Pandora Read Free Page A

these questions you posed.
    “They locked up the Veil, you know,” you said. “It’s in the Vatican. There were two weeks of frenzy on Fifth Avenue in St Patrick’s Cathedral in which people came to look into the eyes of The Lord, and then they had it, gone, taken to their vaults. I doubt there is a nation on the Earth with the power to gain even a glimpse of it now.”
    “And Lestat,” I said. “Where is he now?”
    “Paralyzed, silent,” you said. “Lestat lies on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans. He doesn’t move. He says nothing. His Mother has come to him. You knew her, Gabrielle, he made a vampire of her.”
    “Yes, I remember her.”
    “Even she draws no response from him. Whatever he saw, in his journey to Heaven and Hell, he doesn’t know the truth of it one way or the other—he tried to tell this to Dora! And eventually, after I’d written down the whole story for him, he passed within a few nights into this state.
    “His eyes are fixed and his body pliant. They made a curious Pietà, he and Gabrielle, in this abandoned convent and its chapel. His mind is closed, or worse—it’s empty.”
    I found I liked very much your manner of speaking. In fact, I was taken off guard.
    “I left Lestat because he was beyond my help and my reach,” you said. “And I must know if there areold ones who want to put an end to me; I must make my pilgrimages and my progresses to know the dangers of this world to which I’ve been admitted.”
    “You’re so forthright. You have no cunning.”
    “On the contrary. I conceal my keenest assets from you.” You gave me a slow, polite smile. “Your beauty rather confuses me. Are you used to this?”
    “Quite,” I said. “And weary of it. Come beyond it. Let me just warn, there are old ones, ones no one knows or can explain. It’s rumored you’ve been with Maharet and Mekare, who are now the Eldest and the Fount from which we all spring. Obviously they’ve drawn back from us, from all the world, into some secret place, and have no taste for authority.”
    “You’re so very correct,” you said, “and my audience with them was beautiful but brief. They don’t want to rule over anyone, nor will Maharet, as long as the history of the world and her own physical descendants are in it—her own thousands of human descendants from a time so ancient there is no date for it—Maharet will never destroy herself and her sister, thereby destroying all of us.”
    “Yes,” I said, “in that she believes, the Great Family, the generations she has traced for thousands of years. I saw her when we all gathered. She doesn’t see us as evil—you, or me, or Lestat—she thinks that we’re natural, rather like volcanoes or fires that rage through forests, or bolts of lightning that strike a man dead.”
    “Precisely,” you said. “There is no Queen of the Damned now. I fear only one other immortal, andthat’s your lover, Marius. Because it was Marius who laid down the strict rule before he left the others that no more blood drinkers could be made. I’m base-born in the mind of Marius. That is, were he an Englishman, those would be his words.”
    I shook my head. “I can’t believe he would harm you. Hasn’t he come to Lestat? Did he not come to see the Veil with his own eyes?”
    You said No to both questions.
    “Heed this advice: whenever you sense his presence, talk to him. Talk to him as you have to me. Begin a conversation which he won’t have the confidence to bring to a close.”
    You smiled again. “That’s such a clever way of putting it,” you said.
    “But I don’t think you have to fear him. If he wanted you gone off the Earth, you’d be gone. What we have to fear is the same things humans fear—that there are others of our same species, of varying power and belief, and we are never entirely sure where they are or what they do. That’s my advice to you.”
    “You are so kind to take your time with me,” you said.
    I could have wept. “On the