The Fallen Read Online Free Page A

indiscriminate. The mafia was many things, but it wasn’t so conspicuous or so brazen in its operations.
    As she reached the far side of the river bank, she was suddenly aware that the man’s lips were moving, mouthing silent words. Amazingly he still clung onto life.
    â€œWhat is it?” cried Isabella to the man, as another hail of bullets rippled the waters around her. She clasped him tightly, the brooch at the front of his robe coming away in her hand. “What are you trying to say?”
    Breathlessly the man mouthed the same word over and over. A name. And with a final effort, a sound was pushed behind the breath.
    â€œTacit,” Inquisitor Cincenzo said, the life slowly draining from him. “Tacit. Tacit.”
    Stunned, Isabella let go of the dead man, his body sinking fast beneath the surface of the river as another shower of bullets clattered about her. She stretched for the cold stone of the far bank and held onto it like a lost lover. Her feet touched the riverbed and she sprang onto the bank, rolling over and over the cobbles as more rounds sprayed around her, drawing sparks as they struck the stones.
    She sank into the shadows of the far side of the walkway and lay still for a moment, trying to steady her nerves and collect her shattered thoughts on what she had stumbled into, what the Inquisitor had said with his final dying breath.
    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
    T OULOUSE I NQUISITIONAL P RISON . T OULOUSE . F RANCE .
    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