"And you'll be in grave trouble for giving it to me."
"I don't care about that," said Arion. "I may be gone by then. I don't know. It is a canker in me that you're imprisoned here. But I cannot sin against my host." He stood by the refrigerator with his hands in his pockets. He was staring off again. He did not like eye contact. "I feel so sorry for you," he said. "It's full of music. Just listen to the music if you want to. I couldn't bear to think of you down here, all alone, and like this."
There were sounds above.
"Shut it off, and hide it," whispered Arion. "And make it work after we are asleep. I must go."
In less than an hour the great house had become a tomb. The mortal servants would not come till late afternoon, and they never ventured down the stairs. The city of Budapest roared with the world of daytime.
Derek played with the iPod. It was not so complicated at all. And in no time he'd found the broadcast archive and found himself fascinated to hear the unnatural voice of a blood drinker addressing the whole wide world under cover of music at a decibel level humans couldn't possibly hear. Now that was marvelously clever. He lay back on his bed listening.
"Benji Mahmoud here from New York this New Year's Eve, beloved brothers and sisters in the Blood--to report that all is well at the great Court in France, to which all are welcome. And to let you know that our beloved Prince has now officially turned the night-by-night governance of the tribe over to the Council of Elders, who will soon be drawing up for us our own constitution and laws. In the meantime, those who wish to be in the good graces of the Court know how to conduct themselves. No more arguments, quarrels, pitched battles. No more feeding on the innocent. Brothers and Sisters, remember, as I say so often, we are no longer parentless!"
Derek wept again. He couldn't help it. He got up, clutching the little gadget as he listened and walked round and round the little room. He drank more of the water that Arion had brought him, all the while listening. He did not care that there was no purpose to which he could put this new knowledge of his captors. This was a voice speaking to him, and he was not alone.
2
Lestat
IT WASN'T HARD to find them. The old monastery of Saint Alcarius was northeast of Paris, in a deep forest near the Belgian border. Gremt's secret headquarters for the ancient Order of the Talamasca.
Amel and I were both determined to pay Gremt a visit. We should have done this long before now, and I was ashamed that we hadn't.
Did I really want to be here just now? Well, no. I wanted to be across the sea, in New Orleans, because I'd persuaded my beloved fledgling Louis to meet me there. But this visit was important. And my mind was boiling with questions about and for Gremt and his spectral companions.
First things first, however. I had to apologize for not inviting them to Court and not coming here sooner.
In the village, a quaint and clean little place beneath which the past slept without a word, they told me the owners of Saint Alcarius were hermits of sorts, and that all their affairs were handled through a firm in Paris. They wouldn't let me in "up there." Don't bother to knock. In the summer months, the tourists and hikers were always welcome in the gardens, however. There were benches for them under the old trees.
The private road was unpaved and near impassable. Even in this light snow, we'd have a time with it.
But we'd come from Chateau de Lioncourt in a hefty four-wheel-drive vehicle, and we found our way easily over the potholes and the debris that hadn't been cleared in some months. I have been for decades enchanted with powerful motorcars. I loved driving them and feeling the surge of power when I stepped on the gas.
The moon was full, and the wintry night was bright and cold. I saw their lights through the ancient yew trees, and as we drew closer, I saw more and more lights go on in the old square tower and the high diamond-paned windows of the stone facade. A quick scan told me there were many beings inside, though what they were, I couldn't tell. Ghosts, spirits, blood drinkers.
I got out of the car and told Thorne and Cyril to wait for me. I couldn't go anywhere now without Thorne and Cyril. Those were the orders of Marius and Gregory, and Seth, and Fareed, and Notker, and any "elder" that happened to be hanging about "the Court." And the elders ran the Court, no doubt about it. I was the Prince, yes, but treated often like a twelve-year-old under the thumb of a committee of regents. They were the ones running things, and the host could not venture out ever anywhere without his bodyguards.
Thorne, the big redheaded and hulking Viking, would have given up his immortal life for me; and for reasons I'd never fathomed, so would the obdurate cynical Egyptian, Cyril, who pledged his loyalty the moment he walked through the door of the Chateau. "I've always wanted to have someone to whom I could pledge my all," he'd said with a shrug. "And now you're it. No use arguing."
"You have the Core now," said Gregory whenever I protested. "You fail to seek shelter well before sunrise, and the young ones burn!" As if I didn't know this! Well, in truth, I hadn't even thought of it once before devouring the Core, had I? But I knew it. I knew it perfectly well. I didn't need Thorne and Cyril dogging my every step.
Courtly life, endless demands for audiences, and bodyguards who wouldn't leave my side. It was coming home to me every night just what it meant to be the Prince and to have Amel inside me, in more ways than they knew. And I had built up this secret fantasy that the one person in all the world who would let me moan about it was Louis. Ah, Louis...
As for Amel, his infinitely mobile consciousness came and went, though the ethereal command center remained rooted in my brain. He could talk endlessly for nights on end, or vanish for as long as a week.
Amel was with me now, of course, since he'd nagged me incessantly for weeks to approach "the spirits."
I could always feel Amel's presence, or feel his absence, and sometimes I could feel his abrupt desertions, as if my whole body had been shaken. When he was here, it was the sensation of a warm hand on the back of my head, only inside of me, and I wondered if he had full control of how I experienced that telltale sign. I sensed he didn't.
How did he do his traveling? Was he like a giant spider skittering at lightning speed over the spokes of the visible web that united us all, or did he fly blind towards the heated or throbbing pulse of another consciousness? He wouldn't tell me. And every time I asked, I had the uncomfortable perception that he didn't understand the question. That's what disturbed me more than anything else--the things he didn't seem able to understand.
Most of his long silences were the result of his inability to understand my questions, and his need to think about all aspects of what I was asking him.
I was wondering so many things about Amel that I couldn't organize my thoughts. But of one thing I was certain. He wanted to see those spirits close at hand, and that's why he'd pushed me to come here. And he wanted me to go to New Orleans later on.
"I know you have some evil motive of your own," I said aloud as I stood there in the snow. "But just be quiet for once and let me do what I want to do."
I walked up the snowy drive. Lantern-style lights burned beside the ironbound double doors.
"Evil motive, evil motive, evil motive...," he sang. "What nonsense, evil motive! You are a fool. If you neglect these monster spirits, they might turn on you."
"And then what?" I asked.
Gremt, Teskhamen, and Hesketh claimed to have founded the Talamasca over a thousand years ago. No one doubted their word on it, or that they still acted as guardians for the Talamasca today. But the human Talamasca knew nothing of its monstrous foundation, and the human Order carried on as it always had, studying the psychic phenomena of the world with scholarly respect.
I heard Amel laugh bitterly inside me, the voice no one else could hear. "Just remember. Spirits lie, and they lie, and they lie. And don't bother to knock. They 'heard' you thirty miles off. Teskhamen is in there. Teskhamen is a blood drinker, and if you don't think I've been inside Teskhamen of late surveying this
place from stem to stern, you're an idiot."
"Okay, so now I'm an idiot and a fool in the same contentious breath," I said.
The doors opened. I was standing in a flood of warm light, and the air was warm too and fragrant with the scent of wax candles, old wood, old books.
Gremt stood there, looking as always as solid as a human being. Short neatly groomed black hair, smooth symmetrical face marvelously eloquent of human courtesy and apprehension. But there was none of the gracious generosity in his expression that I had seen in the past. His long priestly thawb or soutane was of dark heavy blue velvet, and he wore a dark gray cashmere scarf tucked inside the simple collar, as if he could feel the cold.
"Lestat," he said and made me an old-fashioned bow. "I'm glad you've come." But something was wrong, and I felt I knew what it was.
He stepped aside for me to enter. The bodyguards approached, and I put out my hand with a forbidding gesture. And just to bring it home, I sent a quick telepathic blast to force the Range Rover backwards some ten feet, crunching and crashing through the overgrown gravel. They hated it, but they stood stock-still.
"Never mind them," I said to Gremt. "They'll wait outside."
"They may come in if you wish," he said, but he was distracted, conflicted, ill at ease. He struggled to appear friendly, gesturing again for me to enter.
"I don't wish," I replied. "But thank you, just the same. I can't go anywhere without them, which I accept, but I don't want them breathing down my neck."
He shut the door behind me and led me through a hollow shadowy stone alcove into what might have been in ancient times a great hall. Now it was a great library, with a crude old fireplace on the long front wall, a giant gaping affair with carved lions' heads, and a blazing fire. Sweet the smell of the oak burning. But I could also detect the distinct scent of natural gas mingled with it.
The air was amazingly warm for a place populated with spirits and an ancient vampire. Maybe their bodies did feel it. I liked it. I don't need warmth, but I enjoy it. And I enjoyed this place a lot.
The bookshelves had been recently built, and smelled of fresh wood, turpentine, and wax. The books were orderly, and at opposite ends of the hall were large old Renaissance Revival-style desks, heaped with papers and old black telephones. There was a fancy harpsichord to the far left of the fireplace, obviously a new instrument but skillfully made to reproduce all the excellent engineering of the original instruments and carefully painted to resemble something from my time. I saw electric sconces on the walls, and a low-hanging iron chandelier with a tracery of electric wires stealthily following its chain from the arched ceiling, but nothing illuminated the room but the fire.
I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.
There were thick wool carpets everywhere on the stone floor, mostly Persian in design, worn, faded, but comfortable underfoot.
A grouping of large knobby Renaissance oak chairs was clustered before the hearth and there sat Teskhamen and Magnus. No one else about. But I could hear beings moving in the rooms above. Someone up in the ancient square tower. Scents of modern plasterwork and paint, of copper plumbing and electrical equipment in distant rooms giving off the inevitable soft hum. A place of divine atmosphere and every modern comfort.
Teskhamen and Magnus rose from their chairs to greet me, and I braced myself for the encounter with Magnus, for looking into the eyes of this one who'd made me, and died on a pyre less than an hour after doing that, leaving me his powerful blood, his fortune, his home, and nothing else. Maybe our splendid vampire doctors, Seth and Fareed, could tell whether my blood had a discernible mixture that undeniably connected me to Magnus. Fareed was working on that. Fareed was working on everything.
I sensed a great unease on the part of all three of these creatures.
"Don't be their plaything," Amel said inside me. "Magnus is nothing as solid as he looks. He's a pathetic ghost. Notice that his monkly robes are part of the illusion. He isn't solid enough to risk real clothing or real shoes like Gremt."
I noted this. And I was certain that the last time I'd seen Magnus, he'd been the image of a living creature with real clothes. I wondered why the change.
"Can they hear you?" I asked Amel without moving my lips.
"How do I know?" he said. "Teskhamen can scour your mind as well as any of the old blood drinkers if you let him. He can't shut me out any more than the others. But ghosts? Spirits? Who the Hell knows what they sense or hear? Get on with it. I don't like it." This was disingenuous. He was excited. I knew it.
"Patience," I responded telepathically. "I've waited too long in coming."
He made a soft disgusted fuming sound, but went still.
Magnus gestured for me to take the chair on the far left, closest to the fire. I saw none of that doting affection in his eyes that I'd seen last time we met in New York.
Nobody extended a hand. I didn't extend my hand.
I sat down and folded my hands over the wooden arms of the chair, liking the feel of the carving. It was a new piece of furniture but a splendid imitation of something fashioned in the time of Shakespeare. And above the fireplace I spied a great intricate tapestry that was also new, full of vibrant new dyes and chemical threads, but exquisitely rendered--with medieval saints clustered about the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus on a golden throne. I loved the thickets of trees surrounding them, and the birds in the branches, and the tiny creeping things amid leaves and flowers. I wondered if mortal hands had made this, or had it been done by manically focused blood drinker weavers with preternatural patience and eye for detail.
"I appreciate all these many refinements," I said, my eyes sweeping the arched ceiling. "This was once a windowless croft, wasn't it? And you cut those big windows and made them beautiful with thick glass and iron lattices. You have kept this place well enough for the ghosts of old monks to be happy here, haven't you?"
"Yes, I think so," said Gremt, but he was forcing his smile.
"Well, this old ghost is happy here," said Magnus in a low rich voice. "I can tell you that much." I heard the past in the voice. I heard words spoken I hadn't remembered for decades. There, my son, is the passageway to my treasure....
I tried not to recoil, but to meet his smile with my own.
Amel was right. His brown habit and soft brown leather slippers were part of the illusion. If he vanished, he'd leave nothing behind. And there was something else I observed about him immediately. His facial features, their proportions, and the details of his soft ashen-blond hair, they weren't fixed. They were not flickering like an image on a bad movie screen, but the entire illusion was fragile as if vulnerable to the slightest movement of the air. I don't think a mortal could have detected this. And I sensed it took a colossal amount of energy from him to remain solid-looking and stable. His intense gaze, his brilliant eyes fixed on mine, was the most vital thing about him.
Gremt, the ancient one, the pillar of the Talamasca, had no such difficulty. He appeared solid enough to be torn limb from limb. He looked no less real than he had at our earlier meetings, his obvious discomfort having no effect whatsoever on his visual anatomy. Spirit, powerful spirit.
Teskhamen was of course a blood drinker survivor of the millennia, old before he gave the Blood to Marius. He was his predictable elegant self, thick wavy white hair cut short, his skin darker than it had appeared when I'd first laid eyes on him some six months before.
They had resumed their places. Gremt closest to me, and Teskhamen beside him. Magnus at the far end just opposite. I looked at Teskhamen's skin, I could smell the sun when I looked at it.
A sudden jolt of pain passed through me. I'd never be able again to expose myself to the sun in any way, not to darken my skin, not to test my endurance, not to...Because if I did the young ones might burn up in seconds. There had to be some way around that. There had to be some way to test the old legend.
"I was a victim of the old legend," said Teskhamen. His face was bright, friendly. Whatever was bothering the other tw
o, it was not affecting him. He was so lean and sharply contoured that his bones were part of his beauty.
He was also perfectly at ease with me--self-possessed and almost charming. He wore a dark gray wool suit of English tailoring and fine narrow handmade high string shoes with wing tips, fashionable.
"I burned up in my cell within the oak here in this very country," he said, "when the Queen was exposed to the sun in Egypt." He spoke evenly, calmly. Only his many gold and jeweled rings looked ancient. "I felt the raging fire," he said. "I barely survived it. You know all this but let me verify it for you. Believe me, the old legend is quite true. All Marius ever told you of me is true. You hold my life in your hands as you hold the life of the entire tribe in your hands. Go forth into the sun, and we'll all feel it, some to survive, some to suffer agonies and wish they hadn't, and some to be immolated entirely."
"He's patronizing you," Amel hissed. "How can you stand him? Either you leave here or I will." But he didn't want to leave. I knew he didn't.
"Be still," I said silently. "I want to be here and I'm staying here, and there's nothing you can do about it." He was happy but wouldn't admit it.
Teskhamen laughed softly.
"Tell our blessed friend I can hear him well enough," said Teskhamen. "But be assured, Prince, we're glad to see you. I don't know that we are glad to receive him. But we are glad to see you. We didn't expect you. We'd more or less given up on hearing from you. We're very glad you've come."
The others said nothing. Gremt stared into the fire. He did not appear rude or hostile, but preoccupied, preoccupied enough to ignore me, preoccupied and anguished. His eyes moved uneasily over the burning logs, and there was a subtle gnawing quality to his lips, as if he truly was flesh and blood and unable to conceal his misery.
Magnus, who sat across from me, seemed supernaturally still. Then something came over him. I felt it as surely as I saw it, and in a flash, he was altered indescribably and completely. The made-up ghost was gone. There was the monster I knew from the night of my mortal death, the same hollow withered white cheeks and huge black eyes, and mop of long tangled black hair streaked with shining silver. A dark cold chill passed through me.