Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (44 page)

Was I?

I was.

I grasped the axe by the handle. I hefted it. It felt comfortable. Well weighted. Right.

“Okay,” I said. “Think you can make it up to the helipad? Good. You should be safe there. Avatars?”

The others were grouped round us. I rose to my feet.

“This is going to be harder than we thought,” I said. “But we do not stop. We do not falter. Somewhere on this boat are three men who we need to take alive at all costs. Everyone else is just in the way. Collateral damage. Do not get shot. Even a flesh wound will turn you back into who you used to be and leave you vulnerable. Apart from that – go for it. Let’s give these bastards hell.”

I caught Vamana’s eye. For once, the Dwarf wasn’t giving me that arch, superior look of his.

“Not bad, Mighty Joe Young,” he said. “Nice speech, well delivered. Rousing.”

And then mercenaries appeared, each clutching a stubby submachine gun at chest level.

And so began the fight of our lives.

49. AN ENGLISH THING

I
WAS THINKING
of Krystyna the Polish barista as we battled our way down through the boat.

I was thinking of Herriman my cat, and Mrs Deakins my busybody neighbour, and Francesca my ex.

I was thinking of my parents, now living at opposite ends of England, my dad in Cornwall, my mum in Northumberland, as far away from each other as they could be without crossing borders or water but still in contact via email and getting on better than at any time during their doomed-as-Uncle-Ben marriage.

I was thinking of the comics industry pros I’d hung out with at conventions and laughed and got drunk with, and also the fans who’d queued at a publisher’s booth for a signed sketch or my autograph, their admiration like a drug, heady while it lasted but always followed by a guilty comedown crash, as though I didn’t deserve it, a hollow high.

I was thinking of the people I liked and loved, the people who meant something to me, who had significance – Aanandi Sengupta foremost among them – and of all the people whom those people liked and loved, a network of personal connections, relationships that extended across nations, branching to all quarters of the globe, the thing that made seven billion separate humans a race.

The world had more uniting it than dividing it.

That was worth preserving.

That was what we were fighting for.

I swung Parashurama’s battleaxe as though I had been practising with it all my life. Mercenaries attacked. Mercenaries fell before me like scythed wheat.

Chatter-bursts of gunfire ripped the air. Rama’s arrows flew in showers. Kurma’s club bludgeoned and pummelled. Narasimha tore. Vamana crushed. Kalkin and Krishna slashed and stabbed. Blood spattered the decks and walls of the
Makara
. Stray bullets ricocheted off metal bulkheads and sent chips of fibreglass and aramid composite flying in all directions.

Up on the helipad, Parashurama – Tyler Weston – defended himself with guns taken from the body of the man who’d shot him. One-armed, he blazed away at anyone foolhardy enough to poke their head up over the top the stairs.

On the dive deck at the stern, Matsya whirled through a throng of opponents, his bladed discuses parting skin and flesh. Droplets of seawater and blood glistened on his scales.

The Fish-man was the next to lose his siddhis. The mercs overwhelmed him with sheer numbers. Rama and I struggled to reach him but were pinned down by suppressing fire. Windows above us shattered, spraying us with glass fragments as we crouched behind a bench seat.

The mercenaries wrestled Matsya to the floor and one of them casually lodged a bullet in his thigh. Then they all stood back to watch him transform. His scales faded away. His gill slits receded, closing up like gashes healing in fast motion. His glassy black eyes became the eyes of an ordinary man. The webs of skin between his fingers and toes shrank to nothingness.

The mercs laughed at this belittling, this humiliation. In return Klaus Gottlieb, professional aquanaut, cursed them in German, spitting out his fury and defiance. There was no question that they had deliberately chosen to wound rather than kill. They wanted to see him become normal, human, at their mercy.

The same mercenary who had shot him in the leg now pressed the barrel of gun to his forehead. Gottlieb went calm and still.

“Any last words, Kraut?” the man asked.

“Yes. Enjoy the rest of your life while you still can.”

“Eh? What the hell’s that supposed to – ?”

The merc looked round, following Gottlieb’s gaze, in time to see Vamana leaping from one of the upper decks down to the dive deck. The entire yacht rocked as the Dwarf landed right in the mercenaries’ midst. His gigantic arms swiped left and right, scattering the black-clad men, knocking many of them overboard. His expression was a leer of pure rage.

“Leave! Him! Alone!” he bellowed, snatching up the mercenary who had Gottlieb at gunpoint.

The man turned his weapon on Vamana, but the Dwarf popped his hand off at the wrist as though twisting an apple from a bough. As the mercenary screamed, Vamana grasped his head loosely and slammed a fist into it, squashing it into a mangled mess. He then used the corpse like a flail, threshing the other mercenaries with it.

“You know, I’m beginning to like that arrogant wanker,” I said to Rama. “Who knew he actually cared about Matsya?”

“Vamana would rather pour scorn than say what he really feels. Isn’t that an English thing?”

“Touché.”

“Duck!”

I did, and Rama planted an arrow right in the eye of a mercenary who was trying to sneak up on me from behind.

I returned the favour a moment later as a mercenary pounced on the Archer from the deck above. The axe caught the man between the legs and continued upward, cleaving him neatly in two. The halves fell to the deck like sides of beef.

The opposition dwindled, crumbled. Soon the
Makara
was littered with the bodies of its defenders.

A handful of the mercenaries, having seen the tide of battle turning, made an escape bid in one of the yacht’s motor launches. They didn’t get far. An arrow from Rama struck the powerhead on the outboard, crippling it. A second arrow, this one explosive-tipped, found the launch’s fuel tank and –
boom!
– that was all she wrote.

Some thought it would be okay if they surrendered, but Narasimha was having none of that. By the time he had finished with them, his talons were clogged with gore. Prisoners of war? Geneva Convention? Fuck that shit.

So now we were down to seven, Parashurama and Matsya both alive but depowered, and the
Makara
was ours. Nothing more stood between us and the Trinity Syndicate, wherever they were on board, except their bodyguards.

We went inside through a set of sliding doors, to find ourselves amidships in a three-storey atrium with a spiralling glass staircase around the edge and a geometrical modernist chandelier overhead. Gilt-flecked marble flooring, and mahogany fixtures with gold accents, added to an air of over-the-top opulence. The Palais de Versailles looked tastefully restrained by comparison.

The atrium was so well soundproofed, we couldn’t hear the crash of waves and spume outside. Nor could we feel the
Makara
’s pitch and yaw; gyroscopic stabilisers compensated, giving a smooth ride in all but the roughest conditions. In fact, the only thing reminding us that we were on a moving boat was the faint burr of the engines detectable through the soles of our feet.

We advanced slowly. I motioned to Rama and Krishna that they should split off and take the stairs. They obeyed without demur. I didn’t realise until then that I had somehow become leader. From “eleventh man” to captain. From comics nerd to head of the herd. It must have been the axe – Parashurama’s signature weapon, still charged with his authority, a baton symbolically passed on. That or nobody else wanted the position and it had fallen to me, dumb chump, by default. I like to think that maybe, too, I had gained the Avatars’ respect. Surely they wouldn’t be deferring to me otherwise.

As Rama and Krishna ascended, Kurma, at my instruction, took point for the rest of us. We crossed the atrium in a wedge formation, the indestructible Turtle at the front, a bulwark against any foe.

A door burst open.

Burst
– as in splintered into a thousand pieces.

And out stepped an asura so grotesque, so hideous, we stopped in our tracks.

He had to bend low to fit through the doorway. His massive frame was sheathed in a pelt of matted mud-brown fur. Whiskery jowls hung from his face, flapping and covered in slobber. Two lower fangs rose either side of his muzzle like a warthog’s tusks. The smell of him – godawful. And his eyes were jutting crimson orbs, alive with savagery and contempt.

He had long, powerful arms, and from the paw of each protruded a scimitar that was larger, broader and more fearsomely curved than Kalkin’s talwars or Krishna’s Nandaka. His bearlike belly heaved imperiously as he surveyed us. His feelings were plain: he did not think much of what he saw.

Radiating off him was a sensation of horror, depravity, wickedness, so strong it was almost a physical force. Here was a creature steeped in the ugliness of the world. Everything that was wrong with human nature was embodied in this shambling, vile, doglike beast. What good people loathed, he loved. What decent folk abhorred, he embraced. He moved where the dirt was thick, darkness’s patron saint, a lord of vice and squalor.

He was evil. Let’s not beat around the bush here. He was all that’s foul and bad, and sin fed him, sin made him grow fat and strong, sin in his gut, sin in his sinews, the sin which starved infants in the Horn of Africa and stalked the slums of Mumbai and chained women in basements and groomed pre-teens online and paid the obscene bonuses of bankrupting financiers and oppressed democratic uprisings and gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico and left the Aral Sea a toxic wasteground, the cumulative abuse and avarice of mankind, and it was all in him.

He was evil, and he was awesomely strong, and he was the end of days, and his name was Kali.

50. KALI

K
ALI LET HIS
aura of utter malevolence wash over us for a few more seconds, and then he struck.

He took three steps forward and booted Kurma into the air like a football. The Turtle pirouetted helplessly almost all the way to the chandelier, and as he descended Kali readied both of his scimitars, pointing them perpendicular, a pair of deadly pillars.

I distinctly remember thinking,
It’s Kurma. The armoured one. He’ll be all right
.

Then Kurma fell onto Kali’s blades, back first, like a fakir onto a bed of nails, and they impaled his torso clean through, piercing both the supposedly impenetrable armour and the supposedly impenetrable flesh beneath.

With little more than a shrug, Kali flicked Kurma away. The Turtle’s lifeless body flew straight at Narasimha, who didn’t quite dodge in time. His reflexes were lightning, but he was still reeling from the shock of seeing Kurma killed, as were we all.

The
snap
of bones breaking was audible across the width of the atrium. The Man-lion managed to disentangle himself from Kurma and stagger back to his feet, but he was clutching his chest and wincing. Two ribs had been shattered by the weight of the Turtle’s armoured bulk, a third fractured.