being I had held on Saint-Domingue, the one who needed me, but that weakness wasn't destroying her after all, though it would certainly destroy me.
"Lestat," she whispered as if in disbelief.
"I can't follow you," I said, my voice breaking. Slowly I rose to my feet. "We're not angels, Akasha; we are not gods. To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us."
It was killing me to look at her. I thought of her blood flowing " into me; of the powers she'd given me. Of what it had been like to travel with her through the clouds. I thought of the euphoria in the Haitian village when the women had come with their candles, singing their hymns.
"But that is what it will be, my beloved," she whispered. "Find your courage! It's there." The blood tears were coursing down her face. Her lip trembled and the smooth flesh of her forehead was creased with those perfectly straight lines of utter distress.
Then she straightened. She looked away from me: and her face went blank and beautifully smooth again. She looked past us, and I felt she was reaching for the strength to do it, and the others had better act fast. I wished for that-like sticking a dagger into her; they had better bring her down now, and I could feel the tears sliding down my face.
But something else was happening. There was a great soft musical sound from somewhere. Glass shattering, a great deal of glass. There was a sudden obvious excitement in Daniel. In Jesse, But the old ones stood frozen, listening. Again, glass breaking; someone entering by one of the many portals of this rambling house.
She took a step back. She quickened as if seeing a vision; and a loud hollow sound filled the stairwell beyond the open door. Someone down below in the passage.
She moved away from the table, towards the fireplace. She seemed for all the world afraid.
Was that possible? Did she know who was coming, and was it another old one? And was that what she feared-that more could accomplish what these few could not?
It was nothing so calculated finally; I knew it; she was being defeated inside. All courage was leaving her. It was the need, the loneliness, after all! It had begun with my resistance, and they had deepened it, and then I had dealt her yet another blow. And now she was transfixed by this loud, echoing, and impersonal noise. Yet she did know who this person was, I could sense it. And the others knew too.
The noise was growing louder. The visitor was coming up the stairs. The skylight and the old iron pylons reverberated with the shock of each heavy step.
"But who is it!" I said suddenly. I could stand it no longer. There was that image again, that image of the mother's body and the twins.
"Akasha!" Marius said. "Give us the time we ask for. Forswear the moment. That is enough!"
"Enough for what!" she cried sharply, almost savagely.
"For our lives, Akasha," he said. "For all our lives!"
I heard Khayman laugh softly, the one who hadn't spoken even once.
The steps had reached the landing.
Maharet stood at the edge of the open doorway, and Mael was beside her. I hadn't even seen them move.
Then I saw who and what it was. The woman I'd glimpsed moving through the jungles, clawing her way out of the earth, walking the long miles on the barren plain. The other twin of the dreams I'd never understood! And now she stood framed in the dim light from the stairwell, staring straight at the distant figure of Akasha, who stood some thirty feet away with her back to the glass wall and the blazing fire.
Oh, but the sight of this one. Gasps came from the others, even from the old ones, from Marius himself.
A thin layer of soil encased her all over, even the rippling shape of her long hair. Broken, peeling, stained by the rain even, the mud still clung to her, clung to her naked arms and bare feet as if she were made of it, made of earth itself. It made a mask of her face. And her eyes peered out of the mask, naked, rimmed in red.
A rag covered her, a blanket filthy and torn, and tied with a hemp rope around her waist.
What impulse could make such a being cover herself, what tender human modesty had caused this living corpse to