There was a thick quiet, the soggy smell of dreary waters and decaying stone. He could see barely twelve feet ahead, however stressing his ears, he made out the pulsating of hearts close by two humans sequestered from everything approximately fifteen or twenty yards away. Guys, he chose, in light of their smell. Either workers, advance components of a seeking after power, or—and this he thought more plausible—displaced people who had once served the Family and had deserted their expectations of life unfading. The idea that he had become like them, a cringing pariah, started sensations of disgrace and shock, and looking at Giselle, who floated persistently next to him, weak-looking with her hair all unfastened, he encountered a blaze of disdain. How is it possible that he would have left himself alone influenced by such an animal? On the off chance that he had not escaped, he may have had the option to persuade the Patriarch that he was the survivor of double-dealing; he ought to have remained and requested a conflict with Alexandra. Also, with Roland Agenor. Particularly with Agenor. That old reprobate’s touch was wherever in the plan of his demise. Gracious, he was conceivably guiltless. Honest of homicide, at any rate. However, Lady Dolores had made a telling point: Agenor likely could be utilizing him to make the Golden’s demise advantageous for him. What Beheim had taken for fatherly anxiety and respectable intention may have just been the proper dress of a shrewdness trick, and he accursed himself for not having perceived that benevolence, for example, Agenor claimed to uphold was a prudence outsider to the Family, that couple of favors done were not freighted with guile, no generosity untainted by avarice or some other type of backwardness. Agenor’s posture of an antiquated developed to rosy shrewdness through hundreds of years of scholastic isolation without a doubt covered hunger as wild and conscienceless as those of the de Czeges. Agenor and Alexandra, Alexandra and Agenor. Did that hub pivot upon some urgent reality, something that may bear upon the investigation? Impossible to say. He had lost everything and mastered nothing. Beheim’s misery planed away into outrage, and his resentment became so significant, so freeing, he started to feel that he was taking off high over the depressing plain of his idea, presently not grounded in the reasonable worries that had incited it. Furthermore, in that irate flight, removed from every gentler thought, it appeared to be that he had finally finished the curve of his being, accepted the lineaments of an inky, sharp-winged soul, and occupied it completely. He thought he detected 1,000 crucial possibilities that a second before he may have discovered nefarious, but at this point seemed interesting and welcoming, promising recent trends of strength, new points from which to move toward the issue of for eternity. It was thrilling, this information. Inebriating. His heart siphoned with the powerful beat of one just took care of, and to him’s eye—or maybe it was no internal vision, yet a result of the dividers existing apart from everything else separating and allowing him a perspective on some underworld through a battered break in the stones of Castle Banat—he saw obscure figures gathering around him: thin, dimly clad people with fair skin and shiny eyes. They floated toward him with the processional gradualness of animals in a fantasy, wreathed in decorations of fog. Scared, he tried to will them away, and when they didn’t scatter, he became considerably more apprehensive; however then, at that point, he understood that these were the hosts of the Agenor branch, both the living and the dead amassed in a position of the witness, there yet not there, an unimportant splinter of each attracted to go to the function of this, his edification. He appeared to hear their names in his blood, a quieted rambling like the shadow of a melody, music that filled and improved him like haziness thickening in a tomb; he could feel the particular power of their existences, a brush of energies as complicated as plant shadow; and from this, saturated with those otherworldly pressing factors, he inferred a new enthusiasm for his set of experiences.
These rotting scalawags with cracked chests and sewed shut eyes; these masculine youthful monsters with their exquisite habits and shining teeth; these ladies with fanged grins whose mix of magnificence and unfortunate life was a lash to the faculties—they all common, he understood, substantially more than the particular strain of a blood disease, for that contamination, was the pot from which an incredible agreement was being manufactured. As they swarmed close, closer, their highlights developing progressively particular, he identified several of his associates among them: Danielle Hinault, her chestnut hair heaped high; Monroe Seaforth, the American agent; Claude St. Cyrille, Paul Widows, and Andrew McKechnie, three men—like him—moderately new to the Family. What’s more, there was old Agenor himself. His shock of hair, similar to a white fire, struck Beheim—as opposed to his past evaluation of his guide’s person—as mirroring a whiteness of soul. Not a genuine temperance.