The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [240]
“The beauty is out there!” Maharet said. “It does not deserve your violence! Are you so merciless that the lives you would destroy mean nothing! Ah, it was always so!”
The tension was unbearable. The blood sweat was breaking out on my body. I could see the panic all around. Louis had bowed his head and covered his face with his hands. Only the young Daniel seemed hopelessly enraptured. And Armand merely gazed at Akasha as if it were all out of his hands.
Akasha was silently struggling. But then she appeared to regain her conviction.
“You lie as you have always done,” she said desperately. “But it does not matter whether you fight on my side. I will do what I mean to do; I will reach back over the millennia and I will redeem that long ago moment, that long ago evil which you and your sister brought into our land; I will reach back and raise it up in the eyes of the world until it becomes the Bethlehem of the new era; and peace on earth will exist at last. There is no great good that was ever done without sacrifice and courage. And if you all turn against me, if you all resist me, then I shall make of better mettle the angels I require.”
“No, you will not do it,” Maharet said.
“Akasha, please,” Marius said. “Grant us time. Agree only to wait, to consider. Agree that nothing must come from this moment.”
“Yes,” I said. “Give us time. Come with me. Let us go together out there—you and I and Marius—out of dreams and visions and into the world itself.”
“Oh, how you insult me and belittle me,” she whispered. Her anger was turned on Marius but it was about to turn on me.
“There are so many things, so many places,” he said, “that I want to show you! Only give me a chance. Akasha, for two thousand years I cared for you, I protected you . . . ”
“You protected yourself! You protected the source of your power, the source of your evil!”
“I’m imploring you,” Marius said. “I will get on my knees to you. A month only, to come with me, to let us talk together, to let us examine all the evidence . . . ”
“So small, so selfish,” Akasha whispered. “And you feel no debt to the world that made you what you are, no debt to give it now the benefit of your power, to alchemize yourselves from devils into gods!”
She turned to me suddenly, the shock spreading over her face.
“And you, my prince, who came into my chamber as if I were the Sleeping Beauty, who brought me to life again with your passionate kiss. Will you not reconsider? For my love!” The tears again were standing in her eyes. “Must you join with them now against me, too?” She reached up and placed her two hands on the sides of my face. “How can you betray me?” she said. “How can you betray such a dream? They are slothful beings; deceitful; full of malice. But your heart was pure. You had a courage that transcended pragmatism. You had your dreams too!”
I didn’t have to answer. She knew. She could see it better perhaps than I could see it. And all I saw was the suffering in her black eyes. The pain, the incomprehension; and the grief she was already experiencing for me.
It seemed she couldn’t move or speak suddenly. And there was nothing I could do now; nothing to save them; or me. I loved her! But I couldn’t stand with her! Silently, I begged her to understand and forgive.
Her face was frozen, almost as if the voices had reclaimed her; it was as if I were standing before her throne in the path of her changeless gaze.
“I will kill you first, my prince,” she said, her fingers caressing me all the more gently. “I want you gone from me. I will not look into your face and see this betrayal again.”
“Harm him and that shall be our signal,” Maharet whispered. “We shall move against you as one.”
“And you move against yourselves!” she answered, glancing at Maharet. “When I finish with this one I love, I shall kill those you love; those who should have been dead already; I shall destroy all those whom I can destroy; but who shall destroy me?”
“Akasha,” Marius whispered. He rose and came towards her; but she moved in the blink of an eye and knocked