It was now an hour before sunrise.

Teskhamen embraced them both. And then he was gone. Simply gone. And they stood alone together on the sand as the wind swept in from the endless sparkling surf, and the vast sprawling city behind them slowly came to morning life.

The next night, Marius needed less than an hour to make all arrangements by phone with his mortal agents, and to ship their possessions and clothes, such as they were, to New York. They’d lodge at a small hotel uptown as they’d always done, where a suite of rooms had always been kept in readiness for them. And they would talk then, once they’d reached New York, about when to go to Benji and Armand and Louis and blessed Sybelle.

Daniel was powerfully excited that they were going. Daniel wanted to be with the others, Marius knew this, and he was happy for Daniel, but he himself was full of foreboding.

The encounter with Teskhamen had stimulated him, there was no doubt of that; he was in fact reeling from the shock.

Daniel could not grasp the extent of it. Yes, Daniel had been Born to Darkness in a time of myriad shocks. But, before that, Daniel had been born into a physical world of myriad changes and shocks. He had never known the dreary and weary mind-set of times past. He had never understood the inveterate pessimism and resignation into which most of the world’s teeming millions had been born and lived and died.

But Marius had known the millennia, and they had been millennia of suffering as well as joy, of darkness as well as light, in which radical change of any kind too often culminated in disappointment and defeat.

Teskhamen. Marius could scarce believe that he had seen him, spoken to him, that such a momentous thing had taken place—that old god of the grove alive now, articulate and eloquent, and pointing the way to the past and the future in the same breath. A great dark portion of Marius’s early history flamed into living color for him, and prompted him to search for a coherent thread to all of his life.

But there was the foreboding.

He could not stop thinking of all those long-ago interludes, when he had lain against the breast of Akasha—her caretaker, her keeper—listening to her heart and trying to fathom her thoughts. He had been inside her, this alien creature Amel. And Amel was inside of Marius now.

“Yes, I’m inside of you,” said the Voice to him. “I am you and you are me.”

There followed silence. Emptiness. And the lingering echo of a threat.

14

Rhoshamandes and Benedict

“BE CALM,” he said. “Whatever you saw, whatever almost happened to you, you’re safe now. Be calm and talk to me. Tell me precisely what you saw.”

“Rhosh, it was unspeakable!” said Benedict.

Benedict sat at the desk with his head down on his folded arms, sobbing.

Rhosh, known to so many others through the ages as Rhoshamandes, sat by the cavernous hearth in the old stone room looking at his fledgling with a mixture of impatience and irresistible sympathy. He had never been able to divorce himself entirely from Benedict’s boiling emotions, and maybe he had never really wanted to do that. Of all his companions and fledglings through the centuries, he loved Benedict the most—this child of Merovingian royalty who had been such a dreamy Latin scholar in his time, so eager to understand those years which the world now called the Dark Ages. How he’d cried when brought into the Blood, sure of his ultimate damnation, and only come round to worship Rhoshamandes instead of his Christian god—never believing in a world untainted by fear of perdition. But this great superstitious fear was, however, part of Benedict’s eternal charm.

And this hapless child had had a gift for making other blood drinkers better than himself as time passed. Now that was quite a mystery to Rhosh, but it was fact.

It was Benedict who had made the young Notker the Wise of Prüm, who likely survived to this day, a mad genius sustained on music as much as human blood.

Pretty Benedict, always a joy to look at, if not to listen to, whose tears could be as beguiling as his smiles.

Rhoshamandes was dressed in what might have passed for a monk’s long hooded robe of heavy gray wool with a thick black leather belt around the waist, and big deep sleeves. But the robe was in fact made from fine cashmere, and the buckle on his belt was pewter and revealed a delicately modeled face of Medusa with writhing snakes for hair and a howling mouth. He wore exquisitely crafted brown leather sandals because he didn’t feel the cold here on this craggy green island in the Outer Hebrides.

He had short and very soft golden-brown hair and large blue eyes. He’d been born thousands of years ago on the island of Crete to parents of Indo-European descent, and gone down into Egypt when he was twenty. His skin was the smooth creamy tan of immortals who go into the sun often in order to pass for human, and it made his eyes appear wondrously bright and beautiful.

He and Benedict were speaking English now, the language they’d shared for the last seven hundred years, more or less, the Old French and the Latin having passed from their daily speech but not their libraries. Rhosh knew ancient tongues, tongues never known to Benedict.

“It burnt them all,” Benedict sobbed. “It destroyed them completely,” he said in his muffled, hopeless voice.

“Sit up and look at me,” said Rhoshamandes. “I am talking to you, Benedict. Now look at me and tell me precisely what happened.”

Benedict sat back in the chair, his long brown curly hair mussed and falling into his eyes, his boyish mouth quivering. Of course his face was smeared with blood and so were his clothes, his wool sweater and his tweed jacket. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Vampires who spilt blood on their garments either from victims or tears were anathema! Nothing so revolted Rhoshamandes about modern fictive and film vampires as their utter unrealistic sloppiness.

And Benedict looked perfectly like a cheap television vampire with that blood all over him.

He’d be the image of an eighteen-year-old youth forever because that is what he was when he’d been made a blood drinker, just as Rhoshamandes would always look like a man a few years older than that with a fuller chest and heavier arms. But Benedict had always had a childlike personality. No guile, no cunning. He might never have outgrown it in mortal life. Something to do with Christ’s command, “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Benedict had not only been a monk in his youth, he’d been a mystic.

Who could know?

Rhoshamandes, on the other hand, if it mattered, had been the eldest of ten mortal children and a man at the age of twelve, protecting his mother. Palace intrigue. The day she’d been murdered, he’d run away to sea and survived by his wits, amassing a fortune before he journeyed up the Nile to trade with the Egyptians. He had fought many a battle, survived unscarred, but made his wealth by instinct rather than violence—until the Queen’s blood drinker slaves captured him and dragged him from his boat.