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"You've loved him from the start of all this," said Teskhamen. "You and you alone spoke up for him to the others who were seeking a way to dislocate him into some sort of secure trap where he might animate the vampire world for their sake. But you loved him. You saved him from that. You invited him into your own body."

Did they know how little I ever stopped to consider for one split second anything that I had ever done? Likely they did. Likely they knew how I lived my life, riding wave after wave of instinct and emotion, driven by immense greed as well as generosity.

But that was not the point here. They were driving at something crucial about Amel himself.

"So what you're saying," I asked finally, "is that the realm of spirits is populated by ambitionless beings, largely benign, drifting, flighty, whatever--the way Maharet had once described them to us...childlike things...but that this spirit, Amel, is something else?"

"Benign?" asked Gremt. "Childlike? Lestat, have you forgotten Memnoch?"

Memnoch!

"What do you know about Memnoch?" I asked. I could hardly contain my excitement. "If you know anything of Memnoch, anything at all, you must tell me! Tell me now. What do you know of him?"

Memnoch was a spirit that had once hunted me down, seduced me with visions and tales of Heaven and Hell, and begged for me to become his apprentice in a spirit realm. Memnoch had claimed to be one of the "sons of God" who had engendered the Nephilim. Memnoch had claimed to be the Jewish-Christian Devil. I'd escaped and repudiated Memnoch in utter horror. But I had never known whence he came or what he was--really.

"What did Maharet tell you about Memnoch?" asked Gremt.

"Nothing," I said. "Nothing other than what I told the whole world. She said she knew him. That's all. That's all she ever said. Maharet didn't tell people things. That's the whole point about Maharet. She sat down with us once, long ago, and told us her personal history, and how the blood drinkers had come into existence, and then after that, she retired from the world, refusing to be any sort of mentor or leader. When she brought young ones to her hideouts, she put them to studying old human documents, tablets, scrolls, or pondering mysteries dug up from the earth. She held court not as an instructor but as some sort of..."

"Some sort of mother," said Gremt.

"Well, yes, I guess so," I said. "She brought a letter to me from Memnoch, or so she claimed. And in the letter was wrapped my eye, this eye, which Memnoch's demons had torn out of the socket. The letter was mocking and vicious. The eye I restored to its place and the eye has healed. But the heart will never heal from an assault such as Memnoch made on me. But Maharet never told me anything. I think Maharet was constitutionally wary of all forms of ambition."

Magnus smiled at this, as if it delighted him.

"He played the Devil for you," said Magnus, "for the little boy who had been frightened by stories of Hellfire and demons. He us

ed your imagination, your mind, your heart, so to speak, to weave his airy realms about you."

"Yes, I know that now. I suspected it then. And I left. I fled. I fled even though they took my eye from me."

"You were braver and stronger than I was," said Magnus softly. "And you are right about Maharet. She was against all forms of ambition."

"She believed in passivity," said Gremt, "and sad to say, she believed in ignorance."

"I agree," I said.

"It comes to that after centuries and centuries of vain hope," said Teskhamen. "You can gaze on the struggling beings around you with a sad detachment. And you can thank Heaven for ignorance, for simple beings who don't long to know anything."

"Look, I don't want to talk about Maharet," I said. "There's time enough for that. I want to talk about Memnoch. If you keep from me what you know of Memnoch--."

I sat up in the chair. I planted both feet on the floor as if I were prepared to rise and attack somebody but this didn't mean anything. "Who was Memnoch?"

"Why use the past tense?" asked Gremt. "You don't think he's hovering near you, quite ready again to sweep you up into his imaginary worlds?"

"He can't," I said. "He's tried. He's tried for years."

They were skeptical.

"Every spellbinder has a signature," I said. "Once I learn to recognize that signature, I become immune. They can't make it happen to me after that." I studied them individually. "Centuries ago, Armand would seek to sweep me up in his spells. I learned to recognize them instantly." I waited but they volunteered nothing. "I want to know what you know of Memnoch," I said. "You said his name!" I said to Gremt. "I would not have asked, not now, not until much later on, when we had come to know one another, all of us, and love one another. I would not have presumed. But you said his name, and you know what this means to me. What do you know of him?"

Magnus roused himself, brightening and glancing at his companions.

"He's an evil spirit," said Magnus. "He believes all the things he said to you. He fed off your fear of God and the Devil. He is greedy. Long aeons ago he fell in love with the religions of human beings; he dwells now in great purgatorial realms of his own making, seducing the lost earthbound souls of dead believers, sustained by their faith in those systems...."

"You do recall," I said, "that he claimed to teach love and forgiveness in his purgatorial Hell."

"Of course," said Magnus, "and he provides abundant images of those souls who have learned his lessons well ascending to Heaven. But nobody ascends from his domain. He is not of God. He is not of Hell. He's a spirit. And into his maw go the unwary, those longing to be judged and punished."