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But another sound was comming to me. I knew it as I went up the stairs. And I marveled at its power to reach me. It was like a song arching over an immense distance, low and sweet.

Once years ago, I had heard a young farm boy singing as he walked along the high road out of the village to the north. He hadn't known anyone was listening. He had thought himself alone in the open country, and his voice had a private power and purity that gave it unearthly beauty. Never mind the words of his old song.

This was the voice that was calling to me now. The lone voice, rising over the miles that separated us to gather all sounds into itself.

I was frightened again. Yet I opened the door at the top of the staircase and went out onto the stone roof. Silken the morning breeze, dreamlike the twinkling of the last stars. The sky was not so much a canopy as it was a mist rising endlessly above me, and the stars drifted upwards, growing ever smaller, in the mist.

The faraway voice sharpened, like a note sung in the high mountains, touching my chest where I had laid my hand.

It pierced me as a beam pierces darkness, singing Come to me; all things will be forgiven if only you come to me. I am more alone than I have ever been.

And there came in time with the voice a sense of limitless possibility, of wonder and expectation that brought with it the vision of Armand standing alone in the open doors of Notre Dame. Time and space were illusions. He was in a pale wash of light before the main altar, a lissome shape in regal tatters, shimmering as he vanished, and nothing but patience in his eyes. There was no crypt under les Innocents now. There was no grotesquery of the ragged ghost in the glare of Nicki's library, throwing down the books when he had finished with them as if they were empty shells.

I think I knelt down and rested my head against the jagged stones. I saw the moon like a phantom dissolving, and the sun must have touched her because she hurt me and I had to close my eyes.

But I felt an elation, an ecstasy. It was as if my spirit could know the glory of the Dark Trick without the blood flowing, in the intimacy of the voice dividing me and seeking the tenderest, most secret part of my soul.

What do you want of me, I wanted to say again. How can there be this forgiveness when there was such rancor only a short while ago? Your coven destroyed. Horrors I don't want to imagine . . . I wanted to say it all again.

But I couldn't shape the words now any more than I could before. And this time, I knew that if I dared to try, the bliss would melt and leave me and the anguish would be worse than the thirst for blood.

Yet even as I remained still, in the mystery of this feeling, I knew strange images and thoughts that weren't my own.

I saw myself retreat to the dungeon and lift up the inanimate bodies of those kindred monsters I loved. I saw myself carrying them up to the roof of the tower and leaving them there in their helplessness at the mercy of the rising sun. Hell's Bells rang the alarm in vain for them. And the sun took them up and made them cinders with human hair.

My mind recoiled from this; it recoiled in the most heartbreaking disappointment.

"Child, still," I whispered. Ah, the pain of this disappointment, the possibility dimini

shing. . . "How foolish you are to think that such things could be done by me. "

The voice faded; it withdrew itself from me. And I felt my aloneness in every pore of my skin. It was as if all covering had been taken from me forever and I would always be as naked and miserable as I was now.

And I felt far off a convulsion of power, as if the spirit that had made the voice was curling upon itself like a great tongue.

"Treachery!" I said louder. "But oh, the sadness of it, the miscalculation. How can you say that you desire me!"

Gone it was. Absolutely gone. And desperately, I wanted it back even if it was to fight with me. I wanted that sense of possibility, that lovely flare again.

And I saw his face in Notre Dame, boyish and almost sweet, like the face of an old da Vinci saint. A horrid sense of fatality passed over me.

Chapter 6

6

As soon as Gabrielle rose, I drew her away from Nicki, out into the quiet of the forest, and I told her all that had taken place the preceding night. I told her all that Armand had suggested and said. In an embarrassed way, I spoke of the silence that existed between her and me, and of how I knew now that it wasn't to change.

"We should leave Paris as soon as possible," I said finally. "This creature is too dangerous. And the ones to whom I gave the theater -- they don't know anything other than what they've been taught by him. I say let them have Paris. And let's take the Devil's Road, to use the old queen's words. "

I had expected anger from her, and malice towards Armand. But through the whole story she remained calm.

"Lestat, there are too many unanswered questions," she said. "I want to know how this old coven started, I want to know all that Armand knows about us. "

"Mother, I am tempted to turn my back on it. I don't care how it started. I wonder if he himself even knows. "

"I understand, Lestat," she said quietly. "Believe me, I do. When all is said and done, I care less about these creatures than I do about the trees in this forest or the stars overhead. I'd rather study the currents of wind or the patterns in the falling leaves. . . "

"Exactly. "