The Fallen

by Tarn Richardson

  Tacit!

  She could hear the armed men coming, dashing back across the bridge in her direction. She knew what they were. Inquisitors. The way they moved, the way they had acted without mercy. But even Inquisitors had limits. The Inquisition was a secret organisation, always acting under deathly silence and secrecy. She could not understand why they were here in Rome and gunning down their own kind in an open and seemingly unprovoked attack.

  She leapt to her feet and ran, her sodden clothes clinging tight to her body. She wrenched her cape from her shoulders and flung it aside, moving more easily without its constricting embrace.

  Behind her the pack of Inquisitors charged, their heavy footsteps slapping on the riverside path, weapons jostling in holsters. Cincenzo’s killer, the man long believed dead, stopped and let them run on. Something else had caught his eye. He picked up Isabella’s cape from where it had fallen, lifting it to his nose and smelling it. A smile came to his lips, as if he could recognise the sweet scent of the Sister and with it a memory long forgotten.

  THREE

  TOULOUSE INQUISITIONAL PRISON. TOULOUSE. FRANCE.

  Tacit turned slowly on his hard bed in the cold and dark of his cell, the heavy chain on his leg clanking as it fell to the stone floor, the iron ring on his ankle cutting cruelly into the already torn skin. If it troubled the Inquisitor he made no sign, drawing a hand under his head to offer a little respite from the firm cold board which formed the bed beneath him. Sleep wasn’t hard to find in that cell, not after long hours under the torturer’s hand, but there was no comfort and a well-muscled arm would have to suffice as a pillow, as it had for the nine months Tacit had been held in that dreadful place.

  The days of his imprisonment had crawled, as if time itself had been stretched by the monotony and torment of his confined life. His old life as one of the Catholic Church’s greatest Inquisitors, dispatching monsters dreamt of only in your worst nightmares, now seemed a distant memory. The terror and fire of daily conflict had become a slowly cooling ember in the dark recesses of his mind. But despite all that had tarnished within him since his arrest and imprisonment, he could still recall with needle-like clarity the events that had led him to be bound in chains in the very deepest part of the prison: the treachery of Cardinal Poré; the fiendish but flawed plan to unleash terror within Notre Dame; the wolf pelt.

  The case which had led to his incarceration had started innocuously enough, just another brutal killing of a Catholic Priest, this time Father Andreas in Arras Cathedral. With Sister Isabella at his side, sent to test his faith and see if he had fallen from his faith’s vows, Tacit had quickly focused his enquiries regarding the murder on a local woman named Sandrine Prideux. Even though she managed to elude him herself, she was not able to keep the plot from him, devised by traitors within the Catholic faith and Hombre Lobo, werewolves, on the western front. A wolf pelt, taken from Sandrine’s wolf father, had been sneaked into the coven of traitorous Cardinals by Cardinal Poré, part of a plot to unleash carnage at the Mass for Peace in Notre Dame in an attempt to bring an end to the world war and grant revenge to the wolves after centuries of persecution and torment. They were the Catholic Church’s darkest secret, excommunicated for daring to defy the Church and cursed forever to walk as men during the day while transforming into wolves at night.

  In a world fuelled by hate, at the end it was a love Tacit thought he never could feel again, this time for Isabella, which brought salvation for him and saved Isabella. Making sure she was out of harm’s way, Tacit had bounded alone into the Mass for Peace and blasted Cardinal Monteria from the pulpit just moments before he had slipped the stinking wolf’s pelt over his head and transformed into a bloodthirsty werewolf. Tacit wondered if he could have done anything differently to save himself, to avoid arrest. He had been over it in his mind time and time again, particularly when conditions within the prison were particularly bad. To have done so would have meant never being able to voice his true feelings for Isabella. Every time he asked himself the question, the same answer came back to him. No, he would have changed nothing.

  Tacit sighed heavily, a shiver running down his spine. During the biting cold of that first winter, when the dungeon had grown so bitter that the walls froze and fingers and toes went dead to the touch, he had for a little while questioned if even he would survive it. But there was now the hint of summer in the air, a subtle warming of the cell. Not that Tacit could see it. There were no windows in his deeply buried chamber, but the ice on the walls had begun to thaw, the glistening stalactites dripping from the ceiling onto him and the piss-covered floor below. Tacit imagined the sun’s warm tendrils reaching across and embracing the land, ripening the crops long dormant during the winter months. And he remembered another time, a happy time, when he worked the lands of Mila’s farm, long ago, when life had seemed less dark, less troubled.

  With this thought his mind turned back to Isabella, as it so often did in the darkest moments of his imprisonment, the soft feel of her skin on his fingertips, the light fragrance of her scent, her radiant beauty filling his mind. A tonic. A light in the blackness that had surrounded him since the death of Mila, his first love. A relief from his now intolerable life.

  Despite the cold and dark, the memory of her could still easily be retrieved, like a hidden drawer within his mind to which he forever held the key. He thought of Isabella, of what she might be doing at this very moment, of whether her life had changed since the Mass for Peace, the event after which everything had changed for Tacit. A warmth blossomed within him and with it he dared to wonder if she still thought of him, or if he had now become nothing more than a vague memory, withered and shrunken. A weight grew in his chest, a feeling both aching and foreign, and he took hold of it and crushed it out of him with anger and spite.

  Almost immediately something took the dying emotion’s place within him, a pervading darkness, a shrieking, mocking thing, dripping with wickedness and alarm. This ancient evil, full of rage and remorse, attacked his mind when he was vulnerable, when he was in the darkest and most hated of places.

  He sat up, his hand clutched to his head, embraced by a shroud of fear. He hated the voices and the messages they brought, but they had come to him all his life and he had learnt to find strange comfort at times in their baleful cries and grim confessions. As if through their guttural sounds, hope could be gleaned. He opened his eyes and found there were tears in them, and relief that he was still where he was, in that charnel house of torture and death. Better there than in the hellish nightmares of his mind. For he knew it was hell whence these visions came, and to which they were trying to drag him.

  A mouse scurried from its hole in the corner of the room and dared to explore the ground beneath the cell’s operating chair, where most of the heinous tools of torture had been played upon him. The tiny creature settled back onto its hind legs and looked up at the imposing blood-red wood of the seat, black-grey chains and manacles hanging lifeless from it, smelling of gore and sweat. The mouse caught the stench of horror ingrained within it and turned to run, darting for its hole and safety from the odious thing.

  Tacit turned his eyes back to the ceiling and wondered again about the world beyond the thick walls of the place. He never knew if it was night or day, but he knew it would not be long until he heard the heavy clang of the iron gate and the sound of many heavy eager feet on the cold damp stone passageway outside his cell. Every day they visited him, the torturers of the prison, to try to break him. But his body was still resolute, his mind strong, strong enough to withstand the agonies set upon him by the torturer’s hand. At least for now. How long could he hold out against their murderous tools, against the clinging dark, against the maddening sounds from the prison? Against the memories of Isabella and the ghost of their brief embrace, a memento of a life lost forever, save when it returned to taunt him in his darkest nightmares. And how long could he last against the demonic voices within him, the ones he had always heard, the ones who had always compelled
him to react, as they were now, compelling him to rise and act and do?

  FOUR

  THE VATICAN. VATICAN CITY.

  “Poldek Tacit!” called Cardinal Bishop Adansoni above the growing throng of dissenters and cries of derision from the Holy See. “Poldek Tacit! Surely it is not my belief alone that he should never have been imprisoned?”

  The circle of rallying Cardinals rocked and gestured manically within the inquisitional hall, a heavy scent of incense and teak oil on the air. “What are you suggesting, Cardinal Bishop Adansoni?” asked the newly appointed Cardinal Secretary of State Casado, the one supposedly in charge of keeping order within the inquisitional chamber and the protesting voices of the gathered Holy See in check. “That he should be released?”

  “He murdered Cardinal Bishop Monteria!” seethed Cardinal Bishop Korek. Sitting next to the Secretary he scowled at the elderly Cardinal who, despite his years, still possessed the fire of youth behind his bushy eyebrows.

  “We have since dropped Monteria’s full title,” countered Adansoni. “After all, the man intended to commit mass murder at the Mass for Peace in Paris.” Adansoni pressed home his point with a thrust of his finger. “And he would have done so if it wasn’t for Inquisitor Tacit.”

  “This is about who Inquisitor Tacit is, isn’t it, Cardinal Bishop Adansoni?” asked Korek shrewdly, his eyes fierce on the man. “The boy plucked from his dead mother? The one the prophecy spoke of?” Adansoni made a noise of derision himself now, as if the old man’s words were a pointless diversion, but Korek continued, ignoring him. “The one who will come from the East? The preordained one? That he’ll be found abandoned on high and will be rescued from the clutches of death. That he’ll display incredible skills of hand and eye. That he’ll master languages. That victory will be his brand and emanate from him. That death will follow in his wake.” Korek skewered the greying Adansoni with a piercing glare. “The boy that you found, Cardinal Bishop Adansoni. You feel he is too important to be imprisoned within an inquisitional cell, don’t you?”

  “I was simply Father Adansoni when I found him,” countered the Cardinal, his tone softening in an attempt to defuse the rising tensions. “And while I might have been the one who found him, I never claimed he possessed any great qualities.”

  “Other than those of an Inquisitor?” said Casado.

  “Of those significant skills I think we are all in agreement,” said Adansoni, nodding to his old friend and then addressing the wider room for support. He paused, and looked back at Korek. “But in answer to your question, Cardinal Bishop Korek, no this is not about whether Inquisitor Tacit is too important to be chained to the wall of a cell for the remainder of his days or not. No! This is about doing what is right.” The clamour of the inquisitional hall rose on this admission, but Adansoni managed to regain control over the throng. “To imprison Inquisitor Tacit for the crime of saving the Catholic faith simply cannot be right,” he announced, when the room had fallen silent.

  “Much like Monteria, I think we have since dropped Tacit’s title?” spat the snakelike Bishop Basquez, who had somehow managed to obtain a place among the elected Cardinals in the inquisitional meeting hall this late evening. His narrowed eyes glowered at Adansoni. “Regardless of what you might think, Poldek Tacit is a murderer. Pure and simple. If we allow him to walk free from the Inquisitional Prison in Toulouse, what message would we be sending to all our other enemies within the Church who wish to do us harm?”

  “Whoever said that Tacit was our enemy?” replied Adansoni. As he spoke, he saw the indefatigable figure of Father Strettavario among the crowd at the rear of the chamber, watching proceedings with his usual measured contemplation. Adansoni allowed his eyes to return slowly back to the Bishop as Basquez turned on the congregation for their assistance, his eyes now as wide as his arms were spread.

  “Not our enemy?” laughed Basquez, with cold humour and feigned surprise. “Have you not forgotten our concerns as to his previous behaviour, the reason why the Holy See first suggested he be assessed in Arras? Something they were clearly right to do. The man is out of control. Possessed.”

  Now Adansoni glowered. “Possession is a strong word, Bishop.”

  “And so I do not use it lightly,” Basquez retorted.

  Adansoni shook his head. “Surely when you talk of possession, you talk of those whom Tacit processed in their thousands, those who truly are possessed with the spirit of the Devil?”

  “Like those who trouble our city currently?” said Casado across the noise of the hall. He shut his eyes, bowing his head with the weight of worry, of responsibility. “It seems there are more episodes of demonic possession than ever before within Rome. Every day the number of new cases increases threefold. And not just within Rome. Across the world, signs of the Devil can be witnessed every day. A plague of locusts in Palestine. A famine in Lebanon. Strange warnings within the heavens. Statues which bleed. Rivers running red. The Inquisition can barely keep up.”

  “More reason why we need men like Tacit among us,” replied Adansoni, his finger raised. “I say again, he is not our enemy. The Devil is our enemy.”

  “Not our enemy?” said Korek, rejoining the debate. “Need I remind the Holy See of Father Desrochers’ broken wrist courtesy of Poldek Tacit in Paris shortly before the Mass for Peace? Or of Bishop Gagne’s broken nose in Arras when Tacit was ransacking Cardinal Poré’s private residence? Or of Monteria’s murder?”

  “And why must you keep referring back to the ‘murder’, as you so call it, Cardinal Bishop Korek?” retorted Adansoni, his nostrils flaring. “Tacit saved our Church that day. As I have said before, and said many times, surely he should be rewarded, not imprisoned for what he did?”

  “The day we reward those who murder within our faith,” the Cardinal replied coldly from the other end of the room, “is the day we should call for the Catholic faith to be brought to an end.”

  “Then perhaps we should end our faith right this moment,” said Adansoni, going to sit in his chair, defeated. Casado called out to him before he could do so.

  “Why say such a thing, Javier?”

  “Murder in the name of our faith?” replied Adansoni, turning his eyes from his old friend back over to Strettavario. “The Inquisition. Remember the Inquisition, and what it is they do on a daily basis in the name of our faith.”

  FIVE

  ROME. ITALY.

  As she fled, all Isabella could taste was fear. Night had fallen across the city with alarming speed, plunging it into an almost instant purple darkness.

  She sprinted along the river bank and up the stone staircase at the far end, onto the bridge above, her breath snatched, every twenty paces looking back over her shoulder to see if they were still on her tail. And as she ran, Tacit’s name echoed over and over in her ears, though whether as a tribute or a warning she did not know.

  Isabella knew she had one advantage over her pursuers, small though it was. She knew the capital well. Her Chaste assignments within the city, coaxing errant hands and snatched kisses from wayward Priests, had taken her to the more unfrequented areas of the city, the dark streets, the paths rarely travelled. She would lead her pursuers into the labyrinthine parts of Rome, the twisting confusion of side-streets, courtyards and alleyways, which could confound and bind the unwary. She would try to lose them there.

  There was no question who was chasing her. She had recognised them from the moment she’d laid eyes on them through the grey dusk, their black uniforms, their ruthless demeanour, the way they acted without hesitation or doubt. But still she could find no explanation as to why, in the open heart of Rome, the Inquisitors had behaved so brazenly? Even the Inquisition had rules. Even it didn’t gun down Priests and agents of the Chaste without good reason. What had the man who had toppled mortally wounded from the bridge done that was dreadful enough to demand his public execution? Why was his dying word the name of the man Isabella loved? And why did witnessing the shooting bring its own death sentence?

>   Isabella’s light fleet feet barely made a sound as she sprang across the Via dell’ Olmetto and plunged into the darkness of the street beyond. She was no longer cold from the river. Instead, she was chilled with fear. She had not felt like this since Arras, when Tacit …

  As she ducked right down a side-alley, a handgun exploded behind her and a piece of masonry burst from the wall beside where she was running. She ducked beneath it, her hair sprayed with masonry and dust, unable to contain the cry of alarm from her throat, and turned into the alley immediately on her left, crouching low as she went.

  There was a six-foot wall in front of her and she threw herself over the top of it, taking a moment to look back before she dropped down the other side. Four men. Robed. Hooded. Dark-featured.

  Isabella raced up the alleyway into which she had dropped, climbing broad cobbled steps lined with slate. It was cold and dark, every shadow suggesting another Inquisitor lying in wait to reach out for her. She sprinted along it with reckless speed, taking the steps three at a time, her lungs burning, pleading for her to stop. But to do so would be the death of her. She knew that much.

  There was a ladder to her right and she leapt onto the third rung and climbed, reaching the top moments before the Inquisitors reached its base. Two men went after her, bounding up the rusted iron rungs, the ladder groaning under their weight, the remaining Inquisitors taking another route, hoping to head her off at the far side of the building.

  Across the roof tops Isabella ran, her arms held wide as if on a high wire, hoping not to lose her balance and plunge to the dark streets below. She reached the far side of the building, where, faced with a seven-foot gap between her and the building opposite, she took her chance, clearing it and landing on the other side. But her momentum carried her forward and she rolled onto the tiles beyond. At once she felt the roof sag and buckle beneath her. Seconds later, the aged rafters gave way, the tiles cracking and splintering in a circle around her, before plummeting Isabella downwards, down into the room below.