“All right, my babies,” I said. “This is a grand moment.”

I couldn’t prevent the tears. The clock would soon strike nine.

High above in the ballroom, Marius and Pandora waited, and it would have been purely selfish of me to delay this further.

The whole great house of Trinity Gate was scented with flowers.

“It is the finest gift,” I whispered, the tears tinting my vision. “It is the gift that we can give, which means life everlasting.”

They clung to me tightly.

“Go now,” I said. “They’re waiting for you. Before the sun rises, you’ll be Born to Darkness, but you will see all light then as you’ve never before imagined it. As Marius once said, ‘an endless illumination in which to understand all things.’ And when I set eyes on you again, I’ll give you my blood as my blessing. And you will really be my children.”

Chapter 30

Cyril

The Silence Heard Round the World

HE WAS HUNGRY AGAIN, and disappointed to be bothered by it so soon. He listened and the great emptiness amazed him. He lay in his cave, in blessed solitude and darkness, and he thought, They are all gone.

Quiet the cities around him. Quiet the land. Only the cries and rumbling and human voices.

Except for that radio voice, that blood drinker from America speaking through a computer or a cellphone somewhere out there in the wilderness of Tokyo.

“The Voice is now one of us. The Voice is the root of our tribe.”

What could that possibly mean?

He slipped out into the warm night.

Seems it was another one now speaking through the radio and not one of those desperate young ones weeping to Benji Mahmoud for solace or help. No. It was a calm voice simply talking, talking about the quiet that had descended over “our world.”

Before midnight, Cyril had visited the silence of Beijing and the silence of Hong Kong.

Was it thirst that had awakened him, or was it curiosity? Something had happened, as remarkable as the waking of the Queen years ago, something as remarkable as the coming of the Voice.

They were gone, the others!

On he moved to Mumbai, and then to Kolkata and on towards the cities of the two rivers and the mighty Nile.

Gone, all of them, everywhere, those miserable little monsters struggling for their rung on the ladder to eternal life.

At last he stood in the ancient city of Alexandria, in the small hours, near dawn—this modern metropolis he so loathed on account of the stones and blood buried beneath it, the old catacombs in which the wicked Queen had been worshipped by the priesthood that had taken him out of life so long ago.