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Everywhere I saw mixtures of historical motifs, ribbons of egg-and-dart decoration dividing diamond-shaped panels of multipetaled flowers or dark blue night behind symmetrical stars, or painting so vividly real it seemed a glimpse here and there into a real garden. A great harmony held it all together, and gradually my eyes saw that much that had been done here was ancient and fading, yet other areas were fresh and still smelled of the pigment and plaster recently applied. The whole was a visual wonderland.

The lights. I had not noticed it before but of course all this was seen in a wealth of electric light, streaming from horizontal fixtures tucked everywhere along borders, in corners, and beneath the lower rim of the huge dome. The steady brilliance of electric light came from the many doorways.

We had come to a stop now on the marble tiled floor of this huge piazza-like place. I could feel the fresh air moving around us. It smelled of the night beyond, of water and green things.

From one of the doors came a figure to greet us, a blood drinker who resembled a young woman of perhaps twenty. Oval face, and oval eyes, and a complexion like cream.

"Lestat and Gabrielle," she said as she drew near, her hands extended to include both of us. "I'm Bianca, Marius's Bianca, from Venice."

"Of course, I should have known you immediately," I said. She felt soft and tender to me, remarkably so, in fact, considering she had five hundred years in the Blood and plenty of the blood of the Mother. All those years with Marius during which he protected the shrine of Those Who Must Be Kept, she'd drunk that precious blood. And she'd been made by Marius, and all those made by Marius had been well made, much better made than my fledglings.

I hadn't known to take and give the Blood over and over as Marius had always done.

Bianca wore a simple black robe trimmed in gold, and her long hair was braided with what seemed a leafy vine of gold. And a delicate gold circlet around her head made me think of the painting the mortal painter Botticelli had done of her.

"You come with me, please, both of you," she said.

We followed her down another corridor of splendid gold enameling, bordered in delicately wrought flowering trees with blossoms like jewels, and into another large and splendid chamber.

Behind a long heavy wooden table with carved legs sat Sevraine, who rose now to greet us. It had to be Sevraine. Indeed it was the same powerful and ancient immortal I'd seen rising out of the tunnel in Paris.

She was a strongly built figure with fine high breasts in what seemed a Roman gown of sheer rose fabric crisscrossed with gold ribbons and bound around the waist. With a mane of flowing light blond hair she looked Nordic, and her pale-blue eyes underscored the impression. She was big boned but beautifully shaped all over, down to her tapering fingers, and her lush naked arms.

But before I could fully absorb this miracle, this vision, this creature who was reaching across the table now and inviting us to sit down, I was distracted by two figures who flanked her--one a female blood drinker I knew but couldn't place, a woman taken in her prime with remarkably long dark-ashen hair, hair that was almost a luminous gray, and clever vibrant eyes. And the other a spirit.

I knew at once it was a spirit, but it was not like any other spirit I'd seen up close before. It was a spirit clothing himself in actual physical particles, a body of particles that it had made up somehow and drawn to itself, out of dust, air, free-floating bits of matter, and it was so solidly put together, the physical vehicle of this spirit, that it was wearing actual clothes.

This was wholly different from the apparitions of ghosts and spirits I'd known in the past. And I had seen some powerful ghosts and spirits--including the spirit who had called himself Memnoch the Devil--in differing forms. But they had been hallucinations, those ghosts and spirits with their clothes being a part of the illusion, and even the scent of blood and sweat or the sound of a heartbeat had been part of the illusion. When they'd smoked a cigarette or drunk a glass of whiskey or given off the sound of a footstep it had been part of the apparition. The whole vision had been of a different texture than the world around it, the world I inhabited and from which I'd seen it. Oh, so I believed.

Not so at all with this spirit. His body, whatever it was made of, was occupying three-dimensional space, and had weight, and I could hear the sounds of simulated organs inside it, hear the distinct beating of a heart, hear the respiration. I could see the light of the room actually falling on the planes of this spirit's face, see it glittering in his eyes, see the shadow of his arm on the table. No scent, however, except that of incense and perfume which clung to its clothes.

Maybe I had in fact seen such spirits as this--but only fleetingly in the past, and never close enough or long enough to realize that they could be touched, that they were being seen by others.

I felt sure this one had never been a human being. He wasn't a ghost. No, he had to be something originating in some other realm for the simple reason that his body was wholly ideal, like a work of Greek classical art, and there was nothing about it that was particular.

In sum, this was the best spirit body I'd ever beheld. And he was smiling at me, apparently pleased with my quiet but obvious fascination.

He had dark and wavy and perfect hair framing his face in a classical Greek style, and the face could easily have come from a Greek statue. Yet this thing lived and breathed in the body it had assembled for itself. I had no idea how it could have a heartbeat, how the blood could rush to its face now, or appear to do so, as I smelled no actual blood, but it was a splendid spirit.

We had come to the edge of the table. It was perhaps three feet wide, of a wood so old I could smell the generations of oil worked into it. There were playing cards out on the wood, bright pretty glittering playing cards.

"Welcome to you both," said Sevraine. She spoke in a sweet lyrical voice with a girl's enthusiasm. "I'm so happy you've come, Lestat. You don't know how many nights I've heard you out there roaming this land, wandering about the ruins of Gobekli Tepe, and I always dreamed you would find your way here, that you would hear something emanating from these mountains that would prove irresistible to you. But you seemed alone, dedicated to being alone, not eager at all to have your thoughts interrupted. And so I've waited, and waited. And your mother and I have long known each other and she at last has brought you here."

I didn't believe a word she was saying. She coveted her secrecy. She was merely trying to be polite, and I was bound to be polite as well.

"Maybe this is the perfect time, Sevraine," I said. "I'm happy to be here."

The mysterious woman had risen at Sevraine's right and so had this male spirit on her left.

"Ah, young one," said the woman and immediately I knew this voice from the charnel house under Paris. "You have ridden the Devil's Road with greater zeal than any I've ever known. You don't know how many nights from my grave I followed you, catching one image of you after another from the minds that doted on you. I dreamed of waking merely to talk to you. You burnt like a flame in the blackness in which I suffered, beckoning me to rise."

A chill came over me. I took both her

hands.

"The old one," I said in a whisper, "from Les Innocents! The one who was with Armand and the Children of Satan!" I was astonished. "You're the one I called the old Queen."

"Yes, beloved one. I'm Allesandra," she said. "That's my name. Allesandra, daughter of Dagobert, last king of the Merovingians and brought into the Blood by Rhoshamandes. Oh, what a splendid pleasure it is to behold you here in this safe and warm place!"