The plague took all, all it seemed except the most wicked. In my house they walled me up, with bloating corpses of my brothers and sisters. It was a vampire found me out, for foraging there he found no other blood to drink but mine. And there had been so many!"

"Do we not give up our mortal history for the love of God?" Allesandra asked but most carefully. Her hand worked on his hair and brushed it back from his forehead.

His eyes were huge with thought and memory, yet as he spoke again he looked at me, perhaps not even seeing me.

"There are no walls there now. It's gone to trees and blowing grass and piles of rubble.

And in castles far away one finds the stones which once made up our lord's keep, our finest hard-paved street, our proudest houses. It is the very nature of this world that all things are devoured and time is a mouth as bloody as any other."

A silence fell. I could not stop my shivering. My body quaked. A moan broke from my lips. I looked from right to left and bowed my head, my hands tight to my neck to stop from screaming.

When I looked up again, I spoke.

"I won't serve you!" I whispered. "I see your game. I know your scriptures, your piety, your love of resignation! You're spiders with your dark and intricate webs, no more than that, and breed for blood is all you know, all you know round which to weave your tiresome snares, as wretched as the birds that make their nests in filth on marble casements. So spin your lies. I hate you. I will not serve you!"

How lovingly they both looked at me.

"Oh, poor child," Allesandra said with a sigh. "You have only just begun to suffer.

Why must it be for pride's sake and not for God?"

"I curse you!"

Santino snapped his fingers. It was such a small gesture. But out of the shadows, through doorways like secretive dumb mouths in the mud walls, there came his servants, hooded, robed, as before. They gathered me up, securing my limbs, but I didn't struggle.

They dragged me to a cell of iron bars and earthen walls. And when I sought to dig my way out of it, my clawing fingers came upon iron-bound stone, and I could dig no more.

I lay down. I wept. I wept for my Master. I didn't care if anyone heard or mocked. I didn't care. I knew only loss and in that loss the very size of my love, and in knowing the size of love could somehow feel its splendor. I cried and cried. I turned and groveled in the earth. I clutched at it, and tore at it, and then lay still with only silent tears flowing.

Allesandra stood with her hands on the bars. "Poor child," she whispered. "I will be with you, always with you. You have only to call my name."