Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [214]
This catacomb was under the cemetery called Les Innocents, and those words seemed tragically apt when I caught their addle-brained vows and chants before they poured out into the night to bring cruelty as well as death to the people of Paris.
“All for Satan, all for the Beast, all to serve God, and then return to our penitential existence.”
It was not difficult for me to find, through many different minds, the location of my Amadeo, and within an hour or so of my arrival in Paris, I had him fixed as he walked through a narrow medieval street, never dreaming that I watched him from above in bitter silence.
He was dressed in rags, his hair caked with filth, and when he found his first victim, he visited upon her a painful death which appalled me.
For an hour or more my eyes followed him as he proceeded on, feeding on another hapless creature, and then circling back to walk his way to the enormous cemetery.
Leaning against the cold stone of the tower room, I heard him deep in his underground cell drawing together his “coven” as he himself now called it and demanding of each how he or she had harried, for the love of God, the local population.
“Children of Darkness, it is almost dawn. Each of you shall now open his or her soul to me.”
How firm, how clear was his voice. How certain he was of what he said. How quick he was to correct any Child of Satan who had not slain mortals ruthlessly. It was a man’s voice I heard coming from the lips of the boy I once knew. It was chilling to me.
“Why were you given the Dark Gift?” he demanded of a laggard. “Tomorrow night you must strike twice. And if all of you do not give me greater devotion, I shall punish you for your sins, and see that others are brought into the coven.”
At last I couldn’t listen anymore. I was repelled.
I dreamt of going down into his underground world, of pulling him out of it as I burnt his followers, and forcing him into the light, of taking him with me to the shrine of Those Who Must Be Kept, and pleading with him to renounce his vocation.
But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.
For years and years, he had been one of them. His mind, his soul, his body belonged to those he ruled; and nothing that I had taught him had given him the strength to fight them.
He was not my Amadeo anymore. That is what I had come to Paris to learn and now I knew the truth of it.
I felt sadness. I felt despair. But maybe it was anger and revulsion which caused me to leave Paris that night, saying to myself in essence that he must free himself from the dark mentality of the coven on his own. I could not do it for him.
I had labored long and hard in Venice to erase his memory of the Monastery of the Caves. And now he had found another place of rigid ritual and denial. And his years with me had not protected him from it. Indeed, a circle had long ago closed for him. He was the priest once more. He was the Fool for Satan, as he had once been the Fool for God in far-away Russia. And his brief time with me in Venice had been nothing.
When I told these things to Bianca, when I explained them as best I could, she was sad but she didn’t press me.
It was easy between us as always, with her listening to me, and then offering her own response without anger.
“Perhaps in time, you’ll change your mind,” she said. “You are the one with the power to go there, to fight those who would restrain him if you tried to take him. And that is what it would require, I think, that you would have to take him by force, insist that he come here to be with you, and see the Divine Parents. I don’t possess the power to do these things. I ask only that you think on it, that you make no bitter iron resolve against it.”
“I give you my word,” I said, “I have not done that. But I do not think the sight of the Divine Parents would change the heart of Amadeo.” I paused.
I thought on all this for a long moment and then I spoke to her more directly:
“You’ve only shared this knowledge