“Not at all,” said Fareed. “I can’t. I know its properties by how they behave. When a creature is made into a vampire, it’s as if a tentacle of this monster invades the new organism, hooking itself into the brain of the human being and then slowly beginning to transform it. Senescence is stopped forever. And then the alchemical blood of the creature works on the human blood, slowly absorbing it and then transforming what it does not absorb. It works on all the biological tissue; it becomes the sole source of cell development and change within the host. Are you following me?”

“Well, yes, I think I’ve always understood that,” said Gregory. “Now it needs more human blood to continue its work.”

“And what’s the goal of its work?” asked Flavius.

“To make us into perfect hosts for itself,” said Fareed.

“And to drink blood, always to drink more blood,” said Gregory. “To drive us to drink more blood. I remember how the Queen cried out in those early months. The thirst was unbearable. It wanted more blood. The red-haired witches told her that before they’d been given the Blood. ‘It wants more blood.’ ”

“But I don’t think that is its main goal,” said Fareed. “Nor has it ever been. But I’m not sure that it is conscious of a goal! That is what I want to know more than anything. Is it self-conscious? Is it a conscious being living inside the body of Mekare?”

“But in the very beginning,” Gregory said, “the spirits of the world told the twin witches that Amel, once fused with the Queen, was not conscious. They said, ‘Amel is no more.’ They said Amel was lost now inside the Mother.”

Fareed laughed to himself and looked into the fire.

“I was there,” said Gregory. “I remember it, when the twins said these things.”

“Well, of course you were, but what amazes me is that after all the generations you’ve seen rise and fall, you still believe those spirits actually spoke to the witches.”

“I know they did.”

“Do you?” asked Fareed.

“Yes,” said Gregory. “I do know.”

“Well, you may be right and the spirits may be right, and the thing is mindless and subsumed, but I cannot help but wonder. I tell you, there are no discarnate entities. This thing, Amel, is not a discarnate entity but something of immense size and intricate organization, something that has now so thoroughly mutated its host and those connected to her.…” And suddenly his language ascended again into a vocabulary as opaque to Gregory as the syllables uttered by dolphins or birds.

Gregory tried to pierce the language with the finest abilities of his own mind, to see the pictures, shapes behind it. Design. But he saw something that resembled the stars in the night sky and their infinite and purely accidental patterns.

Fareed continued.