The Black Chalice

'Give it to me,' Alymere said, looking up.

He didn't hold his hands out for it.

If he had, Bors would have been able to see him shaking.

The big man moved cautiously into the room and closed the door behind him with his foot. 'I have it,' he said unnecessarily.

Alymere felt a thousand warring emotions surge up within him then, this close to the book, but it was fear that won out. He closed his eyes.

'Leave it with me. I will do what has to be done.'

'I don't know…'

'Trust me, please. This once. Trust me.'

He couldn't look up. He couldn't meet the big man's gaze. He didn't want to remember him like this, clutching a burning brand in a dank cell. He wanted to remember him striding confidently through Camelot, flirting outrageously with Katherine, making Maeve the cook laugh by stealing food. Being larger than life. If he looked at Bors now, he knew he wouldn't be able to go through with it.

Bors put the Devil's Bible down on the bed beside Alymere.

'Be careful, lad.'

'Don't worry about me, my friend. I know what I am doing. It is the only way.'

Bors rested a hand on his shoulder. 'I meant what I said last night. Roth, Corynn, Lowick, they would have been proud of you, lad.'

'I hope so,' Alymere said. When he looked up, tears were streaming down his face. The big man said nothing, but left him. He switched the brand for the burnt-out torch in the sconce, leaving Alymere the light.

Beside him, the book spoke straight into the darkness of his heart.

You can hear me, can't you, Alymere? You know I am still here. I am always in the darkness, and always will be. You can't escape me. You and I, we are one. Our time together is not over until I am done with you. You are my creature.

'No,' Alymere said aloud. 'I am your keeper. There is a difference.'

He looked at the linen favour on his arm.

It was the last thing he ever saw.

With that, he lifted the brand from the wall and put his own eyes out, welcoming the darkness.

Fifty-Seven

Come dawn, Bors opened the door to the cell, unsure what he expected to find.

Alymere lay huddled in the corner of the room, clutching the Devil's Bible to his chest.

He looked up. Tears of blood caked his cheeks.

Bors stared at the young man's ruined eyes, unable to accept what he saw.

He rushed to Alymere's side, cradling him in his arms. 'You foolish boy. What have you done?'

'What I had to,' Alymere said, tilting his head unerringly toward Bors, as though, despite the deep holes where his ruined eyes lay, he could see him. 'It is the only way. I cannot stop the voices, but no matter how seductive they become I can never read the book. He cannot crawl his way back inside me. I have won.'

'But at what cost?' Bors said, aghast.

'It was the only way,' Alymere repeated, remembering his promise to the Crow Maiden. There is nothing you could ask of me that I would not willingly do, without a second thought. This is what it meant, to be her champion. Sacrifice. The willing offering of everything he was and everything he could ever have been. 'Now, one last favour, my friend.'

'Anything. You need only ask,' Bors said, unhesitant.

'Take me away from this place. Take me somewhere I will never see another living soul as long as I live. Take me to Medcaut.'

Bors understood. Isolated, the book's vile voice could not worm its way inside another man. 'And that will be the end of it? How will you live? How will you eat?'

'The book will sustain me,' Alymere said, thinking of the blind monk, and finally understanding.

'And the Chalice? What of it?'

'It can't stay here.'

Fifty-Eight

She was waiting for them in the forest. He did not need to see her to know she was there.

She smelled like summer.

'My champion,' Blodyweth said. She leaned close, kissing his cheek, and he smiled. He could not help himself. Despite everything, despite the savagery of his wounds and the ugliness of the scars they left behind, she could still be tender towards him. Loving.

He offered her the Chalice. 'The Kingdom of Summer is safe, my lady. I have kept my promise. I will live out all of my days doing so.'

'I never doubted you, my love.'

Here endeth the first part of the

Second Book of King Arthur

and his Noble Knights…

The Salisbury Manuscript

June, 2006. The vestry of the nine-hundred-year-old parish church of St. Barbara and St. Christopher in Salisbury has been in need of a new roof for years; swathes of irreplacable parish records have been destroyed by leaking rainwater, not to mention mould and the various pests which enter through the cracks to nest in the room. A collection, several church fetes and a fundraiser thrown by the local school have finally raised the?16,000 needed to carry out the repairs, and work starts in the beginning of August.

Before work can begin, the countless documents lying stacked and boxed at the rear of the room need to be removed, which has turned out to be a more complicated task than expected. Students from Salisbury University, working side by side with Church volunteers, need to open and inspect every box in situ, identify, index and catalogue every document, and transfer them to new, more secure archive boxes before removing them from the building. Many of the boxes haven't been opened in decades — some, according to Canon Arthur Drake, since before World War I — and few of Drake's forerunners made any attempt at organising them.

On the third or fourth day, a remarkable find is uncovered by one of the students.

'I remember Lily [Evanson, the Church secretary] had just come back with about the seventh tea run of the day, and I had my back turned to the kids while I selected a biscuit,' says Drake. 'Suddenly, one of the girls from the university — I honestly can't remember which — started shouting and carrying on.'

What the unnamed student had discovered was a large bound manuscript, purporting to be a second book of Arthurian tales by the writer of Le Morte D'Arthur.

'Work more or less stopped for the day,' reminisces the canon. 'Who am I kidding?' he laughs. 'For the week. I just about managed to keep the kids from just running out of there until they'd logged it and cleared everything up for the night, and it was rushed off to the university.'

At the university's Middle English department the next day, the job of identifying and analysing the