The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [216]
“ ‘How is such a thing possible?’ asked the King.
“ ‘This being has a great invisible part,’ Mekare said. ‘Were you to have seen it in its entirety, before this catastrophe took place, you would have seen something almost without end.’
“ ‘Yes,’ the Queen confessed. ‘It was as if the net covered the whole sky.’
“Mekare explained: ‘It is only by concentrating such immense size that these spirits achieve any physical strength. Left on their own, they are as clouds over the horizon; greater even; they have now and then boasted to us that they have no true boundaries, though this is not likely the truth.’
“The King stared at his wife.
“ ‘But how can it be released!’ demanded Akasha.
“ ‘Yes. How can it be made to depart!’ the King asked.
“Neither of us wanted to answer. We wondered that the answer was not obvious to them both. ‘Destroy your body,’ Mekare said to the Queen finally. ‘And it will be destroyed as well.’
“The King looked at Mekare with disbelief. ‘Destroy her body!’ Helplessly he looked at his wife.
“But Akasha merely smiled bitterly. The words came as no surprise to her. For a long moment, she said nothing. She merely looked at us with plain hatred; then she looked at the King. When she looked to us, she put the question. ‘We are dead things, aren’t we? We cannot live if it departs. We do not eat; we do not drink, save for the blood it wants; our bodies throw off no waste any longer; we have not changed in one single particular since that awful night; we are not alive anymore.’
“Mekare didn’t answer. I knew that she was studying them; struggling to see their forms not as a human would see them but as a witch would see them, to let the quiet and the stillness collect around them, so that she might observe the tiny imperceptible aspects of this which eluded regular gaze. Into a trance she fell as she looked at them and listened. And when she spoke her voice was flat, dull:
“ ‘It is working on your body; it is working and working as fire works on the wood it consumes; as worms work on the carcass of an animal. It is working and working and its work is inevitable; it is the continuance of the fusion which has taken place; that is why the sun hurts it, for it is using all of its energy to do what it must do; and it cannot endure the sun’s heat coming down upon it.’
“ ‘Or the bright light of a torch even,’ the King sighed.
“ ‘At times not even a candle flame,’ said the Queen.
“ ‘Yes,’ Mekare said, shaking off the trance finally. ‘And you are dead,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Yet you are alive! If the wounds healed as you say they did; if you brought the King back as you say you did, why, you may have vanquished death. That is, if you do not go into the burning rays of the sun.’
“ ‘No, this cannot continue!’ the King said. ‘The thirst, you don’t know how terrible is the thirst.’
“But the Queen only smiled bitterly again. ‘These are not living bodies now. These are hosts for this demon.’ Her lip trembled as she looked at us. ‘Either that or we are truly gods!’
“ ‘Answer us, witches,’ said the King. ‘Could it be that we are divine beings now, blessed with gifts that only gods share?’ He smiled as he said it; he so wanted to believe it. ‘Could it not be that when your demon sought to destroy us, our gods intervened?’
“An evil light shone in the Queen’s eye. How she loved this idea, but she didn’t believe it . . . not really.
“Mekare looked at me. She wanted me to go forward and to touch them as she had done. She wanted me to look at them as she had done. There was something further that she wanted to say, yet she was not sure of it. And in truth, I had slightly stronger powers of the instinctive nature, though less of a gift for words than she.
“I went forward; I touched their white skin, though it repelled me as they repelled me for all that they had done to our people and us. I touched them and then withdrew and gazed at them; and I saw the work of which Mekare spoke, I could even hear it, the tireless churning