The Black Chalice

Nineteen

Alymere dropped his sword.

Sir Lowick looked at him, aghast. For all his coldness, he was a pure man. He held to the tenets of the knighthood. He had sworn an oath of chivalry. An unknighted boy acting in anger, taking the life of an unarmed man — a defenceless man — from behind like that was tantamount to cowardice. "God have mercy… What have you done?"

Alymere didn't have the words, so offered his bloody hands in answer. He couldn't think. Nothing inside him made anything approaching sense. The spark of hatred had gone. In its place there was nothing — a void where hate had, so briefly, burned so brightly. Now he was empty. He strove to find the words to explain what had just happened to him, why he had just run the Scot through, but all he could think was: he deserved to die.

The knight ignored his young ward and turned to the monk, pulling his gauntlets off slowly. His expression was grim as he said, "This stays between us."

He expected some sort of objection from the pious man, but the monk merely cocked his head slightly, listening all the more intently to his voice. Lowick saw that his knuckles whitened around the quarterstaff. The knight was an astute reader of men and their intentions. It came with the territory. The monk was tensed to defend himself, not to attack.

And for a moment, as the pair faced each other, Sir Lowick could have sworn he squared up to a demon across the cloister garden. At least that was how it seemed to him as he gazed upon the monk's disfigured face, back-lit by hellish flames.

The man was battered and bruised and bloody, but none of those newer injuries accounted for his demonic aspect. No. These wounds were much older, and deeper.

He had no eyes.

They had been gouged out, and not recently.

The maiming was almost as old as the man; certainly he had borne the scars since childhood. They were white and thick, cross-hatched like veins of bone. The skin of the monk's eyelids had been stretched taut and stitched together crudely to seal the hollows.

The knight could not look away.

He couldn't understand how, being blind, the monk could possibly have held the northerners at bay. It was miracle enough that a man armed only with a stick could beat back the blood-thirsty raiders for more than a few minutes, never mind hours, but that the man was blind was impossible to fathom.

He took a single step toward the monk, who spun on his heel and brought the quarterstaff to bear in one fluid movement.

"Peace," Sir Lowick cried, instinctively holding out his hands to show he meant no harm. "We are friends."

Despite his blindness, there was nothing ungainly about the man. He rocked back on his heels again, turning the wooden staff over quickly in his hands until the movement became a blur, and finally rolling it over his wrist and planting it back in the dirt at his feet. "Speak, then. Let the Good Lord judge the honesty of your words. If you are deemed a liar, you do not leave this place."

The knight looked around him. A dozen fires and more had broken out all across the cloister garden and the surrounding buildings. The chances of any of them walking away from the inferno were slim and growing slimmer by the moment as more of the monastery became food for the fire.

"I am Sir Lowick, Knight of the Round Table, sworn protector of these lands, and this is my ward, Alymere, son of Roth. You may have known his father, my brother."

"The old lord was known to us," the monk said. And that was all he said. He seemed undisturbed by the fire raging through his home, or the dead men at his feet. He turned, as though to look up at the window where Lowick saw one of his brother monks gazing out over the cloister garden despite the fire behind him. Of course, there was no way the blind monk could have seen his brother up there. It was impossible. And yet the knight had to wonder if they could not somehow feel each other, because he was left with the distinct impression that something passed silently between the two men.

But how could it be?

He had heard curious things about God blessing men, robbed of one sense, with extraordinary gifts where the others were concerned, but had always considered them stories to appease the maimed. He could understand men becoming more aware of their environment, perhaps hearing the chirp of the lark and appreciating its beauty come dawn instead of cursing their lost sleep. But that was different. And that couldn't explain the monks passing silent messages between themselves. One was rational, the other anything but.

"You must leave this place, Lowick of the Round Table. Leave now, while you still can."

Lowick felt it then; all of the sadness and suffering Medcaut had seen, all of the painful memories trapped within its stones. It was overwhelming. Such suffering. Such bittersweet sorrow, bursting to be free. To be remembered. He felt the tears come to his eyes, then run down his cheeks unchecked. He didn't know how, and he had still less idea why, but he was sure that the monks had chosen to reveal the secrets of this place to him. He was sure of it in a way that he had never been sure of anything in his life. That was the meaning of the look the blind men shared; they had chosen him to experience the truth of Medcaut. And again, he didn't know how he knew — could it truly be from the stones themselves? What witchcraft were these blind men working between them? — but he was sure that the second monk bore the same ritual blinding as the first. Lowick took a step toward the fire, and then another, needing its heat to break the hold the tortured memories had on him.

He stared at the flames rising higher. Higher.

He heard voices in the flames.

The longer he stared at them the more insistent the voices became, but they were speaking in tongues he had never heard. Tongues, he felt sure, no mortal mouth had ever uttered.

"The Devil abides here, still," Lowick gasped, suddenly understanding the Scot's cryptic warning. It was too late for it to make a blind bit of difference. The knight made the sign of the cross over his chest. It would take more than faith to ward off the evils resident in this place. He licked his parched lips with an even drier tongue and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

With the buildings around the cloister garden ablaze, it was hard to imagine anything holy about the world right then. The fire was unquenchable. After all, fire and flame were the hallmarks of demons and the damned, not angels and the righteous.

Fear had taken root in his gut.

Strangeness gathered all around him.

There was more at work here than his understanding of the world allowed for.

Something darted across his line of sight, skimming the very tops of the flames. It took him a moment to realise it was a crow — a huge crow, more than twice the wingspan of a natural bird. It didn't settle, but flew from left to right, dangerously close to the fire as it skirted the perimeter wall. The bird banked and completed the circle again, and a third time whilst the knight just stared at it. As he watched, time seemed to stretch, sliding away from him until it came to a stop, and then as the crow broke from the third circle and climbed high into the sky, it came snapping back into place and everything began to move too quickly.

Everything changed then.

Sir Lowick felt the overwhelming need to fill the silence between himself and the monk, to bark orders and take charge of the situation, to banish the lethargy that had settled over him in the last few minutes.

He turned to face the monk.

"Two men could not be responsible for this."

"You are right, Sir Knight. Two men did not do this."

"Then where are the others?"

The blind man inclined his head once more, as though listening to the wind and fires. "They sought to flee," he said after a moment. "You will find them on the other side of the island, down by the water bailing out their coracle. If we are done, I would tend to the animals." It was as though the man had no concept of the conflagration raging all around him, nor the danger he was in. It had burned well beyond containment. In a few hours, Medcaut would be reduced to a shell. And in a few years that shell would weather and crumble and there would be no trace of the brotherhood or their monastery on the holy island. That was the way of the world; it purged the past.

But some horrors could not simply be washed away.

Would the memories of the stones always haunt this promontory?

Perhaps.

Lowick shook his head. "No. No. You must leave this place. It is not safe here. Follow the causeway to the mainland. I will find your brothers. How many reside here?"

"We are few in number."

"That is not an answer, monk. Tell me how many of your brotherhood reside here?"

"We number thirteen. Though I fear some of my brothers have fallen."

"If they live, we will find them. You have my word."

"And if they don't, will you bury them?"

The knight bit back on an angry retort. There was nothing to be gained from fighting with the monk, only time to be lost. "We have to get you out of here," Lowick said, hawking and spitting a wad of phlegm into the dirt between them.

"I cannot leave this place."

"It isn't up for debate, monk. You must."

"You do not understand. I cannot leave this place."