Cover

Title Page

Prince Lestat

The Vampire Chronicles #11

Anne Rice

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Blood Genesis

Blood Argot

Part I
THE VAMPIRE LESTAT

1
The Voice

2
Benji Mahmoud

3
Fareed and Seth

4
Trouble in the Talamasca and in the Great Family

Part II
THE OPEN HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SAVAGE GARDEN

5
The Story of Rose

6
Cyril

7
The Story of Antoine

8
Marius and the Flowers

9
The Story of Gregory

10
Everard de Landen

11
Gremt Stryker Knollys

12
Lestat
The Jungles of the Amazon

13
Marius
Reunion on the Brazilian Shore

14
Rhoshamandes and Benedict

15
Lestat
Be It Ever So Humble

16
Fareed
Moment of Decision

17
Gregory
Trinity Gate
Shall We Dance?

18
Lestat
Sevraine and the Caves of Gold

19
Rhoshamandes
Murder Most Foul

Part III
RAGNARÖK IN THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

20
Rose
In the Topless Towers of Midtown

21
Rhoshamandes
The Devil’s Gambit

22
Gregory
Trinity Gate
Inheriting the Wind

23
Lestat
In the Multitude of Counselors

24
Lestat
He Who Cuts the Knot

25
Lestat
The Garden of Love

26
Lestat
Hostages to Fortune

27
Lestat
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Part IV
THE PRINCIPALITY OF DARKNESS

28
Lestat
The Prince’s Speech

29
Lestat
Pomp and Circumstance

30
Cyril
The Silence Heard Round the World

31
Rose
The People of the Moon and Stars

32
Louis
“Its Hour Come at Last”

Appendix 1
Characters and Their Chronology

Appendix 2
An Informal Guide to the Vampire Chronicles

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

TO

Stan Rice, Michele Rice, Christopher Rice

and

Karen O’Brien and Cynthia Rice Rogers

Victoria Wilson

Lynn Nesbit

Eric Shaw Quinn

Suzanne Marie Scott Quiroz

and

The People of the Page

and to my muses,

Mary Fahl

and

Jon Bon Jovi

Epigraph

From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voice, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastic discoveries, I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil’s Road through its heart.

—Allesandra,
yet unnamed in
The Vampire Lestat

Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.

And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time when we sat upon our mother’s knee and each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both Heaven and Hell: our doom again and again and again.

—Lestat
in The Vampire Lestat

In the flesh all wisdom begins. Beware the thing that has no flesh. Beware the gods, beware the idea, beware the devil.

—Maharet to Jesse
in The Queen of the Damned

Blood Genesis

In the beginning were the spirits. They were invisible beings, heard and seen only by the most powerful sorcerers or witches. Some were thought to be malevolent; some were praised as good. They could find lost objects, spy upon enemies, and now and then affect the weather.

Two great witches, Mekare and Maharet, lived in a beautiful valley on the side of Mount Carmel, and they communed with the spirits. One of these spirits, the great and powerful Amel, could, in his mischief making, take blood from human beings. Tiny bits of blood entered the alchemical mystery of the spirit, though how no one knew. But Amel loved the witch Mekare and was ever eager to serve her. She saw him as no other witch ever had, and he loved her for it.

One day the troops of an enemy came—soldiers of the powerful Queen Akasha of Egypt. She wanted the witches; she wanted their knowledge, their secrets.

This wicked monarch destroyed the valley and the villages of Mekare and Maharet and brought the sisters by force to her own kingdom.

Amel, the furious familiar spirit of the witch Mekare, sought to punish the Queen.

When she lay dying, stabbed over and over by conspirators of her own court, this spirit Amel entered into her, fusing with her body and her blood and giving her a new and terrifying vitality.

This fusion caused a new entity to be born into the world: the vampire, the blood drinker.

From the blood of this great vampire queen, Akasha, all the other vampires of the whole world were born over the millennia. A blood exchange was the means of procreation.

To punish the twins who stood opposed to her and her new power, Akasha blinded Maharet and tore the tongue from Mekare. But before they could be executed, the steward of the Queen, Khayman, a newly made blood drinker himself, passed on to the twins the powerful Blood.

Khayman and the twins led a rebellion against Akasha, but they could not stop her cult of blood drinker gods. Eventually the twins were captured and separated—sent out as castaways—Maharet into the Red Sea and Mekare into the great ocean to the west.

Maharet soon found familiar shores and thrived, but Mekare, carried across the ocean to lands yet undiscovered and unnamed, vanished from history.

This was six thousand years ago.

The great Queen Akasha and her husband, King Enkil, went mute after two thousand years, maintained like statues in a shrine by elders and priests that believed Akasha contained the Sacred Core—and that if she should be destroyed, all the blood drinkers of the world would die with her.

But by the time of the Common Era, the story of the Blood Genesis was completely forgotten. Only a few elder immortals passed on the tale, though they did not believe it even as they told it. Yet blood gods, vampires dedicated to the old religion, still reigned in shrines throughout the world.

Imprisoned in hollowed-out trees or brick cells, these blood gods starved for blood until the holy feasts at which they were brought offerings: evildoers to judge and condemn and feast upon.

AT THE DAWN of the Common Era, an elder, a keeper of the Divine Parents, abandoned Akasha and Enkil in the desert for the sun to destroy them. All over the world young blood drinkers perished, burnt to death in their coffins, their shrines, or in their tracks as the sun shone on the Mother and Father. But the Mother and Father themselves were too strong to perish. And many of the very old ones survived as well, though badly burned and in pain.

A newly made blood drinker, a wise Roman scholar by the name of Marius, went down to Egypt to find the King and Queen and protect them so that no holocaust would ever again ravage the world of the Undead. And thereafter Marius made them his sacred responsibility. The legend of Marius and Those Who Must Be Kept endured for almost two millennia.

In the year 1985, the story of this Blood Genesis was told to all the world’s Undead. That the Queen lived, that she contained the Sacred Core, this was part of the story. It appeared in a book written by the Vampire Lestat, who also told the tale in song and dance in film and from the stage where he performed as a rock singer—calling the world to know and destroy his own kind.

Lestat’s voice waked the Queen from millennia of silence and slumber. She rose with a dream: that she would dominate the world of human beings through cruelty and slaughter and become for them the Queen of Heaven.

But the ancient twins came forward to stop Akasha. They too had heard Lestat’s songs. Maharet appealed to the Queen to stop her superstitious blood tyranny. And the long-lost Mekare, rising from the earth after untold aeons, decapitated the great Queen, and took the Sacred Core into herself as she devoured the dying Queen’s brain. Mekare, under the protection of her sister, became the new Queen of the Damned.

Lestat once again wrote the story. He had been there. He had seen the passing of the power with his own eyes. He gave his testimony to everyone. The mortal world took no notice of his “fictions,” but his tales shocked the Undead.

And so the story of origins and ancient battles, of vampire powers and vampire weaknesses, and wars for control of the Dark Blood became the common knowledge of the Undead tribe the world over. It became the property of old ones who’d been comatose for centuries in caves or graves, of young ones misbegotten in jungles or swamps or urban slums who had never dreamed of their antecedents. It became the property of wise and secretive survivors who had lived in isolation through the ages.

It became the legacy of all blood drinkers the world over to know they shared a common bond, a common history, a common root.

This is the tale of how that knowledge changed the tribe and its destiny forever.

Blood Argot

When the Vampire Lestat wrote his books, he used any number of terms taught to him by the vampires he had encountered in his life. And those vampires who added to his work, offering their memoirs and their experiences in written form, added terms of their own, some much more ancient than those ever revealed to Lestat.

This is a list of those terms, which are now common amongst the Undead throughout the world.

The Blood—When the word is capitalized it refers to vampiric blood, passed on from master to fledgling through a deep and often dangerous exchange. “In the Blood” means that one is a vampire. The Vampire Lestat had over two hundred years “in the Blood” when he wrote his books. The great vampire Marius has over two thousand years in the Blood. And so forth and so on.

Blood Drinker—The most ancient term for vampire. This was Akasha’s simple term, which she later sought to supplant with the term “blood god” for those who followed her spiritual path and her religion.

Blood Wife or Blood Spouse—One’s vampire mate.

Children of the Millennia—Term for immortals who have lived more than a thousand years and most specifically for those who have survived more than two.

Children of the Night—Common term for all vampires, or all those in the Blood.

Children of Satan—Term for vampires of late antiquity and after who believed they were literally children of the Devil and serving God through serving Satan as they fed upon humankind. Their approach to life was penitential and puritanical. They denied themselves all pleasure except drinking blood and occasional Sabbats (large gatherings) at which they danced, and they lived underground, often in filthy and dismal catacombs and enclosures. The Children of Satan have not been seen nor heard of since the eighteenth century, and in all likelihood the cult has died out.

The Coven of the Articulate—A modern slang term popular among the Undead for the vampires whose stories appear in the Vampire Chronicles—particularly Louis, Lestat, Pandora, Marius, and Armand.

The Dark Gift—A term for the vampiric power. When a master bestows the Blood on a fledgling, that master is offering the Dark Gift.

The Dark Trick—Refers to the act of actually making the new vampire. To draw out the fledgling’s blood and to replace it with one’s own powerful Blood—is to work the Dark Trick.

The Devil’s Road—Medieval term among the vampires for the road each vampire takes through this world; a popular term of the Children of Satan who saw themselves as serving God through serving the Devil. To ride the Devil’s Road was to live one’s life as an immortal.

The First Brood—These are the vampires descended from Khayman who were in rebellion against Queen Akasha.

The Queens Blood—These are the vampires made by Queen Akasha to follow her path in the Blood and fight the rebels of the First Brood.

The Sacred Core—This refers to the residing brain or governing life force of the spirit Amel, which is inside the body of the vampire Mekare. Before it was in Mekare it was in the vampire Akasha. It is believed that every vampire on the planet is connected to the Sacred Core by some sort of invisible web or network of tentacles. If the vampire containing the Sacred Core were to be destroyed, all the vampires of the planet would die.

The Fire Gift—This is the ability of older vampires to use their telekinetic power to burn matter. They can, through the power of their minds, burn wood, paper, or any flammable substance. And they can burn other vampires as well, igniting the Blood in their bodies and reducing them to cinders. Only older vampires possess this power, but no one can say when and how a vampire acquires it. A very young vampire made by an ancient one may immediately possess the power. A vampire must be able to see that which he or she wants to burn. In sum, no vampire can burn another if he cannot see that vampire, if he is not close enough to direct the power.

The Cloud Gift—This is the ability of older vampires to defy gravity, to rise up and move in the upper atmosphere and to cover long distances easily, traveling the winds unseen by those below. Again, no one can say when a vampire might acquire this power. The will to have it may work wonders. All truly ancient ones possess it whether they know it or not. Some vampires despise the power and never use it unless forced.

The Mind Gift—This is a loose and imprecise term which refers to the preternatural powers of the vampiric mind on many levels. Through the Mind Gift, a vampire might learn things from the world above even when he is sleeping in the earth below. And consciously using the Mind Gift, he might telepathically listen to the thoughts of mortals and immortals. He might use the Mind Gift to pick up images from others as well as words. He might use the Mind Gift to project images into the minds of others. And finally he might use the Mind Gift to telekinetically open a lock, push open a door, or stop the progress of an engine. Again, vampires develop the Mind Gift slowly over time, and only the most ancient can rape the minds of others for information they do not wish to give, or send a telekinetic blast to rupture the brain and blood cells of a human being or another vampire. A vampire can listen to many the world over, hearing and seeing what others hear. But to destroy telekinetically, he or she must be able to see the intended victim.

The Spell Gift—This refers to the power of vampires to confuse, beguile, and spellbind mortals and sometimes other vampires. All vampires, even fledglings, have this power to some extent, though many don’t know how to use it. It involves a conscious attempt to “persuade” the victim of the reality the vampire wants the victim to embrace. It doesn’t enslave the victim. But it does confuse and mislead. It depends on eye contact. One can’t spellbind anyone from a distance. In fact, it more often involves words as well as glances, and certainly involves the Mind Gift on some level.

Fledgling—A new vampire very young in the Blood. Also, one’s own offspring in the Blood. For example, Louis is the fledgling of Lestat. Armand is the fledgling of Marius. The ancient twin Maharet is the fledgling of her twin, Mekare. Mekare is the fledgling of the ancient Khayman. Khayman is the fledgling of Akasha.

The Little Drink—Stealing blood from a mortal victim without the victim knowing it or feeling it, without the victim having to die.

Maker—Simple term for the vampire who brought one into the Blood. Being slowly replaced by the term “mentor.” Sometimes the maker is also referred to as the “master.” However, this has gone out of use. In many parts of the world it is considered a great sin to rise up against or seek to destroy one’s maker. A maker can never hear the thoughts of a fledgling, and vice versa.

The Queen of the Damned—Term given to the vampire Mekare by her sister Maharet once Mekare had taken the Sacred Core into herself. It was ironic. Akasha, the fallen Queen who had sought to dominate the world, had called herself the Queen of Heaven.

The Savage Garden—A term used by Lestat for the world, fitting with his belief that the only true laws of the universe are aesthetic laws, the laws that govern the natural beauty we see all around us on the planet.

The Undead—Common term for vampires of all ages.

Part I

THE
VAMPIRE
LESTAT

Chapter I

The Voice

YEARS AGO, I heard him. He’d been babbling.

It was after Queen Akasha had been destroyed and the mute red-haired twin, Mekare, had become “the Queen of the Damned.” I’d witnessed all that—the brutal death of Akasha in the moment when we all thought we would die, too, along with her.

It was after I’d switched bodies with a mortal man and come back into my own powerful vampiric body—having rejected the old dream of being human again.

It was after I’d been to Heaven and Hell with a spirit called Memnoch, and come back to Earth a wounded explorer with no appetite anymore for knowledge, truth, beauty.

Defeated, I’d lain for years on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans in an old convent building, oblivious to the ever-shifting crowd of immortals around me—hearing them, wanting to respond, yet somehow never managing to meet a glance, answer a question, acknowledge a kiss or a whisper of affection.

And that’s when I first heard the Voice. Masculine, insistent, inside my brain.

Babbling, like I said. And I thought, Well, perhaps we blood drinkers can go mad like mortals, you know, and this is some artifact of my warped mind. Or maybe he is some massively crippled ancient one, slumbering somewhere nearby, and somehow I, telepathically, get to share in his misery.

There are physical limits to telepathy in our world. Of course. But then voices, pleas, messages, thoughts, can be relayed through other minds, and conceivably, this poor slob could be mumbling to himself on the other side of the planet.

As I said, he had babbled, mixing languages, ancient and modern, sometimes stringing a whole sentence out in Latin or Greek, and then lapsing into repetitions of modern voices … phrases from films and even songs. Over and over he begged for help, rather like the tiny human-headed fly at the end of the B-movie masterpiece, Help me, help me, as if he too were caught in a spiderweb and a giant spider were closing in on him. Okay, okay, what can I do, I’d ask, and he was quick to respond. Near at hand? Or just the best relay system in the Undead world?

“Hear me, come to me.” And he’d say that over and over again, night after night, until it was noise.

I have always been able to tune him out. No problem. Either you learn to tune out telepathic voices when you are a vampire or you go straight out of your mind. I can tune out the cries of the living just as easily. Have to. No other way to survive. Even the very ancient ones can tune out the voices. I’ve been in the Blood for over two hundred years. They’ve been in the Blood for six millennia.

Sometimes he simply went away.

Around the early years of the twenty-first century he began to speak in English.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you like it,” he said in that crisp masculine tone of his. Laughter. His laughter. “Everybody likes English. You must come to me when I call you,” he said. Then he was babbling again, in a mélange of languages, all about blindness, suffocation, paralysis, helplessness. And it devolved into “Help me” again with snatches of poetry in Latin and Greek and French and English.

This is interesting for maybe three-quarters of an hour. After that, it’s repetitious and a nuisance.

Of course I did not even bother to say no.

At one point, he cried out “Beauty!” and babbled on incessantly, always getting back to “Beauty!” and always with an exclamation point I could feel like the jab of a finger against my temple.

“Okay, ‘beauty,’ so what?” I asked. He moaned, wept, went into dizzying incoherent reverie. I tuned him out for a year, I think. But I could feel him rumbling under the surface, and then two years after that—it might have been—he started addressing me by name.

“Lestat, you, Brat Prince!”

“Oh, get off it.”

“No, you, Brat Prince, my prince, boy oh boy, Lestat.…” Then he ran those words through ten modern languages and six or seven ancient ones. I was impressed.

“So tell me who you are, or else,” I said glumly. I had to confess when I was extremely lonely, I was happy to have him around.

And that was not a good year for me. I was wandering aimlessly. I was sick of things. I was furious with myself that the “beauty” of life wasn’t sustaining me, wasn’t making my loneliness bearable. I was wandering at night in jungles and in forests with my hands up to touch the leaves of the low branches, crying to myself, doing a lot of babbling of my own. I wandered through Central America visiting Maya ruins, and went deep down into Egypt to walk in the desert wastes and see the ancient drawings on the rocks on the way to the ports of the Red Sea.

Young maverick vampires kept invading the cities where I roamed—Cairo, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Honolulu, San Francisco—and I grew weary of disciplining them, punishing them for slaughtering the innocent in their misbegotten hunger. They’d get caught, thrown into human jails where they’d burn up when dawn came. Occasionally they’d fall into the hands of actual forensic scientists. Bloody nuisance.

Nothing ever came of it. But more on that later.

The mavericks multiplying everywhere were causing trouble for one another, and their gang fights and brawls have made life ugly for the rest of us. And they think nothing of trying to burn with fire or decapitate any other blood drinker who gets in their way.

It is chaos.

But who am I to police these preternatural nincompoops?

When have I ever been on the side of law and order? I’m supposed to be the rebellious one, l’enfant terrible. So I let them drive me away out of the cities, and even from New Orleans, I let them drive me away. My beloved Louis de Pointe du Lac left soon after, and from that time on lived in New York with Armand.

Armand keeps the island of Manhattan safe for them—Louis, Armand, and two young blood drinkers, Benjamin and Sybelle, and whoever else joins them in their palatial digs on the Upper East Side.

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