She narrowed her eyes. "Is Maharet herself the Voice?" she asked with obvious horror.
Gremt said nothing.
"Could it be her twin, Mekare?"
Still Gremt didn't answer.
"Unspeakable thought," whispered Arjun.
"Well, who else could guide gentle Khayman to such things?" Pandora murmured. She was thinking out loud.
Again Gremt didn't answer.
"And if it is not one of those two," Pandora went on. "Well, then, who is it?" She asked it as if she were a lawyer and Gremt were a hostile witness in a courtroom.
"It's far from clear," Gremt said finally. "But I think I know who it is. What I don't know is what it wants and what it means to do in the long run."
"And what is all this to you, precisely?" Pandora demanded.
Arjun was frightened by her tone, and he blinked as if she were a light blinding him with her coldness.
"What does it matter to you, in particular," she pressed, "what happens to us, creatures like us?"
Gremt pondered. Sooner or later he must reveal all. Sooner or later he must put forth all he knew. But was this the time for it, and how many times must he confess everything? He'd learned what he needed to learn here from Arjun, and he had comforted Arjun as had been his intention. And he had laid eyes on Pandora to whom he owed an immense debt, but he was not sure he could answer her questions fully.
"You are dear to me," he said to her now in a small but steady voice. "And it gives me a certain pleasure, at last, after all these years, these centuries, to tell you that you are, and that you have always been, a shining star on my path, when you had no way of knowing it."
She was intrigued and mollified, but not satisfied. She waited. Her pale face, though she'd rubbed it with ashes and oil to make it less luminous tonight, looked virginal and biblical on account of her robes and the delicacy of her features. But behind that beautiful face she was calculating: How could she defend herself against a being like Gremt? Could she use her immense strength to harm him?
"No, you cannot," he said, giving her the answer. "It's time for me to leave you both." He rose to his feet. "I urge you to go to New York, to join with Armand and Louis there...."
"Why?" she asked.
"Because you must come together to meet the challenge of the Voice, just as you did long ago to meet the challenge of Akasha! You cannot allow this thing to continue. You must get to the root of the mystery, and that is best done if you come together. If you go there, Marius will follow your lead surely. And so will others, others whose names you do not know and have never known, and surely Lestat will come. And it is to Lestat that people look for leadership."
"Oh why, oh why to that insufferable brat," murmured Arjun. "What has he ever done but make trouble?"
Gremt smiled. Pandora laughed softly under her breath as she glanced at Arjun, but then she fell silent again, thinking, gazing up at Gremt.
She weighed all this calmly. Nothing he'd said shocked or surprised her.
"And you, Gremt ... why is it that you want the best for us?" asked Arjun. He rose to his feet. "You have been so kind to me. You have comforted me. Why?"
Gremt hesitated. He felt a knot loosened inside him.
"I love you all," he said in a low confidential voice. He wondered if he looked cold to them as he spoke. He was never entirely sure how his emotions registered on this made-up human face, even when he could feel the blood in his veins rushing to his cheeks, feel the tears rising in his eyes. He never knew for sure if all these myriad systems that he so well controlled with his mind were truly working as he wanted them to work. To smile, to laugh, to yawn, to weep--this was nothing. But to truly register what he felt inside his own true invisible heart--well, that was another matter.
"You know me," he said to Pandora. The tears were indeed rising in his eyes. "Oh, how I have loved you."
She sat in the peacock chair like a queen on a throne gazing up at him, the soft black silk hood making a dark frame around her radiant face.
"It was long, long ago," he said, "on the coast of Southern Italy, and a great man, a great scholar of those times, died on that night in a beautiful monastery that he had built called Vivarium. Do you remember these things? Do you remember Vivarium? His name was Cassiodorus, and all the world remembers him, remembers his letters, his books, and most truly what he was, the scholar that he was in those days when darkness was closing over Italy." His voice was rough now with his emotions. He could hear it breaking. But he went on, staring into her placid unwavering gaze.
"And you saw me then, saw me, a bodiless spirit, rise from the beehives in which I'd been slumbering, extended, and rooted through a thousand tentacles in the bees, in their energy, in their collective and mysterious life. You saw me spring loose at that moment and you saw me embrace with all my power the ludicrous figure of a straw man, a scarecrow, a thing of ridicule in a beggar's coat and pants, with an eyeless head and fingerless hands, and you saw me weep in that form, weep and mourn for the great Cassiodorus!"
Red tears had risen in her eyes. She had written of this not long ago, but would she believe now that he was the one she'd seen? Would she remain silent?
"I know you remember the words you spoke to me," he said. "You were so very brave. You didn't flee from something you couldn't understand. You didn't turn away in disgust from something unnatural even to you. You stood your ground and you spoke to me."
She nodded. She repeated the words she'd said to him that night.
" 'If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy, then struggle and make yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.' "
"Yes," Gremt whispered. "And you said more. 'But know this: if you would become an organized being as you see in me, love all mankind and womankind and all their children. Do not take your strength from blood! Do not feed on suffering. Do not rise like a god above crowds chanting in adoration. Do not lie.' "
She nodded. "Yes," she said. A gentle smile broke over her face. She was not failing him in this moment. She was opening to him. He saw the same sensitivity and compassion in her now that he had seen those many years ago. And he had waited so very long for this! He wanted to reach out to her, to embrace her, but he didn't dare.
"I have followed your counsel," he said. Now he knew the tears were streaming from his eyes, though they never had before. "I've followed it always. And I built the Talamasca for you, Pandora, and for all of your kind and for all humankind and I patterned it as best I could on the monks and scholars of that beautiful old monastery, Vivarium, of which not a stone remains. I built it in memoriam to that brave Cassiodorus who studied and dipped his pen to write to the very end, with such strength and devotion, even as the world went dark around him."
She sighed. She was amazed. And her smile brightened. "And so it was from that moment?"
"Yes, that the Talamasca was born," he said. "From that encounter."
Arjun was gazing at him in pure wonder.
She rose from the table.
She moved around it and came towards Gremt. How loving and eager she appeared, how guileless and how fearless. She was no more frightened of him now than she'd been hundreds of years ago.
But he was spent, dangerously spent--more spent than he could ever have imagined by this--and he couldn't bear the sweetness, the joy, of having her in his arms.
"Forgive me," he whispered. He wiped foolishly at the tears on his face.
"Talk with us, stay with us here," she said imploringly. And Arjun uttered the same invitation.
But Gremt did the only thing he could do with his waning strength. He moved away fast, leaving the garden behind him and the lights of the bungalow lost in the forest of bamboo and mango trees.
She could have pursued him. If she did try to pursue, he would have no choice but to vanish, and that he di
d not want to do. He wanted to remain in this body as long as possible. That was always his choice.
But she didn't pursue him. She accepted his exit. And he knew he'd see her soon again. He'd see them all soon. And he would tell her and all of the others everything.
He followed the road for a long time, gradually regaining his strength, his body hardening once more, his pulse steady, the tears gone and his vision clear.
Headlights now and then picked him out of the darkness as cars swept by, leaving him once more in silence.
So he had told her. He had confided the great secret of the Talamasca to her first of all, before all others, and very soon he would make it known to the entire tribe of blood drinkers.
Never to those mortal Talamasca members who struggled as they always did to continue their studies. No. They would be left in peace to continue with the fables of the Order's origins.
But he would tell it to all of them, the great supernatural beings whom the Talamasca had studied from its very beginnings.
And maybe they would understand as she understood, and maybe they would accept as she had accepted. And maybe they would not fail him in those moments of connection he so badly needed with them.
Whatever the case, it was time, was it not, to help them directly, to reach out, to give them what he could as they confronted the greatest challenge in their history. Who better to help them solve the mystery of the Voice than Gremt Stryker Knollys?
12
Lestat
The Jungles of the Amazon
DAVID HAD DRAWN me out. Clever David. He'd called Benji's line in New York, chatting away with Benji on the broadcast about the crisis. He never gave his name. Didn't have to. Benji knew and I knew, and probably a lot of other blood drinkers knew, that cultured British voice.
On and on, David kept warning the young ones to stay out of the cities, to go into the countryside. He warned the old ones who might be hearing some anonymous command to destroy others: Don't listen. Benji kept agreeing. Over and over again, David said, Stay out of cities like Lyon, or Berlin, or Florence, or Avignon, or Milan, or Avignon or Rome or Avignon ... and so on it went as he named city after city, always throwing in Avignon, and saying that he was certain the great hero, Lestat, was not the one guilty of all this. He'd stake his eternal life on Lestat's honor; Lestat's loyalty to others; Lestat's innate sense of goodness. Why, he, David, wished he had the authority of the pope, so that he could stand in the courtyard of the ruined Popes' Palace at Avignon and declare for all the world that Lestat wasn't guilty of these Burnings!
I burst out laughing.
I was listening in my drawing room in my father's chateau not four hundred kilometers from the little city of Avignon. There had never been any vampires in Avignon! And no burnings either.
Every night, I'd been listening to Benji. I was sick with worry for those who were dying. It was not all fledglings and the misbegotten. Many of the three-and four-hundred-year-old Children of Darkness were being slaughtered. Perhaps some of those I had known and loved on my long journey had been slaughtered, lost to me and to everyone else forever. When Akasha had gone on her rampage, her great Burning, she'd spared those connected to me, out of favor, but this new Burning seemed infinitely more terrible, more random. And I could not guess, any more than anyone else, who or what lay behind the devastation.
Where was my beloved Gabrielle? And how long would it be before this thing attacked the house of Armand and Louis in New York? I wondered: whoever and whatever it was, did it like listening to Benji's broadcasts, did it like hearing of all the misery it was creating?
"What do you think, Voice?" I asked.
No answer.
The Voice had long ago left me, hadn't it? The Voice was behind this. Everyone knew that now, didn't they? The Voice was rousing engines of murder from long slumber, urging them to use powers perhaps they'd never known they had.
"These old ones are being roused by this Voice," David said. "There's no doubt of this now. Witnesses have seen these old ones at the site of the massacres. So often it's a ragged figure, sometimes a hideous wraith. Surely it is the Voice waking these people. Are not many of us hearing this Voice?"
"Who is the Voice?" Benji demanded over and over again. "Which of you out there has heard the Voice? Call us, talk to us."
David rang off. The surviving fledglings were taking over the airwaves.
Benji had twenty phone lines now to receive those who were calling. Who staffed these lines? I didn't know enough about radio stations, phones, monitors, etcetera to understand how it worked. But no mortal voice had ever been broadcast by Benji, not for any reason, and sometimes one mournful and miserable blood drinker calling in would take an hour to unfold a tale of desperation. Did the other calls pile up?
Whatever the case, I had to get to Avignon. David wanted me to meet him in Avignon, in the old ruined Palace of the Popes, that was plain enough.
Benji was now addressing the Voice. "Call us here, Voice," he was saying in that chipper, confident manner of his. "Tell us what you want. Why are you trying to destroy us?"
I looked around my glorious digs here on the mountain. How I'd worked to reclaim this land of my father, how I'd worked to restore this chateau completely--and lately with my own hands, I'd dug out secret rooms beneath it. How I loved these old stone-walled chambers where I'd grown up, now transformed with every sweet amenity, and the view from these windows over the mountains and fields where I'd hunted as a boy. Why, why did I have to be drawn away from all this and into a battle I didn't want?
Well, I wasn't going to reveal this place to David or anybody else for that matter. If they didn't have the sense to look for me at Chateau de Lioncourt in the Auvergne, that was their misfortune! After all, the place had been on all the maps.
I put on my favorite red velvet jacket, slipped on my black boots and my usual sunglasses, and went to Avignon immediately.
Lovely little city, Avignon, with winding cobblestone streets and countless cafes and those old broken-down ruins where once the Roman Catholic pontiffs had reigned in splendor.
And David was waiting for me, sure enough, along with Jesse, haunting the old ruin. Not a single other blood drinker in the city.
I came right down into the dark grassy high-walled courtyard. No mortal eyes to witness this. Just the dark empty broken archways in the stone cloister gazing on like so many black eyes.
"Brat Prince." David rose from his seat on the grass and threw his arms around me. "I see you're in fine form."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I mumbled. But it was so good to see him again, to see both of them. Jesse hovered against the old crumbling stone wall, wrapped in a heavy gray muffler.
"Do we have to stand out here in this desolate place, under the shadow of all this history?" I said testily, but I didn't mean it. It was fine with me, this chilly September night with deep winter already in the air. I was embarrassingly glad that they'd forced me to this meeting.
"Of course not, Your Royal Highness," said David. "There's a fine little hotel in Lyon, the Villa Florentine, not far away at all"--he's telling me? I was born here!--"and we have comfortable rooms there." That sounded good enough.
Within fifteen minutes we'd made the little journey, and we entered the red-carpeted suite by the patio doors and were comfortably settled in the parlor. The hotel was above the town, on a hilltop with a pretty view, and I liked it just fine.
Jesse looked worn and miserably unhappy, dressed in a creased and cracked brown leather jacket and pants, her gray wool sweater high under her chin, muffler covering her mouth, hair the usual shimmering veil of copper waves. David was in his gray worsted wool with a nappy suede vest and flashing silk tie--all bespoke most likely. He was a good deal brighter in tone and expression than Jesse, but I knew the gravity of the situation.
"Benji doesn't guess the half of it," Jesse said, the words just pouring out of her. "And I don't know what I can tell him or anyone else." She sat on the foot of the bed, hands cla
sped between her knees. "Maharet's banished me and Thorne forever. Forever." She began to cry, but didn't stop talking.
She explained that Thorne had been going and coming since the time Fareed had restored his eyes to him, and he, the great Viking warrior, wanted to stand with Maharet against any force that threatened her.
He'd heard the Voice. He'd heard it in Sweden and Norway, prompting him to clean out the riffraff, speaking of a great purpose. He'd found it easy to shut out.
"And you?" I asked, looking from Jesse to David. "Have either of you heard the Voice?"
Jesse shook her head no, but David nodded. "About a year ago, I started hearing it. About the most interesting words it ever uttered were in fact a question. It asked me whether or not we'd all been weakened by the proliferation of the power."
"Remarkable," I said under my breath. "What was your response?"
"I told it no. I said I was as powerful as I'd ever been, perhaps a little more powerful of late."
"And did it say anything else?"
"It spoke mostly nonsense. Half the time I wasn't even sure it was speaking to me. I mean it could have been addressing anyone. It spoke of an optimum number of blood drinkers, considering the source of the power. It spoke of the power as the Sacred Core. I could hear the capital letters. It raved that the realm of the Undead was sunk now into depravity and madness. But it would go on and on around these ideas, often making little or no logical or sequential sense at all. It would even lapse into other languages and it would, well, it would make mistakes, mistakes in meaning, syntax. It was bizarre."
Jesse was staring at him as if all this was a surprise to her.
"To tell the truth," David explained, "I had no idea it was the Voice as people are saying now," said David. "I'm giving you the distilled version. It was mostly incoherent. I thought it was some old one. I mean, this happens, of course. Old ones shoot their messages to others. I found it tiresome. I tuned it out."
"And you, Jesse?" I asked.
"I've never heard it," she whispered. "I think that Thorne is the first to have spoken of it directly to me or Maharet."