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The heart stopped.

I lay there for a long moment, still feeling the warmth of his chest against me, the side of his face under me, feeling some last quiver of life pass through his arms.

Then the Voice spoke.

The Voice was there, low, confidential, right there. And the Voice said:

"You see I want to know all those things too. You see, I wanted to know, wanted to know with my whole heart, what is snow? And what is beautiful and what is love? I still want to know! I want to see with your eyes, Lestat, and hear with your ears, and speak with your voice. But you have denied me. You have left me in blindness and misery and you will pay for that."

I climbed to my feet.

"Where are you, Voice?" I asked. "What have you done to Mekare?"

He wept bitterly. "How can you ask me such a question? You, of all the blood drinkers spawned by me and sustained by me. You know how helpless I am inside of her! And for me you have no pity, and only hate."

He was gone.

I tried to anatomize how I knew, what it was I felt, when he left me, what were the tiny indications of his sudden abandonment, but I couldn't really even remember all the tiny little aspects of it. I just knew he was gone.

"I don't despise you, Voice," I said aloud. My voice sounded unnatural in the empty stone chamber. "I have never really despised you. I was guilty of only one thing, not knowing who you really are. You might have told me, Voice. You might have trusted me."

But he was gone, gone to some other part of the great Savage Garden to do mischief, no doubt.

I left the dead man, since there seemed no proper place to dump his bloodless carcass, and I started back through the maze to find the others.

Somewhere along the way, when stone passages had once more given way to brightly painted passages and golden passages, I heard singing.

It was the softest most ethereal singing, words spun out by high clear soprano voices in Latin, one thread of melody interweaving with another, and under this the sounds of what had to be a lyre.

The sounds of running water came to me with the exquisite music, singing--running water, splashing water, and the laughter of blood drinkers. Sevraine laughing. My mother laughing. I smelled the water. I smelled sunlight, green grass in the water. Somehow the freshness and sweetness of the water mingled in my mind with the richly satisfying blood that had just flooded my mouth and my brain. And I could all but see the music in golden ribbons winding through the air.

I came to a large, cavernous, and brightly lighted bath.

Glittering mosaics covered the uneven ceiling and walls, tiny bits of gold and silver and crimson marble, malachite and lapis lazuli and shining obsidian and flakes of glinting glass. Candles burned on their bronze stands.

Two gentle dancing waterfalls fed the large rock-cut basin in which they bathed.

They were all standing in the water--the women--together under the soft sparkling downpour, some naked, some clothed in sheer gowns that had turned transparent with the water, faces glistening, hair slicked into long serpentine streaks of darkness over their shoulders. And in the far-left corner were the singers--three white-robed blood drinkers obviously made in boyhood, singing in high sweet soprano voices, castrati made by the Blood.

I found myself transfixed by the vision of this. The women beckoned me to come into the bath.

The musicians sang on as if blind to all those present, though they were not, each strumming the strings of a small ancient Greek-style lyre.

The room was warm and moist and the light itself was golden from the candles.

I moved forward, stripping off my clothes and joining them in the fresh sweet-smelling pool. They poured the water over me from pink-throated seashells. And I splashed it again and again against my face.

Allesandra, naked, danced with her arms up, singing with the boy sopranos, though in words of Old French, some poetry of her own, and Sevraine, her body frighteningly pale and hard, the water glancing off it as if it were marble, kissed me on the lips.

The sharp yet exquisitely controlled singing pierced me, paralyzed me, as I stood in the cool flowing water. I closed my eyes, and thought, Always remember this. Always remember though agony and fear crouch at

the door. This. The throb of the lyre strings, and these voices weaving like vines together, climbing to heights undreamt of by the logical fearful mind and descending slowly to blend in harmony again.

Through the flashing waterfall I looked at them, these boys, with their round faces and their short curling blond hair; very slightly they swayed with the music and it was the music that they saw, not us, not this place, not this now.

What does it mean to be a singer in the Blood, a musician, to have that purpose, that love affair to carry you through the ages--and to be as happy as all of these creatures seemed to be?

Later on, dressed in fresh garments provided by the mistress of the palace, I passed a long shadowy chamber in which Gremt sat with Raymond Gallant. There was a blood drinker with them, as ancient perhaps as was Sevraine. And other ghosts there as beautifully realized in material bodies as were Gremt and Raymond Gallant.