How lovely she was, the flower of the twisted old stem she'd been then.
I muttered something about how I'd longed even back then to see what she could have been. I stopped myself. It was so presumptuous and selfish. She was restored after all. She was here, vital, vibrant, part of this new and astonishing age. But she didn't correct me. She didn't shrink from me. She only smiled.
Sevraine was pleased with all this. And this woman who hardly seemed old at all now, nothing like the wretched hag she'd been in those eighteenth-century nights, was flushed with pleasure.
Finally I put my knee on the table and leaned forward and clasped Allesandra's face in my hands and kissed her.
In those earlier times, she'd been doomed, a dead thing in medieval garb, even to a filthy and ragged veil and wimple. Now her healthy silvery ashen hair was free and came down in dark waves over her shoulders. The robe she wore was fresh and soft like that of Sevraine, only it was a pale green, a green like the grass of the world of the day, that bright and beautiful. Around her neck was a single bright ruby on a chain. Allesandra, daughter of Dagobert. Her lips were dark and red like that ruby.
What a monster she'd appeared back in those nights, a face deformed by madness like the face of my maker, Magnus. But she was free now, freed by time, freed by survival to be something else, something entirely different and wondrous and sweet and vital.
"Yes, young one. Yes, and thanks to you, your voice, your videos and songs, your desperate revelations, I have slowly come back to myself. But I've been a pawn of this Voice. I have been the dupe of this Voice!" Her face darkened, and for a moment it seemed to crumple into that of the medieval horror she'd been before. "Only now I am in the helping hands of others."
"Put that aside," said Bianca. She was still beside me on my right, with Gabrielle on my left. "It is over," said Bianca. "The Voice will not triumph." But she was trembling with some sort of inner conflict, some battle between anguish and optimism.
Sevraine turned slowly to the spirit. He had stood quite still all this time regarding me with his bright but quiet blue eyes as if he could actually see through them, process through them all that lay before him. He wore a fancy, glittering decorative Indian garment called a sherwani, a kind of robe that went down to his ankles, I supposed, though I couldn't see below the top of the table, and his skin was amazingly realistic, nothing as synthetic looking as our skin always looks, but natural-looking skin made up of tiny changing pores and the soft down that covers humans.
"Gremt Stryker Knollys," he said, extending his hand. "But Gremt is my simple and true name. Gremt is my name for you and for all those I love."
"And you love me? Why?" I asked. But it was thrilling to be talking to this spirit.
He laughed softly and politely, unshaken by my sharp question. "Doesn't everyone love you?" he asked sincerely. It was as human a voice as I'd ever heard, tenor in pitch, even. "Isn't everyone hoping for you to somehow lead the tribe when this present war has been brought to the finish?"
I looked at Sevraine. "Do you love me?" I asked. "Are you hoping for me to lead this tribe?"
"Yes," she said with a radiant smile. "I am hoping and praying you will lead it. Surely you cannot expect me to lead it."
I sighed.
I looked at my mother.
"We do not have to talk about this right now," my mother said, but there was something about her remote half-lidded regard of me that chilled me. "Don't worry," she crooned with a cold ironic smile. "No one can crown you Prince of the Vampires against your will, can they?"
"Prince of the Vampires!" I scoffed. "I don't know," I said.
I looked back at the others. I wished I had a full night to take in all of these revelations, these new and startling encounters, just to try to fathom the limits of this splendid Sevraine, or why the tender Bianca was suffering so, because she couldn't conceal the pain.
"But I'll tell you that, why I am suffering," Bianca said, drawing near but talking in a normal and not a confidential voice, her arm slipping around me. "I lost one I loved in the attack in Paris, a young one, one I'd made and lived with for decades. But this was the Voice at work, not the one he'd brought out of the earth to do his bidding."
"And that was I," said Allesandra, "roused by the Voice. And given the unholy strength by the Voice to climb out of that tomb of bones and filth. That sin lies on me."
I saw it now in horrific flickering images, a wraith of a woman, a macabre skeleton of a creature with hag hair, sending a fatal jet of heat at the house in the Rue Saint-Jacques. And revenants rushing to their very doom as they fled the doors and windows right into the path of the murderous power. I saw Bianca down on her knees on the pavement wailing, hands pressed to the side of her head, face upturned. I saw the wraith approach and reach out for her, as if the very personification of Death had paused in its rounds to show compassion to one lone soul.
"Many have been duped by the Voice," said Gabrielle. "And not so many have survived it and turned away with such immediate disgust. That counts for much as far I'm concerned."
"It counts for everything," said Bianca gravely.
Allesandra's face was sad. She appeared to be dreaming, to have slipped away from the present time and back into a great limitless gulf of darkness. I wanted to reach out and take her hand, but it was Sevraine who did this.
All the while the spirit, Gremt Stryker Knollys, gazed on without a word. He was seated now as he had been before.
Others were coming into this large room.
For a moment I didn't believe my eyes. There was a ghost there, surely it was a ghost, in the person of an elderly man with dark gray hair and skin that suggested mother-of-pearl to me. He was in a body as solid as the body of the spirit Gremt. And he too wore real clothes. Breathtaking.
And two exquisitely groomed and exquisitely dressed female blood drinkers were with him.
When I saw who they were, who they actually were, these two with their coiffed hair and soft silken robes, I started crying. They came at once to me, and both embraced me.
"Eleni and Eugenie," I said. "Safe after all this time." I could hardly speak.
Somewhere in a chest locked away, a chest that had survived neglect and fire, I still had in my possession all the letters once written to me from Paris by Eleni, the letters that had told me of the Theatre des Vampires in the Boulevard du Temple that I had left behind in my wanderings, the letters that told me of its prosperity with the Paris audiences, of Armand's governance, and of the death of my Nicolas, my second fledgling, my only mortal friend, and my greatest failure.
This was Eleni, and her companion Eugenie, fresh and perfumed and quietly resplendent in their simple silk garments. They were dark-eyed with soft almond-colored skin and dark hair loose over their shoulders. And I had thought them long gone from the Earth, gone in this or that catastrophe--a mere memory of the century of white-powdered wigs consumed by time and violence.
"Come, let's all sit down together," said Sevraine.
I looked around a bit dazed, a bit uncertain. I wanted somehow to sink into some shadowy corner and think about what was happening, absorb what was happening, but there was no time or place for this. I was shaken and at a loss. Indeed, I was overwhelmed when I contemplated how many other reunions and shocks awaited me, but how could I shrink from this? How could I resist it? Yet if this was what we all wanted, if this is what we dreamed of, in our grief and our loneliness--being reunited with those we'd lost--then why was I finding it so very hard?
The ghost, the puzzling ghost of the elderly man with the dark gray hair, had taken a seat beside Gremt, and he sent me a quick sharp telepathic introduction. Raymond Gallant. Did I know that name?
Eleni and Eugenie went around the table and sat beside Allesandra.
I saw a hearth now to the far left, well stacked with burning logs, though the light of the fire was lost in the great electric illumination of this golden room with its twinkling and flickering walls and ceiling. I saw a mult
itude of things--sconces, bronze sculptures, heavy carved chests. But nothing registered for the moment except that I was suffering a kind of paralysis. I worked against it. I had to look at the faces that surrounded me.
I took the empty high-backed chair opposite Sevraine. That's what she wanted. Gabrielle sat beside me. And it was quite impossible to ignore that I was the center of attention, that all these beings were connected by earlier encounters, or even long history, and that I had much to learn.
I found myself looking at this ghost, and then the name hit me. Raymond Gallant. Talamasca. A friend to Marius in the Renaissance years, before and after Marius had been attacked by the Children of Satan and his Venetian palazzo destroyed. A friend who had actually helped him, through the Talamasca, find his beloved Pandora, who'd been traveling Europe in those nights with an Indian blood drinker named Arjun. Raymond Gallant had died in very old age in an English castle belonging to the Talamasca, or so Marius had always believed.
The ghost was looking at me now with the most genial eyes, smiling eyes, friendly eyes. His clothes were the only decidedly Western garb in the room besides mine--a simple dark suit and tie, and yes, absolutely, they were real, these garments, not part of his complex and marvelously realized artificial body.
"Are you ready to join the others in New York?" asked Sevraine. She had a simplicity and directness that reminded me of my mother. And I could hear that powerful heart of hers beating, that ancient heart.
"And what good would that do?" I asked. "How can I affect what's happening?"
"Plenty," she said. "We must all go there. We must all come together. The Voice has contacted them. The Voice wants to join them."
I was shocked and skeptical. "How is that possible?"
"I don't know," she said. "And they don't know either. But the Voice has endorsed Trinity Gate in New York as the place for us to meet. We must go there."
"What about Maharet?" I asked. "And what about Khayman? How can the Voice ...?"
"I know what you're saying," said Sevraine, "and again I am saying that we must gather under Armand's roof. No one of us can stand against Maharet and Khayman. I've been to their encampment. I've tried to talk with Maharet. She would not admit me. She would not listen to me. And with Khayman beside her, I can't prevail against her. Not alone. Only with others. And the others are meeting in New York."
I bowed my head. I was shaken by what she was saying. Surely it wasn't coming to that, a battle of the ancients, a battle involving force, but then what other kind of battle would it be?
"Well, then let the great Children of the Millennia gather," I said. "But I'm no Child of the Millennia!"
"Oh, come now, Lestat," she answered. "You've drunk the Mother's blood in staggering amounts and you know it. You have an indomitable will that counts for a supernatural gift in itself."
"I was Akasha's dupe," I said. I sighed. "So much for will. I have indomitable emotions. That's not the same as having indomitable will."
"Now I know why they call you the Brat Prince," said Sevraine patiently. "You're going to New York and you know you are."
I didn't know what to say. What could it conceivably mean that the Voice meant to join a New York meeting if the Voice was emanating from Mekare? Would the Voice somehow through Khayman force the twins to travel to New York? I couldn't figure it. And what of Maharet envisioning that volcano and their fiery finish? Did the others know about that? I didn't dare to think of it in this company of minds that could rake mine with total ease.
"Believe me," said Sevraine. "I offered my presence, my sympathy, and my strength to Maharet only nights ago and I was rebuffed. I have told her in plain words who the Voice is and she has refused to believe it. She insists the Voice cannot be what we know it is. Maharet is a bruised and broken soul now. Maharet cannot stop this thing. She can't fathom that the Voice is coming from her own sister. Maharet is ruined."
"I can't give up on her that easily," I said. "I understand what you're saying. It's true. I went there and tried to talk with her and she forced me to leave. She used her power to physically push me away. Quite literally. But I can't give up on her as broken and bruised. That can't be right. The last time, when we all faced annihilation, she and Mekare saved us! We would all have died if ... Look, we ought to go to her now. You, me, Marius, whoever else we can find ..."
"Say this to them when we meet, all of us, under Armand's roof," Sevraine said.
But I was horror-struck at the thought of what might be happening in that jungle compound now. What if the Voice through Khayman found some way to do away with Maharet? It was unthinkable to me, and equally unthinkable that I might stand by and let this happen.
"I know this," said Sevraine. She was responding to my thoughts. "I am fully aware of it. But as I told you, this creature's destiny has been fulfilled. Maharet's found her twin, and in her twin she's confronted the nothingness, the emptiness--the sheer meaninglessness of life--that all of us face sooner or later, and maybe more than once, and maybe even many times. Maharet has not survived this final encounter. She has divorced herself from her mortal family. She has nothing now to sustain her. The tragedy of her mindless sister, Mekare, has devoured her. She's finished."
"You go join the others," I said. "I'll go back to the Amazon now and I'll take my stand with her. I can reach there before sunrise in that hemisphere."
"No, you mustn't do this." It was the voice of the spirit, Gremt. He was still sitting quite calmly to Sevraine's left as before. "You're needed at the conclave, and that's where you must go. If you return to Maharet's sanctuary now, she'll only drive you away again. And she may do worse."
"Forgive me," I said, straining to be courteous, "but what has this to do with you?"
"I knew this spirit, Amel," he answered, "for thousands of years before he came into the physical. If he had not come, not fused with Akasha, I might never have come, never have sought to take on a body and walk on the Earth in the guise of a human. I've been prompted in all I've done by him, by his descent into flesh and blood and my own love of flesh and blood. I followed him here."
"Well, that's a staggering revelation," I said. "And how many others like you are roaming around this Earth, may I ask, watching this pageant for pleasure?"
"I'm not watching the pageant for pleasure," he replied. "And if there are others from our realm who've concerned themselves with these events, they haven't made their presence known to me."
"Stop, please," Sevraine implored me. "It will all make more sense to you if you realize this being founded the Talamasca. Now, you know the Talamasca. You know their principles. You know their high-minded goals. You know their dedication. You loved and trusted David Talbot when he was still the Superior General of the Talamasca, a mortal scholar who did all in his power to be your friend. Well, Gremt Stryker Knollys founded the Talamasca, and that should answer all your questions as to his character. I don't know what other word to use but 'character.' You need not doubt Gremt."
I was speechless.
Of course I'd always known that some supernatural secret burned at the heart of the Talamasca, but what it was I'd never been able to fathom. And to the best of my knowledge, David did not know. And neither did Jesse who had also been a child of the Order long before her aunt Maharet had brought her into the Blood.
"Trust in me," said Gremt. "I am on your side now. I fear Amel. I have always feared him. I have always dreaded the day he would come into his own."
I listened patiently but said nothing.
"Tomorrow at sunset, we should all leave here together," said Sevraine. "And there I'll find those as old as I am, as powerful. I'm convinced of it. This conclave will draw them there and under moral constraints which I welcome and respect. Perhaps some have already arrived. And then we'll be in a position to determine what to do."
"And meanwhile," I said softly, "Maharet grapples with this on her own." I sought to banish all images of that volcano, Pacaya, in Guatemala, where our collective destiny might just en
d.
Sevraine's eyes locked on mine. Had she seen it?
Of course I know your fears, but why frighten the others? We do what we must do.
"Maharet will accept no one's help," said Gremt. "I too went to her. It was no use. I knew her when she was a mortal woman. I spoke to her when she was a mortal woman. I was among the spirits who listened to her voice." His voice remained even but he was becoming emotional, emotional as any genuine human being. "And now after all this time, she does not trust me, or listen to me. She cannot. In her mind she lost the voices of the spirits when she entered the Blood. And any spirit who seeks to incarnate as I've done she can't trust. She can only regard me with abhorrence and fear." He stopped, as if he couldn't continue. "I've always somehow known that she would turn her back on me when I stood before her, when I confessed to her that it was I, I who'd ..." And now he could not say anything more.
His eyes were glazed with tears. He sat back and appeared to take a deep breath, seeking to silently collect himself, and he pressed the fingers of his right hand hard against his own lips.
Why was this so seductive to me, so fascinating? Our emotions came from our minds, did they not, yet softened or hardened our physical bodies. And so his powerful spirit agitated this artfully made physical form in which he resided, with which he had become one. I felt drawn to him. I felt that he was no alien thing at all, but something very like us, a mystery whole unto himself, of course, but very like us.
"I have to go to Maharet," I said. I started to rise. "I have to stand with her now. You go to the conclave of course, but I'm going to her."
"Sit down," said Gabrielle.
I hesitated and then very reluctantly obeyed. I did want to reach the Amazon with hours to spare.
"There are other reasons why you should come with us," said Gabrielle, in the same firm voice.
"Oh, I know, don't tell me!" I said angrily. "They want me there. The young ones are clamoring for me to go. They attach some special importance to me. Armand and Louis want me to come. Benji wants me to come. I've heard it over and over."