More Than Mortal (46 page)
Authors: Mick Farren
Fenrior made a courtly bow to both Julia and Destry, while Gallowglass and Goneril looked on and Duncanon and his Highlanders stared in both amazement and trepidation. “Mistress Maitland, Fraulein Aschenbach, welcome to Fenrior.”
R
enquist was in the great spaceport of Baalbeck, but it was as he’d never dreamed it before, and he wondered why the Merlin was sending him this glimpse. The sliver of rational thought that remained with Renquist even in the dreamstate, the part that would always tell him he was only dreaming if the imagery or content waxed too outlandish, had few doubts that the ancient epic now decorating his sleep was coming straight from Taliesin, and might actually be an unedited slice of Urshu memory. In the fourteenth century B.C., all chaos seemed to rule. Parts of the spaceport were burning, and the obelisks and trilithons around the central landing ziggurat were shrouded in a pall of oily black smoke. The sparking blue tracer of particle weapons cut through the gloom and ricochetted off the marble, gold, and black titanium facings of the power stones in lethal energy splashes. Attack disks hurled low overhead, pounding the ground with their deathrays. Crumps like the rumble of thunder, and regular tremblings from the ground under
his feet, indicated, somewhere in the distance, huge explosions were being detonated as Nephilim-loyal sappers demolished the Baalbeck infrastructure. Without being told, Renquist knew he was seeing the final days of the Nephilim. They were pulling out, abandoning the colony as the rebellion swept over them and the Earth became unmanageable.
enquist was in the great spaceport of Baalbeck, but it was as he’d never dreamed it before, and he wondered why the Merlin was sending him this glimpse. The sliver of rational thought that remained with Renquist even in the dreamstate, the part that would always tell him he was only dreaming if the imagery or content waxed too outlandish, had few doubts that the ancient epic now decorating his sleep was coming straight from Taliesin, and might actually be an unedited slice of Urshu memory. In the fourteenth century B.C., all chaos seemed to rule. Parts of the spaceport were burning, and the obelisks and trilithons around the central landing ziggurat were shrouded in a pall of oily black smoke. The sparking blue tracer of particle weapons cut through the gloom and ricochetted off the marble, gold, and black titanium facings of the power stones in lethal energy splashes. Attack disks hurled low overhead, pounding the ground with their deathrays. Crumps like the rumble of thunder, and regular tremblings from the ground under
his feet, indicated, somewhere in the distance, huge explosions were being detonated as Nephilim-loyal sappers demolished the Baalbeck infrastructure. Without being told, Renquist knew he was seeing the final days of the Nephilim. They were pulling out, abandoning the colony as the rebellion swept over them and the Earth became unmanageable.
The revolt was first instigated by the genetically engineered military class, Renquist’s own ancestry, the Original Beings, but it had quickly spread through the large and constantly growing human population, and even to some of the Urshu. Tampering with monkey genes, it turned out, had been a grave error by the alien Nephilim. All around him, crowds were in advanced states of refugee panic or lynch-mob hysteria. Some simply wanted to get away, while others sought to destroy. Bodies of the dead and wounded lay where they fell. The great flowing flags and banners that had once streamed in the backwash of the rising and descending shuttles were now burned, torn, or trampled underfoot. The vents in the lower levels of the ziggurat, that, in better and calmer times, had jetted decoratively imposing gushers of brightly colored vapor, were now dead—smashed by rioters or clogged with debris. Only the massive iron wind chimes in front of the primary trilithon clashed and clanged, and even their tone seemed to have changed. They now tolled the passing knell of an era.
The crowds milling across the landing and launch sites at Baalbeck were primarily human, but by no means exclusively so. Dozens of the small grey bioentities scurried, scuttled, and tried to hide before they were trampled underfoot. A number of Urshu could also be spotted amid the tumult, doing their best to avoid the hostility they naturally seemed to evoke as the Nephilim’s key administrators. The only group manifesting a defined sense of purpose was a flying wedge of Original Beings who had fought their way to the foot of the landing ziggurat. Their intention seemed to be to board and capture
the single spacecraft that floated over the apex of the ziggurat and continued to load a select passenger list of those who would return to the stars and continue to live in the golden sunland of an advanced culture and technology. The Original Beings had a few beam weapons, but they were seriously outgunned by the loyalist humans in blue battle armor maintaining a perimeter partway up the structure.
the single spacecraft that floated over the apex of the ziggurat and continued to load a select passenger list of those who would return to the stars and continue to live in the golden sunland of an advanced culture and technology. The Original Beings had a few beam weapons, but they were seriously outgunned by the loyalist humans in blue battle armor maintaining a perimeter partway up the structure.
Renquist didn’t have to be told he was not only looking at the very last ship out, but the command vessel of Marduk Ra, as well. It came to him as one of those innate pieces of given intelligence that come only in dreams. He had seen ships like it before in the dreamstate. More organic than the geometrical machines to which Renquist had become accustomed in the twentieth century, they gave the impression parts had been grown rather than built. The long threatening spines that extended from the underside and the outer edge of its convex, saucer-shaped structure seemed more akin to something that might be found on a creature from an extremely hostile marine environment. The sense of the aquatic was reinforced by fringes of waving tendril-like projections that undulated between the spines. Even the very fabric of the craft’s main hull was composed of formidable overlapping scales, like those of a mythological dragon or sea monster. He could imagine how effective these craft must have been in putting the fear of the gods into primitive mankind when they had first arrived. Now that the last ship was leaving, the Earth would undoubtedly revert to the same primitivism that had held sway before the Nephilim had arrived, except it would be complicated by the products of their failed experiments. The newly modified humans, the Urshu, and the nosferatu would roam the planet, having their own influence on all the history to come.
A commotion broke out at the foot of the ziggurat. A small force of loyalist troops were fighting their way up to the ship, acting as an escort to something that, at first,
Renquist was unable to see. Then, in a flurry of movement, as the escort struggled up the main ramp of the ziggurat, he had a brief glimpse of a face. Malevolent and wholly nonhuman, it had two black, sharklike eyes and a bizarre, vertical, almost vaginal slit for a mouth, beneath which depended a beard of moving tendrils, like articulated feelers or fleshy sluglike probes. He recognized it immediately. It was either the Great Lord Cthulhu, the soul-sucking, squid-headed god of human legend, or one of his close, malignant, and alien kin. Thousands of years later, in contemporary Los Angeles, Renquist would all but lose his undead immortality to Cthulhu, and although many among those who knew credited him with having defeated the monstrous Old One, he knew he had inflicted only a mild reversal, and, indeed, finding himself so close to the being, or even to one like it, so disturbed him that Renquist struggled desperately to wake.
Renquist was unable to see. Then, in a flurry of movement, as the escort struggled up the main ramp of the ziggurat, he had a brief glimpse of a face. Malevolent and wholly nonhuman, it had two black, sharklike eyes and a bizarre, vertical, almost vaginal slit for a mouth, beneath which depended a beard of moving tendrils, like articulated feelers or fleshy sluglike probes. He recognized it immediately. It was either the Great Lord Cthulhu, the soul-sucking, squid-headed god of human legend, or one of his close, malignant, and alien kin. Thousands of years later, in contemporary Los Angeles, Renquist would all but lose his undead immortality to Cthulhu, and although many among those who knew credited him with having defeated the monstrous Old One, he knew he had inflicted only a mild reversal, and, indeed, finding himself so close to the being, or even to one like it, so disturbed him that Renquist struggled desperately to wake.
Although neither would ever know it, at the same time Renquist’s dream took him to the ancient destruction of Baalbeck, Marieko’s dreamstate was also being invaded by outside forces. As an accomplished dreamwright herself, Marieko instantly knew that she was being either mildly tortured or rigorously tested. Her first assumption was that, since she was deep within Fenrior’s realm, it was the lord or one of his retainers infiltrating her sleep, but she had seen his handiwork when he’d introduced his ninja into the dream she had shared with Renquist back at Ravenkeep. This intrusion was entirely different in its style, content, and the ambiguity of its meaning and motivation. Fenrior’s approach might have been violent, even intimidating, but it would also have been direct and to the point. Whoever or whatever was now gauging the vulnerabilities of her mind was subtle, devious, and so highly skilled it frightened her. What frightened her more, though, was that each time she attempted to wrestle back control of the nightmare, the
author of the horror had the power to swat her helplessly away, as though it was scarcely any effort.
author of the horror had the power to swat her helplessly away, as though it was scarcely any effort.
To start from a point of complete imbalance, the invasion of her dreams began by using her own memories to take her back to the single most terrifying episode in her existence. She found herself back, buried alive in the iron-bound Kenzu casket, with twelve feet of earth packed above her, at the very moment when, in reality, she had started helplessly screaming, before she was ultimately rescued by the thrall Katoh. In this new version, however, Katoh didn’t seem to exist, and she had to rescue herself, chewing with her own fangs, like a man-trapped she-wolf, through the carved and lacquered pine of the confining coffin, and then clawing her own way to the surface, nails ripped, and fingers little more than bloody stumps, choking and gagging on the loose earth that filled her nose, mouth, and throat.
Even when she thrust through the subsoil, parting the damp, insect-filled grass on her grave, she found her troubles far from over. In one of those unquestioned and unquestionable dream transitions, she was suddenly a human child again, age seven or eight, the time when the Lord Vampire Daimyo and his noble undead companions, on their tall thoroughbred horses, had descended on the peasant home of her parents and feasted with casual brutality on the entire family with the exception of the single girlchild who would one day be Marieko Matsunaga. On a whim, Daimyo had taken her alive to be put through the Change at puberty and adopted into the Yarabachi Clan, first as a plaything, then as a concubine, a blade-maid, and finally, when she found elevation and favor, as a scholar and historian.
Again, the story differed from reality; instead of being taken by the Lord Vampire and set on the strange immortal path she had taken ever since, in another exquisitely executed transition, she found herself part of a parade of miniskirted street whores in some gaudy post-nuclear anime dystopia. Strange aircraft drifted over a
landscape of slums and bombed-out ruins, and mutant cruisers leered at her from passing, futuristic automobiles, while the engines of lightweight motorcycles screamed as suicidal young men performed tricks on them for the benefit of the working girls. A figure in a voluminous Yakuza pimp-black overcoat approached her down the wet neon-reflecting sidewalk. She recognized him immediately, or, to be more exact, she recognized both of the pimp’s alternating faces: Lord Daimyo and Taliesin the Merlin, one and the threatening same, in body and overcoat.
landscape of slums and bombed-out ruins, and mutant cruisers leered at her from passing, futuristic automobiles, while the engines of lightweight motorcycles screamed as suicidal young men performed tricks on them for the benefit of the working girls. A figure in a voluminous Yakuza pimp-black overcoat approached her down the wet neon-reflecting sidewalk. She recognized him immediately, or, to be more exact, she recognized both of the pimp’s alternating faces: Lord Daimyo and Taliesin the Merlin, one and the threatening same, in body and overcoat.
In Marieko’s reading of the glimpse, the Merlin had just betrayed himself by a flourish of vanity. He hadn’t been able to resist affixing his signature to this bout of Freudian assault. Had he remained anonymous, he would have been able to continue to mess with her mind long after the dream was finished. She would never have been sure who had been doing it to her, and she would have continued to guess and speculate. The Merlin was a fool, and she decided to tell him so. She opened her mouth and found herself screaming invective, and probably obscenities, in some imaginary dream-tongue even she didn’t recognize. The other prostitutes on the street were nosferatu to a sister, but once she had opened her mouth in defiance to Daimyo/Taliesin, they turned on her, fangs extending, hands morphing to talons, eyes glowing with the menace of bloodlust, advancing on her like a pack, edging to circle, building their rage to rip, rend, and mutilate. At the selfsame time Renquist was fighting his way out of the dream downfall of Baalbeck, Marieko decided she’d had more than enough of this pointless and unpleasant game and kicked upward with all her strength for the surface of wakefulness.
Renquist exited the dreamstate both angry and mystified. His distrust of the Merlin was also greatly intensified. Taliesin had fed dreams to Columbine—and look what had happened to her. He had no idea of the extent of the
Merlin’s powers or his objectives, and he knew there was no easy way to learn. The only purpose Renquist could see behind invading his much needed sleep with a graphic dream projection of the fall of Baalbeck was to implant the idea of a kinship between the nosferatu and the Urshu. Of course, the destruction of Baalbeck could have come either from his own genetic memory or that of another of the undead, except he absolutely knew it couldn’t be.
Merlin’s powers or his objectives, and he knew there was no easy way to learn. The only purpose Renquist could see behind invading his much needed sleep with a graphic dream projection of the fall of Baalbeck was to implant the idea of a kinship between the nosferatu and the Urshu. Of course, the destruction of Baalbeck could have come either from his own genetic memory or that of another of the undead, except he absolutely knew it couldn’t be.
The destruction of Baalbeck was not encoded anywhere in the DNA memory of any contemporary nosferatu because that very destruction had been total and all consuming. That last spacecraft, with its scales and spines, had dropped the final sunbomb as it rose through the stratosphere. The fusion-plasma device had incinerated the spaceport from which the vessel had, moments before, departed. All were obliterated, loyalists and rebels alike, nosferatu, human, Urshu, and bioentity. No place remained in the double helix for any legacy of the ones who perished in the spaceport holocaust. All trace of them had been permanently erased. Modern nosferatu were exclusively descended from the Original Beings who had taken part in the earlier escape bid, the Flight. The logic was irrefutable. The dream was a manipulation by the Merlin, and the invasion angered Renquist to the point that he knew he must confront Taliesin immediately. The game must be stopped.
He rose from the bed and from his precious fur rug. He knew the sun had yet to set, but it hardly mattered. Both his room in the castle, and the one where the Urshu was lodged were closed and without windows. Inside the confines of Fenrior, day and night were one. After the arrival of Julia and Destry, Renquist’s quarters had been upgraded from the high-end dungeon to a fairly luxurious guest room as merited by the understanding, not to say friendship, being established between him and the Lord Fenrior. Although he by no means had anything
more than the most vague impression of the general layout of the castle, he knew the Merlin occupied similar guest accommodations two landings below him in the same tower. He would face the Merlin immediately, while his anger was still hot. He knew to confront Taliesin while still incensed would probably be the best kind of psychic smoke screen. The Urshu would be forced to cut through a tangle of outrage before he discovered Renquist’s real thoughts.
more than the most vague impression of the general layout of the castle, he knew the Merlin occupied similar guest accommodations two landings below him in the same tower. He would face the Merlin immediately, while his anger was still hot. He knew to confront Taliesin while still incensed would probably be the best kind of psychic smoke screen. The Urshu would be forced to cut through a tangle of outrage before he discovered Renquist’s real thoughts.
He dressed quickly and left the room. For a moment, as he closed the door behind him, he contemplated taking a sword with him, but decided against it. The occasion called for tactics and intelligence, not cold steel, and carrying the blade, even for the sake of symbolism, was too much of an implied admission that he didn’t know if he could handle the situation without resorting to violence. With the Merlin, recourse to even the threat of violence was the very last thing Renquist desired. Aside from any other considerations, he was certain the Merlin was more than capable of handling anything physical.
As he descended the stairs to the level that included Taliesin’s quarters, he met Theda dressed in an ankle-length leather skirt with a hobble, and a starched white shirt, which together lent her a look not unlike a fetishistic Edwardian governess. Her face was a pale thundercloud of undisguised frustration. “You wouldn’t have happened to see a lazy slut of a house thrall would you, Victor?”
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