The Black Chalice koa-1

by Steven Savile

"We have no fight with you," the Scot rasped in his thick brogue. Lowick could barely understand him. His eyes were wide and wild and his muscles were corded so tensely that his entire body quivered. "All we're after is getting off this cursed rock, and putting the damned sea between us and these demons. If you had half a mind, you'd do likewise."

  "As far as I can see there are only four demons here, lads," he inclined his head at each in turn, "one — two — three — four. Repent and I might absolve your sins7 before you move on to your next life. But know this," the knight said, gravely. "You will not leave this place alive. That much I promise you."

  "So be it."

  One of the reivers broke ranks, plunging into the sea and wading toward him, forcing Lowick to defend himself on two fronts. The northerner was hip-deep in the water, but the knight was forced to divide his concentration, which could prove fatal.

  Lowick took the first wild overhead swing from the grim-faced raider on the flat of his broadsword. The entire sword shivered from foible to forte. The sheer ferocity of the blow had the Scot's blade slide along the length of his broadsword and slam into the cross-guard. The knight heaved his wrist around, disengaging. His heel butted up against the back of the step. He grunted, another eerily bestial sound. The warrior backed off, allowing the man in the sea to swing. His was a more controlled two-handed thrust; a manoeuvre his cumbersome sword was not best suited for, but that didn't make it any less lethal should the point find its mark in the knight's sweetmeats.

  Lowick whipped his sword around barely in time, an almost dismissive flick of the wrist sending the thrust wide and very nearly wrenching the claymore out of the big northerner's meaty hands. It was only the man's brute strength that prevented the sword from ending up on the seabed.

  The knight countered with a clubbing left hook square into his opponent's face. The man staggered back, rocked by the blow. The cartilage of his bulbous nose ruptured, spewing blood and mucus. He spat one of his front teeth out. The other sat crooked, giving him a gap-toothed cemetery smile as he came back for more. Blood dribbled down through the stubble on his chin.

  Sir Lowick blocked two more savage thrusts as they came in from his flank. The big Scot had planted his feet as best he could, but the shifting stones and roiling sea betrayed him. His huge, broad shoulders didn't help him. Desperately trying to maintain his balance, the reiver only succeeded in announcing his intentions a moment before he could deliver the blow. The knight read him, turning both strokes aside.

  The killing stroke itself seemed almost an after-thought, a left-over from the parry. Sir Lowick rolled his wrist with the momentum of the thrust, letting the raider's own strength lend itself to the blow that killed him. He locked his elbow and bought the broadsword up in a wicked arc that slashed down through the reiver's torso, opening a gaping wound from his throat to his balls before ending in the water in a bloody splash.

  The northerner dropped his claymore and clutched at his throat, and the knight turned his back on him; any potential threat he represented was extinguished. In a moment or two he would sink to his knees and go under.

  "Do you regret your crimes?" The knight asked the three men in front of him.

  "The only thing I regret is setting foot on this damned island. If that is regret enough for you, then aye, I regret."

  "And the families you destroyed on your way here? What of them? Do you not regret what you did to those poor people?"

  "They were weak! Just like you. You want me to fall on my knees, weep and beg for mercy? Well you can kiss my hairy crack, laddy. Now come down here if yer in such a hurry t'die!"

  The reiver stepped back, inviting Sir Lowick to come down onto the shifting pebbles, and brought his claymore up to kiss the flat of the blade.

  The two other men fanned out across the stone beach to take up position beside him.

  "It matters not to me where you die," Sir Lowick said, stepping onto the stones. "I can kill you just as well here."

  "You talk a lot for a dead man."

  "It's a curse," the knight said grimly, bringing his own blade to bear. "So, shall we dance, boys?"

  They came at him, three at once, bellowing their hideous ululating war cry as they rushed across the unsteady ground at him.

  Sir Lowick braced himself, regretting the lack of his shield, which he had left back with the horses in his haste. There was nothing he could do about it now. Gritting his teeth, he met the first blows head on.

  The clash of steel was lost beneath the crash of the waves and the roar of the surf.

  The knight's sword moved seemingly of its own accord, so perfectly attuned were the man's body and mind that nothing separated thought from action. Every breath he took was in perfect concert with the cut and thrust of the fight. It was a long, brutal, and bloody slaughter, but as he had promised them, the reivers did not leave the beach alive.

  Spent, the sweat of survival thick on his skin, Sir Lowick raised his hands and bloody sword to the heavens and cried, "I'm still alive!"

  Twenty-Five

  Alymere fell in a ball of fire.

  The agony was incredible. The right side of his face was burning, but it was nothing compared to the pain that came with hitting the ground. The only thing that saved his life was the monk taking the brunt of the fall, cushioning him from the impact.

  He tried desperately to roll away from the dead man, but could not move. His body refused to obey him.

  He stared into the monk's crudely stitched eye sockets. He couldn't feel the man's breath on his cheek.

  Alymere tried to get his hands underneath himself and ease away from the monk but even that little victory was beyond him. His entire right side was wracked with convulsions. As his vision misted over, he was sure he had killed himself.

  He felt someone stand over him, rather than saw them; felt them tear the cloak from his shoulders and slap at his head, dousing the flames. They dragged him off the monk and rolled him onto his back. The sky was fiery red. He tried to focus on the stars; to hold them in his mind, knowing somehow that to lose them, to let go, would be to die.

  His skin felt too tight for his body. He tried to open his mouth, to breathe, to speak, but he couldn't work his jaw. The pain was blinding. The entire right side of his face felt like it had been dipped into Hell's pit and pulled out barely a fraction of a second before the flames scorched the meat from the bones of his skull. It went beyond any concept of pain he had ever known, or even imagined, and into a whole new territory of suffering.

  "Hush, now," the man said, though his words lacked any real substance. He felt his hands gentle over his wounds, and then, alarmingly, the pain subsided, as his body went into shock. "Rest easy, son. Don't try to move."

  He couldn't even if he had wanted to.

  Black veins threaded through the sky, thickening as they spread to slowly block out the stars.

  He felt his grip on consciousness slipping.

  He tried to call her name. For a moment, as all colour fled his world, he thought he felt the press of her lips on his, their souls mingling as she breathed life into him in that shared kiss, making him immortal. And then he tasted the rancid breath in the back of his throat and all fantasies of Blodyweth were banished.

  He opened his eyes and saw the crudely stitched eye sockets of a blind monk just inches from his face.

  At that moment, it was the most beautiful face he had ever seen.

  Twenty-Six

  Sir Lowick found the monk hunched over Alymere's body.

  Seeing him lying there, lain out on the muddy grass all broken and ravaged by the fire, it seemed impossible that he could still be alive.

  All the pride he felt at cheating death swept from his body in a wave of grief; the stupid fool of a boy had gotten himself killed.

  He raced across the cloister garden to his side, the sorrow caught in his throat.

  The blind man's fingers were in Alymere's mouth.

  Was he trying to choke the last bit of life out of him?
/>   The man seemed to be trying to pull the tongue out of his throat with his filthy fingers.

  The knight roared, grasping the hilt of his broadsword with two hands and raising it high above his head as he charged across the muddy grass, ready to do murder.

  And then he saw his chest heave.

  And everything changed. He dropped his sword and sank to his knees beside his nephew. "What have you done to him?"

  "The boy lives," the monk said, trying to calm the knight, "but whether it remains that way is in the hands of the Lord, Knight. His wounds are most grievous indeed. His skin was ablaze as he plunged from up there," he pointed up at the shattered window with unerring accuracy. For a moment it was impossible for Sir Lowick to comprehend the fact that the man was truly blind; he spoke with such certainty, yet all of his understanding came from sounds and smells and touch, not from what Lowick thought of as the most basic and trustworthy of all the senses, sight. "And but for my brother's body beneath him, the fall alone would surely have killed him. Yet, for all his fortune, without aid far beyond my limited skill I fear he will not live to see morning. Once, perhaps, we had the medicinal herbs here on Medcaut, and the physician's gift, but now, now our home is burnt barren. Who knows what is left in the herbarium worth scavenging? And I fear that after this night nothing will grow. As much as it saddens me to say so, there can be no healing for Alymere here." The knight could not recall having used the boy's name in front of the monk. That he seemed so familiar with it placed a chill in Lowick's heart. "You need to take him to the mainland."

  Tenderly, he rolled his nephew away from the body beneath him and onto his side, seeing the raw pink flesh where the fire had burned away the features down the right side of his face. His cloak had burnt onto his neck. The knight teased the blackened wool away from the sores, whispering wordlessly over and over. He had no unguents or salves and no way of lessening the fire beneath Alymere's skin. All he could do was pray, and pray that words uttered in this holiest of places found their way to the Lord all the more quickly.

  He saw the book clenched in Alymere's hands. Its leather binding was burned beyond recognition, but as far as he could tell the pages within were merely scorched along the edges. The skin from Alymere's palm had burned off on the front of the book, leaving a black and bloody handprint in the middle of the binding. He tried to ease it out of his nephew's hands, but Alymere's grip on the book was rigor-tight. And try though he might, Sir Lowick could not pry the damned book from his hands. He left it be, and instead cradled his nephew in his arms.

  Until dawn it was as though the burning monastery, the blind monk, all of the dead men and the raging sea ceased to exist.

  The world was reduced to the boy in his arms. Everything beyond that was gone.

  Sir Lowick did not see the blind monk kneel over his fallen brother, nor hear the low mumble of his prayers, the rhythm of his words matching the ebb and flow of the tide, and so he missed the one true miracle that would ever occur in his presence, as the blind monk wrapped both of his hands around the hilt of Alymere's sword, drew the blade from his brother's chest, and cast it aside.

  The dead man drew in a sudden sharp breath and shuddered back to agonizing life. The cackling of the fire masked his moans.

  Neither did Sir Lowick see the wound in the hitherto dead man's stomach begin to heal as the skin puckered around thick scar tissue and drew together to form yet another long white gash in the mesh of old wounds that marred his abdomen.

  Nor did Sir Lowick witness the dead man rise like Lazarus and walk away with his brother toward the shadow-figures that stood waiting at the monastery gates. Had he looked up he could have counted the silhouettes and realised that not a single monk had fallen to the raiders' claymores.

  The Brothers of Medcaut left him alone with his grief, merging with fire and flame until only their shadows remained, and as the fires died down those too departed.

  Come dawn the fires had burned themselves out completely, leaving only scorched earth and a few walls of the blackened shell that had been Medcaut's holy monastery intact. The stones still smouldered. Atop their highest point the black bird watched intently with yellow eyes. When finally content that Alymere would live, it took flight, banking in the clear blue morning and flying back toward the mainland and the forest that was its home.

  Their horses had long since gone, driven away by the raging fire. No doubt they had bolted as soon as the tide allowed.

  The knight gathered Alymere into his arms and walked the miles back along the causeway to the mainland. Grief cut through the soot on his cheeks and the tears flowed freely. His nephew was near weightless in his arms; like a scarecrow, he was no burden at all.

  The tide lapped around his ankles as he walked, his gaze fixed on the horizon.

  He never stopped praying, beseeching the Lord to show mercy, to save his flesh and blood, and making promise after promise of what he would do in return for a moment's grace, as though he were in a position to bargain with the Almighty.

  Twice more he saw the crow in the periphery of his vision, shadowing him as he walked toward the stretch of beach and the dunes and thick maram grass beyond them, but every time he tried to watch it for more than a few moments the bird banked sharply and flew away. He would never have seen it save that it was the only bird in the sky.

  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.