“He’s stopped his relentless meddling out there,” I said, “that’s what matters.” I gestured to the front of the house, towards the street where the young ones were milling, towards the wide world which lay to the east, and the west, and the south and the north.

“I suppose it would be pointless for me to scrawl a message to you on paper here,” said Marius, “because he can read it through your eyes. But why bring over these two until we’re certain that this thing is not yet going to destroy the entire tribe?”

“He’s never wanted to do that,” I said. “And there is no ultimate solution so long as he exists. Even in the most agreeable host, he can still plot and then travel, and then foment. I don’t see any end to that except for one.”

“Which is what?”

“That he might have some larger vision, some infinitely larger challenge, with which to occupy his mind.”

“Does he want that?” Marius asked. “Or is that not something you’ve dreamed up, Lestat? You are such a romantic at heart. Oh, I know you fancy yourself hard-boiled and practical by nature. But you’re a romantic. You always have been. What he wants perhaps is a sacrificial lamb, a perfect blood drinker, old and powerful, whose functioning brain he can take over and control relentlessly as he gradually obliterates its personality. Rhoshamandes was his prototype. Only Rhoshamandes wasn’t vicious enough or foolish enough—.”

“Yes, that does make sense,” I said. “I’m exhausted. I want to go back to that little retreat I’ve found in the other building.”

“What Armand calls the French library.”

“Yes, exactly,” I said. “He couldn’t have designed a more perfect spot for me. I need to rest. To think. But you may do this with Viktor and Rose whenever you wish, and I say the sooner the better—don’t wait, don’t wait for any resolution that may never come. You do it, go on and do it, and you’ll make them strong and telepathic and resourceful, and you’ll give them the best instructions, and so I leave it to you.”

“And if I do it with a bit of ceremony?” he asked.

“Why not?” I remembered the description of the making of Armand, how he’d taken the young Armand into a painted room in his Venetian palace and there amid blazing multicolored murals he had made him, offering the blood as sacrament with the most appropriate words. So different from my own making, that ruthless Magnus who was now a wise ghost, but had been then a warped and vile blood drinker, tormenting me as he brought me over.

I had to stop thinking of all this. I was bone tired, as mortals say. I rose to go. But then I stopped.