Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [213]
I stood back, took my knife and cut my hand with it, and held out my hand so that they could see the flesh heal.
There were gasps from them.
“I must be gone now. Raymond, my thanks and my love,” I said.
“But wait,” said one of the most elderly of the men. He had been standing back all the while, leaning on a cane, listening to me as intently as all the others. “I have one last question for you, Marius.”
“Ask me,” I said immediately.
“Do you know anything of our origins?”
For a moment I was puzzled. I couldn’t quite imagine what he meant in this question. Then Raymond spoke:
“Do you know anything about how the Talamasca came to be? That is what we are asking you.”
“No,” I said in quiet astonishment.
A silence fell over them all, and I realized quickly that they themselves were confused about how the Talamasca had come about. And it did come back to me that Raymond had told me something of this when first I met him.
“I hope you find your answers,” I said.
Then off I went into the darkness.
But I didn’t stay away. I did what I had failed to do on my arrival. I hovered quite close but just beyond their hearing and their vision. And with my powerful gifts, I listened to them as they roamed their many towers and their many libraries.
How mysterious they were, how dedicated, how studious.
Some night in the far future perhaps I would come to them again, only to learn more of them. But just now, I had to return to the shrine and to Bianca.
She was still awake when I came into the blessed place. And I saw that she had lighted the hundred candles.
This was a ceremony that I sometimes failed to do, and I was pleased to see it.
“And are you happy with your visit to the Talamasca?” she asked in her frank voice. She had that beguiling look of simplicity on her face which always prompted me to tell her everything.
“I was most pleased. I found them the honest scholars they professed to be. I gave them what knowledge I could, but by no means what I might, for that would have been too foolish. But all they seek is knowledge and I left them more than happy.”
She narrowed her eyes as if she could not quite imagine what the Talamasca was and I understood her.
I sat down beside her, folded her close and wrapped the fur cloak around us both.
“You smell of the cold, good wind,” she said. “Perhaps we are meant to be creatures of the shrine only, creatures of the cold sky and the inhospitable mountains.”
I said nothing, but in my mind I thought of only one thing: the far-off city of Dresden. Pandora sooner or later always returned to Dresden.
31
A hundred years would pass before I found Pandora.
During that time my powers increased enormously.
That night after my return from the Talamasca in England, I tested all of them and made certain that, never again would I be at the mercy of Santino’s miscreants. For many nights I left Bianca to herself as I made certain of my advantages.
And once I was utterly sure of my swiftness, of the Fire Gift, and of an immeasurable power to destroy with invisible force, I went to Paris with no other thought but to spy upon Amadeo’s coven.
Before I left for this little venture, I confessed my goals to Bianca and she had at once beseeched me not to court such danger.
“No, let me go,” I responded. “I could hear his voice now over the miles perhaps if I chose to do it. But I must be certain of what I hear and what I see. And I shall tell you something else. I have no desire to reclaim him.”
She was saddened by this, but she seemed to understand it. She kept her usual place in the corner of the shrine, merely nodding to me and exacting the promise from me that I would be most careful.
As soon as I reached Paris, I fed from one of several murderers, luring him by the powerful Spell Gift from his place in a comfortable inn, and then I sought refuge in a high bell tower of Notre Dame de Paris itself to listen to the miscreants.
Indeed, it was a huge nest of the most despicable