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"Blessed darkness!" I said suddenly "Blessed darkness has coain "

"Yes," he said sadly, "and we rule in it as we have always done "

Wasn't that enough?

He took my hand-what did it feel like now?-and led me down the narrow corridor between the oldest, the most venerable tombs; tombs that went back to the oldest tiether, the swa, and I had fed on the blood of roustabouts and cutthroat thieves

His toraved on theold-fashioned script

Louis de Pointe du Lac 1766-1794

He rested against the tomb behind him, another one of those little temples, like his oith a peristyle roof

"I only wanted to see it again," he said He reached out and touched the writing with his finger

It had faded only slightly fro at the surface of the stone The dust and gri each letter and nu of what the world had been in those years?

I thought of her drea from the blood-soaked soil

"Noe can go home," he said

Horaves on either side of ainst the ruffled clouds

"You're not going to leave us, are you?" he asked suddenly, voice sharpened with distress

"No," I said I wished I could speak of it, all the things that were in the book "You knoere lovers, she and I, as surely as a mortal man and woman ever were "

"Of course, I know," he said