She sat back in the small gilded chair. David kissed her cheek.

I threw up my hands. “It’s true,” I said. “Maharet was thinking of destroying herself and Mekare. Of carrying Mekare with her into a core of an active volcano. I saw the images of this coming from her. Pacaya in Guatemala is that volcano. I hate to say it. I hate to admit it, because she should not have died as she did at the hands of this unspeakable Rhoshamandes! But it’s true.”

Everyone waited, but it was clear I would not go on and neither would Jesse, and finally Marius rose to his feet with his usual commanding air and waited for all eyes to fix on him.

“Look, it’s plain we can’t surprise the being, and we can’t deceive the being,” he said. “And we can’t live without him. So let’s resolve where our strongest defense lies. We will agree to nothing unless Viktor is returned unharmed. And then we will listen to the Voice, to what the Voice has to say about what it wants.”

“It cannot claim Rhoshamandes!” said Allesandra heatedly.

“No, it cannot,” said Notker. “And I can plainly tell you that his most devoted confederate, the one who must be his ally in this, is as peace loving and unprepared for a battle like this as is his master.”

“And who is that ally?” demanded Allesandra.

“It must be Benedict,” said Notker. “It can be no other.”

“Aye, Benedict,” said Sevraine. “Of course. It’s with Benedict that he lives on this island in the northern seas. It’s with Benedict that he’s lived for centuries.”

“Benedict,” whispered Allesandra, “not the poor benighted saintly boy he brought over from the monks!”

“Benedict?” asked Eleni. “Benedict was the one from whom Magnus—your maker, Lestat—stole the Blood. Why he’s barely twice my age in the Blood. He’s never been strong, never. Why, his entire charm is that he’s as fragile as a wisteria blossom, as an orchid. But how do we know that this is Rhoshamandes’s only ally?”

“I wager it is,” said Notker, “because I know of no other. And by the way, this ‘poor benighted saintly boy’ brought me into the Blood and he did a fine job of it.”

There was a soft ripple of laugher in the room, but it died almost immediately.

“But what a mystery we have here,” said Notker. “We have the gentle Rhoshamandes that fed off beauty and poetry and music, and brought over those who pleased him, and never had the strength to fight for any of them against others, and now Benedict, saintly Benedict. And you, Lestat, you say the Voice loves. You say it loves and it has imagination and a soul. Well, we have a puzzle here in that it has picked two remarkable blood drinkers.”

“Perhaps they were the only two,” said Seth coldly, “who would tolerate the Voice’s schemes, who fell prey to his ridiculous fantasies.”

“Why ridiculous?” asked Marius. “What do you mean?”

It was Fareed who answered for Seth. “Lestat’s right. The Voice is just beginning its journey as a conscious entity. It might have wielded some dark brutal influence on the Core Body in ages past, but it is a child now in the realm of purpose. And we don’t know its full intent. I suspect that switching bodies, being removed from the mute and near-blind Mekare into the vigorous body of Rhoshamandes, a personable male of undoubted gifts, is just the first step for the Voice.”

“Well, that’s why we have to stop it,” said Marius.

“Can’t it be taken out of a vampiric body in some way?” asked Benji. “Dr. Fareed, can’t you put it in some sort of machine in which it’s fed the Blood constantly yet unable to see and hear or travel through its own invisible web?”

“It’s not a web, Benji,” said Fareed patiently. “It’s a body, a great invisible but palpable body.” He sighed. “And no, I cannot devise a machine to sustain it. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Or whether such a scheme would work, and when this thing is removed from the Core Body we begin to die, all of us, don’t we? This is what you’ve told us happened before.”

“It is what happened,” said Seth.

“But the Core Body was dying,” said Marius, “when last it was removed. What happens if you remove it while the Core Body lives, heart and brain connected?”

“Nonsense,” said Seth. “The thing lives in the brain, and when you remove the brain, the Core Body begins to die.”

“Not necessarily.…” said Fareed.

“Of course,” sighed Marius. He shrugged and made a helpless gesture. “This is beyond my grasp. Utterly beyond my grasp. I simply can’t—.” He stopped.

I sympathized. I knew almost nothing about the mechanics of what we’d all witnessed when Akasha had been killed. All I knew was that Mekare had devoured her brain and that had been sufficient for Amel to take root inside her.

“The point is that clever as we may be,” said Seth, “we are not able to make a machine to sustain Amel, and we are not at all able to imagine an infinitely secure means of sustaining such a machine even if we could build one. We would still be harnessed to the Voice in such a scenario, of course. And the Voice might be constantly on the prowl, so to speak, to find an ally to free it.”

“It would be,” I said. “And who could blame him? You’ve been talking about this idea of a machine as if this being weren’t sentient, and capable of excruciating pain. Well, he does feel such things. I’m telling you there must be a solution to all this which doesn’t involve the hopeless imprisonment of Amel. His imprisonment in Mekare is what led to this! Yes, her injured mind gave him a vacuum in which to come into his own. And I confess I stimulated him when I stimulated Akasha. No doubt of that! But Amel feels and Amel wants and Amel loves.”

“I wouldn’t call him Amel,” said Marius. “That is far too personal. So far he is the Voice.”

“I called him the Voice when I didn’t know who he was,” I objected. “And others who described him as the Voice didn’t know who he was.”

“We still don’t really know who he is,” said Marius.

“So what are you saying, Lestat?” asked Armand in that subtle tone of his. “You are saying this spirit, Amel, is good? Lestat, all we ever learned of it from the twins was that it was evil.”

“Not so,” I said. “That is not really what the twins told us at all. Besides why would it be inherently either good or evil? And what the twins described was a playful, boasting spirit that loved Mekare and sought to punish Akasha for ever harming her, and somehow this spirit went into Akasha’s body and became one with her, one with the one he hated. And now six thousand years later, he finds himself restored to the body of the one he loved, and she’s dead to him, dead to everything.”