The Fallen (40 page)

“I can't go to sleep again,” Pablo pleaded.

“Of course you can,” the nurse told him. “You're ever so tired, Pablo.” She rolled him under the sheets. “Ever so tired. And you have such an important job still to do. You must get your strength back. After all, everything depends on you.”

EIGHTY THREE

R
OME
. I
TALY
.

Henry reached out for the stone wall outside the front door to Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini and tried to make sense of the nightmare in which he seemed to be living. A world at war. A city in flames. Tortured and murdered figures strung from churches. Sandrine gone, maybe dead.

“Come on!” Tacit called, bounding down the church steps to the avenue below them. The second of the rituals had been performed. They had to
move if they were to have any chance of stopping the Darkest Hand and the final act. Without a word, Henry and Isabella flew after him.

Terraced buildings, blood-red in the grubby first light of day, flashed by as the three of them ran, guided by Tacit's barked commands. Every now and then he allowed himself a glance over his shoulder towards the sounds of conflict behind him, the shrieking cries of dying Inquisitors, the terrifying howl of wolves on the rampage. And as he ran he saw the brightening sky turn powder blue, and was aware that dawn, and salvation of a kind, was at hand.

“Over the road!” he roared, as they reached a junction where the narrow street was bisected by another broader one, lined with saplings rich with a new harvest on their branches.

“Where are we going?” called Isabella.

But Tacit did not reply. His eyes scoured the shadows for any movement, any sign of the enemy, whatever guise that enemy might take.

He did see the thing come at him, but too late.

The huge wolf sprang from the street on the right, bundling the giant man over the cobbles, its claws and slavering jaws shimmering in the final rays of moonlight.

“Tacit!” cried Isabella, as the wolf and the Inquisitor rolled and tumbled across the road, smashing into railings on the far side, buckling the blackened, weathered metal bars. Isabella pulled out her revolver and took aim.

“Don't shoot!” warned Henry, pushing the gun to the side. “You might hit him!”

The wolf climbed over Tacit and raked his chest with its terrible talons, slicing at the chainmail armour beneath his shirt. Tacit kicked the beast clear with the metal toes of his boots and sprang to his feet.

“And that thing might be Sandrine,” Henry added, his eyes glowering with fear.

Isabella batted him aside and prepared to take aim again, but before she could do so Tacit had tumbled away, entwined with the creature, into the shadows of the street.

“If it's her,” called Tacit, finding his feet and landing a plum punch to the wolf's midriff, “prepare to be widowed.” He battered the wolf once, twice, in the side of the head, sending it stumbling backwards. There was a flash of silver in his hand. The wolf came back at him without a moment's pause, but Tacit was now armed, the knife flashing no more, instead dripping red with blood.

The wolf howled feebly, a pathetic attempt to summon up a cry, and
went down onto its hindquarters, a cruel wound to its neck. It struck out with a paw to slice at Tacit a final time, but he reared back and then thrust again, catching the beast under the chin and sinking all eight inches of blade into its flesh. The wolf's yellow eyes glazed and closed and it slammed forward onto the cobbled pavement between the trees. Tacit stepped back, drenched in his own blood and that of the creature.

“Tacit!” cried Isabella, dashing to his side.

He held up his hand to restrain her, his free hand on his knee, bent over to help draw the air into his lungs. He gulped four deep breaths and skewered Henry with a glare.

“You figure out whose side you're on, Henry,” he spat, his lips snatched tight to his teeth, “and you figure it out quick. If you're not on my side then you're my enemy. And if you're my enemy, you die like everyone else.”

He slammed the bloodied blade hard into its sheath at his waist, the hilt connecting with a dull ring, before ushering Isabella's searching hand away from his wounds.

“I'm fine,” he growled, snatching a bottle from his pocket and drinking three gulps from it, as if it were an elixir to heal his wounds. “Come on.” He broke back into a run, “let's keep going. Let's get out of this city.” And he shook his head, his hand to his wounds. “Wolves in Rome!” he exclaimed. “I've never known of wolves in Rome before.”

Isabella jogged beside him. “Sandrine, she said they had gathered beneath the capital. Beneath the Vatican, in underground lairs, tunnelled by their own hands.”

Tacit nodded. “It seems there is no holding their masses back. For decades they gathered in small groups. They seem now to be banding together in larger and larger clans, as if they sense a change. Perhaps one day they will envelop the entire world. But for now, dawn is coming. And with it, they'll return to their lairs.” He froze, his eyes snagged by something across the road, half hidden in the dirty light of a side-street.

“So you came back, did you?” he called. Sandrine slunk forward towards them into the street, a long coat she had purloined from somewhere covering her naked flesh beneath, her face vibrant with blood.

“Sandrine!” cried Henry, coming forward. Sandrine accepted his embrace, but her eyes remained fixed on Tacit.

“As I always suspected, you're a beast,” he growled. “A monster. A half-wolf.” He took three steps towards her and stopped in the middle of the road, his hand resting on the handle of his gun. “I'd be doing you a favour if I killed you now.”

Instantly she dropped from Henry's arms and sunk lower, her face etched with anger, her eyes wide. “You're just a man,” she hissed.

“And you're a half-wolf who's just recovered.” Something malign moved inside him, urging his hand to pull his revolver free from the holster. Tacit ignored it.

“Faced a few of us in your time, have you?”

“No,” muttered Tacit, power bristling within him, “Not half-wolves. But I know enough about your kind. That you'll be drained. That you can't change again. Not till you've recovered. Even if you could, I would kill you before you even moved.” His hand clenched tighter to the silver revolver strapped to his left thigh. “So, it seems to me, I have the advantage over you. Seems to me, I can rid myself of something I've been hunting all my life in a single moment.”

Then his palm dropped from the handle and instead he held out his hand for Sandrine to take it. “But it seems to me that I also owe you a debt of thanks.”

“What do you mean?” hissed Sandrine, rising a little from the protective pose she had adopted, but her eyes still distrusting.

“Back in the monastery, here in the city, you fought like one of us and you fought well. You and your Hombre Lobo. You helped save us.”

He turned his eyes down to his hand as a prompt for Sandrine to take it, and she did so, slipping her fingers over Tacit's huge palm.

“The wolves,” he said, “they're still my enemy. What you tried to do in Paris, I will never agree with it or forget. But all that is over now. It's in the past. Everything now is about the future and what we can do to stop it.”

“And what can we do?” asked Henry, admiration gritted in his face. He played his rifle from his left to his right hand.

“What we always do. We fight. We try and stop them, whoever is trying to complete the rituals. Isabella, you asked me where we're going? We're going north, to the Karst Plateau in the Carso. We stop the third ritual from happening and whatever they are trying to summon from coming through.”

The final ritual. Pride of life. Tacit knew it came down to this. The thought of it, of what it represented and what it might achieve if it was allowed to happen, was as terrifying as it was tantalising. He did not know exactly how the ritual would manifest itself, how it would be realised, but he had begun to have an inkling – and with it a sickening lingering fear of just what it would mean for him, and for the person he loved.

“We take a train,” he revealed, cracking his knuckles. “Time is of the essence and therefore the train is the only way. Termini Station.” He waved
roughly in the station's direction. “It's not far from here. We'll take the first train for the northern border. Do you have any money?” he asked, looking at each of them.

“A little,” Isabella replied. “Enough.”

“I have some,” nodded Henry.

Sandrine dug deep in the pockets of her coat, finding them empty. “The Inquisitor to whom this belonged, he obviously was not one to pay his bills.”

Tacit smiled grimly. “Looks like the Inquisitor settled up,” he said, looking at the dried blood on her face. “We'll need to try to get on board as inconspicuously as possible. The Inquisition will be watching for us. I suggest you find some clothes and get washed,” he said to Sandrine, dark humour gracing his features. “I suspect no eye will look the other way with you walking around like that.”

EIGHTY FOUR

T
HE
V
ATICAN
. V
ATICAN
C
ITY
.

The Holy See had been called to session, just three hours since the last. The atmosphere was more charged than ever.

“Grand Inquisitor Düül,” said Casado, clutching his skullcap tight to his head. “He is dead.” He exhaled loudly, defeated by this latest news.

“Where?” asked a Cardinal opposite, horrified. “How?”

“In the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione. His body was found in the Crypt of the Resurrection by the resident Father, Father Fesetti, when he came to open up the church for morning Mass.”

“The wolves?” someone asked. But Casado shook his head.

“We believe him to be the second victim of these rituals.”

“The lust of flesh,” muttered Korek, and many in the congregation who heard him nodded in feared agreement.

“But how did this happen?” asked Bishop Basquez. “The head of the Inquisition? Slain?”

“There are grave adversaries in the world, Bishop Basquez,” replied Casado.

“But to have killed Düül? What exactly did they do to him?”

“I don't think we need to go into details,” said Korek, raising a hand of restraint.

“Indeed,” agreed Casado. “Needless to say, how he was discovered aroused our suspicions immediately. The second of the three rituals has been performed.
He
is a step closer to achieving his plans.”

“And so Tacit has killed another,” said Basquez.

Cardinal Bishop Adansoni played with the loose threads on the sleeve of his gown. It seemed to him that his entire life was now spent in meetings, either private closed affairs, shared between just a few in claustrophobic chambers, or within the main inquisitional chamber, as the Cardinals currently found themselves, deep within the bowels of the Vatican. An exhausting treadmill of discussions and lamentations, an attempt for the assembled great minds to find wisdom and a way forward.

“We don't know that,” he said, but Basquez rounded on him, laughing.

“Your attempts to protect that murderer grow more pathetic with every passing crime. If not Tacit, then who? It stands to reason it was him. If he killed Sister Malpighi, he killed Düül. The man's crazed, possessed. He knows no boundaries.”

“I agree,” nodded Korek, before catching Casado's eye.

“With Düül gone,” muttered a hirsute Cardinal, long greying hair like a mane, “what hope is there? Who can protect us?”

“With Düül dead, we can take back control and responsibility for the Holy See. Let us be strong. Dawn is almost upon us,” Adansoni said, iron in his voice. “And with it, the Hombre Lobo will retreat back to their lairs.”

“Those who are left,” added Korek. “The Inquisition, they have killed a great many. The bodies of dead wolves are being burned as we speak.”