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Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis: The Vampire Chronicles - Softcover

Buch 12 von 13: Vampire Chronicles

Rice, Anne

 
9780804173148: Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis: The Vampire Chronicles
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804173141 ISBN 13: 9780804173148
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this ambitious, rich vampire novel of vision and power, the indomitable vampire hero, Lestat de Lioncourt, returns ... caught up in an urgent and fundamental quest to understand the origins of the Undead and the deeper meanings of existence for both mortals and immortals.

“In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea . . . And all the world was shaken . . .”

Now Lestat, Prince of the vast tribe of the undead, finds himself at war with a strange, ancient, otherworldly form that has somehow taken possession of his immortal body and spirit, and it is through this perilous and profound struggle that we come to be told the hypnotic tale of a great sea power of ancient times: a mysterious heaven on earth situated on a boundless continent in the Atlantic Ocean.

As we learn of the mighty, resonant powers and perfections of this lost kingdom of Atalantaya, the lost realms of Atlantis, we come to understand how and why the vampire Lestat, indeed all the vampires, must reckon so many millennia later with the terrifying force of this ageless, all-powerful Atalantaya spirit. An exhilarating novel that deepens Rice’s vampire mythology as it brings together the ancient worlds and beings of the Vampire Chronicles and opens up to us a whole new universe of characters, history, storytelling, and legend.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANNE RICE is the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Derek

They had been talking up there for hours. If Derek lay very still he could hear them perfectly. At this hour, the Andrássy Út was noisy above him, with its cafés and bookstores, but this damp hidden mansion of cellar chambers was quiet. And what else did Derek have to do but listen?

Derek was a tall male with dark brown skin and large dark eyes that made him look forever young and vulnerable. His black wavy hair was parted in the middle and it had grown down just below his shoulders. An unmistakable broad blond streak grew from the center part on the left side, more golden than yellow. He wore a thin old shirt, filthy with dust, and the black dress pants he’d had on ten years ago when he’d been captured. He sat on his cot, in the corner of his prison dungeon cell, his back to the wall, his head bowed, and his arms folded as he listened.

Roland, the evil master of the house and its prison dungeons, talked and talked.

Roland’s guest was an ancient one named Rhoshamandes. And this Rhoshamandes spoke vehemently of one called “the Prince,” whom he wanted to destroy. How many of these blood drinkers were there? Others came through this house from time to time, but they never remained. Others had talked of this Prince too. Derek listened, but without hope.

Rhoshamandes was a powerful one, Derek could hear this in his voice, and in the beating of the blood drinker’s heart. Older than Roland most likely, much older, but he and Roland were friends.

This Rhoshamandes excited Roland. It was some sort of privilege for Roland that the fabled Rhoshamandes now sought his counsel.

Roland was the blood drinker who had taken Derek prisoner, luring him away from the opera house years ago, and locking him in this dungeon cell, beneath the city of Budapest. Roland was the one who came down the stairs at least once a week to drink Derek’s blood and taunt him and laugh at him.

Roland was rawboned, tall, painfully gaunt, with long straight white hair bound with a bronze clip at the base of his neck to leave a white streak down his back. He had the most cruel eyes Derek had ever beheld, and he smiled when he spoke, which made his most casual unpleasant remarks completely sinister.

Derek had had years to study Roland, Roland who appeared to live in fashionable evening dress of fine-­cut dark-­tinted velvet dinner jackets with satin lapels, waistcoats of bright patterned silk, and boiled shirts with cuffs and collars as stiff as cardboard. His black patent-­leather boots appeared as simple evening shoes beneath the cuffs of his pleated trousers, and a great evening scarf with fringed edges was forever wrapped around his neck. He drained the blood of Derek without ever spilling a drop. He wore kid gloves so sleek they showed the bony knots in his fingers, and his cadaverous face with its large gray eyes was the picture of sarcastic disdain.

Then there was Arion of the shining black skin, the wounded one, burnt and miserable, who had seen his home on the coast of Italy destroyed. He was much younger “in the Blood” than Roland, and for months he’d drunk from Derek nightly, and now he came several times a week. Arion had come to Roland in rags, and Roland had comforted him and restored him, and nursed his soul back to health as they spoke in the ancient Greek language of olden times when Rome had ruled the world and everything, it seems, had been better. Of course. Better. You could forgive human beings for such nonsense, but how forgive immortals who had lived then?

There was a gentleness to Arion, and a pity in his heart for Derek. Derek could sense this when Arion was drinking from him. Also Arion brought Derek gifts of fruit now and then and good wine. Derek could see the history and the pain of Arion in flashes—­a great seaside villa burned, young blood drinkers immolated, a red-­haired female blood drinker burnt to death, her red hair kindling and disappearing in flames. Only Arion had survived this rape of his home and massacre of his oldest companions. Arion sought shelter with Roland, and Roland sought to give Arion courage to “go on.”

Arion’s skin was quite truly as black as coal, and he had grave thoughtful eyes, eyes of a very pale green that appeared almost yellow. His hair was a cap of close-cropped silky black curls, and his face reminded Derek of a cherub. His skin had been blotched with white and pink scars when he had first come, and his neck and chest so badly burned that he could scarcely speak, but he was rapidly healing. And it seemed to Derek that Arion’s skin was darkening though he did not understand why.

Earlier this evening, this powerful Rhoshamandes had given Arion his own ancient and healing blood. That was the way with these creatures, to offer their own blood to the host or his wounded guest, to exchange blood when they lodged under one another’s roofs for some time, to offer blood as in the olden days humans had offered other humans food and drink and shelter as hospitality.

When they drank they opened their minds whether they wanted to or not.

But then so did Derek when they drank from him, and so they knew what they knew about him, though he sought desperately to hold back.

What would it do for them to have his innermost secrets? Derek didn’t know but he concealed everything from them and always would.

“You won’t be here forever,” he thought to himself quietly. “Someday when these night monsters are slumbering and helpless, you’ll get out of here and you’ll find the others. If you are alive, they must be alive.” He closed his eyes and he looked at their faces as he remembered them. For most of the twentieth century, Derek had been searching for them. It was his third “life” wandering the earth, looking for the slightest trace of them. But this was a time like no other time and Derek had entered the twenty-­first century with even-­greater hope of finding the others, only to be snared by this blood-­drinking monster.

He was weeping again now. No good. He couldn’t hear what they were saying above.

He took a deep easy breath. And once again he listened.

“The Prince,” whom Rhoshamandes hated, was a young undeserving maverick blood drinker named Lestat. Lestat had done an “unspeakable” thing to Rhoshamandes, cutting off his left hand and then his arm. They had been reattached, these limbs, as with blood drinkers that was possible, but Rhoshamandes could never forgive the injury, nor “the pardon.” For in spite of the pardon, everywhere he went now he bore the mark of Cain.

Derek knew what that was, the mark of Cain. When he had come awake in this time, it had been a poor priest in Peru who had educated him and taught him the ways of the world—­in a farming village not unlike the one Derek had abandoned thousands of years before for the frozen caves of the mountain peaks. Derek had learned the man’s religion inside and out, and read the biblical scriptures in Spanish many a time. Derek had not gone down into the cities of South America until the very middle of the century, and it had taken him decades to learn the great literature of the current period in Spanish, Portuguese, and in English. English had proved the most useful language as Derek traveled through North America and Europe.

Roland had brought books down into this prison—­books that Derek had read over and over again. Die Bibel nach Martin Luther; the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a German-­English copy of Faust by Goethe; the works of Shakespeare in many small ragged volumes, some in German, some in English, some in other...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804173141
ISBN 13 
9780804173148
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
561
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SC
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/

CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41
Madrid
Madrid
Spanien