"Who's heard from the Voice? Who's heard him tonight here?" He looked around expectantly.
No one responded.
Antoine, my beloved fledgling from New Orleans, said softly that he'd never heard the Voice. Sybelle said the same. So did Bianca.
Then Notker spoke up, this bald but handsome blood drinker with the saddest eyes, big puppy eyes, beautiful and swimmingly deep but pulled down at the ends to make him look tragic even if he was smiling.
"He last spoke to me three nights ago," said Notker. "He told me he had found his instrument, that he'd be imprisoned no longer. He told me to remain in my home--my home is in the French Alps as many of you know--and to keep my people there, that what was to happen with him had no bearing on me. He said he would come into his own, and only the young and the weak would die, and my children were too old, and too strong to be affected."
He paused, and then went on.
"There are many here in this room whom this Voice would call young and weak." He looked directly at Armand who sat a few chairs away from me on the left and opposite him. He looked at Louis. He didn't bother to look at Sybelle or Benji or Antoine, or even Fareed.
"And I will tell you something else," said Notker. "This Voice can drive a person mad. There is no stopping it now. Months ago, yes, before the killing began, one could block it. But not now. It's too strong."
This amazed me. I hadn't reflected on this. But it made perfect sense. The more the Voice killed off the vampires of the world, the stronger the Voice became.
"That's true," Benji declared. "That's what the young ones are reporting from all over. There's no shutting him out now. The killings have made him strong."
Fareed rose to his feet. He'd been sitting quietly beside Seth. They both wore what I would call cassocks of black velvet, with high neatly fitted collars and long rows of jet buttons. He stood facing me.
"The Voice wants to be transferred from the body of Mekare into the body of this chosen one, this anointed," he said. "And he wants me to affect this. He has told me. He told me the night we arrived here. He wants the cooperation of me and of Seth. I've never answered the Voice. And true the Voice is becoming remarkably strong. I can still shut out the Voice but it's difficult. The Voice must be seen as a force which can harry and drive to madness any mind it possesses. This is now part of the picture. I will not do what the Voice wants. I will not bring an end to the innocent Mekare. At least not, not as things now stand."
He took his seat and Seth rose. Of all the vampires gathered, Gregory and Seth were perhaps the most powerful. And there was clearly no enmity between them. Gregory was looking eagerly to Seth, and Seth was collecting his thoughts slowly, his eyes moving from one to the other of all those assembled--except those behind him against the wall.
"We must remind ourselves," said Seth, "that the Voice knows what we are saying to one another. It can obviously, at will, visit any of us, and see through our eyes and hear through our ears, but it cannot visit more than one, or so it seems. But since there is no way to take the Voice by surprise by any decision we make here, then I will say this outright. The Voice must not pass into this one, Rhoshamandes. This one is not spiritually strong. Strong he is in the Blood, yes, but he is not spiritually strong. How do I know this? I know this by what he has already done--the brutal slaughter of Maharet and Khayman who were hacked to death as if by common marauders. And if the Voice takes over such a mind, the Voice will rule it."
All around the table others nodded, murmured their agreement. All were horrified by what had befallen the great Maharet and the helpless Khayman. I was horrified. I never wanted to relive my last visit to the burnt-out compound, my discovery of those hasty graves. A deep rage was gathered in me against this murderous Rhoshamandes. But we did have to speak more of this now.
"That mustn't happen," I agreed. "The Voice cannot go into Rhoshamandes. Absolutely must not happen."
I'd told them when I arrived what I'd found in the jungle compound. The bodies mutilated and hastily buried, the place burnt. I'd told them of the wreckage, ancient books destroyed, chests of venerable jewelry and treasured objects torn open and scattered and blackened with soot. But I referred to it briefly again for any here that had not heard or understood.
"Common marauders indeed," I said with disgust.
Jesse bowed her head. I saw the blood tears coming to her eyes. I saw David embrace her.
Pandora, who sat with her head bowed and her arm around her companion, Arjun, wiped the blood tears from her eyes.
Armand spoke up now, not bothering to stand or raise his own voice, but merely addressing the group in a way that forced them to focus more attentively on him. Excellent trick of those who whisper so you must move forward to hear them.
"What is the character of the Voice?" he asked. "It's never spoken to me. What is the soul behind the Voice?"
"Well, you know damned good and well," said Benji, "that it's Amel, the spirit familiar of Mekare that went into Akasha and lost its mind for all this time, these aeons of time, these epochs, these millennia."
"Yes, but what's the character of the Voice?" asked Armand.
"Without morality of any kind," said one of the younger ones who hadn't uttered a word until now. This was a fashionable black-haired vampire in a rather snappy three-piece leather suit and a high-collared shirt with a raging red tie. He turned in his chair to face me. He said his name aloud for all, "Everard," and then proceeded.
"It wants to destroy the young ones, it turns them against each other. It rouses the old. But all these things you know, all of you know this. It has no morality. No character. No love of its own tribe, as Benji says. It is a tribeless monster. It's promised to destroy me."
"And me as well," said Davis, a stunning silky black blood drinker of staggering beauty. "And it could drive anyone out of his head, just out of his head."
Arjun, the black-haired companion of Pandora, nodded. "Madness," he whispered. "He is the breath of it in the brain."
Allesandra rose to her feet. "It came into me," she said. "It drew me out of the earth. It has great powers of persuasion." Allesandra's voluminous hair made a frame for her long oval face, her narrow almond-shaped eyes. What a beauty she was now, even more powerful than she'd been two nights ago, with absolutely nothing left of that mad queen of old under Les Innocents. But she still had that regal bearing, and that stentorian voice. "It convinced me that I could free myself from a grave in which I'd lain for over two hundred years; it brought my mind back to me and then set me against the others of Paris. It spoke intimately to me. It knew my suffering, and told me of its own. It must not get into Rhoshamandes." She paused now looking to Eleni and Eugenie and to Bianca. "Rhoshamandes has no true moral strength of his own," she said. "He never did. When we his fledglings were captured by the old Children of Satan, he never rescued us. He shrank from war with those monsters. He left us to our doom."
There were many nods and affirmation around the table, though obviously Eleni was uncertain on this, but didn't care to speak.
"No, he's peace loving by nature, but not weak," said Gregory. "You're not seeing him in the proper light. He's never cared to be a warrior. The life never satisfied him but that does not mean he is weak."
"But the point she makes," said Sevraine, raising her voice, "is that he is too weak to battle the will of the Voice."
"And he's old enough," said Seth coldly, "to take the Voice into him, burn himself in the sun, and kill scores of younger blood drinkers, and that's precisely what the Voice wants. I tell you again, he is not spiritually strong."
"But why?" asked Louis. "What so offends the Voice about the young ones?"
"They weaken him," said Seth. "They have to. That's why his telepathic power is increasing now. The uncontrolled proliferation of young ones drains him. His physical body--this unimaginable vehicle by which we're all kept animated--is not infinite in size." He glanced at Fareed, who nodded. "And when the fledglings proliferate, he wants them burnt off.
Now how precisely he is strengthened remains a mystery. Does he taste blood in the Core Body more exquisitely? Does he see through the eyes of the Core Body with greater acuity? Can he hear sounds more sharply? We don't know. We do know his actual telepathic voice is stronger now as the result of the killings. That we do know. But I wager you this. It was he, the Voice, that drove the elder in those long-ago nights at the dawn of the Common Era to leave Akasha and Enkil in the sun to cause the first Great Burning. And it was he in some guise in the mind of Akasha who drove her to exterminate so many of the tribe before she wooed Lestat for her even-darker purposes."
"You can't be sure of any of that," said Pandora. It was her first time to speak and she was plainly reluctant, almost shy. She wiped at the blood in her eyes again. There was a shrinking quality to Pandora, a passivity, a diffidence that made her less visible than the other females here, though she was just as gifted in every way. She was dressed in a Western gown of soft Indian fabric and embroidery, almost the equal of Arjun's long jeweled sherwani. "All those centuries," she said, "that I communed with her, I never saw anything stirring in her, ever, that might have been Amel."
"I'm not so sure you're right," said Marius with a little flash of annoyance. He would never ever be patient with Pandora.
"I'm not so certain either," I said. "I was with Akasha very briefly. But I saw things--moments when she appeared to lock up, to stop as if something invisible had taken control of her. There wasn't time to know."
No one challenged me.
"But I must say this now," I continued. "I don't think the Voice is necessarily unredeemable. That is, not if we're not unredeemable. I think the Voice has in the last twenty years taken a major step on a wholly new journey."
I could see this shocked some of those who were looking at me. But it hadn't shocked Marius or David. As for Seth, it was impossible to tell.
"Does it matter now?" I asked. "I'm not sure it does. I want to get Viktor back. I've never laid eyes on my son. I want him here safe, and the Voice knows this. But as to the Voice himself, as to Amel himself, he is far from a conscienceless and insensitive monster."
"Why ever do you say this?" asked Benji. "Lestat, this is unbelievably vexing. How can you say this? This thing is murdering us."
Sybelle gestured for him to be quiet.
"The Voice has been speaking to me for a long time," I said. "I first heard the Voice only a few years after Akasha was destroyed. I think the damaged mind of Mekare let the Voice come to consciousness. And I know my video films, my songs, whatever I did there in broadcasting our history, all those images, might well have stirred the Voice inside Akasha just as they stirred Akasha's conscious mind."
They all knew the old story of how a giant video screen in the shrine of Akasha and Enkil had brought my rock music experiments right to the King and Queen. No need to dwell on that now.
"The Voice came to me early on. And maybe to me on account of those videos. I don't know. But sadly, I didn't know who or what the Voice was. And I didn't respond as I should have."
"You're saying things would be different now," asked David, "if you had known and had responded in some other way?"
I shook my head. "Don't know. But I can tell you this. The Voice is an entity with his own distinct story. The Voice suffers. He's a being that has imagination. One has to have imagination and empathy in order to know love and beauty."
"Whatever makes you think that?" asked Marius in a gentle reproving voice. "Ruthless amoral beings can appreciate beauty. And they can love."
"But I think it's true, what Lestat is saying," said young Daniel. He made no apology for contradicting Marius now. They had been together for a long time. "And I'm not surprised to hear this. Every single one of you that I've ever known has had this capacity, to appreciate beauty and to love."
"Well, you're proving my point exactly," said Marius.
"Enough of this," said Seth. "I want Viktor back. He is our son as much as yours."
"I know that," I answered.
"But if the Voice has empathy," Benji cried, sitting forward, his fedora dipping down over his face. "If the Voice has imagination and knows how to love, well, then the Voice can be reasoned with. That's what you're driving at, right?"
"Yes," I replied. "Of course. Which puts our friend Rhoshamandes in a very dangerous situation. The Voice switches loyalties easily. The Voice is desperate to learn as well as to achieve his ends."
Everard laughed. "That's the Voice all right. Fickle. That's this demon that can slide into your mind or mine or yours or yours like a spider sliding down the slippery shining thread of its web and try to make you do things that you would never do."
All this while neither Bianca nor Jesse had spoken. They were in fact sitting side by side, Jesse weary and worn and broken by the news of Maharet's death, and Bianca still in a private Hell on account of her lost companion, but suddenly it was as if neither of them could stand it anymore, and after some silent agreement, Bianca rose and demanded in a shrill tone, "What is the point of all this? We're helpless in the face of this Voice and what it wants! Why do we sit here talking, trying to reason this out? This Voice, look what it has done to us! Look! Is no one here going to weep for Maharet? Is no one here going to ask for a moment of silence in her memory? Is no one going to speak for those who might have lived forever and are now dead and gone in the earth as easily dispatched as if they were mortals?"
She was trembling. Her eyes fixed on Armand who sat nearer to me on the opposite side of the table from her. Armand's face was the picture of shock and pain as he gazed on her. In fact it was so darkened and so vulnerable that it didn't seem to be Armand's face. And then she turned and glared at Marius as if making some silent demand. He too looked at her with the deepest sympathy. Then she sank down in her chair and put her face in her hands, and wept silently.
Jesse barely stirred. Jesse the young one, made by Maharet with the ancient blood in her, white-faced, shivering with the most human emotions, yet sustained by such powerful blood. Fareed concealed the same formula infinitely better than she did.
"My beloved aunt was indeed thinking of destroying the tribe," Jesse said. "She promised me she would not do it. But she thought about it continuously."
"This is true," David said. He was right beside her.
"I understand why Rhoshamandes did the bidding of the Voice," said Jesse. "And I know that if my aunt had wanted to live, she could have stopped Rhoshamandes. She could have stopped any one of us, even you, Gregory, or you, Seth. Or you, Sevraine. She was no stranger to defending herself. Her power was beyond our imagining. So was her experience. She was dying inside. And she let Rhoshamandes take her life."
She sat back in the small gilded chair. David kissed her cheek.
I threw up my hands. "It's true," I said. "Maharet was thinking of destroying herself and Mekare. Of carrying Mekare with her into a core of an active volcano. I saw the images of this coming from her. Pacaya in Guatemala is that volcano. I hate to say it. I hate to admit it, because she should not have died as she did at the hands of this unspeakable Rhoshamandes! But it's true."
Everyone waited, but it was clear I would not go on and neither would Jesse, and finally Marius rose to his feet with his usual commanding air and waited for all eyes to fix on him.
"Look, it's plain we can't surprise the being, and we can't deceive the being," he said. "And we can't live without him. So let's resolve where our strongest defense lies. We will agree to nothing unless Viktor is returned unharmed. And then we will listen to the Voice, to what the Voice has to say about what it wants."
"It cannot claim Rhoshamandes!" said Allesandra heatedly.
"No, it cannot," said Notker. "And I can plainly tell you that his most devoted confederate, the one who must be his ally in this, is as peace loving and unprepared for a battle like this as is his master."
"And who is that ally?" demanded Allesandra.
"It must be Benedict," said Notker. "It can be no other."
<
br /> "Aye, Benedict," said Sevraine. "Of course. It's with Benedict that he lives on this island in the northern seas. It's with Benedict that he's lived for centuries."
"Benedict," whispered Allesandra, "not the poor benighted saintly boy he brought over from the monks!"
"Benedict?" asked Eleni. "Benedict was the one from whom Magnus--your maker, Lestat--stole the Blood. Why he's barely twice my age in the Blood. He's never been strong, never. Why, his entire charm is that he's as fragile as a wisteria blossom, as an orchid. But how do we know that this is Rhoshamandes's only ally?"
"I wager it is," said Notker, "because I know of no other. And by the way, this 'poor benighted saintly boy' brought me into the Blood and he did a fine job of it."
There was a soft ripple of laugher in the room, but it died almost immediately.
"But what a mystery we have here," said Notker. "We have the gentle Rhoshamandes that fed off beauty and poetry and music, and brought over those who pleased him, and never had the strength to fight for any of them against others, and now Benedict, saintly Benedict. And you, Lestat, you say the Voice loves. You say it loves and it has imagination and a soul. Well, we have a puzzle here in that it has picked two remarkable blood drinkers."
"Perhaps they were the only two," said Seth coldly, "who would tolerate the Voice's schemes, who fell prey to his ridiculous fantasies."
"Why ridiculous?" asked Marius. "What do you mean?"
It was Fareed who answered for Seth. "Lestat's right. The Voice is just beginning its journey as a conscious entity. It might have wielded some dark brutal influence on the Core Body in ages past, but it is a child now in the realm of purpose. And we don't know its full intent. I suspect that switching bodies, being removed from the mute and near-blind Mekare into the vigorous body of Rhoshamandes, a personable male of undoubted gifts, is just the first step for the Voice."
"Well, that's why we have to stop it," said Marius.
"Can't it be taken out of a vampiric body in some way?" asked Benji. "Dr. Fareed, can't you put it in some sort of machine in which it's fed the Blood constantly yet unable to see and hear or travel through its own invisible web?"
"It's not a web, Benji," said Fareed patiently. "It's a body, a great invisible but palpable body." He sighed. "And no, I cannot devise a machine to sustain it. I wouldn't know where to begin. Or whether such a scheme would work, and when this thing is removed from the Core Body we begin to die, all of us, don't we? This is what you've told us happened before."