Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles, #5)

by Anne Rice

All around and high above, the golden mosaics blazed with faces which seemed now transfixed in horror as they beheld this slaughter. Saints and saints and saints. Flames rose and danced. Piles of books were burning! Icons were smashed into pieces, and statuary lay in heaps, smoldering and blackened, the gold gleaming as it was eaten by the flames. “Where are we!” I cried out. Memnoch’s voice was right beside me. He was sitting, collected, against the stone wall. “Hagia Sophia, my friend,” he said. “It’s nothing, really. It’s only the Fourth Crusade.” I reached out with my left hand for him, unwilling to let go of the veil with my right. “What you see is the Roman Christians slaughtering the Greek Christians. That’s all there is to it. Egypt and the Holy Land have for the moment been forgotten. The Venetians have been given three days to loot the city. It was a political decision. Of course they were all here to win back the Holy Land, where you and I have lately been, but the battle wasn’t in the cards, and so the authorities have let the troops loose on the town. Christian slaughters Christian. Roman against Greek. Do you want to walk outside? Would you like to see more of it? Books by the millions are being lost now forever. Manuscripts in Greek and Syriac and Ethiopian and Latin. Books of God and books of men. Do you want to walk among the convents where the nuns are being dragged out of their cells by fellow Christians and raped? Constantinople is being looted. It’s no...