

Casado turned away from the fresco, making for the light of the grounds outside. “It is not a mistake we will make for a second time.”

THIRTY SEVEN

R
OME
. I
TALY
.

“Are you sure he will come?” asked Henry, his thumbnail scratching a line on the table in the new safe-house they had acquired.

“He'll come,” nodded Strettavario, not bothering to look up, his nose buried in a black tome, spidery engraved writing across its front cover.

“How can you be so sure? The Inquisition have not managed to track us to this place. What makes you think Tacit will?”

“Not yet they haven't,” replied Strettavario, raising a finger from the edge of the leather-bound tome. “And this is Tacit. He will want revenge. Revenge for what I've done to him. To Isabella. He'll stop at nothing. He will find us.”

Henry remembered the size and manner of the man from when he had observed him in Fampoux and absently dropped his hand to the handle of his revolver, the other tightening around the body of the rifle in his lap. His stomach convulsed.

“And they won't help you when he arrives, if that's what you're thinking,” said Strettavario. Henry saw the old Priest's face brighten with a knowing smile. “When he arrives, keep clear, or he'll kill you.”

“You make him sound like some kind of elemental force.”

“He is a force,” replied Strettavario, only now looking up, weighing the comment on his lips. “Of sorts.”

“How long have you known him?” asked Henry, taking a sip of his tea and making no effort to hide his disapproval at how the old Priest had made it.

“His entire life as an Inquisitor.” Strettavario put down his book and gathered his own cup into his hand. Through the pale flickering light of candles on the table, Henry could see the steam twist before the old man's pallid eyes.

“Was he always … so fearsome?”

“No,” the Priest said quickly. The question seemed to embolden him, capture a memory. “No, when he was younger he was a good man, too good for the Inquisition. But he was brilliant and strong and quick, the best of us. They took him and they made him one of them.”

“Do all who join the Inquisition change?”

“Mankind's deeds know no depths and yet our souls can only sink so far before they are submerged within the domain of the Devil. He blackens hearts and corrupts minds. It takes a great man, greater even than Tacit, to withstand such a life and not find himself corrupted by it, not be left with its indelible mark. And there are few as great as Tacit.”

“The war,” said Henry, turning his cup between his thumb and fingers, “what little time I spent at the front line, I saw many terrible things, the depths to which man can fall to do his duty when commanded by those in authority. Or simply to try and live. It terrifies me to see what we are capable of but also the lengths our spirit will take us in order to survive. It gives me hope that one day this spirit will be put to good use by all, not used against mankind. I realised when I met Sandrine that really there is only love. Nothing else matters. It changed me. I knew I could not stay fighting an enemy that I did not know or feel anger and hatred towards. She helped me to see.” Henry was aware of the Priest's cold empty eyes upon him. “What is it?”

“This woman you travel with.”

“Sandrine.”

“She is Hombre Lobo, the sworn enemy of the Church.”

“She is my love.”

“She is not to be trusted.”

“She is my love,” Henry repeated, the shadows around his eyes darkening.

“They are deceitful creatures, as they were before they were struck down by excommunication.”

“But Sandrine was never excommunicated. She was born of wolf and woman.”

“That I find hard to believe,” muttered Strettavario.

“And that is the truth.”

“Tacit, he will kill her. You know that, don't you?” The Priest's face seemed to harden.

Henry swallowed. “Then I will have to kill him first.”

Instantly, Strettavario's demeanour softened and he chuckled and shook his head, so that the hanging skin beneath his chin wobbled. He took up his cup and sipped at it again. “I am sure you were a good soldier, Lieutenant Henry Frost, but you were never Poldek Tacit.”

A sound on the brickwork of the narrow ledge outside caught their ears and they both froze. Henry's eyes flickered over Strettavario through the gloom and then back to the closed window.

“Did you hear that?” he asked, his voice tense.

Strettavario shushed him and slowly drew his chair back, preparing to stand. The sound, the creak of boots on stone, came again and Henry pushed back his own chair, stepping away into the dark of the room, his hands gripped tighter to his rifle, watching the window carefully.

“Perhaps it was the wind?” he asked, but in that moment the window shattered inwards and a vast figure hurled itself into the room, roaring like an unleashed beast. The rifle in Henry's hands exploded and then the man was upon him, wrenching the weapon free and breaking it in two with his hands. A giant fist came out of the black and Henry's head cracked backwards. He saw darkness and nothing else.

Tacit spun on Strettavario and turned the table over with a violent swipe, lurching towards him, his hands drawn into tight fists.

“Good evening, Poldek,” Strettavario said calmly, moments before a blow to his guts bent him double and a hand grasped the back of his neck, lifting him, gasping for breath, from the floor.

Tacit growled, taking two steps forward into the shadows and thrusting the Priest hard into the wall. Strettavario felt his ribs shatter and blood spluttered into his throat. “Tonight you die.”

“You're later than I expected,” groaned the Priest with a pained smile, a shard of moonlight striking across his face, catching in his white eyes.

“Is that so?” Tacit retorted, pulling back a fist to crush Strettavario's face with a single punch.

“I thought Isabella meant more to you? I thought you would have got to her sooner?”

“Don't play games with me, Strettavario. You killed her and now you're going to die. But slowly, just as you deserve.”

“Tacit!” came a woman's voice.

Tacit's fist froze, his head yanked in the direction from where his name had been called. His fingers loosened around Strettavario's collar and the old Priest dropped to the ground with a groan. Tacit turned like a man struck dumb towards the figure in the open doorway.

“What is this?” he hissed, his arms drawn tight to his body, his hands splayed wide, crouching low, suspecting a trick. He stood motionless in the dark of the place, his eyes fixed on the figure before him. “What is this?” he repeated, taking another step forward towards the woman. There were tears in his eyes and his hands were now held out beseechingly. “Is it you?” He spoke the words as if the vision was a ghost come to haunt him.

“It's me, Tacit,” replied Isabella, her heart clutched tight inside her chest, her hands wrapped across it. “It's me.”

PART THREE

THIRTY EIGHT

T
HE
I
TALIAN
F
RONT
. T
HE
S
OČA
R
IVER
. N
ORTHWEST
S
LOVENIA
.

All night Pablo had been unable to sleep, kept awake by the sound of rifle-fire from the lip of the trench and the churning of his mind, ruminating on his predicament, the Priests, the consortium of soldiers to whom he had been handed. All his life it seemed he had been guarded, protected, advised and shadowed by the Priests, who did all they could to ensure he was drilled in the right rhetoric and schooling, but chiefly that no harm came to him.

It seemed to the young man that they had taken him into their fold, with something approaching reverence and adoration, from the very day he had been turned out of his family home, branded a freak, a blight upon the family name, for the deformity he bore. The Priests assured him it was a divine blessing to carry such imperfection, and lucky chance that they were in the northern Italian city of Udine on the very first day that the twelve-year-old Pablo wandered its streets homeless, weeping and loveless.

In the six years that followed they showed him nothing but kindness and protection, ensuring his every whim was catered for and his health carefully monitored.

Strange then, he thought, that they had been so quick to recommend him for the army, to thrust him into the front line when the call came. And yet even here it seemed as if he was still being protected, both by the Priests who followed in the shadow of the forward line and by the soldiers in the unit into which he had been placed.

He watched his six fingers in the pale silver moonlight, drawing his other arm up behind his head to try to find some comfort in the shallow trench. All his life he had cursed his deformity, but in many ways it had proved to be his security and his benediction. He had lost the love of his blood family but had gained another family, one built upon the foundations of faith, endeavour and Godly rhetoric.

A line of soldiers, picked out at random from the massed ranks, had been ordered to lie thirty feet apart along the length of the forward trench, a little way ahead of where Pablo and the others rested, and fire spasmodically into the blackness beyond.

“What are they shooting at?” Pablo had asked, dragging his blanket across his chest to fend off the biting chill of night.

“Ghosts,” replied Private Lazzari. “What else do they hope to hit in this darkness?”

“They are keeping the Austro-Hungarians on their toes,” answered Corporal Abelli, pulling on his pipe and sending a plume of smoke rising into the frigid night air. “Making them aware we're here.”

“I think they know that already,” said Pablo mournfully.

From somewhere behind him a chorus of field guns opened up and buffeted the black mountain beyond. Pablo imagined the shells breaking apart among the rocks, the limestone splitting open and spinning a thousand razor fragments of stone hundreds of metres into the dark of the enemy front line, every shard a lethal weapon.

He thought of mud and sand and wished he was not halfway up a mountain of brittle stone.

The echo of the brief artillery barrage faded, replaced by the bark of rifle-fire, making Pablo think of the depleted supply of rounds in his bullet pack for his Carcano carbine rifle. He looked over to the front line, muzzle flashes preceding each crack of the rifle like little fires being lit and then instantly extinguished. He knew that every shot fired into the darkness was one fewer in his own rifle.

THIRTY NINE

T
HE
V
ATICAN
. V
ATICAN
C
ITY
.

Bloody water pooled in the basin before him. Georgi flicked his wet hands and reached for a towel, drying them on the rough cotton fabric, leaving a red residue. “Don't bother getting yourself clean,” called a voice from the shadows of the room behind him.

Georgi spun round, his knife instantly in his hand.

“Oh, it's you,” he said, putting the knife away and continuing to dry himself. “More work needed of me? The second ritual is not ready to be performed yet.”

“Monsignor Benigni,” the voice warned, the figure remaining resolutely hidden in the darkness at the edge of the chamber, as if the light from the room might burn him. “He has become … troublesome.”