At night, alone, the voice came.
Still, he could not make out a word it said.
He didn't need to.
The words formed impressions inside his head and those impressions came alive inside him.
He lay in his bed, his entire body hollowed out, so that when the voice came, it filled him. It swelled to reach every corner of his being. The shapeless sounds repeated the same sibilance of syllables, chanting them over and over and over again:
chalicechalicechalicechalicechalicechalicechalicechalice…
And for once he did not feel alone in the great manor house.
Thirty-Four
He could not say what instinct caused him to open the Devil's Bible the next morning — having left it untouched for days — but even as he opened his eyes to the morning he found himself reaching for it.
It felt so familiar to his touch; cold and marble-smooth, like the skin of a dead man.
As Alymere turned the first page and saw those familiar words — being an account of the entire wisdom of Man as transcribed by Harmon Reclusus — he knew that more secrets of the book were going to reveal themselves to him.
He looked at the words, at the shape of them as they bled across the page, and found his still sleep-addled mind imagining them running together. The letters moved, twisting and sliding into and away from one another, forming new nonsense words and old familiar ones, although never settling for more than a heartbeat in any shape that allowed him to read them. As he rested his fingertips flat on the page he saw the ink stain them, the words climbing from the page to stain his skin. They curled around his fingers, sharing secrets with his flesh that he could not know, rising up the soft smooth expanse of the meat of his forearm, each line becoming a vein and artery, feeding the life of him as completely as might blood. He rubbed at his eyes, knowing it was impossible for words to rewrite themselves once writ and that they could not move of their own accord, nor tattoo his body, and in the back of his mind heard the soft sibilant whisper of the word Chalice again, though this time he was awake and in full charge of his faculties. There could be no pretending the voice was the work of ghosts.
The spell broken, the words fell back onto the page — although in truth they had never left it — and Alymere pushed himself up in bed. He leaned on an elbow, and called, "Who is there?"
No-one answered, not that he expected them to.
"Father?" he asked, not daring to believe it possible and feeling stupid for thinking it. "Is that you?"
Again there was no answer.
When he looked down at the book this time there were more words that he recognised — incomplete phrases that alone made no sense, though in the centre of the poem, above the words Black Chalice he could now read seven more words: The White Crow and the Devil's Tree.
He recalled the white-streaked feathers of the crow that watched him preside over the Assizes, the last of its kin to take flight. Before he could check to see if any more of the words within the book had made themselves known, a floorboard creaked outside his room.
Someone was out there. There could be no mistaking it this time.
He closed the book, and as the pages came together again the word chalice slipped into the back of his mind, repeating itself, chalicechalicechalice, in a woman's voice this time. No, he realised — not a woman's, a boy's.
That he had imagined the word spoken by three different voices ought to have steered his mind toward the truth, or at least some revelation of his own madness. Instead, ignoring the implications, he called out, almost shouting, "What trickery is this?"
Again, the deliberate sigh of a floorboard beneath someone's foot, and then silence.
"Who goes there?"
This time, his question was answered by a soft knock on the chamber door.
The iron handle twisted and the door opened a crack, and he could see a sliver of shadow sneak into the room.
He sprung from the bed, casting about for something to defend himself with.
As the door opened wider he saw that it was the woman, Gwen. She wore a simple white shift, her face like ash as she stepped into the room.
The tension ebbed from his body, leaving him standing naked in the middle of the floor. He laughed at his own unease, and pulled the blanket from the bed to cover his nakedness.
"What is it?" Alymere asked, and realising that she could not answer him, abandoned any pretence of modesty and grasped her with both hands, forcing her to meet his gaze. "What is wrong?"
"It is your uncle."
Alymere felt a dread chill blossom in his heart. "He is here?"
The woman nodded. "They brought him in on a stretcher. He is grievously wounded, my lord. They fear he may not make it through the night."
"What happened to him?"
"I do not know, and did not think it my place to ask."
"No. Of course. Thank you, Gwen."
Alymere grabbed his shirt, discarded the night before with the rest of his clothes in a heap, and buttoned it with trembling hands. Three times he missed the eyelet and the button slipped through his fingers. He pulled on his hose and tied the leather thong tight, before running barefoot out of the room, his feet slapping on the hardwood floor.
The entire house was in a commotion. He could hear people calling out, barking orders. There was none of the laughter he had come to associate with his home.
He stopped dead on the landing, clutching the balustrade, caught between looking down the great staircase to the reception room where servants and soldiers gathered, and what had been the door to his parent's chamber along the landing. The white hart painted onto the heavy oak had faded, but it was still visible in the morning gloom.
They would have taken Sir Lowick to his room so that he might die in his own bed, he knew, though the bitter little voice at the back of his head insisted on reminding Alymere, it wasn't his uncle's bed at all, and that already one of two brothers had died in it.
He forced himself to walk down the passageway to the door, and knocked once, his knuckles striking the belly of the white hart.
Pushing open the door without waiting to be summoned, and seeing the dying man sprawled out upon the sheets, his skin already the texture and tone of the dead, Alymere could not help but see the grotesque symmetry in the fates of the brothers Lowick and Roth.
He was not alone in the room. A giant of a man knelt at his bedside, head bowed in prayer. He did not look up until he had offered his final words to the Lord, beseeching the Almighty to make his friend's final journey a peaceful one.
Alymere could not see his face, but he did not need to. The voice was unmistakable, as were the wild black curls that spilled over his clasped hands, and the sheer bulk of the man. It could only have been Sir Bors de Ganis at the bedside.
When finally the big knight raised his head, all mirth and wildness had gone from his eyes. He appeared tortured; haunted by the things he had seen and by the things he had done since last they met.
"Tis a good thing you were not a pretty boy to start with, lad," he said, pushing himself to his feet. "For the fire has done you no favours. Still, no doubt some doxy will want to kiss it all better."
Alymere felt like he was a child again, tiptoeing into his parents room to sit beside his dying father. There were too many dark memories in this room. Stripped down like this, the two of them — the memory and the man — looked so similar it rocked him to the very foundation of his being. He recalled the vow he had made when his uncle first claimed the manor house — that he would never set foot in this room again — and yet here he was, fate making a liar out of him as he watched another man slowly die.