the process of consumption and excretion, hurrying from form to form with only the merest pauses for sleep, death, thought and faith. The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, the hermit determined, was that life had its own energy, its own circulation and its own busy complexity. It did not need a sculptor—and he sensed that any sculptor who ever tried to tame its innate exuberance would surely fail.
“What is this to me?” Anthony said to the Devil. “I came to the desert to escape tumult, not to conjure it up in my dreams. It is in loneliness that one finds the Lord, and becomes close to the Lord. Life’s transactions are not uninteresting to me, nor are they irrelevant, but my first concern is the immortal soul, which rests immune to all of this confusion.”
“And yet, my friend,” the Devil said, “you thirst for water and you thirst for blood. Your flesh has no immunity to need, and your mind can have no immunity to the thirst induced by that need.”
The disguised Father of Lies took a dagger from the folds of his clothing, rolled up his sleeve, and cut his forearm from the crook of the elbow to the junction of his palm. “Come and drink,” he said, as the blood welled out and began to rain down on the rocky escarpment. “Drink of my blood, and be content.”
“I will not,” Anthony replied. “Not now, or ever. You cannot terrify me, demon that you are, for I am armored by my faith in the Lord, and in Jesus Christ my savior. You cannot tempt me, demon that you are, for I am armored by the certainty of my salvation, and the inviolability of my immortal soul. Water I shall drink as the need arises, but blood I never shall; I shall bear my thirst to the grave, no matter how long it might take to arrive there.”
The Devil lifted his arm, and licked his own blood, seeming to take considerable comfort therefrom. Then he turned, and looked behind him.
Anthony had not seen the four human figures that were creeping through the night until the Devil looked directly at them, but that did not mean that they had not been there all along, moving forward surreptitiously, as men who are abroad at night are wont to do.
“Ah!” the Devil said, as if he were not surprised to find them there, even though he had not suspected their presence until some tiny sound caused him to turn around. “Here are some who won’t refuse a drop of blood, though I dare say they haven’t thirsted quite as long as you, my friend.” He held out his arm, inviting the four to approach.
They did so, warily. They, at least, were surprised. They were not used to such offerings—or, indeed, to any offerings at all.
Anthony stared at the shadowed figures as they came closer, illuminated by a moon that was less than half full but whose light served nevertheless to augment the feeble glimmer of the distant stars. The newcomers were so thin as to seem like walking skeletons, their clothing reduced to mere ribbons—but their eyes were large and bright and greedy, and their thin lips were pursed in anticipation.
The Devil offered his arm freely. The cut was long enough to allow them all to drink simultaneously, two on each side; if the Devil had as much blood in him as a common man, they might have taken a stomach-full apiece and still left a residue behind—but that was not what happened.
The four vampires leapt upon their prey like a pack of jackals, clawing and snapping at him and at one another. Maddened by the combination of their thirst and their proximity to the means of slaking it, they lashed out in every direction, each of them seemingly more intent on keeping his companions away from the prize than to claim it for himself.
They bit and sucked, lapped and swallowed—but for every drop they claimed a dozen were spilled on the rocky ledge. The Devil went down beneath their assault, bitten on both his legs as well as his arms, and about his face and throat as well. He sustained a dozen new wounds within a minute, a hundred within five. All of them bled with what seemed to Anthony to be unnatural copiousness—as if the vampires’ saliva had some agent within it that prevented the blood from clotting.
In his home town of Coma, and in Alexandria too—within the shadow of the library wall—Anthony had seen starving dogs fighting over a bone, but this was different. Even starving dogs retained some vestige of respect for one another, snarling and howling at the expense of inflicting deadly bites. The four vampires knew no such restraint. They did not howl and they did not snarl, but they clawed and they bit. They gouged at one another’s eyes and aimed deadly blows at one another’s throats. Their intentions were rarely fulfilled, in the immediate sense, but, as time went by and the Devil’s blood leaked away unharvested, the destruction they sought to wreak could hardly be avoided.
They were close to the edge of the cliff. One went sprawling over the edge, and then another. That left two—at which point the conflict became far less chaotic, more sharply focused.
The two vampires fought with all their might, and the Devil’s precious blood continued to ebb away.
Anthony watched, dumbfounded.
Eventually, one vampire went down for the last time—not dead, but broken in his limbs and stunned into unconsciousness. The survivor, who was by no means uninjured, immediately set about trying to lick the last few rivulets of blood from the Devil’s wounds, and to lap up the few fugitive pools that the rock had cupped. It seemed to Anthony to be a rather meager meal.
When the vampire had finished he sat back warily, supporting himself with his scarred and twisted hands, and he looked up at Anthony. His eyes were bright and wild, but not devoid of intelligence.
“You can’t allow yourself to be paralyzed by fear, my friend,” the vampire said. “You’re one of us now.”
“Are you the one who bit me?” Anthony asked.
“What does that matter?” the vampire retorted, licking his lips avidly in search of one last drop of sustenance. “It’s done. You should come with us—we’re heading for Alexandria.”
“Us?” Anthony echoed. “I think you will be alone from now on—and deservedly so, given that you treat your friends so vilely.” “They’ll recover,” the vampire said. “They’ll be thirsty, but their bones will knit and their scratches will heal. They’ll bear me no ill will. They know that there’s strength in numbers, even if the contest that results when we find a lone victim can have only one winner. In Alexandria, it will be different. Cities were made for our kind. If you stay out here, though, alone, they’ll catch you eventually. Then they’ll behead you, and burn your body. There’s no way back from that. You’d best come with us—you have a great deal to learn.”
“You have the Devil’s blood in you now,” Anthony told the creature. “It might make you stronger, I suppose, but it’s poison nevertheless.”
“If that were true,” the vampire replied, “it would make little enough difference to me, who was damned a long time ago—but I know the blood of a philosopher when I taste it. An Epicurean, I believe—the least intoxicating of all.”
“He wore the guise of an Epicurean,” Anthony admitted, “but he was the Devil. He had been a cloud of transparent darkness only an hour or so before.”
“The desert’s full of djinn,” the vampire told him. “There’s no blood in them, but they can play tricks with your head. Thirst makes it easier. If he gets up again, he’ll be one of us—but they don’t always get up. I was lucky; so were you. Him too, although he won’t feel it when he wakes up.” The creature inclined his head briefly in the direction of his erstwhile companion and adversary, who was still unconscious.
“You cannot hurt me, monster,” Anthony
