Prince Lestat (62 page)

And so this fledgling hates his maker and why? Was it on behalf of Maharet?

Slowly, without turning his head Everard looked up at me and his mind went quiet and I caught from him the distinct response that he did indeed hate Rhoshamandes but for more reasons than he could say.

How in the world could any prince keep order amongst these powerful beings, I thought. Indeed the sheer impossibility of it rather crushed me.

I turned and left them all that way.

Way upstairs, Sybelle was playing her music. This must have been in the studio. Possibly Benji was breaking up the broadcast with it. It was comforting, the melody. I listened with all my being, and I heard only gentle voices all through the various chambers that made up this great and glorious house.

I was tired all over, dreadfully tired. I wanted to see Rose and Viktor, but not before I’d spoken to Marius.

I found him now in a library very much different from the one I’d come to love, a more dusty and crowded affair in the middle townhouse of the Trinity Gate complex, a room full of maps and world globes, and stacks of periodicals and newspapers as well as books climbing the walls, where he was at a battered old oak table spotted with ink, poring over a huge book on the history of India and Sanskrit.

He’d put on one of those cassocks that Seth and Fareed obviously favored, but his choice had been for a deep red-velvet fabric, and where he’d gotten it I had no idea, but it was Marius through and through. His long full hair was loose on his shoulders. No disguises or subtle accommodation of the modern world required under this roof.

“Yes, they have the right idea, surely,” he said to me, “when it comes to clothing. Why I have ever bothered with barbarian garb, I’ll never know.”

He was talking like a Roman. By barbarian garb he meant trousers.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Viktor and Rose must be given the Blood. I am hoping that you will do this. I have my reasons, but where do you stand with being the one?”

“I’ve already spoken to them,” he said. “I’m honored and willing. I told them as much.”

I was relieved.

I sat down in a chair opposite his, a big Renaissance Revival chair of carved wood that Henry VIII might have loved. It was creaky but comfortable. Slowly I saw the whole room was more or less Tudor in style. This room had no windows. But Armand had given it the effect of windows by heavy gold-framed mirrors set in every wall, and the hearth was Tudor, with black carvings, and heavy andirons. The coffered ceiling was scored by dark beams. Armand was a genius at these things.

“Then it is just a matter of when,” I said with a sigh.

“Surely you don’t want to bring them over until some decision has
been made about the Voice,” said Marius. “We need to meet again, all of us, don’t we, as soon as you’re willing?”

“Well, you would think in terms of the Roman Senate,” I said. “Why isn’t he in my head or yours?” Marius asked. “Why is he so quiet? I would have thought he’d be punishing Rhoshamandes and Benedict but he isn’t.”

“He’s in my head now, Marius,” I said. “I can feel him. I’ve always known when he was absent or leaving. But now I know when he’s simply there. It’s rather like having a finger pressed against one’s scalp or cheek or the lobe of one’s ear. He’s here.”

Marius looked exasperated, and then plainly furious.

“He’s stopped his relentless meddling out there,” I said, “that’s what matters.” I gestured to the front of the house, towards the street where the young ones were milling, towards the wide world which lay to the east, and the west, and the south and the north.

“I suppose it would be pointless for me to scrawl a message to you on paper here,” said Marius, “because he can read it through your eyes. But why bring over these two until we’re certain that this thing is not yet going to destroy the entire tribe?”

“He’s never wanted to do that,” I said. “And there is no ultimate solution so long as he exists. Even in the most agreeable host, he can still plot and then travel, and then foment. I don’t see any end to that except for one.”

“Which is what?”

“That he might have some larger vision, some infinitely larger challenge, with which to occupy his mind.”

“Does he want that?” Marius asked. “Or is that not something you’ve dreamed up, Lestat? You are such a romantic at heart. Oh, I know you fancy yourself hard-boiled and practical by nature. But you’re a romantic. You always have been. What he wants perhaps is a sacrificial lamb, a perfect blood drinker, old and powerful, whose functioning brain he can take over and control relentlessly as he gradually obliterates its personality. Rhoshamandes was his prototype. Only Rhoshamandes wasn’t vicious enough or foolish enough—.”

“Yes, that does make sense,” I said. “I’m exhausted. I want to go back to that little retreat I’ve found in the other building.”

“What Armand calls the French library.”

“Yes, exactly,” I said. “He couldn’t have designed a more perfect spot for me. I need to rest. To think. But you may do this with Viktor
and Rose whenever you wish, and I say the sooner the better—don’t wait, don’t wait for any resolution that may never come. You do it, go on and do it, and you’ll make them strong and telepathic and resourceful, and you’ll give them the best instructions, and so I leave it to you.”

“And if I do it with a bit of ceremony?” he asked.

“Why not?” I remembered the description of the making of Armand, how he’d taken the young Armand into a painted room in his Venetian palace and there amid blazing multicolored murals he had made him, offering the blood as sacrament with the most appropriate words. So different from my own making, that ruthless Magnus who was now a wise ghost, but had been then a warped and vile blood drinker, tormenting me as he brought me over.

I had to stop thinking of all this. I was bone tired, as mortals say. I rose to go. But then I stopped.

“If we are to be one tribe now,” I said. “If we are to be a true sodality, then we can and should perhaps have our own ceremonies, rites, trappings, some way of surrounding with solemn enthusiasm the birth of others into our ranks. So do it as you wish and make a precedent, perhaps, that will endure.”

He smiled.

“Allow me one innovation at the start,” he said, “that I perform the rites with Pandora, who is nearly my same age, and very skilled at making others, obviously. We will share the making of each between us so that my gifts will go into both Rose and Viktor, and her gifts will go into both as well. Because you see, I cannot really bring both of them over perfectly at the same time on my own.”

“Of course, as you wish,” I said. “I leave this in your hands.”

“And then it can be done with grace and solemnity for both at the same time.”

I nodded. “And if they emerge from this telepathically deaf to one another, and deaf to both of you?”

“So be it. There’s a wisdom in it. Let them have their silence in which to learn. When has telepathy really done us any great measure of good?”

I gave my assent.

I was at the door when he spoke again.

“Lestat, be careful with this Voice!” he said.

I turned around and looked at him.

“Don’t be your usual impulsive self in lending this thing a sympathetic ear.”

He stood and left the table, appealing to me with his arms out.

“Lestat, no one is insensible to what this thing endures in the body of one with dimmed eyes and stopped ears, a thing that can’t move, can’t write, can’t think, can’t speak. We know.”

“Do you?”

“Give Seth and Fareed time, as long as the thing is quiet, to ponder this.”

“What? The making of a ghastly machine?”

“No, but possibly some vehicle can yet be found—some fledgling brought over for the very purpose, with senses and faculties intact, but with little intellect or sanity at stake, and with a physicality—as a fledgling—that can be controlled.”

“And this fledgling would be kept a prisoner, of course.”

“Inevitably,” he said. His arms dropped to his sides.

Inside me the Voice gave a long low agonized sigh.

“Lestat, if it’s in your mind, it’s going to go for your mind. And you must call us, all of us, to your aid if this thing begins to push you to the brink.”

“I know that, Marius,” I said. “I’ve never known myself, but I know when I’m not myself. That is certain.”

He gave a soft despairing smile and shook his head.

I went out.

I went back to the French library.

Someone had been in here, one of those quiet, strange mortal servants of Armand’s who went about the house like obedient somnambulists—and this one had dusted and polished, and laid out a soft green silk cover for me, over the back of the darker green damask couch.

The two small lamps burned on the desk.

I turned on the computer long enough to confirm at clear volume what I already knew. Benji was broadcasting vigorously. No Burnings anywhere on the planet. No word of the Voice from far and wide. No calls coming in from desperate victims.

I shut off the machine.

I knew
he
was with me. That subtle touch, that embrace of invisible fingers on the back of my neck.

I sat down in the largest of the leather wing chairs, the one in
which Viktor and Rose had cuddled together last night, and I looked up at the great mirror over the mantel. I was pondering the hallucinations the Voice had once created for me in mirrors—those reflections of myself which he had so playfully ignited in my brain.

Those were hallucinations, surely, and I wondered just how far he might take such a power. After all, telepathy can do infinitely more than invade a mind with a logical string of words.

A quarter of an hour passed during which I considered all these things in an unguarded way. I looked dreamily at the giant mirror. Was I longing for him to show himself as my double, as he’d done before? Longing to see that clever impish face that wasn’t my face and had to be some semblance of his intellect or soul?

The mirror reflected only the shelves of books behind me, the polished wood, the many differing volumes of varying thickness and height.

I became drowsy.

Something appeared in the mirror. I blinked, thinking that perhaps I was mistaken, but I saw it more clearly. It was a tiny amorphous reddish cloud.

It was swirling, growing bigger, and then shrinking and then expanding again, indistinct in shape, swelling, fading, growing ever more red, thickening again.

It began to grow larger, giving the illusion that it was coming closer to me, traveling steadily towards me from some point very far away, deep in the world of the mirror, where its diminutive size was an illusion.

Steadily towards me, it moved, and now it appeared to be swimming, propelling itself by the writhing work of myriad red-tinted tentacles, gossamer and transparent tentacles, moving as if through water, as if it were a sea creature of innumerable translucent arms.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It seemed the mirror was just a piece of glass. It was traveling towards me from a vast dark and cloudy world in which it was purely at home.

Suddenly it resembled nothing so much as a reddish Medusa’s head but with a tiny dark visage, tiny, and with writhing red serpentine arms beyond count. They had no serpent heads, these arms. And the entire image retained its ruby-red-tinged transparency. The face—and it was a face—grew larger and larger as I stared at it amazed.

It became the size of an old silver half dollar as I watched, and
the countless translucent tentacles seemed to elongate and become ever more delicate, dancing as they did so, dancing, reaching outward beyond the frame of the mirror on either side.

I stood up.

I moved towards the fireplace. I looked directly into the mirror.

The face grew larger and larger and I could now make out tiny glittering eyes in it, and what seemed a mouth, a round mouth of elastic shifting shape, a mouth seeking to be a mouth. The great mass of crimson tinted tentacles now filled the mirror to the very frame.

The face grew bigger, and it seemed the mouth which was only a dark cypher stretched into a smile. The eyes flashed black and filled with life.

Bigger and bigger grew the face as though the being were indeed still moving towards me, moving towards the barrier of this glass that divided us, and the face slowly grew to be the size perhaps of my own.

The dark eyes expanded, took on the human accoutrements of eyelashes and eyebrows; a semblance of a nose appeared, and the mouth had lips. The whole mirror now was filled with the deep pellucid red of this image, a soft elusive red, the color of blood suffusing the tubular tentacles and the face, the slowly darkening face.

“Amel!” I cried out. I gasped for breath.

The dark eyes grew pupils as they looked at me, and lips smiled as the opening had smiled before. An expression bloomed on the surface of the face, an expression of unutterable love.

Pain fused with the love, undeniable pain. The expression of pain and love so fused in the face that I could hardly bear to look at it, aware suddenly of a huge pain inside me, inside my heart, pain blooming in me as if it were unstoppable, out of all control, and would soon be more than I could bear.

“I love you!” I said. “I love you!” And then without words I reached out towards it. I reached out and I told it that I would embrace it, I would know it, I would take into myself its love, its pain.
I will take into myself what you are
.

I heard the sound of weeping only it had no sound. I heard it rising all around me the way the sound of falling rain can rise as it strikes more and more surfaces around one, pattering on streets and roofs and leaves and boughs.

“I know what’s driven you to these things!” I said aloud. I was crying. My eyes were filling with blood.

“I would never have hurt that boy,” whispered the Voice inside me, only it was coming from this face, this tragic face, these lips, this one looking into my eyes.

“I believe you,” I said.

“I will never hurt you.”

“I will give you all that I know,” I said, “if only you’ll do the same with me! If only we can love one another! Always, completely! I will not suffer you to go into any other but me!”