The Black Chalice

Thirty

Alymere read the words again, his index finger running over each of them slowly as he sounded the syllables inside his head: being an account of the entire wisdom of Man as transcribed by Harmon Reclusus.

Those fifteen words promised so much; the entire wisdom of Man. That he couldn't read more than those fifteen words was a torment beyond reason. He had stared at them for hours, lost in their shapes, imagining he could hear them come alive inside his head without ever knowing what they meant. Why had the monk chosen to record such precious words in a language few could read?

For protection, of course, to safeguard that wisdom from those unworthy of it, or unready for it, from those who would corrupt it or use it to do harm. Like the sword, wisdom was itself merely a tool, it was how it was wielded that made all the difference.

He turned the page, breathing in the musty smell of those old sheets as he thumbed through them. The fragrance he thought of as the smell of knowledge filled his senses.

Alymere studied the shape of what he assumed to be a prayer as it was laid out on the page, tapering to a point. His finger traced the ragged shape of the stanza, resting upon the two words, alone at the bottom of the page, and he realised he could read them: Black Chalice.

He read them over and over again, but there could be no mistaking what they said. "Black Chalice," he said aloud, barely breathing the words. It was enough to send a thrill through his entire being. He felt it in that intangible place men call the soul. And it was electrifying.

How could he have missed them?

The entire body of text pointed towards those two words as though they were the focal point of the stanza itself.

How could he have been so blind as to not see them?

Did that mean there were other words in the book he had somehow failed to recognise? Heart racing, he turned page after page, quickly, eyes hungrily scanning the rows of indecipherable text for anything, even a single word, that made sense.

He found the same two words repeated several times within the book: Black Chalice.

He could only wonder how, in all of his poring over the book, he had missed them.

He set the book aside.

This time when he dreamed it was of a hanged man and a cup. As the man twisted and turned against the bite of the rope a shadowy figure — a woman, he thought — used a silver dagger to open the artery at his ankle and bleed him, catching the slow drip, drip, drip of his death in a black cup. She raised it to her lips and drank the blood of Iscariot, the traitor, and Alymere sat bolt upright in bed, sweating and screaming, the taste of blood on his lips where he had bitten through his cheek.

He did not see the crow cross the moon.