2
He was moving towards the center of the great circle, his back to the pyre, a strange woman vampire at his side.
And when I looked full at him in the torchlight I felt the same shock I had experienced when he entered Notre Dame.
It wasn't merely his beauty; it was the astonishing innocence of his boyish face. He moved so lightly and swiftly I could not see his feet actually take steps. His huge eyes regarded us without anger, his hair, for all the dust in it, giving off faint reddish glints.
I tried to feel his mind, what it was, why such a sublime being should command these sad ghosts when it had the world to roam. I tried to discover again what I had almost discovered when we stood before the altar of the cathedral, this creature and I. If I knew that, maybe I could defeat him and defeat him I would.
I thought I saw him respond to me, some silent answer, some flash of heaven in the very pit of hell in his innocent expression, as if the devil still retained the face and form of the angel after the fall.
But something was very wrong. The leader was not speaking. The drums beat on anxiously, yet there was no communal conviction. The dark-eyed woman vampire was not joined with the others in their wailing. And others had stopped as well.
And the woman who had come in with the leader, a strange creature clothed as an ancient queen might have been in ragged gown and braided girdle, commenced to laugh.
The coven or whatever it called itself was quite understandably stunned. One of the kettledrums stopped.
The queen creature laughed louder and louder. Her white teeth flashed through the filthy veil of her snarled hair.
Beautiful she'd been once. And it wasn't mortal age that had ravaged her. Rather, she appeared the lunatic, her mouth a horrid grimace, her eyes staring wildly before her, her body bent suddenly in an arc with her laughing, as Magnus had bent when he danced around his own funeral pyre.
"Did I not warn you?" she screamed. "Did I not?"
Far behind her, Nicolas moved in the little cage. I felt the laughter scorning him. But he was looking steadily at me, and the old sensibility was stamped on his features in spite of their distortion. Fear struggled with malice in him, and this was tangled with wonder and near despair.
The auburn-haired leader stared at the queen vampire, his expression unreadable, and the boy with the torch stepped forward and shouted for the woman to be silent at once. He made himself rather regal now, in spite of his rags.
The woman turned her back on him and faced us. She sang her words in a hoarse, sexless voice that gave way to a galloping laughter.
"A thousand times I said it, yet you would not listen to me," she declared. Her gown shivered about her as she trembled. "And you called me mad, time's martyr, a vagrant Cassandra corrupt by too long a vigil on this earth. Well, you see, every one of my predictions has come true."
The leader gave her not the slightest recognition.
"And it took this creature," she approached me, her face a hideous comic mask as Magnus's face had been, "this romping cavalier to prove it to you once and for all."
She hissed, drew in her breath, and stood erect. And for one moment in perfect stillness she passed into beauty. I longed to comb her hair, to wash it with my own hands, and to clothe her in a modern dress, to see her in the mirror of my time. In fact, my mind went suddenly wild with the idea of it, the reclaiming of her and the washing away of her evil disguise.
I think for one second the concept of eternity burned in me. I knew then what immortality was. All things were possible with her, or so for that one moment it seemed.
She gazed at me and caught the visions, and the loveliness of her face deepened, but the mad humor was coming back.
"Punish them," the boy screamed. "Call down the judgment of Satan. Light the fire."
But no one moved in the vast room.
The old woman hummed with her lips closed, some eerie melody with the cadence of speech. The leader stared as before.
But the boy in panic advanced upon us. He bared his fangs, raised his hand in a claw.
I snatched the torch from him and dealt him an indifferent blow to the chest that sent him across the dusty circle, sliding into the kindling banked against the pyre. I ground out the torch in the dirt.
The queen vampire let out a shriek of laughter that seemed to terrify the others, but nothing changed in the leader's face.
"I won't stand here for any judgment of Satan!" I said, glancing around the circle. "Unless you bring Satan here."
"Yes, tell them, child! Make them answer to you!" the old woman said triumphantly.
The boy was on his feet again.
"You know the crimes," he roared as he reentered the circle. He was furious now, and he exuded power, and I realized how impossible it was to judge any of them by the mortal form they retained. He might well have been an elder, the tiny old woman a fledgling, the boyish leader the eldest of them all.
"Behold," he said, stepping closer, his gray eyes gleaming as he felt the attention of the others. "This fiend was no novice here or anywhere; he did not beg to be received. He made no vows to Satan. He did not on his deathbed give up his soul, and in fact, he did not die!" His voice went higher, grew louder.
"He was not buried! He has not risen from the grave as a Child of Darkness! Rather he dares to roam the world in the guise of a living being! And in the very midst of Paris conducts business as a mortal man!"
Shrieks answered him from the walls. But the vampires of the circle were silent as he gazed at them. His jaw trembled.
He threw up his arms and wailed. One or two of the others answered. His face was disfigured with rage.
The old queen vampire gave a shiver of laughter and looked at me with the most maniacal smile.
But the boy wasn't giving up.
"He seeks the comforts of the hearth, strictly forbidden," he screamed, stamping his foot and shaking his garments. "He goes into the very palaces of carnal pleasure, and mingles there with mortals as they play music! As they dance!"
"Stop your raving!" I said. But in truth, I wanted to hear him out.
He plunged forward, sticking his finger in my face.
"No rituals can purify him!" he shouted. "Too late for the Dark Vows, the Dark Blessings..."
"Dark Vows? Dark Blessings?" I turned to the old queen. "What do you say to all this? You're as old as Magnus was when he went into the fire .... Why do you suffer this to go on?"
Her eyes moved in her head suddenly as if they alone possessed life, and there came that racing laughter out of her again.
"I shall never harm you, young one," she said. "Either of you." She looked lovingly at Gabrielle. "You are on the Devil's Road to a great adventure. What right have I to intervene in what the centuries have in store for you?"
The Devil's Road. It was the first phrase from any of them that had rung a clarion in my soul. An exhilaration took hold of me merely looking at her. In her own way, she was Magnus's twin.
"Oh yes, I am as old as your progenitor!" She smiled, her white fangs just touching her lower lip, then vanishing. She glanced at the leader, who watched her without the slightest interest or spirit. "I was here," she said, "within this coven when Magnus stole our secrets from us, that crafty one, the alchemist, Magnus ... when he drank the blood that would give him life everlasting in a manner which the World of Darkness had never witnessed before. And now three centuries have passed and he has given his pure and undiluted Dark Gift to you, beautiful child!"
Her face became again that leering, grinning mask of comedy, so much like Magnus's face.
"Show it to me, child," she said, "the strength he gave you. Do you know what it means to be made a vampire by one that powerful, who has never given the Gift before? It's forbidden here, child, no one of such age conveys his power! For if he should, the fledgling born of him should easily overcome this gracious leader and his coven here."
"Stop this ill-conceived lunacy!" the boy interrupted.
But everyone was listening. The pretty dark-eyed woman had come nearer to us, the better to see the old queen, and completely forgetting to fear or hate us now.
"One hundred years ago you'd said enough," the boy roared at the old queen, with his hand up to command her silence. "You're mad as all the old ones are mad. It's the death you suffer. I tell you all this outlaw must be punished. Order shall be restored when he and the woman he made are destroyed before us all."