It was like a hand touching my throat. I turned and saw him staring at me. Do you love them, your silent children? Do they love you? That was what he asked, the sense disentangling itself from an endless echo.
I felt the blood rise to my face. The heat spread out over me like a mask as I looked at him. All the books in the room were now on the floor. He was a haunt standing in the ruins, a visitant from the devil he believed in. Yet his face was so tender, so young. The Dark Trick never brings love, you see, it brings only the silence. His voice seemed softer in its soundlessness, clearer, the echo dissipated. We used to say it was Satan's will, that the master and the fledgling not seek comfort in each other. It was Satan who had to be served, after all. Every word penetrated me. Every word was received by a secret, humiliating curiosity and vulnerability. But I refused to let him see this. Angrily I said:
"What do you want of me? " It was shattering something to speak. I was feeling more fear of him at this moment than ever during the earlier battles and arguments, and I hate those who make me feel fear, those who know things that I need to know, who have that power over me.
"It is like not knowing how to read, isn't it? " he said aloud. "And your maker, the outcast Magnus, what did he care for your ignorance? He did not tell you the simplest things, did he? " Nothing in his expression moved as he spoke.
"Hasn't it always been this way? Has anyone ever cared to teach you anything? "
"You're taking these things from my mind. . . " I said. I was appalled. I saw the monastery where I'd been as a boy, the rows and rows of books that I could not read, Gabrielle bent over her books, her back to all of us. "Stop this! " I whispered. It seemed the longest time had passed. I was becoming disoriented. He was speaking again, but in silence. They never satisfy you, the ones you make. In silence the estrangement and the resentment only grow. I willed myself to move but I wasn't moving. I was merely looking at him as he went on. You long for me and 1 for you, and we alone in all this realm are worthy of each other. Don't you know this? The toneless words seemed to be stretched, amplified, like a note on the violin drawn out forever and ever.
"This is madness, " I whispered. I thought of all the things he had said to me, what he had blamed me for, the horrors the others had described-that he had thrown his followers into the fire.
"Is it madness? " he asked. "Go then to your silent ones. Even now they say to each other what they cannot say to you. "
"You're lying... " I said.
"And time will only strengthen their independence. But learn for yourself. You will find me easily enough when you want to come to me. After all, where can I go? What can I do? You have made me an orphan again. "
"I didn't- " I said.
"Yes, you did, " he said. "You did it. You brought it down. " Still there was no anger. "But I can wait for you to come, wait for you to ask the questions that only I can answer. " I stared at him for a long moment. I don't know how long. It was as if I couldn't move, and I couldn't see anything else but him, and the great sense of peace I'd known in Notre Dame, the spell he cast, was again working. The lights of the room were too bright. There was nothing else but light surrounding him, and it was as if he were coming closer to me and I to him, yet neither of us was moving. He was drawing me, drawing me towards him. I turned away, stumbling, losing my balance. But I was out of the room. I was running down the hallway, and then I was climbing out of the back window and up to the roof. I rode into the Ile de la Cite as if he were chasing me. And my heart didn't stop its frantic pace until I had left the city behind. Hell's Bells ringing. The tower was in the darkness against the first glimmer of the morning light. My little coven had already gone to rest in their dungeon crypt.
I didn't open the tombs to look at them, though I wanted desperately to do it, just to see Gabrielle and touch her hand. I climbed alone towards the battlements to look out at the burning miracle of the approaching morning, the thing I should never see to its finish again. Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music . . . But another sound was comming to me. I knew it as I went up the stairs. And I marveled at its power to reach me. It was like a song arching over an immense distance, low and sweet. Once years ago, I had heard a young farm boy singing as he walked along the high road out of the village to the north. He hadn't known anyone was listening. He had thought himself alone in the open country, and his voice had a private power and purity that gave it unearthly beauty. Never mind the words of his old song. This was the voice that was calling to me now. The lone voice, rising over the miles that separated us to gather all sounds into itself. I was frightened again. Yet I opened the door at the top of the staircase and went out onto the stone roof. Silken the morning breeze, dreamlike the twinkling of the last stars. The sky was not so much a canopy as it was a mist rising endlessly above me, and the stars drifted upwards, growing ever smaller, in the mist. The faraway voice sharpened, like a note sung in the high mountains, touching my chest where I had laid my hand. It pierced me as a beam pierces darkness, singing Come to me; all things will be forgiven if only you come to me. I am more alone than I have ever been. And there came in time with the voice a sense of limitless possibility, of wonder and expectation that brought with it the vision of Armand standing alone in the open doors of Notre Dame. Time and space were illusions. He was in a pale wash of light before the main altar, a lissome shape in regal tatters, shimmering as he vanished, and nothing but patience in his eyes.
There was no crypt under les Innocents now. There was no grotesquery of the ragged ghost in the glare of Nicki's library, throwing down the books when he had finished with them as if they were empty shells. I think I knelt down and rested my head against the jagged stones. I saw the moon like a phantom dissolving, and the sun must have touched her because she hurt me and I had to close my eyes. But I felt an elation, an ecstasy. It was as if my spirit could know the glory of the Dark Trick without the blood flowing, in the intimacy of the voice dividing me and seeking the tenderest, most secret part of my soul. What do you want of me, I wanted to say again. How can there be this forgiveness when there was such rancor only a short while ago? Your coven destroyed. Horrors I don't want to imagine . . . I wanted to say it all again. But I couldn't shape the words now any more than I could before. And this time, I knew that if I dared to try, the bliss would melt and leave me and the anguish would be worse than the thirst for blood. Yet even as I remained still, in the mystery of this feeling, I knew strange images and thoughts that weren't my own. I saw myself retreat to the dungeon and lift up the inanimate bodies of those kindred monsters I loved. I saw myself carrying them up to the roof of the tower and leaving them there in their helplessness at the mercy of the rising sun. Hell's Bells rang the alarm in vain for them. And the sun took them up and made them cinders with human hair. My mind recoiled from this; it recoiled in the most heartbreaking disappointment.