I waited.

  "The air was thick with these spirits," he said, "for once having seen them, once having detected their faint outline and their ceaseless voices, we could never again not see them, and like a wreath they surrounded the earth! The spirits of the dead, Lestat! The spirits of the human dead."

  "Souls, Memnoch?"

  "Souls."

  "Souls had evolved from matter?"

  "Yes. In His image. Souls, essences, invisible individualities, souls!"

  I waited again in silence.

  He gathered himself together.

  "Come with me," he said. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. As he reached for mine, I felt his wing, distinctly for the first time, brush the length of my body, and it sent a shiver through me akin to fear, but not fear at all.

  "Souls had come out of these human beings," he said. "They were whole and living, and hovered about the material bodies of the humans from whose tribe they had come.

  "They could not see us; they could not see Heaven. Whom could they see but those who had buried them, those who had loved them in life, and were their progeny, and those who sprinkled the red ochre over their bodies before laying them carefully, to face the east, in graves lined with ornaments that had been their own!"

  "And those humans who believed in them," I said, "those who worshipped the ancestors, did they feel their presence? Did they sense it? Did they suspect the ancestors were still there in spirit form?"

  "Yes," he answered me.

  I was too absorbed to say anything else.

  It seemed my consciousness was flooded with the smell of the wood and all its dark colors, the endlessly rich variations of brown and gold and deep red that surrounded us. I peered up at the sky, at the shining light fractured and gray and sullen yet grand.

  Yet all I could think and consider was the whirlwind, and the souls who had surrounded us in the whirlwind as though the air from the earth to Heaven were filled with human souls. Souls drifting forever and ever. Where does one go in such darkness? What does one seek? What can one know?

  Was Memnoch laughing? It sounded small and mournful, private and full of pain. He was perhaps singing softly, as if the melody were a natural emanation of his thoughts. It came from his thinking as scent rises from flowers; song, the sound of angels.

  "Memnoch," I said. I knew he was suffering but I couldn't stand it any longer. "Did God know it?" I asked. "Did God know that men and women had evolved spiritual essences? Did he know, Memnoch, about their souls?"

  He didn't answer.

  Again I heard the faint sound, his song. He, too, was looking up at the sky, and he was singing more clearly now, a sombre and humbling canticle, it seemed, alien to our own more measured and organized music, yet full of eloquence and pain.

  He watched the clouds moving above us, as heavy and white as any clouds I'd ever beheld.

  Did this beauty of the forest rival what I had seen in Heaven?

  Impossible to answer. But what I knew with perfect truth is that heaven bad not made this beauty dim by comparison! And that was the wonder. This Savage Garden, this possible Eden, this ancient place was miraculous in its own right and in its own splendid limitations. I suddenly couldn't bear to look on it, to see the small leaves flutter downwards, to fall into loving it, without the answer to my question. Nothing in the whole of my life seemed as essential.

  "Did God know about the souls, Memnoch!" I said. "Did He know!"

  He turned to me.

  "How could He not have known, Lestat!" he answered. "How could He not have known! And who do you think flew to the very heights of Heaven to tell Him? And had He ever been surprised, or caught unawares, or increased or decreased, or enlightened, or darkened, by anything I had ever brought to His Eternal and Omniscient attention?"

  He sighed again, and seemed on the verge of a tremendous outburst, one that would make all his others look small. But then he was calm again and musing.

  We walked on. The forest shifted, mammoth trees giving way to slender, more gracefully branching species, and here and there were patches of high, waving grass.

  The breeze had the smell of water in it. I saw it lift his blond hair, heavy as this hair was, and smooth it back from the side of his face. I felt it cool my head and my hands, but not my heart.

  We peered into an open place, a deep, wild valley. I could see distant mountains, and green slopes, a ragged and rambling wood breaking here and there for spaces of blowing wheat or some other form of wild grain. The woods crept up into the hills and into the mountains, sending its roots deep into the rock; and as we grew closer to the valley, through the branches I would see the glitter and twinkling light of a river or sea.

  We emerged from the older forest. This was a marvelous and fer­tile land. Flowers of yellow and blue grew in profusion, caught this way and that in dancing gusts of color. The trees were olive trees and fruit trees, and had the low, twisted branches of trees from which food has been gathered for many generations. The sunlight poured down upon all.

  We walked through tall grasses—the wild wheat perhaps—to the edge of the water, where it lapped very gently without a tide, I think, and it was clear and shimmering as it shrank back, exposing the extraordinary array of pebbles and stones.

  I could see no end to this water either to the right or to the left, but I could see the far bank and the rocky hills growing down towards it as if they were as alive as the roots of the straggling green trees.

  I turned around. The landscape behind us now was the same. The rocky hills, rising eventually to mountains, with miles upon miles of scalable slopes, copses of fruit trees, black, open mouths of caves.

  Memnoch said nothing.

  He was stricken and sad and staring down at the waters, and to the far horizon where the mountains came as if to close in the waters, only to be forced to let the waters flow out and beyond our sight.

  "Where are we?" I asked gently.

  He took his time to answer. Then he said, "The Revelations of Evolution are, for the time being, finished. I've told you what I saw— the thin outline of all you'll know once you die.

  "Now what is left is the heart of my story, and I should like to tell it here. Here in this beautiful place, though the rivers themselves are long gone from the earth and so are the men and women who roamed at this time. And to answer your question, 'Where are we?' Let me say: Here is where He finally flung me down from Heaven. Here is where I Fell."

  12

  GOD SAID: 'Wait!' So I found myself stopped at the gates of Heaven, along with all my companions, the angels who generally went and did what I did, and Michael and Gabriel and Uriel, though not among my companions, were there too.

  " 'Memnoch, my accuser,' said God, and the words were spoken with the characteristic gentleness and a great effulgence of light. 'Before you come into Heaven, and you begin your diatribe, go back down to the Earth and study all you have seen thoroughly and with respect—by this I mean humankind—so that when you come to me, you have given yourself every chance to understand and to behold all I have done. I tell you now that Humankind is part of Nature, and subject to the Laws of Nature which you have seen unfold all along. No one should understand better than you, save I.

  " 'But go, see again for yourself. Then, and only then, will I call together a convocation in Heaven, of all angels, of all ranks and all endowments, and I will listen to what you have to say. Take with you those who seek the same answers you seek and leave me those angels who have never cared, nor taken notice, nor thought of anything but to live in My Light.' "

  Memnoch paused.

  We walked slowly along the bank of the narrow sea until we came to a place where several boulders made a natural place to sit and to rest. I wasn't feeling weariness in any real physical sense, but the change of posture seemed to sharpen all my fears, and concentration, and eagerness to hear what he said. He sat beside me, turned to me slightly on his left, and his wings once again faded. But first they rose, and stretched out, the left far above my head and the whole wingspan startling me. But then they disappeared. There simply wasn't room for them when Memnoch was seated, at least not for them to be folded behind him, so they were gone.

  He continued: "Immediately following these words," he said, "there was a great commotion in Heaven over who wanted to go down and examine the Creation with me and who did not. Now understand, angels were all over Creation as it was, as I've told you, and many had already been years on Earth, and fallen in love with creeks, ana valleys, and even the deserts which had begun to appear. But this was a special message the Lord had given me—Go and Learn All You Can About Mankind—and there was some question as to who was as interested or as passionate about the mysteries of the human race as was I."

  "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "If you forgive me. How many angels are there? You quoted God as saying 'all ranks,' and 'all endowments.' "

  "Surely you've heard some of the truth," he answered, "from the lore. God created us first—the archangels—Memnoch, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and many others whose names have never been discovered—either inadvertently or deliberately—so I would rather not say. The whole number of archangels? Fifty. And we were the First Made as I said, though who exactly came before whom has become a hysterical subject of argument in Heaven, and one in which I lost interest a long time ago. Besides, I'm convinced I am the first anyway. But it doesn't matter.

  "We are those who communicate in the most direct way with God, and also with Earth. That's why we have been labeled Guardian Angels, as well as Archangels, and sometimes in the religious literature we are given a low rank. We don't have a low rank. What we have is the greatest personality and the greatest flexibility, between God and man."

  "I see. And Raziel? And Metatron? And Remiel?"

  He smiled. "I knew these names would be familiar to you," he said. "They all have their place among the Archangels, but I cannot possibly explain all of this to you now. You'll know when you're dead.

  And also it's almost too much for a human mind, even a vampiric mind, such as your own, to comprehend."

  "Very well," I said. "But what you're saying is the names refer to actual entities. Sariel is an entity."

  "Yes."

  "Zagzagel."

  "Yes, an entity. Now let me continue. Let me stick with the schemes. We, as I told you, are God's Messengers, and Most Powerful Angels, and I was fast becoming God's Accuser, as you can see!" "And Satan means accuser," I said. "And all those other dreadful names you don't like are in some way connected with that idea. Accuser."

  "Exactly," he replied. "And the early religious writers, knowing only bits and pieces of the truth, thought it was man whom I accused, not God; but there are reasons for this, as you'll soon see. You might say I have become the Great Accuser of everybody." He seemed mildly exasperated, but then his voice resumed, very calm and measured. "But my name is Memnoch," he reminded me, "and there is no angel more powerful or clever than I am and there never was."

  "I see," I said, meaning this to be polite. And also because I actually didn't question this statement at all. Why should I?

  "The Nine Choirs?" I asked.

  "All there," he said. "The Nine Choirs, of course, making up the bene ha elohim. And very well described by Hebrew and Christian scholars, thanks to times of revelation and perhaps disaster, though one would be hard put to determine the nature of each event. The First Triad is made of Three Choirs, the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones or Ophanim, as I prefer to call them. And this First Triad is in general locked to the glory of God. They are in His thrall, thrive in the light which can blind or dazzle others, and almost never get very far from the light at all.

  "At times when I am angry and making speeches to all of Heaven, I accuse them ... if you'll pardon the expression again—of being held to God as if by a magnet and not having a free will or personality such as we possess. But they have these things, they do, even the Ophanim, who are in general the least articulate or eloquent—in fact, Ophanim are likely to say nothing for eons—and any of these First Triad can be sent by God to do this and that, and have appeared on Earth, and some of the Seraphim have made rather spectacular appearances to men and women as well. To their credit, they adore God utterly, they experience without reserve the ecstasy of His presence, and He fills them completely so that they do not ask questions of Him and they are more docile, or more truly aware of God, depending on one's point of view.

  "The Second Triad has Three Choirs which have been given the names by men of Dominations, Virtues, and Powers. But to tell the truth, there is very little difference between these angels and the First Triad. The Second Triad is a little farther from the Light of God and perhaps as close as it can come, given its endowments, and perhaps it is not so clever when it comes to logic or questions. Who knows? Certainly the Second is more docile altogether; but then there is more coming and going from the Second Triad, from Earth to Heaven, than from the devoted and magnetized and sometimes arrogant Seraphim. You can see how this could lead to much discussion."

  "I think I understand it."

  "Both triads sing continuously when they are in Heaven, and most of the time when they are on Earth; their songs rise to Heaven spontaneously and continuously; they don't erupt with the deliberate jubilation of my song or the songs of those like me. Nor do they fall silent for long periods as my kind—Archangels—are apt to do.

  "When you're dead you'll be able to hear the song of all these triads. It would destroy you now if you did. I've let you hear part of the Din of Heaven, but that's all it can be to you, a din—the sound of song and mingled laughter, and seemingly erratic eruptions of beautiful sound."

  I nodded. It had been both painful and gorgeous to hear it.

  "The Lowest Triad is supposed to include Principalities, Archangels, and Angels," he continued, "but this is misleading, as I said. For we, the Archangels, are in fact the most powerful and the most important, have the most personality, and are the most questioning and concerned.

  "The other angels think we are flawed on that account. It does not occur to the average Seraph to plead for mercy for mankind.

  "But here you have the rough scheme of things. The angels are innumerable. And there is mobility among angels, some drifting closer to God than others, and then away when the majesty is too great for them, and they choose to slip back and sing a softer song.

  It's continuous.

  "Now, the important thing is that the Guardian Angels of Earth, the Watchers, those who became intent upon the Creation, came from all these ranks! Even from the very Seraphim there have come Guardians who have spent millions of years on Earth and then gone Home. Going and coming is common. The disposition I describe is innate but not fixed.

  "Angels aren't perfect. You can see that already. They are Created Beings. They don't know everything God knows, that's obvious to you and everyone else. But they know a great deal; they know all that can be known in Time if they wish to know it; and that is where angels differ, you see. Some wish to know everything in Time, and some care only for God and God's reflection in those of His most devoted souls."

  "I see, then. What you're saying is everybody's right about it, and everybody's sort of wrong."

  "More right than wrong. Angels are individuals, that is the key.

  We Who Fell are no single species, unless being the brightest, the most clever, and the most comprehending makes us a species, which I don't think it does."

  "Go on."

  He laughed. "You think I'm going to stop now?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Where do I fit in? I don't mean me, Le­stat de Lioncourt, I mean what I am . .. the vampire I am."

  "You're an earthbound phenomenon, just like a ghost. We'll get to that in a moment. When God sent us down to Earth to Watch, specifically to observe all Mankind, we were as curious about the dead as the living—this wreath of souls we could see and hear, gathered about the world, and which we called Sheol immediately because it seemed to us that the realm of these weeping souls was the realm of pure gloom. 'Sheol' means gloom."

  "And the spirit that made the vampires—"

  "Wait. It's very simple. Let me present it, however, as it came to me. If I don't do that, how can you understand my position? What I ask of you—to be my lieutenant—is so personal and so total that you can't fully grasp it unless you listen."

  "Please go on."

  "All right. A gathering of Angels decided to go with me, to draw as close as possible to Matter in order to pull together for ourselves our entire knowledge, to better comprehend, as God had asked us to do. Michael came with me. And so did a host of other archangels.

  There were a few Seraphim. There were a few Ophanim. And some of the lower orders which are the least intelligent angels, but nevertheless angels, and much in love with Creation and curious as to what was making me so angry with God.

  "I can't give you the number of how many we were. But when we reached the earth, we went our separate ways to perceive things, and came together often and instantly and agreed upon what we had seen.

  "What united us was our interest in the statement of God that Humankind was part of Nature. We just couldn't see how this was true. We went exploring.

  "Very quickly, I learnt that men and women lived now in large groups, very unlike the other primates, that they built shelters for themselves, that they painted their bodies with various colors, that the women often lived separate from the men, and that they believed in something invisible. Now what was that? Was it the souls of the ancestors, the dearly departed who were still locked in the air of Earth, disembodied and confused?

  "Yes, it was the souls of ancestors, but the humans worshipped other entities as well. They imagined a God who had made the Wild Beasts and to him they made blood sacrifice on Altars, thinking this aspect of Almighty God to be a personality of very distinct limits and rather easy to please or displease.

  "Now, I can't say all this was a big surprise to me. I'd seen the early signs of it. After all, I telescoped millions of years for you in my Revelations. But when I drew near to these altars, when I heard the specific prayer to the God of the Wild Animals; when I began to see the care and deliberation of the sacrifice—the slaying of a ram or a deer—I was much struck by the fact that not only had these humans come to look like Angels, but they had guessed at the truth.