The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [576]
It was a monster of a weapon, as much for battering as for slashing or piercing. I remembered the weight of it, the way it had made my arm ache when I had slashed again and again at the attacking wolves. Knights in battle had often held such weapons with two hands.
But then what did I know of such battles? I’d been no knight. I’d skewered an animal with this weapon. My only moment of mortal glory, and what had it got me? The admiration of an accursed bloodsucker who chose to make me his heir.
She placed the sword in my hands.
“It’s not heavy now, my prince,” she said. “You are immortal. Truly immortal. My blood is in you. And you will use your new weapons for me as you once used this sword.”
A violent shudder went through me as I touched the sword; it was as if the thing held some latent memory of what it had witnessed; I saw the wolves again; I saw myself standing in the blackened frozen forest ready to kill.
And I saw myself a year later in Paris, dead, immortal; a monster, and on account of those wolves. “Wolfkiller,” the vampire had called me. He had picked me from the common herd because I had slain those cursed wolves! And worn their fur so proudly through the winter streets of Paris.
How could I feel such bitterness even now? Did I want to be dead and buried down below in the village graveyard? I looked out of the window again at the snow-covered hillside. Wasn’t the same thing happening now? Loved for what I’d been in those early thoughtless mortal years. Again I asked, “But whom or what will I kill?”
No answer.
I thought of Baby Jenks again, that pitiful little thing, and all the blood drinkers who were now dead. And I had wanted a war with them, a little war. And they were all dead. All who had responded to the battle call—dead. I saw the coven house in Istanbul burning; I saw an old one she had caught and burned so slowly; one who had fought her and cursed her. I was crying again.
“Yes, I took your audience from you,” she said. “I burnt away the arena in which you sought to shine. I stole the battle! But don’t you see? I offer you finer things than you have ever reached for. I offer you the world, my prince
How so?”
“Stop the tears you shed for Baby Jenks, and for yourself. Think on the mortals you should weep for. Envision those who have suffered through the long dreary centuries—the victims of famine and deprivation and ceaseless violence. Victims of endless injustice and endless battling. How then can you weep for a race of monsters, who without guidance or purpose played the devil’s gambit on every mortal they chanced to meet!”
“I know. I understand—”
“Do you? Or do you merely retreat from such things to play your symbolic games? Symbol of evil in your rock music. That is nothing, my prince, nothing at all.”
“Why didn’t you kill me along with the rest of them?” I asked, belligerently, miserably. I grasped the hilt of the sword in my right hand. I fancied I could see the dried blood of the wolf still on it. I pulled the blade free of the leather scabbard. Yes, the blood of the wolf. “I’m no better than they are, am I?” I said. “Why spare any of us?”
Fear stopped me suddenly. Terrible fear for Gabrielle and Louis and Armand. For Marius. Even for Pandora and Mael. Fear for myself. There isn’t a thing made that doesn’t fight for life, even when there is no real justification. I wanted to live; I always had.
“I would have you love me,” she whispered tenderly. Such a voice. In a way, it was like Armand’s voice; a voice that could caress you when it spoke to you. Draw you into itself. “And so I take time with you,” she continued. She put her hands on my arms, and looked up into my eyes. “I want you to understand. You are my instrument! And so the others shall be if they are wise. Don’t you see? There has been a design to all of it—your coming, my waking. For now the hopes of the millennia can be realized at last. Look on the little town