Page 170

I nodded gravely. I had expected this, but I knew without even thinking that this might prove very hard indeed.

"If you tell even one part," he said, "another will follow, and with every telling of the secret of Those Who Must Be Kept you increase the danger of their discovery. "

"Yes," I said. "But the legends, our origins . . . What about those children that I make? Can't I tell them -- "

"No. As I told you, tell part and you will end up telling all. Besides, if these fledglings are children of the Christian god, if they are poisoned as Nicolas was with the Christian notion of Original Sin and guilt, they will only be maddened and disappointed by these old tales. It will all be a horror to them that they cannot accept. Accidents, pagan gods they don't believe in, customs they cannot understand. One has to be ready for this knowledge, meager as it may be. Rather listen hard to

their questions and tell them what you must to make them contented. And if you find you cannot lie to them, don't tell them anything at all. Try to make them strong as godless men today are strong. But mark my words, the old legends never. Those are mine and mine alone to tell. "

"What will you do to me if I tell them?" I asked.

This startled him. He lost his composure for almost a full second, and then he laughed.

"You are the damnedest creature, Lestat," he murmured. "The point is I can do anything I like to you if you tell. Surely you know that. I could crush you underfoot the way Akasha crushed the Elder. I could set you ablaze with the power of my mind. But I don't want to utter such threats. I want you to come back to me. But I will not have these secrets known. I will not have a band of immortals descend upon me again as they did in Venice. I will not be known to our kind. You must never -- deliberately or accidentally -- send anyone searching for Those Who Must Be Kept or for Marius. You will never utter my name to others. "

"I understand," I said.

"Do you?" he asked. "Or must I threaten you after all? Must I warn you that my vengeance can be terrible? That my punishment would include those to whom you've told the secrets as well as you? Lestat, I have destroyed others of our kind who came in search of me. I have destroyed them simply because they knew the old legends and they knew the name of Marius, and they would never give up the quest. "

"I can't bear this. ," I murmured. "I won't tell anyone, ever, I swear. But I'm afraid of what others can read in my thoughts, naturally. I fear that they might take the images out of my head. Armand could do it. What if -- "

"You can conceal the images. You know how. You can throw up other images to confuse them. You can lock your mind. It's a skill you already know. But let's be done with threats and admonitions. I feel love for you. "

I didn't respond for a moment. My mind was leaping ahead to all manner of forbidden possibilities. Finally I put it in words:

"Marius, don't you ever have the desire to tell all of it to all of them! I mean, to make it known to the whole world of our kind. , and to draw them together?"

"Good God, no, Lestat. Why would I do that?" He seemed genuinely puzzled.

"So that we might possess our legends, might at least ponder the riddles of our history, as men do. So that we might swap our stories and share our power --

"And combine to use it as the Children of Darkness have done, against men?"

"No . . . Not like that. "

"Lestat, in eternity, covens are actually rare. Most vampires are distrustful and solitary beings and they do not love others. They have no more than one or two well-chosen companions from time to time, and they guard their hunting grounds and their privacy as I do mine. They wouldn't want to come together, and if they did overcome the viciousness and suspicions that divide them, their convocation would end in terrible battles and struggles for supremacy like those revealed to me by Akasha, which happened thousands of years ago. We are evil things finally. We are killers. Better that those who unite on this earth be mortal and that they unite for the good. "

I accepted this, ashamed of how it excited me, ashamed of all my weaknesses and all my impulsiveness. Yet another realm of possibilities was already obsessing me.

"And what about to mortals, Marius? Have you never wanted to reveal yourself to them, and tell them the whole story?"

Again, he seemed positively baffled by the notion.

"Have you never wanted the world to know about us, for better or for worse? Has it never seemed preferable to living in secret?"

He lowered his eyes for a moment and rested his chin against his closed hand. For the first time I perceived a communication of images coming from him, and I felt that he allowed me to see them because he was uncertain of his answer. He was remembering with a recall so powerful that it made my powers seem fragile. And what he remembered were the earliest times, when Rome had still ruled the world, and he was still within the range of a normal human lifetime.

"You remember wanting to tell them all," I said. "To make it known, the monstrous secret. "

"Perhaps," he said, "in the very beginning, there was some desperate passion to communicate. "

"Yes, communicate," I said, cherishing the word. And I remembered that long-ago night on the stage when I had so frightened the Paris audience.

"But that was in the dim beginning," he said slowly, speaking of himself. His eyes were narrow and remote as if he were looking back over all the centuries. "It would be folly, it would be madness. Were humanity ever really convinced, it would destroy us. I don't want to be destroyed. Such dangers and calamities are not interesting to me. "

I didn't answer.

"You don't feel the urge yourself to reveal these things," he said to me almost soothingly.