The Black Chalice

Forty

He grabbed a flagon of mead from the dresser in the kitchen, ignoring the protestations of the cook, and uncorked it with his teeth. He took a deep swallow, smacking his lips as the honeyed drink hit the back of his throat and he felt the burn of the alcohol. He took a second and third swallow, swatting the woman away as he drained the bottle dry. Alymere looked around for a second flagon and snatched it up, pulling the cork out of its neck and throwing it at the guttering fire. He turned around and stumbled out of the kitchen, down the long passageway and out into the fresh air.

It hit him hard.

Taking another huge swig of mead from the bottle, Alymere ran toward the old sour apple tree where he had sat so many times with Gwen over the last few months, thinking to drink and lose himself there. His head was spinning, less from the drink than from what he had just done. A few steps from the apple tree's shadow he turned away. He didn't want to contaminate the place with the blackness of his soul. It was the only happy place left to him in this house of lies. Instead, he walked toward the graves of his parents on the outskirts of the estate. Lime trees interspersed with elm formed a long passage that led from the furthest edge of the lawn to the stone mausoleum on the hill. He drained the second flagon before he was halfway down the leafy tunnel, tossing it aside. The alcohol spread through his blood, thinning it and affecting his balance.

The air felt so much colder up here, and the drink offered little in the way of fortification. He looked up at the sky, thinking it really ought to have been raining. He wanted the world to be in mourning, as he was. He shivered again and wished he had thought to grab his cloak as well as the mead on the way out of the house. His throat burned and his eyes itched; he felt the mead churning around in his stomach. But it couldn't soak up the sudden surge of guilt he felt at what he had just done. He tried to justify it by reminding himself that Sir Lowick would have died in a few hours anyway, but that didn't matter. He had snuffed out his life, and in that single act had become a murderer and betrayed every promise he had ever made. He thought of the Oath the king had made him swear, and for the first time in his life couldn't remember all the tenets of it.

He was crying.

He left the tears to stain his cheeks, wearing them like his shame, and walked unsteadily toward the mausoleum. His head felt cloudy, his thoughts muggy. Snot ran from his nose and he smeared it across his face.

"Why?" he shouted at the sky.

The heavens had no answers for him.

The dead house was overgrown with vines, where nature had begun the slow process of claiming it. In a decade or more it would be invisible against the landscape, but for now it was a sinister blend of stone and vegetation. He walked slowly toward the door, not really certain what he intended to do. He could hardly push his way inside and rail at the coffins lined up within, could he?

Alymere leaned against the door and closed his eyes.

His mother and father were on the other side of the door — or so he had thought for years now, but the man buried there wasn't his father.

He pushed at the door, more out of frustration than any hope of it swinging open.

It was locked, of course, but he wasn't about to let that prevent him. He put his shoulder to it, thinking suddenly to batter it down, and rocked back on his heels, steeling himself, but at the last moment thought better of it. He had other options. The lock wasn't complex. It didn't need to be, no-one would rob the dead. Not here. They respected his family too much; they were every bit a part of the land as the mountains or the trees.

Alymere crouched and put his eye to the mechanism. He felt a wave of nausea swell up inside his throat and swallowed it down. He ran his fingers across the seam where the door met the stone wall. There was a thin gap between them, barely wide enough for him to slip the blade of his dagger into. The tip scraped across the wood at first, as he fumbled with it, but, grating against the stone and cutting free splinters from the edge of the door, he managed to work it into the gap. He worried the metal against the lock's latch, trying to pry it free again and again, until, exasperated with his lack of success, Alymere slammed his shoulder against the door, screaming out his frustration, and the metal latch gave way.

The door swung open and he tumbled inside, cursing as he sprawled across the floor. It was a drunkard's entry, lacking subtlety or grace, but he was inside. Alymere pushed himself to his feet and slowly dusted himself off. He looked around the mouldering tomb. It was too dark to see anything but the vaguest outlines of the stone sarcophagi inside. The air smelled dead. He reached out to steady himself on the lid of his mother's sarcophagus, and then recoiled as though he had just laid his hand on her cold dead face.

A thin line of light cut like a sword through the centre of the dead house. Alymere stepped into the light.

"Mother!" he shouted, surely loud enough to wake the dead. He gritted his teeth, turning in circles and listening for the slightest sound, the tiniest indication that she had heard him and was going to answer.

The dead slept on.

"How could you lie to me for so long?" This time there was no strength behind his words. He turned again, facing the stone box where his father's bones mouldered. "How could you pretend like that? How could you look at me and call me son when you knew?" And the question he really wanted to ask, "How could you not hate me?"

The wind called forlornly across the hillside, whispering around the mausoleum's door. It didn't cry his name. There was no answer. No satisfaction.

"Or did you hate me? Did you look at me and see his crime over and over again? Did you see him in my face? Is that why you gave up? Is that why you let yourself die? Was I your shame?" His voice spiralled out of control at the end. He was drunk. He was crying. He felt stupid and he felt angry. He wanted to break something. But even as he said it he realised that was his greatest fear; he couldn't bear to think that he had been a constant source of grief for the man he had idolised. "Father…" he said. Birth had nothing to do with it; Lowick wasn't his father, he never had been. He'd given up every right to fatherhood by his betrayal. Roth was his father and always would be. "I'm sorry." It sounded woefully inadequate once he said it, but it was honest.

He was a child of violence. The hatred of his very conception had imprinted on his soul. He touched the hard skin of the scars on his cheek, recalling the rage he felt trying to wrest the book from the blind monk, and worse, the thrill, the enjoyment that came with it. He was broken in some essential way and always had been, all the way back from before he was born.

He wasn't going to have some sort of revelation here. There wasn't going to be an epiphany where suddenly what had happened was understandable or excusable. And he wasn't going to find forgiveness. Instead of looking for any of that he stumbled over to his mother's tomb and knelt, pressing his forehead against the cold stone. "Sleep well, Mother. Rest easy in the knowledge that after all these years, reckoning has finally been had. He went to meet the Devil full of fear," he breathed deeply, again reliving that moment, recalling how it felt to choke the life out of Lowick. "And now he's burning."

Burning, the voice of the book echoed in his drunken mind. Burning, burning bright, it cackled. There was something manic, almost childish about its delight.

He stayed on his knees for long minutes before finally pushing himself to his feet. He lowered his head again, unable to look at the stone sarcophagi.

"You are avenged," he said, finally, realising why it had been important for him to come here. They needed to know, even if they couldn't hear him. He had to believe that somehow their bones would carry his words to their ears, wherever they were. Finally they had their justice. They could rest now. The lies were unravelled, justice delivered.

And yet he felt hollow inside.

Something in him was broken and no words were going to fix it. Words were empty. All they had ever done for Alymere was hide the truth.

He kicked out at his mother's tomb, spinning clumsily around. His arms windmilled as his balance betrayed him and he pitched backward, stumbling into the wall. He grunted and slumped, sliding down the cold stone until he sat propped up and staring at the two tombs. "I curse you," he muttered. "I curse ever knowing you. I curse ever knowing what brought me into this damned world. I wish… I wish… I…" but what did he wish for? He couldn't very well wish that they were dead, though neither did he wish that they were alive. Could he wish that they hadn't turned him into a murderer with their lies? Well, he could wish, but that wouldn't change the fact that, less than an hour ago, he had betrayed everything he believed in, because his beliefs had been ripped out from under him. It was all just words and excuses and he was tired of both of them.

His own words haunted him: A true man must never do outrage, nor murder… never will a true man stand by idly and watch such evils perpetrated by others upon the innocent, for a true man stands as last bastion for all that is just. He was caught in the contradiction of his own vow. Lowick's evil had been done against his own mother. How could he sit by idly? The man would never have gone to trial, and so would have avoided mortal justice.

You did the only thing you could, the voice of the book whispered in his head. There was something different about it; it wasn't so much seductive as satisfied. You had to open yourself up. You had to feel the rage. And in the end, you had to kill him. That was justice. It was right. You became a man. A true man. But the way the Devil's book said the words "true man" left him in no doubt, it didn't mean them in the way the knights of Albion intended them. Hearing them now, they spoke of man's base nature, not his nobility.

"Leave me alone," he said.

Never. We are one and the same. You cannot live without me. I have made you what you are, forged in the furnace of life. Shaped by the hammer of death. I have made you whole. And without you I would be nothing. We need each other. We are each other.

And yet he had never been more alone in his life.

He saw her face then, plain but not unappealing; pretty in some ways. But more than that, Gwen was the only person in this world he considered a friend.

Gwen.

He pushed himself up to his feet, needing the wall to stop him from falling. His mind reeled, the ground shifting beneath him. He needed to find her. He needed to… to what? Be loved? No. That wasn't it. Alymere shuffled forward an unsteady step, screwing his face up against the light that speared through the heart of the dead house. She didn't know what had happened today. She didn't know who he was — what he was. And she didn't care. She wouldn't judge him. She was his friend. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to his drunken mind. He wasn't damaged in her eyes, at least not beyond the surface scarring. And not once had she shied away from looking at him. Not once had he seen revulsion in her eyes for the monster he had become. She only saw her friend when she looked at him. Nothing went deeper than that.

He touched his cheek. The scars burned beneath his fingers.

He needed to find Gwen.

He turned his back on the sarcophagi, and stumbled out into the daylight. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the bright light, but still it stung them. He screwed up his face, looking down at his feet. It was only when he lowered his hand and raised his head that he saw the crude wooden crosses planted in the earth a dozen paces away.