“No, of course not,” I said. “But the Voice is controlling him. Isn’t that obvious? The Voice is manipulating him as it has been all along. I suspect the Voice began these massacres with him; and then moved to enlisting others. The Voice is working on a number of fronts, you might say. But Maharet and Khayman are too close for any telepathic bridge. She can’t know. And he obviously can’t tell her. He hasn’t the wits to tell her or anyone.”

A dark cold feeling came over me that, no matter how this came to an end, Khayman as an immortal on this Earth was finished. Khayman wouldn’t survive. And I dreaded the loss of Khayman. I dreaded the loss of all he’d experienced in his thousands of years of roaming, the loss of the tales he might have told of the early battles of the First Brood, of his later wanderings as Benjamin the Devil. I dreaded the loss of the gentle, sweet-hearted Khayman whom I’d briefly known. This was too painful. Who else wouldn’t survive?

Jesse appeared to be reading my thoughts. She nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.”

“Well, I think I know what’s happening,” I said. “I’m going there now. After I see her I’ll meet you in Manaus. That’s far enough away from her, isn’t it?”

David nodded. He said he knew of a fashionable little jungle lodge about thirty miles out of Manaus located on the Acajatuba River. Ah, British gentlemen, they always know how to go forth into the wilderness in style. I smiled. We agreed we’d meet there.

“Are you ready for this journey tonight?” he asked.

“Absolutely. It’s westward. We’ll gain six hours of darkness. Let’s go.”

“You do realize there’s danger here, don’t you?” asked David. “You’re going against Maharet’s express wish.”

“Of course,” I said. “But why did you two come to me? Didn’t you expect me to do something? Why are you both staring at me?”

“We came to urge you to go with us to New York,” Jesse explained timidly, “to urge you to call a meeting of all the powerful ones of the tribe.”

“You don’t need me to do that,” I said. “Go yourselves. Call the meeting.”

“But everyone will come if you call the meeting,” David said.

“And who is everyone? I want to see Maharet.”

They were edgy, uncertain.

“Look, you go on ahead of me to the Amazon now, and I’ll meet you later this very night. And if I don’t—if I don’t meet you in two nights at the jungle lodge on the river, well, have a Requiem Mass said for me in Notre Dame de Paris.”