Empress of the Sun Read online

  It’s like in the Napoleonic War, Everett thought. All charges and close-in action. Only on the scale of insects. Claw-to-claw combat. Halo-bots! Thousands of ’em!

  The spy-bots fought hard but were overwhelmed by Kax’s forces. They went down; legs flailing, they went under.

  Everett saw tiny machine mandibles take the spy-bots apart, hack them finer and finer until no visible trace remained. They were only machine, but the death struggles of the spy-bots disturbed him.

  Kax’s halo-bots recombined, sprouted wings and flew up to join her own halo. The crew waited as Kax’s halo ran with rainbow colours. Her eyes were closed. Sharkey held the shotgun ready in his hands.

  Kax’s eyes flashed open. ‘It is as I feared, Anastasia Sixsmyth. The Genequeens know you are here.’

  ‘I still don’t believe—’ Sharkey began, but Captain Anastasia cut him off.

  ‘The Genequeens?’

  ‘The Worldwheel is ruled by six clades: the Water-Born, the Stormsingers, the Genequeens, the Grain Queens, the Strong-Against-Asteroids, the Sunlords. Each controls one vital function of the Worldwheel. Water, weather, biology, agriculture, space-defence. The sun itself is the territory of my clade, the Sunlords. The Worldwheel is arranged so that it can’t function unless all of us work together. But there will always be … rivalries. This crechewood was designed by the Genequeens; their bots are all over it. They are aware of your ship, that it’s from somewhere outside the World-wheel, and they would claim it as their property.’

  ‘Mr Mchynlyth, Sen, I don’t care how much you’re hurting, but all efforts to get us airworthy. Mr Sharkey, Mr Singh, as soon as it’s light you get down there and find that final engine. I want off this world quick smart. Kax, I apologise for doubting you. Please help my crew.’

  The Jiju riffled her crest.

  ‘To work,’ Captain Anastasia commanded.

  ‘Sen,’ Everett called her back as the crew went to their posts. ‘What was the card?’

  ‘Dunno what you mean, Everett Singh.’

  Why did everything with Sen come down to a denial or a challenge or a game or a lie?

  ‘I saw you playing with the tarot.’

  Everett could see no possible space to hide the Everness tarot in Sen’s tiny clothing, but she produced the deck as if by her conjuring skill and flipped up the top card: the fat jolly woman on the throne, holding stars on sticks. Everett could read the title now: the Sun Empress. He shivered. Coincidences, he was beginning to believe, were not coincidences, but subtle leaks and links between universes. Everything was connected.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘A generous host. An unexpected visit or an invitation. ’Ware the powerful.’

  14

  ‘Just two of you left?’

  ‘Temporarily. Then two become one.’

  The engine hunters were ranging deep into unknown terrain. Number-one impeller had sheared off first and so lay furthest from Everness’s crash site. Sharkey strode ahead, the great white explorer, jaunty hat on his head and a shotgun cocked over his shoulder, but Everett knew that he had no idea where he was going. Finding pod one would be as much stumbling over it as jungle navigation. We could be anywhere, Everett thought. The forest looked different from every angle; they could be many miles or just footsteps away from the drop point and never realise it. Kax assured them she would not let them get lost. Her halo was an external memory that logged every image, every footstep. Jiju satnav. It also contained a vast amount of forest lore. On every side were plants, bugs, mini-lizard-birds and things that lurked in the perma-shadows on the far sides of the trees that could bite sting poison blind burn trip-out infect infest and outright kill. Plus Sunlord hatchlings, hatchling hordes of other, hostile clades and Kax’s rival for Princess of the Sunlords status. Poor old ’Appening Ed never stood a chance. If that same little geometry problem that crashed Everness hadn’t dropped him from Earth 3 screaming into a kilometre of open air.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, how many of you were there originally?’

  ‘Three or four thousand.’

  Everett’s imagination reeled. This was death on an industrial scale.

  ‘That’s … That’s horrible. That’s megadeath.’

  Kax cocked her head at Everett in the way he had learnt meant, You are so alien to me.

  ‘How can something die that isn’t properly alive?’

  ‘But, they’re you.’ And the look Everett gave Kax said exactly the same thing.

  ‘Do you worry about megadeath every time you masturbate?’

  Everett tripped over a non-existent root.

  ‘Dah … wha … what?’

  ‘It’s a male ape thing, I understand.’

  ‘I … don’t … never …’

  ‘Really? From my understanding, that is almost unique.’

  ‘Kax, omis don’t talk about that sort of thing.’

  ‘Why not? They should. But my point is, all those billions of sperm, do you worry about them dying? Of course not. You only worry about them when they become complex, living, thinking things. We’re like that with hatchlings. Thousands come out of the hatching ponds but only a very few become Jiju. All the stuff that you apes do inside you, we do out in the world. The fastest sperm, the toughest hatchling – it’s no different.’

  Everett was still squirming inside. How deep inside had Kax’s scanners reached? He felt as embarrassed as if she had examined his balls close up and very, very personal.

  ‘So, how old are you?’ Everett asked. Move the subject away. Get right away from teenage-omi stuff.

  ‘Almost six hundred days.’

  Everett relished the mental arithmetic. Diskworld days were about thirty hours. That made Kax about …

  ‘Two years old!’

  ‘Like I said, everything that happens inside for apes happens outside for Jiju. When the hatch is down to about a hundred, then the first transformation occurs and we attract haloes and become fully Jiju. I’m still growing, but I have twelve kills.’ Everett was a beginner in reading Jiju emotions – they were not the same as human emotions, not the same at all – but he read the equivalent of pride in the display of colours on Kax’s crest.

  ‘I hear what you’re saying, but it’s like so, so far away from anything I know. It’s like … The nearest I can think of is like kids in Syria, or child soldiers in Africa. But I can’t really know what that’s like for them either – it’s something I see on the television. I can’t feel it. Life is so cheap with you.’

  ‘You are so, so wrong, Everett. Life is everything to us. Every moment is like a burning flame or a jewel or a flower to us, because we have so little of it. We have a word for it. It can’t be translated.’ Kax gave a fluting, falling whistle. In that brief phrase was every musical turn, every chord change, that had turned Everett’s heart over. ‘Think of a storm, a great howling storm, bigger than any you have ever known before,’ Kax continued. ‘A storm so big it could tear the earth from the bones of the world. That storm has howled and raged forever. Then, for a moment, the wind drops and the clouds break and there is calm and sun. In the sun, in the stillness, a creature sings. Only for a moment: the song. Then the clouds close and the wind returns and the storm roars on forever.’ Again, Kax spoke the achingly beautiful tune. ‘That is the song in the heart of the storm. Life is precious to us because we don’t live as long as you apes. By the time you are thirty, I will be dead. If my enemy doesn’t kill me first. The world is a wheel of wonders.’ Everett had heard Kax use that expression before, like a blessing, or a God-willing. ‘We live our lives hard and fast and knowing that all this wonder will end. Everything I experience might be the one and only time I experience it, so I must suck every drop of nectar out of it. And it’s the same for you. It’s just that, because your lives are long, you think you will live forever. But no one lives forever, Everett. The storm will come and never end. I think our way is wiser.’

  A yipping rebel yell from ahead. Everett saw Sharkey’s hat
go up in the air on the end of his shotgun.

  *

  The impeller pod lay in a shaft of sunlight at the centre of a clearing of snapped branches and splintered wood. Everett stared up the well the falling impeller had smashed through the trees. Up there, clear blue sky. The great forest of Crechewood rang around him with voices; layer upon layer of sound, circling out further and further, creature calling to creature. It was dangerous here, but it was beautiful.

  I’m trying to sense like a Jiju does, Everett thought. Each experience as if it were the first and last time.

  Nanocarbon was light and very strong – necessary qualities for airship engineering – and the forest canopy had broken the fall, but Sharkey still worked his way carefully and meticulously over the pod, feeling out every crack and break.

  ‘I am still interested in your sperm,’ Kax said. She perched in a root buttress, grooming her crest with her thumb claw and examining what she found there. ‘Have you put any inside the girl Sen?’

  Even Sharkey stopped his examination to stare at that.

  ‘What?’ Everett yelled. ‘What the f … God, no! She’s only thirteen. Nearly fourteen. No!’

  ‘Are human females not fertile at that age?’

  ‘Yes, but … we have rules. You have to be sixteen. I think.’

  Sen was as gobby and in-your-face about sex as the only child of a piratical Airish air-freighter could be. Much more than Everett ever could be – she made him blush with her forwardness – but Everett knew it was just Big Talk. Sen was too proud, too self-possessed, too well brought up by Anastasia Sixsmyth to play around with sex. She was the Captain’s beautiful daughter: she was a princess.

  ‘Silly rules. Jiju would not waste time.’

  ‘I don’t … You can’t say things like that. You can’t talk about her like that.’

  ‘You don’t? I thought you did. Maybe I was wrong about what I saw.’

  ‘You didn’t see anything.’

  ‘I did.’ Kax extended a fighting claw and gently touched the point to Everett’s forehead.

  ‘You had no right!’ Everett yelled.

  ‘This is my world. I have every right. So: what I saw, what did it mean?’

  ‘I like her. She’s a friend. A mate who’s a girl. A special friend.’

  Kax blinked at Everett.

  ‘I like being with her,’ Everett continued. ‘But she can be so annoying. Sometimes it’s like she’s the only one who understands me, but then sometimes it’s like she doesn’t know anything, and I can’t get anything through to her, and it’s like she’s being stupid on purpose. And then all those games she plays with me that I don’t even know are games, let alone the rules. And she’s so moody it’s like I’m scared to be near her half the time; and the other half of the time I don’t know what I’ve done to make her be like that and she won’t ever tell me and she gets on like she’s so tough but she’s not as tough as she thinks she is, no way. But she’s annoying, and stupid, but she’s like always in my head and I can’t get her out.’

  ‘Oh man,’ Sharkey said. ‘You got it bad, omi.’

  ‘So do you or do you not want to put your sperm into her?’ Kax asked Everett innocently. ‘I am confused.’

  ‘Let me tell you this, my reptile friend,’ Sharkey said. ‘You may have built this disc-world, and that’s a mighty work, but us apes, well, we done something greater: we created this funny little thing called love. Engine’s good. Let’s get back to the drop zone and get the hell off this terrible place – no offence, ma’am.’

  *

  The plume of orange smoke from the distress flare rose straight up through the hole in the trees into the clear air. The final engine had fallen too far from the ship for brute-force, aching-muscle hauling to drag it through the forest. Captain Anastasia had a different plan. When the smoke went up, she would lay in a course, Mchynlyth would gingerly release what power remained in the batteries and Sen would coax the creaking, groaning impellers into motion. She would fly her ship to the engine, haul it up and make Everness a proper airship again, bona Hackney-fashion.

  Everett shaded his eyes and peered up into the circle of bright sunlight. ‘How long do you think?’

  ‘Captain will take her own good time,’ Sharkey said. ‘You can’t push the lady.’ But he too was scanning the sky, looking for the shadow of Everness’s hull.

  The sound was small but unlike anything Everett had heard in the wheel of the world. A ringing, like high-pitched bells. It came from every side at once.

  ‘What is that?’ Sharkey said.

  Kax reacted to the sound as if she had been electrocuted. She crouched, every muscle in her legs and arms tensed, her tight belly knotted like fists. Her eyes and nostril-slits were wide, the pupils of her eyes black holes. Her halo was like a crown of blades, flashing silver-blue. Her thumb claws were out.

  ‘Kax …’

  ‘Arm yourselves, apes,’ she said. Her voice was like the edge of a blade along Everett’s spine.

  Sharkey threw Everett a shotgun. They scanned the edge of the clearing. Nothing to be seen, but again the ringing chime came from the tree shadows. And was answered. The blades of Kax’s halo were striking each other, giving off beautiful, clear, tuned bell chimes.

  ‘Oh. My. God,’ Everett whispered. It could only be one thing.

  ‘My enemy has found me,’ Kax said. The adversary stepped out from the dark depths of Crechewood into the light of the clearing. In every way she was Kax’s double. At the sight of the humans she sank into a fighting crouch. Her halo flashed into a battery of hovering sword-blades. Kax sang a long phrase at the adversary. The blades flicked back into the halo, blue-silver to Kax’s silver-blue.

  ‘Do not interfere,’ Kax said. ‘Whatever happens.’

  ‘At the same time, Mr Singh, keep your safety-catch off,’ Sharkey whispered.

  ‘Kax!’ Everett had not meant to say the word aloud but the fear spoke out. Kax glanced at him. In the instant’s distraction, her hatch-sister attacked.

  A storm of blades blazed across the clearing. Kax rolled, threw up a hand. Her halo reconfigured into a shield. The blades bounced. The adversary hissed, sent her blade-storm high up into the air, turned it into spears and brought them plunging down towards Kax. With a thought Kax dissolved her shield, flashed her halo into a swarm of dancing daggers. As one each dagger targeted a spear and deflected it. Everett jumped back as a spear embedded itself in the leaf litter a hand’s breath from his foot. Even as her hatch-sister pulled her spears out of the ground, Kax threw the dagger-swarm at her. The adversary shrieked in rage: daggers duelled with daggers in mid-air, like a swarm of furious insects. The clearing rang to a rising whistling whoop: Kax’s war cry as she launched herself at her adversary, thumb claws extended. The adversary spun away, but Kax’s left claw opened a line across her side.

  The two Jiju rolled apart.

  The shotgun twitched in Everett’s hand.

  ‘I’ve got a shot,’ he whispered.

  Sharkey knocked the barrel away. ‘And do you know which is which? This ain’t our fight.’

  The Jiju had recalled their swarms of battling daggers and, in a blink, changed them into swords: long sword, short sword, swashbuckling back and forth in thrusts and cuts and parries while beneath them Kax and her adversary tangled in a blur of stabs, punches, slashes, bites. Blood sprayed as thumb claws opened up long gashes; Jiju feet slipped on the blood-soaked ground. The speed and savagery left Everett reeling; each blow, each rake of the claw, was across his own imagination. Sharkey was right – he could no longer be certain which was Kax and which her hatch-sister. Above them, the dancing swords cut and parried. Everett understood how this battle would end. Whoever lost concentration first died. The halo-blades would make short and sure work of that.

  The Jiju sprang apart with ringing cries that sent winged things surging up from the branches through the spire of orange smoke. They were hacked and bloodied. Everett could not look. His heart was hammering. His breath
was pumping. There was a slow, steady beat behind his eyes. But he wanted to look. This was hideous and terrifying and the most exciting thing he had ever seen. This would end with bloody death, perhaps for a creature – a person – he had come to care about, and he could not take his eyes away. It was all he could do to stop himself roaring as if he was in the North Stand at White Hart Lane. He hated himself.

  A short sword parried a long sword and dived down to nick six quills from a Jiju crest. If the target hadn’t spotted it at the last moment, it would have cut her head in two.

  This couldn’t go on much longer. Not at this speed and with such savagery.

  As if they both knew the battle was in the endgame, each Jiju called back her halo-weapons and bonded them to her hands. Spiked ball on a chain and a brutal stabbing sword against two sets of long curved claws. They clashed in flying sparks. Shrieks and piercing whistles tore the air. Everett had once heard a rabbit die in the jaws of a fox. It had squealed long and terrible, but never so filled with hate. The clearing rang with metal on metal. Stop it, stop, Everett wanted to scream, but he could not speak, could not move, could do nothing but look in horror and wonder. Guys had fought at Bourne Green – Everett had not been one of them, but he had seen fights and he hated them; they made people – friends – into something he did not know and could not recognise. Ugly, harming things. He never looked at them the same way afterwards. They had seemed savage, those fights, but they were short and they had rules. This had no rules and would go on until only one survived. He cried out as a set of claws drew three bloody gashes across a belly. The one with the claws was the one with the cropped crest – that was Kax. Was it? Wasn’t it? But she also had the wound in her side. That was the other one. Was it? Wasn’t it? Then the other Jiju caught her feet in the chain of the morning-star and tripped, and threw all her weight on top of the short, stabby, brutal blade, and the other one tried to hold her off but her strength was gone, she was bleeding from a dozen cuts and the blade was inching closer and she was trying to hold it off but her fingers were blood-slippery and all of a sudden it was the end and he could see it in both their eyes.