by Anne Rice
And Benji’s radio voice came back to me. “We are a parentless tribe. Where are you, old ones? Why don’t you spread your wings to shelter us?”
“Yes, mortal victims, very well,” I said.
The following night, as I sat in my comfortable apartment in the Château with Louis and Gabrielle, we pondered the vitality of the Court that was increasing in size around us. We talked of Rhosh and why he’d kept his prisoners alive, rather than destroying them.
“He wanted you to suffer what he had suffered,” said my mother. “That much he told me. It’s the last thing I remember before I found myself unable to move or breathe and falling into a kind of emptiness.” I couldn’t bear to picture it, my mother in the arms of that demon. But why had he not crushed her head, which he might have done with one hand as he spirited her away from us?
I saw Louis shuddering, hugging the backs of his arms. He was still battered by the abduction, and gave no hint of how he had experienced it.
“I think he meant to use us after you were dead,” my mother said. “I think he meant to destroy you and then sue for peace, offering to return us to the tribe.”
“Yes, I think that is a very good guess,” I said.
But we all agreed we’d never really know. As for the words he’d spoken in his last moments, Rhosh was bargaining for his own life with me.
“I will never be able to convey,” I said, “how quickly it all happened. One moment he had me at his mercy; the next he was blind, and essentially helpless. And no matter how great is the power of one to burn or to destroy, no blood drinker possesses a gift for putting an end to the flames once he’s engulfed by them. Only water will do that. If he’d fled the room and plunged into the sea, he might have saved himself. And it was an easy thing to do. But I gave him no time to realize it.”
I saw him again, stumbling, pressed back against the fireplace by all the force I could muster against him. Surely he had known which way to flee. But then I’d pounded him against the stones, and sent the fire in one swift blast after another.
I felt no pity for him in those moments, no pity for him anymore at all. That was plain enough. It seemed impossible that I had ever felt pity for him. But I was keenly aware that something else had prevented me from condemning him to death, and that was simply my respect for him as a living being.
I didn’t like having the power of life or death over others in a formal way. God knows, and God alone, how many lives I’ve extinguished. But to formally condemn a creature of my own ilk to death, that is not something I would ever be able to do with ease, no matter how the council might press me on it. I saw in my mind’s eye the death of Baudwin, and my heart went cold remembering those calls for it. There is killing and there is killing. There is murder; there is massacre; there is slaughter. And what I willed for this Court was something that was now in great peril.
But how could I explain this to Gabrielle and Louis, Louis who had confessed long years ago that the taking of a human life was his unequivocal definition of evil? Louis who was hungry now and pale, and had asked me more than once if I’d come with him to Paris, Paris where he might hunt in the early hours, alone with only me at his side, hunt for something neither of us ever really found.
For the first time, I told them both the story of my return with Rhoshamandes’s remains, even though I knew they’d heard it from others. I told them of how Baudwin had been brought up, and how Santh had beheaded him. I told them of how the ballroom reverberated with merciless cries as an immortal being, a being immune to sickness and natural death, had perished along with all he’d ever seen, and all he knew, as Antoine waited to strike up the dance that would celebrate the being’s passing.
“And this little ritual you despise, is that it?” It was my mother who asked this question, sitting back on the antique velvet couch in her jungle khaki and boots, her hair once more braided behind her back. “Is that what you’re telling us?”
“Yes,” I said. “I despised it.” I looked away. Her eyes were no harder now than they usually were, and her tone no less cynical and remote.
“But they loved it,” said Louis. He had not spoken all this while. “Of course they did.”
“As we speak, the old dungeons under this house are being repaired,” I said. “An even lower level of cells has been discovered. The filth of centuries is being removed.”
“Lestat, the fledglings long to be here with you,” said Louis, “and you know their need for blood.”
“Ah, so you too are for it,” I said.
“And you are not?” he asked. He was genuinely puzzled.
I didn’t answer.
“It is the young ones who need you,” Louis said, “far more than the elders. It is the young ones whom you must prepare for the Devil’s Road. And the young ones must drink or suffer agony.”
“I know,” I said dejectedly.
I realized suddenly and silently that Louis was regarding me the way the others did, that he was actually looking at me with a mixture of awe and wonder.
“Good Lord, don’t tell me you are starting to believe all this!” I said.
A shadow of disappointment fell over his face. He implored me as he spoke:
“You mean to tell me that you don’t believe it?”
My mother laughed softly under her breath. “He believes it, Louis,” she said. Her voice had a cheerful ring to it. “He believes in it and he believes it, that the Court has changed our world forever. And it’s what he wants, and what he’s always wanted.”
I had always wanted this? How could she believe such a thing, but I knew she was speaking the truth, and I had the deep disconcerting suspicion that she knew more about the truth of the matter than I did.
“The mortal prisoners,” she said, “this was inevitable. Had you not found those old dungeons under the southwest tower, you would have had to create them. You have the council behind your decision. You should have—.” She broke off with a short apologetic gesture.
“I know, Mother,” I said. “I know. I should have listened to them about Rhoshamandes a long time before. I do know that now.”
I couldn’t read the expression on her face. I couldn’t read the expression on Louis’s face either, but they were both looking at me, and then my mother came close to me, and though she did not touch me, she sat beside me on the floor in front of the fireplace.
“You’re not alone,” she said. “No matter how strong you are, my son,” she said. “You are not alone anymore.”
Louis gazed at me with a faint smile on his lips, and I felt a tenderness for both of them suddenly that I couldn’t express. Louis’s words came gently and slowly from his lips.
“You have all of us.”
Chapter 23
Three nights later our dungeon cells were filled with wretched mortal reprobates, drug dealers, slave traders, mercenaries, terrorists, pimps, gunrunners, and assassins. The old kitchens I’d installed when I renovated the Château were now pressed into service in feeding them. And the furnace stood ready with its belly of fire for whatever refuse would be fed to it. And when I closed my eyes, I could hear the babble of voices down there in the darkness, where the wine and the food never ran out, speculating on which tyrannical government had dared to put them in this unspeakable place and how they might buy their way out of it. The dregs of Mumbai, Hong Kong, San Salvador, Caracas, Natal, Detroit, and Baltimore were soon thrown into the mix, along with fabled gangsters, and arms traffickers from Moscow, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Spain.
I insisted against all objections that there would be no public ritual of feeding these hapless thugs to a crowd, but that the hungry could go down the winding stone stairs to pick their victims silently by torchlight and have them brought to a large richly furnished chamber; and there the feeding would take place, as it had so often in the past, against the backdrop of plastered walls, darkly varnis
hed paintings in ornate frames, damask chairs, and a great canopy bed hung with silk and golden embroidery. Amongst pillows or on the thick wool carpet, the condemned would succumb to the fatal embrace, with only the silence to witness it.
“That is how it must be,” I said. “We are not barbarians.”
Chapter 24
The rebuilding of the village was happening very fast, in spite of the cruel winter, and as more mortal carpenters and craftsmen poured into the valley, I made the decision to offer the Dark Gift to my head architect, Alain Abelard, when all the rebuilding was done. Of course I didn’t confide my decision to him. I wanted to discuss it with the council before I did that.
Marius was hard at work once again on the documents that would embody our basic laws. He had much to say on the making of blood drinkers, and was struggling to get his best ideas into a manageable form.
Amel, Kapetria, and the colony of Replimoids were completely resettled in England within a week. I visited often, sometimes without seeing anyone in particular, and just walking about their little British village and the restored church and the spacious grounds that surrounded their manor house and the restored asylum building in which their laboratories were hard at work with research so technical and baffling to me that I resolved never to underestimate it or fear it, trusting Amel’s love to keep us all safe.
It was clear to me that Gremt, the spectral founder of the Talamasca, was now part of Kapetria’s community along with Hesketh and Teskhamen, though Teskhamen often came to Court.
I knew that at least one of Kapetria’s projects was making a study of the flesh-and-blood body that Gremt had formed for himself, and I did find myself curious about that. Magnus also was in residence with Kapetria in England, and that made me curious as well. Could Kapetria make a flesh-and-blood body for Magnus? For Hesketh? For any of those Earthbound human souls that clung to the atmosphere around us, listening to us, watching us, wanting to reenter the life they were slowly forgetting as the years passed?
Armand’s warnings were ever on my mind.
More than once I sat with Kapetria in her office discussing her long-ago commitment to do nothing that would ever harm humanity, and I was convinced that she believed in this old vow.
“We will always be the People of the Purpose,” Kapetria assured me. “Let me tell you about one small bit of evidence we’ve collected about ourselves so far. Every clone child born of my parts has this full commitment, and almost all of my knowledge, at least all of that knowledge with which I was initially endowed—and it’s that way with the direct clone children of any of us who make up the original team.
“Allow me to point out that there is no end to the number of such clone children we can generate. Severing the very same limb each time I want to give birth to another works as effectively as choosing another limb. But…” She paused, her finger raised to insist on my close attention.
“But,” she continued. “If I should make a clone child from a clone child, the purpose and the knowledge are not as firmly imprinted as with the direct clone. And then if a clone child is made from that third-generation clone child, there is even less knowledge and less emotional conviction to the purpose, and so on it goes so that by the time we reach the fifth-generation child made from the fourth generation, there is almost no innate knowledge, no innate grasp of science or history or logic, and there is no knowledge of the purpose at all.”
I was slightly horrified.
“This fifth-generation clone child is not dim-witted so much as passive, with a malleable and agreeable personality which seems to be the pale shadow of my own. Now, to know, as I had to know, I have gone on to produce a sixth generation and a seventh. But the seventh is so obedient and compliant, so easily led and manipulated, that I hesitated to go further. But then again, I felt that I had to go on, and with the tenth generation I produced a perfect slave.”
“I see,” I said.
“Now the slave, even with her diminished intelligence and total lack of ambition or curiosity, nevertheless knows pain and seeks to avoid it, and appears to want only the simplest comforts and peace. The slave likes nothing better than to sit outside in my garden and watch the movement of the trees in the breeze.”
“Is the slave capable of anger, or malice, or the will to do harm?”
“Apparently not,” she responded. “But how can we know? I can tell you think that if I were to present you with a present of such a tenth-generation Replimoid she would be content as your guest forever supplying you with blood whenever you desired it. Teskhamen has put that to the test. There is a slight response in the slave to being praised for obedience, a certain happiness in knowing that her blood has nourished another, but almost no real sense of the difference between herself and other clone children or blood drinkers or incarnate spirits such as Gremt. To the tenth-generation slave, all beings register socially in terms of what they say and how they smile or frown.”
“This is a power that could be misused in hideous ways,” I said.
“Absolutely. So right now, it is forbidden amongst us for any clone child to propagate. We alone propagate—Derek, Garekyn, Welf, and I.”
“What became of the line of generations?” I asked.
“Well, there are two—one line from me and one from Derek, and the results were about the same. They are all valued members of the community here, but the tenth generation has to be watched. Should I ask Karbella, the tenth-generation clone of me, to sweep the paths of the garden outside, she will sweep them hour by hour, day and night, week after week, month after month, until told to stop.”
“I see.”
“The generation right before Karbella is far more useful in terms of service, in that it possesses what we call common sense and a broad simplified awareness of our overall objectives here. What comes after Karbella, I do not know.” She gave a sigh at that point, but then continued. “But sooner or later, I will want to know,” she said, “because I must know everything about us, and I must discover why it is that our clones inherit ‘the Purpose’ as we redefined it for ourselves before the city of Atalantaya fell, and not the original purpose given us when we were sent here—to destroy the city of Atalantaya and the whole human race.”
“Which of your fields of study excites you the most?” I asked.
“Figuring out why the body I grew for Amel has so many faults.”
“But what are the faults?” I asked. Amel appeared not only to be a beautiful healthy male, but to have an immense passion for life.
“He cannot procreate at all,” said Kapetria. “And he does not experience the pleasure of attempted procreation.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “And he’s aware of this deficiency, he has to be.”
“Oh, he is aware of it, but he suffers no desire, so doesn’t feel the lack of anything, and indeed loves everything equally whether it is embracing me or drinking a glass of fine wine, or listening to a symphony. In fact, he’s convinced that his erotic passions pervade his entire body and mind, and that he approaches all of life with an orgiastic fervor that he’s not eager to lose.”
I thought of him, of the joy he found in listening to music, of the way that he loved to dance, of the manner in which he could be distracted and obsessed with the spectacle of the rain falling on the pavements in the lamplight or the moon slipping behind layers of cloud.
“That’s how it is with us,” I said, “except that when we drink blood, when we take the victim to the brink, there’s a…a satisfaction we don’t know in any other way.”
“I know,” she said. “He’s explained all this to me. His mind is running over with observations and discoveries to the point where he can’t organize what he knows, or focus on any one topic, and is forever asking me for some sort of medication to slow down the process, if for no other reason, so that he can sleep.”
“I can understand.”
> “He says that when the vampires lie dormant in the hours of the day, their minds and bodies experience all manner of essential processes, that it is not merely paralysis because the sun has risen, that it is part of a cycle triggered by changes in the atmosphere prompted by the sun’s rays.”
“He must have a great deal to teach us as well as you,” I said. I reflected on my battle with Rhoshamandes, and the long journey westward to return to France. My exhaustion had become excruciating, as it can be with human beings. We blood drinkers could be tortured by eternal wakefulness just as humans can.
“Yes,” Kapetria said, addressing my comment, “but until Amel can get some control over his impulses, he won’t be teaching people anything. The reason he likes to be with you, and not with us, is that you can think as fast as he thinks, and you keep bringing him back to the subject, and also, well, he loves you in a special way. Each of us loves you in a special way. All the Court, all of them love you in unique and special ways.”
“Isn’t that true of everyone?” I said.
“I was driving at something particular to you, your seeming gift for making each person you encounter feel connected to you. I suspect others have the gift, but in you the gift is strong.”
I felt uneasy with this topic. I didn’t really want to talk about myself. I changed the subject, asking if she and the others would all come to the up and coming ball.
“Our invitation has gone out to the whole world,” I said, “and we’re finding that blood drinkers who ignored us in the past are coming to us. Gregory and Seth are receiving letters. Fareed has the idea that there might be two thousand of us when the ballroom opens. I suppose there will be dancing on the terrace and dancing in the corridors and in the adjacent rooms.”
“I believe it is best if we do not come,” she said. “I don’t think you need include us in your special entertainments. I think it is better for you and for your fellow blood drinkers that we not be there—that it be a night for only you and them.”