“I appreciate all these many refinements,” I said, my eyes sweeping the arched ceiling. “This was once a windowless croft, wasn’t it? And you cut those big windows and made them beautiful with thick glass and iron lattices. You have kept this place well enough for the ghosts of old monks to be happy here, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Gremt, but he was forcing his smile.

“Well, this old ghost is happy here,” said Magnus in a low rich voice. “I can tell you that much.” I heard the past in the voice. I heard words spoken I hadn’t remembered for decades. There, my son, is the passageway to my treasure….

I tried not to recoil, but to meet his smile with my own.

Amel was right. His brown habit and soft brown leather slippers were part of the illusion. If he vanished, he’d leave nothing behind. And there was something else I observed about him immediately. His facial features, their proportions, and the details of his soft ashen-blond hair, they weren’t fixed. They were not flickering like an image on a bad movie screen, but the entire illusion was fragile as if vulnerable to the slightest movement of the air. I don’t think a mortal could have detected this. And I sensed it took a colossal amount of energy from him to remain solid-looking and stable. His intense gaze, his brilliant eyes fixed on mine, was the most vital thing about him.

Gremt, the ancient one, the pillar of the Talamasca, had no such difficulty. He appeared solid enough to be torn limb from limb. He looked no less real than he had at our earlier meetings, his obvious discomfort having no effect whatsoever on his visual anatomy. Spirit, powerful spirit.

Teskhamen was of course a blood drinker survivor of the millennia, old before he gave the Blood to Marius. He was his predictable elegant self, thick wavy white hair cut short, his skin darker than it had appeared when I’d first laid eyes on him some six months before.

They had resumed their places. Gremt closest to me, and Teskhamen beside him. Magnus at the far end just opposite. I looked at Teskhamen’s skin, I could smell the sun when I looked at it.

A sudden jolt of pain passed through me. I’d never be able again to expose myself to the sun in any way, not to darken my skin, not to test my endurance, not to…Because if I did the young ones might burn up in seconds. There had to be some way around that. There had to be some way to test the old legend.

“I was a victim of the old legend,” said Teskhamen. His face was bright, friendly. Whatever was bothering the other two, it was not affecting him. He was so lean and sharply contoured that his bones were part of his beauty.