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Each step jolted my entire frame and the nausea came again more than once, but I kept walking, doing what they wanted, until we reached the ballroom where it seemed the entire world of the Undead was gathered, even threaded all through the orchestra chairs, and out onto the open terrace, and out through the doors to the adjacent salons.

We made a space for ourselves in the middle, and I made up my mind I was going to appear absolutely strong for everyone here, no matter what I felt. I let go of Louis's hand and I let go of Fareed's hand. Cyril had his hand on my back and Thorne still held my right arm.

"It's all right," I said to them. Reluctantly, they allowed me to stand on my own.

All around, I saw pale hands raised with glittering little glass cell phones aloft, as if they were lights beamed down towards me.

Seth held a narrow silver candelabrum with all three candles burning. There was a feverish and low murmuring around us, rolling like a wave through the meandering assembly, with occasional gasps, and then silence again except for the faintest whispering like dry leaves crackling in a wind.

"Give that thing to me," I said. With my left hand, I took the candelabrum by its bulbous sterling-silver stem, and then I held my right hand, palm down, above the three quivering flames. It took a few seconds before the pain became unbearable and still I held it, gritting my teeth and letting it burn me, holding steady, not moving.

"Silence," said a voice.

I held firm. The pain was so acute I had to look away, look up at the painted ceiling, look up into the light of the chandelier. This is beyond bearing, and it's such a simple thing, just candles, just little flames. Steady little flame. A flame is a flame is a flame. I heard the sound of my flesh cracking.

My mother cried out, "That's enough!"

She pulled my hand away from the flames. She held my wrist with all her strength, her eyes flashing with protective rage. The candelabrum was taken away. Scent of smoking wicks.

Even in the midst of the pain, I saw she had let her hair down, all her glorious fair hair, and just for an instant she was my mother, the mother I knew, staring at my hand and then at me with her quick anxious gray eyes. I heard her whisper my name.

The palm of my hand was black, covered with big yellow blisters. It was a mass of agonizing throbbing pain. The black skin was cracked and bleeding, and then as I watched, it faded to red, bloody red, and the blisters shrank. The fissures closed. And the raw red flesh turned to dark blue. The pain was slowly fading. The hand was healing itself. The hand was turning a pale pink color and slowly it became purely white. Just my hand. The pain was gone.

And they didn't have to tell me:

No one else, no one else in the ballroom, no one else in the Chateau--no one else throughout the whole world--had died and no one had felt this pain.

The orchestra gathered. Everyone was talking. The music began and I went to the nearest chair and sat down. I looked out at the night sky beyond the terrace and I kept seeing the bright blue sky over Atalantaya, and feeling that soft tropical air.

29

Fareed

r /> IT HAD WORKED, and for nine nights, Fareed had been writing, writing endlessly as to how and why it had worked, and how it had affected the tribe worldwide. The first panicked calls proved false alarms. No one now disconnected from the Core was in fact aging or falling to pieces, and none of the elders had lost the Cloud Gift, or the Fire Gift, or the Mind Gift, or any other gift. And the vast majority of the Undead could still read the minds of others and the minds of mortals. And finally early in the morning on this very night, a new fledgling had been made securely by a vampire in Oxford, England--an old coven master willing to attempt the step with one he'd loved for a long time--and it had worked. Was the fledgling somehow connected to the master, as all the tribe had once been connected to Amel? No.

But this was just the beginning. Fareed would be gathering data on an infinite number of aspects of each and every individual whose nightly progress he followed--for years to come. Flannery Gilman, who worked at his side for hours without speaking, would keep feeding the data into the computers. And vampires of all ages would be hard put not to keep imagining things in the wake of the Great Disconnection, and it might be years before anything like a full picture of properties and probabilities and expectations could be made.

The bottom line? Nothing had changed. Nothing, that is, except that each and every one of them was now a discrete entity. Or as Louis described it, each and every one had his or her own etheric body with its etheric brain--the etheric brain collected, formed, and developed in the biological brain of the fledgling when the vampiric blood of the master had first gone into it, and the etheric body that had developed from that etheric brain all through the biological body of the fledgling as the vampiric blood circulated through the biological body driven by the biological heart.

Louis's simple explanation became the explanation that most could understand.

And Fareed had acknowledged more than once that Louis's simple understanding of old-fashioned Theosophical rhetoric had led them in the right way.

But Louis took no pleasure in his triumph. He received acknowledgments with sad eyes and bitter smiles. Fareed understood this only too well.

As for the Prince, Fareed couldn't imagine what life was really like for him now, and the Prince obviously didn't care to share.

They all knew that Amel could no longer travel into the minds of others, no longer be heard in other brains as a separate and distinct entity, but everyone had expected as much. Was Amel unhappy with this development? Had Amel's thirst become an agony because he was confined to one vampiric body? Lestat never said.

As he watched Lestat move through the inevitable crowds in the Chateau, Fareed began to wonder whether Lestat possessed extraordinary courage, or whether Lestat simply didn't know what fear was. He appeared oblivious to the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head.

He danced with the young ones and the old ones, took long walks up and down the mountain with Louis, played chess or cards whenever he wanted, and spent hours watching films in the screening room of the castle just as he had done before.

Maybe Lestat knew something that they didn't know.

But Fareed doubted that, and Seth said it wasn't so. Marius said it wasn't so. Lestat was simply living from moment to moment, with the same brashness and boldness that had always characterized him. Maybe he simply didn't care.

The fourth night, Lestat had gone to see Rhoshamandes without warning a single soul as to what he planned to do. Thorne and Cyril followed him as faithfully as they had in the past.