Only He is supposed to speak the truth! And Memnoch over and over described Him as if He were Mad, a Moral Idiot."

He turned slowly, the light playing with the shadows of his face.

Softly he asked, "His blood, Lestat, could it truly be inside you?"

"Don't start believing it!" I said. "Not you! No. Don't believe. I refuse to play. I refuse to take either side! I brought the Veil back so you and she would believe what I said, that's all I did, and this, this madness has happened!"

I swooned.

I saw the Light of Heaven for an instant, or it seemed I did. I saw Him standing at the balustrade. I smelled that fierce horrid smell that had arisen so often from the earth, from battlefields, from the floors of Hell.

David knelt beside me, holding me by my arms.

"Look at me, don't fade out on me now!" he said. "I want us to leave here, we're to go away. You understand? We'll go back home. And then I want you to tell me the whole story again, dictate it to me, word for word."

"For what?"

"In the words we'll find the truth, in the details and in the plot we'll discover who did what for whom. Whether God used you, or Memnoch did! Whether Memnoch was lying the whole time! Whether God...."

"Ah, it makes your head ache, doesn't it? I don't want you to write it down. There will only be a version if you write it down, a version, and there are already so many versions, what has she told them of her night visitors who brought her the Veil, her benign demons who brought her the Veil? And they took my clothes! What if there is tissue from my skin on those clothes?"

"Come now, take the books, here, I'll help you, here, there are three sacks here but we need only two, you put this bundle in yours, and I'll take the other."

We obeyed his orders. We had the books in the two sacks. We could go now.

"Why did you leave them here when you sent all the other things back?"

"She wanted you to have them," he said. "I told you. She wanted me to see that they were put in your hands. And she's given you all the rest. All ties are cut for her. This is a movement drawing fundamentalist and fanatic, cosmic Christians and Christians from East and West."

"I have to try to get near her again."

"No. Impossible. Come. Here. I have a heavy coat. You must put this on."

"Are you going to care for me forever?" I asked.

"Perhaps."

"Why don't I go to her now in the church and burn up the Veil! I could do it. I could do it with the power of my mind, make the Veil explode."

"Then why don't you?"

I shuddered. "I... I...."

"Go ahead. You don't even have to go in the church. Your powers go before you. You could burn it up, maybe. It would be interesting if it didn't burn, wouldn't it? But suppose it did, suppose it just went black and burnt up like the wood in a grate when you light it with the telekinetic power of your mind. What then?"