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"And is he confiding in you as to where he came from?" asked Gremt.

"You should know perfectly well that he has no idea where he came from," I replied. "Do you have any idea where you came from?"

"What makes you assume that I don't?"

"I know you don't. If you knew where you came from and why you were a spirit, you would never have founded the Talamasca. You might never have incarnated. I think you and all your spirit entity brothers and sisters...assuming they have gender...are as confused as we are. So are ghosts. Everybody's confused. And yes, he has made some philosophical pronouncements if you must know."

"What were they?" asked Magnus intently.

"That in the realm of the invisible there is no right and wrong," I said. "He told me that. And he told me that ideas of right and wrong originate with biological beings and they seduce the spirit world, and the spirit world wants to know more of it. All quests, he says, come from us."

This totally surprised them, but it was absolutely the truth.

Amel was saying nothing, absolutely nothing. "Don't tell me you don't remember all this," I whispered to him.

Long pause, then in a low voice: "I remember."

Teskhamen looked calmly from Gremt to me and back again, in a manner which I found faintly disturbing. But he seemed to sense this and he lowered his gaze again to the fire, as if he'd been rude to me.

"Listen to me, Lestat," said Gremt. It was a tone I'd never heard from him before. His voice was low, markedly soft, but rather hard. "You don't know this spirit. You think you do. But you don't."

Silence inside me.

"Why do you say this?" I asked.

An ominous expression darkened Gremt's face.

"Because I remember in the airy Heavens a time when he was not there," he said.

"I don't understand."

"He's no simple spirit, Lestat," said Gremt. "I am a simple spirit, and indeed there are myriad simple spirits--there are simple spirits who 'possess' mortals, and there are even simple spirits who seek to make for themselves a secure citadel of flesh as I've done--and spirits without count--collected in the earth's thinner atmosphere whom humans cannot usually see or hear. But he--Amel--is no simple spirit. And I who can remember almost nothing of those airy aeons well remember when he came. There was a tumult in Heaven when he came. He was new. He had the name Amel when he came. Do you follow me?"

He broke off as if unsatisfied, and looked into the fire. No wonder we gather around fires because they give us something to look at when we can't look at one another.

Silence. Coldness. The serpent coiling inside of me had gone still.

"What did he say of himself?" I pressed. "Did he talk of where he'd come from?"

"No," said Gremt. "He was wounded, suffering, rather like an earthbound ghost, blundering through the invisible in agony. But he was no simple ghost. He has the immense power of a spirit."

"How so?"

"We are as different from ghosts as angels are from humans," Gremt said. "Don't think for a moment you know what he is. He has a cunning and an ambition which other spirits do not possess and never did. At least not as I have ever known them. I learned my cunning and ambition from watching him. And when he came into the flesh through Akasha, I came after him, but it took me thousands of years to achieve the concentration and strength sufficient for me to enter this physical world. Never for a moment think he is of the same ilk as me. Something different drives him and that something is rooted in experience and knowledge which I never possessed."

"So you're saying he is a ghost!"

"No." He shook his head. He was defeated.

Shimmer. Flash. The city falling into the sea. The huge cry of thousands. Gone.

I'd lost the thread. I put my hand to my forehead, massaging my temples. "You're saying he was flesh and blood before, that he's a ghost."

"He's no ghost," said Gremt. "I know ghosts." He gestured to Magnus. "This is a ghost, fired with the urgency and moral concerns he learned before he died. No. He's not a ghost."

"I think what my friend means," said Teskhamen, "is that you must not trust him, Lestat. Love him, yes, of course, and treat him with the immense concern you've always shown for him, but never trust him."

I nodded, to acknowledge that I was listening, of course, but I did not really respond.