"It is a legend," said Gregory. "Nobody ever believed that legend in my time. But it was repeated now and then." Though he was the eldest at the table, born some thousand years before he'd brought Sevraine over, he never assumed an air of authority or command. He saved that for his vast enterprises in the mortal world. Here he wanted to be an equal among equals. He went on. "A great empire, thriving in the Atlantic Ocean, that perished in the space of a day and night."
"And where is this being now," asked Pandora, "this being that can destroy vampires? Crack their skulls as if they were eggs?" Pandora was usually quiet during these council meetings, but she spoke up with obvious concern.
"We've traced it to the West Coast of the United States," said Gregory. "It's a male human for all the world knows, with substantial private holdings, and several residences, the main one of which is in London. And it is most certainly an immortal, having arranged to inherit its own fortune at least twice. The account of how this being was discovered in Siberia in the ice by an amateur Russian anthropologist named Prince Alexi Brovotkin is all available in several obscure sites online. Brovotkin died a hundred years ago. The story goes that Brovotkin's team came upon the starved and frozen body of the individual in a cave in Siberia, and managed to resuscitate it with simple ordinary fresh water and warmth.
"Of course nobody believed the preposterous paper Brovotkin wrote on the subject. But the 'story' was popular in Saint Petersburg at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Prince and his protege were extremely popular in society until Brovotkin died at sea and Garekyn never returned to Russia."
It was Gremt who spoke up now.
"So this being," said Gremt, "we are to presume, has been frozen since the fall of the legendary Atlantis, and only came to light due to the explorations of this adventuresome Russian explorer?"
"Perhaps," said Marius. "Brovotkin never refers to the legend of Atlantis. He offers no speculation as to the origins of the creature. And the trail we've uncovered--of Garekyn, and his fictitious son Garekyn, and the next fictitious Garekyn--is a simple one of men of means traveling the world."
"I saw a group of such creatures when I drank from him," said Armand. "I received the impression that this creature had been searching desperately to find anyone connected to the fallen city, anyone who might have also been there."
"And how did Amel figure in the story of the city?" asked Gremt. He glanced at Marius and then back to Armand.
Armand thought for a long moment. "Unclear. But it was the name Amel spoken so often by Benji and others on the radio broadcast that brought the creature to our door."
With a small subtle gesture of his right hand, Teskhamen spoke up. "The Talamasca has accumulated materials on the legend of Atlantis for centuries," he said. "There are two lines of research."
I nodded for him to go on. "There are the legends beginning really with Plato's account written in four hundred B.C. And then there are the recent speculations of modern New Age scholars that some sort of catastrophe did affect this planet around eleven to twelve thousand years ago, at which time a great civilization was destroyed, leaving underwater ruins all over the world."
The comely ghost of Raymond Gallant was studying him, hanging on his every word. When Teskhamen didn't say anything more, Raymond spoke up. "There's a lot of evidence apparently that there was indeed an ancient civilization before this cataclysm, and possibly more than one civilization. Yet scientists are resistant. The climatologists argue constantly. The sea levels did change drastically, but why precisely we don't know. Biblical scholars claim it was Noah's flood. Others go about examining underwater ruins, attempting to relate them to the catastrophe. The British writer Graham Hancock writes elegantly and persuasively on the topic. But again, there is no consensus."
"Fareed says it's all bunk," I volunteered. "But beautiful bunk."
"I'm no longer inclined to agree," said Marius. "Certainly I thought so centuries ago, yes, that Plato gave birth to a splendid idea with the story of Atlantis, but he was writing a moral tale."
"And where are Fareed and Seth?" asked my mother.
"Off on a mission to investigate what just may be another of these creatures," I explained. "The minute word reached Fareed as to this creature, Garekyn, he went off to have a look at a mysterious female employee of Gregory's whom he'd come to suspect wasn't a human being."
I could see that some at the table knew this and some didn't. It was always the way with the blood drinkers. Some knew all that was happening everywhere as if they received every telepathic emission generated anywhere by anyone, and others were startled, like my mother, who looked up and at me with narrow scornful gray eyes.
My mother's hair was in her usual long solitary ashen-blond braid, but she was dressed like Sevraine for this meeting, or because it was the way she dressed now in Sevraine's underground Cappadocian compound--in a long simple gown of gray wool trimmed in thick silver embroidery obviously made by vampiric hands. She looked no softer or more feminine than usual, and in fact slightly disdainful of the entire meeting and even annoyed.
Gregory explained about the mysterious woman, how she'd been working for him for ten years. Brilliant, imaginative, a scientist engaged in longevity and life enhancement research and possibly human cloning. It was Fareed who had insisted she wasn't a human being.
"I suspect Fareed will come up with nothing," Gregory offered now in his usual low-key polite manner. "Except perhaps a good candidate to come over into the Blood. I could see nothing in the photographs or tapes of the woman to indicate she wasn't a simple flesh-and-blood mortal like all the rest."
Only the scientists among us boldly brought creatures into the ranks of the Undead to do important work. Well, one couldn't discount Notker of Prum, who had brought over many a fine singer or musician during the last millennium. But in general the rest of us had not caught up with the idea of "turning" a mortal simply because we had a job for him here or there. I found myself pondering all this again. The matter had huge implications, implications we'd have to deal with at some point. Who qualif
ies for the Blood? And how do we give it? Or does it simply go unregulated and ungoverned as it has for centuries, with every vampire determining for himself when it was time to select a companion or an heir?
"I don't know what's taking them so long," said Gregory. "They must be in Geneva by now. In fact, they should be back here."
"Now, let's get to the matter of where other blood drinkers are just now," said Marius, "and whether or not all know about this Garekyn, and how important it is not to harm him but to bring him back here alive, to speak to us, and tell us what he is and what he wants."
"Well, Avicus and Zenobia are in the California desert at Fareed's old compound," said Marius. "Rose and Viktor of course are in San Francisco. Rose is revisiting the places that meant so much to her when she was alive. And they did receive the general alert and called in last night."
"I want them back here now," I said. "I told them. And I don't like that this creature Garekyn has gone to Los Angeles. That's too close to where they are."
"I think we may be disturbing ourselves over nothing," said Gregory. And then he repeated what he had said several times earlier that evening, that in all his life in this world, he'd never seen a creature that looked human but was not human. He had seen some strange beings all right, and certainly ghosts and spirits, but never anything biologically human that wasn't human. "I think we'll find some puerile and disappointing explanation for all this," he said.
"You didn't see it," said Armand sharply. His tone was low but hostile. "You didn't drink its blood. You didn't see that city falling into the ocean, those towers melting."
A chill passed over me.