The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (392 page)

“Very well, sweet Master,” I said as I tore at his skin once again. “I have you, and will have every drop of you, Sir, unless you are quick, most quick.” Only then did I realize! I too had tiny fangs!

He started to laugh softly, and it heightened my pleasure, that this which I fed upon should laugh beneath these new fangs.

With all my might I sought to tug his heart out of his chest. I heard him cry out and then laugh in amazement. I drew and drew on his blood, swallowing with a hoarse disgraceful sound.

“Come on, let me hear you cry out again!” I whispered, sucking the blood greedily, widening the gash with my teeth, my sharpened, lengthened teeth, these fang teeth that were now mine and made for this slaughter. “Come on, beg for mercy, Sir!”

His laughter was sweet.

I took his blood swallow after swallow, glad and proud at his helpless laughing, at the fact that he had fallen down on his knees in the square and that I had him still, and he must now raise his arm to push me away.

“I can’t drink anymore!” I declared. I lay back on the stones.

The frozen sky was black and studded with the white blazing stars. I stared at it, deliciously aware of the stone beneath me, of the hardness under my back and my head. No care now about the soil, the damp, the threat of disease. No care now whether the crawling things of the night came near. No care now what men might think who peeped from their windows. No care now for the lateness of the hour. Look at me, stars. Look at me, as I look at you.

Silent and glistering, these tiny eyes of Heaven.

I began to die. A withering pain commenced in my stomach, then moved to my bowels.

“Now, all that’s left of a mortal boy will leave you,” my Master said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“No more music?” I whispered. I rolled over and put my arms around my Master, who lay beside me, his head resting on his elbow. He gathered me to him.

“Shall I sing to you a lullaby?” he said softly.

I moved away from him. Foul fluid had begun to flow from me. I felt an instinctive shame, but this quite slowly vanished. He picked me up, easily as always, and pushed my face into his neck. The wind rushed around us.

Then I felt the cold water of the Adriatic, and I found myself tumbling on the unmistakable swell of the sea. The sea was salty and delicious and held no menace. I turned over and over, and finding myself alone, tried to get my bearings. I was far out, near to the island of the Lido. I looked back to the main island, and I could see through the great congregation of ships at anchor the blazing torches of the Palazzo Ducale, with a vision that was awesomely clear.

The mingled voices of the dark port rose, as if I were secretly swimming amongst the ships, though I was not.

What a remarkable power, to hear these voices, to be able to hone in on one particular voice and hear its early-morning mumblings, and then to pitch my hearing to yet another and let other words sink in.

I floated under the sky for a while, until all the pain was gone from me. I felt cleansed, and I didn’t want to be alone. I turned over and effortlessly swam towards the harbor, moving under the surface of the water when I neared the ships.

What astonished me now was that I could see beneath the water! There was enough life for my vampiric eyes to see the huge anchors lodged in the mushy bottom of the lagoon, and to see the curved bottoms
of the galleys. It was an entire underwater universe. I wanted to explore it further, but I heard my Master’s voice—not a telepathic voice, as we would call it now, but his audible voice—calling me very softly to return to the piazza where he waited for me.

I peeled off my rank clothes and climbed out of the water naked, hurrying to him in the cold darkness, delighted that the chill itself meant little. When I saw him I spread out my arms and smiled.

He held a far cloak in his arms, which he opened now to receive me, rubbing my hair dry with it and winding it around me.

“You feel your new freedom. Your bare feet are not hurt by the deep cold of the stones. If you’re cut, your resilient skin will heal instantly, and no small crawling creature of the dark will produce revulsion in you. They can’t hurt you. Disease can’t hurt you.” He covered me with kisses. “The most pestilential blood will only feed you, as your preternatural body cleanses it and absorbs it. You are a powerful creature, and deep in here? In your chest, which I touch now with my hand, there is your heart, your human heart.”

“Is it really so, Master?” I asked. I was exhilarated, I was playful. “Why so human still?”

“Amadeo, have you found me inhuman? Have you found me cruel?”

My hair had shaken off the water, drying almost instantly. We walked now, arm in arm, the heavy fur cloak covering me, out of the square.

When I didn’t answer, he stopped and embraced me again and began his hungry kisses.

“You love me,” I said, “as I am now, even more than before.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. He hugged me roughly and kissed my throat all over, and my shoulders, and began to kiss my chest. “I can’t hurt you now, I can’t snuff out your life with an accidental embrace. You’re mine, of my flesh and of my blood.”

He stopped. He was crying. He didn’t want me to see. He turned away when I tried to catch his face with my impertinent hands.

“Master, I love you,” I said.

“Pay attention,” he said brushing me off, obviously impatient with his tears. He pointed to the sky. “You’ll always know when morning’s coming, if you pay attention. Do you feel it? Do you hear the birds? There are in all parts of the world those birds who sing right before dawn.”

A thought came to me, dark and horrid, that one of the things I had missed in the deep Monastery of the Caves under Kiev was the sound of birds. Out in the wild grasses, hunting with my Father, riding from copse to copse of trees, I had loved the song of the birds. We had never been too long in the miserable riverside hovels of Kiev without those forbidden journeys into the wild lands from which so many didn’t return.

But that was gone. I had all of sweet Italy around me, the sweet Serenissima. I had my Master, and the great voluptuous magic of this transformation.

“For this I rode into the wild lands,” I whispered. “For this he took me out of the Monastery on that last day.”

My Master looked at me sadly. “I hope so,” he said. “What I know of your past, I learnt from your mind when it was open to me, but it’s closed now, closed because I’ve made you a vampire, the same as I am, and we can never know each other’s minds. We’re too close, the blood we share makes a deafening roar in our ears when we try to talk in silence to one another, and so I let go forever of those awful images of that underground Monastery which flashed so brilliantly in your thoughts, but always with agony, always with near despair.”

“Yes, despair, and all that is gone like the pages of a book torn loose and thrown into the wind. Just like that, gone.”

He hurried me along. We were not going home. It was another way through the back alleys.

“We go now to our cradle,” he said, “which is our crypt, our bed which is our grave.”

We entered an old dilapidated palazzo, tenanted only with a few sleeping poor. I didn’t like it. I had been brought up by him on luxury. But we soon entered a cellar, a seeming impossibility in rank and watery Venice, but a cellar it was, indeed. We made our way down stone stairs, past thick bronze doors, which men alone could not open, until in the inky blackness we had found the final room.

“Here’s a trick,” my Master whispered, “which some night you yourself will be strong enough to work.”

I heard a riot of crackling and a small blast, and a great flaring torch blazed in his hand. He had lighted it with no more than his mind.

“With each decade you’ll grow stronger, and then with each century, and you will discover many times in your long life that your powers have made a magical leap. Test them carefully, and protect what
you discover. Use cleverly all that you discover. Never shun any power, for that’s as foolish as a man shunning his strength.”

I nodded, staring spellbound at the flames. I had never seen such colors in simple fire before, and I felt no aversion to it, though I knew that it was the one thing that could destroy me. He had said so, had he not?

He made a gesture. I should regard the room.

What a splendid chamber it was. It was paved in gold! Even its ceiling was of gold. Two stone sarcophagi stood in the middle of it, each graced with a carved figure in the old style, that is, severe and more solemn than natural; and as I drew closer, I saw that these figures were helmeted knights, in long tunics, with heavy broadswords carved close to their flanks, their gloved hands clasped in prayer, their eyes closed in eternal sleep. Each had been gilded, and plated with silver, and set with countless tiny gems. The belts of the knights were set with amethyst. Sapphires adorned the necks of their tunics. Topaz gleamed in the scabbards of their swords.

“Is this not a fortune to tempt a thief?” I asked. “Lying as it does here beneath this ruined house?”

He laughed outright.

“You’re teaching me to be cautious already?” he asked, smiling. “What back talk! No thief can gain access here. You didn’t measure your own strength when you opened the doors. Look at the bolt I’ve closed behind us, since you are so concerned. Now see if you can lift the lid of that coffin. Go ahead. See if your strength meets your nerve.”

“I didn’t mean it to be back talk,” I protested. “Thank God you’re smiling.” I lifted the lid and then moved the lower part of it to one side. It was nothing to me, yet I knew this was heavy stone. “Ah, I see,” I said meekly. I gave him a radiant and innocent smile. The inside was cushioned in damask of royal purple.

“Get into this crib, my child,” he said. “Don’t be afraid as you wait for the rise of the sun. When it comes you’ll sleep soundly enough.”

“Can I not sleep with you?”

“No, here in this bed which I have long ago prepared for you, this is where you belong. I have my own narrow place there next to you, which is not big enough for two. But you are mine now, mine, Amadeo. Vouchsafe me one last bevy of kisses, ah, sweet, yes, sweet—.”

“Master, don’t let me ever make you angry. Don’t let me ever—.”

“No, Amadeo, be my challenger, be my questioner, be my bold and
ungrateful pupil.” He looked faintly sad. He pushed me gently. He gestured to the coffin. The purple satin damask shimmered.

“And so I he in it,” I whispered, “so young.”

I saw the shadow of pain in his face after I’d said this. I regretted it. I wanted to say something to undo it, but he gestured that I must go on.

Oh, how cold this was, cushions be damned, and how hard. I moved the lid into place above me and lay still, listening, listening to the sound of the torch snuffed, and to the grinding of stone on stone as he opened his own grave.

I heard his voice:

“Good night, my young love, my child love, my son,” he said.

I let my body go limp. How delicious was this simple relaxation. How new were all things.

Far away in the land of my birth, the monks chanted in the Monastery of the Caves.

Sleepily, I reflected on all I’d remembered. I had gone home to Kiev. I had made of my memories a tableau to teach me all that I might know. And in the last moments of nighttime consciousness, I said farewell to them forever, farewell to their beliefs and their restraints.

I envisaged
The Procession of the Magi
splendidly glowing on the Master’s wall, the procession which would be mine to study when the sun set again. It seemed to me in my wild and passionate soul, in my newborn vampiric heart, that the Magi had come not only for Christ’s birth but for my rebirth as well.

If I had thought my transformation into a vampire meant the end of my tutelage or apprenticeship to Marius, I was quite wrong. I wasn’t immediately set free to wallow in the joys of my new powers.

The night after my metamorphosis, my education began in earnest. I was to be prepared now not for a temporal life but for eternity.

My Master gave me to know that he had been created a vampire almost fifteen hundred years ago, and that there were members of our kind all over the world. Secretive, suspicious and often miserably lonely, the wanderers of the night, as my Master called them, were often ill prepared for immortality and made nothing of their existence but a string of dreary disasters until despair consumed them and they immolated themselves through some ghastly bonfire, or by going into the light of the sun.

As for the very old, those who like my Master had managed to withstand the passage of empires and epochs, they were for the most part misanthropes, seeking for themselves cities in which they could reign supreme among mortals, driving off fledglings who attempted to share their territory, even if it meant destroying creatures of their own kind.

Venice was the undisputed territory of my Master, his hunting preserve, and his own private arena in which he could preside over the games which he had chosen as significant for him in this time of life.

“There is nothing that will not pass,” he said, “except you yourself. You must listen to what I say because my lessons are first and foremost lessons in survival; the garnishes will come later on.”

The primary lesson was that we slay only “the evildoer.” This had once been, in the foggiest centuries of ancient time, a solemn commission
to blood drinkers, and indeed there had been a dim religion surrounding us in antique pagan days in which the vampires had been worshiped as bringers of justice to those who had done wrong.

“We shall never again let such superstition surround us and the mystery of our powers. We are not infallible. We have no commission from God. We wander the Earth like the giant felines of the great jungles, and have no more claim upon those we kill than any creature that seeks to live.

“But it is an infallible principle that the slaying of the innocent will drive you mad. Believe me when I tell you that for your peace of mind you must feed on the evil, you must learn to love them in all their filth and degeneracy, and you must thrive on the visions of their evil that will inevitably fill your heart and soul during the kill.