I couldn’t prevent the tears. The clock would soon strike nine.
High above in the ballroom, Marius and Pandora waited, and it would have been purely selfish of me to delay this further.
The whole great house of Trinity Gate was scented with flowers.
“It is the finest gift,” I whispered, the tears tinting my vision. “It is the gift that we can give, which means life everlasting.”
They clung to me tightly.
“Go now,” I said. “They’re waiting for you. Before the sun rises, you’ll be Born to Darkness, but you will see all light then as you’ve never before imagined it. As Marius once said, ‘an endless illumination in which to understand all things.’ And when I set eyes on you again, I’ll give you my blood as my blessing. And you will really be my children.”
30
Cyril
The Silence Heard Round the World
HE WAS HUNGRY AGAIN, and disappointed to be bothered by it so soon. He listened and the great emptiness amazed him. He lay in his cave, in blessed solitude and darkness, and he thought, They are all gone.
Quiet the cities around him. Quiet the land. Only the cries and rumbling and human voices.
Except for that radio voice, that blood drinker from America speaking through a computer or a cellphone somewhere out there in the wilderness of Tokyo.
“The Voice is now one of us. The Voice is the root of our tribe.”
What could that possibly mean?
He slipped out into the warm night.
Seems it was another one now speaking through the radio and not one of those desperate young ones weeping to Benji Mahmoud for solace or help. No. It was a calm voice simply talking, talking about the quiet that had descended over “our world.”
Before midnight, Cyril had visited the silence of Beijing and the silence of Hong Kong.
Was it thirst that had awakened him, or was it curiosity? Something had happened, as remarkable as the waking of the Queen years ago, something as remarkable as the coming of the Voice.
They were gone, the others!
On he moved to Mumbai, and then to Kolkata and on towards the cities of the two rivers and the mighty Nile.
Gone, all of them, everywhere, those miserable little monsters struggling for their rung on the ladder to eternal life.
At last he stood in the ancient city of Alexandria, in the small hours, near dawn—this modern metropolis he so loathed on account of the stones and blood buried beneath it, the old catacombs in which the wicked Queen had been worshipped by the priesthood that had taken him out of life so long ago.
Even here the voice of Benji Mahmoud continued but it was recorded now. “It is a new era. It is a new time. We are the People of Darkness, we are the People of Everlasting Life. The Prince has spoken. The Prince rules.”
The Prince? He couldn’t fathom it. Who was the Prince?
He walked through a narrow street, listening for that recorded broadcast, until he came upon a small dark tavern filled with drunk lazy mortals on whom he might easily feed. Skins of all nations here. That pulsing twanging music he hated. And in the corner on a filthy little table against a wall covered with a beaded curtain stood the computer through which Benji Mahmoud addressed the world.
A pretty mortal girl, puffing on a long pink cigarette, listened to Benji Mahmoud and laughed under her breath. She saw Cyril. Come here, big boy, just let me make you happy, come on, closer, closer. Daggers in the back room. Her skin was thick with tinted powder, her eyes rimmed in kohl. She had the red smile of a child witch.
He sat down beside her in the shadows. The stench of the place was vile, but he wouldn’t be here very long. And the smell of her blood was pure. All lies die in the blood. All evil is purged in the blood.
“You know,” she said to him in English, “he could make you want to be a real vampire.” And she laughed again, a rich cynical ugly laugh, lifting her yellow drink and spilling it down the front of her dark dress.
“Never mind that,” he said as he kissed her.
She pushed at him helplessly as he sank his teeth. Sold into it at twelve years old. Honey, tell me all about it! And the blood sang and sang its ancient and unchanging song.
He walked away from the city.
He walked away from the damp hazy air of the Mediterranean, inland to the everlasting sands. He would sleep here in the land of Egypt, maybe for years, he would sleep in the land of his birth. Why not?
Finally, he stood alone under the great dark sky, away from all human sounds and scents, with the cold desert wind washing him, cleansing away the filth that clung to him of foreign lands.
Then the Voice sighed inside his head.
“Oh, spare me!” Cyril cried. “Get away from me! Don’t torment me here.”
But the Voice spoke to him now with an inflection he’d never heard before, and with a deep resonance that was wholly new. It was beautiful. And yet it was the Voice, and the Voice said,
“Cyril, come home. Come home to the tribe. At last we are one.”
31
Rose
The People of the Moon and Stars
THE VOICE OF PANDORA called to her from far away: “Rose, drink!”
And she could hear Marius calling to her and Viktor, Viktor’s desperate plea.
“Rose, drink.”
The burning droplets hit her lips, trickled into her mouth. Poison. She couldn’t move.
Gardner had ahold of her and was whispering in her ear, “Would you disappoint me yet again, Rose! Rose, how dare you do this to me!” To me, to me, to me. The echo faded into the roaring voice of the minister’s wife, Mrs. Hayes, “And if you cannot convict yourself of sin, deeply convict yourself and admit your sin, and all the dreadful things you’ve done, and you know what you have done, you can never be saved!” Her grandmother was talking to them. She was in the little lawyer’s office in Athens, Texas, but she was right there with Gardner. Don’t want the child, really, don’t know who the father was.
Gardner clung to her, his breath hot in her face, his fingers closing on her throat. How could that be true when her body was gone? She floated in this darkness, sinking ever deeper and deeper. The dark clouds rolled upwards, thick and swelling and blinding.
Viktor cried out, and Pandora and Marius called to her, but they were fading.
Oh, she’d seen such wondrous things when Pandora held her. She’d seen the Heavens, and she’d heard the music of the spheres. Never had anything been more grand.
Gardner’s fingers bit into her neck. Her heart jumped and then slowed. It was so slow, the beat of her heart, and she was so weak, so dreadfully impossibly weak. Dying. Surely she was dying.