19
Rhoshamandes
Murder Most Foul
FOR TWO NIGHTS, Rhosh had been holed up in a luxury hotel in Manaus, waking up to look out on the small Amazonian city and the jungles beyond stretching into infinity. He was furious. He had sent for Benedict, and Benedict had come, as always frayed and exhausted from the lonely journey through miles of uncharted sky, and was now equally agitated by sleeping in this multistoried mortal hostel with only a hiding place in a closet to keep him safe from the sun and from prying mortal eyes.
There was good hunting for a blood drinker in this city and in its surrounding areas, but that was about all that could be said for it in Rhosh’s estimation, and he was desperate to penetrate the compound of Maharet, Khayman, and Mekare, but he could not.
Each night the Voice urged him to be strong, to attack the defenses of the twins, to force his way in. But Rhosh was wary. He could not overcome the combined strength of Khayman and Maharet. He knew this. And he did not trust the Voice when it said they would never attack him, that he would take them by surprise and find them surprisingly vulnerable to his gifts and his will.
“I need you to free me from this creature,” the Voice continued to insist. “I need you to free me from this Unholy Trinity which keeps me captive here, blind and immobile and unable to fulfill my destiny. And I do indeed have a destiny and have always had a destiny. Do you know what I have endured to learn how to express myself as I am talking to you now? You are my hope, Rhoshamandes, you have five thousand years in the Blood, do you not? You are stronger than they are because you know how to use your gifts and they are reluctant.”
Rhosh had given up arguing honestly with the Voice. The Voice was a conniver and a child.
Rhosh feared Maharet. He always had. Who in the Blood was more powerful than Maharet? She had a thousand years on him, but she had something else. She’d been one of the first ever made, and her spiritual resources were a legend.
If the earliest children of First Brood and Queens Blood hadn’t been deaf to each other telepathically, this drama would have come to a close well before now. If Maharet could hear the Voice speaking to Rhoshamandes, it would be finished for Rhosh, he was sure. Even now he wondered if this miserable humid and tropical place was not to be the end of his long journey on this Earth.
But just when his thoughts sank into discouragement, the Voice would come, whispering, cajoling, wheedling. “I will make you the monarch of the tribe. Don’t you see what I am offering you? Don’t you grasp why I need you? Once inside your body, I can walk into the sun of my own free will because your body is strong enough for this, and all over the world young ones will burn. But you and I inside of you will only be kissed by that golden light. Oh, I remember now, yes, I remember, the blessed peace and strength that came to me when Akasha and Enkil were put into the sun. Golden brown they became, and no more than that, but all over the world children burned. My strong blood was restored to me. I was myself in flashes of waking wonder! We will do that, don’t you see, when I am in you and you can brave the sunlight. And you love me! Who else loves me?”
“I love you all right,” said Rhosh grimly. “But not enough to be destroyed trying to take you into me. And if I did have you inside me, would you feel what I feel?”
“Yes, don’t you see? I am entombed in one who feels nothing and desires nothing, and never drinks, never drinks of the life-giving human blood!”
“When I expose myself to the sun, I know pain as I’m falling into unconsciousness and pain for months after I wake. I do it only because I must to pass for human. Are you willing to know that pain?”
“That is nothing to the pain I know now!” he said. “You’ll wake to golden skin as you know, and so many others will have died, mercifully died, died! And we will be stronger than ever! Don’t you see? Yes, I will feel what you feel. But once you have the Sacred Core in you, you will feel what I feel too.”
The Voice rambled on.
“Did I ever promise the Queen of Egypt that I could support a legion of blood drinkers? Was she mad? Were the First Brood not mad? They knew what I was and who I was and yet they stretched my body and my power beyond all reasonable limits, greedy and wanton, passing the Blood to anyone who would revolt against Akasha, and she made this Queens Blood as if the size of her guard was all that mattered—until I was as a human bleeding from all limbs and all orifices, unable to think, to dream, to know.…”
Rhosh was listening but not much. You will feel what I feel, too.
The possibilities were blazing in his mind as he stood at the window looking out over the nighttime city of Manaus.
“What else would you want of me, other than that I sleep under the sun to burn off the riffraff?” The riffraff? More than the riffraff would burn. All the many younger ones would burn—Lestat, his precious Louis, Armand that vicious and notorious tyrant, and of course the little genius Benjamin Mahmoud.
And all of their generations would burn. Vampires would burn who had a thousand years in the Blood, or even two thousand. It had happened before. And Rhoshamandes knew this. It wasn’t legend. He had been burned a shining mahogany brown and suffered agony for months after the King and Queen had been dragged into the Egyptian desert by the wicked elder. Had the elder had the strength to leave the Divine Parents in the sun for three days, Rhoshamandes might have died. And the elder would have died. And who would have come to the rescue of Akasha or Enkil? It would have been the finish there and then. Somewhere in the world Sevraine and Nebamun and countless others must have suffered a similar fate. For those who survived and grew stronger, many perished driven to further immolation by the pain of their existence. He remembered all that. Yes, he remembered.
But no one knew how many years in the Blood were needed to survive such a holocaust. Oh, well, maybe the great doctors Fareed and Seth knew. Maybe they had made studies, calculations, based on interviews with blood drinkers, analysis of accounts in the Vampire Chronicles. Maybe they had made projections. Maybe they could transfuse blood from the ancients to the young ones with glistening plastic sacks and shining plastic tubes. Maybe they had a store of ancient blood in their vaults, drawn out of the veins of the great Seth.
“Oh, yes, they are very clever,” said the Voice, ignoring Rhosh’s earlier question and addressing his rambling thoughts. “But they have no love for me. They are treacherous. They speak of ‘the tribe’ as does Benji Mahmoud as if I were not the tribe!” He roared in anguish. “As if I, I, Amel, were not the tribe!”
“So you don’t want to fall into their hands,” said Rhosh.
“No, never! Never!” The Voice sounded frantic. “Think what they might do to me! Can you imagine?”
“And what could they possibly do?” asked Rhosh.
“Put me in a tank of the Blood, my Blood, Blood I made, put me in a tank of it where I would be blind and deaf and mute and trapped in even deeper darkness than I am in now.”
“Nonsense. Somebody would have to feed and sustain such a tank. They’d never do such a dangerous thing. And you are not a separate element now. Even I know that. You are wed to the brain of Mekare, wed to her heart to pump blood to her brain. If they were to simulate such an arrangement, as I said, someone and indeed more than one would have to maintain it and sustain it. That will never happen to you.”
The Voice was clearly mollified.
He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I must be quiet now but you must come to me. She comes. She’s hunted and she is full of despair. She dreams of plunging herself and Mekare and me into a lake of fire! She mourns her lost fledglings. She has driven away those who love her.”
Rhoshamandes shook his head. Under his breath he murmured a desperate negation.
“Listen to me!” pleaded the Voice. “She needs but one word of encouragement from some despairing soul like herself, I tell you, and she will take Mekare in her arms and go at once to this volcano called Pacaya. Do you know where that is?”
“Pacaya,” whispered Rhosh. “Yes, I know where it is.”
“Well, it is where our story will end in fire if you do not come! It could happen this very night, I tell you!”
“You can’t read her mind, can you? You’re entombed in her maker. You can’t …”
“I do not read her mind from Mekare’s mind, you fool,” said the Voice. “I go stealthily into her mind as I go into yours! She cannot lock me out! But oh, if I were to seek to speak to her how I would terrify her, how I would drive her over the edge!”
Pacaya, an active volcano in Guatemala. Rhosh was gasping for breath. He was trembling.
“You must come now,” said the Voice. “Khayman is lost somewhere in the north where I sent him to destroy. He is a ruin of himself, I tell you. He was never crafted for eternity as you were. The mere sight of him goads her to despair. He is a broken instrument. Come to me now. Do you know what a machete is? There are machetes all over in this place. Machetes. You know how to use a machete? Free me from this body! And if you do not, I will sing my songs to someone else!”
It was gone. He could feel that it was gone.
Where had it gone? Off to turn some desperate fearful blood drinker somewhere against another? Or to tempt Nebamun wherever he might be, or even Sevraine?
And what precisely would happen if the Sacred Core was transferred to such a being? What if the very worst happened and somehow that impulsive Lestat de Lioncourt got control of it in his young body? Perish the thought.
And Pacaya, what if she took her twin with her, rose into the air, and sought out that inferno? Oh, what agony would descend on each and every member of the tribe throughout the world as unquenchable heat and flame sought to burn the host of the Sacred Core?
Benedict had fallen asleep on the bed. Barefoot in freshly laundered jeans and a white dress shirt open at collar and cuffs, he lay there dreaming.
There was something about the sight of him sleeping so trustingly that touched Rhoshamandes. Of all the blood drinkers Rhosh had ever made or known, this one’s body and face were a true reflection of his soul no matter how much time passed. This one knew how to love.
No wonder it had been Benedict who brought the memoirs of the Vampire Chronicles to Rhosh and insisted he read them. No wonder Benedict had so cherished Louis de Pointe du Lac’s suffering and Lestat’s wild rebellion. “They understand,” he’d told Rhosh. “We cannot live without love. Doesn’t matter how old, how strong, we are, what we possess. We cannot exist without love. It’s absolutely impossible. And they know it, young as they are, they know.”
Rhosh sat down gently beside him, and touched his back. The cotton shirt was soft, clean against his smooth skin. His neck and his soft curly brown hair were silky. Rhosh bent to kiss his cheek.
“Wake up now, Ganymede,” he said. “Your maker needs you.” He ran his hand over the boy’s hips, and his slender powerful thighs, feeling the iron muscles under the starched denim. Had there ever been a more nearly perfect body in the Blood? Well, perhaps, in Allesandra, before she’d become a crone of her own making, twisted, leering, mad, a ragged monster of the Children of Satan. But this was surely the next-best body, wasn’t it?
Benedict woke with a start staring blindly forward.
“The Voice,” he murmured against the pillow. “The Voice is saying come, isn’t it?”
“And we will, but you are to stay some twenty feet behind me. You come when I call to you.”
“Twenty feet against monsters like this.”
Rhosh stood and pulled Benedict to his feet.
“Well, fifty feet then. Stay out of sight, but near enough to hear my slightest command and come instantly.”
How many times had Rhosh instructed Benedict in how to use the Fire Gift, how to muster it and send it against any blood drinker who ever tried to use it against him, how to fight off the power of another older killer, how to slam back with full force against gifts that seemed on the surface to be overwhelming? How many times had he demonstrated how he might do things with his mind which he’d thought impossible, opening doors, shattering them, blowing them off their hinges?
“No one knows the full measure of anyone else’s powers,” he’d said countless times over the centuries. “You survive the attacks of others when you fight! Fight and flee. Do you hear me?”
But Benedict was no natural warrior. In that short span of his mortal life on Earth, he’d been a prayerful scholar, only tempted by the sensuality of the natural world all around him to abandon his Christian god. He’d been a being made for monastery libraries and royal courts, a lover of gorgeously illustrated manuscripts and books, of flutes and drums and lutes playing, of blended voices in song, of the love of men and women in silken beds, and in perfumed gardens.
Not a warrior, no, never. He’d only sinned against his Christian god because he couldn’t see the harm in loving passion. And the satisfaction of his rampant desires had always been easy, harmonious, pleasant.
A deep chill passed through Rhosh. Perhaps he had done the very wrong thing bringing Benedict here, but was he not infinitely more vulnerable miles away, even in the crypt, to some trickery on the part of the Voice?
Well, there was no time to go over a plan now, not when Maharet was returning to her fortress and when she might, with those preternatural ears, hear what she could not hear telepathically.
“Put on your shoes, we’re going now.”
Finally, they stood like dark shadows in the open window. Not a single mortal eye saw them ascend.
And only moments passed before they came down silently into the jungles surrounding Maharet’s compound.
“Ah, you are here and not a moment too soon,” said the Voice, fearlessly inside Rhosh’s head. “And she is here. She comes and she leaves the gates open behind her. Hurry before she presses all her magical electric buttons and closes me off in this prison!”
He stepped inside the great wire-mesh enclosure, and walked quietly towards the lighted archway.
“The machetes. Do you see them?” said the Voice. “They are against the wall. They are sharp.”
Rhosh was tempted to say, If you don’t shut up, you’re going to drive me mad, but he didn’t. He clenched his teeth, lifted his chin slightly.
And yes, he did see the long wooden-handled machete lying on the wooden bench among the pots of orchids. He did see the blade glinting in the light from the arch, though it was caked with mud.
“She dreams of Pacaya,” said the Voice. “She sees its boiling crater. She sees white steam rising to the dark sky. She sees lava flowing down the mountain in fiery fingers of light. She thinks nothing can live in that inferno, not her, not her sister—.”
Oh, if he could only shut out the Voice.
“And I dare not seek to deter her for I am what she fears above all things!”
There was a dark shape to his left. He saw it just as he picked up the machete and watched the caked mud fall off the blade.
Slowly he raised his eyes to see the figure of one of the twins staring at him—one, but which one?
He was petrified, holding the machete in his hand. Those blue eyes were fixed on him in a kind of dreamy indifference, the light from the doorway slicing out the edge of the smooth expressionless face. The eyes moved on away from him indifferently.
“That is Mekare,” the Voice whispered. “That is my prison. Move on! Move on as if you know where you are going! Do you know where you are going?”
A soft brokenhearted crying reached his ears. It was coming from the lighted room beyond the archway.
He made his way forward on the soft earthen path, clutching the machete in his right hand, fingers massaging the rough wooden handle. Strong, heavy handle. Monstrous blade. Two feet in length perhaps. A powerful cleaver. He could smell the steel blade, smell the dried mud, and smell the moist earth all around him.
He reached the doorway.
Maharet sat in a dark brown rattan chair with her face in her hands, her body clothed in a long robe of dark rose cotton. Long sleeves covered her arms, and her fingers as white as her face were dripping with the delicate blood of her tears, her long copper hair tossed behind her, covering her bent back. She was barefoot.
She cried softly.
“Khayman,” she said softly in an agonized voice. And slowly she sat back turning to face him wearily.
With a start she saw him there in the doorway.
She didn’t know who he was. She couldn’t pick his name suddenly from all the years, all the many years.
“Kill her,” said the Voice. “Get rid of her now.”
“Benedict!” he said loudly, distinctly, most certainly loud enough for his companion to hear, and at once he heard the boy coming through the garden.
“What is it you want of me?” asked the woman facing him. The blood made two fine strokes down her cheeks like the painted tears of a French clown with a china face. Her eyes were rimmed in red, her eyebrows gleaming golden.
“Ah, so it’s brought you here, has it?” she said. She rose to her feet in one swift movement, the chair thrown back and over behind her.
Some five feet stood between them.
Behind him, Benedict stood, waiting. He could hear Benedict’s breath.
“Don’t speak to her!” cried the Voice inside his head. “Don’t believe what she says to you.”
“What right have you to be here?” she demanded. It was the ancient tongue now.
He kept his face a mask. He gave not the slightest indication that he understood her.
Her face changed, her features knotting, her mouth twisting, and he felt the blast hit him full force.
Back he hurled it against her. She staggered and fell over the chair.
Again, she hit him with it full force to drive him back and away.
“Benedict!” he cried.
And this time he sent the Fire Gift at her with all his power, lunging for her as he did so, the machete raised.
She screamed. She screamed like a helpless village woman in a war, a powerless and frantic being, but as she reached for her chest with both hands, she sent the Fire Gift against him and he felt the intolerable heat just as she was feeling it, felt his body burning in unspeakable pain.
He denied the pain. He refused to be defeated, refused to freeze in panic.
He heard Benedict shouting as he sought to drive her back, Benedict’s left hand on his back. It was an ugly battle cry, and he heard the same coming from his own lips.
Again, he mustered his power and aimed it at her heart, as he brought down the machete with all his physical strength sinking the blade deep into her neck.
A dreadful roar rose from her. Blood shot up out of her mouth in a horrid fountain.
“Khayman!” she roared, the blood bubbling from her lips. “Mekare!” Suddenly a whole litany of names broke from her, names of all she’d known and loved, and the great choking wail, “I am dying. I am murdered!”
Her head was falling back, her neck twisting desperately, her hands reaching up to steady her own head, the blood splashing all over her cotton robe, all over her hands, splashing on him.
He grabbed the machete with both hands and slammed it into her neck again with all his force, and this time, the head came off and flew through the air and landed on the moist earthen floor of the room.
Her headless body sank down to the ground, its hands reaching up desperately, and as it fell forward on its breasts, the hands clawed at the earth, clawed like talons.
The head lay there staring to one side, the blood flowing slowly out of it. Who knew what prayers, what pleas, what desperate entreaties, still came from her?
“Look at it, the body!” Benedict wailed. He beat on Rhosh’s back with his fists. “She’s crawling to it.”
Rhosh charged forward, his boot crunching into the headless torso, crushing it down into the mud, and switching the machete to his left hand, he grabbed up the bleeding head by the copper hair.
Her eyes shifted and fixed him firmly as the mouth gaped, and a low whisper came from the quivering lips.
He dropped the machete. And backing up, shoving Benedict out of his path, nearly stumbling over the flailing body, he swung the head against the wall again and again, but he could not break the skull.
Suddenly he dropped the thing, dropped it into the dirt, and he was down on his hands and knees, and Benedict’s boot came down right in front of him, and he saw the machete come flashing down and slice into the shining copper hair, slice through it, slice into the skull, and the blood bubbled up crimson and glittering.
The head was on fire. Benedict was blasting it. The head was in flames. He knelt there a mute witness—helpless, utterly helpless—watching the head blacken and burn, watching the hair go up in sizzling smoke and sparks.
Yes, the Fire Gift. Finally he rallied. He sent it with full fury. And the head was curling up, black, like that of a plastic doll on a burning trash heap, and the eyes gleamed white for one second before they turned black, and the head was as a lump of coal with no face, no lips. Dead and ruined.
He scrambled to his feet.
The headless body lay still. But Benedict was now blasting this too, blasting the blood that was flowing out of it, and the whole prone figure there went up in flames, the cotton robe consumed.
In a panic, Rhosh turned right and left. He stumbled backwards. Where was the other one?
Nothing stirred. No sound came from the garden enclosure.
The fire crackled and snapped and smoked. And Benedict was catching his breath in anxious musical sobs. His hand was on Rhosh’s shoulder.
Rhosh stared at the darkened mass that had been her head, the head of the witch who had come to Egypt long ago with the spirit Amel, who had gone into the Mother, the head of the witch who had endured for six thousand years without ever going down into the earth to sleep, this great witch and blood drinker who had never made war on anyone except the Queen who’d torn her eyes from her and condemned her to die.
She was gone now. And he, Rhosh, had done this! He and Benedict, at his instigation.
He felt a sorrow so immense he thought he would die from the weight of it. He felt it like his very breath gathering in his chest, in his throat, threatening to suffocate him.
He ran his fingers back through his hair, tearing at his hair, pulling it suddenly in two hanks, pulling it till it hurt, and the pain sliced into his brain.
He staggered into the doorway.
There, only ten feet away, stood the other—unchanged—a lone robed figure in the night, looking around her with a drifting gaze, a glinting drifting gaze at leaves, at trees, at creatures moving in the high branches, at the moon far above the compound.
“Now, you must do it!” roared the Voice. “Do to her what you have done to her sister, and take the brain from her and into yourself. Do it!” The Voice was screaming.
Benedict stood beside him, clinging to him.
Rhosh saw the bloody machete in Benedict’s right hand. But he didn’t reach for it. The sorrow was knotted inside him, twisted, like a rope pulled tight around his heart. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think.
I have done wrong. I have done unspeakable wrong.
“I’m telling you, do it now,” said the Voice in a tone of perfect desperation. “Take me into your body! You know how to do this! You know how it was done to Akasha. Do it now. Do it as you did to that one! Do it. I must be freed from this prison. Are you mad? Do it!”
“No,” said Rhosh.
“You betray me now? You dare? Do as I tell you.”
“I can’t do it alone,” Rhosh said. For the first time he realized he was trembling violently all over, and a blood sweat had broken out on his face and on his hands. He could feel his heart knocking in his throat.
The Voice had given way to cursing, babbling, screaming.
The mute woman stood there unchanged. Then the distant cry of a bird seemed to waken her, and she bowed her head just a little to the left, towards Rhosh, as though she were looking upwards for that bird, that bird outside the wire mesh of the garden.
Slowly she turned and walked slowly away from Rhosh through the gentle crowd of fern and palm, her feet making a soft unhurried trudging sound in the soil. A kind of humming came from her. On she moved, away from him.
The Voice was crying. The Voice was weeping.
“I tell you I cannot do it without help,” Rhosh said. “I need help. The help of that vampire doctor if I’m to do it, don’t you see? What if I start to die when she does, what if I can’t do what Mekare did when she killed Akasha! I can’t do it.”
The Voice whimpered, and sobbed. It sobbed like a broken and defeated thing. “You are a coward,” the Voice whispered. “You are a miserable coward.”
Rhosh made his way to a chair. He sat down, leaning forward, his bloody arms clutching his chest. And I have done unspeakable evil. How can I live now after what I’ve done?
“What do we do?” asked Benedict frantically.
Rhosh scarcely heard him.