It had worked. Her fine green robe of interwoven silk and cotton with its trimming of gold and jewels had been spotless, no need to change it. Only wrap her gently in fresh-washed sheets and blankets, slowly, slowly, binding her gently, whispering to her the whole while. It seemed she’d welcomed the soft silk scarf blindfold. Or she hadn’t cared. She hadn’t cared anymore about anything. She was way past caring. Way past sensing that anything around her was amiss. Oh, that we become such monsters, it was unthinkable. It made Rhosh shudder.
Only once had there been a bad moment, an alarming moment. Benedict after binding her head securely in silk had backed off suddenly, almost stumbling in his haste to get away from her. He stood staring at her.
“What is it!” Rhosh had demanded. The panic was contagious. “Tell me.”
“I saw something,” Benedict whispered. “I saw something I think that she is seeing.”
“You’re imagining it,” said Rhosh. “She sees nothing. Go on, finish.”
What had that been, that thing that Benedict had seen?
Rhosh didn’t want to know, didn’t dare to want to know. But he couldn’t stop wondering.
When they’d had her securely bound like a dead one in a shroud, it had been possible then to leave that horrid place, that awful place that had been Maharet’s hearth and sanctum. Rhosh had had enough of looking through the storerooms, of looking at books and parchments and ancient keepsakes, enough, the desks, the computers, all of it. It was tainted with death. He would have taken the jewels perhaps and the gold, but he didn’t need these things, and he couldn’t bear to touch them. It was sacrilege somehow, stealing the personal treasures of the dead. He’d been unable to reason himself out of it.
When they were at the edge of the garden enclosure, he’d turned back, pulled the pin from the grenade he’d brought with him, and hurled it into the lighted doorway. The explosion was immediate. The flames raged through the buildings.
Then they had brought the silent burden to these shores, to a planned location obtained through the mortal attorneys with the least amount of delay, and put her to rest in a cool darkened cellar with its small windows soon boarded up by the ever-resourceful Benedict. Only the heartbeat of that bundled body gave evidence of life.
Benedict stood beside him at the railing of the deck. The wind off the Atlantic was deliciously cold, not as fierce as the winds of the northern seas, but bracing, clean and good.
“Well, I understand, you’ll be untouchable, but how can you maintain power over them, enough, say, to kill Benji Mahmoud before their very eyes?”
“What are they going to do about it?” asked Rhosh. “And suppose I threaten them that I’ll lie in the sun at dawn, as does happen to be my custom, by the way, and can be no more—unless I and they want the younger ones to be devoured by fire when my body, the Source Body, suffers that insult?”
“Would I die,” asked Benedict, “if you did that? I mean once you have the Sacred Core?”
“Yes, but I’d never do it!” Rhosh whispered. “Don’t you see?”
“Then what good is the threat? If they know you love me—?”
“But they don’t know,” said the Voice. “That’s the thing. They don’t know. They know almost nothing about you!” The Voice was fuming again. “And you can strengthen your friend with your blood, strengthen him to where he suffers from such a burning but not fatally! Why have you not given him more of your blood over the centuries? And then of course your blood will be the Source Blood and the strongest that there is, and you will feel the engines of power grinding in you with a new efficiency and fury—.”
“Leave this in my hands,” said Rhosh to Benedict. “And no, you might not at all die, were I to make good on my threat. Burn yes, but die no. And I will give you my blood.” He felt like a fool suddenly obeying the Voice’s orders.
“But you could never make another blood drinker,” said Benedict, “because if you did you wouldn’t be able to make the threat …”
“Stop talking,” said Rhosh. “I have no choice now, do I, but to follow this through! I must get Fareed to put the Sacred Core into me. Never mind all the rest. Just remember the instructions I’ve given you. Be ready at any moment for my phone call.”
“I am,” said Benedict.
“And don’t, whatever you do, don’t call me. Keep the phone ready. And when I call and instruct you to begin torturing the boy—that is, if I have to do that—then you must do it and they must be able to hear his screams through the phone.”
“Very well!” said Benedict disgustedly. “But you do realize I’ve never tortured a human being before.”
“Oh, come on, it won’t be that difficult! Look at what you’ve done already. You’ve taken to this, you know you have. You’ll figure a way to make him scream. Look, it’s simple. Break his fingers, one by one. There are ten of them.”
Benedict sighed.
“They will not harm me as long as the boy is in our hands, don’t you see? And when I return here with Fareed, we’ll deal with the goddess in the cellar, you understand?”
“All right,” said Benedict with the same tone of bitter resignation.
“And then I will be the One! And you will be my beloved, as you have always been.”
“Very well.”
Truly, with his whole soul, he wished he had not killed Maharet and Khayman. With his whole heart he wished there were some escape now from this. Blood guilt. That had been the name for what he was feeling now. Thousands of years ago as a boy on Crete he’d known what blood guilt was when you killed those who were your own, and Maharet and Khayman had not been enemies.
“Oh, junk poetry, junk philosophy,” sang the Voice. “She was going to plunge with her sister into the volcano. I told you. You did what you had to do, as moderns so simply put it. Forget the ways of ancient cultures. You are a blood drinker of immense physical and spiritual power. I will tell you what is sin and what is guilt. Now go to them and make your demand and leave your acolyte here to slice off the head of that boy upstairs if they do not give in to you.”
“When they find out—.”
“They know,” said the Voice. “Turn up your computer volume, Benjamin Mahmoud is telling them everything.”
And it was true.
He sat down on the couch beside the laptop with its glowing screen. The website of Benji Mahmoud now showed of all things Benji’s very own likeness, not in a still photograph but in a video. There he was with his black fedora and his sharp penetrating black eyes, his round face fiercely animated with the tale he told: