A soft brokenhearted crying reached his ears. It was coming from the lighted room beyond the archway.
He made his way forward on the soft earthen path, clutching the machete in his right hand, fingers massaging the rough wooden handle. Strong, heavy handle. Monstrous blade. Two feet in length perhaps. A powerful cleaver. He could smell the steel blade, smell the dried mud, and smell the moist earth all around him.
He reached the doorway.
Maharet sat in a dark brown rattan chair with her face in her hands, her body clothed in a long robe of dark rose cotton. Long sleeves covered her arms, and her fingers as white as her face were dripping with the delicate blood of her tears, her long copper hair tossed behind her, covering her bent back. She was barefoot.
She cried softly.
"Khayman," she said softly in an agonized voice. And slowly she sat back turning to face him wearily.
With a start she saw him there in the doorway.
She didn't know who he was. She couldn't pick his name suddenly from all the years, all the many years.
"Kill her," said the Voice. "Get rid of her now."
"Benedict!" he said loudly, distinctly, most certainly loud enough for his companion to hear, and at once he heard the boy coming through the garden.
"What is it you want of me?" asked the woman facing him. The blood made two fine strokes down her cheeks like the painted tears of a French clown with a china face. Her eyes were rimmed in red, her eyebrows gleaming golden.
"Ah, so it's brought you here, has it?" she said. She rose to her feet in one swift movement, the chair thrown back and over behind her.
Some five feet stood between them.
Behind him, Benedict stood, waiting. He could hear Benedict's breath.
"Don't speak to her!" cried the Voice inside his head. "Don't believe what she says to you."
"What right have you to be here?" she demanded. It was the ancient tongue now.
He kept his face a mask. He gave not the slightest indication that he understood her.
Her face changed, her features knotting, her mouth twisting, and he felt the blast hit him full force.
Back he hurled it against her. She staggered and fell over the chair.
Again, she hit him with it full force to drive him back and away.
"Benedict!" he cried.
And this time he sent the Fire Gift at her with all his power, lunging for her as he did so, the machete raised.
She screamed. She screamed like a helpless village woman in a war, a powerless and frantic being, but as she reached for her chest with both hands, she sent the Fire Gift against him and he felt the intolerable heat just as she was feeling it, felt his body burning in unspeakable pain.
He denied the pain. He refused to be defeated, refused to freeze in panic.
He heard Benedict shouting as he sought to drive her back, Benedict's left hand on his back. It was an ugly battle cry, and he heard the same coming from his own lips.
Again, he mustered his power and aimed it at her heart, as he brought down the machete with all his physical strength sinking the blade deep into her neck.
A dreadful roar rose from her. Blood shot up out of her mouth in a horrid fountain.
"Khayman!" she roared, the blood bubbling from her lips. "Mekare!" Suddenly a whole litany of names broke from her, names of all she'd known and loved, and the great choking wail, "I am dying. I am murdered!"
Her head was falling back, her neck twisting desperately, her hands reaching up to steady her own head, the blood splashing all over her cotton robe, all over her hands, splashing on him.
He grabbed the machete with both hands and slammed it into her neck again with all his force, and this time, the head came off and flew through the air and landed on the moist earthen floor of the room.
Her headless body sank down to the ground, its hands reaching up desperately, and as it fell forward on its breasts, the hands clawed at the earth, clawed like talons.
The head lay there staring to one side, the blood flowing slowly out of it. Who knew what prayers, what pleas, what desperate entreaties, still came from her?
"Look at it, the body!" Benedict wailed. He beat on Rhosh's back with his fists. "She's crawling to it."
Rhosh charged forward, his boot crunching into the headless torso, crushing it down into the mud, and switching the machete to his left hand, he grabbed up the bleeding head by the copper hair.
Her eyes shifted and fixed him firmly as the mouth gaped, and a low whisper came from the quivering lips.
He dropped the machete. And backing up, shoving Benedict out of his path, nearly stumbling over the flailing body, he swung the head against the wall again and again, but he could not break the skull.
Suddenly he dropped the thing, dropped it into the dirt, and he was down on his hands and knees, and Benedict's boot came down right in front of him, and he saw the machete come flashing down and slice into the shining copper hair, slice through it, slice into the skull, and the blood bubbled up crimson and glittering.
The head was on fire. Benedict was blasting it. The head was in flames. He knelt there a mute witness--helpless, utterly helpless--watching the head blacken and burn, watching the hair go up in sizzling smoke and sparks.
Yes, the Fire Gift. Finally he rallied. He sent it with full fury. And the head was curling up, black, like that of a plastic doll on a burning trash heap, and the eyes gleamed white for one second before they turned black, and the head was as a lump of coal with no face, no lips. Dead and ruined.
He scrambled to his feet.
The headless body lay still. But Benedict was now blasting this too, blasting the blood that was flowing out of it, and the whole prone figure there went up in flames, the cotton robe consumed.
In a panic, Rhosh turned right and left. He stumbled backwards. Where was the other one?
Nothing stirred. No sound came from the garden enclosure.
The fire crackled and snapped and smoked. And Benedict was catching his breath in anxious musical sobs. His hand was on Rhosh's shoulder.
Rhosh stared at the darkened mass that had been her head, the head of the witch who had come to Egypt long ago with the spirit Amel, who had gone into the Mother, the head of the witch who had endured for six thousand years without ever going down into the earth to sleep, this great witch and blood drinker who had never made war on anyone except the Queen who'd torn her eyes from her and condemned her to die.
She was gone now. And he, Rhosh, had done this! He and Benedict, at his instigation.
He felt a sorrow so immense he thought he would die from the weight of it. He felt it like his very breath gathering in his chest, in his throat, threatening to suffocate him.
He ran his fingers back through his hair, tearing at his hair, pulling it suddenly in two hanks, pulling it till it hurt, and the pain sliced into his brain.
He staggered into the doorway.
There, only ten feet away, stood the other--unchanged--a lone robed figure in the night, looking around her with a drifting gaze, a glinting drifting gaze at leaves, at trees, at creatures moving in the high branches, at the moon far above the compound.
"Now, you must do it!" roared the Voice. "Do to her what you have done to her sister, and take the brain from her and into yourself. Do it!" The Voice was screaming.
Benedict stood beside him, clinging to him.
Rhosh saw the bloody machete in Benedict's right hand. But he didn't reach for it. The sorrow was knotted inside him, twisted, like a rope pulled tight around his heart. He couldn't speak. Couldn't think.
I have done wrong. I have done unspeakable wrong.
"I'm telling you, do it now," said the Voice in a tone of perfect desperation. "Take me into your body! You know how to do this! You know how it was done to Akasha. Do it now. Do it as you did to that one! Do it. I must be freed from this prison. Are you mad? Do it!"
"No," said Rhosh.
"You betray me now? You dare? Do as I tell you."
&nb
sp; "I can't do it alone," Rhosh said. For the first time he realized he was trembling violently all over, and a blood sweat had broken out on his face and on his hands. He could feel his heart knocking in his throat.
The Voice had given way to cursing, babbling, screaming.
The mute woman stood there unchanged. Then the distant cry of a bird seemed to waken her, and she bowed her head just a little to the left, towards Rhosh, as though she were looking upwards for that bird, that bird outside the wire mesh of the garden.
Slowly she turned and walked slowly away from Rhosh through the gentle crowd of fern and palm, her feet making a soft unhurried trudging sound in the soil. A kind of humming came from her. On she moved, away from him.
The Voice was crying. The Voice was weeping.
"I tell you I cannot do it without help," Rhosh said. "I need help. The help of that vampire doctor if I'm to do it, don't you see? What if I start to die when she does, what if I can't do what Mekare did when she killed Akasha! I can't do it."
The Voice whimpered, and sobbed. It sobbed like a broken and defeated thing. "You are a coward," the Voice whispered. "You are a miserable coward."
Rhosh made his way to a chair. He sat down, leaning forward, his bloody arms clutching his chest. And I have done unspeakable evil. How can I live now after what I've done?
"What do we do?" asked Benedict frantically.
Rhosh scarcely heard him.
Evil. Without question. Evil by all I've ever held to be right or just or good.
"Rhosh," Benedict pleaded.
Rhosh looked up at him, struggling to focus, to think.
"I don't know," Rhosh said.
"Khayman is coming," said the Voice miserably. "Will you let him murder you without a fight?"
It was an hour before Khayman appeared.
They had buried Maharet's remains. They lay in wait, the two on either side of the door, both armed now with the machetes from the garden.
Khayman returned weary and listless, windblown and sad, and came into the room like a laborer so tired from his work that he couldn't even seek a chair to rest. For a long moment, he stood there breathing slowly and evenly with his hands at his sides.
Then he saw the dark greasy bloodstains all over the mud floor. He saw the soot, the ashes.
He saw the earth churned up where she had been hastily buried.
He looked up and then he spun around, but he had no chance.
With the two machetes, they hacked at his powerful neck from both sides, almost instantly decapitating him.
No words came from him, and when his head fell, his black eyes were wide with astonishment.
Rhosh picked up the head and drank from the neck.
He held it with both hands as he drank, and though his vision misted and his heart beat in his eyes and in his ears, he could see the headless body dying as he pulled the blood from the brain--this powerful, thick blood, this viscid delicious ancient blood.
Never could he have drunk a drop from Maharet. Never. The mere thought of it revolted him. And indeed he did not think of it. But now he thought only, This is a warrior as I was a warrior, this is the leader of the First Brood who fought Queens Blood, and he is in my hands now, Khayman, the defeated leader--and Rhosh drank and drank the blood, and the images poured forth into him, the portal between First Brood and Queens Blood opened, images of this being when he had been young, vital, and human. No. Rhosh dropped the head. He didn't want those images. He didn't want to know Khayman. He didn't want those images inside his brain.
He burnt the body and the head.
There was a fountain in the garden outside, a Grecian fountain. When it was all finished and the body was buried, he went there and washed his hands, and his face, and rinsed out his mouth and spit the water down on the earth.
Benedict did the same.
"And what will you do now?" asked the Voice. "This thing in which I am entombed will seek shelter from the sun soon, for that is absolutely all that she knows, the sum total of all her discernment and all her millennia."
The Voice laughed. He laughed and laughed like a mortal on the verge of madness. He laughed a high-pitched and genuine laugh as if he simply couldn't help himself.
The jungle around them was waking. The morning air had come, that air that all blood drinkers know when the hour of dawn is approaching, when the morning birds sing, when the sun is nearing the horizon.
Mekare moved slowly as a great reptile across the garden and into the room and across the mud floor and through a doorway to an inner chamber.
Rhosh would not remain in this place, no. He wanted to be gone now. He felt sick remaining in this room.
"And so we shall seek shelter at the hotel tonight," said Rhosh. "And then we will think what to do, how to get that Fareed to assist us."
"Well, I can give you a little assistance, my timid charge," said the Voice bitterly. He had finally exhausted himself with his laughing. He had an anguished tone Rhosh had never heard before. "I will tell you precisely how to enlist the cooperation of Fareed. I would have told you long before now if I'd known you were such a miserable coward, such a bumbler! Remember these names: Rose and Viktor. For Rose alone, Fareed may not do your bidding. For Viktor, he will do anything, and so will the elite of the tribe, the entire blessed elite of the tribe now gathering under the roof of this house in New York called Trinity Gate."
He began to laugh again, wildly, uncontrollably, a laugh more filled with pain than any Rhosh had ever imagined. "And Lestat will do your bidding too, I'm certain of it. Oh, yes. You coward. You can make them cooperate, for the love of Viktor!"
He went on laughing.
"This Viktor is Lestat's son, the son of his body and blood, the son of his genes, his human offspring. You get hold of this son and you will be the victor, and so shall I. Get that boy in your hands, in your power, do you hear me? And we will triumph together. And once I am inside you, they will not dare to anger you. You and I shall rule them together."
Part III
RAGNAROK
IN THE
CAPITAL OF THE
WORLD
20
Rose
In the Topless Towers of Midtown
HE WAS IRRESISTIBLE. Rose had been listening to him for hours. She could have listened forever to his faintly sonorous voice. Viktor too had been listening, standing quietly by the open kitchen door. Viktor in his jeans and white polo shirt with that loving smile playing on his lips distracted her by his sheer presence. She wanted to be in his arms again, alone, soon, in the bedroom down the hall.
But right now she was listening to Louis.
Louis shied away from bright electric lights, a soul of the nineteenth century, he confessed, preferring these old-fashioned candles and especially here in this high glass apartment with the brightness of Midtown all around them providing all the nighttime illumination that they might ever need.
Indeed, the sky was never black above the great sharp gleaming silver point of the art deco Chrysler Building, and the countless towers crowding it, in this safe weald of myriad lighted windows that seemed to hold them here more securely in space than the steel girders of this skyscraper whose elevators had brought them to this carpeted haven on the sixty-third floor.
Guards in the next-door apartment. Guards in the marble lobby downstairs, guards out on the narrow pavements of Fifty-Seventh Street. Guards in the apartment above and in the apartment below.
And Thorne here, the red-haired blood drinker, the Viking blood drinker, in a gray wool coat, standing like a sentinel beside the entrance to the hallway, his arms folded, staring out at the night. If he heard what they were saying to one another, he gave no sign of it. He'd been motionless since he'd arrived.
They sat across from one another--Louis and Rose--at a small round glass table with modern black-enameled Queen Anne chairs. He wore a long sweater of black wool that curled at the neck. His hair was as black as the sweater but it was glossy, and his eyes were shining like
the emerald ring he wore on his hand.
His face was so bright, it made her think of something D. H. Lawrence had written, a line from Sons and Lovers, about a man's face in his youth having been "the flower of his body." For the first time Rose sensed she knew now what Lawrence had meant.
Louis was saying in his patient tender voice,
"You think you know, but you can't know. Who wouldn't be blinded by the offer of eternal life?" He'd been there for hours, patiently answering Rose's questions, explaining things about his own point of view. "We don't have eternal life firmly within our grasp. We have to work at it to remain 'immortal.' All around us we see other blood drinkers perish--because they don't have the spiritual stamina for this, because they never transcend the first few years of shocks and revelations, or because they're killed by others, ripped right out of life by violence. We're only immortal in the sense that we don't age, that illness can't take us down, in that we have the potential to live forever, but most of us live very short lives indeed."
She nodded. "What you're trying to tell me is that it's a completely final decision," she said. "But I don't know if you can possibly understand how total my obsession with it has become."
He sighed. There was a sadness about him even in his brightest moments when he'd been talking of Lestat and Lestat's ebullience and refusal to accept defeat. He'd smiled then and it had been rare sunshine, that smile. But his charm was obviously wrapped up in melancholy and unshakable gloom.
Viktor came forward and for the first time in an hour took a chair between them. Faint scent of that Acqua di Gio that was now all over her pillow and her sheets, and all over her dreams.
"What Louis is saying," he said to Rose, "is that once we do pass that barrier we'll know things that we'll never be able to change or forget. Sure, we are obsessed now. We want it. How can we not want it? From our point of view, it's not discussable. But he's trying to warn us: once we cross we'll be obsessed by something totally different and that obsessive awareness--that we're not alive anymore, not human--that's never going to be undone. That's never going to go away. You follow me? What we're obsessed with now, that may go away."
"I understand," said Rose. "Believe me, I do."
Louis shook his head. He drew up his shoulders and then slowly relaxed again laying his right hand idly on the table. He was looking at the table but he was looking at his thoughts.