I sat considering all this, my elbow on the arm of the chair.
"So you trained them to watch us for over a thousand years," I ventured. "And now there is no need for the new Order to watch us, or report on us, or track us at all."
"That's exactly right," said Teskhamen. "The Order is concerned with reincarnation, with Near-Death Experiences, as they are called. And with ghosts, of course, always with ghosts, and sometimes sorcerers and witches. But the vampires have been withdrawn from the Charter, so to speak. And you have absolutely no reason to fear the Order. Do make a proclamation. I appreciate your self-deprecating tone, but you are the Prince and you can, and I do hope you'll do it. They are pitiful mortals, simple mortals, honest mortals, scholars and nothing more."
I nodded and made an open-handed gesture of complete acceptance. I wondered if it was really that easy, to command an Order of mortal scholars not to study vampires any longer, when in fact we were more visible in the world than ever. Had none of those proper British scholars heard Benji's radio broadcasts? Had none of them read newspaper accounts of the mysterious fires around the world that documented Benji's description of the Great Burning of vampires in far-flung capitals?
Memo to self: Have Marius, the Prime Minister, draw up a formal proclamation. And I meant "Prime Minister" in the sense that Mazarin and Richelieu had once been Prime Ministers for the French King, not in the sense of prime ministers today. Marius was my Prime Minister.
"It's easier than you think," Teskhamen explained, "to convince a group of scholars that some other secret department under their roof is working on the question of blood drinkers, when in fact there is no such secret department. We are guiding them. I told you."
I nodded. "I've never really feared the Talamasca," I said. "I don't fear you either. I don't say that to be difficult or unfriendly. But I don't. So we are agreed on all this."
Gremt was studying me. He'd come out of his deep thoughts and I could see his pupils moving in that subtle way which means mental calculation.
Why was Amel silent? I felt that prickling over my scalp, that interior grip on the back of my neck. "If you're so damned angry," I said silently, "why don't you race off down some branch of your immense vine and pester some other blood drinker and leave me alone?"
No response.
Even as I made a mental note of this, a pleasing warmth penetrated my spine. His doing, his physical doing. And then I heard his whispering voice: "Ghosts and spirits and shadowy shapes and things that go bump in the night. You're demeaning us both here. This is a tomb."
I realized that Magnus, or the thing that represented Magnus, was turned away from me and towards the fireplace, and the limbs beneath the brown robe had shriveled, and the one sandaled foot that showed beneath the hem was skeletal and white. The robe appeared threadbare and torn here and there, and I could all but smell dust coming from it. God, what went on in the mind of this creature as he experienced these transformations?
Hundreds of years dropped away. I saw that spindly white monster on all fours jumping up and down on his funeral pyre. I saw the jester's smile and the black hair flying in the swirling embers....I heard my own screams as he went up in flames! I don't know that I remembered anything in all my life any more vividly than I remembered that. I felt myself trembling.
"Can we expect you at Court?" I asked. I looked from Teskhamen to Gremt. Then to Magnus.
"You're a person of surprises," said Teskhamen agreeably. "Of course we'll come. And soon. But there are things now that must be addressed. I have another warning to give you."
"Warning?"
"Rhoshamandes," said Gremt. "You're underestimating him."
"He's weak," I said. "His lover, Benedict, left him and came to us. Rhoshamandes is crushed."
Gremt shook his head. "He hates you, Lestat," he said. "He hates you and wants to destroy you."
"Lots of people do!" I laughed. "But he's the least of my worries. He can't destroy me."
"And there are other rumblings in the great world," said Teskhamen. "Small collectives of creatures of the night who resent that anyone has claimed a crown among the Undead."
"Of course," I said. "How could there not be? And then there are the blood drinkers flocking in every evening. And they want a prince and they want rules. And I never dreamed how much." I sat back and put my left ankle on my right knee. The fire felt good because the icy draft had made it burn brighter. I went on. "Two hours a night we hear grievances and disputes over territory, this one demanding that we punish that one, this coven insisting 'it was there first' and wanting the other banished. This one asking for permission to exterminate an enemy. It's like the time of Constantine with quarreling Christians coming to his court to demand he condemn this or that heretic, and nail down the core doctrines of a creed." None of this surprised them.
Teskhamen smiled and laughed under his breath. "You may be the perfect prince, Lestat," he said. "You really do hate having authority, don't you?"
"You bet I do," I said with an irresistible shudder. "Rhoshamandes told me before he was banished that there is only one reason really to want power and that's to keep others from having power over you, and he and I hold that much at least in common."
Gremt was still riveted to me and even Magnus looked more collected and at ease. But there was still something wrong here.
"Do you want to speak to the spirit himself?" I asked. "Is that it? You want to speak to Amel?" I made an open gesture with my hands.
A low hiss came from Amel. He might have been a snake coiled at my neck and suddenly exerting a subtle pressure on my vocal cords and my breath.
I ignored him.
Suddenly he tried with all his power to make me rise out of the chair. He'd done plenty of this before, and I held fast without the slightest sign of what was happening. It was like holding still when one's limbs are cramped and crying in pain, but I outlasted him. And I hated him for doing this here, in front of this little group of merciless spectators.
"I can't make the spirit speak to you," I said, "but I can ask him to speak to you. I can surrender entirely to him and repeat only what he says. I've done this a lot of late for Fareed and Seth. I allow Amel to tell them anything he wishes."
"Traitor," said Amel. "Slut."
I tried to conceal my smile. I just love being called a slut. I don't know why. I just do. "Have at it, beloved numbskull," I mumbled without moving my lips.
"We can see how it is," said Gremt. His voice was gentle, and easy, but there was distrust in his pale eyes. "He's not at peace in you. Don't underestimate him. Indeed, I think your fault is that you underestimate others across the board."
I reflected for a moment. I wasn't going to talk about love to this group, but I wasn't above letting them know that now telepathically. I love this being. Don't try to understand it. And don't try to undermine it.
"Don't underestimate me," I whispered.
They didn't reply.
"Everything is about learning with Amel," I said calmly. "He told me that for aeons he could see and hear nothing distinct or separate from inside Akasha's body. He was flooded with sensations, echoes, vibrations, blazes of light and color. He had to learn to see, rather like a mortal blind from birth has to learn to see when sight is restored to him."
They were listening intently, and Amel was also listening.
"Well, now he can see and feel and taste," I said. "He can make these distinctions, and so what he's experiencing is wholly new. He speaks, but half the time he doesn't know what he's saying."
What, no response from my clever little friend?
There was no response from the three of them either. In fact their faces were concealing and almost hard.
"Please go on," said Teskhamen. "I want to hear more." He glanced at the others, but they remained fixed on me.
"What else can I tell you?" I said. "He isn't always inside me. But eighty percent of the time, he is. He wants me to take him places, inaugurate experiences for him, choose v
ictims for him, flood my senses with music for him or visual stimuli--like films, for instance, or attendance at operas and symphony orchestras. The plays. He loved the plays. He loved me performing Macbeth. He loves the very concept of me, with him inside me, becoming another person on the stage. He will talk about things like that for weeks. He's fascinated with symphony orchestras. He'll ask absurdly simple questions, then offer the most sophisticated observations. He says things like the orchestra is generating a soul, a collective soul, an entity. I ask him what that means. He says consciousness generates soul. But most of the time, he can't explain such statements." I shrugged. My great overused gesture. I've been shrugging my shoulders at the world for one reason or another since I was born. "That's how it is with him. He isn't longing to go anywhere."
"And is he confiding in you as to where he came from?" asked Gremt.
"You should know perfectly well that he has no idea where he came from," I replied. "Do you have any idea where you came from?"
"What makes you assume that I don't?"
"I know you don't. If you knew where you came from and why you were a spirit, you would never have founded the Talamasca. You might never have incarnated. I think you and all your spirit entity brothers and sisters...assuming they have gender...are as confused as we are. So are ghosts. Everybody's confused. And yes, he has made some philosophical pronouncements if you must know."
"What were they?" asked Magnus intently.
"That in the realm of the invisible there is no right and wrong," I said. "He told me that. And he told me that ideas of right and wrong originate with biological beings and they seduce the spirit world, and the spirit world wants to know more of it. All quests, he says, come from us."
This totally surprised them, but it was absolutely the truth.
Amel was saying nothing, absolutely nothing. "Don't tell me you don't remember all this," I whispered to him.
Long pause, then in a low voice: "I remember."
Teskhamen looked calmly from Gremt to me and back again, in a manner which I found faintly disturbing. But he seemed to sense this and he lowered his gaze again to the fire, as if he'd been rude to me.
"Listen to me, Lestat," said Gremt. It was a tone I'd never heard from him before. His voice was low, markedly soft, but rather hard. "You don't know this spirit. You think you do. But you don't."
Silence inside me.
"Why do you say this?" I asked.
An ominous expression darkened Gremt's face.
"Because I remember in the airy Heavens a time when he was not there," he said.
"I don't understand."
"He's no simple spirit, Lestat," said Gremt. "I am a simple spirit, and indeed there are myriad simple spirits--there are simple spirits who 'possess' mortals, and there are even simple spirits who seek to make for themselves a secure citadel of flesh as I've done--and spirits without count--collected in the earth's thinner atmosphere whom humans cannot usually see or hear. But he--Amel--is no simple spirit. And I who can remember almost nothing of those airy aeons well remember when he came. There was a tumult in Heaven when he came. He was new. He had the name Amel when he came. Do you follow me?"
He broke off as if unsatisfied, and looked into the fire. No wonder we gather around fires because they give us something to look at when we can't look at one another.
Silence. Coldness. The serpent coiling inside of me had gone still.
"What did he say of himself?" I pressed. "Did he talk of where he'd come from?"
"No," said Gremt. "He was wounded, suffering, rather like an earthbound ghost, blundering through the invisible in agony. But he was no simple ghost. He has the immense power of a spirit."
"How so?"
"We are as different from ghosts as angels are from humans," Gremt said. "Don't think for a moment you know what he is. He has a cunning and an ambition which other spirits do not possess and never did. At least not as I have ever known them. I learned my cunning and ambition from watching him. And when he came into the flesh through Akasha, I came after him, but it took me thousands of years to achieve the concentration and strength sufficient for me to enter this physical world. Never for a moment think he is of the same ilk as me. Something different drives him and that something is rooted in experience and knowledge which I never possessed."
"So you're saying he is a ghost!"
"No." He shook his head. He was defeated.
Shimmer. Flash. The city falling into the sea. The huge cry of thousands. Gone.
I'd lost the thread. I put my hand to my forehead, massaging my temples. "You're saying he was flesh and blood before, that he's a ghost."
"He's no ghost," said Gremt. "I know ghosts." He gestured to Magnus. "This is a ghost, fired with the urgency and moral concerns he learned before he died. No. He's not a ghost."
"I think what my friend means," said Teskhamen, "is that you must not trust him, Lestat. Love him, yes, of course, and treat him with the immense concern you've always shown for him, but never trust him."
I nodded, to acknowledge that I was listening, of course, but I did not really respond.
"You've loved him from the start of all this," said Teskhamen. "You and you alone spoke up for him to the others who were seeking a way to dislocate him into some sort of secure trap where he might animate the vampire world for their sake. But you loved him. You saved him from that. You invited him into your own body."
Did they know how little I ever stopped to consider for one split second anything that I had ever done? Likely they did. Likely they knew how I lived my life, riding wave after wave of instinct and emotion, driven by immense greed as well as generosity.
But that was not the point here. They were driving at something crucial about Amel himself.
"So what you're saying," I asked finally, "is that the realm of spirits is populated by ambitionless beings, largely benign, drifting, flighty, whatever--the way Maharet had once described them to us...childlike things...but that this spirit, Amel, is something else?"
"Benign?" asked Gremt. "Childlike? Lestat, have you forgotten Memnoch?"
Memnoch!
"What do you know about Memnoch?" I asked. I could hardly contain my excitement. "If you know anything of Memnoch, anything at all, you must tell me! Tell me now. What do you know of him?"
Memnoch was a spirit that had once hunted me down, seduced me with visions and tales of Heaven and Hell, and begged for me to become his apprentice in a spirit realm. Memnoch had claimed to be one of the "sons of God" who had engendered the Nephilim. Memnoch had claimed to be the Jewish-Christian Devil. I'd escaped and repudiated Memnoch in utter horror. But I had never known whence he came or what he was--really.
"What did Maharet tell you about Memnoch?" asked Gremt.
"Nothing," I said. "Nothing other than what I told the whole world. She said she knew him. That's all. That's all she ever said. Maharet didn't tell people things. That's the whole point about Maharet. She sat down with us once, long ago, and told us her personal history, and how the blood drinkers had come into existence, and then after that, she retired from the world, refusing to be any sort of mentor or leader. When she brought young ones to her hideouts, she put them to studying old human documents, tablets, scrolls, or pondering mysteries dug up from the earth. She held court not as an instructor but as some sort of..."
"Some sort of mother," said Gremt.
"Well, yes, I guess so," I said. "She brought a letter to me from Memnoch, or so she claimed. And in the letter was wrapped my eye, this eye, which Memnoch's demons had torn out of the socket. The letter was mocking and vicious. The eye I restored to its place and the eye has healed. But the heart will never heal from an assault such as Memnoch made on me. But Maharet never told me anything. I think Maharet was constitutionally wary of all forms of ambition."
Magnus smiled at this, as if it delighted him.
"He played the Devil for you," said Magnus, "for the little boy who had been frightened by stories of Hellfire and demons. He us
ed your imagination, your mind, your heart, so to speak, to weave his airy realms about you."
"Yes, I know that now. I suspected it then. And I left. I fled. I fled even though they took my eye from me."
"You were braver and stronger than I was," said Magnus softly. "And you are right about Maharet. She was against all forms of ambition."
"She believed in passivity," said Gremt, "and sad to say, she believed in ignorance."
"I agree," I said.
"It comes to that after centuries and centuries of vain hope," said Teskhamen. "You can gaze on the struggling beings around you with a sad detachment. And you can thank Heaven for ignorance, for simple beings who don't long to know anything."
"Look, I don't want to talk about Maharet," I said. "There's time enough for that. I want to talk about Memnoch. If you keep from me what you know of Memnoch--."
I sat up in the chair. I planted both feet on the floor as if I were prepared to rise and attack somebody but this didn't mean anything. "Who was Memnoch?"
"Why use the past tense?" asked Gremt. "You don't think he's hovering near you, quite ready again to sweep you up into his imaginary worlds?"
"He can't," I said. "He's tried. He's tried for years."
They were skeptical.
"Every spellbinder has a signature," I said. "Once I learn to recognize that signature, I become immune. They can't make it happen to me after that." I studied them individually. "Centuries ago, Armand would seek to sweep me up in his spells. I learned to recognize them instantly." I waited but they volunteered nothing. "I want to know what you know of Memnoch," I said. "You said his name!" I said to Gremt. "I would not have asked, not now, not until much later on, when we had come to know one another, all of us, and love one another. I would not have presumed. But you said his name, and you know what this means to me. What do you know of him?"
Magnus roused himself, brightening and glancing at his companions.
"He's an evil spirit," said Magnus. "He believes all the things he said to you. He fed off your fear of God and the Devil. He is greedy. Long aeons ago he fell in love with the religions of human beings; he dwells now in great purgatorial realms of his own making, seducing the lost earthbound souls of dead believers, sustained by their faith in those systems...."
"You do recall," I said, "that he claimed to teach love and forgiveness in his purgatorial Hell."