name Typhon. Yet he repeated it. But I know what it means."
"Tell me."
"It's from the Greek and Roman myths -- the old story of the Egyptian god, Osiris, slain by his brother Typhon, so that he became lord of the Underworld. Of course Armand could have read it in Plutarch, but he didn't, that's the strange thing."
"Ah, you see then, Marius did exist. When he said he'd lived for a millennium he was telling the truth."
"Perhaps, Lestat, perhaps," she said.
"Mother, tell me this again, this Egyptian story...
'Lestat, you have years to read all the old tales for yourself." She rose and bent to kiss me, and I sensed the coldness and sluggishness in her that always came before dawn. "As for me, I am done with books. They are what I read when I could do nothing else." She took my two hands in hers. "Tell me that we'll be on the road tomorrow. That we won't see the ramparts of Paris again until we've seen the other side of the world."
"Exactly as you wish," I said.
She started up the stairs.
"But where are you going?" I said as I followed her. She opened the gate and went out towards the trees.
"I want to see if I can sleep in the raw earth itself," she said over her shoulder. "If I don't rise tomorrow you'll know I failed."
"But this is madness," I said, coming after her. I hated the very idea of it. She went ahead into a thicket of old oaks, and kneeling, she dug into the dead leaves and damp soil with her hands. Ghastly she looked, as if she were a beautiful blondhaired witch scratching with the speed of a beast.
Then she rose and waved a farewell kiss to me. And commanding all her strength, she descended as the earth belonged to her. And I was left staring in disbelief at the emptiness where she had been, and the leaves that had settled as if nothing had disturbed the spot.
I was away from the woods. I walked south away from the tower. And as my step quickened, I started singing softly to myself some little song, maybe a bit of melody that the violins had played earlier this night in the Palais Royal.
And the sense of grief came back to me, the realization that we were really going, that it was finished with Nicolas and finished with the Children of Darkness and their leader, and I wouldn't see Paris again, or anything familiar to me, for years and years. And for all my desire to be free, I wanted to weep.
But it seems I had some purpose in my wandering that I hadn't admitted to myself. A half hour or so before the morning light I was on the post road near the ruin of an old inn. Falling down it was, this outpost of an abandoned village, with only the heavily mortared walls left intact.
And taking out my dagger, I began to carve deep in the soft stone:
MARIUS, THE ANCIENT ONE: LESTAT IS SEARCHING FOR YOU.
IT IS THE MONTH OF MAY, IN THE YEAR 1780 AND I GO SOUTH FROM PARIS TOWARDS LYONS. PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF KNOWN TO ME.
What arrogance it seemed when I stepped back from it. And I had already broken the dark commandments, telling the name of an immortal, and putting it into written words. Well, it gave me a wondrous satisfaction to do it. And after all, I had never been very good at obeying rules.
Part VI On The Devils Road From Paris To Cairo Chapter 1
Part VI
On The Devil's Road From Paris To Cairo
1
The last time we saw Armand in the eighteenth century, he was standing with Eleni and Nicolas and the other vampire mummers before the door of Renaud's theater, watching as our carriage made its way into the stream of traffic on the boulevard.
I'd found him earlier closeted in my old dressing room with Nicolas in the midst of a strange conversation dominated by Nicki's sarcasm and peculiar fire. He wore a wig and a somber red frock coat, and it seemed to me that he had already acquired a new opacity, as if every waking moment since the death of the old coven was giving him greater substance and strength.
Nicki and I had no words for each other in these last awkward moments, but Armand politely accepted the keys of the tower from me, and a great quantity of money, and the promise of more when he wanted