We travel with the vampire Armand to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood, a ruined city under Mongol dominion; to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell Armand into slavery; to Venice during the Renaissance, where he is in thrall to the great vampire Marius; to nineteenth-century Paris; and to contemporary New Orleans, where Armand is forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.