The Black Chalice koa-1

by Steven Savile

  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.

  Forty-One

  The mausoleum, the crude crosses planted in the dirt, and all the trappings of death that went along with them weren't there to honour the dead, he thought, seeing them. He walked unsteadily towards them. Just as the funeral rites themselves had nothing to do with the needs of the corpses left behind. They were there to prolong the grief of the living. The crosses were nothing more than spars of wound, bound together crudely with twine.

  He sank to his knees in the freshly turned dirt, dusting away the soil that covered the base of the first cross to uncover the name engraved into the wood: Alma. He had heard that name before, but couldn't place it. The dirt had worked its way into the pulp of the wood, staining it black. He shuffled across to the second cross and scrabbled at the base of it desperately, knowing without really understanding why he knew the name that he uncovered: Gwen. Alma and Gwen. He closed his eyes, a low keening moan escaping him. There was nothing to indicate how they had died, but all he could think was that he'd never seen his friend with the baby girl after he had rescued her from the burning house, and that he had never seen Gwen in the company of others since his return.

  He pushed himself to his feet.

  He stared at the dirt on his hands, desperately wanting not to believe… and struggling to remember a single time where he had seen Gwen with other people around, just a single instance where he had seen her interact with another soul, but he couldn't. He felt a thrill of fear.

  "Oh, my God," he breathed, backing away from the graves.

  His feet left deep imprints in the dirt, dragged like scars across the freshly turned soil.

  He couldn't bear to look at the graves; didn't know what they meant.

  He was losing his mind. That was all he could think. He was losing his mind, root and branch. It was spinning away from him. Nothing made sense, from the world he thought he believed in to the mad depths of the underworld he found himself living in, so much deeper and closer to Hell than he had any right to travel. And every step he took seemed to take him further down. Alymere tore at his hair, tugging the roots from his temples, and screamed. It was a long harrowing cry that swelled out over all the land — or so it felt to him. For it to do justice to the agony in his soul it would have had to carry from coast to coast, and even then it couldn't match the pain inside. They deserved that much from him.

  When he opened himself up to it, the grief was overwhelming.

  He rubbed at his face. He was numb; hollow. Nothing made any sense to him.

  The silence around Alymere was suddenly split by a single raucous caw. He spun around, scanning the trees for the crow, knowing even before he saw it that it would be the white-streaked bird that had been haunting him. He felt the bird's cry reverberate through his bones.

  Each breath came fast and shallow. He looked up at the sky, the first fat drops of rain hitting his face. He opened his mouth, tasting the rain on his tongue. For a moment that was all that existed. This dark country that he found himself trapped in was reduced to the taste of the rain on the back of his throat. He felt his grip on the world unravelling. He wanted to cry out, to beg for help, but he was frightened what might answer him. What monsters would come to the aid of a murderer? None that he was prepared to face.

  He felt the sudden chill in the air. It was more than just the rain. He wasn't alone.

  Alymere forced himself to open his eyes.

  He saw her standing, watching him, baby Alma in her arms. The child was crying silently. She looked so very sad standing there in the shadow of the lime tree that Alymere wanted to run to her, to hold her and thank God that it was all a huge mistake, that his mind had run away with itself, but there was something about the way the light didn't strike her and the rain didn't soak her that stopped him. He stared at her, realising that the sunlight filtering through the leaves left no shadow in her wake.

  She beckoned for him, but he couldn't walk over to her, no matter how much he wanted to.

  He felt betrayed once more, not grasping until long after she was gone and he was alone that she had saved him. Gwen's shade had denied itself the peace of the grave to repay him for everything he had done; saving Alma, giving her friends a home, avenging the men they had lost to the reivers; every good deed he had done had kept her here while he needed her. And without Gwen he would have been lost, there was no denying that. It didn't matter that he was blind to her sacrifice as he stood by her graveside in the pouring rain, that he had no comprehension of the pain it must have caused her to linger. So acute was his self-pity that all he could see was another abandonment. Someone else that he couldn't trust, someone else who wasn't they seemed.

  And so, despite everything they had shared, the intimacy that went beyond simple friendship into spiritual healing, he turned his back on her.

  He felt her pain then, but in denying Gwen, he effectively banished her shade, consigning her finally to the grave. Why should she linger if he had neither want nor need of her?

  When he turned back to the avenue of lime trees leading to the house, she was gone. He stayed by her graveside for a while, and the rain washed away his guilt.

  He looked around until he saw what he was looking for: a cluster of daffodils, their trumpets heavy with pollen. He snapped them off at the stem and laid them on Gwen's grave without a word. It was the closest he would ever come to admitting he had done wrong by her.

  Alymere walked away from the dead house and the paupers' graves, the rain matting his hair flat to his scalp and soaking through his shirt. It clung coldly to his skin. Spirits whispered through the dragging branches of the lime trees as he passed beneath them, the leaves rustling in their wake. Somewhere between the mausoleum and the manor the Devil's book spoke to him, promising: I am your friend. I won't leave you. I won't fail you or lie to you. I
am you and you are me. We are bound. Together we are mighty. Together we are Alymere. They will hear our name and know fear. Now come, I have such secrets to share with you.

  And as that voice took hold, he was truly lost.

  Fallen Son

  Forty-Two

  For the first time Alymere could read the book in its entirety.

  There were no more secrets, no hidden words in the writhing script teasing him, staying just out of reach. Everything it had to say was laid bare in a language he could understand.

  He trembled as he laid the old book out on the bed, cracking it open and turning page after page quickly, drinking in the words without focusing on what they said. They spun through him, creating web after web of connections, joining thoughts he had never imagined, and, at the centre of the web, one single image, the Black Chalice. It was there at the heart of all of it, the one great truth of the Devil's Bible. The word chalice chalice chalice blurred into a single sound inside his mind. It began as a low insistent echo, like the distant sound of thunder rolling over the hills, and it grew louder, as though nearing, and becoming more demanding with each repetition. The word caused him to wince as it drummed over and over again through his head, chalicechalicechalice repeating itself so many times it lost all shape and form, sacrificing its own identity to become something entirely new, like a snake coming alive in the darkness at the back of his skull. And as its tongue lashed around the hissing sibilants, the word stopped making any sense. But it was no less demanding for that insanity. Far from it, it was all the more demanding.

  Alymere let his fingers rest on the indentations of the actual words and the shapes they made within the page, feeling out where the scribe's nib had dug into the paper. And as he did so, more and more of the words came alive inside him, starting with the very first line, being an account of the entire wisdom of Man as transcribed by Harmon Reclusus, and he knew beyond any doubting that all of the secrets of the book were going to reveal themselves to him.

  For all that promise, the only thing he was interested in learning about was the Black Chalice.

  He drank it all in hungrily, all the dark knowledge that the Devil's Bible contained, beginning with the confession that the book owed its creation not to Harmon's pen and ink, but rather to the pact the monk had made with the Devil himself. Harmon, if his confession were to be believed, was, at the time of writing, a prisoner of his own kind, locked away in the spire of Medcaut for his human frailties — his perversions, as he called them — without food or water. The only things his brothers would allow him, in order to record his confession, were a quill, inks, and parchment pages. But rather than baring his soul and recording his sins, the monk had chosen to embark upon a far more noble — and impossible — task: to record everything he had ever learned in a single volume. It was nothing short of hubris to declare it the sum of human wisdom, of course, but that was only one of his many sins. Harmon Reclusus had been working on the illuminated manuscript for years, but there was no way he could possibly hope to complete his life's work. Not now. His body was in the final stages of the greatest betrayal imaginable.

  He was dying.

  He could not keep food down. It had been days since he had had even a cup of water, let alone a meal, and as he felt himself weakening to the point of unconsciousness and the inevitability of death, but tormented by the thought of failure, of going without finishing his masterpiece, Harmon had fallen on his knees and made a prayer.

  This prayer was not offered to God, who had forsaken him in his hour of need, but to the Devil himself.

  It was a desperate plea.

  And Satan had answered, granting him a single night of feverish consciousness throughout which he would do more than just finish his book, he would channel the entire knowledge of the divine and demonic, far beyond the understanding of mere man, into the pages of his manuscript, thus transforming it from the wisdom of a single man into something far more dangerous: the Devil's Bible. By sunrise, Satan told him, he would be spent, gone, burned out in a blaze of black wisdom — and the cost of this bargain? The book completed in return for his immortal soul.

  Harmon had sealed the pact with his blood, drawn to the promise of forbidden knowledge.

  How could he have resisted, wondered Alymere? After years of isolation and study, giving everything of his life to the completion of one great work, the penitent had succumbed not to earthly temptations, not to the sins of the flesh, but to the simple promise of finishing what he had started. It was not about knowing everything, for he would hold that knowledge for less than a single night. And so what if the cost of it was something he himself neither had use for nor believed in? God had abandoned him. That only made the deal all the more appealing to the monk. Harmon got what he wanted, he finished his life's work, and the Devil was just as happy with the price they'd agreed.

  Alymere knew all of this in seconds, opening himself up to the book, and understanding even as he did who the voice inside his head belonged to.

  I am glad we understand each other, the voice preened inside his mind. Oh yes, he was well aware what — or who — had taken up residence within him. And rather than repulsing him, Alymere found himself embracing the invader. As he had promised, together they would become everything it was possible for him to become. Together they would be Alymere, Destroyer of Kingdoms. They would be Alymere, Killer of Kings. They would be Alymere, Champion of the Wretched. They would be Alymere, Saviour of the Sick and Alymere, Son of Albion. They would be all of the things the Crow Maiden had foreseen for them. Together they would be all of these and more.

  I can feel the hunger burning inside you… It is unquenchable. It roars. It rages. It consumes. There is nothing like it, nothing like the desire for vengeance, against the world that has wronged you, against the people who have betrayed you, against the black veins of sickness that permeate every work of God, from the foundations up. I can feel it. You cannot hide it from me. It nourishes me. In return I will nourish you. I will be the fire in your blood. I will be the righteous fury in your fist. I will be the passion in your loins. I will be the flame that stirs your heart. I will be the ambrosial milk that grants sustenance even as it spills from your lips. I will be the light in the darkness of your soul. I will be you. And you will be me. Do you want that?

  "Yes."

  How much?

  "More than anything."

  I want you to do something for me, for us, to bring us closer together, to make us complete. Will you do that for me?

  "Yes."

  As the image of the Black Chalice swelled to fill his mind, the Devil commanded: Bring it to me. Bring me the Chalice. Go first to the great Laird's cairn; you will know your way from there. And, as Alymere closed his eyes, all of the real secrets, the darkest, most thoroughly hidden treasures of the Devil's book made themselves known to him in a dizzying rush. The thrill of them raced from his fingers to his heart, traversing every nerve and fibre, transforming him into a conduit for the book's dark wisdom. He opened himself to it, drinking it in, absorbing every fateful ounce of knowledge from the first sins to the greatest evils, the secrets of creation and the lies of faith and flesh. Every treachery, every deceit and betrayal, every bare-faced lie whispered or told bold as brass, echoed through his head; not the words, but a deeper understanding, of the lies themselves. He not only understood the drive to lie, to cheat, to steal, but revelled in it. The thrill he felt was almost sexual in its nature, a force that owned him body and soul. And it came at no little cost. His entire body trembled, every muscle tensing, and then he began to convulse violently as the arcana took root within him. Beads of sweat broke and ran from his temple and brow over the too-smooth planes of his deformity. He blinked them back as they stung his eyes. He chewed on his lower lip until it bled. His breathing was ragged. Excited. Fearful.

  Alymere whispered the words back to the air, repeating what he heard inside his head. As they left his lips, the words began to take on a life all of their own. He fell into a
rhythmic chant that matched the pounding of the blood through his temples. The words came faster and faster, growing louder and louder until he was sure he was shouting, yelling, but he couldn't stop himself. And he couldn't pull his hands from the book.

  Alymere's eyes rolled up inside his skull, his jaw locked open in a silent scream as the ink chased up from the page, roiling through, over and under his skin, painting him as the illumination fled the book. The symbols chased after each other across the flat plains of scar tissue up to his throat, then up over his chin and across his cheekbones and into his eyes, flooding into him. They began as words, identifiable, legible, but as more and more wisdom bled out of the book into him the ink became a solid blackness that transformed him into something demonic: a creature of ink.

  As the last traces of writing fled the page and entered his hands, racing up his forearms, the skin left in its wake returned once more to raw, pink flesh. Stain by stain, his body returned to its natural state, the words of the Devil bleeding into his eyes to stain upon his soul, and then he began screaming again. It was a scream like none that had ever been heard in this house.

  Seconds after the screams began the door flung open on its hinges, slamming against the wall.

  The huge figure of Sir Bors de Ganis filled the doorway, sword in hand, as Alymere fell forward across the book, utterly spent.

  For a moment Bors didn't move. He stood as though trapped in the doorway, staring at Alymere's collapsed body, and then everything exploded into sound and panic as a bird flew at the glass window, cannoning off it in a flurry of feathers as the glass cracked, and whatever spell had bound Bors broke along with it. Seeing Alymere was alone, he dropped his sword and crashed into the room, and bounded forward, arms outstretched as though to catch Alymere, despite the fact that he had already fallen.