Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [220]
I could get nothing further from him. I looked about the miserable place with its few candles dripping wax upon yellowed skulls, and then turning on this creature I destroyed him with the Fire Gift as mercifully as I had destroyed the other. And I do think that it was truly a mercy.
There was but one left, and this one led a far better existence than the other two. I found him in handsome lodgings an hour before sunrise. With little difficulty I learnt that he kept a hiding place beneath the house, but that he spent his idle hours reading in his few well-appointed rooms, and that he dressed tolerably well.
I also learnt that he couldn’t detect my presence. He cut the figure of a man of some thirty mortal years, and he had been in the Blood for some three hundred.
At last I opened his door, breaking the lock, and stepped before him as he stood up, in horror, from his writing desk.
“Santino,” I said, “what became of him?”
Though he had fed like a glutton, he was gaunt with huge bones, and long black hair, and though he was very finely dressed in the style of the 1600s, his lace was soiled and dusty.
“In the name of Hell,” he whispered, “who are you? Where do you come from?”
Again there came that terrific confusion of mind which defeated my ability to subtract thoughts or knowledge from it.
“I’ll satisfy you on those points,” I said, “but you must answer me first. Santino. What happened to him.”
I took several deliberate steps towards him which put him into a paroxysm of terror.
“Be quiet now,” I said. Again I tried to read his mind, but I failed. “Don’t try to flee,” I said. “You won’t succeed with it. Answer my questions.”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” he said, fearfully.
“That ought to be plenty.”
He shook his head. “I came here from Paris,” he said. He was quaking. “I was sent by a vampire named Armand who is the leader of that coven.”
I nodded as though all this were quite intelligible to me, and as though I weren’t experiencing agony.
“That was a hundred years ago, maybe more. Armand had heard no word from Rome in a long time. I came to see the where and why of it. I found the Roman coven in complete confusion.”
He stopped, catching his breath, backing away from me.
“Speak quickly and tell me more,” I said. “I’m impatient.”
“Only if you swear on your honor that you won’t harm me. I’ve done you no harm after all. I was no child of Santino.”
“What makes you think I have honor?” I asked.
“I know you do,” he said. “I can sense such things. Swear on your honor to me and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Very well, I swear. I’ll leave you alive which is more than I’ve done with two others tonight who haunted the Roman streets like ghosts. Now talk to me.”
“I came from Paris as I told you. The Roman coven was weak. All ceremony had fallen away. One or two of the old ones had deliberately gone into the fire. Others had simply run away, and Santino had made no move to catch them and punish them. Once it was known that such escape was possible many more fled, and the coven was in a state of disaster.”
“Santino, did you see him?”
“Yes, I saw him. He had taken to dressing in fine clothes and jewels, and he received me in a palazzo much larger than this one. He told me strange things. I can’t really remember all of them.”
“You must remember.”
“He said he had seen old ones, too many old ones, and his faith in Satan had been shaken. He spoke of creatures who seemed to be made of marble, though he knew they could burn. He said he could no longer lead. He told me not to return to Paris, to do as I pleased, and so I have.”
“Old ones,” I said, repeating his words. “Did he tell you nothing of these old ones?”
“He spoke of the great Marius, and of a creature named Mael. And he spoke of beautiful women.”
“What were the names of these women?”
“He didn’t say their names to me. He said only that one had come to the coven on the night of its ceremonial dance, a woman like a living statue, and she had walked through the fire to show that it was useless against her. She had destroyed