Empress of the Sun Read online

  He saw his face, that was not his face, but the face of his alter, that other Everett Singh, that Charlotte Villiers had taken and twisted into the opposite of him. He saw him in the snow and the evening light at the gate of Abney Park Cemetery, looking straight at Everett as the weapons unfolded from his arms. But worse was what he saw in his imagination: his mum, giving that same ‘Take care, love’ strong-but-tired smile to anti-Everett, as he set off to Bourne Green. He saw the anti-Everett turn and return the smile, not to his mum, to him, Everett. It said, Are you so sure you’re the hero here?

  Everett leaped out of his hammock. He stood panting. Sleep was impossible now. He pulled on clothes and went out into the corridors and walkways of Everness, lit soft ghostly green by emergency lighting. Noises and groaning from the jax. Sharkey was still suffering. Everett took the staircase up to the High Mess. The beautiful room had been wrecked by the crash. Windows were smashed in, shipskin ripped by branches. The great Divano table had been overturned.

  A patch of light focused on a torn section of hull, then rose up and turned on Everett. Everett shielded his eyes. The light went out.

  ‘Everett?’ Captain Anastasia’s voice. Everett’s vision returned through blobs of white and blindness: the Captain, with a headlamp, and a knife in her hand. A knife that could heal as well as cut. A skinripper: a scalpel for the nanocarbon skin of airships. She had been repairing her ship. Guilt, bitter and thick, welled up inside Everett, so strong it made him shudder.

  ‘Captain … Annie.’ Call me Annie, the Captain had said, in this very room, before the fight against the Nahn. You’ll know when you can. ‘The ship … your ship … I’m sorry.’

  The words were wrong. The words were stupid. The words could never be enough. Words were all he had.

  The room was dark but he saw Captain Anastasia flinch, as if he had touched her with a needle of ice.

  ‘We’ll fix her bonaroo,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘We will.’

  ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘Long enough. I can’t sleep. I should sleep – the Dear knows I’ve enough to do in the daylight – but I can’t, not while she’s this way.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be Airish enough to feel the way you do for your ship.’

  ‘It’s not an Airish feeling,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘What do you feel when you think about your father?’

  Again Everett saw his dad, hands outstretched, knocking him out of the focus of the jumpgun. He saw again the look on Tejendra’s face. Surprise, but Everett now recalled another expression: triumph. He had saved his son.

  ‘It’s like that,’ Captain Anastasia said, and Everett knew that his face had said all he could not. ‘It’s the heart of you. Everett, make me some of that hot chocolate. The special stuff.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Everett,’ Captain Anastasia’s tone said that he was not fully forgiven yet. But he would be, when everything was healed and whole again. Her family was; her ship would be. ‘You don’t have to rush off. You don’t have to rush anywhere. I’ve been up here hours. Listen.’ She held a finger to her lips.

  Everett held his breath. Sound by sound, the night made itself heard. Whoops, whistles, chirps, metallic rasping, long dwindling hisses that morphed into tweets, hiccups and burps and barks and sounds like human sobbing. Voice upon voice it built. And not just noises. Winged things darted and dashed past the smashed window. Leaves thrashed, lights pulsed, like glow-worms the size of footballs. Swarms of sparks flocked like starlings in a winter evening sky, a whirl and dance of tiny lights. From the far distance came a deep moan like the cry of a migrating whale.

  ‘Look at the dark,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘There’s no moon. The stars are beautiful, and I know them like I know my own skin, but the moon, that’s part of me. I miss it.’

  ‘They couldn’t really have one,’ Everett said. ‘I think they must have used up every planet and moon in the solar system to build this. Even then, it wouldn’t have been enough. Because I was thinking, whoever built this place, they would have to have been around a long time, like a lot longer than human beings have on our world – worlds. And the things that hit the camp, I mean, I kind of only saw them for a moment, but what they looked like most was dinosaurs. And that got me thinking: what if the dinosaurs hadn’t died out? What if that asteroid hadn’t hit the Earth, or whatever – I don’t totally believe that it was one big catastrophe, but, anyway, what if the dinosaurs hadn’t died out but just kept evolving? And what if one of those dinosaurs had a big brain, and could use its hands, and discovered tools and language and fire and got really, really smart? Smart dinosaurs, they could build something like this. They’d have a sixty-five-million year head start on us.’

  ‘Everett, you don’t have to try to explain everything,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Sometimes being there is plenty. I’ll take that hot chocolate now, I think.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Make it, Mr Singh. And bona breakfasts for everyone. Including Mr Sharkey. I imagine he’ll be pretty hungry.’

  8

  Hunting again. Not meat. Sharkey would not make that mistake again. He had been up all night, groaning and heaving. It was metal they were hunting. Engine. Sharkey hacked a path through thorned vines and feathery fronds that curled away at the touch of his machete blade. Everett was three steps behind him. They were following the line of Everness’s descent, away from the river where Sen had hidden Everett’s clothes, and the forest was dense and confusing. Everett couldn’t see more than five metres in any direction. There were no patterns, no shapes, nothing to steer by, just layer upon layer of vegetation. And sounds. Whistles and twitterings and musical trills and deep whooping noises that rose up into high screeches; clickings and tickings and scritchings and scratchings and hummings and bummings. All around, but never a glimpse of the things that made the sounds. There were movements high in the tree canopy, or the flicker of what looked like the wings of a butterfly the size of a dog, or a shape moving against the unmoving background of the trees and leaves, glimpsed in the corner of the eye. But when Everett looked, there was never anything there.

  Compasses were useless – Diskworld lacked the north and south magnetic poles of a spherical planet. The compass needle spun all over the dial. An Alderson disk had two directions: towards the sun and away from the sun.

  ‘You’d think something that big would have left an equally big hole,’ Sharkey said, squinting up into the dazzle of sun-rays slanting through the leaves.

  ‘I think things grow pretty fast round here,’ Everett said. He climbed over the ridge of an exposed tree root and dropped down into the shadow. Something lunged up at him, something pale and eyeless and silvery that raised a frill of translucent flesh, and spat. Everett dodged a jet of green. It struck a leaf which immediately began to brown and wither. Sharkey swung a shotgun butt and struck it hard. It gave a hissing shriek and vanished into the dark.

  ‘I’ve an idea. Let’s stay out of the shadows,’ Sharkey said. ‘Look after yourself, Mr Singh.’ He threw Everett his other shotgun. ‘You know how to use that.’

  They pressed on, carefully detouring around the shadows that never changed. Everett’s skin prickled. He felt as if he was being watched, not by a single set of eyes, but by the whole forest.

  ‘So tell me, Mr Singh, do you truly believe that this world was made by lizardmen?’ Sharkey said.

  ‘Evolved dinosaurs. They mightn’t look all that different from you and me – walking on two legs, eyes facing forward, hands and thumbs and all that. Maybe a bit scaly.’

  ‘They sound mighty like lizardmen to me. Now, I don’t hold with such things myself, but it strikes me, lizardmen or not, any folk smart enough to build a thing like this Diskworld, well, you’d think we’d’ve seen some evidence of them by now.’

  ‘It’s a big place,’ Everett said. ‘You could lose entire civilisations on this world.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sharkey said.

  ‘When you
say you don’t hold with such things, what does that mean?’ Everett asked.

  ‘When the Dear made the world, his design was perfect, but these lizardmen saw fit to take and turn it to their own design, not just this world but all the other worlds of this sun. That I call hubris – Satanic pride.’

  Everett knew better than to argue with people on matters of personal belief.

  ‘However, I’ve seen things that the word of Dear don’t accommodate,’ Sharkey continued. ‘And I believe that where there is no direct guidance from scripture, a man may interpret according to his own wisdom.’ Sharkey held up a hand. ‘Quiet.’ Everett froze. Sharkey circled slowly. ‘There’s something between us and the drop zone.’

  ‘What?’ Everett whispered. His hands tightened on the shotgun.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Sharkey said. He stopped in his slow turning. ‘Ah! “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto ye.”’ He pointed with his shotgun. Fallen branches, white splintered wood still exposed. A hole in the forest.

  The impeller lay on its side, taller even than the tip of the feather in Sharkey’s hat. The branches had broken its fall but the casing looked battered and dented. Sharkey peered into the open end.

  ‘The fan blades look intact,’ he said. ‘Mchynlyth would know better.’ Sharkey opened up the inspection hatch.

  Out in the forest, branches crashed. Everett looked away from the fallen engine. The sound of thrashing foliage was coming towards them. Louder. Closer. Everett’s every sense was alert. Something was moving, something that did not disappear when you looked at it. Something big.

  ‘Sharkey, that something …’

  Everett saw it in the split second before it burst through the screen of leaves and creepers. It was blue and big. Very big. Proper Jurassic Park carnosaur big.

  Sharkey looked up.

  ‘Run!’ he yelled. Everett was three steps ahead of him. Everett glanced behind to see the hunter crash into the little clearing in an explosion of twigs and leaves. That one glance told him everything. Big as a house. Long neck, tiny beady eyes. Two strong legs. Claws like sabres on the short forearms. Teeth. Way too many teeth. Shimmering electric blue. And coming fast.

  ‘Where?’ Everett shouted.

  ‘Anywhere!’

  Everett looked at the shotgun in his hands.

  ‘Do you think …?’

  ‘You’d only annoy it,’ Sharkey panted.

  ‘It looks pretty annoyed anyway … whoa!’

  Everett’s boot caught an exposed root. He went over and down, hard. He came up to see a head the size of a family hatchback bearing down on him. Jaws opened. There could not be that many teeth in the universe. Rotting, half-chewed, undigested flesh gusted in his face. Then Everett saw a halo like a crown of golden thorns appear above the carnosaur’s head. The halo spun, glittering in the sunbeams striking down through the canopy of leaves. The carnosaur’s eyes went dull. The head pulled back. It drew itself up to its full height, shook its head as if trying to dislodge a fly from an earhole, then turned around and stalked back into the deep forest, still shaking its head.

  The halo lifted from the carnosaur’s head and disappeared.

  A face looked down into Everett’s. Wide eyes, with wide golden pupils and a black slit of an iris. A transparent membrane flicked across each eye. Two slits where a nose would be. The mouth a wide gash with almost no lips at all. Ears like little commas set low on the long, backwards-sloping skull. The skin was silvery, with the powdery consistency of the minute scales of moth wings. The hair was a thin Mohican from just above the eyes over the top of the skull to the nape of the neck. Long thick hairs lay flat. The eyes flicked their membrane-eyelids again and the hair rose and Everett saw it was very fine quills. The crest ran with rainbow colours and lay flat again. The nostrils flared. Not a human face. Never a human face. But it looked Everett up and down with purpose and intelligence. The lips moved. Music like birdsong came out.

  The thing repeated the snatch of birdsong.

  ‘Are you trying to talk to me?’ Everett said.

  The creature’s crest rose again. The air around its skull sparkled: the same halo that had circled the carnosaur’s head now appeared behind the creature’s head, a crown of living gold.

  ‘Everett, on my word, roll away. I have a clear shot,’ Sharkey called. From the edge of his vision Everett could see Sharkey, shotgun levelled. At the same instant the creature saw him too. The creature pointed, the golden aura flickered, something flashed in the light and Sharkey had a twenty-centimetre blade hovering at his throat.

  ‘Okay,’ Sharkey said, but he did not put the shotgun down. The creature snapped its attention back to Everett. It sang a trilling set of notes.

  ‘I am Everett Singh, from Earth 10,’ Everett said.

  The creature whistled a phrase that might have been Everett’s words played on a flute, gave a low burble and blinked its translucent eye-membranes again. The outer parts of the golden halo unravelled, flowed down the creature’s arm and formed a rotating ring around Everett’s face.

  ‘What the …?’ Sharkey shouted. The creature flicked one of its long, slender fingers at him. The hovering knife blade moved a fraction. Blood seeped from the tiny nick it made in Sharkey’s throat.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Everett called. ‘It’s … I think it’s … Oh wow!’

  ‘Are you okay, Everett?’

  He could hear voices in his head. Voices that were all one voice. His voice. Everett aged fourteen; Everett as a toddler forming his first word – Tottenham, his dad said, though his mum said it was really ‘Teddy’s eye socket’; Everett as an excited nine-year-old after a show at the London Planetarium; Everett the smart kid always giving the clever answer in Year Six; Everett speaking Palari; Everett’s few words of Punjabi. A thousand voices, all talking at once, all one voice. The creature lifted another finger and the golden halo lifted from Everett’s face, ran up the finger, up the long arm to rejoin the slowly spinning halo behind its head. Everett thought that it looked like a Ganesh, or a Shiva Nataraja, with haloes that burned with golden flames.

  The creature made a noise that sounded like a parrot saying Everett Singh. It made it again, clearer now. ‘Everett Singh. Earth 10.’

  Its voice was bird-like and more music than language, but Everett could understand every word.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Everett said.

  The creature cocked its head one way, then another.

  ‘Oh my God,’ it said. ‘You are Everett Singh from Earth 10.’ It looked at Sharkey, crooked a finger. The knife pulled away from his neck, flashed back to the halo and dissolved into glittering dust.

  ‘Did you just learn my entire language?’

  Again, the one-way-then-the-other look. Birds do that, Everett thought. Jackdaws and magpies. Clever birds.

  ‘Yes,’ the creature said. Its voice was becoming less bird-song and more Stoke Newington with every word. Its crest flicked up and turned deep electric blue. ‘I am Kakakakaxa.’

  ‘Sharkey,’ Everett said, ‘you believe in lizardmen now?’

  9

  The thousand bells of Heiden rang out from the city’s steeples, peal calling to peal, bell answering bell, from spire to spire, carillon to carillon, further and further until last of all the chimes of the Zeeferrenkerk on the Island of Chains hung faintly on the yellow evening air. Soft wet snow had begun, staying for a moment of white on the cobbles of the courtyard beneath Charlotte Villiers’s window. Golden light shone from the leaded windows around the court.

  ‘How many are staunch?’ Charlotte Villiers asked.

  ‘In our section, Aziz, de Freitas, Tlalo. The Earth 10ers.’

  ‘Not enough, Charles. Not enough. But at least Ibrim Hoj Kerrim is secure.’

  ‘You asked him to join the Order?’

  ‘In as many words. He informed me he would not need the support of the Order. Unfortunate. But he understands his position. The fact that he helped us in the past could be severely da
maging to his chances of becoming Primarch of the Plenitude of Known Worlds.’

  Charles Villiers helped himself to a bonbon from a porcelain dish. ‘Have you ever thought that he might just decide not to run for the Primarchy?’

  ‘Ridiculous. Quite ridiculous.’

  ‘Not everyone is as ambitious as you, cora,’ Charles Villiers said, helping himself to another sweetmeat. ‘These really are very good. I still don’t get the twin thing, but they really know how to cook.’

  A knock at the door. Lewis, Charlotte Villiers’s Earth 3 valet, entered with coffee. He noticed the uncomfortable silence as he poured two cups.

  ‘Thank you, Lewis.’ Charlotte Villiers took a sip. It was exquisite, as she had expected. How do they make it taste the way it smells? she wondered.

  Charles Villiers’s phone chimed. He tapped up the screen, then got up and went and opened the office door and looked up and down the corridor. He locked the door behind him.

  ‘I’ve got a trace from the tracking device,’ he said.

  ‘It works!’

  ‘Everness has made a jump. We know where they are.’

  ‘Good. We’ll have the Infundibulum by morning.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Charles Villiers said. ‘It seems your jumpgun may not have been as random as you think.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The plane he’s gone to, it’s been visited before,’ Charles Villiers said. ‘It was tagged by the E1 random survey.’ Before the Nahn assimilated ninety per cent of Earth 1’s humanity into an oozing nanotech group mind, that world had pioneered the Heisenberg Gate and sent drones on random jumps to parallel Earths, mapping the tiniest hairsbreadth of the immense variety of the Panoply of All Worlds.

  ‘Which plane?’

  Charles Villiers showed his alter the screen of his phone.