The Fallen (31 page)

“What does that mean?”

“These were powerful, from one of the lower levels of hell. There were nine of them.”

“Nine possessions?” he pondered. Isabella cursed, but Tacit kept his drunken eyes on Kell. “In one place?”

Kell nodded. “Entire dormitory possessed. They fought hard, trapped us for days within the place.”

“Which college?”

“Vittoria Colonna.”

Tacit nodded. He'd visited the place several times to deal with possessions in the past, but nine in one place was new even to him. “What did they have to say for themselves?”

“What do you mean?” exclaimed Sandrine, mocking the comment. “This wasn't a social visit! They were demons! Not Priests!”

But Kell came forward and calmed her with a hand on her shoulder. “It's all right, Sandrine, I know what Tacit means. Demons, they cannot resist mockery and arrogance, trying to prove their mastery and might over anyone who might listen, especially anyone who comes to attempt to defeat them.”

“And were they forthcoming?” Tacit asked, sitting back on the lid of the crate and folding his arms, the bottle nestled within them.

Kell nodded. “They were. They confirmed that something is coming.”

“The Antichrist?” asked Isabella urgently, looking at Tacit and then back to the Inquisitor. Kell considered the comment for a while.

“Perhaps, but they referred to whoever was coming as their ‘lieutenant'. Whoever that might be?”

“A person?” Henry suggested.

“Maybe. Whoever they are, whatever they are, apparently they are waiting, waiting for the right moment to arrive.”

Accosi dragged a gloved hand through his hair. “Resurrection. They kept talking about ‘resurrection' and ‘a chamber of bones'.”

“Does that mean anything to you?” Henry asked Tacit. Tacit made a face and took another mouthful of brandy, hoping that after it things might begin to make a little more sense. Everything at the moment seemed a confused blur. In fact, everything had been confused ever since he had broken out of Toulouse.

Inquisitor Santoro, who had said nothing but had drunk heavily from a tankard of ale, spoke for the first time. “Baptised in blood.”

“I wonder what's meant by that?” asked Tacit, feeling drunk and relishing the sensation.

“It was what one of the demons I exorcised said. Admitted it right at the end of the third day, before I finally hounded the evil from the child it had
possessed. That is how he described the lands where this lieutenant would return. Baptised with blood.”

“The war?” suggested Isabella.

“They have a war,” Tacit nodded. “A war across most countries in Europe, on many fronts. But baptised with blood? It sounds like some sort of ritual.”

“A ritual to create a chamber of bones?” suggested Isabella.

“Perhaps they are gathering an army,” said Henry, “baptising them with blood to get them to fight.”

“Well, they already have an army,” answered Tacit, scowling. “Six of them in fact. Six nations committing crimes across all of Europe. Perhaps this baptism is something to do with the letting of blood upon the ground?”

“Demons,” growled Sandrine. “Can we trust them?”

“No,” said all five Inquisitors at once.

“No,” repeated Tacit, “they cannot be trusted, but from out of their lies, truths do come out.”

“And names,” said Kell.

“Sister Malpighi?” asked Tacit, dropping the brandy bottle from his lips.

“How did you know about her?”

“You sent message of a word ahead of you. ‘Seer'.”

Kell nodded. “That was the word we strangled from one of the demons. Over and over he said it, particularly as the end drew near, as if it was a taunt. Seer. Seer. Over and over. Immediately we too thought of Sister Malpighi. The Seer of secrets.”

“It's a start,” nodded Tacit. “Let's go.” He drained the remains of the brandy from the bottle and stood, Henry catching hold of his elbow as he pushed past.

“Tacit, the Inquisition, they'll be watching for you everywhere. You know that, don't you? They'll be waiting for you. They won't let you get away next time.”

“Let them try,” Tacit replied, a drunken leer coming to his face. “If what we've heard is true, that something is coming, some evil, this is not the time to be skulking in the shadows. It's time to step into the light and face it. And destroy it, if we can.”

FIFTY EIGHT

T
HE
V
ATICAN
. V
ATICAN
C
ITY
.

Bishop Basquez stood with his hands flat to the sill of the arched stone window, staring out over St Peter's Square, watching as the crows flocked across the terracotta and beige rooftops in their thousands. Something had drawn them to the city. Something was festering within the holy city. Something foul had been awoken.

The young Bishop sighed loudly and looked across to his desk and the file lying upon it. The final manuscript of Salamanca's ill-fated attempt to unlock the darkness that many believed drove Tacit, at least until Salamanca was parted from his tongue and with it his mind. Basquez knew something lay buried within the Inquisitor. They all did, all those involved with his capture, his incarceration and his torture. That's why they had asked Salamanca to record every subtle revelation, every clue released through the agony of torture to help reveal what power it was that lay within Tacit, waiting to be unlocked.

What had started as rumour and suspicion, supported only by the speculation of prophecy, had grown into something manifest, something real before their eyes. A world in flames. The Antichrist's return. The theft of the dagger of Gath from its secure keeping in Paris.

Thirty-eight years ago, the dagger with its twin had been used to attempt to forge a crossing between the two worlds and bring damnation to the earth. Those who had witnessed the event claimed to have heard the High Priest at the time announce that something had come through.

Now, after all that had been seen and heard, Bishop Basquez was not alone in believing that what had come through was in fact Poldek Tacit.

They had only to unlock the secrets within the man in order to be able to step closer to the Abyss, to peer into its fiery depths and witness firsthand its terror and power.

But the man, the subject of their experiments, the one born out of the satanic ritual and sulphur, had escaped and now Grand Inquisitor Düül had involved himself personally. This would not end well. Basquez knew it would almost certainly end with Tacit's demise and with it the secrets and the potential untapped power stored deep within him.

FIFTY NINE

R
OME
. I
TALY
.

Tacit had wanted to take only Inquisitor Kell up to Sister Malpighi's residence, leaving the others in the entrance below, safe from any dangers they might encounter there, but he'd lost the argument. Partly through the determined spirit of his party and partly due to the clumsiness of inebriation which had embraced him. He had relented, leaving just the three Inquisitors behind to fend off the enquiring Sisters in the main hall.

They stood in the dark of the convent corridor, Tacit beside Kell, the rest of the party behind him, shoulders almost touching, not talking, their breath barely audible in the quiet of the place. There was a smell of polish and teak oil in the still air, incense too, but above it all was the putrescence of rot, seeping like a creeping thing from the closed room beyond. Flies bothered about their faces. Tacit knew exactly what had made them so active.

“Perhaps we weren't the only ones told about Sister Malpighi?” he muttered, fumbling in a pocket for another drink to help face the nightmare he knew lay beyond.

Sandrine scowled, puckering up her nose. “Surely no one would murder here?” she replied. “Not here, in a monastery?”

“Sister Maltese said Malpighi had a visitor, two days ago,” Kell revealed, his voice shallow. “Apparently he had come from the Vatican.”

“Who had come?” asked Tacit.

“A Priest. Sister Maltese said she didn't know him. But he was a big man. Muscular.”

“An Inquisitor,” nodded Tacit, and he instantly knew to which organisation he belonged. The Darkest Hand.

“Whoever it was, it obviously wasn't someone she was expecting,” said Henry.

“Don't forget this is Sister Mapighi we're talking about,” replied Tacit. “She must have known they were coming for her.”

Henry removed his revolver from its holster and snapped the cylinder open, studying the brass rounds inside. Against the metal barrel they sparkled like coins of gold. Sandrine peered at him from the corner of her eye, an eyebrow raised.

“Think you'll be needing that thing?”

“Nowhere seems safe anymore,” replied Henry.

Sandrine raised the back of her hand gently to Henry's and their fingers intertwined.

“You all right back there?” asked Tacit, an indignant look on his face. “You can always go back down to the lobby, wait with the Inquisitors for us.”

“No,” said Henry firmly, pulling his hand away and snapping the cylinder of the revolver shut. He thrust it back in his holster and prepared himself for action, clearing his throat and rolling his shoulders loose. There were tears in his eyes, anger in his face at how fate had catapulted him into this seemingly doomed world. “Shall we go in?” he asked.

“Good idea,” replied Tacit and he raised his boot, kicking the door open off its hinges. A fetid wave washed over them; it was a stench so bad that even the horrors Sandrine had seen and smelt in the lairs beneath the killing fields of the western front paled into insignificance compared to this reek of almost indescribable abhorrence.

“Oh my God!” cried Isabella, her hand tight to her nose and mouth. The smell flooded the corridor, engulfing them in its stink, a depraved malingering thing that seemed to embalm them in its putrescence. “The smell!”

“Do you think that's –”

“Sister Malpighi?” answered Tacit. “Who else could it be?” Tacit peered into the darkness of the little residential chamber. Blackness entombed everything. There was a malevolence to the place, something everyone could feel, something ungodly which had settled within the room. It prickled skin, raised hairs on backs of hands and necks. Sandrine's hand dropped to the nape of her neck.

“Something came to this place,” she said coldly. “Some evil.” There was a pressure in her chest and she was aware she was shaking. Henry reached out and took her hand to steady her.

“Kell,” muttered Tacit, “come with me. The rest of you, stay where you are.” In the fetid darkness, the two Inquisitors stepped over the threshold and waited for their eyes to adjust.

The soft hue of moonlight seeped through the thin blind of the window at the far end of the room. But there was something else as well as the stench, thick, like a soup, the repugnant reek of rot. A chill, an ungodly cold.

Flies buzzed excitedly around them. At first Tacit couldn't see the source of the appalling smell, but as he looked up he recognised the shape of a decomposing figure hanging from the rafters of the room. Haloed silver
from moonlight, the body hung in the middle of the chamber, suspended in the air as if floating, like an angel hovering within the room.

He swallowed and scowled, his eyes never leaving the body, barely recognisable as the Sister. He stared directly into the bored out sockets of the victim's eyes and felt something shift inside him, revulsion and something resembling sorrow. From the look on her face, the eyes had been burnt clean out of her skull, eyeballs, eyelids, optic nerve, everything, all the way down to the socket bone behind. This was not the work of men.

Kell, hands wrapped about himself like an embrace, noticed that even the silence seemed to have grown into an almost overwhelming presence in the room. He looked aside, snatching a brief breath, before lifting his eyes to look at Tacit.