“The one who made me is dead,” he said aloud, again glancing at Daniel and then back to Teskhamen. “He died the very night I was Born to Darkness. That was two thousand years ago in a forest in northern Europe. Those events are engraved on my soul.”

“And on mine,” said Teskhamen. “But I did not die that night. And I did make you what you are now. I was the blood god imprisoned in that oak to which the Druids brought you. It was I, that blackened and scarred and ruined thing, that gave you the Blood, and told you to escape the Druids—not to remain imprisoned in the oak as a blood god—but to go down to Egypt, no matter what the cost, and see what had happened to the Mother and the Father, to find out why we had, so many of us, been horribly burned in our very shrines.”

“Prisons, you mean, not shrines,” Marius whispered. He stared forward at the distant horizon where the dark undulating sea met the silver sky.

Could this be possible?

The horrific sights and sounds of that night came back to him, the deep oaken forest, his own helplessness as, a prisoner of the Druids, he’d been dragged towards the shrine of the god within the tree. And then had come those staggering moments when the burnt and white-haired god had spoken to him and explained the powers of the Blood he would share.

“But I saw them throw your body on the pyre afterwards,” said Marius. “I tried to save you, but I didn’t know my own strength then in the Blood. I saw you burned.” He shook his head, peering earnestly into the being’s eyes. “Why would one so old and so seemingly wise lie about these things?”

“I am not lying to you,” said Teskhamen gently. “You saw them try to immolate me. But I was a thousand years old then, Marius, perhaps older. I didn’t know my own strength either. But when you fled as I’d instructed you to do, when all of them to a man ran after you through that forest, I escaped those burning logs.”

Marius stared at Teskhamen, stared at the dark eyes looking at him, at the simple but kindly mouth. Out of the gloom of memory emerged that fragile blackened figure clinging to dark unnatural life through will.

Suddenly Marius knew. He knew it now, knew it in countless subtle ways. He knew the being’s demeanor, the dark and unwavering gaze. He knew the calm and almost melodious cadence of his speech, and even the contained and almost shrinking posture with which he sat there on the bench.

And he knew why he could hear nothing from this one’s mind. This was the maker. The maker had survived.