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I went back to the couch. David was patiently waiting, and so was Jesse. Surely their preternatural hearing was as acute as mine.

"And then there was the time when Marius came to her," said Jesse, looking at me eagerly.

I nodded for her to continue.

"You know these things. Marius came wanting Maharet's permission to put an end to Santino, the vampire who'd done so much to harm him over the centuries, the vampire who brought the Children of Satan against him in Venice."

David nodded, and so did I. I shrugged.

"She had hated that she was asked to sit in judgment, that Marius wanted her to convene a court of sorts, to give permission for what he wanted to do. She refused permission to Marius to harm Santino, not because she didn't believe he should but because she did not want to be the judge. And she did not want a murder beneath her roof."

"That was clear," said David.

Marius had recounted this story in his memoir. Or somebody had recounted it. The memoir might have been polished up by David for all I knew. Probably was. Pandora and Armand had been present for this court or tribunal when Marius had come before Maharet with his request, wanting vengeance on Santino but forswearing it if Maharet would not give her blessing. And somebody had brought Santino there, but who precisely had done that? Maharet?

It was Marius who'd said somebody has to rule. It was Marius who had raised the entire issue of authority. What were we to expect from someone who came into the Blood during the age of the great Pax Romana? Marius had forever been the rational Roman, the believer in reason and law and order.

And then it had been another blood drinker, Thorne, an ancient fledgling of Maharet, an old Norseman, red-haired, romantic, newly emerged from the blessed solitude of the earth, who had destroyed Santino for reasons of his own. An ugly violent scene it had been with Santino burnt by Thorne right before Maharet's eyes. Maharet had wept. Her outrage had not been that of a queen so much as the mistress of a household defiled. And Thorne had followed this act of disobedience and defiance by offering Maharet a precious gift: his preternatural eyes.

Maharet had been blind all her long life as a blood drinker. Blinded by Akasha before she came into the Blood, she'd used the eyes of her mortal victims; but they had never endured very long. Thorne had given her his vampire eyes. He'd asked the mute and impassive Mekare to take his eyes from him and give them to her sister. And that Mekare had done. Thorne had remained in the compound after that for all anyone ever knew, a prisoner of the twins, blind, suffering, maybe content.

When I'd read that account in Marius's memoir, I'd thought back on Fareed's promise to achieve permanent preternatural eyes for Maharet. Had he ever had the opportunity?

"That broke something inside of her," said Jesse, "that awful trial. Not Thorne's rebellion, you understand. She loved and forgave Thorne. She kept Thorne with us after. But simply the fact of Marius appealing to her, saying that there had to be a law amongst us, that somebody had to have authority. That broke her. That made it all too plain that she was no sovereign for the Undead."

This had never occurred to me. I had assumed that one so old and so powerful had simply gone on, pursuing a path well beyond our various disputes.

"I think it was after that that she began to obliterate all contact with the Great Family, and I saw her slipping ever deeper into her own silence."

"But she'd summoned young ones from time to time, didn't she?" I asked. "And David, you were still coming and going...."

"Yes, she did continue to invite others to the archives," said David. "She was especially tolerant of me. But I think I disappointed in those early years too. There were times when I could not bear the archives, and all the secret knowledge there that the outside world would never see. She knew how I felt. She knew that reading of lost cities and empires only made me feel less human, less vital, less purposeful. She saw all that. She knew."

"But she told me once we go through cycles, all of us," I protested. "I'm in a bad cycle now. That's why I so wanted to talk to her for a little while. I thought she was the great expert on cycles of despair and cycles of confidence. I thought she had to be. I thought she was the strongest of us all."

"She's a fallible being ultimately," said David, "just as you or I. Very likely her gift for survival depends on her limitations. Isn't that always the way it is?"

"How the Hell do I know!" I said crossly, but he only smiled as if he was on to my bad behavior and had always been. He waved it away and looked to Jesse.

"Yes, she did bring young ones to the compound," Jesse said, picking up the thread. "But only a few. Then four years ago something completely unexpected happened."

She took a deep breath, and sat back again, putting the sole of her boot up against the coffee table. Small delicate brown leather boot.

David was waiting, and from the world beyond I heard the voice of Benji broadcasting out of New York: "If you don't want disaster, I tell you leave them alone. Play my voice. Let my voice plead with them to come to us,

to speak to us, yes, but do not approach them. You know their power. You know what they can do."

I closed my mind to the voices.

"All right," said Jesse as if she'd won an exhausting argument with herself. She sat up straight again, crossing her legs rather gracefully, and stretching her left arm along the back of the chair. "This was four years ago, as I said. And she'd been visited by a very strange blood drinker, perhaps the strangest blood drinker I'd ever encountered or heard of, and he took her completely by surprise. His name was Fareed Bhansali, and if you can believe it, he is a physician and a research scientist. This was something that Maharet had in particular always feared--a scientist blood drinker, a blood drinker who might use knowledge that she viewed as magical to take power in the world."

I was about to protest that I knew Fareed, had known him well, though we'd only met once, when I perceived that she understood this, understood it from my thoughts, and David was signaling that he knew Fareed as well. Very well. The story of Seth and Fareed was out there.

"But Fareed Bhansali would never seek to use power unwisely or wrongly," David said. "I've met him, sat with him, talked to him, talked to Seth, his mentor." ("Mentor," it seemed, had become interchangeable with the word "maker," which was fine with me.)

"Well, that's what she came to discover soon enough. He told her he could easily restore Thorne's eyes to Thorne and provide her with eyes from a blood drinker that would last her for eternity. He said he could implant these new eyes for her with surgical delicacy so that they would endure forever. He explained that he knew how to override the Blood in us and stop its relentless war on change long enough to make the alterations in tissue required for a true wedding of nerves and biological threads." Jesse sighed. "I didn't understand most of it. I don't think Maharet did either. But he was brilliant, undeniably brilliant. He explained he was a true physician for our kind. He said he'd recently attached a full-functioning vampiric leg to an ancient vampire named Flavius who had lost the limb before he was ever brought into the Blood."

"Of course, Flavius," said David. "Pandora's Flavius, her Athenian slave. But this is marvelous."