Prince Lestat (33 page)

She nodded. She repeated the words she’d said to him that night.

“ ‘If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy, then struggle and make yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.’ ”

“Yes,” Gremt whispered. “And you said more. ‘But know this: if you would become an organized being as you see in me, love all mankind and womankind and all their children. Do not take your strength from blood! Do not feed on suffering. Do not rise like a god above crowds chanting in adoration. Do not lie.’ ”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. A gentle smile broke over her face. She was not failing him in this moment. She was opening to him. He saw the same sensitivity and compassion in her now that he had seen those many years ago. And he had waited so very long for this! He wanted to reach out to her, to embrace her, but he didn’t dare.

“I have followed your counsel,” he said. Now he knew the tears were streaming from his eyes, though they never had before. “I’ve followed it always. And I built the Talamasca for you, Pandora, and for all of your kind and for all humankind and I patterned it as best I could on the monks and scholars of that beautiful old monastery, Vivarium, of which not a stone remains. I built it in memoriam to that brave Cassiodorus who studied and dipped his pen to write to the very end, with such strength and devotion, even as the world went dark around him.”

She sighed. She was amazed. And her smile brightened. “And so it was from that moment?”

“Yes, that the Talamasca was born,” he said. “From that encounter.”

Arjun was gazing at him in pure wonder.

She rose from the table.

She moved around it and came towards Gremt. How loving and eager she appeared, how guileless and how fearless. She was no more frightened of him now than she’d been hundreds of years ago.

But he was spent, dangerously spent—more spent than he could ever have imagined by this—and he couldn’t bear the sweetness, the joy, of having her in his arms.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. He wiped foolishly at the tears on his face.

“Talk with us, stay with us here,” she said imploringly. And Arjun uttered the same invitation.

But Gremt did the only thing he could do with his waning strength. He moved away fast, leaving the garden behind him and the lights of the bungalow lost in the forest of bamboo and mango trees.

She could have pursued him. If she did try to pursue, he would have no choice but to vanish, and that he did not want to do. He wanted to remain in this body as long as possible. That was always his choice.

But she didn’t pursue him. She accepted his exit. And he knew he’d see her soon again. He’d see them all soon. And he would tell her and all of the others everything.

He followed the road for a long time, gradually regaining his strength, his body hardening once more, his pulse steady, the tears gone and his vision clear.

Headlights now and then picked him out of the darkness as cars swept by, leaving him once more in silence.

So he had told her. He had confided the great secret of the Talamasca to her first of all, before all others, and very soon he would make it known to the entire tribe of blood drinkers.

Never to those mortal Talamasca members who struggled as they always did to continue their studies. No. They would be left in peace to continue with the fables of the Order’s origins.

But he would tell it to all of
them
, the great supernatural beings whom the Talamasca had studied from its very beginnings.

And maybe they would understand as she understood, and maybe they would accept as she had accepted. And maybe they would not fail him in those moments of connection he so badly needed with them.

Whatever the case, it was time, was it not, to help them directly, to reach out, to give them what he could as they confronted the greatest challenge in their history. Who better to help them solve the mystery of the Voice than Gremt Stryker Knollys?

D
AVID HAD DRAWN
me out. Clever David. He’d called Benji’s line in New York, chatting away with Benji on the broadcast about the crisis. He never gave his name. Didn’t have to. Benji knew and I knew, and probably a lot of other blood drinkers knew, that cultured British voice.

On and on, David kept warning the young ones to stay out of the cities, to go into the countryside. He warned the old ones who might be hearing some anonymous command to destroy others: Don’t listen. Benji kept agreeing. Over and over again, David said, Stay out of cities like Lyon, or Berlin, or Florence, or Avignon, or Milan, or Avignon or Rome or Avignon … and so on it went as he named city after city, always throwing in Avignon, and saying that he was certain the great hero, Lestat, was not the one guilty of all this. He’d stake his eternal life on Lestat’s honor; Lestat’s loyalty to others; Lestat’s innate sense of goodness. Why, he, David, wished he had the authority of the pope, so that he could stand in the courtyard of the ruined Popes’ Palace at Avignon and declare for all the world that Lestat wasn’t guilty of these Burnings!

I burst out laughing.

I was listening in my drawing room in my father’s château not four hundred kilometers from the little city of Avignon. There had never been any vampires in Avignon! And no burnings either.

Every night, I’d been listening to Benji. I was sick with worry for
those who were dying. It was not all fledglings and the misbegotten. Many of the three- and four-hundred-year-old Children of Darkness were being slaughtered. Perhaps some of those I had known and loved on my long journey had been slaughtered, lost to me and to everyone else forever. When Akasha had gone on her rampage, her great Burning, she’d spared those connected to me, out of favor, but this new Burning seemed infinitely more terrible, more random. And I could not guess, any more than anyone else, who or what lay behind the devastation.

Where was my beloved Gabrielle? And how long would it be before this thing attacked the house of Armand and Louis in New York? I wondered: whoever and whatever it was, did it like listening to Benji’s broadcasts, did it like hearing of all the misery it was creating?

“What do you think, Voice?” I asked.

No answer.

The Voice had long ago left me, hadn’t it? The Voice was behind this. Everyone knew that now, didn’t they? The Voice was rousing engines of murder from long slumber, urging them to use powers perhaps they’d never known they had.

“These old ones are being roused by this Voice,” David said. “There’s no doubt of this now. Witnesses have seen these old ones at the site of the massacres. So often it’s a ragged figure, sometimes a hideous wraith. Surely it is the Voice waking these people. Are not many of us hearing this Voice?”

“Who is the Voice?” Benji demanded over and over again. “Which of you out there has heard the Voice? Call us, talk to us.”

David rang off. The surviving fledglings were taking over the airwaves.

Benji had twenty phone lines now to receive those who were calling. Who staffed these lines? I didn’t know enough about radio stations, phones, monitors, etcetera to understand how it worked. But no mortal voice had ever been broadcast by Benji, not for any reason, and sometimes one mournful and miserable blood drinker calling in would take an hour to unfold a tale of desperation. Did the other calls pile up?

Whatever the case, I had to get to Avignon. David wanted me to meet him in Avignon, in the old ruined Palace of the Popes, that was plain enough.

Benji was now addressing the Voice. “Call us here, Voice,” he was
saying in that chipper, confident manner of his. “Tell us what you want. Why are you trying to destroy us?”

I looked around my glorious digs here on the mountain. How I’d worked to reclaim this land of my father, how I’d worked to restore this château completely—and lately with my own hands, I’d dug out secret rooms beneath it. How I loved these old stone-walled chambers where I’d grown up, now transformed with every sweet amenity, and the view from these windows over the mountains and fields where I’d hunted as a boy. Why, why did I have to be drawn away from all this and into a battle I didn’t want?

Well, I wasn’t going to reveal this place to David or anybody else for that matter. If they didn’t have the sense to look for me at Château de Lioncourt in the Auvergne, that was their misfortune! After all, the place had been on all the maps.

I put on my favorite red velvet jacket, slipped on my black boots and my usual sunglasses, and went to Avignon immediately.

Lovely little city, Avignon, with winding cobblestone streets and countless cafés and those old broken-down ruins where once the Roman Catholic pontiffs had reigned in splendor.

And David was waiting for me, sure enough, along with Jesse, haunting the old ruin. Not a single other blood drinker in the city.

I came right down into the dark grassy high-walled courtyard. No mortal eyes to witness this. Just the dark empty broken archways in the stone cloister gazing on like so many black eyes.

“Brat Prince.” David rose from his seat on the grass and threw his arms around me. “I see you’re in fine form.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. But it was so good to see him again, to see both of them. Jesse hovered against the old crumbling stone wall, wrapped in a heavy gray muffler.

“Do we have to stand out here in this desolate place, under the shadow of all this history?” I said testily, but I didn’t mean it. It was fine with me, this chilly September night with deep winter already in the air. I was embarrassingly glad that they’d forced me to this meeting.

“Of course not, Your Royal Highness,” said David. “There’s a fine little hotel in Lyon, the Villa Florentine, not far away at all”—he’s telling me? I was born here!—“and we have comfortable rooms there.” That sounded good enough.

Within fifteen minutes we’d made the little journey, and we
entered the red-carpeted suite by the patio doors and were comfortably settled in the parlor. The hotel was above the town, on a hilltop with a pretty view, and I liked it just fine.

Jesse looked worn and miserably unhappy, dressed in a creased and cracked brown leather jacket and pants, her gray wool sweater high under her chin, muffler covering her mouth, hair the usual shimmering veil of copper waves. David was in his gray worsted wool with a nappy suede vest and flashing silk tie—all bespoke most likely. He was a good deal brighter in tone and expression than Jesse, but I knew the gravity of the situation.

“Benji doesn’t guess the half of it,” Jesse said, the words just pouring out of her. “And I don’t know what I can tell him or anyone else.” She sat on the foot of the bed, hands clasped between her knees. “Maharet’s banished me and Thorne forever. Forever.” She began to cry, but didn’t stop talking.

She explained that Thorne had been going and coming since the time Fareed had restored his eyes to him, and he, the great Viking warrior, wanted to stand with Maharet against any force that threatened her.

He’d heard the Voice. He’d heard it in Sweden and Norway, prompting him to clean out the riffraff, speaking of a great purpose. He’d found it easy to shut out.

“And you?” I asked, looking from Jesse to David. “Have either of you heard the Voice?”

Jesse shook her head no, but David nodded. “About a year ago, I started hearing it. About the most interesting words it ever uttered were in fact a question. It asked me whether or not we’d all been weakened by the proliferation of the power.”

“Remarkable,” I said under my breath. “What was your response?”

“I told it no. I said I was as powerful as I’d ever been, perhaps a little more powerful of late.”

“And did it say anything else?”

“It spoke mostly nonsense. Half the time I wasn’t even sure it was speaking to me. I mean it could have been addressing anyone. It spoke of an optimum number of blood drinkers, considering the source of the power. It spoke of the power as the Sacred Core. I could hear the capital letters. It raved that the realm of the Undead was sunk now into depravity and madness. But it would go on and on around these ideas, often making little or no logical or sequential sense at all. It
would even lapse into other languages and it would, well, it would make mistakes, mistakes in meaning, syntax. It was bizarre.”

Jesse was staring at him as if all this was a surprise to her.

“To tell the truth,” David explained, “I had no idea it was
the Voice
as people are saying now,” said David. “I’m giving you the distilled version. It was mostly incoherent. I thought it was some old one. I mean, this happens, of course. Old ones shoot their messages to others. I found it tiresome. I tuned it out.”

“And you, Jesse?” I asked.

“I’ve never heard it,” she whispered. “I think that Thorne is the first to have spoken of it directly to me or Maharet.”

“And what did she say?”

“She banished us both. She gave us infusions of her blood. She insisted on this. And then she told us we were not to come back. She’d already banished David.” She glanced at him and then went on. “She said pretty much the same things to us she’d said to him. The time was past when she could extend hospitality any longer to others, that she and Mekare and Khayman must now be alone—.”

“Khayman wasn’t there at the time,” David interjected. “Isn’t that so?”

She nodded. “He’d been missing for a week at least.” She went on with her story. “I begged her to let me remain. Thorne went down on his knees. But she was adamant. She said to leave then, not to wait on anything as cumbersome as regular transportation, but to take to the air and put as much distance between ourselves and her as we could. I went to England immediately to see David. I think Thorne actually went to New York. I think many are going to New York. I think he went to Benji and Armand and Louis, but I’m not sure. Thorne was in a fury. He so loves Maharet. But she warned him not to try to deceive her. She said she’d know if he lingered. She was agitated. More agitated than I’d ever seen her. She pressed on me some routine information about resources, money, but I reminded her she’d seen to that. I knew how to get along out here.”