There was a long moment of silence.

“You know what the Talamasca is today. It has thousands of dedicated scholars of the supernatural. But it does not know and must not know how it was born. And now its Elders are mortal men, and it is on its own. It is strong, it has its traditions, its sacred trusts, and it no longer needs those of us who brought it into being. Yet those of us who brought it into being can benefit at any moment from its tireless research, can steal into its archives to peruse its treasures, can access its most ancient records or its very latest reports. There is no reason anymore for us to control it. It is now fully on its own.”

“It was always your intent to watch us, to watch the progress of Amel,” said Daniel.

Teskhamen nodded, but then he shrugged. He made a graceful gesture with his open hands. “Yes, and no. Amel was the torch that led the procession through the ages. But many things have been learned and there are many more to learn, certainly, and the great Order of the Talamasca will continue, and so will we.”

He looked from Daniel to Marius.

“Gremt would know more about what he is as well. And Hesketh and all ghosts seek to understand themselves completely too. But we have come now with Amel to a moment we have long dreaded, a moment we knew would come.”

“How so?” asked Daniel.

“We are seeing now the moment we have long feared, the moment when Amel, the spirit of the vampiric Blood, comes to consciousness and seeks to direct his destiny for himself.”

“The Voice!” Marius whispered. The Voice. The voice that had spoken to him in his thoughts had been Amel. The voice urging him to slay had been Amel. The voice urging one blood drinker to kill another was Amel.

“Yes,” said Teskhamen. “After all these long millennia it is aware of itself, and it struggles to feel, and to see, as it did in those first moments when it went into the body and blood of the Queen.”

Daniel was dumbstruck. He climbed off the bench and came and seated himself beside Marius, but he wasn’t looking at either of the others, but rather into his own thoughts.

“Oh, it was never truly unaware,” said Teskhamen. “And the spirits knew it. Gremt knew. Only conscious awareness was no more. But that consciousness was always struggling. You might say it has gone through some sort of infancy towards childhood and now seeks to speak as a child, understand as a child, think as a child. And it would be a man. It would put away childish things quickly if it could. And the glass through which it sees is dark indeed.”

Marius was quietly marveling. Finally he asked, “And Gremt, its brother spirit, he does see clearly as we see, and speak and understand and think as we think? He knows what Amel does not know?”

“No, not really,” said Teskhamen, “as he is not really flesh and blood even as is Amel. He is a spirit still who’s learned to take on form amongst us, to sharpen his spirit eyes and his spirit ears through what he grasps of what we see and hear, but he does not feel what we feel or what Amel feels. And his life is to some extent more penitential than ours has ever been.”

Marius couldn’t contain himself. He stood up and walked slowly back and forth on the paving and then out on the soft warm sand. What do these spirits see when they look at us? He stared down at his own hands, so white, so strong, so flexible, so powerful in every simple human way, and now with preternatural strength. He had always sensed that spirits were attracted to the physical, could not remain indifferent to it, and were creatures of parameters and rules like humans even if they were unseen.

Behind him, Daniel asked, “Well, what will happen now, now that it can speak and plot and connive to destroy the young ones? Why has it done all this?”

Marius turned back and sat down again on the bench. But he could scarcely follow what they were saying. He was thinking of all those intimate whispers of the Voice, all that eerie eloquence, that searching to strike the right pitch.

“The ever-increasing young ones weaken it,” said Teskhamen. “Proliferation of the Blood ultimately weakens it. That is my guess, but it is only a guess. I suppose as a scholar I should say that is my working hypothesis. Amel has limits, though what they are no one knows. Gremt and Amel knew each other in the spirit realm in ways that cannot be described.

“Gremt is a powerful spirit now in the body he’s made for himself, drawn to himself through some form of etheric magnetism. Oh, after all these centuries the Talamasca knows no more about the science of the supernatural than before. I suspect the blood drinker doctor, Fareed, already has learned infinitely more than we have. We approached the data empirically and historically. He approaches it scientifically.”

Marius said nothing. He knew of Fareed and Seth, yes. David Talbot had told him of Fareed and Seth. But he had never laid eyes on either. He had assumed, wrongly, that Maharet would never tolerate their foray into hard science. But in truth, he had not himself been terribly interested. He had had his own reasons for choosing to live away from other blood drinkers with only Daniel for a companion. Daniel had spoken gently a number of times of wanting to approach Fareed and Seth, but Marius had never taken the matter up in a serious way.

“Whatever the case,” Teskhamen went on, “these invisible bodies have limits, and Amel has limits. He is not, as the ancient witches supposed, a thing of infinite size. Invisible does not mean infinite. And I think now he resents the drain upon his body. It—he—would limit the population, and how severely no one can know.”

“And no one can know that he has always been unconscious,” said Marius. He was remembering many things, so many things. “What if two thousand years ago,” he asked, “it was Amel who put the wicked elder of Alexandria up to abandoning the Mother and the Father in the sun? He knew, somehow, on some level, that the Mother and Father would survive, but that all the young ones out there would burn, and ones of your age would suffer as you did. What if Amel knew?”

“And when Akasha awakened,” asked Daniel, “when she went after Lestat. Was that Amel’s doing as well?”

“That we can’t know,” said Teskhamen. “But I wager he comes to consciousness more often and more strongly when there is no fierce mind in the host body to contest his own churning thoughts.”

Churning. That seemed a perfect word for it, Marius agreed. That was a perfect word for his own ruminations. He was seeking to remember so many things, moments over the centuries when he had drunk Akasha’s blood, been visited by visions he had thought to come from her. But what if they had not come from her? What if they had come from Amel?