Gremt slipped his arm around my waist, warmly, and placed his hand on my arm. But it was the ghost who needed comforting. My heart was breaking.

Teskhamen was gone. I’d barely realized it, but he had slipped out of the room, leaving us alone here. And some part of my mind registered that he, a living being, as I was a living being, who had never known incorporeal consciousness could not share the pain that these two specters shared in these moments.

“This will pass,” Gremt said under his breath. “It is my doing, all of it. We are wanderers. We have no Fareed and no Seth for spirits and phantoms. Fate is merciless to the living who lack flesh and blood.”

“Not so,” said Magnus. He turned and as he did so his figure appeared to toughen, to lose something of its brilliant shimmer. “It is not your fault.” He looked at me with the same gaunt white face he’d had when he made me.

Again the phantom wavered, turning its back to us, and becoming transparent, the sound of its voice vaporous as it wept.

I couldn’t watch and do nothing. I moved towards Magnus, reaching out for him, trying to enfold him in my arms, and wrapping myself around what seemed a vibrant invisible force that was nothing now but light and voice.

“I have no regrets now, none,” I said. “You can’t be weeping for me. Weep for yourself, yes, that’s your right, but not for me.”

Someone else entered the room, as softly as Teskhamen had left it. Had he gone to summon this one, to send him in? I heard the step of the other, and picked up the scent of a blood drinker. But I didn’t detach myself from the weeping spirit and I didn’t want to be detached.

It seemed the spirit was wrapping itself around me. I could feel the subtle throbbing presence enclosing my arms, my face, my heart. A swoon bound us together. Images of long ago flooded my senses, the dim hollow cloister in which beneath the purpling dusky sky the mortal alchemist Magnus had bound the tender vampiric prisoner whom I now knew to be Benedict, the Benedict of Rhoshamandes, from whom he bent to steal the precious Blood. Denied this Blood, cruelly denied this Blood, no matter what his brilliance, his wisdom, his worthiness, because he was not young, was not beautiful, was not pleasing to the eyes of those who safeguarded it from all but their favorites, Magnus at last feloniously and greedily drinking the Blood even as his own blood poured from his torn wrists, drinking and drinking the pure nectar, not intermingled with his own but undiluted and supremely powerful. Weeping, weeping.

A voice filled the illusion, an ominous and punishing and angry voice, the voice of Rhoshamandes.