“I'm afraid I do.” His voice was hurt. He laid a hand on Pareesa's journal. “Do you even wish to continue with me?”
“Yes. Yes. Please, don't be offended. I believe in what you're teaching. It means everything to me. I'd be lost without you.” Adele sat back into the shadows. “Still, the things I've done. All the dead spread over Grenoble. I can still see them, and smell them.”
“I'm sorry. Vampires are brutal creatures. No one knows that better than you.”
“Actually I mean the vampire dead. Males. Females. Children.” She began to roll the talisman in her fingers. “Children. I killed them. I did it. I don't know exactly how, which is bad enough, but now I'm beginning to think I don't know exactly why.”
“They aren't children,” Mamoru said through clenched teeth. “They're monsters. What more reason could you need?”
“I need more.” Adele sat quietly thinking of Gareth. She glanced up into the eyes of her mentor, hoping for some sympathy, but she saw only cold dismay, as if he could read her thoughts. “Surely there's something more to all this power I have. Something beyond just killing.”
“Why can't you understand? You aren't just killing. You are saving the human race. When you see those dead vampires in your mind, try to think of all the human beings, all the men, women, and human children they have slaughtered over the centuries. Think of your father killed here in Alexandria as I think of my wife and daughter killed in Yunnan Province. You are their vengeance. That is your purpose.”
“I understand. I just need time to process it all. So much is changing, so fast. It seems I am at a crossroads no matter the issue. I'm frightened, Mamoru.”
“Of what?”
“Of myself. And the future.”
Mamoru regarded her. “Your future is clear, Majesty.”
“If only that were true.” Adele exhaled and wished there were times she could banish her personal concerns. “I believe we should postpone our lesson for today.”
“Majesty, on the contrary, we should press on.”
“No, Mamoru. I have other issues I need to work through. I fear I couldn't concentrate.”
Mamoru bowed stiffly in a posture of profound disappointment and sadness.
Adele wanted to apologize. He had given so much to her over the years. He had introduced her to ideas and concepts that no one else in the world could fathom. He had opened a fearsome door for her and then stood by her as she walked through it. Now she felt as if she was betraying him by hesitating, by asking too many questions about things he'd rather not face. But it was he who had encouraged her to be an outsider, to doubt the common wisdom of the world, and she couldn't stop that aspect of her nature, even for him.
“I'm sorry, Mamoru. I would do anything to keep from disappointing you, but I have concerns that I must face. I hope you understand.”
“I do, Your Majesty.” The priest did not raise his face to meet her eyes. “I fear I understand completely.”
Adele watched her mentor formally withdraw from her presence and shut the door behind him, leaving her alone with her crystal and her doubts.
THE EMPRESS TRUSTED Mamoru without question. For more than ten years, he had been her tutor, publicly, in the sciences including geology and chemistry and botany, as well as her fencing master. Privately, he had instructed her in various arcane arts and sciences. He had come from Java at the behest of Empress Pareesa with the agreement of the emperor. Even the criticism of the hard-line court technocrats that Mamoru was a dangerous religionist, and shouldn't be on Princess Adele's staff, couldn't outweigh Empress Pareesa's will.
So influential was he that Mamoru had access to the crown's most infamous prisoner, Selkirk, the man who had attempted to assassinate Empress Adele. Little was publicly known about the assassin. The press had uncovered that he was from a poor family in Alexandria and had disappeared from school at age ten. He was unheard-of until the day he appeared as a man in his late twenties in the imperial crypt and plunged a knife into Adele's breast. It fascinated the public that he had been the tool of Lord Kelvin, the former prime minister who had been overthrown by Adele's triumphant return to Alexandria. But that tantalizing connection was made all the more mysterious because Kelvin was later killed by the empress's triumvirate of champions—the Greyfriar, General Anhalt, and Mamoru himself.
That was the story in the papers anyway.
The truth was more complicated and chilling, and raised a great many questions about the stability of the Empire, as well as the interactions between human and vampire hemispheres. Very few people knew the truth about Lord Kelvin and Selkirk, and how the attempted assassination of the empress was tied to the British vampire clan. Mamoru was one of those few, but even he didn't know the whole truth. However, he intended to.