Georgi ran to the side, laughing to see Tacit clinging by his fingertips to a rocky outcrop ten feet below.
He leaned over, hands on his hips, and shook his head.
“Yes, it was always the damned lights. For years you ignored them, scorned them. Never used them. Tried to follow the faithful, honourable path, without their wickedness influencing your life. Me? I was sent to do the Devil’s bidding.”
Tacit felt his fingers slip on the wet rock and found a new hold.
“I would offer you a hand but I’m otherwise engaged. I’ll return to the cavern below. I’ll find Isabella. I’ll throttle the life out of her. And then I’ll wait for the Dark Lord to call for me.”
The aquamarine river swam up from below. Tacit swung across to try to find another hold but there were none to be found, his cold wet fingers beginning to ache.
“Come on, Poldek!” laughed Georgi, “don’t keep us hanging around all day! There are a great many things I need to do. A certain person to kill, demons to meet.”
A howl came from the stairs and Georgi turned just in time to see a huge feral creature leap from the stairs and cross the needle’s tip. It landed squarely on his chest, bucking him backwards towards the edge. Georgi fought against gravity, his arms flapping wildly, his eyes manic. And then he slipped and fell. Shooting past Tacit, he managed to grasp Tacit’s right boot and wrenched him from the pinnacle. Together they tumbled and fell in an embrace.
The wolf sat at the edge of the cliff face looking down and watched as the two figures fought and tussled all the way to the valley bottom before they hit the surface of the blue Soča River far, far below with an enormous splash.
ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
THE ITALIAN FRONT. THE SOČA RIVER. NORTHWEST SLOVENIA.
On the summit of rock, the High Priest turned and surveyed the carnage all around him, his plans lying in bloodied, tattered ruins. Pablo was crouched on the floor still cradling the knives in his hands, one slick with Abelli’s blood.
“You!” he cried, and it seemed as if the heavens thundered above him as he spoke. “Why could you not have done what was commanded of you? Forever now you are condemned to lie open to the torments of hell!”
He strode towards the terrified young man, who held his hands across his face in readiness for the killing blow. A shadow swept over him, something large, smelling of blood and rot, and instantly his eyes snapped open.
An enormous wolf stood between Pablo and the High Priest, standing on its hind legs but hunched over so that its giant front talons were almost scraping the surface of the rock floor. Even bowed, the wolf still towered above the tall bearded Priest, monstrous in size.
But if there was any fear in the Priest’s mind, he showed none. He stared hard at the beast and spat at the ground in front of it.
“You dare to come and face me, condemned and cast down off-cut of man?” the Priest seethed, his eyes like flaming orbs, the burn on his face glistening in the rain. He took a step forward and pointed at the creature. “You do not have the authority to threaten me, if you cannot face me as a man! And you were stripped of that title long ago. Get out of here! Go back to your lair and your cursed existence!”
With that, the wolf reached up with one of its taloned hands and grappled at its neck, pulling the ragged pelt from its head. Instantly the wolf withered and shrank to the naked, gaunt figure of Poré.
“But I do face you as a man!” shouted Poré, and the High Priest glowered and sank back, his hand to his heart.
“What is this witchcraft?” he hissed.
“Do you not remember me, Cardinal Gílbert?” Poré asked, his pallid skin splashed with dirt and blood. The great bearded Priest hesitated, confused. “Many years ago you placed a curse upon me, but of a different kind, the condemnation to a life of full of bitterness, of longing, of questions. My family taken from me, sent to the rack and the torturer’s chair of the Inquisition. Sent there by your hand!
“By the time I had regained enough of myself and my senses to seek you out, you had vanished from the Catholic Church, slipped into the black hole and onto this corrupt path you have followed ever since. I have sought you much of my life, and now I have found you. Now I shall have my revenge!”
But Cardinal Gílbert laughed. “Pathetic!” he spat. “That you should have carried such a burden of resentment and spite towards me for so long, and yet I have no memory of who you are, or your family. I suppose I should feel pride that you think of me with such passion, but then, I sent so many to the inquisitional chambers. And still so many are weak and in need of correction and grinding out, under the guidance of my Lord.”
Poré shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s over. It’s finished.”
But the Priest scowled, rage gathering in his face. “It’s never finished!” he roared. “This is only the beginning! Now I see you, skin and bone!” His eyes grew wide. “All the easier to kill!” He reached for a knife at his belt and sprang forward, wrestling Poré to the ground and rolling with him over the prostrate figure of Pablo. His hand gripped tightly around Poré’s gaunt throat, as he fumbled with his blade in the other. But as Poré struggled, he managed to snatch one of Pablo’s knives and, turning over, raised it above his shoulder and plunged it deep into the High Priest’s chest.
The six-fingered blade slipped effortlessly between his ribs. The air gushed out from Cardinal Gílbert’s choked lips, as if his spirit was trying to flee his dying mortal remains before it was trapped within.
Poré fell away, lying with his back to the cold wet stone, and closed his eyes, the last of the power crackling and dying around him before everything went dark.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE
THE ITALIAN FRONT. THE SOČA RIVER. NORTHWEST SLOVENIA.
In the moment the High Priest was slain, a noise and heat rose from the pentagram in the inner chamber below, a sound as if all the hordes in hell had been set free and a thousand thunderstorms were tearing open the heavens.
The broken vanquished powers came screaming from the claustrophobic chains of hell where they had been caged for so long, the cool air dissolving their ruptured, fractured shadows. Cursing and shrieking, the spectres of the princes of hell fought and clawed over each other to be the first to taste the air of earth, knowing that it would be for but a fleeting moment, a harrowing taunt of what they could have tasted, before their chains pulled them once more back into the fiery abyss. They took to the skies, spinning and evaporating in the moonlight like shadows before the sun, until only their frightful cries hung on the wind like a dark memory.
Sandrine sunk to her knees at the edge of the needle of stone, high above the pinnacle, the last of the rain washing the filth from her body. She lay there panting for breath, the low sun now breaking from between the clouds on the western horizon, capturing her in its final warming rays.
There was a noise from the steps behind her and, exhausted, she turned her head to look, as Henry and Isabella appeared. Henry set Isabella down and rushed forward, taking Sandrine into his arms, removing his coat and setting it about her, pressing the hair away from her face.
“Sandrine!” he cried. “Sandrine! My darling! Are you all right?”
She nodded, slumping in his arms. He looked around the empty circle of rock.
“Tacit!” cried Isabella, weeping and holding her hand to her mouth. “Where is he?”
“Gone,” replied Sandrine, tears of remorse and pain in her eyes. “He fell.” She looked over the edge of the cliff and cried long into Henry’s chest as he pulled her close to him. “They came through,” she sobbed. “The demons. They came through. I heard them! I heard them come!”
But Henry shook his head. “No. They were only shadows of what might have been. The summoning was stopped. It is over.”
Isabella got to her feet and shakily staggered to the edge, peering over it. She screamed out to the valley far below, sinking to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. She felt hands around her shoulders and let Sandrine embrac
e her.
Dusk fell. The three of them huddled close on the pinnacle of rock, chilled and sodden. The storm had stopped in an instant. They clutched onto each other, both weeping and cursing, sometimes animated and enraged, at other times quiet and withdrawn.
A gentle wind tugged at Isabella as she closed her wet eyes to the breeze and tried to make sense of everything. Tacit, the man they had followed, the man she had loved, was gone. Dead. He couldn’t have survived such a fall, a mile drop into a surging river far below. A noise drew them all to look towards the steps up to the stone circle. Pablo approached cautiously, hands gripped in front of him as if in prayer, his head bowed like a subservient slave to a master.
“He’s gone!” he cried. “Poré, the one who came as a wolf. He killed the High Priest, the one he called Cardinal Gílbert. I saw it, with my own eyes. Stabbed him clean through the heart with one of the daggers.” The words came like a cascade, a rush of noise.
“Poré!” muttered Sandrine, shaking her head so her damp lank hair tickled the edge of her shoulders. There was the hint of a smile on her lips, amazement twinned with admiration. “So he followed us, all this way! I thought he’d died at the Mass for Peace.”
“How did he know?” asked Isabella. “How did he know to come here? Is he still on the summit?”
“He was,” replied Pablo. “But he left. He took the wolves with him.”
“Small mercies,” Isabella added, looking across at Henry and Sandrine.
“What do we do now?” asked Sandrine.
“We get off this mountain,” said Henry. “We get far away from here. The Austro-Hungarians,” he said, looking away to the east, “they’re gathering for another assault.”
“Take me with you!” pleaded Pablo, his hands bound together in a white knot. “I have nothing left here.”
“How can you say that?” asked Sandrine. “What about your war?”
But he shook his head. “It is not my war. It never was. They groomed me for this moment, those Priests dressed in black. I cannot follow that same path, not now, not after all I have seen and heard and done.”
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN
TWO WEEKS LATER.
THE VATICAN. VATICAN CITY.
The sun scorched the cobbled street, the flagstones so hot that to walk barefoot would burn one’s feet within a few steps. Children squealed and splashed in the pools and fountains, their shimmering skin roasting under the endless glare of the sun. Their shrieks of delight sounded like a festival after recent dismal days, everyone seemingly buoyed by the return of the warming sun which had lifted the gloom that had engulfed the city for so long.
Father Strettavario stood looking down into the clear waters.
“And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters. And they became blood.”
Strettavario looked up at the figure who had stepped close to him unnoticed and quoted from the bible.
“Cardinal Bishop Adansoni,” said Strettavario, smiling weakly.
Adansoni smiled. “All along I suspected it was an algae infestation which turned the waters red. Not the Devil at all.” He looked long into the waters, his lips pursed in thought, before turning back at the old hunched Priest. “Why’ve you come here, Father Strettavario? Usually only tourists come here to the Trevi Fountain hoping for a miracle? Do you not have sermons to read, Priests to admonish, Inquisitors to scrutinise?”
Crowds of people drifted about them, chattering and gesticulating. Ladies dressed in pretty white dresses, cooling themselves with matching fans, threw coins into the waters. Men, moustached and elegant in their open-collared shirts and waistcoats, tutted and laughed, before guiding their wives away to the shade of Roman side-streets. Strettavario could hear that the main topic of the conversation was the war and Italy’s checked expansions into the east.
“What is the point, Cardinal Bishop Adansoni, of anything?” shrugged Strettavario. “Tacit is dead. Perhaps it is a miracle I’m hoping for as well?” he said, before throwing three coins from his own pocket into the waters and walking away.
ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN
SANTA ANA. CALIFORNIA. AMERICA.
A dust devil blew across Orange County, a spiralling column of stinging sand that made the two figures walking up South Raitt Street turn their faces away.
“Why ever did I agree to an afternoon walk?” asked the man in the light cotton plaid suit, knocking his hat against his hand once the whirlwind had passed. “A lie down after today’s matinee would have suited me far better, Noah.”
“Nonsense, Ethan!” exclaimed the man next to him, smoothing down his hair and running his fingertips down the lengths of his moustache. “What better way is there to spend an hour than in the great outdoors?”
“There’s dust in my eyes,” Ethan replied, looking down McFadden Avenue dismally. “We really shouldn’t have ventured out. I have quite a headache.”
“And I must say, Ethan, that you have become quite a headache yourself. All day. Your performance this lunchtime at Clunes Theatre was barely passable. The critics will have a field day. If you’re going to commune with the dead, or at least give the impression that you are, you really need to do so with a little more passion. As your agent it’s my duty to speak truthfully and the truth is you sounded as morose on stage as those you were trying to raise.”
Noah searched in a pocket for his cigarette case and drew it out, offering one to the clairvoyant. Ethan shook his head and took a deep breath, letting it out in a long exhalation. “We have a reputation to uphold,” continued his agent, lighting a cigarette for himself. He picked a strand of tobacco from the tip of his tongue before blowing smoke out of his nose. “People come from all over to witness the miracle of you speaking with the dead. Don’t let them down, dear fellow, and, more to the point, don’t let us down.” He pressed a finger into Ethan’s breast, before flattening his hair with a palm and taking another puff on his cigarette. He looked back and studied his colleague closely. “That said, you do look a bit peaky. Perhaps you’re ailing with something after all?”
“I think I am.”
“I suggest a strong drink and a little sleep before this evening’s performance.”
A black saloon car drove slowly past, the driver, a Priest, watching them intently.
“And the meek shall inherit the earth,” Noah muttered under his breath, watching the expensive car vanish down another avenue. “More like the bloody wealthy shall inherit it.” He turned his attention back to his charge and slapped him gently across the shoulder, as if to shock the despondency from him. “Rest and a strong drink. What do you do say?”
But the clairvoyant shook his head. “I don’t need rest, or a strong drink, Noah. I just need to get this … this malaise off my mind.”
“And what exactly is this malaise?”
“A most ghastly feeling. About the world.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ethan!” muttered Noah, taking a drag on his cigarette and slipping a hand into his suit pocket. “Can you not save the apocalyptic visions for your performances? These emotional outbursts are exactly what your act has been missing recently. What our paying public are wanting. Terror! Revelation! Excitement!” He scrunched his chin into the neck of his shirt. “Try not to use up all your energy when there’s no one around to witness it, dear fellow!”
“But this feeling, it’s been nagging at me for days.”
“Probably the chicken salad you had in the Lancaster. I warned you at the time to eat only beef in those places. You never risk poultry at a steak-house.”
“There’s something coming, Noah,” said Ethan, growing ever more serious.
“Yes, so you said,” replied Noah.
“A war.”
“A war?” said the agent, and he frowned, as if the word unsettled him. “Whatever do you mean? Surely you don’t mean this damned war in Europe?”
“I do. I mean exactly that.”
“And how exactly does a war on the other side of
the world concern America?”
“Because America’s going to join it,” said Ethan, deathly pale. “I just know it. America’s going to join Britain and France in the war and things will turn far worse than anything that has gone before.”
EPILOGUE
THE VATICAN. VATICAN CITY.
The Priest knocked twice and entered only when he received the invitation to do so. It seemed to him that the chamber beyond had grown even colder since he had visited it earlier that day. A single candle, black, burned on the central table, weak flickering light seeping into the corners of the room. A solitary figure stood in one corner, his back turned to the door.
“Well?” the figure asked.
“It … it failed,” said the Priest.
At once the figure spun on the messenger, skewering him with a piercing stare. “What do you mean ‘it failed’?”
“Wolves,” the Priest replied, his own voice appearing to disbelieve what it was he was saying, before he cleared his throat and said the word again, more clearly this time and with it a name. “Poré.”
The hunched figure’s eyes narrowed, the light in them ice-cold. “What about him?”
“He was there. He arrived. With wolves. They killed everyone before the ceremony could be completed.”
The figure in the shadows slowly shut his eyes as if he could not stand to look at the world any longer, turning his head away. “And Tacit?” he asked. “What about him?”
“Dead,” replied the Priest. “He fell, with Georgi, into the gorge. They were swept away by the Soča River. We have dredged it but found no trace of either of them. It’s over. It’s finished.”
The figure rocked gently where he stood and, for a moment the Priest thought his master was weeping silently. “No,” he said solemnly, grit in his words. “It is only just beginning.” He turned and stepped away towards the window. “His returning is nigh. Born upon a battlefield too terrible to conceive, he will come and tear down all that has gone before. Nothing can stop this from unfurling. We must be ready, and protect him the best we can, even if we are without his lieutenants. Gather around him powerful people and forces of the world. Summon all demons to be his protectors. Make sure witches prepare their most potent incantations.”
The Fallen Page 34