in all directions, clutching at his eyes as if he would pull them out of his head.
"Why can I not see? Why can I not see better than mortals see?"
Holding tight to the Master. Waiting for the rapture of the kiss. Dark secret, unspoken secret. The Master slipping out of the door sometime before dawn.
"Let me go with you, Master."
"Soon, my darling, my love, my little one, when you're strong enough and tall enough, and there is no flaw in you anymore. Go now, and have all the pleasures that await you, have the love of a woman, and have the love of a man as well in the nights that follow. Forget the bitterness you knew in the brothel and taste of these things while there is still time."
And rarely did the night close that there wasn't that figure come back again, just before the rising sun, and this time ruddy and warm as it bent over him to give him the embrace that would sustain him through the daylight hours until the deadly kiss at twilight again.
He learned to read and write. He took the paintings to their final destinations in the churches and the chapels of the great palaces, and collected the payments and bargained for the pigments and the oils. He scolded the servants when the beds weren't made and the meals weren't ready. And beloved by the apprentices, he sent them to their new service when they were finished, with tears. He read poetry to the Master as the Master painted, and he learned to play the lute and to sing songs.
And during those sad times when the Master left Venice for many nights, it was he who governed in the Master's absence, concealing his anguish from the others, knowing it would end only when the Master returned.
And one night finally, in the small hours when even Venice slept:
"This is the moment, beautiful one. For you to come to me and become like me. Is it what you wish?"
"Yes."
"Forever to thrive in secret upon the blood of the evildoer as I thrive, and to abide with these secrets until the end of the world."
"I take the vow, I surrender, I will ... to be with you, my Master, always, you are the creator of all things that I am. There has never been any greater desire."
The Master's brush pointing to the painting that reached to the ceiling above the tiers of scaffolding.
"This is the only sun that you will ever see again. But a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has ever seen it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things."
How many months were there after? Reeling in the power of the Dark Gift.
This nighttime life of drifting through the alleyways and the canals together -- at one with the danger of the dark and no longer afraid of it -- and the age-old rapture of the killing, and never, never the innocent souls. No, always the evildoer, the mind pierced until Typhon, the slayer of his brother, was revealed, and then the drinking up of the evil from the mortal victim and the transmuting of it into ecstasy, the Master leading the way, the feast shared.
And the painting afterwards, the solitary hours with the miracle of the new skill, the brush sometimes moving as if by itself across the enameled surface, and the two of them painting furiously on the triptych, and the mortal apprentices asleep among the paint pots and the wine bottles, and only one mystery disturbing the serenity, the mystery that the Master, as in the past, must now and then leave Venice for a journey that seemed endless to those left behind.
All the more terrible now the parting. To hunt alone without the Master, to lie alone in the deep cellar after the hunt, waiting. Not to hear the ring of the Master's laughter or the beat of the Master's heart.
"But where do you go? Why can't I go with you?" Armand pleaded. Didn't they share the secret? Why was this mystery not explained?
"No, my lovely one, you are not ready for this burden. For now, it must be, as it has been for over a thousand years, mine alone. Someday you will help me with what I have to do, but only when you are ready for the knowledge, when you have shown that you truly wish to know, and