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.