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I tried not to recoil, but to meet his smile with my own.
Amel was right. His brown habit and soft brown leather slippers were part of the illusion. If he vanished, he'd leave nothing behind. And there was something else I observed about him immediately. His facial features, their proportions, and the details of his soft ashen-blond hair, they weren't fixed. They were not flickering like an image on a bad movie screen, but the entire illusion was fragile as if vulnerable to the slightest movement of the air. I don't think a mortal could have detected this. And I sensed it took a colossal amount of energy from him to remain solid-looking and stable. His intense gaze, his brilliant eyes fixed on mine, was the most vital thing about him.
Gremt, the ancient one, the pillar of the Talamasca, had no such difficulty. He appeared solid enough to be torn limb from limb. He looked no less real than he had at our earlier meetings, his obvious discomfort having no effect whatsoever on his visual anatomy. Spirit, powerful spirit.
Teskhamen was of course a blood drinker survivor of the millennia, old before he gave the Blood to Marius. He was his predictable elegant self, thick wavy white hair cut short, his skin darker than it had appeared when I'd first laid eyes on him some six months before.
They had resumed their places. Gremt closest to me, and Teskhamen beside him. Magnus at the far end just opposite. I looked at Teskhamen's skin, I could smell the sun when I looked at it.
A sudden jolt of pain passed through me. I'd never be able again to expose myself to the sun in any way, not to darken my skin, not to test my endurance, not to...Because if I did the young ones might burn up in seconds. There had to be some way around that. There had to be some way to test the old legend.
"I was a victim of the old legend," said Teskhamen. His face was bright, friendly. Whatever was bothering the other tw
o, it was not affecting him. He was so lean and sharply contoured that his bones were part of his beauty.
He was also perfectly at ease with me--self-possessed and almost charming. He wore a dark gray wool suit of English tailoring and fine narrow handmade high string shoes with wing tips, fashionable.
"I burned up in my cell within the oak here in this very country," he said, "when the Queen was exposed to the sun in Egypt." He spoke evenly, calmly. Only his many gold and jeweled rings looked ancient. "I felt the raging fire," he said. "I barely survived it. You know all this but let me verify it for you. Believe me, the old legend is quite true. All Marius ever told you of me is true. You hold my life in your hands as you hold the life of the entire tribe in your hands. Go forth into the sun, and we'll all feel it, some to survive, some to suffer agonies and wish they hadn't, and some to be immolated entirely."
"He's patronizing you," Amel hissed. "How can you stand him? Either you leave here or I will." But he didn't want to leave. I knew he didn't.
"Be still," I said silently. "I want to be here and I'm staying here, and there's nothing you can do about it." He was happy but wouldn't admit it.
Teskhamen laughed softly.
"Tell our blessed friend I can hear him well enough," said Teskhamen. "But be assured, Prince, we're glad to see you. I don't know that we are glad to receive him. But we are glad to see you. We didn't expect you. We'd more or less given up on hearing from you. We're very glad you've come."
The others said nothing. Gremt stared into the fire. He did not appear rude or hostile, but preoccupied, preoccupied enough to ignore me, preoccupied and anguished. His eyes moved uneasily over the burning logs, and there was a subtle gnawing quality to his lips, as if he truly was flesh and blood and unable to conceal his misery.
Magnus, who sat across from me, seemed supernaturally still. Then something came over him. I felt it as surely as I saw it, and in a flash, he was altered indescribably and completely. The made-up ghost was gone. There was the monster I knew from the night of my mortal death, the same hollow withered white cheeks and huge black eyes, and mop of long tangled black hair streaked with shining silver. A dark cold chill passed through me.
"Remember, any ghost is working with your brain, my beloved," said Amel, "to make you see what you are seeing."
What was I to do with that brilliant bit of intelligence?
Gremt was startled. He fixed his eyes intently on Magnus, and slowly the old image came back--the Magnus of now, the handsome ghost, the ghost dreamed up by the ancient mortal who'd endured badly formed limbs, a humped back, and a narrow hooked nose and now wanted none of it. Here were the even Grecian features and the beautiful forehead and the blond hair, the picture of a male in his prime, with the confidence of the fair.
Yet he looked away from me, humiliated, shattered. He stared into the fire, while Gremt stared at him with obvious concern. I was still shaken. In fact, I was beginning to feel a kind of panic.
Then a weariness took hold of Gremt and he settled back in the chair and looked up, perhaps at the figures of the tapestry, and he closed his eyes.
Amel was laughing softly and with a malicious delight. "What a crew they are," he said confidentially and with his low iron laughter. "Are you enjoying their company? Why don't you burn down their house and be done with it!"
"You're wasting your rage," I said to him. But I could see that Teskhamen had of course heard the threat and he didn't take it lightly. He was looking to me for some ratification that I had no such intention.
"I came here as your guest," I said. "I don't do what he wants."
"And how long before he can make you do what he wants?" asked Teskhamen. He didn't sound the least bit angry or impatient. Just smooth.
"He'll never be able to make me do anything," I said. I shrugged. "What makes you think otherwise?" There was no response. "Look, if he caused Akasha ever to do anything at his behest, it was because he deceived her, led her to believe that she was the author of the thoughts coming into her mind. He could never make Mekare do anything."
"What makes you certain?" asked Teskhamen. He was studying me intently. "Perhaps he coaxed Mekare into coming to you, offering herself to you, inviting you to take him out of her."
I shook my head.
"She came on her own," I said. "I was there. She wanted to go on, to be with her sister." Flash flicker of those images, of the late gracious red-haired Maharet in a place of sunshine awaiting her surviving sister.
Teskhamen nodded, but it seemed no more than a courtesy. "You will be on the watch, however," he said gently. "You will be careful. You have inside you a powerful and evil spirit."
