Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (The Vampire Chronicles 12)

Lestat

SEVEN NIGHTS HAD passed. How the discussion raged. Of course Benji issued only the blandest of official announcements on the radio broadcast. Peace had been made with Garekyn Zweck Brovotkin and the other Replimoids and no blood drinker anywhere in the world was to harm these creatures. The Replimoids had sworn never to bring harm to the vampires, or betray their secrets. Life was to go on as before. But the world of the Undead knew what was happening. The endless telepathic emanations had circled the globe.

All the blood drinkers gathered beneath the roof of the Chateau knew precisely what was happening, and groups came forth demanding that we defend ourselves against this new enemy that might try to seize the Core from within the Prince and thereby annihilate the tribe. Cyril and Thorne asked why we didn't fight.

Armand and Marius had a dreadful quarrel in which Armand demanded that the Replimoids be hunted down and annihilated, and Marius accused Armand of having the savage and ignorant soul of a child.

The ancient ones discussed it amongst themselves endlessly, except for Fareed, Seth, and Flannery, who went off to Paris to work ceaselessly to find some solution to the problems we faced. Fareed was of the opinion that my precious evil twin, Amel, could be removed some night somehow into a neutral container of some sort, a tank of ever-circulating vampiric blood, until such time as the Replimoids surfaced again. But he admitted that as of now, he was utterly incapable of achieving this feat.

And what good would that do anyway when Kapetria sought to put the brain inside a Replimoid body, a body of flesh and blood that could walk in the light of the sun? Wouldn't the mysterious nano-particle tentacles be severed then? Or would we all burn up, even the eldest of us, within a space of weeks as the mysterious engine that animated us exercised its new prerogatives? And what was to stop him, except our keeping him a prisoner forever in some chemical device?

Again and again, the ancient ones sought to calm the young ones, and all who came from far and wide to find out what was truly happening or not happening, and what they might do.

One thing was now achieved. We had a fairly good fix on our numbers. It was merely an estimate but I thought it was a sound estimate. We could not be more than about two thousand worldwide. Such a small tribe. Fareed had completed the calculations that he had begun last year--putting together all accounts of the infamous Burnings when Amel was on the rampage, and calculations as to how many any one coven house had claimed as occupants, and calculations as to how many coven houses there had been in the world. He had recorded the identity and particulars of each new blood drinker arriving among us. And he had taken the blood of the blood drinker too for his laboratory. And he had questioned each blood drinker as to what other blood drinkers he'd encountered throughout his life.

It was over my head, the graphs and the mathematical talk. But I sensed the figure itself was accurate, and now we were seeing not a flood of new faces at Court but the same people coming back who'd been here when we'd fir

st opened our doors.

But what did it matter if two thousand of us perished or fifteen thousand? Were we soon to be a legend and nothing else? Would the human Talamasca, now severed from Gremt and Teskhamen and Hesketh, ever know what became of the fabled vampires they'd studied for centuries?--ever know why they perished or that a new tribe of immortals had now come together, the Replimoids, to increase exponentially if they chose?

And that exponential increase is what we tried to explain to those who kept saying, Destroy them! Burn them. Wipe them out.

"That has never been an option," said Marius night after night as he addressed the company in the ballroom. "Even when they came to us, there were others hidden somewhere, likely multiplying beyond reckoning. While the embassy of Replimoids was with us, it multiplied. We know of nothing that limits their individual or collective ability to replicate. For all we know there are hundreds of them now, and possibly thousands. So whom are we to hunt down, and seek to destroy?"

Marius didn't attempt to defend our conviction that we could not morally exterminate the Replimoids. But we, the inner circle, never wavered in this regard. Besides, they had done nothing yet. They had not even made a threat against us. And if and when they did, could we not protect ourselves?

Our vaults were so strong, it would require explosives in mass quantity to disrupt them during the daylight hours; and it was inconceivable that the Replimoid tribe, so distinctive physically, would come here with the strength of a battalion to breach the castle doors and crypts. The villagers would panic at the first sounds of explosives. They'd summon the forces of the mortal world from far and wide.

Whatever they were, and whatever they were destined to be, the Replimoids surely were fearing exposure just as we had always feared it; and though we had triumphed in hiding in plain sight in a world convinced we were fictional, the Replimoids, once captured, imprisoned, and examined, simply did not have our formidable gifts to help them escape from mortal bonds and literally burn up all traces of their cell matter that might remain in mortal hands.

"Why don't we expose them?" asked the young ones. "Why don't we turn the forces of the world loose on them?"

"Because they could in turn expose us," said Marius, answering some form of this question almost every single night.

As for the vial of blood which Kapetria had given to Fareed, he could find nothing in it that was directly helpful to what he had to do, though its makeup puzzled him. He spoke of its having five times the density of folic acid as human blood. He talked of other chemicals, of breaking down the baffling DNA, of mysterious components for which he had to make new names. When, through me, he put the question to Amel as to what distinguished Replimoid blood from human blood, Amel wouldn't answer. I don't think Amel knew how to answer. Or something about the question aroused deep currents of feeling in him that he couldn't bear.

Amel certainly had no idea as to how to solve the problem of the connection, that was clear. Whether he might ever be the great scientist of Atalantaya again, no one could know; but he was not the Great One now.

As for me, I was no more resigned to perish than I'd ever been, my dramatic little suicide attempt in the Gobi Desert notwithstanding. But helpless to do anything about the connection between me and Amel, I became obsessed with our connection to the others, and how they might be severed from Amel inside of me.

I told Fareed: Find a way to snip the tentacles of the nano-particle thermoplastic luracastria that bound all vampires to the Core. Then I'd die when Amel was removed from me, yes, but the tribe would live.

I became convinced that Kapetria was giving us time to focus on this, and when she had described this vast web of connections as a failed attempt at propagation, she'd been giving us the only help that she could.

More than once I went on Benji's radio cast and made vague appeals to her, heavily disguised as general admonitions to blood drinkers everywhere as to how we must always work together, and think of one another, and think of the welfare and destiny of one another. I gave out the number of the cell phone I carried. But no call from Kapetria came.

"If she knew how to sever the connection, she'd tell us," I said to the others; though why I clung to such a view of her I wasn't sure. Maybe it was simply that I had liked her, liked all she'd told us of her birth and her brief life in Atalantaya, and I positively loved what she'd told us about the life and adventures of the spirit inside us who had always been known as Amel. I loved that she had volunteered the vial of her blood. Yes, she'd lied to us. But I knew why she'd lied. I couldn't fault her for lying. I couldn't yield to a cynical view of Kapetria, or to a cynical view of those with her. And I could not bear to think of their annihilation any more than I could think of ours.

That anything so ancient and mysterious should die--this was unthinkable to me. When Maharet had died, the great unique universe of Maharet had perished with her, and I found it unendurable to think about it. And that was why I couldn't wish for the death of Rhoshamandes either. Who was I to put an end to a being who knew what Rhoshamandes knew, a being who had seen all that he had seen? Some night, Rhoshamandes and I would talk about it all, talk about what it had been like when he first came north from the Mediterranean into the wild primal forests of the land we now call France. Some night, we'd talk about so many things...that is, if it wasn't too late.

Whatever the nightly arguments, the heated question-and-answer sessions, vampires clung to the Court. The Chateau could shelter some fifty or more guests in its crypts; another two hundred or more lodged safely and secretly in the nearby cities; and the young ones who had to hunt the millions in Paris came nightly to Armand's house in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. And I went to be with the young ones there for at least an hour every night.

There were tears shed, loud accusations of betrayal, sharp challenges to my integrity or worth as the Prince of the Vampires, and long violent discussions as to what to fear and what to do, and how long we might have.

But we hung together, at Armand's house, or here in this mighty fortress where the lights never went out and the music always played.

As for Amel, he listened to all of my speeches and exhortations in silence, only pouring forth his heart to me when we were alone. It seemed with every passing night, he knew more of his own story, but he knew it threaded through and through with confusion and pain. He wept and railed at the Bravennans, whom he called the authors of all evil, and blamed on them all the bloody religions that had ever become the scourge of humankind. He lapsed into the ancient tongue for hours as if he could not help himself, and other times he fell to weeping without words.