Authors: Mick Farren
More Than Mortal (8 page)
“Damn that Bolingbroke. Why can’t he keep the lighters filled?”
Destry, who had remained standing through the conversation,
took a lighter from the pocket of the bush shirt she wore over her usual jodhpurs and tight, high hunting boots. “Come here.”
took a lighter from the pocket of the bush shirt she wore over her usual jodhpurs and tight, high hunting boots. “Come here.”
Columbine had moved to Destry. “He needs thrashing.”
Destry flicked the Zippo she had managed to carry across a dozen war zones. “He enjoys the attention too much.”
Columbine had inclined her head slightly and drawn on the cigarette, at the same time holding back stray ringlets so they wouldn’t fall in the flame. “You know what would happen if Renquist came here? He’d try to turn us into the classic foursome. The male master and his three compliant concubines.”
Destry and Marieko didn’t seem to respond quite as quickly as Columbine would have expected. “Are you two out of your minds? Are you suggesting you might enjoy such an arrangement?”
Destry, realizing she’d been caught in a fleeting what-if reverie, quickly snapped her lighter shut and put it in her pocket. “Of course not. Would we live like this if we did?”
Marieko smiled with deceptive sweetness. “The presence of a male would, however, be a diversion.”
Columbine had retorted angrily. “Then why don’t you go the whole way and move in with Fenrior?”
“Rudeness is hardly appropriate.”
Destry closed ranks with Marieko. “Really, Columbine, after all this time, the nonsense between you and Victor Renquist has to be primarily in your imagination. Even you have to agree you were very young and silly at the time, and he was, and still is, eight hundred years your senior. You’ve spent the passage of years enlarging and embroidering on the situation. He probably doesn’t even remember you.”
Despite herself, Columbine exhaled smoke and pouted. “He remembers me. I’ll guarantee you that.”
Marieko pressed their two-to-one advantage. “If you
could be objective for a moment, you would realize Renquist is exactly what we need.”
could be objective for a moment, you would realize Renquist is exactly what we need.”
“I don’t want him here.” But even as she spoke, Columbine knew her aura was giving her away. A part of her was subversively excited at the prospect of seeing Victor Renquist again.
“Be real, Columbine.”
“You’re the one who’s complaining about the nightmares.”
Destry glanced at Marieko. “Perhaps she thinks Renquist would be too much for her to handle. Perhaps she’s afraid she’ll turn into a simpering girl again at the sight of him.”
Columbine knew she was being both teased and manipulated by the other two, but she couldn’t stop herself from angrily reacting. “I am not afraid of Victor bloody Renquist.”
Destry pressed home the advantage. “Then act your age, and let’s make use of him.”
Columbine wasn’t quite ready to give in. “There must be another undead of the same stature.”
“Name one.”
Columbine cast around for a name. “I can’t
“No, of course you can’t. So act your age, and let’s make use of him.”
Columbine was effectively outnumbered, but she couldn’t surrender without one more turn of the wheel. “Very well, suppose we did manage to get Victor to come here. What then? If there is some potential power in the burial mound, wouldn’t we be running the risk of him taking over whatever we might find there?”
“You think the three of us aren’t a match for him?”
“No, I don’t think that.”
“So?”
“All right, all right, I don’t want to see him, but if we can get his attention, I’ll go along with it. I’m not so sure he’s actually going to be that interested. He’s fascinated
by nosferatu history, but he’s also very circumspect, and protective of his colony.”
by nosferatu history, but he’s also very circumspect, and protective of his colony.”
Marieko made a Zen gesture indicating the great merit of simplicity. “We send him a letter.”
By the time the sun had begun to sink over the West London suburbs, Renquist decided he had experienced more than enough of this drifting but not sleeping and resolved, as soon as he had the safety of twilight, to take another walk out in the streets. He needed to move, to stride and to swing his arms, and, after his own fashion, to breathe in his new surroundings. Only after that, when he returned to the Savoy, would he telephone Columbine Dashwood. In the meantime, until the sun was down, he would abandon these attempts at halfway rest and apply himself to a final recap of what he knew so far about the task at hand. He reached for the leather folder in which he’d filed the paperwork relevant to the project, unzipped it, and extracted the letters. The sequence of correspondence and the way it had been couched bore all the hallmarks of Columbine’s style and operational approach. She had always fancied herself as the seductive coquette, the incremental tease. Each letter had given away a little at a time, never allowing him to know more until he’d at least made some tentative commitment of interest. He doubted, though, that Columbine was the author of the letters in terms of physically creating them. Unless she had undergone a radical change over the many years since he’d seen her, she was not the kind to labor long and diligently at perfecting the complicated calligraphy of the nosferatu. The flame script, in scarlet ink on the handmade oriental writing paper, had been drawn with a near-flawless dexterity and what appeared to be an ultrafine 00 sable hair paintbrush. The delivery by exclusive courier service had been the icing on an already exquisite cake, and it was enough to convince Renquist the whole presentation was a team effort by the entire troika, and not just some strange,
out-of-the-night scheme devised by Columbine acting on her own.
out-of-the-night scheme devised by Columbine acting on her own.
This made him a little more willing to take the information on face value. Columbine Dashwood, up to their acrimonious predawn parting in Brussels, during the grand ball on the eve of Waterloo, had never shown such a capacity for detail. At the time, Renquist had been in the highly covert employ of the Duke of Wellington, and she had been the secretly undead darling of the Anglo-Prussian alliance. She had challenged him to meet her after the battle, but the tide of human events had intervened. He had never kept their rendezvous, and she’d hated him for it ever since with all the ferocity of a scorned female. Over the years, Columbine had made a number of vengeful attempts to lure him into humiliating or dangerous situations, but Renquist’s instincts told him the letters were not another of these. It was possible, of course, that she had persuaded the entire troika to assist her in another plot against him, but he thought it unlikely.
The first letter had merely hinted that she and the other two women of her troika had come across some kind of nosferatu artifact and perhaps a correspondence should be initiated. His response had been politely interested, but decidedly noncommittal. The second missive had fed him a little more detail, clearly designed to tantalize. The artifact, still unspecified, was seemingly entombed, beneath a prehistoric burial mound, presumably in the countryside somewhere near the troika’s residence. This had both intrigued Renquist, as was intended, but also caused him a measure of hesitation. Although England, especially the counties in the southwest, was noted for its wealth of prehistoric and Roman sites, the country had always been exceptionally short on nosferatu in any period with the exception of a few recent notables like Sir Francis Varney, Barnabas Collins, or Lord Ruthven. At no time had these islands supported a population of the undead to compare with prehistoric India, the Third
Dynasty Egypt, China under the Shun, or eastern Europe at any time in the Christian era.
Dynasty Egypt, China under the Shun, or eastern Europe at any time in the Christian era.
The British Isles were too ordered and contained to be the habitat of more than a handful of the undead. The population was too dense. The great forests had been all but completely felled in between the sixteenth and eighteenth century to build the men-o’-war of the formidable British navy. Since Renquist’s mortality, the English had killed off their wolves, their bears, and their wild boar. The English countryside was a place of neat fields, measured acres, and a network of close interconnecting roads where hedgehogs were crushed under the tires of lorries and automobiles, and even the skylarks had been destroyed by pesticides. A few wild areas did remain, primarily the Highlands and Islands in the north of Scotland, but even these seem only to retain their untamed glory by a kind of national consent, as though they had a spurious permission to remain the way they once were because, in reality they could never really be domesticated. By strange irony, it was the highly tamed nature of the domestic United Kingdom that allowed the few like Columbine Dashwood and the Clan Fenrior to survive. No one bothered them, because absolutely no one believed in them.
The third letter had been somewhat more forthcoming. Apparently human archeologists were delving into the mound, and among their finds had been a tiny broken triangle of mica, assumed to be from a much larger sheet. The mica that carried a single but very clear character, the
nya
of the nosferatu flame script. This information had come close to fully convincing Renquist that the information being fed to him one bite at a time was genuine if maybe considerably less than complete. Any writing on mica had, by definition, to be very old indeed, dating back the full fifteen thousand years to the lost ages of the Nephilim, the Original Beings and Marduk Ra. Nowhere had mica been used as a print medium at any time since. It seemed all but impossible that such a
fragment should turn up during a routine excavation of an English barrow, unless the mound had, maybe at some point after its original construction, been used as a place of concealment for some very old, very rare, and possibly priceless nosferatu relics. The suggestion in the letter was that Renquist should perhaps travel to England to investigate.
nya
of the nosferatu flame script. This information had come close to fully convincing Renquist that the information being fed to him one bite at a time was genuine if maybe considerably less than complete. Any writing on mica had, by definition, to be very old indeed, dating back the full fifteen thousand years to the lost ages of the Nephilim, the Original Beings and Marduk Ra. Nowhere had mica been used as a print medium at any time since. It seemed all but impossible that such a
fragment should turn up during a routine excavation of an English barrow, unless the mound had, maybe at some point after its original construction, been used as a place of concealment for some very old, very rare, and possibly priceless nosferatu relics. The suggestion in the letter was that Renquist should perhaps travel to England to investigate.
On this, Renquist had procrastinated for some time. He still considered the colony to be recovering its equilibrium following their hard-won victory over the Apogee cult. He had been loath to leave until the rest of the colony’s members had repeatedly assured him, particularly Dahlia, Lupo, and Julia, they could get on very well without his obsessive, hands-on leadership. He had considered bringing Lupo with him, but to bring an escort resonated too strongly of packing muscle, and Lupo had “henchman/protector/bodyguard” written all over him. Born in the time of the Borgias and of the convoluted intrigue and skulduggery among the Italian city-states, Lupo was one of the few nosferatu who had ever exploited his undead attributes by actually marketing them to humans. For almost five hundred years, Lupo had been a nocturnal contract killer for popes, presidents, and prime ministers, captains of industry, bankers, beer barons, and racketeers. In more modern times, as his life continued to extend and extend, he had been content to assist Renquist in the organization and protection of the colony and to allow his fearsome-killer reputation to cool a little. This was not to say he didn’t, from time to time, execute a commission for organized crime, who knew him as Joey Nightshade, or for the intelligence community, who claimed not to know him at all. He tended to be sought for the hits that were thought to be impossible, and he charged accordingly, which was a continuing boon to the colony’s material liquidity. Lupo had old-fashioned principles and old-fashioned loyalties. He insisted on addressing Renquist as Don Victor, and for Renquist to show up with such an ancient and influential
heavyweight at his shoulder would be too much like, as the humans put it, being “loaded for bear.”
heavyweight at his shoulder would be too much like, as the humans put it, being “loaded for bear.”
Julia had also expressed a desire to go with him, but since Julia Aschenbach always conducted herself strictly according to her own agenda, Renquist had turned her down flat. For him to so much as entertain the idea of traveling overseas with Julia was not asking, but pleading for trouble. Renquist often thought of Julia as a form of personal retribution. She was his own creation: a headstrong Berlin starlet from the National Socialist film industry whom he had brought through the Change mainly as a nasty parting gift for Joseph Goebbels. He had never expected her to survive, calculating that someone in the SS would know enough to drive a stake into her after she’d wreaked short but noticeable havoc. Quite the reverse proved true. Julia had not only survived, but had also honed herself into a remorseless cutting edge of Nordic steel, as some bastard undead conjunction of Marlene Dietrich and Niccoló
Machiavelli. Ever since she had tracked down Renquist in the mid-sixties, she had alternated between challenging him, directly or by proxy, for the Mastery of the colony, or, since the destruction of his still sorely missed Cynara, by attempting to become his consort and pair-bonded hunting partner. Even by nosferatu standards, Julia was dangerous—definitely not a traveling companion he could trust to watch his back or act from mutual interest and common purpose. In addition, while Julia on her own was one thing, the idea that she might easily form an alliance against him with Columbine Dashwood and her two companions was very much another matter. That he might find himself pitted against four hostile and snarling females scarcely bore thinking about. If Renquist was going to travel at all, he would travel alone.
Machiavelli. Ever since she had tracked down Renquist in the mid-sixties, she had alternated between challenging him, directly or by proxy, for the Mastery of the colony, or, since the destruction of his still sorely missed Cynara, by attempting to become his consort and pair-bonded hunting partner. Even by nosferatu standards, Julia was dangerous—definitely not a traveling companion he could trust to watch his back or act from mutual interest and common purpose. In addition, while Julia on her own was one thing, the idea that she might easily form an alliance against him with Columbine Dashwood and her two companions was very much another matter. That he might find himself pitted against four hostile and snarling females scarcely bore thinking about. If Renquist was going to travel at all, he would travel alone.Other books
JARED: The Justice Brothers Series by Taylor Lee
The Witch's Halloween Hero (Nocturne Falls) by Kristen Painter
Only a Game by J. M. Gregson
Murder Mamas by Ashley Antoinette
Harbinger of the Storm by Aliette De Bodard
The Shamrock & the Rose by Regan Walker
Legacy of Secrecy by Lamar Waldron
Citadel (Book 1): Training in Necessity by Clevenger, J.
Dead Magic by A.J. Maguire
The Girl Before by Rena Olsen
