The Fallen (29 page)

Tacit caught the man he was grappling a beauty in the solar plexus, but the man was big enough to take it, returning the blow with interest to Tacit's kidney. He went down on one knee, crying out as his right side seized up from the hit. He rode the next blow, buying himself enough time to twist free and catch his breath. His breath! Tacit couldn't believe how much he was puffing and how little the men he faced were. Tacit came at the second of them and the man rolled away, Tacit catching the glint of an Inquisitor's brooch in the moonlight. He tried a haymaker, wild, desperate but devastating if it connected. The Inquisitor ducked and brought a heavy fist up onto Tacit's jawbone, as the Inquisitor behind him battered him back with a blow to the back of the neck. Darkness and cold came in from the edges.

This is it, thought Tacit, but from somewhere consciousness returned and the figure in front of him merged from two back to one. He thrust with his index and middle fingers, hard as nails, and drove them deep into the Inquisitor's eyes. The man cried out, his hands to his face, sinking blindly to his knees.

Now there was just one left, the Inquisitor behind him, but he was on Tacit before he had even had a chance to raise his fists. The Inquisitor was quick, quicker than Tacit, now he was so spent from the fight, and almost as big. Tacit felt a fourth rib crack and then break from two quick jabs to his chest, his right eye closed from a left hook. Everything was slowing down. Tacit was tired and rusty. And stupid. He should have used the Colt revolver. He should have ended it. Instead, he was going to die here. He'd been imprisoned for too long. It had been a mistake coming here. He should have fled, made a new life for himself. But then he would never have found out just who had killed the Inquisitor and if the Antichrist really had returned. And Isabella. There was Isabella. Isabella …

A figure came out of the dark and brought a broken chair leg down hard on his attacker's head. He stumbled and shuffled right, his left hook flying wild. Tacit took his chance. He got one in just under the ribs followed by a beauty in the splenius capitis, which slackened the man's entire left-hand side. He stumbled forward, his hands grasping out blindly. Tacit let him fall before turning to face his accomplice. Isabella. He bundled her into his arm, leaning on her for support.

“Thank you,” he groaned.

“Are you all right, Tacit?” she asked, knowing he was not.

He nodded, surveying the room for any remaining Inquisitors. At the far end of the apartment he spotted Sandrine and Henry. He stumbled towards them and crouched down, Sandrine stirring as he checked her pulse.

“What's going on?” she asked, groggily.

“No time to explain,” replied Isabella, as Tacit dragged Henry from the floor and threw him over his shoulder. “Are you okay to walk?”

Sandrine struggled to her feet, testing her senses, and nodded.

“Good,” growled Tacit. “Let's get out of here. The Inquisition will send more once they know what's happened.”

“Gaulterio?” asked Isabella. “Did he betray us?”

But Tacit shook his head. “We must have been spotted, triggered an alarm.”

“I knew it was a mistake coming here,” she said, following him into the passageway outside the room.

“No,” replied Tacit. “Thank God we did. We've discovered something.”

“And what's that?”

“Something someone clearly didn't want us to find.”

FIFTY THREE

R
OMALDKIRK
. N
ORTH
Y
ORKSHIRE
. E
NGLAND
.

The three children had run all the way from school to reach the farm, as quickly as their little legs could carry them. The instant the bell had rung in
the school hall, signalling the end of the day, they had torn from the building, their satchels thrown over shoulders or swinging from tightly clasped fingers. They loved visiting the shepherdess and her flock, and had been promised a special treat this day. For the lambs were to be brought down from the hills in readiness for the farmers' market at the weekend and she had told the children they could take one lamb away with them, to keep as a gift, if their father allowed it. He had begrudgingly assented after catching his wife's insistent eye.

“I could almost explode with excitement!” squealed Maisie, her ginger plaits bouncing as she ran. “Where shall we keep it?”

“Father said in the garden would be fine,” said her brother Ross. “As long as we don't let it get under his feet.”

“Or eat his carrots!” laughed Annabel, the youngest of the three siblings.

“We'll be ever so good at caring for it,” insisted Ross. “And every summer we can make our own wool!”

“I'd like a black lamb,” said Maisie.

“Come on! First one into the yard can choose!”

They ran out of the shadows of Phillis Wood, the girls behind Ross, racing along the rutted stony path that cut between the two fields at the bottom of the Simpsons' farm. Now that the grey stone farmhouse had come into view, the children's excitement became greater with every stride.

“I can't hear anything,” said Ross as they grew nearer, his pace slowing a little to allow his sisters to catch up. “I'd have expected to hear baaing if shepherdess Simpson had brought them down into the yard.”

“Perhaps she hasn't managed to bring them down to the farm yet?” asked Maisie, immediately disappointed.

“Perhaps she never intended to?” said Annabel. “Perhaps she was only lying when she said she was going to bring the sheep down from the field? She did seem awfully strange that day she first suggested it, as if she was out to play tricks on us. Do you remember how she looked? As if she was teasing us?” The little girl recalled how unkind the shepherdess had appeared at moments during their visit and how she had scared her at times, an unnerving light in her old grey eyes.

“Mrs Simpson would never lie,” retorted Ross. “Maybe the sheep are just behaving themselves. Being good girls and boys and keeping quiet for us?”

They ran along the back of the house, snatching peeks through the windows of the place and the courtyard beyond. They were sure they could see the silhouette of the shepherdess in the yard among the flock, but didn't
pause to look more closely, instead dashing up the stone path at the side of the house and into the yard itself to see her with their own eyes.

The figure of the shepherdess, her stooped back to the children, hesitated and then turned to look at them, a violent slash of a smile on her face, splashed with blood. She was holding something. There was blood down her front, on her hands and all across the yard which was covered with the massacred white bodies of the lambs.

At once the children froze and Annabel and Maisie screamed, Ross breaking down in tears, his hands to his eyes.

“Whatever are you doing, Mrs Simpson?” he cried. “Whatever have you done?” His hands dropped a little and he stared at the bloody mess stretching to the far end of the yard.

The shepherd dropped the lifeless lamb in her arms onto the cobbled stones and took a step towards the three children

“The lamb of Christ lies down before him,” she spoke, as if reciting a passage from a sermon.

“Before who, Mrs Simpson?” wept Ross, shaking his head in anger and confusion.

“Before the Antichrist!” she laughed lightly. “He is coming. And his power reaches around the world.”

FIFTY FOUR

T
HE
S
LOVENIAN
B
ORDER
.

Naked, bloodied and covered in dirt, Poré dropped to his knees and hung his head like a man defeated. But he wasn't, not quite yet. He had run for hours from Pleven into the west, wearing his pelt, still transformed into the form of a wolf, stopping not even once, not until he knew he was far away from the town and the Inquisitors hunting him. Not until he knew they would no longer be able to follow his scent.

As a wolf he was stronger, faster. He found the wound to his leg did not trouble him as it did when he was a man. But even a wolf had to rest occasionally.

Slowly he recovered his breath and looked west, into the dark ridge of night which clung to the rolling hills beyond. Slovenia and, beyond that, somewhere, Italy and the Carso.

He looked back down into the damp grey and white of the fur pelt, turning it over in his fingers. His thoughts turned to his travelling companions who were now dead, killed by those who had thwarted him in Paris. A feeling close to sorrow enveloped him and quite without warning he felt the sudden need to weep. He let the cries come, shuddering and weeping into the pelt, feeling so alone, so terribly alone. Privately he had been grateful to find solace in others as desperate as he had been, people who shared a common hatred for that accursed religion. They were scoundrels and thieves, all of them with a history of mischief and violence, but they had come away with him and trusted him, for a while at least.

He had dared to believe, from the moment when he had found the pelt of Frederick Prideux discarded and stinking in the rubbish behind Notre Dame that night after the Mass for Peace, that the Mass had merely been an essay in a greater story he was to write. He had begun to understand that the road he travelled was assigned to him by a greater power and that it was always going to be long and difficult.

But now everything was close to its end. He just hoped the end had not already come.

A sudden heat exploded on the back of his head, as if the sun was shining just for him. He peered into the glittering heavens above at the new day breaking, as if trying to discern a reading from the constellations.

Now there was a light, shining down. And with it came a voice, a voice he recognised from long ago when he was a young man, the sound ringing sweet in his ears, just as it had back then. He almost expected to see a host of angels, such was the beauty of the sound and the warmth he felt. And then he saw it, the light, both brilliant and terrible, blinding and rendering him unable to move or talk, other than to shield his eyes. It was both terrifying and majestic but with it came a renewed strength and the voice called to him, as clearly as a bell. “Gerard-Maurice Poré,” it commanded, “you still have so much to do. And upon you the fate of all will one day rest.”

Almost as soon as the light had come it vanished, and the kneeling man was cast once more into cold and darkness, save for the meagre pale light of dawn at his back.

He lifted his head to the horizon, discerning a line of red dawn across it. Then he slowly gathered himself to his feet and walked on, knowing every step took him closer towards it, to redemption and to sacrifice.

PART FOUR

FIFTY FIVE

T
HE
V
ATICAN
. V
ATICAN
C
ITY
.

“Which way?” called Isabella, confused by the layout of the corridors. It was years since she'd been to this part of the Vatican, her work rarely taking her to the areas of the city afforded to the Sodalitium Pianum. Only the most resolute and austere of men resided here.

“Left,” replied Tacit, feeling Henry stir on his shoulder, leaving him relieved that he hadn't wasted his energy dragging a corpse halfway across the central offices of the Vatican. “Go left.” He indicated with the thrust of his head and turned to look back down the way they had come. “Keep going!” he called. “Keep going. Don't stop!” He could hear footsteps coming, heavy booted steps, and he knew to whom they belonged.

Isabella followed his directions, her feet tracing lightly over the wooden floorboards and through an arch of grey stone which led into a long broad corridor. Portraits of Priests adorned the walls, a carpet of faded lime lining the passageway, making their footsteps sound hollow and dull as they ran.