The Black Chalice

Twenty-Seven

The healing process was arduously slow; days bled into weeks, weeks crawled into months, the seasons turning, before Alymere could bear the agony of standing on his own two feet, and even then his uncle kept looking glasses out of his reach for fear of what they would reveal. The knight did not want him to have to bear the ruination of his once handsome features. And with good reason; the fire had remade the shape of Alymere's face. It had recast him as a monstrous thing. The entire right side of his head, from the burned stubble of roots at his hairline down to the lumpish deformity of his jawline, had melted into a single smooth plane of flesh. There was no ridge of cheekbone, no declivity of eye socket, and when he spoke — when he smiled, when he sobbed against the pain — no crease in the corner of his lips, no dimple in the middle of his cheek, no cleft in the middle of his chin. And his right eye, burned out, was a milky white orb in that featureless flesh.

The fire had robbed the young man of half of his being; even a simple smile was beyond him. It was as though his own flesh was telling him he was not permitted to smile, not in this house of death.

And that was what he thought it was: he imagined he could still see things through his ruined eye — shadow shapes, ghosts. And for a while, in the agony of the long dark nights, he would open his ruined eye, seeking the dead, for surely his dead eye could see dead souls? And for a while he believed he could hear them all around him, could hear their agonies in the draughts of the old manor house, but as he retreated further and further from the veil and returned to the land of the living, those voices became nothing more sinister than the creaks and sighs of the old walls. In other words, the ghosts of his fever became the foundation of his world when he awoke. They became real. Honest. Was it the Book doing this? Or merely his fever? He could not shake the feeling that the dead watched him. That they were drawn to him. And once a day, when he first closed his eyes, he would hear them all, every one of them, screaming. Those screams would last until his heart threatened to rupture, so fast was it beating, and it was all he could do to will his body not to burst into flames. And then they left him. The dead, it seemed, could only torment him once a day.

And through it all he refused to let the book, the Devil's Bible, out of his sight.

Strange things had begun to happen from the very moment his hand had come into contact with the curious leather binding, and they had only turned stranger once his palm print fused with it. Somehow, in that moment, the damned book had become a part of him, and in return he had become a part of it, though how that was possible he could not begin to say.

At first it had only been sounds, like the dead voices, but though these were obviously alive and full of concern and compassion, he could not recognise who was talking to him through the haze of pain.

In fact the only time the pain seemed to ebb was when his hand rested upon the book.

He tried to read it once, opening the cover and running his finger over the first few words there: being an account of the entire wisdom of Man as transcribed by Harmon Reclusus. He turned the page, but beyond that he could not read. The language of the verse, which appeared to be a prayer, was unknown to him. Baptiste had taught him his letters, and his uncle had schooled him in the language of the Church, but this curious curling script was unlike any he had ever seen. It seemed almost serpentine as it crawled across the page. Why should it be that the title, promising the entire sum of human knowledge, should be in one language while the rest of the book was in another? Alymere turned page after page, but each was as indecipherable as the last, until he came upon a painting toward the back of the book: a colourful cloven-hoofed devil playing pipes. There was something almost whimsical about the image. It was childish in its simplicity and not at all sinister, and yet, the closer he regarded it, the more precise he realised the ink strokes were and the more detailed the supposed simplicity. It was a work of art. A perverse, brilliant painting as well rendered as any he had ever seen. But it had no place being in there amid the monk's painstaking work. Alymere could not begin to imagine how many years it must have taken a single man to illuminate such a text, and he was in no doubt that it had been created by a single man, the monk Harmon, by hand: the shaping of the letters and the pressure of the quill upon the page was even across the hundreds of bound sheets. It was quite possibly the man's life's work.

He closed the book and set it down reverently upon the small table beside his cot, drawing the blanket up over his bare chest.

He could smell the sickness in the airless room.

His mind raced with thoughts he could barely follow through the delirium sweats.

Why was this book so precious to Blodyweth?

Why would the monk refuse to surrender it, to the point of it costing his life?

Why should the fate of kingdoms rest upon it when only the most learned could hope to read more than a single line of its supposed wisdom?

That posed another question: was it in fact a grimoire? Were those words he could not read in truth incantations scribed in the secret tongue of witchcraft?

As Alymere felt fresh beads of perspiration trickle down the too-smooth side of his face, he made a vow: if he had not learned its secrets before his two years and a day of servitude with Sir Lowick were at an end, he would bring the book with him to Camelot and present it to the king's mage, Merlin, along with the story of the maiden, the Summervale in the heart of the winter forest, the burning monastery and its blind guardians. If the book contained even a trace of magic, for good or ill, surely Merlin would know.

But until that day he would devote himself to learning its secrets. If nothing else, it would give him something to live for.

That night, in the depths of his fever dreams, he heard a haunting melody calling to him, and found himself dreaming of trees and the hunt, chasing a cloven-hoofed piper deeper and deeper into the darkness.

And whilst he tossed and turned in the grip of the dream, the black crow perched upon his windowsill, watching over him.