Page 114

When I came back down to the crypt I saw her building up the fire again with the last of the wood. In a slow, weary fashion, she stoked the blaze, and the light was red on her profile and in her eyes.

I sat quietly on the bench watching her, watching the explosion of sparks against the blackened bricks.

"Did he give you what you wanted?" I asked.

"In his own way, yes," she said. She put the poker aside and sat down opposite, her hair spilling down over her shoulders as she rested her hands beside her on the bench. "I tell you, I don't care if I never look upon another one of our kind," she said coldly. "I am done with their legends, their curses, their sorrows. And done with their insufferable humanity, which may be the most astonishing thing they've revealed. I'm ready for the world again, Lestat, as I was on the night I died. "

"But Marius -- " I said excitedly. "Mother, there are ancient ones -- ones who have used immortality in a wholly different way. "

"Are there?" she asked. "Lestat, you're too generous with your imagination. The story of Marius has the quality of a fairy tale. "

"No, that's not true. "

"So the orphan demon claims descent not from the filthy peasant devils he resembles," she said, "but from a lost lord, almost a god. I tell you any dirty-faced village child dreaming at the kitchen fire can tell you tales like that. "

"Mother, he couldn't have invented Marius," I said. "I may have a great deal of imagination, but he has almost none. He couldn't have made up the images. I tell you he saw those things. . . "

"I hadn't thought of it exactly that way," she admitted with a little smile. "But he could well have borrowed Marius from the legends he heard. . . "

"No," I said. "There was a Marius and there is a Marius still. And there are others like him. There are Children of the Millennia who have done better than these Children of Darkness with the gifts given them. "

"Lestat, what is important is that we do better," she said. "All I learned from Armand, finally, was that immortals find death seductive and ultimately irresistible, that they fail to conquer death or humanity in their minds. Now I want to take that knowledge and wear it like armor as I move through the world. And luckily, I don't mean the world of change which these creatures have found so dangerous. I mean the world that for eons has been the same. "

She tossed her hair back as she looked at the fire again. "It's of snow-covered mountains I dream," she said softly, "of desert wastes -- of impenetrable jungles, or the great north woods of America where they say white men have never been. " Her face warmed just a little as she looked at me. "Think on it," she said. "There is nowhere that we cannot go. And if the Children of the Millennia do exist, maybe that is where they are -- far from the world of men. "

"And how do they live if they are?" I asked. I was picturing my own world and it was full of mortal beings, and the things that mortal beings made. "It's man we feed on," I said.

"There are hearts that beat in those forests," she said dreamily. "There is blood that flows for the one who takes it . . . I can do the things now that you used to do. I could fight those wolves on my own. . . " Her voice trailed off as she was lost in her thoughts. "The important thing," she said after a long moment, "is that we can go wherever we wish now, Lestat. We're free. "

"I was free before," I said. "I never cared for what Armand had to tell. But Marius -- I know that Marius is alive. I feel it. I felt it when Armand told the tale. And Marius knows things and I don't mean just about us, or about Those Who Must Be Kept or whatever the old mystery -- he knows things about life itself, about how to move through time. "

"So let him be your patron saint if you need it," she said.

This angered me, and I didn't say anything more. The fact was her talk of jungles and forests frightened me. And all the things Armand said to divide us came back to me, just as I'd known they would when he had spoken his well-chosen words. And so we live with our differences, I thought, just as mortals do, and maybe our divisions are exaggerated as are our passions, as is our love.

"There was one inkling. . . " she said as she watched the fire, "one little indication that the story of Marius had truth. "

"There were a thousand indications," I said.

"He said that Marius slew the evildoer," she continued, "and he called the evildoer Typhon, the slayer of his brother. Do you remember this?"

"I thought that he meant Cain who had slain Abel. It was Cain I saw in the images, though I heard the other name. "

"That's just it. Armand himself didn't understand the name Typhon. Yet he repeated it. But I know what it means. "

"Tell me. "

"It's from the Greek and Roman myths -- the old story of the Egyptian god, Osiris, slain by his brother Typhon, so that he became lord of the Underworld. Of course Armand could have read it in Plutarch, but he didn't, that's the strange thing. "

"Ah, you see then, Marius did exist. When he said he'd lived for a millennium he was telling the truth. "

"Perhaps, Lestat, perhaps," she said.

"Mother, tell me this again, this Egyptian story. . .

'Lestat, you have years to read all the old tales for yourself. " She rose and bent to kiss me, and I sensed the coldness and sluggishness in her that always came before dawn. "As for me, I am done with books. They are what I read when I could do nothing else. " She took my two hands in hers. "Tell me that we'll be on the road tomorrow. That we won't see the ramparts of Paris again until we've seen the other side of the world. "

"Exactly as you wish," I said.