The Fallen (49 page)

He drank deeply, nursing his wounded shoulder as he did so, turning it in its joint to ensure that it still had movement. He'd have need of it. Of that he was sure. The chain mail had taken most of the sting out of the rounds fired by Georgi on the train, but his shoulder was still bruised and hurt to move.

The hot Italian sun had roasted his sunburnt neck through the high thin atmosphere of the Karst and it pulled when he stretched at it to work any stiffness away. He took another long final swig from the bottle and, as if suddenly remembering that he was not alone, offered it to Henry. The soldier took it graciously and toasted him.

“Once more unto the breach?” Henry suggested quietly, raising the bottle to his lips. He handed it to Sandrine, who took two large gulps before handing it back to Tacit. He put it back in his coat, reaching down and checking his revolver in his holster, and the pack of ammo in a separate pocket. He'd lost a lot of kit back on the train, but he had enough for whatever lay ahead. He was sure of that. And he had his anger. He supposed with it he'd have enough for whatever he came up against. He'd have to.

The Karst Plateau. The place of the third and final part of the ritual. Tacit grimaced and promised himself it would end here.

“Pride of life,” he growled at Henry and Sandrine. “Let's try and kill it,” and he thought of Georgi and a hatred pulled within him.

He stepped forward and the anger began to burgeon at once. He let it. He could feel the darkness and the power almost overwhelm him as he stepped down into the cavern.

And then Tacit stopped dead in his tracks.

There was his old friend, dressed in black, standing above a woman who had been pushed down onto her knees, her hands tied by chains to a hook in the ground. Isabella!

She cried out to him and pulled hard at her bonds.

Tacit felt wrath build up inside him as he took another step forward, his eyes surveying the cavern for anything else, for any traps, for any other adversaries. It seemed that only Georgi faced him. He saw that he held a gun, thrust tight to the side of Isabella's head. There was no way he could get close enough to save her, not with a forward charge. “I'm here,” said Tacit, his face etched with hate.

“I was expecting you to come,” retorted Georgi, looking down momentarily at Isabella before stepping towards his old friend, a cold smile coming to his lip. There was a shrewd look in his eye. “After all, I knew you'd never leave this,” he said, lifting his hand to indicate Isabella.

“Get out of here, Tacit!” she cried. “Leave!”

But Georgi shook his head and chuckled. “He won't,” he said. “He can't.”

Tacit noticed that a pattern had been drawn into the floor of the cavern, a pentagram in the very centre, and immediately it confirmed all of Tacit's fears. After all the rituals, it was here that they concluded. To summon something wicked from hell.

“Lost your way badly, Georgi,” said Tacit, turning back to him. “What changed you?”

“Let's just say that death was the making of me,” replied Georgi, the
smile hardening, the revolver waved in Tacit's direction. Tacit considered his chances of wrestling it from the Inquisitor. He was ten feet away now. Close enough, but he knew Georgi was good. Perhaps too good. Tacit's old friend had proved that already on the train.

“Perhaps you should have stayed dead?” he said. “Seems to me you've caused no end of trouble since. Grand Inquisitor Düül? I suppose that was your handiwork?”

Georgi smiled and bowed in recognition, holding his hands wide. “My master commands and I must do.”

“It seems there's no limit to the depths you're willing to go to for your master?”

“Let's just say that he has been generous in what he has given to me. What skills he has taught me, what powers he has provided to me. Mind you, you're a fine one to talk, Poldek,” replied Georgi, laughing. “Unyielding in your commitment to your own faith, aren't you, misguided though it is. Almost to the point of obsession. I must admit you have surprised me. I thought you would have wavered in your faith long ago. You were always a mean bastard, weren't you, Poldek? But we always said you, of all of us, would be the first to break.”

“How so?” asked Tacit, his fierce eyes on the man with the gun.

“Because you were the hardest of us, and the hardest blade is often the easiest to shatter. But it turned out that you were the one who never questioned anything he was told. The one who never doubted. Although …” He stopped and looked at his friend, his head tilted at an angle. “I heard you failed once when you were younger? When you thought you were in love?” He laughed, a short, spitting laugh like a wound. “What was it that made you leave the Church, Poldek? Love? True love? Did you prefer to lie in the arms of your lover than the arms of the Lord?”

“I know what you're suggesting, Georgi. Keep Mila out of it,” warned Tacit, his eyes flashing. He could feel the blood pumping behind his ears, could feel his heart rage. “Let's finish this,” he growled.

But the black-clad man laughed. “Finish this? No, my friend. It's only just begun. It's only just beginning. The lights. The voices. Is it true they talk to you? Is it true they empower you, empower you to take life, and give it? You understand now don't you, Tacit? You understand why you're here, why Isabella is here? What we're going to do?”

Tacit did. He had known from the moment they had taken Isabella. Perhaps he had always known. He nodded. His heart raged, but if there was any emotion, he didn't show it.

“You are the final piece, just like you were with the Mass for Peace. We needed a world upon which our lord could return, one fitting for him. And only through completion of the ritual will that happen. Pride of life!” He spat the words, spittle flying from his mouth, and Tacit knew at once that madness had entrapped him totally. “The desire to break that bond between life and death. The final act. The ultimate sin. To break God's will and ensure that they who he captured and enslaved are claimed back to earth.”

And without another word, he raised his revolver and levelled it at Isabella's body.

“Georgi!” hissed Tacit, his hand raised to urge him back, but Georgi's finger whitened against the trigger and the gun instantly exploded in his hand. Isabella let out a short cry and was thrown back with a grunt, lifeless in the dirt of the cavern, blood streaming from her chest.

“No!” roared Tacit, running forward and taking her into his arms, Henry and Sandrine standing in horrified silence at the entrance to the cavern. “No!” he cried, rocking her to and fro, as he had Mila all those years ago. “What have you done?” Looking up at Georgi, his eyes were full of tears and anger. Georgi smiled and pointed the revolver to the sky.

“My bidding for the Lord, beginning the final part of the ritual, Poldek. You know what to do,” he said, his face darkening. “Do it!”

Georgi backed away as Tacit turned back to Isabella, hanging limp in his arms. He held her tightly to his body, tears flowing down his cheeks, still rocking her gently.

ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

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LOVENIA
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Figures, all dressed in black robes, gathered around Pablo and ushered him forward through the complex of caves. He resisted and felt hands take hold of his arms and push him in the back, forcing him on.

“Come, come, Private Gilda,” said Corporal Abelli, leering at him closely. “This is your moment to become the great warrior you've always wanted to be, to justify the blood which runs in your veins.”

He was bundled on, half pushed, half pulled, resisting the best he could against the army of hands and whatever ritual it was they were dragging him towards. But the strength had all but run out of him after the exhausting battle, and fear had taken the rest.

The archway of the cave ahead opened out onto a broad exposed circle of rock, thirty feet wide, at the far end of which were gathered an assembly of Priests, all watching Pablo intently, hoods pulled high up over their faces. At their head stood the High Priest, tall, bearded, in his hands two long pale daggers. Forty feet below them on the plains of the Carso, the battlefield of the Karst Plateau festered in the dying heat of daylight's final hour.

Now Pablo fought harder to flee, but the hands just gripped him more firmly and pushed him ahead. At once the Priests scurried forward and laid out the elaborate relics they had brought with them with well-trained efficiency and speed. Above them, a full pale moon had begun to rise over the eastern horizon, a scatter of stars appearing above. Crows circled the pinnacle in vast flocks, gathering on rocky outcrops and the single needle of stone which climbed yet higher into the heavens, squawking and croaking loudly.

Moonlight felt its way across the vast plateau, its silvery fingers creeping over the blackened stone of the pinnacle and onto the jet-black robes of the Priests. The wind had fallen away and from the depths of the battlefield below, the smell of churned bodies and blood began to climb, assaulting the senses.

A large silken black cloth had been set out on the dark rock, on which white ribbon had been laid out in the shape of a five-pronged star. Black candles had been set at its points.

Pablo was pushed towards it and onto his knees. Lightning flashed and sparked above and thunder rumbled in from the east. The Priest threw his arms wide, both daggers held in his hands, moonlight glinting off their blades.

“Deadened eyes. Torn bloodied skin. Branded tongues burnt from toothless mouths. These are signs pleasing to our Lord.”

The growing dusk was torn open with shards of electric white lightning.

“They who would sacrifice all and nothing for their master, they who would fight and die and yet can never be destroyed for his majesty and his safe returning and reign, for they are as old as the foundations of time itself and created in the very fires of when time too was made.

“He has seen the sacrifices we have made for him here in this plain, ensuring the nourishing life blood of the fallen has seeped down into the
bowels of his domain. For too long this world has been full of light and life. The new age has arrived, foretold by many and by just a few, an age of apocalypse and ruin for those who choose not to believe, not to follow, to give themselves entirely to his darkness and might.”

He let his arms drop to his side and stared at Pablo. “Bring the final sacrifice!”

ONE HUNDRED AND SIX

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LOVENIA
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Again. It was happening again. Everything he loved, everyone for whom he cared, who touched his life, died or fell away from him. His mother. Mila. Now Isabella.

“What can we do?” asked Henry, as he and Sandrine fell alongside Tacit.

But if Tacit heard the question, he did not acknowledge it. Instead he cried out, louder than ever, shaking his head, his eyes tightly shut, muttering “No” under his breath over and over again. Her deathly pale, beautiful face was void of any life, a death mask. He crushed her lifeless, chilling body to his, feeling the cooling of her blood against him.

“Isabella!” he cried and anger rippled through him, anger at Georgi, anger at himself, anger at his curse, for he knew then that it was a curse which he carried.

The lights and the voices, they had always been there, his constant companion. He couldn't remember when they had first come to him as a young boy, but always they came whenever he was tested, whenever things were most bleak, the spirits filling him with their might and their majesty and their horror.

At first, when they came to him as a boy, he had thought it was a madness which had struck him down, when the voices spoke to him, whispering wicked enticements in his ear, the lights dazzling his eyes. But when the voices and lights subsequently returned, and each time they returned after that, they brought with them power and speed and foresight. It was then that Tacit knew them not to be an affliction but a gift, a strength in
dark times. And while the words spoken to him were cruel and the lights blinding, they empowered him to achieve things beyond the measure of his years. To become more than a man. To become a god.