Rhoshamandes and Benedict were both comely and fine boned, chosen for the Blood on account of their seeming physical perfection. Rhoshamandes had brought over dozens of such beauties as Benedict into the Blood, but none had survived with him, stayed with him, loved him as had Benedict, and when he thought of the times he’d driven Benedict away, he shuddered inwardly and thanked some dark god of the blood-drinking world that he’d always been able to find Benedict and bring him back.
Benedict was sniffling and now and then moaning in his inimitable charming fashion, trying to regain possession of himself. Benedict’s mortal soul had been formed in kindness and gentleness and true faith in goodness, and these traits he’d never lost.
“All right, that’s better,” said Rhoshamandes. “Now recall it all for me.”
“Surely you saw it, Rhosh, you saw the images. All those blood drinkers couldn’t have perished without your catching images.”
“Yes, I did, of course,” said the other, “but I want to know just how it got the jump on them when they’d been warned. They had all been warned.”
“But that’s just it, we didn’t know where to go or what to do. And the young ones, they have to hunt. You don’t remember what an agony it is for them. I don’t know if it was ever an agony for you.”
“Oh, stop with all that,” said Rhosh. “They were told to get out of London, to get away from that hotel, to move into the countryside. Benji Mahmoud had been warning them for nights on end. You warned them.”
“Well, a lot of them did,” said Benedict sadly. “Plenty of them did. But then we got the word. They were being spotted and burned out there—in the Cotswolds and in Bath—and all over!”
“I see.”
“Do you? Do you care?” Benedict wiped furiously at his eyes. “I don’t think you care. You’re exactly as Benji Mahmoud describes. You’re an elder of the tribe who doesn’t care. You never did.”
Rhoshamandes was looking away, out of the arched window, at the darkened land below, and the thick jagged forest that clung to the bluff over the ocean. There was no way in the world he was going to disclose his true thoughts to his beloved Benedict. Elder of the tribe, indeed.
Benedict went on talking.
Old ones had perished the night before. On waking Benedict had discovered the burnt remains of two of them right there in the house. He’d run to alert the others. Get out.
“That’s when the walls caught fire,” he said. “I wanted to save them, save one of them, anything, anything that I could. But the roof exploded and I saw them in flames all around me. And I saw this thing, this thing standing there, and it looked ragged and grotesque and it was on fire too. Is that possible? I swear it was burning. I went up. I did what I had to do.”
He broke into sobs again and buried his face in his crooked arm on the desktop.
“You did right,” said Rhoshamandes. “But are you sure this one was making the fire?”
“I don’t know,” said Benedict. “I think it was. It was a wraith. It was bones and rags, but I think … I don’t know.”
Rhoshamandes was reflecting. Bones and rags on fire. He was in fact nothing as calm inside as he pretended now. He was in fact furious, furious that Benedict had almost been harmed, furious about all aspects of this. But he went on listening in silence.
“The Voice,” Benedict stammered. “The Voice, it said such strange things. I heard it myself two nights ago, urging me to do it. I told you. It wanted me and I laughed at it. I told them then it was going to find someone to do its dirty work. I warned everyone. A lot of them left then, but I think they’re dead, all those who left. I think it found someone else and that someone else was out there waiting. It’s not true about Paris, is it? They were all talking about Paris before this happened—.”
“Yes, it’s true about Paris,” Rhoshamandes replied. “But the massacre was interrupted. Someone or something intervened, stopped it. Blood drinkers did escape. I have a feeling I know what happened there.” But he fell silent again. There was no point in disclosing all this to Benedict. There never had been.
Rhoshamandes rose to his feet. He began to pace, his narrow hands together as if in prayer, making a slow leisurely circle in the old stone room, gradually coming up behind Benedict and putting a reassuring hand on his head. He bent and kissed Benedict’s head. He stroked his cheek with his thumb.
“There, there now, you are here,” he murmured. He drew away and stood before the twin arches of the windows.
Rhoshamandes had built this castle in the French Gothic style when he had first come north to England, and he still loved these narrow pointed arches. The dawn of the truly delicate and ornate Gothic style had thrilled him to his heart. Even now he could be reduced to weeping when he wandered the great cathedrals.
Benedict had no idea how often Rhoshamandes went on his own to walk in the cathedrals of Rheims or Autun or Chartres. Some things could be shared with Benedict and some could not. Benedict never stepped inside a great cathedral without experiencing a crisis of cosmic proportions and weeping in grief for his lost faith.
It occurred to Rhosh idly that the notorious Vampire Lestat would understand, Lestat who worshipped nothing and no one but beauty—but then it was easy to love celebrities like Lestat, wasn’t it, to imagine them perfect companions.
Later additions to this castle, Rhosh had designed in the High Gothic style for his own pleasure, and his heart was warmed when those mortals who occasionally stumbled on this place thought it was a triumph.
How he loathed being disturbed here by all this. How much other immortals must loathe it, those who’d made sanctuaries like this so they could have some peace.
He’d never modernized the place. It was as cold and severe as it had been five hundred years ago, a castle appearing to grow out of rocky cliffs on the western coast of a steep, inaccessible, and untamable island.
He’d managed to install generators in the gulch below the cliff some twenty years ago, and tanks for petrol, and to deepen and improve the eastern harbor for his sleek modern boats, but electric power here was reserved entirely for the televisions and the computers, never for lighting or warmth. And those computers had brought him the first word of all this madness, not telepathic voices that he had long ago learned to entirely shut out. No, Benji Mahmoud had told him the times were changing.
How he wanted to keep things as they had always been.