The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [280]
My heart was racing. My face was warm and pulsing with blood. I was in no fear of him now, but I was angry beyond all mortal anger, and I didn’t fully understand why.
His mind—I had wanted to pierce his mind—and this is what I heard, this superstition, this absurdity. He was no sublime spirit who understood what his followers had not. He had not believed it. He had believed in it, a thousand times worse!
And I realized quite clearly what he was—not demon or angel at all, but a sensibility forged in a dark time when the small orb of the sun traveled the dome of the heavens, and the stars were no more than tiny lanterns describing gods and goddesses upon a closed night. A time when man was the center of this great world in which we roam, a time when for every question there had been an answer. That was what he was, a child of olden days when witches had danced beneath the moon and knights had battled dragons.
Ah, sad lost child, roaming the catacombs beneath a great city and an incomprehensible century. Maybe your mortal form is more fitting than I supposed.
But there was no time to mourn for him, beautiful as he was. Those entombed in the walls suffered at his command. Those he had sent out of the chamber could be called back.
I had to think of a reply to his question that he would be able to accept. The truth wasn’t enough. It had to be arranged poetically the way that the old thinkers would have arranged it in the world before the age of reason had come to be.
“My answer?” I said softly. I was gathering my thoughts and I could almost feel Gabrielle’s warning, Nicki’s fear. “I’m no dealer in mysteries,” I said, “no lover of philosophy. But it’s plain enough what has happened here.”
He studied me with a strange earnestness.
“If you fear so much the power of God,” I said, “then the teachings of the Church aren’t unknown to you. You must know that the forms of goodness change with the ages, that there are saints for all times under heaven.”
Visibly he hearkened to this, warmed to the words I used.
“In ancient days,” I said, “there were martyrs who quenched the flames that sought to burn them, mystics who rose into the air as they heard the voice of God. But as the world changed, so changed the saints. What are they now but obedient nuns and priests? They build hospitals and orphanages, but they do not call down the angels to rout armies or tame the savage beast.”
I could see no change in him but I pressed on.
“And so it is with evil, obviously. It changes its form. How many men in this age believe in the crosses that frighten your followers? Do you think mortals above are speaking to each other of heaven and hell? Philosophy is what they talk about, and science! What does it matter to them if white-faced haunts prowl a churchyard after dark? A few more murders in a wilderness of murders? How can this be of interest to God or the devil or to man?”
I heard again the old queen vampire laughing.
But Armand didn’t speak or move.
“Even your playground is about to be taken from you,” I continued. “This cemetery in which you hide is about to be removed altogether from Paris. Even the bones of our ancestors are no longer sacred in this secular age.”
His face softened suddenly. He couldn’t conceal his shock.
“Les Innocents destroyed!” he whispered. “You’re lying to me … ”
“I never lie,” I said off hand. “At least not to those I don’t love. The people of Paris don’t want the stench of graveyards around them anymore. The emblems of the dead don’t matter to them as they matter to you. Within a few years, markets, streets, and houses will cover this spot. Commerce. Practicality. That is the eighteenth-century world.”
“Stop!” he whispered. “Les Innocents has existed as long as I have existed!” His boyish face was strained. The old queen was undisturbed.
“Don’t you see?” I said softly. “It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil.” I paused, watching him. “I am the vampire for these times.”
He had not foreseen my point. And I saw in him for the first time a glimmer of