He took his seat and Seth rose. Of all the vampires gathered, Gregory and Seth were perhaps the most powerful. And there was clearly no enmity between them. Gregory was looking eagerly to Seth, and Seth was collecting his thoughts slowly, his eyes moving from one to the other of all those assembled—except those behind him against the wall.

“We must remind ourselves,” said Seth, “that the Voice knows what we are saying to one another. It can obviously, at will, visit any of us, and see through our eyes and hear through our ears, but it cannot visit more than one, or so it seems. But since there is no way to take the Voice by surprise by any decision we make here, then I will say this outright. The Voice must not pass into this one, Rhoshamandes. This one is not spiritually strong. Strong he is in the Blood, yes, but he is not spiritually strong. How do I know this? I know this by what he has already done—the brutal slaughter of Maharet and Khayman who were hacked to death as if by common marauders. And if the Voice takes over such a mind, the Voice will rule it.”

All around the table others nodded, murmured their agreement. All were horrified by what had befallen the great Maharet and the helpless Khayman. I was horrified. I never wanted to relive my last visit to the burnt-out compound, my discovery of those hasty graves. A deep rage was gathered in me against this murderous Rhoshamandes. But we did have to speak more of this now.

“That mustn’t happen,” I agreed. “The Voice cannot go into Rhoshamandes. Absolutely must not happen.”

I’d told them when I arrived what I’d found in the jungle compound. The bodies mutilated and hastily buried, the place burnt. I’d told them of the wreckage, ancient books destroyed, chests of venerable jewelry and treasured objects torn open and scattered and blackened with soot. But I referred to it briefly again for any here that had not heard or understood.

“Common marauders indeed,” I said with disgust.

Jesse bowed her head. I saw the blood tears coming to her eyes. I saw David embrace her.

Pandora, who sat with her head bowed and her arm around her companion, Arjun, wiped the blood tears from her eyes.

Armand spoke up now, not bothering to stand or raise his own voice, but merely addressing the group in a way that forced them to focus more attentively on him. Excellent trick of those who whisper so you must move forward to hear them.

“What is the character of the Voice?” he asked. “It’s never spoken to me. What is the soul behind the Voice?”

“Well, you know damned good and well,” said Benji, “that it’s Amel, the spirit familiar of Mekare that went into Akasha and lost its mind for all this time, these aeons of time, these epochs, these millennia.”

“Yes, but what’s the character of the Voice?” asked Armand.

“Without morality of any kind,” said one of the younger ones who hadn’t uttered a word until now. This was a fashionable black-haired vampire in a rather snappy three-piece leather suit and a high-collared shirt with a raging red tie. He turned in his chair to face me. He said his name aloud for all, “Everard,” and then proceeded.

“It wants to destroy the young ones, it turns them against each other. It rouses the old. But all these things you know, all of you know this. It has no morality. No character. No love of its own tribe, as Benji says. It is a tribeless monster. It’s promised to destroy me.”

“And me as well,” said Davis, a stunning silky black blood drinker of staggering beauty. “And it could drive anyone out of his head, just out of his head.”

Arjun, the black-haired companion of Pandora, nodded. “Madness,” he whispered. “He is the breath of it in the brain.”

Allesandra rose to her feet. “It came into me,” she said. “It drew me out of the earth. It has great powers of persuasion.” Allesandra’s voluminous hair made a frame for her long oval face, her narrow almond-shaped eyes. What a beauty she was now, even more powerful than she’d been two nights ago, with absolutely nothing left of that mad queen of old under Les Innocents. But she still had that regal bearing, and that stentorian voice. “It convinced me that I could free myself from a grave in which I’d lain for over two hundred years; it brought my mind back to me and then set me against the others of Paris. It spoke intimately to me. It knew my suffering, and told me of its own. It must not get into Rhoshamandes.” She paused now looking to Eleni and Eugénie and to Bianca. “Rhoshamandes has no true moral strength of his own,” she said. “He never did. When we his fledglings were captured by the old Children of Satan, he never rescued us. He shrank from war with those monsters. He left us to our doom.”

There were many nods and affirmation around the table, though obviously Eleni was uncertain on this, but didn’t care to speak.

“No, he’s peace loving by nature, but not weak,” said Gregory. “You’re not seeing him in the proper light. He’s never cared to be a warrior. The life never satisfied him but that does not mean he is weak.”

“But the point she makes,” said Sevraine, raising her voice, “is that he is too weak to battle the will of the Voice.”

“And he’s old enough,” said Seth coldly, “to take the Voice into him, burn himself in the sun, and kill scores of younger blood drinkers, and that’s precisely what the Voice wants. I tell you again, he is not spiritually strong.”

“But why?” asked Louis. “What so offends the Voice about the young ones?”

“They weaken him,” said Seth. “They have to. That’s why his telepathic power is increasing now. The uncontrolled proliferation of young ones drains him. His physical body—this unimaginable vehicle by which we’re all kept animated—is not infinite in size.” He glanced at Fareed, who nodded. “And when the fledglings proliferate, he wants them burnt off. Now how precisely he is strengthened remains a mystery. Does he taste blood in the Core Body more exquisitely? Does he see through the eyes of the Core Body with greater acuity? Can he hear sounds more sharply? We don’t know. We do know his actual telepathic voice is stronger now as the result of the killings. That we do know. But I wager you this. It was he, the Voice, that drove the elder in those long-ago nights at the dawn of the Common Era to leave Akasha and Enkil in the sun to cause the first Great Burning. And it was he in some guise in the mind of Akasha who drove her to exterminate so many of the tribe before she wooed Lestat for her even-darker purposes.”