The Fallen (15 page)

Strettavario paused, his hand to his chin, his eyes boring into Isabella, “He likes you.” His gaze was fierce. Determined. “Tacit, he likes you.”

“I wouldn't know,” Isabella replied, too quickly.

“We don't have time for this!” ordered Henry from the open door. There were footsteps in the street outside the building.

“I think you're the only person he's ever felt anything for, since Mila was taken from him.” Isabella looked away, but it was more to hide the emotion welling in her eyes. “I think you're the only person who can bring him back, give him back his spirit and a reason to live and fight.”

More footsteps sounded in the alley outside, harsh voices intermingled among them.

“I don't understand,” Isabella said, her hands held out towards the old Priest. “I don't understand. What I can do?”

A heavy blow on the bolted door behind them rattled its hinges and drew plumes of dust from the lintel. Strettavario stepped towards Isabella, his hands clawed and raised, as if about to throttle her. “Sister Isabella, it's very simple,” he muttered, his face a murderous scowl, “I need you to die.”

TWENTY THREE

T
OULOUSE
I
NQUISITIONAL
P
RISON
. T
OULOUSE
. F
RANCE
.

Tacit's skin was slick with blood and sweat, his mind shattered by the torment of his suffering, delirious with pain and exhaustion. The cell sank and spun from his vision and momentarily he felt he was falling down into darkness, embraced by the raw talons of death. He thought then it was his time to die, alone in that cell, butchered and broken, no longer human but a piece of meat, hacked and desecrated for another's pleasure.

Why they were doing this to him, he did not know, only that someone hated him enough to unleash their most depraved of visions upon his body and then retreat when there was just enough left of him to survive, only to return the following day to continue the torture.

His body was spent. He knew that he had nothing more to give, no more strength to resist. Not now. Not after so much had been done to him. Not after last time. The thought of Isabella came into his mind and he smiled through the delirium of death's closing embrace. A fleeting image. A final moment of peace.

The door to the cell creaked open and Tacit looked up. He knew there was something different about this visit from Salamanca from the moment the head torturer first entered his cell, the way he looked at him with his head turned to one side, the way his eyes flashed, as if he had divined some inner secret about Tacit and was waiting for the most opportune moment to reveal it.

As if Salamanca possessed something which he knew would hurt the prisoner far more than any nail, blade or flaming brand could ever do.

Tacit watched him closely, his eyes heavy and his teeth bared, waiting as the usual mass of subordinates followed in Salamanca's wake into his cell. Somewhere inside him an ancient baleful voice shrieked. “What is it?” he hissed, tensing himself against the nails and the bonds which still held him, the chains cutting hard into his already torn skin, the iron spikes grinding against his bones. “What's so amusing, Salamanca?”

Salamanca smiled and leant back against the prison wall, his arms drawn about him. He crossed his ankles and chuckled, studying Tacit with calculating eyes. The pack of jailers and miscreants of the prison guard laughed with him, they too recognising the unfamiliar manner of their master this visit, intrigued by it. “You're a brave man, Tacit,” Salamanca nodded, puckering his dry lips while he examined one of his dirt-encrusted nails in the sickly light, “I'll give you that. Strong. Unfeeling. Unyielding. Seemingly impervious to physical pain.”

“What's that I detect, Salamanca?” replied Tacit, allowing himself the hint of a smile. “Envy?”

“How could I possibly be envious of you? Chained and unloved! Or maybe there is, was, someone?” Salamanca allowed the words to hang in the air before he followed them with a hoarse, withering chuckle. “Do you think there's someone out there waiting for you, outside these prison walls, someone who holds a torch for a monster like you?”

Tacit's eyes narrowed.

“I mean, we've all heard the rumours that Poldek Tacit, the heartless Inquisitor, had in fact a heart after all.”

Tacit tested the bonds. “Let me out of here and I'll show you how much heart I have!”

Salamanca ignored him. “But those rumours, it seems they've grown, taken on a life of their own. Blossomed from rumour into what some believe is fact.”

“And what is that?”

“Perish the thought that you'd let someone close enough to thaw your frozen heart!” And then Salamanca stood back and smirked. “Or did you?” he asked, at length.

Tacit stared hard. “What do you mean?” he growled, but there was the root of doubt growing within him, and with it the hellish voices of hate were growing too.

“Sister Isabella?”

At once Tacit held himself rigid. “What about her?” he seethed, his jaw set wide, his eyes fierce.

“She's dead, Tacit,” Salamanca smiled, and his eyes flashed with triumph at seeing Tacit's face fall. “She's dead,” he repeated laughing, seeing how his words were finally defeating the prisoner. “Dead! Dead!”

The blood drained from Tacit's face and his mouth crumpled open. Instantly, tears welled in his wide eyes, his pupils now pinpricks of black, every feature in his face frozen, as if time itself had stopped. Shrieks of derision and coarse laughter from the crowd of jailers shook the cell, and all along the cell block inmates wondered what terrible injustice had been done to the most feared and reviled of prisoners.

Inside Tacit's head, old memories danced and then burned in the terrible rage growing in his mind. Fragments of the past, of laughter, love, warmth, passion, of Isabella, of her touch, gathered like fiery brands of hope, almost too dazzling to behold, and then fell spinning into the torment of black which was overtaking every sense, every perception Tacit possessed. A darkness was creeping in from the edges of his consciousness, of his very being. A devilish cold clutched him, as if an angel of death had placed her icy talon into his heart. But Tacit knew who it was who had wounded his heart and his eyes were on him. The man in front of him, Salamanca, laughing and slapping at his knee, as the revelation bent the torturer double with hilarity.

Out of the darkness there came a cry, like that of a demon dragging itself from the very bowels of hell itself. And with it a strength even Tacit never knew he possessed, grew. At once Salamanca stopped laughing and with him the other jailers began to rush for the door. For the cry had become a roar and the roar was now a thunderclap. And with it the chains that held Tacit's left arm tight ripped clear, whipping in the air like
bonds broken from a caged animal. The jailers were shrieking and falling back, scrambling for the door and fighting each other in their urge to get away.

Tacit tore his right arm from the bonds and then his legs. Down the length of the cell block bells of alarm began to sound, but Tacit never heard them. He wrenched his ankle from the chain which had held him firm to the wall for so long and powered after Salamanca, catching hold of him within four broad strides. The first blow broke the torturer's spine below his ribs. The second spun him flat out on the floor, his broken back against the piss-covered corridor down which he would walk no more. Tacit sprang on him, setting his entire weight on his chest.

“A name,” he growled, his teeth gritted so firm in his jaw that they sounded as if they were cracking, his whole body shaking with fury. Lights seemed to gather and fork from the ends of his fingers. The voice within had become a wail. “You're going to give me the name of the person who killed Isabella. And then death will seem like a gift after what I'm going to do to you.”

TWENTY FOUR

T
OULOUSE
I
NQUISITIONAL
P
RISON
. T
OULOUSE
. F
RANCE
.

The prison hammered with noise and people, guards and gunfire. Tacit didn't know which way was out but he suspected up was as good as any, knowing he'd been buried deep within the prison, as deep as it went.

“Isabella!”

If Tacit screamed her name as he ran, he never knew that he was doing so, only that her name roared aloud in his skull. Over and over.

There were three guards at the end of his corridor, cowering as they watched him approach from behind their locked door. He knew them all. They'd witnessed him being tortured often enough. He took the door at a run and bundled into it, knocking it from its hinges. The men went down beneath it with a grunt and didn't move.

Tacit felt nothing but red rage coursing within him, a devouring anger
to which he gave himself entirely, the voice, the screaming beseeching voice, urging him on. On.

There were stairs just ahead. He took them at a bound, four steps a stride, roaring up them as rifle-fire sprayed down onto him from above. Something bit hard into his shoulder, failing to break his pace. He bounded across the room and caught the man at the gun post firm in the throat, his fingers tightening so that they touched together through the flesh and skin of his neck. The warden went down gasping for air as Tacit gathered his rifle from the ground and checked the magazine. There were four rounds left. He put three through the heads of the next three guards he found in the corridor beyond and the fourth through the lock of the heavy metal door ahead, allowing him to plough through it and its shattered lock as if they weren't there.

The corridor into which he had run was too narrow to swing the rifle so now he used it as a spear. He caught one man wielding a knife in front of him in the eye and he went down without a sound. The rifle wedged firmly in his socket and Tacit left it there, falling on the next guard and gouging with his thumbs. The tips squeezed through the man's eyeballs and he continued thrusting with his great thumbs all the way in until he'd pushed through bone into something soft beyond, his thumbs buried up to his palms in the man's head.

Tears poured from Tacit's eyes, but these weren't cold embittered tears. They were scolding tormented tears of wrath. He thought of Father Strettavario and the anger boiled within him. All his life he'd expected the killing blow to be delivered to him by the conniving guarded Priest, never upon the person he …

He hesitated, unable to compose his thoughts, to grasp just what it was he felt for Isabella, above the anger and violence and the incessant voice, now she was gone. Another who had touched his life cut mercilessly from it.

Gunfire from a heavier calibre rifle battered the wall next to him. He ran towards it with the man he'd gouged still in his hands, held up as a shield, throwing him to one side at the last moment and dashing the gun emplacement and the guards over with his bare bloodied hands. The door in front of him was locked. He ripped it from its hinges and threw it over his shoulder, tumbling breathlessly into the guardroom beyond. Eight men fell on him with truncheons and knives. Within six seconds, they lay still.

Tacit caught the scent of the air, coming down from the way ahead, his lungs filling with fresh oxygen, the first he had tasted for too long. It was like a tonic. At once his limbs felt re-energised and empowered, his
strength renewed. There were stone stairs going up, broad and more ornate than anything he had passed so far. He took them at speed, curving up and around the outside wall of the jail block to a mezzanine platform above, from where it was possible to look down on the cells below. As he reached the top floor, his eyes fell on the head jailer, a pistol clutched tight in his white shaking fingers, whimpering and weeping as he tried to keep the weapon straight.

“I'll shoot!” he warned, as Tacit strode towards him. “Damn it, I'll shoot!”

Tacit snatched the pistol from him and drove it hard, barrel first, into the top of the jailer's balding skull. It snapped through the man's pallid scalp and sunk cylinder and trigger deep. The warden's eyes rolled up into his head, and he fell backwards, grunting as his life passed out of him.