He turned and went back to the foot of the table, so to speak, and sat down in the chair that had been provided for him.

“You know what I want,” he said. He addressed me. “You know what Amel wants. You know you, Lestat, you know that your son is with Benedict.” He reached into his pocket and held up a shining iPhone for all to see and then placed it before him on the table. “I press the button here and Benedict kills Viktor.” He paused, his eyes sweeping the table up and down and then settling on me. “But that does not have to happen, does it? And of course I have Mekare in a safe place, as you no doubt have surmised.”

I said nothing. With the power of his mind, he might send a blast from that phone, I figured. But did he know that? I certainly didn’t know it for certain. I hated him. I loathed the very sight of him.

“Need I remind you that if anything happens to me,” he went on, “the Voice will incite Benedict to immediately kill your son, and you may never find out the location of Mekare.”

The others stared at him in cold silence.

24

Lestat

He Who Cuts the Knot

I TRIED TO PENETRATE the creature’s mind, trying to pick up the faintest image from it that might indicate precisely where Viktor was, and where Mekare was. And I knew surely that every other blood drinker at the table was doing this. Nothing. And whether the Voice was inside this being right now, looking through his eyes at me and at all of us, I couldn’t know.

“I can explain to you simply enough,” said Rhoshamandes, “what I want. The Voice wishes to come into me. I am loath to attempt this on my own. I feel I need the assistance of others here, most particularly Fareed, this vampire doctor. I need his help.”

Fareed said nothing.

“If we agree to proceed, I’ll take Fareed with me now, and when the deed is done, when Mekare is mercifully freed from this Earth, and the Voice is in me, I will return Fareed and Viktor unharmed. I will then possess the Sacred Core. And I will become the leader, so to speak, of this tribe.” He smiled coldly as he looked at Benji. “I assure you, I’m neither despotic nor obsessively interested in the conduct of blood drinkers. Like many a being who rises to power, I rise not because I want power, but because I don’t intend to be governed by anyone else.”

He was about to go on when Seth gestured for his attention. “Have you no hesitation,” he said, “about living with this Voice inside you night after night for the rest of your immortal journey in this world?”

Rhoshamandes didn’t immediately answer. Indeed his face went blank and became a bit rigid, a bit grim. He stared at the shiny little mobile phone in front of him and then he looked again at me and then at Seth.

“I am committed now to doing what the Voice wants,” he said. “The Voice wants to be freed from Mekare. The Voice can only temporarily possess any one of us at any given time, and the Voice does not see clearly or hear clearly through us when it possesses us. And in Mekare it is trapped in an instrument so damaged and blunted, so destroyed through isolation and privation, that it cannot hear or see at all.”

“Yes,” said Fareed quietly. “We all know this. We’re well aware of what the Voice is experiencing now. But Seth’s question was for you. How are you going to survive with the Voice inside you, night after—?”

“Yes, well, I will!” came the answer, emphatically and impatiently. Rhoshamandes flushed. “Do you think I have a choice?” he said. Then he drew back gesturing for silence. The Voice was talking to him, no doubt.

I was trying to conceal my thoughts completely, which meant leaving them in an inchoate state as best as I could, but clearly this creature was miserable, I could see it, miserable and conflicted, and his pale eyes, fixing on me again, couldn’t express anything but a deep frustration that bordered on pain.

“This must be followed to the finish,” he said now. “Fareed, I must ask you to come with me.”

“And what happens,” asked Sevraine suddenly, “when the Voice tires of being in your body, Rhoshamandes, and decides it wants to be transferred to another?”

“Well, very likely that is never going to happen!” Rhoshamandes flashed furiously, “because the Voice has things to learn in my body, a world to see as he’s never seen it before. This thing, this, this Voice …” He was stammering now in frustration. “This Voice has only just come to consciousness.”

“Yes, and it wants a better host body,” said Seth in a strong cold tone. “And it’s chosen you, a splendid male specimen, but once you take it into yourself you do realize it might just drive you stark raving mad.”

“We’re wasting time,” said Rhoshamandes. “Don’t you understand?”

“What? That you’re a pawn or a slave of this thing?” Seth was facing him and I couldn’t see his face except in semiprofile, but his tone was withering as before.

Rhoshamandes sat back in the chair and put up his hands. He stared at the phone again.

Suddenly Benji slid out of his place at my right and silently hurried down the length of the table until he stood at Rhoshamandes’s left and then he stared down at the phone.

“You touch it, and the boy dies!” said Rhoshamandes. He was now full of rage. His eyes were blazing as he glared at Benji, and his mouth was contorted, his lips pressed together and then released in a vicious sneer. “As I said, one errant signal from that phone and Benedict kills Viktor—.”

“And when that happens,” said Sevraine, “we destroy you, don’t we, in the most painful way because you no longer have any bargaining power whatsoever. What makes you think you can get what you want here?”

“I warn you!” He put up his right hand. Right, I was noticing. He’d taken out the phone with his right hand. Right-handed. “This will happen as the Voice has decreed.”

Marius cleared his throat and sat forward, hands clasped on the table. “The Voice is young to govern this tribe. And I think if you have the Sacred Core within you, you will expose yourself to the sun—and more of the younger generations of us will perish, because that’s what the Voice wants.”

“What of it!” demanded Rhoshamandes.

“What of it?” asked Marius. “All of us here have younger fledglings whom we love! You think I want to sit idly by while you destroy Armand, or Bianca?” He was allowing his own rage to rise. “You think I want to see Benji and Sybelle die?”