Page 116

I lingered on the vision. I saw the hazy basement round about them. I saw the low beams above their heads. Gathering all my power into my projected gaze, I saw Santino's face, so troubled, soft, the very one who had shattered the only youth I might have ever had. I saw my old Master gazing almost wistfully at the flames. "We're finished," Marius said in his quiet, commanding voice, speaking Italian perfectly to the other. "I cannot think of another thing that we should do. "

"Break apart the Vatican, and steal the veil from them," answered Santino. "What right have they to claim such a thing?"

I could only see Marius's reaction, his sudden shock and then his polite and poised smile. "Why?" he asked, as if he held no secrets.

"What's the Veil to us, my friend? You think it will bring him back to his senses? Forgive me, Santino, but you are so very young. "

His senses, bring him back to his senses. This had to mean Lestat. There was no other possible meaning. I pushed my luck. I scanned Santino's mind for all he knew, and found myself recoiling in horror, but holding fast to what I saw.

Lestat, my Lestat-for he was never theirs, was he?-my Lestat was crazed and railing as the result of his awful saga, and held prisoner by the very oldest of our kind on the final decree that if he did not cease to disturb the peace, which meant of course our secrecy, he would be destroyed, as only the oldest could accomplish, and no one could plead for him on any account.

No, that could not happen! I writhed and twisted. The pain sent its shocks through me, red and violet and pulsing with orange light. I hadn't seen such colors since I'd fallen. My mind was coming back, and coming back for what? Lestat to be destroyed! Lestat imprisoned, as I had once been centuries ago under Rome in Santino's catacombs. Oh, God, this is worse than the sun's fire, this is worse than seeing that bastard brother strike the little plum-cheeked face of Sybelle and knock her away from her piano, this is murderous rage I feel.

But the smaller damage was done. "Come, we have to get out of here," said Santino. "There's something wrong, something I sense that I can't explain. It's as if someone is right near us yet not near us; it's as if someone as powerful as myself has heard my footfall over miles and miles. "

Marius looked kindly, curious, unalarmed. "New York is ours tonight," he said simply. And then with faint fear he looked into the mouth of the furnace one last time. "Unless something of spirit, so tenacious of life, clung still to his lace and to the velvet he wore. "

I closed my eyes. Oh, God, let me close my mind. Let me shut it up tight.

His voice went on, piercing the little shell of my consciousness where I had so softened it.

"But I have never believed such things," he said. "We're like the Eucharist itself, in some measure, don't you think? Being Body and Blood of a mysterious god only so long as we hold to the chosen form. What's strands of reddish hair and scorched and tattered lace? He's gone. "

"I don't understand you," Santino confessed gently. "But if you think I never loved him, you are very very wrong. "

"Let's go then," Marius said. "Our work's done. Every trace of every one is now obliterated. But promise me in your old Roman Catholic soul, you won't go seeking the Veil. A million pairs of eyes have looked on it, Santino, and nothing's changed. The world is the world, and children die in every quadrant under Heaven, hungry and alone. "

I could risk no more.

I veered away, searching the night like a high beam, casting about for the mortals who might see them leave the building in which they'd done their all-important work, but their retreat was too secret, too swift for that.

I felt them go. I felt the sudden absence of their breath, their pulse, and knew the winds had taken them away.

At last when another hour had ticked, I let my eye roam the same old rooms where they had wandered.

All was quiet with those poor muddled technicians and guards whom white-faced specters from another realm had gently spellbound as they went about their gruesome task.

By morning, the theft and all the missing work would be discovered, and Dora's miracle would suffer yet another dreary insult, receding ever more swiftly out of current time.

I was sore; I wept a dry, hoarse weeping, unable even to muster tears.

I think that once in the glimmering ice I saw my hand, a grotesque claw, more like a thing flayed than burnt, and shiny black as I had remembered it or seen it.

Then a mystery began to prey upon me. How could I have killed the evil brother of my poor love? How could it have been anything but an illusion, that swift horrible justice, when I had been rising and falling beneath the weight of the morning sun?

And if that had not happened, if I had not sucked dry that awful vengeful brother, then they too were a dream, my Sybelle and my little Bedouin. Oh, please, was that the final horror?

The night struck its worst hour. Dim clocks chimed in painted plastered rooms. Wheels churned the crunching snow. Again, I raised my hand. There came the inevitable crack and snap. Tumbling all around me was the broken ice like so much shattered glass!

I looked above on pure and sparkling stars. How lovely this, these guardian glassy spires with all their fast and golden squares of light cut in ranks run straight across and sharply down to score the airy blackness of the winter night, and here now comes the tyrant wind, whistling through crystalline canyons down across this small neglected bed where one forgotten demon lies, gazing with the larcenous vision of a great soul at the city's emboldened lights on clouds above. Oh, little stars, how much I've hated you, and envied you that in the ghastly void you can with such determination plot your dogged course.

But I hated nothing now. My pain was as a purgative for all unworthy things. I watched the sky cloud over, glisten, become a diamond for a still and gorgeous moment, and then again the white soft limitless haze took up the golden glow of city lamps and sent in answer the softest lightest fall of snow.

It touched my face. It touched my outstretched hand. It touched me all over as it melted in its tiny magical flakes.

"And now the sun will come," I whispered, as if some guardian angel held me close, "and even here beneath this twisted little awning of tin, it will find me through this broken canopy and take my soul to further depths of pain. "

A voice cried out in protest. A voice begged that it not be so. My own, I thought, of course, why not this self-deception? I am mad to think that I can bear the burning that I've suffered and that I could willingly endure it once again.