Page 111

"Why is it you don't hearken to your own story?" I asked. "Is it that you have never forgiven Marius for not warning you about them, letting you fall into their hands? You will never take anything, not example or inspiration, from Marius again? I am not Marius, but I tell you since I set my feet on the Devil's Road, I have heard of only one elder who could teach me anything, and that is Marius, your Venetian master. He is talking to me now. He is saying something to me of a way to be immortal. "

"Mockery. "

"No. It wasn't mockery! And you are the one whose heart breaks for what he will never have: another body of belief, another spell. "

No answer.

"We cannot be Marius for you," I said, "or the dark lord, Santino. We are not artists with a great vision that will carry you forward. And we are not evil coven masters with the conviction to condemn a legion to perdition. And this domination -- this glorious mandate -- is what you must have. "

I had risen to my feet without meaning to. I had come close to the fireplace and I was looking down at him.

And I saw, out of the comer of my eye, Gabrielle's subtle nod of approval, and the way that she closed her eyes for a moment as if she were allowing herself a sigh of relief.

He was perfectly still.

"You have to suffer through this emptiness," I said, "and find what impels you to continue. If you come with us we will fail you and you will destroy us. "

"How suffer through it?" He looked up at me and his eyebrows came together in the most poignant frown. "How do I begin? You move like the right hand of God! But for me the world, the real world in which Marius lived, is beyond reach. I never lived in it. I push against the glass. But how do I get in?"

"I can't tell you that," I said.

"You have to study this age," Gabrielle interrupted. Her voice was calm but commanding.

He looked towards her as she spoke.

"You have to understand the age," she continued, "through its literature and its music and its art. You have come up out of the earth, as you yourself put it. Now live in the world. "

No answer from him. Flash of Nicki's ravaged flat with all its books on the floor. Western civilization in heaps.

"And what better place is there than the center of things, the boulevard and the theater?" Gabrielle asked.

He frowned, his head turning dismissively, but she pressed on.

"Your gift is for leading the coven, and your coven is still there. "

He made a soft despairing sound.

"Nicolas is a fledgling," she said. "He can teach them much about the world outside, but he cannot really lead them. The woman, Eleni, is amazingly clever, but she will make way for you. "

"What is it to me, their games?" he whispered.

"It is a way to exist," she said. "And that is all that matters to you now. "

"The Theater of the Vampires! I should rather the fire. "

"Think of it," she said. "There's a perfection in it you can't deny. We are illusions of what is mortal, and the stage is an illusion of what is real. "

"It's an abomination," he said. "What did Lestat call it? Petty?"

"That was to Nicolas because Nicolas would build fantastical philosophies upon it," she said. "You must live now without fantastical philosophies, the way you did when you were Marius's apprentice. Live to learn the age. And Lestat does not believe in the value of evil. But you do believe in it. I know that you do. "

"I am evil," he said half smiling. He almost laughed. "It's not a matter of belief, is it? But do you think I could go from the spiritual path I followed for three centuries to voluptuousness and debauchery such as that? We were the saints of evil," he protested. "I will not be common evil. I will not. "

"Make it uncommon," she said. She was growing impatient. "If you are evil, how can voluptuousness and debauchery be your enemies? Don't the world, the flesh, and the devil conspire equally against man?"

He shook his head, as if to say he did not care.

"You are more concerned with what is spiritual than with evil," I interjected, watching him closely. "Is that not so?"