Prince Lestat (36 page)

“You proud of yourself, Voice?” I asked.

But he wasn’t there. Not there at all. I would have known if he was there.

He hadn’t spoken to me again since Miami, not in spite of all my pleas, my questions, my long confessions of respect, interest, immense desire to understand.

“Amel, Amel, talk to me,” I’d said over and over again. Had it found others to love, others infinitely more malleable and useful?

And more to the point, what was I going to do? What did I have to offer all those who seemed to think, for the most foolish reasons, that I could somehow solve all this?

Meanwhile coven houses and young ones had perished. And now this in Paris.

For hours I searched the Quartier Latin. I searched all of central
Paris, walking the banks of the Seine and homing as I always did to Notre Dame. Nothing. Not a single preternatural voice left in Paris.

All those paparazzi gone.

It was almost like those olden nights when I thought I was the only vampire in the world, and I’d walked these streets alone, longing for the voices of others.

And all the time those other blood drinkers, those evil blood drinkers led by Armand, had been hiding under the cemetery of Les Innocents.

I saw bones in stacks, skulls, rotting bones. But this was no image of the old catacombs of those Children of Satan in the eighteenth century. These were images of the catacombs under Paris today where all the bones of the old cemetery had been moved long after the Children of Satan had been dissolved into ruin.

Catacombs. Images of bones. I heard a female blood drinker crying. Two creatures. And one speaking very rapidly in a low whisper. I knew that timbre. That was the voice I’d heard earlier this night. I left the Île de la Cité, and started for the catacombs.

In a flash I caught a vision of two women together weeping, the elder a white skeletal monster with a hag’s hair. Horrid, like something painted by Goya. Then it was gone, and I couldn’t home in on it again.

“Bianca!” I said. “Bianca!”

I picked up speed. I knew where those tunnels were, those deep dark ugly tunnels beneath the city whose walls are packed with the disintegrating bones of centuries of dead Parisians. The public was admitted to those underground passages. I knew the public entrance. I was racing towards the Place Denfert-Rochereau, and had almost reached the spot, when a strange sight stopped me.

It was a brilliant flash at the entrance to the tunnel, as if a flame had erupted from the mouth of the charnel house. The dark wooden pedimented building that sheltered the entrance exploded and fell to pieces with a loud clatter.

I saw a female blood drinker with long blond hair, white, immensely powerful, rising from the pavement, and in her arms two other figures, both clinging to her, one with a skeletal white arm and hag hair buried against her bosom, the other, auburn haired and shaking with sobs.

For me, for my eyes, this mysterious being slowed her ascent, and we gazed for one split second at one another.

I will see you again, brave one
.

Then she was gone.

I felt a blast of air against my face.

I was sitting on the pavement when I came to my senses.

Sevraine
.

That was the name imprinted on my mind. Sevraine. But who was this Sevraine?

I was still sitting there staring at the entrance to the tunnel when I heard fast crisp steps approaching, someone walking steadily, heavily and fast.

“Get up, Lestat.”

I turned and looked up into the face of my mother.

There she was after all these years in her old khaki safari jacket and faded jeans, her hair in a braid over her shoulder, her pale face like a porcelain mask.

“Come on, stand up!” she said, those cold blue eyes flashing in the lights of the burning building at the mouth of the tunnel.

And in that moment as love and resentment clashed with humbling fury, I was back at home hundreds of years ago, walking with her in those cold barren fields, with her haranguing me in that impatient voice. “Get up. Move. Come on.”

“What are you going to do if I don’t?” I snarled. “Slap me?”

And that’s what she did. She slapped me. “Get up quickly,” she said. “Take me to that glorified shelter you’ve made for yourself in the old castle. We must talk. Tomorrow night, I’ll take you to Sevraine.”

I
T SEEMED
the Voice woke him each evening, telling him to go out and cleanse the country around him of mavericks, that he would be infinitely more content if he did this. The Voice took a gentle tack with him.

“I know you, Marius. I know you well. I know that you love your companion, Daniel. Do as I ask of you and he will never be in danger.”

Marius ignored the Voice, as certainly as a priest might ignore the small voice of Satan, calculating all the while: How does this creature get into my brain? How does he manage to speak to me in such a palpable warm way as if we were brothers?

“I am you, Marius, and you are me,” said the Voice. “Listen to what I say.”

Marius wouldn’t let Daniel out of his sight.

The handsome old coven house in Santa Teresa had been burned to the ground. If any of the young survived in Rio de Janeiro they were silent. Even the great country surrounding the city was silent. No sharp, tinny, and piercing cries out there anymore for help.

As they walked along the beach together near midnight, Daniel and Marius, side by side at the end of the waves, Marius listened. He was a beachcomber in khaki, with his sandals tied to his belt. And Daniel was easy in his polo shirt and dungarees, sneakers easily pushing against the hard sand.

Far off in the jungles to the north, Marius heard preternatural
voices, faint but filled with rage. Maharet was there now, he knew it. In those Amazonian jungles. He recognized some faint pattern of speech, of telepathic eruption that even the great Maharet could not contain or control.

He and Daniel had to leave Brazil. This was a safe place no longer. Daniel said he understood. “Whither thou goest, I go,” he had said. It amazed Marius that Daniel seemed so indifferent to danger, that his zest for all he saw around him remained so strong. Having survived madness, he was now wise beyond his years in the Blood, accepting that another crisis had come, and that he might survive this one as he had survived the Akashan Massacre before. As he himself had put it earlier this evening, “I was Born to Darkness in the midst of a storm.”

Marius loved Daniel. He had salvaged Daniel from the aftermath of that storm, and never for one moment regretted it. Marius knew that Daniel had also salvaged him from the same chaos, becoming for Marius someone Marius could care for, someone Marius could personally love. It meant the world to Marius that he was not walking on this beach alone, that Daniel was walking at his side.

The night was magnificent as it so often was over Copacabana Bay, the silvery surf raging on the endless sand, mortals few and far between and keeping to themselves. The great city of Rio was never silent, and the din of traffic and machines, and the teeming mortal voices, blended for Marius with the sweet and incessant symphony of the waves.

All things under Heaven contain some blessing, and so it is with modern noise that it can become the gentle roar of a waterfall in our ears protecting us from disparate and ghastly sounds. Ah, but what is Heaven but a silent and indifferent void through which the shattering noise of explosions echo forever or are heard not at all? And men once spoke of the music of the spheres.

But we are blessed to be tiny beings in this universe. We are blessed to feel momentous because we are larger than these grains of sand.

Something intruded suddenly on his thoughts.

Far ahead in the darkness, he spied a lone figure coming towards them.
Immortal. Powerful. Child of the Millennia
. He drew Daniel close to him, putting his arm around Daniel as if Daniel were his son. Daniel too had sensed the presence perhaps, even heard the subtle heartbeat.

Who are you?

He could pick up no answer. The figure came on steadily, a slim delicate-boned male, in a soft ankle-length white Arabic robe, the robe flapping in the wind. His short white hair was mussed by the wind. The moonlight made an aureole out of it, and the steps came on as the steps of the ancient always do, with measured strength indifferent to the softness of the terrain.

Now is this how it is to happen? Had the Voice roused this rude instrument to smite them with fire?

There was nothing to do but move steadily towards this figure. What good would it do to flee? With one so old, flight might be impossible, for eyes such as these can follow an ascending body everywhere when there is nothing else to distract them.

Again, Marius identified himself silently, but there was no response, not the smallest inkling of a thought, an attitude, an emotion from the other, as he slowly came into full view.

They approached each other in silence, crunch of sand underfoot, sigh of the wind, and then the white-haired one extended his hand. Long almost spidery fingers.

“Marius,” he said. “My beloved, my savior of long ago, my friend.”

“I know you?” asked Marius politely. Even as he clasped the hand he divined nothing but what the agreeable and open face reflected: friendship. No danger.

But this one was far older than Marius, perhaps as much as a thousand years. His eyes were black and his unblemished skin the color of amber, which made his white hair all the more remarkable, a cloud of white light around his head.

“I’m Teskhamen,” said the older one. “And you, you are the one who gave me new life.”

“How did I ever do that?” asked Marius. “When and where did we ever meet?”

“Come, let’s find a quiet place where we can talk.”

“My rooms?” asked Marius.

“If you wish, or the bench up there at the boardwalk. This is a quiet night on the boardwalk. And the sea is like molten silver to my eyes. The breeze is fragrant and comforting. Let’s go there.”

They climbed the sands together, Daniel hanging slightly behind as if it were the respectful thing to do.

And when Marius and Teskhamen sat down together, Daniel
chose another bench nearby. They were all three facing the distant waves, facing that writhing pearly surf. Beyond the mist the stars climbed forever. Great far-off mountains and rocks were purely dark.

Marius looked at Daniel anxiously. He didn’t want a divide from Daniel of even a few feet.

“Don’t be concerned for him now,” said Teskhamen. “We are more than adequate to protect him, and what stalks the young blood drinkers tonight is on the move in other cities. The young of this place have already been exterminated. It turned them against each other. It played on their distrust of one another and their escalating fear. It was not content merely with the burning of the house; it hunted them down one by one.”

“So that is how it is being done.”

“That is one way. There are others. It becomes more clever with every passing night.”

“I saw it,” said Marius. And indeed he had in images, those battles, images he would like very much to forget. “But please, tell who you are and what you want with me.” He had said this politely, but he was a little ashamed of himself. After all, obviously this old one was friendly and knowledgeable as to what was happening. This old one wanted to help.

“There must be a gathering,” said Teskhamen, “and the place will be New York.” He gave a little laugh. “I think Benji Mahmoud has marked the spot there with his enterprising broadcasts, but then two of the authors of the Vampire Chronicles are there already, and they are known to the entire world of the Undead.”

“I have nothing against any particular gathering place,” said Marius. “And Benji is no stranger to me.” Marius had made Benji a vampire, brought him and his companion Sybelle over, and given them to his fledgling Armand, but he saw no reason to confide this to a stranger, a stranger who likely knew it anyway, especially one whose thoughts he couldn’t hear. Not even the faintest shimmer came to him.

But he caught suddenly a very strong emanation from Daniel.
He is the one who made you
.

Marius was visibly startled, glancing first at Daniel, who sat staring at him, sideways on the bench with one leg up and his arms casually wrapped around his knee. Daniel was plainly fascinated.

Marius looked back to Teskhamen, this smaller blood drinker who gazed at him with steady black eyes.

“The one who made me is dead,” he said aloud, again glancing at Daniel and then back to Teskhamen. “He died the very night I was Born to Darkness. That was two thousand years ago in a forest in northern Europe. Those events are engraved on my soul.”

“And on mine,” said Teskhamen. “But I did not die that night. And I did make you what you are now. I was the blood god imprisoned in that oak to which the Druids brought you. It was I, that blackened and scarred and ruined thing, that gave you the Blood, and told you to escape the Druids—not to remain imprisoned in the oak as a blood god—but to go down to Egypt, no matter what the cost, and see what had happened to the Mother and the Father, to find out why we had, so many of us, been horribly burned in our very shrines.”

“Prisons, you mean, not shrines,” Marius whispered. He stared forward at the distant horizon where the dark undulating sea met the silver sky.

Could this be possible?

The horrific sights and sounds of that night came back to him, the deep oaken forest, his own helplessness as, a prisoner of the Druids, he’d been dragged towards the shrine of the god within the tree. And then had come those staggering moments when the burnt and white-haired god had spoken to him and explained the powers of the Blood he would share.

“But I saw them throw your body on the pyre afterwards,” said Marius. “I tried to save you, but I didn’t know my own strength then in the Blood. I saw you burned.” He shook his head, peering earnestly into the being’s eyes. “Why would one so old and so seemingly wise lie about these things?”