“Rhoshamandes, listen to me,” said Derek. “You’re ancient. You come from times long past, before this one came into the world. I heard you speaking upstairs! Surely you have some morality. You remember something of human reverence for right and wrong. You spoke of a prince who injured you, affronted you. But it was about right and wrong, your quarrel, was it not? Listen to me. That I’m kept here, as a bottomless fount of blood for this monster, is wrong!”

He had begun to cry again. Oh, why had they made him the “most” human! Why did he have to be the one who felt things so deeply? He turned away. In a flash he pictured the others with him, comforting him the way they had always done. And he told himself as he had countless times, If you are alive, they are alive. If you are walking this earth once more, they could be walking this earth.

But something was changing in the room.

Rhoshamandes sat down beside him on the bed.

Slowly Derek turned and looked at him. Such pure skin, pure as liquid, as if it had been poured over the being, as if it had never been human! Yes, I look human, Derek thought, and these beings cease to be human apparently with every passing year.

“I understand you’re here against your will,” the blood drinker said leaning close to him. “I want to drink. I want you to yield to me, to allow it.”

Derek laughed bitterly. “What, you insist on my permission?”

Roland laughed silently; his face was the picture of scorn.

But before Derek could say more he felt the loathsome creature’s hand on his left shoulder and the being’s face pressing close to the right side of his neck.

“Remember, you cannot kill him,” said Roland. “Look deep, Rhosh. Drag the truth from him in the blood.”

Why was the ancient one hesitating?

Derek gazed up at Roland, the white-haired Roland with the graven wrinkles of mortal old age inscribed forever perhaps in his long oval face. Roland of the cold indifferent eyes. Before Arion had come, this face was the only face that Derek had seen for nine years.

“Show him no pity, Rhosh,” said Roland looking directly at Derek. “I have tried everything with him. Nothing works. He will not tell me anything.”

Rhosh drew back, as if he’d bent to kiss and thought the better of it, and that probing right hand of his clasped Derek’s head and smoothed Derek’s hair.

In spite of himself Derek felt chills, the sweet high-pitched chills of being touched by another with seeming affection, even one as cold and inhuman as this being.

He closed his eyes and swallowed. The tears poured down his cheeks.

“Such a beautiful creature,” whispered Rhosh. “And such a youthful voice. Such a pleasing voice.”