“And then it had a tone and a vocabulary all its own, this Voice, speaking to me in English sharply, telling me that I wanted to rise, I, Arjun, wanted to rise, to go into Mumbai and wipe them out, the young ones. It seemed so true to me, true! Why did I listen to this? I, who have never wanted trouble with my own kind, who stood my ground patiently centuries ago with Marius, telling him from my soul I would give up my maker to him if that’s what he wanted, what she wanted. You understand? I fought my last battles when I was a mortal prince. What is this to me, murdering, massacring, burning young ones?” He hastened to answer his own question. “Is there something in the gentlest of us that longs to destroy? Something that dreams of annihilating other sentient beings?”

“Perhaps there is,” said Gremt. “When did you realize that this was not what you wanted?”

“When it was happening!” confessed Arjun. “The buildings were in flames. They were screaming, pleading with me, going down on their knees. And these were not all fledglings, you understand. Some of them had been in the Blood hundreds of years. ‘We survived the Queen to perish like this?’ That’s what they screamed as they put out their arms to me. ‘What have we done to you?’ But it was only slowly coming clear to me what I had started. It became a battle, their fighting me with the Fire Gift and I overriding their weaker power. It was … it was …”

“Pleasurable.”

Tears of shame rose in Arjun’s eyes. He nodded.

“Ah, you murder a human being,” Arjun said, “and you steal a life, yes, and that is unspeakable. You murder a blood drinker and you steal eternity! You steal immortality!”

He laid his head down on his arm.

“What happened in Kolkata?”

“That was not me,” he said at once. He sat back in the old rattan peacock chair, the broad woven back creaking against his weight. “I did not do it.”

“I believe you,” said Gremt.

“But why did I kill these children in Mumbai?”

“The Voice roused you for the purpose. It’s done this in other places. It’s done it in the Orient. It’s doing it in South America. I’ve suspected from the beginning there was no one blood drinker enacting the Burning.”

“But who is the Voice?” asked Arjun.

Gremt grew quiet. “Pandora is coming,” he said.

Arjun rose to his feet, almost upsetting the big chair behind him. He looked from right to left, trying to see through the darkness.