The Fallen (24 page)

There were tears in his own eyes, and tears in the eyes of the man he had just killed.

FORTY TWO

R
OME
. I
TALY
.

“Is it you?” Tacit asked the woman before him, his mouth open, his chin jutting forward like a slab of stone.

“It's me,” Isabella replied.

Something blazed inside him and he swallowed, fighting emotions which threatened to overwhelm him. “My God,” he muttered, raising his fingers towards her face, to test she was who she claimed to be, not an apparition. “Isabella!” And then he stopped and his face went dark once more. He spun on the heel of his boot and glowered at the old Priest. “What the hell are you up to, Strettavario?”

But Isabella took his arm and turned him back to her, her free hand curling inside his calloused palm. The touch of her skin on his was like fire and Tacit wrenched away as if burnt. She held up her hands as a way of pacifying him and showing she would not touch him again. “I'm sorry,” she spoke as a whisper. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” She said the words over and over, her eyes burrowing into Tacit's, as if casting a spell. She could hear Tacit's breath calming, in and out, slowing and growing shallow. “Don't blame Father Strettavario.” She took a step towards him and Tacit didn't move. “He only wanted to get you out of there.”

“How did you know?” replied Tacit, still staring at Isabella, but the question was meant for the old man.

“That you would try to break out? Exact revenge?” Tacit nodded and turned his head to one side to hear the answer. “I know you, Tacit, perhaps better than you know yourself.”

“I killed a lot of people in that place,” Tacit growled, looking back at Isabella, something approaching regret bound up in his words.

“I heard,” answered Strettavario.

“Why've you done this to me?” And for the first time Tacit resembled a man aware of his actions, sullen and cowed, not some beast driven by rage. “Why've you lied to me?”

“We need you,” said Strettavario. “More than ever.”

A black fire seemed to flicker once more on Tacit's features. “The man who put me away, the man whose evidence condemned me after the Mass for Peace and cast me into Toulouse Prison, the man who saw me bound and gagged and tortured for nine long months.” He turned on the Father and took a step towards him, his powerful fingers splayed. “He now needs my help? I should kill you where you stand.”

“Yes, you should,” replied Strettavario. The Priest's top lip had beaded with sweat, but there was a hint of humour beneath it. “But you won't.”

“And why's that?”

“Because then you'll never know why we had to get you out.”

“I can live with regrets.”

“But not with the consequences of not knowing.”

Tacit hesitated. He could feel the pulse beating in his neck begin to slow, the madness of his rage lessen. He looked between the pair of them, trying to work out just what it was they knew and why it was so important to have brought him to them. Tacit worked his tongue around the rough contours of his mouth, finally looking away and setting his weight over the table, spreading his great palms across the wood.

“Does anyone have anything to drink?” he asked at length, his eyes settling on Henry and Sandrine sitting at the far end. He narrowed on them, as if only now realising their presence.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Does it matter who we are?” spat Sandrine.

“The hell is does.”

“It's not important, Tacit,” called Isabella.

“The hell it isn't!” replied Tacit. He caught sight of the bottle of brandy on the sideboard and his hope flared. He powered across the room towards it, gathering it up as if claiming a great prize. It was uncorked and at his lips in a flash, the contents swirling. To Tacit it felt as if the memory of the
months of torment was diminished with every fierce burning gulp of the harsh liquor.

“Something is coming, Tacit.” At once he stopped drinking and took the bottle from his mouth. “Something terrible.”

Waves of haziness flooded across his mind and his eyes rolled in his skull. The caress of the alcohol was like a soothing lullaby. Ambition and anticipation wavered and then slipped from within him. He shrugged and raised the bottle to take another swig.

“The Antichrist,” said Strettavario, and at once Tacit froze. “He is returning, as was prophesied by our Pope thirty years ago.”

Tacit scowled. “Rubbish.”

“Strettavario is right,” said Isabella, coming forward and gripping hold of Tacit's arm to make him look at her. “Remember what you said to me that time in Arras? About the way the demon looks at you? About the way it knows it is winning?”

Tacit studied Isabella's face for a moment, drinking in her beauty and feeling a weight rise once more inside him, a feeling stronger than the drunkenness pulsing about him. “How long?” asked Tacit, his hand gripping tighter to the bottle. His eyes flickered over to the old Priest who had now clambered into a chair beside the table to ease his pain. “How long have you known of the Antichrist's return?”

“Three months. Maybe four? Possessions. Signs of demons among the newborn. Other signs, not just across the country but across Europe. Across the world. People are seeing and feeling his return. The Eagle Fountain, it is running red with blood.”

Tacit stopped mid-pull on the bottle and lowered his hard eyes onto the Priest. Strettavario continued.

“These signs, they have happened before. In 1877.”

“The Russo-Turkish war,” said Tacit without hesitation. “In Bulgaria. I know of it. It cost many lives.”

“But perhaps not enough,” countered Strettavario, “for his purposes. This war, it is the preparation of his domain for his return. We have chosen to ignore this possibility. But now, we cannot deny the darkness anymore.”

“Where does the heart of this darkness reside?”

“It grows within the Vatican.”

Tacit's eyes narrowed and something cold sliced through him. “How did you find out?”

“Inquisitor Cincenzo,” announced Henry, nursing his bruised jaw with his fingers. “He was one of our spies, the one who confirmed the darkness
to us. He too had suspected that something was wrong. Had seen the signs. He'd gone looking for answers and we think had found them. The last message we received was that he had found the ‘location'.”

“What location?”

“We don't know. He was intending to tell us that final evening, but they killed him before he was able to reach us. He paid with his life for what he discovered.”

“Did you know Cincenzo?” asked Strettavario.

Tacit shook his head. If the name was known to him, he couldn't recall it. He turned the bottle in his fingers, his back resting against the sideboard.

“Well, he knew you,” said Isabella. Tacit skewered her with a glare. “He mentioned you by name as he died.”

Tacit stood quietly for a moment, trying to take in all he had been told, trying to make sense of it. “Why you?” he asked after a while, looking at the strangers at the end of the table dismissively. “Why did Inquisitor Cincenzo know and trust you?”

Sandrine hesitated and Tacit detected something treacherous about her.

“There's more to this than meets the eye,” he said. “Outsiders, dealing with dead Inquisitors, announcing the return of the Antichrist? I don't like the smell of you. It reminds me of things I hunt in the dark places of the world.”

“Used to hunt,” Sandrine retorted, and Tacit fell silent, pursing his lips. “You're no longer an Inquisitor, Poldek Tacit. It seems to me you're as abandoned as the rest of us.”

For a moment Tacit felt wrong-footed, snagged by the cruel truth of her words. What the woman had revealed was right. Everything he had known, it was gone. He was as exposed as the heretics he used to hunt. He looked across at Strettavario.

“Who else in the Vatican knows about this?”

“The Holy See suspect, but hope they are wrong. They are putting precautions in place, one of which is to stop you.”

“Why me?”

“They think you are in some way bound up with everything.”

Tacit rolled his eyes. “What about you?” he asked, indicating Henry and Sandrine. “Is this it? Just you two?”

Sandrine shook her head. “There are others, throughout the Vatican, who too have felt this darkness and fight with us.”

“Do you know any of them, Strettavario?” Tacit asked the Priest.

The old man shook his head.

“That's a first for you.” Tacit thrust the mouth of the bottle back between his lips. He needed the drink to help take in what he supposed he was hearing, what he had long feared but never dared to believe. Just like the Holy See.

“You always drink so much?” asked Sandrine, distain lifting the edge of her mouth.

“No,” replied Tacit, feeling his tongue slur between his teeth. “Not when in prison.”

“You got demons?”

“Don't we all?”

“Is that why you drink?”

“I don't like people prying into my personal business,” growled Tacit, slamming the bottle down on the sideboard, his hand slipping to his hip and the holster which wasn't there. “Particularly people I don't know. People I don't trust.”

Isabella stepped between them. “What do we do first?”

“We?” replied Tacit, shaking his head. “You're not going. It's not safe.”

“Tacit, it's not safe anywhere!” said Isabella, her palms held out to him helplessly. She let them drop. “Not anymore.”

The giant man considered the words. “All right,” he said after a moment, weighing up his options. “We find out what this location is, where it might be. Only thing we can do is to break into Cincenzo's residence and see if there's anything there we can find which might help. It's not much. And they'll be expecting us.”

“Does the word ‘seer' mean anything to you?” asked Henry, thrusting his revolver into his belt, having checked the cylinder was full.

“Seer?” replied Tacit, the edge of his lip turned up. He sank his chin deeper into his hand. “I wonder if they mean Sister Malpighi?”

“Who's she?” asked Sandrine.

Strettavario chuckled. “An intolerable gossip within Trastevere Nunnery!”

“And someone often used by the Holy See for insight and visions of things still to come. How do you know about her?”

“Our contacts, they sent us this one word. ‘Seer'. It was the last we heard from them. We haven't heard from them since.”

“Must be her,” replied Tacit, his hands turning to white fists. “That's settled. We go and see her.”

“Can she be trusted?” Isabella asked.

“Sister Malpighi is many things, but she's not someone to be easily
turned by the Devil. You two,” spat Tacit, looking at Sandrine and Henry, “can you be trusted not to get into trouble if you come with us?”

“Just worry about looking after yourself, Inquisitor,” retorted Sandrine, standing and gathering her belongings from the table.

“Good,” said Isabella. “Are we going straight to see this Sister?”

“No,” replied Tacit, “there's somewhere I need to go first. Something I need to do.”

FORTY THREE

P
LEVEN
. B
ULGARIA
.

The stars had come out and the nocturnal insects were biting by the time Poré and his clan returned to the nearby town they had left six hours before. The air smelt of warm grass and flowers, bleached under a hot, relentless sun, but there was something mixed with the light summer scents, something acrid. Smoke. And there were sounds too, faint, but growing louder with every step closer to Pleven. Gunfire.

“Whatever is going on?” asked one of the old soldiers under Poré's command, as they neared the town's outskirts and saw torchlight and horses ridden hard down the roads, men gathering in crowds to hear messengers speak.