I said nothing. With the power of his mind, he might send a blast from that phone, I figured. But did he know that? I certainly didn’t know it for certain. I hated him. I loathed the very sight of him.

“Need I remind you that if anything happens to me,” he went on, “the Voice will incite Benedict to immediately kill your son, and you may never find out the location of Mekare.”

The others stared at him in cold silence.

Chapter 24

Lestat

He Who Cuts the Knot

I TRIED TO PENETRATE the creature’s mind, trying to pick up the faintest image from it that might indicate precisely where Viktor was, and where Mekare was. And I knew surely that every other blood drinker at the table was doing this. Nothing. And whether the Voice was inside this being right now, looking through his eyes at me and at all of us, I couldn’t know.

“I can explain to you simply enough,” said Rhoshamandes, “what I want. The Voice wishes to come into me. I am loath to attempt this on my own. I feel I need the assistance of others here, most particularly Fareed, this vampire doctor. I need his help.”

Fareed said nothing.

“If we agree to proceed, I’ll take Fareed with me now, and when the deed is done, when Mekare is mercifully freed from this Earth, and the Voice is in me, I will return Fareed and Viktor unharmed. I will then possess the Sacred Core. And I will become the leader, so to speak, of this tribe.” He smiled coldly as he looked at Benji. “I assure you, I’m neither despotic nor obsessively interested in the conduct of blood drinkers. Like many a being who rises to power, I rise not because I want power, but because I don’t intend to be governed by anyone else.”

He was about to go on when Seth gestured for his attention. “Have you no hesitation,” he said, “about living with this Voice inside you night after night for the rest of your immortal journey in this world?”

Rhoshamandes didn’t immediately answer. Indeed his face went blank and became a bit rigid, a bit grim. He stared at the shiny little mobile phone in front of him and then he looked again at me and then at Seth.

“I am committed now to doing what the Voice wants,” he said. “The Voice wants to be freed from Mekare. The Voice can only temporarily possess any one of us at any given time, and the Voice does not see clearly or hear clearly through us when it possesses us. And in Mekare it is trapped in an instrument so damaged and blunted, so destroyed through isolation and privation, that it cannot hear or see at all.”