The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (148 page)

“Perhaps, Lestat, perhaps,” she said.

“Mother, tell me this again, this Egyptian story …”

“Lestat, you have years to read all the old tales for yourself.” She rose and bent to kiss me, and I sensed the coldness and sluggishness in her that always came before dawn. “As for me, I am done with books. They are what I read when I could do nothing else.” She took my two hands in hers. “Tell me that we’ll be on the road tomorrow. That we won’t see the ramparts of Paris again until we’ve seen the other side of the world.”

“Exactly as you wish,” I said.

She started up the stairs.

“But where are you going?” I said as I followed her. She opened the gate and went out towards the trees.

“I want to see if I can sleep in the raw earth itself,” she said over her shoulder. “If I don’t rise tomorrow you’ll know I failed.”

“But this is madness,” I said, coming after her. I hated the very idea of it. She went ahead into a thicket of old oaks, and kneeling, she dug into the dead leaves and damp soil with her hands. Ghastly she looked, as if she were a beautiful blond-haired witch scratching with the speed of a beast.

Then she rose and waved a farewell kiss to me. And commanding all her strength, she descended as if the earth belonged to her. And I was left staring in disbelief at the emptiness where she had been, and the leaves that had settled as if nothing had disturbed the spot.

I walked away from the woods. I walked south away from the tower. And as my step quickened, I started singing softly to myself some little song, maybe a bit of melody that the violins had played earlier this night in the Palais Royal.

And the sense of grief came back to me, the realization that we were really going, that it was finished with Nicolas and finished with the Children
of Darkness and their leader, and I wouldn’t see Paris again, or anything familiar to me, for years and years. And for all my desire to be free, I wanted to weep.

But it seems I had some purpose in my wandering that I hadn’t admitted to myself. A half hour or so before the morning light I was on the post road near the ruin of an old inn. Falling down it was, this last outpost of an abandoned village, with only the heavily mortared walls left intact.

And taking out my dagger, I began to carve deep in the soft stone:

What arrogance it seemed when I stepped back from it. And I had already broken the dark commandments, telling the name of an immortal, and putting it into written words. Well, it gave me a wondrous satisfaction to do it. And after all, I had never been very good at obeying rules.

The last time we saw Armand in the eighteenth century, he was standing with Eleni and Nicolas and the other vampire mummers before the door of Renaud’s theater, watching as our carriage made its way into the stream of traffic on the boulevard.

I’d found him earlier closeted in my old dressing room with Nicolas in the midst of a strange conversation dominated by Nicki’s sarcasm and peculiar fire. He wore a wig and a somber red frock coat, and it seemed to me that he had already acquired a new opacity, as if every waking moment since the death of the old coven was giving him greater substance and strength.

Nicki and I had no words for each other in these last awkward moments, but Armand politely accepted the keys of the tower from me, and a great quantity of money, and the promise of more when he wanted it from Roget.

His mind was closed to me, but he said again that Nicolas would come to no harm from him. And as we said our farewells, I believed that Nicolas and the little coven had every chance for survival and that Armand and I were friends.

By the end of that first night Gabrielle and I were far from Paris, as we vowed we would be, and in the months that followed, we went on to Lyons, Turin, and Vienna, and after that to Prague and Leipzig and St. Petersburg, and then south again to Italy, where we were to settle for many years.

Eventually we went on to Sicily, then north into Greece and Turkey, and then south again through the ancient cities of Asia Minor and finally to Cairo, where we remained for some time.

And in all these places I was to write my messages to Marius on the walls.

Sometimes it was no more than a few words that I scratched with the tip of my knife. In other places, I spent hours chiseling my ruminations into
the stone. But wherever I was, I wrote my name, the date, and my future destination, and my invitation: “Marius, make yourself known to me.”

As for the old covens, we were to come upon them in a number of scattered places, but it was clear from the outset that the old ways were everywhere breaking down. Seldom more than three or four vampires carried on the old rituals, and when they came to realize that we wanted no part of them or their existence they let us alone.

Infinitely more interesting were the occasional rogues we glimpsed in the middle of society, lone and secretive vampires pretending to be mortal just as skillfully as we could pretend. But we never got close to these creatures. They ran from us as they must have from the old covens. And seeing nothing more than fear in their eyes, I wasn’t tempted to give chase.

Yet it was strangely reassuring to know that I hadn’t been the first aristocratic fiend to move through the ballrooms of the world in search of my victims—the deadly gentleman who would soon surface in stories and poetry and penny dreadful novels as the very epitome of our tribe. There were others appearing all the time.

But we were to encounter stranger creatures of darkness as we moved on. In Greece we found demons who did not know how they had been made, and sometimes even mad creatures without reason or language who attacked us as if we were mortal, and ran screaming from the prayers we said to drive them away.

The vampires in Istanbul actually dwelt in houses, safe behind high wall and gates, their graves in their gardens, and dressed as all humans do in that part of the world, in flowing robes, to hunt the nighttime streets.

Yet even they were quite horrified to see me living amongst the French and the Venetians, riding in carriages, joining the gatherings at the European embassies and homes. They menaced us, shouting incantations at us, and then ran in panic when we turned on them, only to come back and devil us again.

The revenants who haunted the Mameluke tombs in Cairo were beastly wraiths, held to the old laws by hollow-eyed masters who lived in the ruins of a Coptic monastery, their rituals full of Eastern magic and the evocation of many demons and evil spirits whom they called by strange names. They stayed clear of us, despite all their acidic threats, yet they knew our names.

As the years passed, we learned nothing from all these creatures, which of course was no great surprise to me.

And though vampires in many places had heard the legends of Marius and the other ancient ones, they had never seen such beings with their own eyes. Even Armand had become a legend to them, and they were likely to ask: “Did you really see the vampire Armand?” Nowhere did I meet a truly
old vampire. Nowhere did I meet a vampire who was in any way a magnetic creature, a being of great wisdom or special accomplishment, an unusual being in whom the Dark Gift had worked any perceivable alchemy that was of interest to me.

Armand was a dark god compared to these beings. And so was Gabrielle and so was I.

But I jump ahead of my tale.

Early on, when we first came into Italy, we gained a fuller and more sympathetic knowledge of the ancient rituals. The Roman coven came out to welcome us with open arms. “Come to the Sabbat,” they said. “Come into the catacombs and join in the hymns.”

Yes, they knew that we’d destroyed the Paris coven, and bested the great master of dark secrets, Armand. But they didn’t despise us for it. On the contrary, they could not understand the cause of Armand’s resignation of his power. Why hadn’t the coven changed with the times?

For even here where the ceremonies were so elaborate and sensuous that they took my breath away, the vampires, far from eschewing the ways of men, thought nothing of passing themselves off as human whenever it suited their purposes. It was the same with the two vampires we had seen in Venice, and the handful we were later to meet in Florence as well.

In black cloaks, they penetrated the crowds at the opera, the shadowy corridors of great houses during balls and banquets, and even sometimes sat amid the press in lowly taverns or wine shops, peering at humans quite close at hand. It was their habit here more than anywhere to dress in the costumes of the time of their birth, and they were often splendidly attired and most regal, possessing jewels and finery and showing it often to great advantage when they chose.

Yet they crept back to their stinking graveyards to sleep, and they fled screaming from any sign of heavenly power, and they threw themselves with savage abandon into their horrifying and beautiful Sabbats.

In comparison, the vampires of Paris had been primitive, coarse, and childlike; but I could see that it was the very sophistication and worldliness of Paris that had caused Armand and his flock to retreat so far from mortal ways.

As the French capital became secular, the vampires had clung to old magic, while the Italian fiends lived among deeply religious humans whose lives were drenched in Roman Catholic ceremony, men and women who respected evil as they respected the Roman Church. In sum the old ways of the fiends were not unlike the old ways of people in Italy, and so the Italian vampires moved in both worlds. Did they believe in the old ways? They shrugged. The Sabbat for them was a grand pleasure. Hadn’t Gabrielle and I enjoyed it? Had we not finally joined in the dance?

“Come to us anytime that you wish,” the Roman vampires told us.

As for this Theater of the Vampires in Paris, this great scandal which was shocking our kind the world over, well, they would believe
that
when they saw it with their own eyes. Vampires performing on a stage, vampires dazzling mortal audiences with tricks and mimicry—they thought it was too terribly Parisian! They laughed.

Of course I was hearing more directly about the theater all the time. Before I’d even reached St. Petersburg, Roget had sent me a long testament to the “cleverness” of the new troupe:

Roget’s letters always unsettled me. They left me with my heart tripping, and I couldn’t help but wonder: What had I expected the troupe to do? Why did their boldness and inventiveness surprise me? We all had the power to do such things.

By the time I settled in Venice, where I spent a great deal of time looking in vain for Marius’s paintings, I was hearing from Eleni directly, her letters inscribed with exquisite vampiric skill.