by Anne Rice
"They have," he said. There were laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, and his lips spread back so easily in such a generous smile. "They certainly have, and I would never interfere with them now. I want you to know that! I would never seek to do what I did before. But right now, here, in this world, the world of Atalantaya, savages do live beyond this dome and the Wilderness lands can be a treacherous and terrible place. But remember what I'm saying. I would never seek again to have such power, to be such a dominant note."
"I understand."
"But I just wanted you to see it, this world, my world. I wanted you to see what I'd done, and see what it was that Bravenna destroyed, and what time buried, and what perished from the record, and what's remembered now only in legends and poems and songs."
Time, so much time passed! How did we get here in the street, walking together, and what had we been saying, the two of us, because it seemed like only a moment ago we'd been way up in the Creative Tower and we'd been talking, but I knew a day had passed. The sun was setting, and the towers were going opaque in shimmering shades of pink, and gold, and even a very pale metallic blue. The street was shaded here from the heat by leafy branches that arched completely over the sidewalk. People were rushing by us, on a multitude of ordinary errands, and we walked slowly on these smooth shining pavers, polished pavers, and suddenly the scent of an unknown flower enveloped me. I stopped. I looked around. Flowers covered the wall beside me, the flowers of an immense and sprawling vine, pretty cream-colored deep-throated flowers climbing up and up on a mass of tangled tendrils and creepers until I couldn't see distinct blossoms anymore or the farthermost tendrils of the vine. The sky was twilight purple and the building had turned to a luminescent violet.
Amel stood there watching me. The vine began to tremble.
"No, wait, look, it's coming undone!" I said. "The whole vine, look, it's losing its grip, it's falling."
And it was--the great leafy mass of it coming loose from the violet wall, and the flowers shivering as they fell, with the branches curling down upon themselves, and the whole thing collapsing suddenly and vanishing as if it had never been there, and there had never been all those blossoms, all those gorgeous blossoms stemming from one root.
"Oh, wait a minute!" I said. "I see."
Darkness.
"Don't go!" I said. "Don't leave me."
Voice against my ear. "I haven't left you!"
Darkness. Stillness. A stillness so perfect that I could have heard my own breathing if I had been breathing. I could have heard my own heart beating if it had been beating.
And then suddenly it was.
I jumped. I felt a pain in my chest that made me wince and sit up.
I couldn't keep quiet, the pain was so sharp and intense, but then it was over and my heart was pounding and I felt a flush of blood in my hands and in my face.
"I told you I wouldn't leave you."
Last glimmer of Atalantaya, twilight, the violet towers filled with soft yellow squares and rectangles, and Amel, long red hair mussed in the breeze, looking into my eyes and kissing me. "I love you, I have never loved anyone in all my long life as I love you."
Silence except for the steady rhythm of my heart.
I opened my eyes. Kapetria and Fareed stood before me, watching me with a horrid impersonal fascination. Louis was sitting on the coffin, and he was holding my right hand.
Rose and Viktor were standing nearby in the alcove before the stairway. They were radiant and regarding me with wonder, and I thought them the most marvelous beings in the whole world. Seth stood behind them.
"Did anyone suffer--?" I could not quite get the words out.
Fareed shook his head. "Everyone felt the shock of it. But within the space of five minutes, I was myself. Seth was himself. For Rose and Viktor it was longer, perhaps ten minutes, and then they were completely restored. Marius came down moments after that. The ballroom was filled with young and old who had felt the shock and recovered."
Only Kapetria looked distressed, wildly distressed. Kapetria was staring at me in alarm.
"Tell her I'm still here," said Amel.
"Oh, yes, of course," I said. "I'm so sorry, Kapetria. Amel says to tell you that he's still here." I didn't try to explain about the vivid dream, the sense of absolutely being somewhere else with Amel, the assurance that Amel had never left.
Kapetria closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she looked up and took a deep breath. Her eyes were moist and then they became glassy. She appeared to shiver all over, but then to collect herself and sink back into her thoughts.
A wave of nausea passed over me.
Left to my own choice, I wouldn't have moved so fast. I would have sat there for a longer period of time, but they wanted us to go upstairs.
"It didn't work, did it?" I said to Fareed. He didn't answer. "They are all fine, all of you are fine, and it just didn't work."
Each step jolted my entire frame and the nausea came again more than once, but I kept walking, doing what they wanted, until we reached the ballroom where it seemed the entire world of the Undead was gathered, even threaded all through the orchestra chairs, and out onto the open terrace, and out through the doors to the adjacent salons.
We made a space for ourselves in the middle, and I made up my mind I was going to appear absolutely strong for everyone here, no matter what I felt. I let go of Louis's hand and I let go of Fareed's hand. Cyril had his hand on my back and Thorne still held my right arm.
"It's all right," I said to them. Reluctantly, they allowed me to stand on my own.
All around, I saw pale hands raised with glittering little glass cell phones aloft, as if they were lights beamed down towards me.
Seth held a narrow silver candelabrum with all three candles burning. There was a feverish and low murmuring around us, rolling like a wave through the meandering assembly, with occasional gasps, and then silence again except for the faintest whispering like dry leaves crackling in a wind.
"Give that thing to me," I said. With my left hand, I took the candelabrum by its bulbous sterling-silver stem, and then I held my right hand, palm down, above the three quivering flames. It took a few seconds before the pain became unbearable and still I held it, gritting my teeth and letting it burn me, holding steady, not moving.
"Silence," said a voice.
I held firm. The pain was so acute I had to look away, look up at the painted ceiling, look up into the light of the chandelier. This is beyond bearing, and it's such a simple thing, just candles, just little flames. Steady little flame. A flame is a flame is a flame. I heard the sound of my flesh cracking.
My mother cried out, "That's enough!"
She pulled my hand away from the flames. She held my wrist with all her strength, her eyes flashing with protective rage. The candelabrum was taken away. Scent of smoking wicks.
Even in the midst of the pain, I saw she had let her hair down, all her glorious fair hair, and just for an instant she was my mother, the mother I knew, staring at my hand and then at me with her quick anxious gray eyes. I heard her whisper my name.
The palm of my hand was black, covered with big yellow blisters. It was a mass of agonizing throbbing pain. The black skin was cracked and bleeding, and then as I watched, it faded to red, bloody red, and the blisters shrank. The fissures closed. And the raw red flesh turned to dark blue. The pain was slowly fading. The hand was healing itself. The hand was turning a pale pink color and slowly it became purely white. Just my hand. The pain was gone.
And they didn't have to tell me:
No one else, no one else in the ballroom, no one else in the Chateau--no one else throughout the whole world--had died and no one had felt this pain.
The orchestra gathered. Everyone was talking. The music began and I went to the nearest chair and sat down. I looked out at the night sky beyond the terrace and I kept seeing the bright blue sky over Atalantaya, and feeling that soft tropical air.
29
Fareed
But this was just the beginning. Fareed would be gathering data on an infinite number of aspects of each and every individual whose nightly progress he followed--for years to come. Flannery Gilman, who worked at his side for hours without speaking, would keep feeding the data into the computers. And vampires of all ages would be hard put not to keep imagining things in the wake of the Great Disconnection, and it might be years before anything like a full picture of properties and probabilities and expectations could be made.
The bottom line? Nothing had changed. Nothing, that is, except that each and every one of them was now a discrete entity. Or as Louis described it, each and every one had his or her own etheric body with its etheric brain--the etheric brain collected, formed, and developed in the biological brain of the fledgling when the vampiric blood of the master had first gone into it, and the etheric body that had developed from that etheric brain all through the biological body of the fledgling as the vampiric blood circulated through the biological body driven by the biological heart.
Louis's simple explanation became the explanation that most could understand.
And Fareed had acknowledged more than once that Louis's simple understanding of old-fashioned Theosophical rhetoric had led them in the right way.
But Louis took no pleasure in his triumph. He received acknowledgments with sad eyes and bitter smiles. Fareed understood this only too well.
As for the Prince, Fareed couldn't imagine what life was really like for him now, and the Prince obviously didn't care to share.
They all knew that Amel could no longer travel into the minds of others, no longer be heard in other brains as a separate and distinct entity, but everyone had expected as much. Was Amel unhappy with this development? Had Amel's thirst become an agony because he was confined to one vampiric body? Lestat never said.
As he watched Lestat move through the inevitable crowds in the Chateau, Fareed began to wonder whether Lestat possessed extraordinary courage, or whether Lestat simply didn't know what fear was. He appeared oblivious to the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head.
He danced with the young ones and the old ones, took long walks up and down the mountain with Louis, played chess or cards whenever he wanted, and spent hours watching films in the screening room of the castle just as he had done before.
Maybe Lestat knew something that they didn't know.
But Fareed doubted that, and Seth said it wasn't so. Marius said it wasn't so. Lestat was simply living from moment to moment, with the same brashness and boldness that had always characterized him. Maybe he simply didn't care.
The fourth night, Lestat had gone to see Rhoshamandes without warning a single soul as to what he planned to do. Thorne and Cyril followed him as faithfully as they had in the past.
"You're our Prince," Cyril had declared. "Nothing has changed that. You think we're going to let anybody take you down? Grow up!"
The meeting with Rhoshamandes had taken place in the Outer Hebrides on his island of Saint Rayne in the formidable and famous castle that Rhoshamandes had built for himself a thousand years ago.
"I simply told him what had happened," Lestat explained afterwards. "I gave him a little demonstration. Nothing as elaborate as setting my right hand on fire, but he took the point. I thought he should know it was true, because I knew he wouldn't believe all the rumors and the extravagant claims. And I didn't want him believing all the predictions of rapid-fire deterioration. After all, he is one of us."
After all, he is one of us.
Cyril and Thorne attested to the fact that Rhoshamandes had received the Prince with cordiality, inviting him in and taking him on a little tour of the castle. They had gone out on the Benedicta together. Rhoshamandes had been candid about fearing the Replimoids. But Lestat had assured Rhosh that the Replimoids were occupied with far more important things than settling any old score. And the Replimoids had given their word.
Had the two discussed what the Replimoids would do next?
"No," said Lestat. "That's no one's concern now but mine."
Rhoshamandes had given Lestat a copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. And Lestat had been seen reading it more than once.
"I see a change in him," said Marius. "It isn't resignation. It isn't courage. It's practicality. He's always been practical. He knows it's about to come to a head."
"We have no hope of safely detaching the spirit from him," said Fareed. "But there has to be a way to do it. There has to be."
"Leave it to Kapetria," said Seth. "Whatever we do is likely to be a blunder compared to what she might do."
It wasn't that she had brought any superior skill to the experiment of stopping Lestat's heart. She hadn't. She'd simply come to assist, to watch, to try to calculate when the experiment might have to be brought to an end. But when it came to the possible fate of Amel, of Amel's transfer into another body, Kapetria was the only one who knew anything at all.
Before she left on the night of the heart-stopping experiment, Fareed had given her a large vial of vampiric blood--from his own veins. She had asked for that. And since she'd gifted him with a vial of her own blood, how could he refuse?
He was surprised that she'd waited so long to ask for it, actually. But then he could not really construct a path for her because there was simply too much he didn't know. But Fareed and Seth talked about it all the time.
"Garekyn saw the etheric brain in the biological brain," Seth pointed out whenever they discussed it. "He described it as something sizzling, sparkling, that he could see. Well, we can't see it. And just possibly Kapetria can see the very thing she'll seek to remove from Lestat's head without killing him. Just possibly she has developed instruments that could see it because she herself can see it."
If this was a possibility, Kapetria never said. After the experiment, she had left the Chateau in the same sleek dark blue Ferrari that had brought her there. And the Prince had laid down the law that no one was to try to follow her, or track her license plate, or hack the facial recognition software systems of Europe for any clues as to where the Replimoids were based.
"We made the decision to leave her alone and we leave her alone," said Lestat. "She knows what she's going to do." He had repeated this since with the same rationale he gave that night. "I know what she's going to do because I know what I would do if I were her."
Whenever three or more ancient ones were gathered together with him, they ended up pounding Fareed with questions on the entire matter, whether the Prince was present or not. But Fareed had never come up with any new answers.
The Prince himself never asked questions. But surely he listened. Surely he heard all the theories being floated, all the back-and-forth amongst Fareed and Seth and Flannery Gilman. Viktor was working with Flannery now; Viktor had started "reading medicine" with his mother, as they used to call it in the old days. Viktor felt driven to find some solution. And Viktor worried about many things.
"What is to stop every blood drinker from making a multitude of other blood drinkers?" asked Viktor. "Before, everyone had agreed; no more making of blood drinkers until the Court had established some rules. But now? Without the problem of Amel, what's to stop our ranks from increasing again until there are wars in the streets?"
Also Viktor
wasn't at all convinced the modern world would ignore the vampires forever as fictional. True, the bias against vampire beliefs in modern medicine was so widespread and rigid that any deviating scientist could be ruined for life. His own mother, Flannery, had been marginalized and destroyed because she had claimed to believe in the vampires. This was still happening to doctors and scientists in parts of the world. But Viktor said it couldn't go on forever. Governments must be investigating. Somebody would round up evidence of the indisputable truth.
Seth said no. The Prince said no. "They'll never believe in us any more than they believe in aliens from other planets or near-death experiences, or the existence of ghosts. And there is no indisputable truth. One doctor's indisputable truth is another man's fantastic lie."
Fareed's head ached. Too much to study; too many directions to take; too many questions; he lacked the discipline now that always upheld him in the past.
And Amel. What went on with Amel?
It was still possible to hear the voice of Amel as Lestat was hearing it--Fareed's telepathic powers had always been considerable. Anytime he was close to Lestat he could eavesdrop. Unless the two wanted to be sealed up in solitude. Then no one could telepathically penetrate their exchanges any more now than before. When Amel wanted to be overheard, he made it obvious. He laughed; he raged; he screamed; he sang in the ancient tongue. When he didn't, he spoke to Lestat alone.
Was all peace and harmony between the two of them?
Marius said no. Amel was gaining ever-greater ascendency over Lestat's body. Lestat tried to conceal this. But Fareed knew it was true. Fareed could discern those brief periods when the Prince allowed Amel to take over--to lift a pen and scrawl innumerable pictographs over pages and pages of paper, or to pick up the cell phone and tap in with one thumb a number that only Amel knew.
Fareed knew when this was happening that Lestat was watching all of it with the same hard focus with which Fareed and Seth watched it. But what about the moments when Lestat didn't want to give in to this interior command center? Did he really like waking up one night last week at sunset to discover the white marble walls of his vault covered in jagged and bizarre alphabetical writing in the ancient tongue?--all of this done apparently during daylight hours with a felt-tip pen that Amel had pilfered without Lestat's knowledge yet obviously using Lestat's left hand?
