Free More Than Mortal by Mick Farren Page B

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.
    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.
    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