Armand begins his story against the dark, dramatic backdrop of the New Orleans convent where Lestat still lies in Endymion-like sleep. The first memories he can conjure up are brutal ones - of himself as a boy, filthy and degraded, on a slave ship bound from Constantinople for Renaissance Venice. There in the magnificent palazzo he becomes the catamite and pupil of a rich, reclusive artist - Marius, the greatest vampire of them all. Later, in a duel with an English lord, Armand receives a fatal wound, from which only Marius's dark gift can save him. Near death, he relives memories of an earlier, half-forgotten childhood in Kiev in Russia - a city under Mongol domination - and of Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sold him into slavery.
