The Black Chalice

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