by Rice, Anne
Four—that no vampire may ever destroy another vampire, except that the coven master has the power of life and death over all of his flock. And it is, further, his obligation to lead the old ones and the mad ones into the fire when they can longer serve Satan as they should. It is his obligation to destroy all vampires who are not properly made. It is his obligation to destroy those who are so badly wounded that they cannot survive on their own. And it is his obligation finally to seek the destruction of all outcasts and all who have broken these laws.
Five—that no vampire shall ever reveal his true nature to a mortal and allow that mortal to live. No vampire must ever reveal the history of the vampires to a mortal and let the mortal live. No vampire must commit to writing the history of the vampires or any true knowledge of vampires lest such a history be found by mortals and believed. And a vampire’s name must never be known to mortals, save from his tombstone, and never must any vampire reveal to mortals the location of his or any other vampire’s lair.
These then were the great commandments, which all vampires must obey. And this was the condition of existence among all the Undead.
Yet Armand should know that there had always been stories of ancient ones, heretic vampires of frightening power who submitted to no authority, not even that of the devil—vampires who had survived for thousands of years. Children of the Millennia, they were sometimes called. In the north of Europe there were tales of Mael, who dwelt in the forests of England and Scotland; and in Asia Minor the legend of Pandora. And in Egypt, the ancient tale of the vampire Ramses, seen again in this very time.
In all parts of the world one found such tales. And one could easily dismiss them as fanciful save for one thing. The ancient heretic Marius had been found in Venice, and there punished by the Children of Darkness. The legend of Marius had been true. But Marius was no more.
Armand said nothing to this last judgment. He did not tell Santino of the dreams he had had. In truth the dreams had dimmed inside Armand as had the colors of Marius’s paintings. They were no longer held in Armand’s mind or heart to be discovered by others who might try to see.
When Santino spoke of Those Who Must Be Kept, Armand again confessed that he did not know the meaning of it. Neither did Santino, nor any vampire that Santino had ever known.
Dead was the secret. Dead was Marius. And so consign to silence the old and useless mystery. Satan is our Lord and Master. In Satan, all is understood and all is known.
Armand pleased Santino. He memorized the laws, perfected his performance of the ceremonial incantations, the rituals, and the prayers. He saw the greatest Sabbats he was ever to witness. And he learned from the most powerful and skillful and beautiful vampires he was ever to know. He learned so well that he became a missionary sent out to gather the vagrant Children of Darkness into covens, and guide others in the performance of the Sabbat, and the working of the Dark Trick when the world and the flesh and the devil called for it to be done.
In Spain and in Germany and in France, he had taught the Dark Blessings and Dark Rituals, and he had known savage and tenacious Children of Darkness, and dim flames had flared in him in their company and in those moments when the coven surrounded him, comforted by him, deriving its unity from his strength.
He had perfected the act of killing beyond the abilities of all the Children of Darkness that he knew. He had learned to summon those who truly wished to die. He had but to stand near the dwellings of mortals and call silently to see his victim appear.
Old, young, wretched, diseased, the ugly or the beautiful, it did not matter because he did not choose. Dazzling visions he gave, if they should want to receive, but he did not move towards them nor even close his arms around them. Drawn inexorably towards him, it was they who embraced him. And when their warm living flesh touched him, when he opened his lips and felt the blood spill, he knew the only surcease from misery that he could know.
It seemed to him in the best of these moments that his way was profoundly spiritual, uncontaminated by the appetites and confusions that made up the world, despite the carnal rapture of the kill.
In that act the spiritual and the carnal came together, and it was the spiritual, he was convinced, that survived. Holy Communion it seemed to him, the Blood of the Children of Christ serving only to bring the essence of life itself into his understanding for the split second in which death occurred. Only the great saints of God were his equals in this spirituality, this confrontation with mystery, this existence of meditation and denial.
Yet he had seen the greatest of his companions vanish, bring destruction upon themselves, go mad. He had witnessed the inevitable dissolution of covens, seen immortality defeat the most perfectly made Children of Darkness, and it seemed at times some awesome punishment that it never defeated him.
Was he destined to be one of the ancient ones? The Children of the Millennia? Could one believe those stories which persisted still?
Now and then a roaming vampire would speak of the fabled Pandora glimpsed in the far-off Russian city of Moscow, or of Mael living on the bleak English coast. The wanderers told even of Marius—that he had been seen again in Egypt, or in Greece. But these storytellers had not themselves laid eyes upon the legendary ones. They knew nothing really. These were often-repeated tales.
They did not distract or amuse the obedient servant of Satan. In quiet allegiance to the Dark Ways, Armand continued to serve.
Yet in the centuries of his long obedience, Armand kept two secrets to himself. These were his property, these secrets, more purely his than the coffin in which he locked himself by day, or the few amulets he wore.
The first was that no matter how great his loneliness, or how long the search for brothers and sisters in whom he might find some comfort, he never worked the Dark Trick himself. He wouldn’t give that to Satan, no Child of Darkness made by him.
And the other secret, which he kept from his followers for their sake, was simply the extent of his ever deepening despair.
That he craved nothing, cherished nothing, believed nothing finally, and took not one particle of pleasure in his ever increasing and awesome powers, and existed from moment to moment in a void broken once every night of his eternal life by the kill—that secret he had kept from them as long as they had needed him and it had been possible to lead them because his fear would have made them afraid.
But it was finished.
A great cycle had ended, and even years ago he had felt it closing without understanding it was a cycle at all.
From Rome there came the garbled travelers’ accounts, old when they were told to him, that the leader, Santino, had abandoned his flock. Some said he had gone mad into the countryside, others that he had leapt into the fire, others that “the world” had swallowed him, that he had been borne off in a black coach with mortals never to be seen again.
“We go into the fire or we go into legend,” said a teller of the tale.
Then came accounts of chaos in Rome, of dozens of leaders who put on the black hood and the black robes to preside over the coven. And then it seemed there were none.
Since the year 1700 there had been no word anymore from Italy. For half a century Armand had not been able to trust to his passion or that of the others around him to create the frenzy of the true Sabbat. And he had dreamed of his old Master, Marius, in those rich robes of red velvet, and seen the palazzo full of vibrant paintings, and he had been afraid.
Then another had come.
His children rushed down into the cellars beneath les Innocents to describe to him this new vampire, who wore a fur-lined cloak of red velvet and could profane the churches and strike down those who wore crosses and walk in the places of light. Red velvet. It was mere coincidence, and yet it maddened him and seemed an insult to him, a gratuitous pain that his soul couldn’t bear.
And then the woman had been made, the woman with the hair of a lion and the name of an angel, beautiful and powerful as her son.
And he had come up the stairwa
y out of the catacomb, leading the band against us, as the hooded ones had come to destroy him and his Master in Venice centuries before.
And it had failed.
He stood dressed in these strange lace and brocade garments. He carried coins in his pockets. His mind swam with images from the thousands of books he had read. And he felt himself pierced with all he had witnessed in the places of light in the great city called Paris, and it was as if he could hear his old Master whispering in his ear:
But a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has ever seen it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things.
“All things have eluded my understanding,” he said. “I am as one whom the earth has given back, and you, Lestat and Gabrielle, are like the images painted by my old Master in cerulean and carmine and gold.”
He stood still in the doorway, his hands on the backs of his arms, and he was looking at us, asking silently:
What is there to know? What is there to give? We are the abandoned of God. And there is no Devil’s Road spinning out before me and there are no bells of hell ringing in my ears.
4
An hour passed. Perhaps more. Armand sat by the fire. No marks any longer on his face from the long-forgotten battle. He seemed, in his stillness, to be as fragile as an emptied shell.
Gabrielle sat across from him, and she too stared at the flames in silence, her face weary and seemingly compassionate. It was painful for me not to know her thoughts.
I was thinking of Marius. And Marius and Marius … the vampire who had painted pictures in and of the real world. Triptychs, portraits, frescoes on the walls of his palazzo.
And the real world had never suspected him nor hunted him nor cast him out. It was this band of hooded fiends who came to burn the paintings, the ones who shared the Dark Gift with him—had he himself ever called it the Dark Gift?—they were the ones who said he couldn’t live and create among mortals. Not mortals.
I saw the little stage at Renaud’s and I heard myself sing and the singing become a roar. Nicolas said, “It is splendid.” I said, “It is petty.” And it was like striking Nicolas. In my imagination he said what he had not said that night: “Let me have what I can believe in. You would never do that.”
The triptychs of Marius were in churches and convent chapels, maybe on the walls of the great houses in Venice and Padua. The vampires would not have gone into holy places to pull them down. So they were there somewhere, with a signature perhaps worked into the detail, these creations of the vampire who surrounded himself with mortal apprentices, kept a mortal lover from whom he took the little drink, went out alone to kill.
I thought of the night in the inn when I had seen the meaninglessness of life, and the soft fathomless despair of Armand’s story seemed an ocean in which I might drown. This was worse than the blasted shore in Nicki’s mind. This was for three centuries, this darkness, this nothingness.
The radiant auburn-haired child by the fire could open his mouth again and out would come blackness like ink to cover the world.
That is, if there had not been this protagonist, this Venetian master, who had committed the heretical act of making meaning on the panels he painted—it had to be meaning—and our own kind, the elect of Satan, had made him into a living torch.
Had Gabrielle seen these paintings in the story as I had seen them? Did they burn in her mind’s eye as they did in mine?
Marius was traveling some route into my soul that would let him roam there forever, along with the hooded fiends who turned the paintings into chaos again.
In a dull sort of misery, I thought of the travelers’ tales—that Marius was alive, seen in Egypt or Greece.
I wanted to ask Armand, wasn’t it possible? Marius must have been so very strong … But it seemed disrespectful of him to ask.
“Old legend,” he whispered. His voice was as precise as the inner voice. Unhurriedly, he continued without ever looking away from the flames. “Legend from the olden times before they destroyed us both.”
“Perhaps not,” I said. Echo of the visions, paintings on the walls. “Maybe Marius is alive.”
“We are miracles or horrors,” he said quietly, “depending upon how you wish to see us. And when “you first know about us, whether it’s through the dark blood or promises or visitations, you think anything is possible. But that isn’t so. The world closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you don’t hope for other miracles. That is, you become accustomed to the new limits and the limits define everything once again. So they say Marius continues. They all continue somewhere, that’s what you want to believe.
“Not a single one remains in the coven in Rome from those nights when I was taught the ritual; and maybe the coven itself is no longer even there. Years and years have passed since there was any communication from the coven. But they all exist somewhere, don’t they? After all, we can’t die.” He sighed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.
Something greater and more terrible mattered, that this despair might crush Armand beneath it. That in spite of the thirst in him now, the blood lost when we had fought together, and the silent furnace of his body healing the bruises and the broken flesh, he could not will himself into the world above to hunt. Rather suffer the thirst and the heat of the silent furnace. Rather stay here and be with us.
But he already knew the answer, that he could not be with us.
Gabrielle and I didn’t have to speak to let him know. We did not even have to resolve the question in our minds. He knew, the way God might know the future because God is the possessor of all the facts.
Unbearable anguish. And Gabrielle’s expression all the more weary, sad.
“You know that with all my soul I do want to take you with us,” I said. I was surprised at my own emotion. “But it would be disaster for us all.”
No change in him. He knew. No challenge from Gabrielle.
“I cannot stop thinking of Marius,” I confessed.
I know. And you do not think of Those Who Must Be Kept, which is most strange.
“That is merely another mystery,” I said. “And there are a thousand mysteries. I think of Marius! And I’m too much the slave of my own obsessions and fascination. It’s a dreadful thing to linger so on Marius, to extract that one radiant figure from the tale.”
Doesn’t matter. If it pleases you, take it. I do not lose what I give.
“When a being reveals his pain in such a torrent, you are bound to respect the whole of the tragedy. You have to try to comprehend. And such helplessness, such despair is almost incomprehensible to me. That’s why I think of Marius. Marius I understand. You I don’t understand.”
Why?
Silence.
Didn’t he deserve the truth?
“I’ve been a rebel always,” I said. “You’ve been the slave of everything that ever claimed you.”
“I was the leader of my coven!”
“No. You were the slave of Marius and then of the Children of Darkness. You fell under the spell of one and then the other. What you suffer now is the absence of a spell. I think I shudder that you caused me so to understand it for a little while, to know it as if I were a different being than I am.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, eyes still on the fire. “You think too much in terms of decision and action. This tale is no explanation. And I am not a being who requires a respectful acknowledgment in your thoughts or in words. And we all know the answer you have given is too immense to be voiced and we all three of us know that it is final. What I don’t know is why. So I am a creature very different from you, and so you cannot understand me. Why can’t I go with you? I will do whatever you wish if you take me with you. I will be under your spell.”
I thought of Marius with his brush and the pots of egg tempera.
“How could you have ever believed anything that they told you after they burned those paintings?” I asked. “How could you have given your
self over to them?”
Agitation, rising anger.
Caution in Gabrielle’s face, but not fear.
“And you, when you stood on the stage and you saw the audience screaming to get out of the theater—how my followers described this to me, the vampire terrifying the crowd and the crowd streaming into the boulevard du Temple—what did you believe? That you did not belong among mortals, that’s what you believed. You knew you did not. And there was no band of fiends in hooded robes to tell you. You knew. So Marius did not belong among mortals. So I did not.”
“Ah, but it’s different.”
“No, it is not. That’s why you scorn the Theater of the Vampires which is now at this very moment working out its little dramas to bring in the gold from the boulevard crowds. You do not wish to deceive as Marius deceived. It divides you ever more from mankind. You want to pretend to be mortal, but to deceive makes you angry and it makes you kill.”
“In that moment on the stage,” I said, “I revealed myself. I did the very opposite of deceiving. I wanted somehow in making manifest the monstrosity of myself to be joined with my fellow humans again. Better they should run from me than not see me. Better they should know I was something monstrous than for me to glide through the world unrecognized by those upon whom I preyed.”
“But it was not better.”
“No. What Marius did was better. He did not deceive.”
“Of course he did. He fooled everyone!”
“No. He found a way to imitate mortal life. To be one with mortals. He slew only the evildoer, and he painted as mortals paint. Angels and blue skies, clouds, those are the things you made me see when you were telling. He created good things. And I see wisdom in him and a lack of vanity. He did not need to reveal himself. He had lived a thousand years and he believed more in the vistas of heaven that he painted than in himself.”