Page 11

I heard Amel laugh bitterly inside me, the voice no one else could hear. "Just remember. Spirits lie, and they lie, and they lie. And don't bother to knock. They 'heard' you thirty miles off. Teskhamen is in there. Teskhamen is a blood drinker, and if you don't think I've been inside Teskhamen of late surveying this

place from stem to stern, you're an idiot."

"Okay, so now I'm an idiot and a fool in the same contentious breath," I said.

The doors opened. I was standing in a flood of warm light, and the air was warm too and fragrant with the scent of wax candles, old wood, old books.

Gremt stood there, looking as always as solid as a human being. Short neatly groomed black hair, smooth symmetrical face marvelously eloquent of human courtesy and apprehension. But there was none of the gracious generosity in his expression that I had seen in the past. His long priestly thawb or soutane was of dark heavy blue velvet, and he wore a dark gray cashmere scarf tucked inside the simple collar, as if he could feel the cold.

"Lestat," he said and made me an old-fashioned bow. "I'm glad you've come." But something was wrong, and I felt I knew what it was.

He stepped aside for me to enter. The bodyguards approached, and I put out my hand with a forbidding gesture. And just to bring it home, I sent a quick telepathic blast to force the Range Rover backwards some ten feet, crunching and crashing through the overgrown gravel. They hated it, but they stood stock-still.

"Never mind them," I said to Gremt. "They'll wait outside."

"They may come in if you wish," he said, but he was distracted, conflicted, ill at ease. He struggled to appear friendly, gesturing again for me to enter.

"I don't wish," I replied. "But thank you, just the same. I can't go anywhere without them, which I accept, but I don't want them breathing down my neck."

He shut the door behind me and led me through a hollow shadowy stone alcove into what might have been in ancient times a great hall. Now it was a great library, with a crude old fireplace on the long front wall, a giant gaping affair with carved lions' heads, and a blazing fire. Sweet the smell of the oak burning. But I could also detect the distinct scent of natural gas mingled with it.

The air was amazingly warm for a place populated with spirits and an ancient vampire. Maybe their bodies did feel it. I liked it. I don't need warmth, but I enjoy it. And I enjoyed this place a lot.

The bookshelves had been recently built, and smelled of fresh wood, turpentine, and wax. The books were orderly, and at opposite ends of the hall were large old Renaissance Revival-style desks, heaped with papers and old black telephones. There was a fancy harpsichord to the far left of the fireplace, obviously a new instrument but skillfully made to reproduce all the excellent engineering of the original instruments and carefully painted to resemble something from my time. I saw electric sconces on the walls, and a low-hanging iron chandelier with a tracery of electric wires stealthily following its chain from the arched ceiling, but nothing illuminated the room but the fire.

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

There were thick wool carpets everywhere on the stone floor, mostly Persian in design, worn, faded, but comfortable underfoot.

A grouping of large knobby Renaissance oak chairs was clustered before the hearth and there sat Teskhamen and Magnus. No one else about. But I could hear beings moving in the rooms above. Someone up in the ancient square tower. Scents of modern plasterwork and paint, of copper plumbing and electrical equipment in distant rooms giving off the inevitable soft hum. A place of divine atmosphere and every modern comfort.

Teskhamen and Magnus rose from their chairs to greet me, and I braced myself for the encounter with Magnus, for looking into the eyes of this one who'd made me, and died on a pyre less than an hour after doing that, leaving me his powerful blood, his fortune, his home, and nothing else. Maybe our splendid vampire doctors, Seth and Fareed, could tell whether my blood had a discernible mixture that undeniably connected me to Magnus. Fareed was working on that. Fareed was working on everything.

I sensed a great unease on the part of all three of these creatures.

"Don't be their plaything," Amel said inside me. "Magnus is nothing as solid as he looks. He's a pathetic ghost. Notice that his monkly robes are part of the illusion. He isn't solid enough to risk real clothing or real shoes like Gremt."

I noted this. And I was certain that the last time I'd seen Magnus, he'd been the image of a living creature with real clothes. I wondered why the change.

"Can they hear you?" I asked Amel without moving my lips.

"How do I know?" he said. "Teskhamen can scour your mind as well as any of the old blood drinkers if you let him. He can't shut me out any more than the others. But ghosts? Spirits? Who the Hell knows what they sense or hear? Get on with it. I don't like it." This was disingenuous. He was excited. I knew it.

"Patience," I responded telepathically. "I've waited too long in coming."

He made a soft disgusted fuming sound, but went still.

Magnus gestured for me to take the chair on the far left, closest to the fire. I saw none of that doting affection in his eyes that I'd seen last time we met in New York.

Nobody extended a hand. I didn't extend my hand.

I sat down and folded my hands over the wooden arms of the chair, liking the feel of the carving. It was a new piece of furniture but a splendid imitation of something fashioned in the time of Shakespeare. And above the fireplace I spied a great intricate tapestry that was also new, full of vibrant new dyes and chemical threads, but exquisitely rendered--with medieval saints clustered about the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus on a golden throne. I loved the thickets of trees surrounding them, and the birds in the branches, and the tiny creeping things amid leaves and flowers. I wondered if mortal hands had made this, or had it been done by manically focused blood drinker weavers with preternatural patience and eye for detail.

"I appreciate all these many refinements," I said, my eyes sweeping the arched ceiling. "This was once a windowless croft, wasn't it? And you cut those big windows and made them beautiful with thick glass and iron lattices. You have kept this place well enough for the ghosts of old monks to be happy here, haven't you?"

"Yes, I think so," said Gremt, but he was forcing his smile.

"Well, this old ghost is happy here," said Magnus in a low rich voice. "I can tell you that much." I heard the past in the voice. I heard words spoken I hadn't remembered for decades. There, my son, is the passageway to my treasure....