It wasn't merely his beauty; it was the astonishing innocence of his boyish face. He moved so lightly and swiftly I could not see his feet actually take steps. His huge eyes regarded us without anger, his hair, for all the dust in it, giving off faint reddish glints.
I tried to feel his mind, what it was, why such a sublime being should command these sad ghosts when it had the world to roam. I tried to discover again what I had almost discovered when we stood before the altar of the cathedral, this creature and I. If I knew that, maybe I could defeat him and defeat him I would.
I thought I saw him respond to me, some silent answer, some flash of heaven in the very pit of hell in his innocent expression, as if the devil still retained the face and form of the angel after the fall.
But something was very wrong. The leader was not speaking. The drums beat on anxiously, yet there was no communal conviction. The dark-eyed woman vampire was not joined with the others in their wailing. And others had stopped as well.
And the woman who had come in with the leader, a strange creature clothed as an ancient queen might have been in ragged gown and braided girdle, commenced to laugh.
The coven or whatever it called itself was quite understandably stunned. One of the kettledrums stopped.
The queen creature laughed louder and louder. Her white teeth flashed through the filthy veil of her snarled hair.
Beautiful she'd been once. And it wasn't mortal age that had ravaged her. Rather, she appeared the lunatic, her mouth a horrid grimace, her eyes staring wildly before her, her body bent suddenly in an arc with her laughing, as Magnus had bent when he danced around his own funeral pyre.
"Did I not warn you?" she screamed. "Did I not?"
Far behind her, Nicolas moved in the little cage. I felt the laughter scorning him. But he was looking steadily at me, and the old sensibility was stamped on his features in spite of their distortion. Fear struggled with malice in him, and this was tangled with wonder and near despair.
The auburn-haired leader stared at the queen vampire, his expression unreadable, and the boy with the torch stepped forward and shouted for the woman to be silent at once. He made himself rather regal now, in spite of his rags.
The woman turned her back on him and faced us. She sang her words in a hoarse, sexless voice that gave way to a galloping laughter.
"A thousand times I said it, yet you would not listen to me," she declared. Her gown shivered about her as she trembled. "And you called me mad, time's martyr, a vagrant Cassandra corrupt by too long a vigil on this earth. Well, you see, every one of my predictions has come true."
The leader gave her not the slightest recognition.
"And it took this creature," she approached me, her face a hideous comic mask as Magnus's face had been, "this romping cavalier to prove it to you once and for all."
She hissed, drew in her breath, and stood erect. And for one moment in perfect stillness she passed into beauty. I longed to comb her hair, to wash it with my own hands, and to clothe her in a modern dress, to see her in the mirror of my time. In fact, my mind went suddenly wild with the idea of it, the reclaiming of her and the washing away of her evil disguise.
I think for one second the concept of eternity burned in me. I knew then what immortality was. All things were possible with her, or so for that one moment it seemed.
She gazed at me and caught the visions, and the loveliness of her face deepened, but the mad humor was coming back.
"Punish them," the boy screamed. "Call down the judgment of Satan. Light the fire."
But no one moved in the vast room.
The old woman hummed with her lips closed, some eerie melody with the cadence of speech. The leader stared as before.
But the boy in panic advanced upon us. He bared his fangs, raised his hand in a claw.
I snatched the torch from him and dealt him an indifferent blow to the chest that sent him across the dusty circle, sliding into the kindling banked against the pyre. I ground out the torch in the dirt.
The queen vampire let out a shriek of laughter that seemed to terrify