“It would be,” I said. “And who could blame him? You’ve been talking about this idea of a machine as if this being weren’t sentient, and capable of excruciating pain. Well, he does feel such things. I’m telling you there must be a solution to all this which doesn’t involve the hopeless imprisonment of Amel. His imprisonment in Mekare is what led to this! Yes, her injured mind gave him a vacuum in which to come into his own. And I confess I stimulated him when I stimulated Akasha. No doubt of that! But Amel feels and Amel wants and Amel loves.”

“I wouldn’t call him Amel,” said Marius. “That is far too personal. So far he is the Voice.”

“I called him the Voice when I didn’t know who he was,” I objected. “And others who described him as the Voice didn’t know who he was.”

“We still don’t really know who he is,” said Marius.

“So what are you saying, Lestat?” asked Armand in that subtle tone of his. “You are saying this spirit, Amel, is good? Lestat, all we ever learned of it from the twins was that it was evil.”

“Not so,” I said. “That is not really what the twins told us at all. Besides why would it be inherently either good or evil? And what the twins described was a playful, boasting spirit that loved Mekare and sought to punish Akasha for ever harming her, and somehow this spirit went into Akasha’s body and became one with her, one with the one he hated. And now six thousand years later, he finds himself restored to the body of the one he loved, and she’s dead to him, dead to everything.”

“Ah, that is a beautiful story,” said Pandora under her breath.

“But that doesn’t make him good!” said Armand.

“And that doesn’t make him evil either,” I said. “When Maharet told us these old tales she made it clear: good spirits were those who did the bidding of witches; bad ones did mischief. That’s a very primitive and near-useless definition of evil or good.”

I was suddenly aware of Benji gesturing to Armand, asking him to be quiet, and Louis also. And I saw that Marius was making a similar gesture with his hands low to the table, as if to say, Be quiet. And no sooner had I picked up on this than Armand picked up on it.