Read Online More Than Mortal by Mick Farren - Free Book Online Page A

maintained his clan of vassals, henchmen, and bonded companions in the isolated and desolate grandeur of the Scottish Highlands. Renquist knew very little about Fenrior and his people beyond the epics and legends, which were both many and lurid but could not always be trusted. Most accounts seemed to agree that the Clan Fenrior was wild, uncouth, barbarous in the extreme, and conducted themselves as though they had yet to adjust to the sixteenth century, let alone the twenty-first. They reputedly depended on the old and violent blood ties of crag, glen, and tarn to preserve them from widespread human detection and retribution.
    Renquist knew that if he was aware of the Fenrior, the Fenrior could well be aware of him, and he wondered how protocol might dictate he act toward them. They were, by all repute, immoderate in the cruelty with which they received strangers in their lands, and yet, by their numbers alone, they qualified as the primary community of nosferatu in Britain. He had been invited by Columbine Dashwood, and etiquette dictated that he must attend her first, but with her requested favor bestowed and his commission discharged, would it be expected
of him to pay his formal respects to the Fenrior, or would it be far wiser to respect the privacy of these Scottish nosferatu beyond the Roman wall, not intrude, and leave them well alone?
    As Renquist was drowsily contemplating how he should behave, he noticed a fleck of color to which he couldn’t put a name, significantly close to the triple pinpoints of Miss Dashwood and her friends. Now what was that? Renquist attempted to see more clearly, but as he did, the perception perversely vanished. The effort to focus had apparently broken the spell. Renquist sighed and ran fingers through the reassuringly familiar fur of the rug.
    “No matter how we deceive or congratulate ourselves, the dreaming is never truly ours to command.”
    He was now aware, however, something was to hand that Columbine had neglected to mention in her letters.
    On the very day following Marieko’s visit to Morton Downs, Columbine’s dreams had entered a new and highly disturbing phase—the one that would remain with her all the way through to the long day she waited for Renquist to make contact. One time and, mercifully, one time only, she had all but been dream-blinded by a flash that she knew by unexplained instinct was called the Fire in the West, although the same instinct refused to give up any further information or explanation of the horrendous and all-consuming flame. It certainly made no sense and seemed hardly to fit with what she knew of the sixth century. As she saw it from the point of view of her mysterious observing host, the explosion looked near-nuclear. The host had stood on a grassy hilltop at what seemed to be the moment of impact. Had the fireball first come from the sky? Columbine had entered the dream a fraction too late to be certain. Just in time, in fact, to be rendered sightless by the flash and all but choked by the stench of burned hair and singed clothing
as a searing radiant heat swept over the hillside, scorching the grass and causing trees to ignite.
    Multiple disasters struck her and her observer like a series of fast hammer blows. First the abominable light, then the heat, and then a shock wave with a sound like nothing she had ever experienced. A scream? A roar? A convulsion of the very earth? An extended thunderclap to herald the Doom of Everything? Finally the wind and a new shriek of universal doom. And yet she knew, again by weird instinct, that she was, in reality, a great distance from the true ground zero of the fiery destruction. In the middle of this off-the-scale violence, way out of both human and nosferatu proportion, she at least had confirmation of Marieko’s theory that the thing through whose eyes she watched was massively powerful. He or she could remain standing when living trees were uprooted and swirled into the air and cattle flew like