With orders given, the castle being sealed, and search parties organized, Fenrior had the time to turn to Renquist and Lupo. “Can you explain any of this to me?”
Renquist spread his hands. “No, my lord. I wish someone could explain it to me.”
“We should never have meddled in this.”
“Taliesin would have woken anyway. We only selected the time and the place.”
Fenrior, Renquist, Lupo, and Gallowglass fell silent as an eerie sound echoed through the Great Hall. Somewhere a female was sobbing, a sound of bereft, inhuman desolation that was coming closer as they listened.
“Now what?”
As if in answer, Julia entered the hall supporting Destry on her arm. The dreadful sobbing was coming from none other than Destry, who had completely broken down.
“What happened?”
“Destry went to check on her horse, and it was gone.”
A bad feeling overtook Renquist. “Gone? The Uzbek?”
Destry gathered her wits. “Dormandu is gone. His saddle and harness, too. That thing has taken him.”
Fenrior’s expression was grim. “So that would be how he got away.”
Gallowglass was even grimmer. “An’, m’ Lord, th’ sun is about t’ broach th’ horizon. Taliesin ha’ well timed his escape. No pursuit can be staged until sunset.”
The sun sank behind the mountains, marking the end of a long, tense, and sleepless day. Everyone in the castle seemed to have a reason to be in the courtyard inside the main gate before the sky was even dark. Vehicles were being manned and their engines started, search parties were organized, and little effort was spared to find the Merlin, but with almost a twelve-hour start, none but the most blindly optimistic expected to find him. Renquist and Lupo walked slowly through the sunset chaos of a delayed pursuit. They first encountered Marieko. Renquist took her by the arm and moved her away from possibly eavesdropping Scots. “Lupo and I are leaving under the cover of all this chaos.”
“How?”
“Lupo has a way prepared. Will you come with us?”
Marieko reluctantly shook her head. “I must return to Ravenkeep. It’s my home. With Columbine gone, there will be much to sort out.”
“How will you get there?”
“The Range Rover has been commandeered by one of the lord’s search parties, but I will go with Destry and Julia. They left the horse box in which they brought Dormandu beyond the village. Fenrior and his people don’t know about it, and we will use it to travel south.”
“Julia is going with you?”
“That seems to be her intention. Right now she and Destry claim to be inseparable.”
“You must come to California as soon as you can get away. I will show you my library, and we will drink the blood of movie stars together.”
“We will do that, Victor, but right now I have to go.”
Lupo stared speculatively at Renquist as Marieko walked away. “A flirtation in the middle of all this, Don Victor? An attraction to the Yarabachi?”
Renquist ignored him except to project a certain concern over the three females traveling on their own.
Lupo looked at him as if he were insane. “Let them adventure their own way out of this, Don Victor. Now you travel with Lupo. We will go home. We will have no more trouble.”
A
fter what Lupo called “all his globe-trotting” Renquist had taken his time settling back into the simple routine of the Residence in Los Angeles, but bit by bit, he sank into the colony’s essentially lazy ways. Evenings began in the big kitchen. Details of the day-to-day running of the house required his attention, as did the management of the financial complexity needed to materially support the small group of nosferatu. In the days after his return, he had explained to the others that Julia might not be returning for a while, and that they might expect a visit from a female called Marieko Matsunaga, late of the Ravenkeep troika and the Yarabachi Clan. The first piece of news was greeted with indifference. The other nosferatu in the colony, particularly Dahlia, considered Julia something of a loose and unpredictable cannon. The second item had caused a certain gossipy speculation: Was Victor through mourning Cynara and casting around for a new consort?
In the first few weeks after his and Lupo’s return from
Europe, Renquist had earnestly taxed himself wondering and worrying about the location of Taliesin and what fresh games the Urshu might be planning. He had taken the Merlin’s declared plan to conduct a cull of the human race at face value, and he had done a good deal of research into the best survival prospects in the event of a limited nuclear war. With the sole exception of Lupo, Renquist had kept his work secret from the others, lest they accuse him of excessive paranoia. The months had passed, however, and the Urshu failed to surface or in any way manifest himself, and thoughts of him had been pushed to the back of Renquist’s mind.
On this particular morning, Renquist had arisen late, drank his water, and dressed. He’d hunted the night before, feeding on a confused table dancer from a strip joint near LAX. The girl had been so loaded on designer drugs she had hardly recognized death even when it was upon her. When he entered the kitchen, he was surprised to see that everyone else was already out and about their business—unusual, but hardly remarkable. The smell of Sada’s idiosyncratic coffee was in the air, and someone had left the TV on. He eyed a report by Wolf Blitzer on CNN with little interest. The subject of the report was Mervyn Talesian, the U.S. president’s new Special National Security Advisor, the one the media were lionizing as the new genius of the current “tough line” in international diplomacy. An Armenian American, and previously a political unknown, he had apparently been a cloistered academic at either Harvard or Princeton, but the press seemed confused over which. He’d only emerged from academic obscurity when the incoming president had selected him to author the first draft of NACT, the Nuclear Arms Containment Treaty. From that point on, he had moved with almost uncanny swiftness into the very center of power, with his own staff, his own office in the White House, and, some said, his own private intelligence unit. Right at this moment, Talesian was in the very center of the nation’s efforts to
defuse the growing nuclear-armed tension between India and Pakistan. Blitzer spoke into a hand mic as, behind him, Talesian disembarked from Air Force One, discreetly behind the president, as they returned to Washington from what was being called a “crisis summit.”
Renquist had read about Talesian, and even seen photographs of the man. He seemed the capable, good-looking politician in the current cookie-cutter mode, but since he watched little TV, he had never seen him through that medium before. The moment Talesian emerged from behind the blandly smiling president, Renquist experienced a not inconsiderable shock of recognition. Talesian outwardly looked nothing like the Urshu he had encountered at Fenrior, but Renquist knew instantly they were one and the same. The deliberate and joking similarity in names should have been a clue, but Renquist had failed to make the connection. To paraphrase the Beatles, it was something in the way he moved: a mannerism, a gesture, an inclination of the head, the way he related to the humans around him. Mervyn Talesian was, beyond all doubt, Taliesin the Merlin, and he was the one attempting to broker a peace between the two fractious nuclear powers on behalf of the president of the United States. Perhaps it was time to dust off the files on survival and prepare the others for what might be the Merlin’s worst-case scenario.
The Time of Feasting
Darklost
Renquist pointed at the dark-haired girl, ordering her to come to him. While the blonde remained blank and motionless, the dark one swayed very slowly toward him, as though in the grip of an immensely powerful but far from unpleasant narcotic. A fine smoke trail, all that was left of her consciousness, curled from magenta to deep blue, frightened but also lethargically excited. Lost from reality and completely unable to translate what was happening to her, she was vacuously happy someone was bringing her the shadowy and mysterious drama so completely lacking in drab real life … . She would embrace her last moments with a previously unpracticed passion. She stood in front of him, stiff and unseeing, but then one level of control seemed to give way, and she sagged into Renquist with a confused sigh. “I don’t understand.”
Renquist caught her easily with his left arm, as though they were about to dance. His right hand slipped into the pocket of his leather jacket, closing around the smooth silver tube. “You never will.”
“I don’t mind.”
The tube was out of his pocket, and he thumbed the button. The sharp steel spike slipped out. “I know.”
COMING IN OCTOBER 2002 FROM TOR BOOKS: THE FOURTH BOOK IN MICK FARREN’S RENQUIST QUARTET
Victor Renquist meets his toughest opponents yet. He’s been coopted by a top-secret US agency to battle the remnants of Hitler’s Third Reich, who have some very strange allies.
Coulson laid a hand on the closed folder. He couldn’t allow Renquist to completely run the encounter. “Do you mind if I take a turn and ask you some questions?”
“I need to know just one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“My feeding requirements?”
Coulson had been wondering when the question would come up. When the plan to trap Renquist had been approved by Grael, Schultz, Lustig, Brauer, and a half dozen other company men had drunk themselves jubilantly stupid in a Washington bar later the same night. Netting the vampire was a much needed justification of their work in very uncertain times. A chant had even broken out. “We’re getting a vampire! We’re getting a vampire!” Coulson, as drunk as any of the others, but holding it better had, had at that point asked the same thing Renquist was now asking. “If you get a vampire, who’s going to feed it?” By so doing, he had stopped the party in its inebriated tracks. Lustig had been the first to recover off handedly suggesting that Washington had enough junkies and crackheads to satisfy any vampire.
Coulson regarded Renquist with all the neutrality he could muster. “Mercifully that is not my direct problem or responsibility. Plans have, however, been made.”
“An exclusive diet of drug addicts is not advisable. They make me sluggish and stupid, and eventually I sicken.”
Coulson looked hard at Renquist. “I thought you agreed not to read my mind.”
“I’m not reading your mind, I was just anticipating the obvious and pragmatic. Crackheads will make me ill.”
“The nosferatu are that fragile?”
Renquist shook his head. “No, my friend. Humans are that toxic.”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MORE THAN MORTAL
Copyright © 2001 by Mick Farren
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429973700
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001027529
First edition: August 2001
First mass market edition: April 2002