The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [314]
How many months were there after? Reeling in the power of the Dark Gift.
This nighttime life of drifting through the alleyways and the canals together—at one with the danger of the dark and no longer afraid of it—and the age-old rapture of the killing, and never, never the innocent souls. No, always the evildoer, the mind pierced until Typhon, the slayer of his brother, was revealed, and then the drinking up of the evil from the mortal victim and the transmuting of it into ecstasy, the Master leading the way, the feast shared.
And the painting afterwards, the solitary hours with the miracle of the new skill, the brush sometimes moving as if by itself across the enameled surface, and the two of them painting furiously on the triptych, and the mortal apprentices asleep among the paint pots and the wine bottles, and only one mystery disturbing the serenity, the mystery that the Master, as in the past, must now and then leave Venice for a journey that seemed endless to those left behind.
All the more terrible now the parting. To hunt alone without the Master, to lie alone in the deep cellar after the hunt, waiting. Not to hear the ring of the Master’s laughter or the beat of the Master’s heart.
“But where do you go? Why can’t I go with you?” Armand pleaded. Didn’t they share the secret? Why was this mystery not explained?
“No, my lovely one, you are not ready for this burden. For now, it must be, as it has been for over a thousand years, mine alone. Someday you will help me with what I have to do, but only when you are ready for the knowledge, when you have shown that you truly wish to know, and when you are powerful enough that no one can ever take the knowledge from you against your will. Until then understand I have no choice but to leave you. I go to tend to Those Who Must Be Kept as I have always done.”
Those Who Must Be Kept.
Armand brooded upon it; it frightened him. But worst of all it took the Master from him, and only did he learn not to fear it when the Master returned to him again and again.
“Those Who Must Be Kept are in peace, or in silence,” he would say as he took the red velvet cloak from his shoulders. “More than that we may never know.”
And to the feast again, the stalking of the evildoer through the alleys of Venice, he and the Master would go.
How long might it have continued—through one mortal lifetime? Through a hundred?
Not a half year in this dark bliss before the evening at twilight when the Master stood over his coffin in the deep cellar just above the water, and said:
“Rise, Armand, we must leave here. They have come!”
“But who are they, Master? Is it Those Who Must Be Kept?”
“No, my darling. It is the others. Come, we must hurry!”
“But how can they hurt us? Why must we go?”
The white faces at the windows, the pounding at the doors. Glass shattering. The Master turning this way and that as he looked at the paintings. The smell of smoke. The smell of burning pitch. They were coming up from the cellar. They were coming down from above.
“Run, there is no time to save anything.” Up the stairs to the roof.
Black hooded figures heaving their torches through the doorways, the fire roaring in the rooms below, exploding the windows, boiling up the stairway. Ail the paintings were burning.
“To the roof, Armand. Come!”
Creatures like ourselves in these dark garments! Others like ourselves. The Master scattered them in all directions as he raced up the stairway, bones cracking as they struck the ceiling and the walls.
“Blasphemer, heretic!” the alien voices roared. The arms caught Armand and held him, and above at the very top of the stairway the Master turned back for him:
“Armand! Trust your strength. Come!”
But they were swarming behind the Master. They were surrounding him. For each one hurled into the plaster, three more appeared, until fifty torches were plunged into the Master’s velvet garments,