Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (27 page)

Down on the ground, the other devas laid into the Al-Khalid tanks and the lighter, shorter Al-Zarrar tanks that were rolling east towards Chandigarh. I only have their testimony to go on, since I was kind of busy in the sky at the time, but by all accounts it was a fierce, hard-fought battle. The Pakistanis did not stint with their coaxial machine guns and 125mm smoothbore tank guns, but they were designed for disabling and destroying other armoured vehicles and causing maximum damage to infrastructure. They were not meant for deployment against individual human beings who presented smaller, nimbler targets.

I can piece together how it went down. Vamana switching between dwarf size to escape notice and giant size to flip a tank over onto its side. Varaha charging like his namesake Boar, hammering an enemy vehicle into submission with his tusks. Narasimha tearing open the turret hatch of an immobilised tank and diving inside to eliminate the crew by hand. Parashurama lopping gun barrels in half with his axe. Matsya, though out of his preferred element, using the same vast strength that made him such a supernaturally swift swimmer to wrench machine guns off their mountings. Kalkin leaning out from Krishna’s chariot as it swooped low, severing caterpillar tracks with precision-placed sabre strikes.

They worked their way along the highway, cutting a swathe through the tank column from vanguard to rear. Indian planes, dominance of the skies once more theirs, zoomed in to finish off the crippled, stationary enemy units.

A couple of Al-Khalids trailing behind the rest made a break for it. They veered offroad onto farmland, crashing through fences and poorly built breezeblock houses in their eagerness to escape.

The Avatars did not let them get away. They chased and hounded the tanks. The driver of one, panicking, steered nose-first into a deep irrigation ditch which he couldn’t reverse out of. The other Al-Khalid headed for a copse to take cover, but Avatars caught up with it while it was still out in the open, halfway across a rice paddy. The crew, rather than remain confined in their vehicle to face their ends, bailed out and ran. Knee-deep in muddy water, they didn’t get far. Matsya circled around them below the surface like a shark, picking them off without mercy.

It was only as the Avatars were returning to Krishna’s chariot that they realised they were down a man. Varaha wasn’t with them any more. They assumed he must be back along the highway somewhere, mopping up the last of the tank crews. Krishna flew low beside the pockmarked road, past one wrecked, burning tank after another. Everyone kept their eyes peeled.

They found Varaha sprawled face down next to the charred hulk of an Al-Zarrar. A 7.62mm bullet had caught him in the torso, boring a hole through his latissimus dorsi muscle. The wound sucked and bubbled. The bullet had hit a lung.

Krishna rushed him to the airbase hospital at Chandigarh in his chariot. The
Garuda
touched down there not long afterwards, and Rama and I were at Varaha’s bedside within moments, bearing an emergency amrita kit. We administered shot after shot, while air force medics swarmed around us trying to keep the patient stable and stem the bleeding.

After the fourth dose of amrita, Varaha went into convulsions. His vital signs dropped precipitously. The docs tried CPR and defibrillation. Nothing doing.

Around noon that day, Varaha the Boar was pronounced dead.

31. THE STONE LOTUS

T
O SAY THE
Avatars took Varaha’s death hard would be an understatement.

It was so mundane. A random bullet. A lucky shot. Such a prosaic way to go. Scarcely befitting of a deva.

And if we hadn’t stopped to help defend Chandigarh, Varaha would still be with us. That was the real kick in the nuts. Our further involvement in the war, reluctant as it was, had got him killed. We hadn’t intended to keep fighting on the Indians’ side, not until our concerns about the Trinity Syndicate had been settled one way or another. But neither could we ignore Air Marshal Venkatesan’s appeal for assistance. That was what devas did, wasn’t it? Responded to cries for help? Answered prayers?

The irony was that Varaha had been the most pacifist among us, after Buddha. He had to some extent been the Dashavatara’s conscience. Just as, in his former life as Stevie Craig, he had staged dramatic protests and publicity stunts to raise awareness about the damage mankind was inflicting on the ecosphere, so as Varaha he had tried to make his fellow devas think carefully about what they were doing.

In Vedic legend, Varaha killed the demon Hiranyaksha, twin of Hiranyakasipu who later fell prey to Narasimha. Hiranyaksha was indestructible, immune to harm from any human or animal – except, as it happened, a boar. Vishnu duly took boar form to challenge him after he kidnapped Bhudevi, the earth goddess. Their duel in the depths of the primordial cosmic ocean lasted a thousand years, and in the end the victorious Varaha carried Bhudevi up to the surface on his tusks and restored her to the rightful place on dry land, above the waters. They fell in love and married, happy ending. All together now:
ahhhh
.

Varaha was earth’s lover and defender. So was Stevie Craig.

Now both were gone.

And we devas were angry.

We’d been angry already and now we were angrier, and there was no Varaha any more to check or temper that anger. Buddha was still with us as the voice of reason, but even he was having trouble processing Varaha’s death. He could offer consoling words about Varaha’s consciousness passing from one state to the next, his karmic energy destined to rematerialise in another form, his atman already on its way through the neverending cycle of life and death towards rebirth, perhaps refined by devotion and good works to the very highest pinnacle of self, which is to say the absence of self. What he could not do was make any of us feel better about there being one less Avatar in our ranks. The Ten had become nine. Something was missing now. The set was irredeemably incomplete.

Maybe, too – though no one said it out loud – we were upset because we were gods, and gods don’t get killed. They especially don’t get killed by something as banal as nine grammes of lead and cupronickel cast into the form of a bullet round. What we had here was cognitive dissonance. We knew we were supposed to be immortal, invulnerable. But we also knew we weren’t, we were just souped-up human beings, stronger and hardier than most but still with human frailties. A bullet
shouldn’t
kill us, but still could.

In fact, if anyone were to ask me to sum up in a single phrase what being a deva was like, that phrase would be “cognitive dissonance”. What we believed about ourselves thanks to theogenesis and our conditioning in the Induction Cocoon clashed repeatedly with what our rational minds kept telling us. We were lab rats who thought themselves gods, or gods who could not forget they were once lab rats. We were creatures of ancient myth transposed into the 21st century, equipped with 21st century hardware and protection, immersed in 21st century environments and geopolitics, deities out of time. We were the unreal made real, legends brought to life.

No wonder what Colonel Zehri had said had freaked us out so much. Our inner equilibrium was precarious enough as it was, without us having to think that we were being dicked around further by the Trinity, that there were wheels within already wobbly wheels.

In short, Varaha’s death was the capper on a crapper of a day.

Things didn’t get much jollier when we arrived back at Mount Meru.

While Buddha and Krishna oversaw the respectful offloading of Varaha’s body, Parashurama selected a delegation of devas whose purpose would be to confront the Trinity and screw some answers out of them. It was him, Kalkin, Rama and me. The others were considered too hot-headed to come along. The matter had to be broached with diplomacy and tact. Threatening the Trinity with a mauling or a stomping was unlikely to secure success.

Why was I included in the delegation? Good question. I think Parashurama understood that Rama and I were inseparable. You wanted the Archer, you got the Monkey too. But also, I was the one who had twigged to the superhero/supervillain dynamic of the relationship between devas and asuras. I had insider knowledge of the whole paradigm.

As Parashurama put it, “Everyone needs a geek on their team.”

“No argument here,” I replied. “The geek shall inherit. Nerd is the word. Who’s got your back? The anorak.”

“Okay, enough. Don’t make me regret my decision.”

“Can’t help it. Like the Jews say at Christmas: happy Hanuman.”

“Seriously. Do you want to come along or do you want to be benched?”

I mimed zipping my lip.

Our swipe cards could get us no further than Meru’s second-from-centre ring, but dammit, we were devas. A little thing like a locked door wasn’t going to stop us. A couple of swings from Parashurama’s battleaxe, and hey presto, we were standing outside the complex’s innermost section.

The tower rose seven storeys high. The damage inflicted by the drone strike near the summit had yet to be repaired, but tarpaulins had been stretched over the gaping holes to keep out the elements.

We were on a walkway that linked to it midway up. The storeys below us were windowless, an expanse of sheer blank wall, prison-like. I speculated whether they were empty, just a supporting structure for the Trinity’s personal accommodation.

“They perch atop a hollow edifice,” said Rama. “How apt.” He had never sounded quite so French as then.

“What now?” Kalkin asked Parashurama. “We call them out?”

The Warrior nodded. “And if that doesn’t get us anywhere, we bust our way in.”

Nobody responded to our yells. Nobody came to one of the tower’s many balconies like some billionaire Juliet or Rapunzel.

“Odd,” said Kalkin. “They have to be in. No one’s seen them anywhere else in the complex today.”

“Oi, rich geezers!” I shouted up. “I’ve got some money out here. Interested? It’s free.”

No answer.

“Damn, I was sure that would work. Like cheese to mice.”

We stared up at the solid, stalwart tower. The tarpaulins bucked like sails in the warm Indian Ocean breeze.

Parashurama crouched, thigh muscles bunching, then sprang. He landed on one of the lowest balconies. If I remembered rightly, this would be Bhatnagar’s floor. Krieger’s lay above, and Lombard’s was at the very top. A hierarchy, even among the Trinity. They weren’t such equals as they liked to make out. I wondered how they had settled on who got which level of the tower. By calling dibs? Drawing lots? Or maybe it was inverse alphabetical order. Or maybe according to net worth, Lombard out-Croesusing Krieger, and Krieger, Bhatnagar.

It didn’t take Parashurama long to establish that there was no one home in Bhatnagar’s apartment, nor in Krieger’s or Lombard’s.

“Weird,” he said, leaping down to rejoin us on the walkway. “I’ve performed a full sweep of all three apartments. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they’ve upped sticks. Something about the way things have been left... They didn’t just go, they went in a hurry.”

“No,” said Kalkin. “I mean, where would they go
to
? Why would they desert?”

“Because they knew we were coming back. And they knew why.” This was from Rama, and it was one of those statements that sound like the person speaking doesn’t want it to be true.

“The lower floors,” I said. “Let’s try those. Could be they have a romper room down there, or a sex dungeon or something, and that’s where they are.”

There was a locked door at the end of the walkway, and just inside, a thicker locked door, this one made of steel, with the added safeguard of retinal and palm print scanners. Neither portal lasted long when Parashurama’s big axe came a-knocking.

Now we were on a gantry with a metal staircase zigzagging down from it. Below us lay a chamber four storeys tall, its circumference lined with stacks of what I can only describe as giant specimen jars. Each was as tall as a man and full to the brim with preservative fluid, a solution of formaldehyde and seawater. Each, too, was illuminated from beneath by uplighters inset into the base.

Some of the jars had nothing in them but fluid.

Others were... occupied.

By the corpses of the asuras which the Avatars had fought and killed during the preceding weeks. The rakshasa from Grand Central Station. The albino vampires from Paris. Various nagas. Duryodhana. Rahu. Adi. Others. A demonic rogues’ gallery. Their remains floating suspended in the dense, slightly cloudy fluid. Eternally still.