14
Rhoshamandes and Benedict
“BE CALM,” he said. “Whatever you saw, whatever almost happened to you, you’re safe now. Be calm and talk to me. Tell me precisely what you saw.”
“Rhosh, it was unspeakable!” said Benedict.
Benedict sat at the desk with his head down on his folded arms, sobbing.
Rhosh, known to so many others through the ages as Rhoshamandes, sat by the cavernous hearth in the old stone room looking at his fledgling with a mixture of impatience and irresistible sympathy. He had never been able to divorce himself entirely from Benedict’s boiling emotions, and maybe he had never really wanted to do that. Of all his companions and fledglings through the centuries, he loved Benedict the most—this child of Merovingian royalty who had been such a dreamy Latin scholar in his time, so eager to understand those years which the world now called the Dark Ages. How he’d cried when brought into the Blood, sure of his ultimate damnation, and only come round to worship Rhoshamandes instead of his Christian god—never believing in a world untainted by fear of perdition. But this great superstitious fear was, however, part of Benedict’s eternal charm.
And this hapless child had had a gift for making other blood drinkers better than himself as time passed. Now that was quite a mystery to Rhosh, but it was fact.
It was Benedict who had made the young Notker the Wise of Prüm, who likely survived to this day, a mad genius sustained on music as much as human blood.
Pretty Benedict, always a joy to look at, if not to listen to, whose tears could be as beguiling as his smiles.
Rhoshamandes was dressed in what might have passed for a monk’s long hooded robe of heavy gray wool with a thick black leather belt around the waist, and big deep sleeves. But the robe was in fact made from fine cashmere, and the buckle on his belt was pewter and revealed a delicately modeled face of Medusa with writhing snakes for hair and a howling mouth. He wore exquisitely crafted brown leather sandals because he didn’t feel the cold here on this craggy green island in the Outer Hebrides.
He had short and very soft golden-brown hair and large blue eyes. He’d been born thousands of years ago on the island of Crete to parents of Indo-European descent, and gone down into Egypt when he was twenty. His skin was the smooth creamy tan of immortals who go into the sun often in order to pass for human, and it made his eyes appear wondrously bright and beautiful.
He and Benedict were speaking English now, the language they’d shared for the last seven hundred years, more or less, the Old French and the Latin having passed from their daily speech but not their libraries. Rhosh knew ancient tongues, tongues never known to Benedict.
“It burnt them all,” Benedict sobbed. “It destroyed them completely,” he said in his muffled, hopeless voice.
“Sit up and look at me,” said Rhoshamandes. “I am talking to you, Benedict. Now look at me and tell me precisely what happened.”
Benedict sat back in the chair, his long brown curly hair mussed and falling into his eyes, his boyish mouth quivering. Of course his face was smeared with blood and so were his clothes, his wool sweater and his tweed jacket. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Vampires who spilt blood on their garments either from victims or tears were anathema! Nothing so revolted Rhoshamandes about modern fictive and film vampires as their utter unrealistic sloppiness.
And Benedict looked perfectly like a cheap television vampire with that blood all over him.
He’d be the image of an eighteen-year-old youth forever because that is what he was when he’d been made a blood drinker, just as Rhoshamandes would always look like a man a few years older than that with a fuller chest and heavier arms. But Benedict had always had a childlike personality. No guile, no cunning. He might never have outgrown it in mortal life. Something to do with Christ’s command, “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Benedict had not only been a monk in his youth, he’d been a mystic.
Who could know?
Rhoshamandes, on the other hand, if it mattered, had been the eldest of ten mortal children and a man at the age of twelve, protecting his mother. Palace intrigue. The day she’d been murdered, he’d run away to sea and survived by his wits, amassing a fortune before he journeyed up the Nile to trade with the Egyptians. He had fought many a battle, survived unscarred, but made his wealth by instinct rather than violence—until the Queen’s blood drinker slaves captured him and dragged him from his boat.
Rhoshamandes and Benedict were both comely and fine boned, chosen for the Blood on account of their seeming physical perfection. Rhoshamandes had brought over dozens of such beauties as Benedict into the Blood, but none had survived with him, stayed with him, loved him as had Benedict, and when he thought of the times he’d driven Benedict away, he shuddered inwardly and thanked some dark god of the blood-drinking world that he’d always been able to find Benedict and bring him back.
Benedict was sniffling and now and then moaning in his inimitable charming fashion, trying to regain possession of himself. Benedict’s mortal soul had been formed in kindness and gentleness and true faith in goodness, and these traits he’d never lost.
“All right, that’s better,” said Rhoshamandes. “Now recall it all for me.”
“Surely you saw it, Rhosh, you saw the images. All those blood drinkers couldn’t have perished without your catching images.”
“Yes, I did, of course,” said the other, “but I want to know just how it got the jump on them when they’d been warned. They had all been warned.”
“But that’s just it, we didn’t know where to go or what to do. And the young ones, they have to hunt. You don’t remember what an agony it is for them. I don’t know if it was ever an agony for you.”
“Oh, stop with all that,” said Rhosh. “They were told to get out of London, to get away from that hotel, to move into the countryside. Benji Mahmoud had been warning them for nights on end. You warned them.”
“Well, a lot of them did,” said Benedict sadly. “Plenty of them did. But then we got the word. They were being spotted and burned out there—in the Cotswolds and in Bath—and all over!”
“I see.”
“Do you? Do you care?” Benedict wiped furiously at his eyes. “I don’t think you care. You’re exactly as Benji Mahmoud describes. You’re an elder of the tribe who doesn’t care. You never did.”
Rhoshamandes was looking away, out of the arched window, at the darkened land below, and the thick jagged forest that clung to the bluff over the ocean. There was no way in the world he was going to disclose his true thoughts to his beloved Benedict. Elder of the tribe, indeed.
Benedict went on talking.
Old ones had perished the night before. On waking Benedict had discovered the burnt remains of two of them right there in the house. He’d run to alert the others. Get out.
“That’s when the walls caught fire,” he said. “I wanted to save them, save one of them, anything, anything that I could. But the roof exploded and I saw them in flames all around me. And I saw this thing, this thing standing there, and it looked ragged and grotesque and it was on fire too. Is that possible? I swear it was burning. I went up. I did what I had to do.”
He broke into sobs again and buried his face in his crooked arm on the desktop.
“You did right,” said Rhoshamandes. “But are you sure this one was making the fire?”
“I don’t know,” said Benedict. “I think it was. It was a wraith. It was bones and rags, but I think … I don’t know.”
Rhoshamandes was reflecting. Bones and rags on fire. He was in fact nothing as calm inside as he pretended now. He was in fact furious, furious that Benedict had almost been harmed, furious about all aspects of this. But he went on listening in silence.
“The Voice,” Benedict stammered. “The Voice, it said such strange things. I heard it myself two nights ago, urging me to do it. I told you. It wanted me and I laughed at it. I told them then it was going to find someone to do its dirty work. I warned everyone. A lot of them left then, but I think they’re dead, all those who left. I think it found someone else and that someone else was out there waiting. It’s not true about Paris, is it? They were all talking about Paris before this happened—.”
“Yes, it’s true about Paris,” Rhoshamandes replied. “But the massacre was interrupted. Someone or something intervened, stopped it. Blood drinkers did escape. I have a feeling I know what happened there.” But he fell silent again. There was no point in disclosing all this to Benedict. There never had been.
Rhoshamandes rose to his feet. He began to pace, his narrow hands together as if in prayer, making a slow leisurely circle in the old stone room, gradually coming up behind Benedict and putting a reassuring hand on his head. He bent and kissed Benedict’s head. He stroked his cheek with his thumb.
“There, there now, you are here,” he murmured. He drew away and stood before the twin arches of the windows.
Rhoshamandes had built this castle in the French Gothic style when he had first come north to England, and he still loved these narrow pointed arches. The dawn of the truly delicate and ornate Gothic style had thrilled him to his heart. Even now he could be reduced to weeping when he wandered the great cathedrals.
Benedict had no idea how often Rhoshamandes went on his own to walk in the cathedrals of Rheims or Autun or Chartres. Some things could be shared with Benedict and some could not. Benedict never stepped inside a great cathedral without experiencing a crisis of cosmic proportions and weeping in grief for his lost faith.
It occurred to Rhosh idly that the notorious Vampire Lestat would understand, Lestat who worshipped nothing and no one but beauty—but then it was easy to love celebrities like Lestat, wasn’t it, to imagine them perfect companions.
Later additions to this castle, Rhosh had designed in the High Gothic style for his own pleasure, and his heart was warmed when those mortals who occasionally stumbled on this place thought it was a triumph.
How he loathed being disturbed here by all this. How much other immortals must loathe it, those who’d made sanctuaries like this so they could have some peace.
He’d never modernized the place. It was as cold and severe as it had been five hundred years ago, a castle appearing to grow out of rocky cliffs on the western coast of a steep, inaccessible, and untamable island.
He’d managed to install generators in the gulch below the cliff some twenty years ago, and tanks for petrol, and to deepen and improve the eastern harbor for his sleek modern boats, but electric power here was reserved entirely for the televisions and the computers, never for lighting or warmth. And those computers had brought him the first word of all this madness, not telepathic voices that he had long ago learned to entirely shut out. No, Benji Mahmoud had told him the times were changing.
How he wanted to keep things as they had always been.
There was no one on this island but the two of them, and down in the gorge the old mortal caretaker and his wife and his poor feebleminded daughter. The old mortal caretaker saw to the petrol tanks and the generators and the cleaning of these rooms by day, and he was paid well for it. He saw to Rhosh’s cabin cruiser in the harbor, that big powerful Wally Stealth Cruiser which Rhosh could effortlessly sail on his own. They were forty miles from the nearest land. That’s how Rhoshamandes wanted to keep it.
True, once the great Maharet had come calling. That had been in the nineteenth century and she had appeared on his battlements, a lone figure attired in heavy wool robes waiting courteously for an invitation to enter.
They had played chess, talked. And she had gone her way. First Brood and Queens Blood had no longer meant the slightest thing to either of them. But he’d been left with the impression of insurmountable power and wisdom, yes, wisdom, though he did not like to admit it. And he had admired her in spite of his wariness and the unpleasant realization that her gifts vastly exceeded his own.
Another time the formidable Sevraine had been here too, though he had only caught a glimpse of her in the oak forest that covered the lower southern coast of the little island. Yes, it had been Sevraine, he’d been sure of it.
He’d gone down into the valley and in search of her. But she’d vanished, and to the best of his knowledge she’d never returned. She’d been splendidly attired, in gold-trimmed robes of rich flashing color. And that indeed was how she was always described by those who insisted they’d seen her—the magnificent Sevraine.
Yet another time when he’d been piloting his boat alone through the violent seas off the Irish coast, he’d seen her high on a bluff looking out at him. He’d wanted to drop anchor and go to her. He’d sent her the message. But telepathy was dim or nonexistant among those made in the first thousand years, and it seemed to have become even dimmer now. He had caught no greeting from her. Indeed she’d disappeared. After that he’d searched Ireland for her but never turned up the slightest indication of her presence or a habitation or a coven or a clan. And it was known that the great Sevraine had always about her a number of women, a female clan.
Not a single other blood drinker had ever come here. So this was and always had been the realm of Rhoshamandes. And he envied no one, not the erudite and philosophical Marius, nor the other gentle well bred vampires of the Coven of the Articulate.
Yes, he wanted to know those new poetic vampire writers, yes, he had to admit it, wanted to know Louis and Lestat, yes, but he could live with that longing for centuries. And in a few centuries they might be gone from the Earth.
What was an immortal like Lestat, who had less than three hundred years in the Blood, after all? One could hardly call such a being a true immortal. Too many died at that age and beyond. So yes, he could wait.
And as for Armand, he would despise Armand till the end of his days. He would like very much to destroy him. Again, on that he could wait, but he had been thinking of late the time for vengeance on Armand might be drawing closer. If Rhoshamandes had still been in France when Armand arrived there to lead the Children of Satan, he would have destroyed Armand. But by that time, Rhosh was long gone. Still, he should have done it, should have ravaged that Paris coven. He’d always thought some other ancient one would do it, and he’d been wrong. Lestat had destroyed it and not by force but with new ways.
Ah, but this is my kingdom, he thought now, and how can all this be coming to my shores?
Never had he hunted in Edinburgh or Dublin or London that he hadn’t wanted to come home immediately to this zone of quiet and changelessness.
Now this thing, this Voice, was threatening his peace and his independence.
And he’d been talking to the Voice a long time, something which he had no intention of confiding in Benedict. He was furious with the Voice right now, furious that Benedict had been in danger.
“And what’s to stop it from coming here?” asked Benedict. “What’s to stop it from finding me here the way it’s been finding all those others who’re trying to escape? It burnt some as old as me.”
“Not quite as old as you,” said Rhoshamandes, “and not with your blood. There was an old one there, obviously, in thrall to the Voice. It was probably blasting you when the walls went up. If others were burning around you, it had you in its sights. It was in that building and it had you. But it couldn’t kill you.”
“It said horrid ghastly things to me when it spoke to me,” said Benedict. He had recovered himself a little and was sitting back again. “It tried to confuse me, to make me think I was having these thoughts and somehow was its servant, that I wanted to serve it.”
“Go, clean all the blood from your face,” said Rhoshamandes.
“Rhosh, why do you always worry about such things?” Benedict pleaded. “I’m suffering, I’m in agony here, and all you care about is blood on my face and clothes.”
“All right,” said Rhoshamandes. He sighed. “So tell me. What is it you want me to know?”
“That thing, that thing when he was talking to me, I mean before the fire …”
“Several nights back.”
“Yes, then. He told me to burn the others, that he could not come to power until they were wiped out, that he wanted me to kill them for him, and that he expected me to be ready to rush into the flames myself for him.”
“Yes,” said Rhoshamandes, laughing softly, “he’s whispered a lot of that rhapsodic nonsense to me too. He has an exalted idea of himself.” He laughed again. “He didn’t begin at such a pitch, however. At first it was simply, ‘You must kill them. Look at what they’re doing to you.’ ”
Again, he did not let on that he was in a rage, a rage now that the Voice had sought after all their many intimate conversations to enlist his Benedict. Did the Voice see through Rhosh’s eyes? Did it hear through his ears? Or could it only pitch its tent inside Rhosh’s brain and talk and talk and talk?
“Yes, but then he started all that about his coming into his own. What does he mean?” Benedict brought his fist down on the old oak desk. He’d screwed up his face like an angry cherub. “Who is he?”
“Stop that,” said Rhoshamandes. “Be still now and let me think.”
He sat down again by the stone hearth. The flames were burning brightly there, fanned by the cool wind that now and then gusted through the glassless windows.
Rhosh had been speaking to the Voice for weeks. But the Voice had been silent now for five nights. Could it be the Voice could not attend to two tasks at one time, that the Voice, if it were to possess some wretched revenant and drive it to burn, could not be speaking politely to Rhosh at the same time or even on the same evening?
Five nights ago the Voice had said, “You of all understand me. You of all understand power, the desire for power, what is at the heart of the desire for power.”
“Which is what?” Rhosh had asked the Voice.
“Simple,” the Voice had replied. “Those who desire power want to be immune to the power of others.”
Then five nights of silence. Mayhem throughout the world. Benji Mahmoud broadcasting all night long from the infamous Trinity Gate house in New York, with recordings of the show looping during his daylight hours so that those in other parts of the globe could hear them.
“Maybe it’s time I discovered what’s going on here for myself,” Rhosh said. “Now listen to me. I want you to go belowstairs and stay there. If some benighted emissary of the thing should crash-land on our wintry little paradise, you’ll be safe from it down there. Stay there till I return. This is the same precaution being taken by others the world over. Belowground you are safe. And if this thing talks to you, this Voice, well, try to learn more about it.”
He opened the heavy iron-braced oak doors to the bedroom. He had to change his clothes for the journey, another terrific annoyance.
But Benedict came after him.
The fire was low in the bedchamber and glowing beautifully. Heavy red velvet draperies covered the open windows, and the stone floors here were covered with old oak boards and layered with silk and wool Persian carpets.
Rhosh stepped out of his robe and flung it to the side, but then Benedict rushed into his arms and held him fast. He buried his face in Rhosh’s wool shirt and Rhosh looked to the ceiling thinking of all this blood smearing onto his own clothes.
But what did it matter?
He embraced Benedict tightly and moved him towards the bed.
It was an old coffered bed from the court of the last Henry. A splendid thing with rich knobby posts, and they loved lying together in it.
He stripped off Benedict’s jacket, and then his shirt and his sweater, and brought him down on the dark embroidered covers. He lay beside him, fingers tightening on the pink nipples on Benedict’s chest, his lips grazing Benedict’s throat, and then he pressed Benedict’s head against his own throat and said, “Drink” under his breath.
At once those razor-sharp teeth broke through and he felt the mighty hungry pull on his heart as the blood flowed out of him towards the heart beating against him. A gusher of images opened. He saw the burning house in London, saw that hideous wraithlike thing, saw what Benedict must have seen but never registered, that thing falling to its knees, the rafters coming down on it, an arm cracked loose and flung away in the fire, black fingers curling. He heard the skull pop.
The images dissolved in the pleasure that he was feeling, the deep dark throbbing pleasure he reveled in as the blood was drawn out of him with greater and greater speed. It was as if a hand had ahold of his heart and was squeezing his heart and the pleasure washed out in waves from his heart, passing through all his limbs.
Finally he turned and pulled Benedict off and sank his teeth into his neck. Benedict cried out. Rhosh ground him against the velvet cover, drawing the blood with all his strength, deliberately sending spasm after spasm through Benedict. He caught the images again. He caught the sight of London below as Benedict had taken to the skies. He caught the roar and the scent of the wind. The blood was so thick, so pungent! The fact was every single blood drinker on this Earth had a distinct and unique flavor of blood. And Benedict’s was luscious. It took all his determination to let go, to run his tongue over his lips and lie back on the pillow and stare up at the worm-eaten oak ceiling of the bed.
The crackling of the fire seemed hugely loud in the empty chamber. How red was the chamber, from the fire, from the dark red draperies. Such lurid and beautiful and soothing light. My world.
“You go down now to the cellar, as I told you,” Rhosh said. He rose up on his elbow and kissed Benedict roughly. “You hear me? You listening to me?”
“Yes, yes, and yes.” Benedict moaned. He was obviously weak all over from the pleasure of it, but Rhoshamandes had taken only what he’d given, passing the zinging red ribbon of his own blood through the younger one’s veins before whipping it back into himself.
He climbed off the bed and, before the open armoire, pulled on a heavy cashmere sweater and woolen pants, then wool socks and boots. He chose his long Russian coat for this journey, the black velvet military coat of czarist days with the black fox collar. He pulled a watch cap down over his hair. And then took from the bottom drawer of the armoire all the papers and currency he might need, and put these securely into his inside pockets. Where were his gloves? He put them on, loving the way his long fingers looked in the sleek black kid leather.
“But where are you going?” asked Benedict. He sat up, mussed, rosy cheeked, and pretty. “Tell me.”
“Stop being so anxious,” said Rhoshamandes. “I’m going west into the night. I’m going to find the twins and get to the bottom of this. I know this Voice has to be coming from one of them.”
“But Mekare’s mindless and Maharet would never do such things. Everybody knows that. Even Benji says that.”
“Yes, Benji, Benji, the great prophet of the blood drinkers.”
“But it’s true.”
“Downstairs, Benedict, before I drag you there myself. I have to be off now.”
It was a fine retreat, that cellar suite of rooms, hardly a dungeon what with its thick animal skins and abundant oil lamps, and of course the oak fire laid ready to be lighted. The television and computers down there were comparable to those up here, and a slender air shaft actually brought a steady bit of fresh ocean breeze in from a tiny opening in the rocky cliff.
As Benedict went out, Rhosh went to the eastern wall, lifted the heavy stag-hunt French tapestry that covered it, and pushed back the door to his secret office, one of those doors weighted so that no mortal alone could move it.
Familiar smell of beeswax, parchment, old leather, and ink. Hmmm. He always stopped a moment to savor it.
With the power of his mind, he quickly ignited a bank of candles on iron candelabra spikes.
The rock-cut chamber was lined with books to the ceiling, and on one wall hung a huge map of the world painted by Rhosh himself on canvas to feature the cities that he most loved in correct relationship to one another.
He stood there gazing at it, remembering all the reports of the Burnings. They’d started in Tokyo, moved to China, then, Mumbai, Kolkata, the Middle East. And then broken out madly all over South America, in Peru, Bolivia, and Honduras.
Then Europe had been stricken. Even Budapest which contained Rhosh’s favorite opera house. Maddening.
It seemed there had been a plan at first; but the plan had broken down into utterly random attacks—except for one thing. The Burnings in South America had occurred in an arc that had become a crude circle. Only there did such a pattern appear. And that’s where the twins were, he was sure of it, deep within the Amazon. Those who knew for certain were clever indeed, and of course he was far too close to the twins in age to have a telepathic advantage with them. But he knew. They were in the Amazon.
The eccentric Maharet favored jungle locations, and always had since the Sacred Core had been taken into her sister. He had now and then caught some weak flashes of the twins in his dreams, emanating from other minds, conveyed to yet other minds and so forth. Yes, they were in the jungles of the Amazon, the ghastly pair who had stolen the Sacred Blood from Akasha’s Egypt.
Rebels, heretics, blasphemers. He’d been nourished on those old tales. In fact they were reputedly the cause of it all, were they not? The twins had brought the evil spirit of Amel into Akasha’s kingdom. He didn’t really care about that old mythology but he did appreciate irony and patterns in human behavior just as he appreciated these elements in books.
Well, he had scant affection for Akasha, who’d been a raving tyrant by the time he’d been dragged into her presence and forced to drink from the Sacred Fount and pledge his eternal fidelity. Icy merciless goddess. She’d been reigning for a thousand years. Or so they said. How she had inspected him, running her hard thumbs over his head, his face, his shoulders, his chest. How her unctuous fawning priests had examined him in all his parts before he was pronounced perfect to be a blood god.
And what fate had awaited him as a blood god? It was either fight under Prince Nebamun’s command with the Queen’s defenders or be walled up in a mountain shrine, starving, dreaming, reading minds, passing judgment for peasants who brought him blood sacrifices on holy feasts and beseeched him with endless superstitious prayers.
He’d run away soon enough. He’d planned it early. A wanderer from the isle of Crete, a seagoing wanderer and merchant, he’d never bought the dark tangled beliefs of old Egypt.
But he’d refused to abandon Nebamun in the time of his worst trial, Nebamun who’d always been kind to him. And he was not going to run when Nebamun stood before the Queen accused of high treason and blasphemy for the frivolous and selfish making of a woman blood drinker.
Making women into blood drinkers was the decadent and foul practice of the First Brood rebels, and utterly forbidden to the Queens Blood. For the blood gods and the dedicated soldiers of the Queens Blood, there need be only one woman, the Queen. Why would anyone dare to make a blood drinker of a woman? True, it had happened a few times, but only with the Queen’s reluctant blessing. Not even her own sister had she brought into the Blood. Nor her daughters.
He’d been sure that Nebamun and Sevraine, his bride, were going to be put to death when Rhosh had delayed his own escape. But it hadn’t happened.
The all-powerful Queen who thought her smallest whim a reflection of the Divine Mind had “loved Sevraine” when she had looked upon her. And she had let Sevraine drink her powerful blood and called her handmaiden.
As for Nebamun, for his transgressions and presumptions, his soldiering times were over. Shut up in a shrine for all time, he was to ponder his offenses. Were he to serve obediently for a century he might be forgiven.
In the early hours of the morning, when the guards of the shrine slept in a drunken stupor, Rhosh had crept to the brick walls and begged Nebamun to speak to him.
“Run away, leave this place,” said Nebamun. “She has taken my precious Sevraine and doomed me to this harsh and unbearable existence. The time will come when I’ll escape these walls. Leave here now, my friend. Get as far away as you can. Find the First Brood rebels if you can, and if you cannot, bring others into the Blood. All we’ve defended is lies built upon lies built upon lies. Blood drinkers of the First Brood tell the truth. She is no goddess. There is a demon inside her, a thing named Amel. I have seen the work of that demon. I was there when it possessed her.”
For words like that they would have ripped out his tongue. But no one had heard that night through the brick wall except Rhoshamandes. And Rhoshamandes would forever love Nebamun for those brave words.
It had been fifty years before Rhoshamandes had returned and smashed that shrine to dust, freeing Nebamun. As for Sevraine, she’d long ago betrayed the Queen. She’d had no use for the old religion either. There was a price on her head. She was hated, as were the twins. Cursed for her blond hair and blue eyes, as if these natural gifts alone marked her as a sorceress and a traitor. And she had vanished.
“Well, old friends, wherever you are,” said Rhoshamandes out loud in the quiet of his little library. “We may soon have to meet over this present disaster. But for now I’m going forth to find out what I can on my own.”
Of course he knew where Nebamun was, he’d known for centuries. Nebamun had become Gregory in the Common Era, and kept a blood drinker family of awe-inspiring stability in the greatest luxury. Just about every year or so, the face of that ancient and powerful Nebamun would flash full bright on a television screen as some mortal commentator spoke of Gregory Duff Collingsworth’s vast pharmaceutical empire, his worldly dealings on different continents, even his famous fin de siècle tower on the shores of Lake Geneva.
How many catching those televised glimpses recognized that face? Probably no one. Except Sevraine perhaps. But then perhaps Sevraine was with Gregory. And perhaps they too had heard the Voice.
Perhaps the Voice was a consummate flatterer and liar. Perhaps the Voice played blood drinkers against one another.
“You alone, I have loved above all, your face and form and your mind,” the Voice had said to Rhoshamandes.
Hmmm. We’ll see about that.
He blew out the candles. For some reason his telekinetic powers could never just make them go out. He had to do it with his breath. So that’s how he did it.
He went back into his bedchamber and opened another armoire that was indeed a true armoire, holding his weapons, those items he’d collected over the years more for sentiment than any other reason. He took the sharp knife he loved best off the shelf, and tied the scabbard to his leather belt inside his coat. Then he took out another weapon, a small greenish weapon from modern war called simply a hand grenade. He knew what this could do. He’d seen it plenty during the great wars that had laid waste to Europe in the twentieth century. He tucked it into his coat. He knew how to pull the pin and hurl it should the need arise.
Then he went out on the high windswept battlements and stared up at the misty sky and out over the cold, roiling gray sea.
For a moment he was tempted to abandon all this, to return to his library and light those candles again and the oak he’d chopped himself for the little fireplace, to sink down into his velvet chair and pick up one of the many books that he’d been reading of late, and just let the night pass as so many others.
But he knew he couldn’t do that.
There was a raw inescapable truth in Benji Mahmoud’s chiding words. He and the others like him had to do something. He’d always admired Maharet, and cherished the wee bits of time in the past that he had spent with her. But he knew nothing of her in this era except what others had written. And it was time to go see her himself and get to the bottom of this mystery. He figured he knew exactly who this Voice was, and it was time for Rhosh and the Voice to meet.
He’d never bowed to anyone’s authority, but avoiding the wars and quarrels of the Undead had cost him dearly. And he wasn’t so sure he was willing to acquiesce or migrate again. The Voice was right about power. We seek power so as not to fall under anyone else’s power, yes.
Long years ago, this cold island remote from the British mainland had been perfect for his retreat, even if it did take him one hundred years to build this castle and its dungeons and its fortifications. He’d brought the trees here for the barren gullies and gorges, planting oak, beech, alder, elm, sycamore, and birch. He’d been a benevolent lord to the mortals who constructed this castle, dug out his many secret chambers from the bedrock, and created a refuge eventually which humans could not themselves conquer by any siege.