“What do you know about Memnoch?” I asked. I could hardly contain my excitement. “If you know anything of Memnoch, anything at all, you must tell me! Tell me now. What do you know of him?”

Memnoch was a spirit that had once hunted me down, seduced me with visions and tales of Heaven and Hell, and begged for me to become his apprentice in a spirit realm. Memnoch had claimed to be one of the “sons of God” who had engendered the Nephilim. Memnoch had claimed to be the Jewish-Christian Devil. I’d escaped and repudiated Memnoch in utter horror. But I had never known whence he came or what he was—really.

“What did Maharet tell you about Memnoch?” asked Gremt.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing other than what I told the whole world. She said she knew him. That’s all. That’s all she ever said. Maharet didn’t tell people things. That’s the whole point about Maharet. She sat down with us once, long ago, and told us her personal history, and how the blood drinkers had come into existence, and then after that, she retired from the world, refusing to be any sort of mentor or leader. When she brought young ones to her hideouts, she put them to studying old human documents, tablets, scrolls, or pondering mysteries dug up from the earth. She held court not as an instructor but as some sort of…”

“Some sort of mother,” said Gremt.

“Well, yes, I guess so,” I said. “She brought a letter to me from Memnoch, or so she claimed. And in the letter was wrapped my eye, this eye, which Memnoch’s demons had torn out of the socket. The letter was mocking and vicious. The eye I restored to its place and the eye has healed. But the heart will never heal from an assault such as Memnoch made on me. But Maharet never told me anything. I think Maharet was constitutionally wary of all forms of ambition.”

Magnus smiled at this, as if it delighted him.

“He played the Devil for you,” said Magnus, “for the little boy who had been frightened by stories of Hellfire and demons. He used your imagination, your mind, your heart, so to speak, to weave his airy realms about you.”

“Yes, I know that now. I suspected it then. And I left. I fled. I fled even though they took my eye from me.”

“You were braver and stronger than I was,” said Magnus softly. “And you are right about Maharet. She was against all forms of ambition.”

“She believed in passivity,” said Gremt, “and sad to say, she believed in ignorance.”

“I agree,” I said.

“It comes to that after centuries and centuries of vain hope,” said Teskhamen. “You can gaze on the struggling beings around you with a sad detachment. And you can thank Heaven for ignorance, for simple beings who don’t long to know anything.”