Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (39 page)

44. KALI YUGA

T
HE
G
ARUDA
FLEW
east, California-bound.

Parashurama had agreed with me that enough was enough. We couldn’t just let the Trinity flog their merchandise wantonly across the world. The existence of the Dashavatara alone, a handful of devas, had sparked a nuclear conflagration. Multiply that by a hundred, a thousand... It was unthinkable.

“We’ve got to limit this thing,” the Warrior said. “Stop it proliferating. Once theogenesis goes global, all bets are off. Let’s assume Kashmir doesn’t become a worst-case scenario. Tempers cool. There’s a truce. What happens next? The Trinity sell to all bidders, and suddenly, super-troops. Every military organisation starts fielding their own deva battalions. You give generals a new toy, sure enough they’re going to want to start playing with it as soon as they can. There’ll be war again. More wars. Super-wars.”

He convened the Avatars, and it didn’t take him long to win them round.

“It’s not proliferation I care about so much,” said Vamana. “It’s getting even with those lying, cheating bastards. They tried to fucking kill us. They had Buddha shot – shot like a dog. I want some bloody payback.”

Grunts of assent, loudest from Narasimha and Kalkin. Vamana was speaking for all of them.

So it was with a mixture of altruism and self-interest that we boarded out multiplatform adaptable personnel transporter and ascended into the skies above Queensland. Refuelling the
Garuda
racked up a sizeable sum on Aanandi’s expense account, but her card had plenty of credit still left and the Trinity hadn’t seen fit to cut her off yet. Presumably they hadn’t bothered because they thought she was dead along with the rest of us, another loose end neatly snipped.

The fact that the
Garuda
was airborne and on the move might have tipped the Trinity off that we were still alive, but Captain Corday had combed carefully through the vehicle and found the GPS transponder they’d been using to keep tabs on us. It was a small piece of tech secreted amid the navigation avionics, something you would easily overlook unless you were familiar with every inch of your aircraft.

The transponder was now lodged behind the cistern in a cubicle in the men’s toilets at Cloncurry airport, beeping out the location of nothing but Aussie males relieving themselves and perhaps a funnel-web spider or two.

Aanandi was the one who had suggested we make California our first port of call. R. J. Krieger owned a clifftop mansion at Point Dume, one of the most exclusive areas of real estate in Malibu. Neither Lombard nor Bhatnagar had property on the West Coast. Krieger’s house was the nearest Trinity residence to Australia and could serve as a useful bolthole, so that was where we should try before looking further afield.

It was a slender thread to be pursuing, but it was
something
. Going to Cloncurry had been a long shot but it had paid off, after a fashion. No harm in pushing our luck a little harder.

Aanandi sat at the front of the cabin, the Avatars towards the rear. The gap between was small but represented a clear separation, a gulf of scepticism. She hadn’t yet proved her trustworthiness to them. I even overheard Vamana mutter that she could be leading us into a second trap. I thought about setting him straight, pointing out that Aanandi had been double-crossed too and could have died with us in the installation. In fact, she had led us to safety, lugging weaponry for Matsya, Kurma and Krishna with her. What more did she have to do to redeem herself? Disembowel herself with a ceremonial sword? Pull us all off in a mass bukkake session?

But I realised it was no good me arguing her case, especially not to someone as boneheaded as the Dwarf. The Avatars would learn to appreciate soon enough that her loyalty no longer lay with the Trinity – it was firmly with us. Her actions would speak louder than my words.

Without shame I joined her, plopping myself down beside her. She and I were in the exact same seats we had occupied when I first flew in the
Garuda
weeks earlier. So much had happened since then, so much had changed, that I could scarcely believe it, looking back. A cynical, lovelorn, somewhat callow comics pro had become a superhero. He had fought battles. He had had brushes with death. He had Got The Girl.

Who says dreams don’t come true?

Mind you, I could have done without the copious bloodshed. Not to mention the world teetering on the brink of Armageddon. Those things kind of took the shine off the cherry.

Aanandi was frowning at her smartphone screen, scanning news sites. Over her shoulder I caught the headlines as she thumb-scrolled down:
Indian Cabinet And Military Hold Crisis Meetings. Pakistan Threatens Nuclear Strikes, With Backing Of Arab League. UN Envoys In New Delhi And Islamabad Urge High-Level Bilateral Peace Talks. American Secretary Of State Warns Of “Unmitigated Disaster” And “Global Repercussions.” Death Toll Mounts. Prevailing Winds Turn Path Of Fallout Towards Abbottabad
.

Lombard’s own Epic News took a slightly different tack, opting for less sombre and ominous wording:
“Worst Over,” Experts Say. Both Sides Likely To Back Away From Further Hostilities. Reconciliation Still Achievable.
This was a surprisingly measured – one might go so far as to say optimistic – response from a media outlet famed for its sensationalism, and I detected the hand of its CEO in the tone of the reporting. Dick Lombard needed the war to end so that the Trinity could get on with the business of peddling theogenesis. For once, it served the interests of Epic News to pour cold water on a conflict rather than fan the flames, even if that meant content that was less attention-grabbing than its rivals’.

Aanandi stroked my gibbon fringe of arm hair absentmindedly.

“Penny for them?” I asked.

She grimaced. “What can I tell you? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Millions could die. Billions. And I feel so helpless, so small.”

“Me too. I’ve downed a jet fighter in midair with my bare hands, which I’m still freaking out about a little bit, and now along with everyone else I’m just hoping and praying that sense prevails. All these siddhis we have, but there are some things bigger than even devas.”

“I can’t help wondering...”

“What?”

“This is going to sound stupid, but I’ve been asking myself, could we be seeing the end of the Kali Yuga?”

“I don’t know what that is. Is it bad?”

“It’s worse than bad. It’s the end of everything, as predicted in the Hindu scriptures. The ages of human civilisation go in cycles. They’re called the yugas, and there are four of them. Each is said to last forty-eight centuries, although there’s some dispute about the figure. You start with the Satya Yuga, which is a golden age, literally the ‘Age of Truth,’ when mortals are ruled by and guided by the gods. The
Mahabharata
says that there is ‘no hatred or vanity, or evil thought’ during the Satya Yuga. Through worship and good works, everyone achieves a long, healthy life and a state of blessed perfection.”

“Sounds good.”

“Then comes the Treta Yuga. Evil rises. Demons walk abroad. People’s devotion to the gods wanes by twenty-five per cent. This is symbolised by the Dharma Bull – which represents morality – standing on three legs now rather than four as it did in the Satya Yuga. The legs are austerity, cleanliness, compassion and truthfulness. One by one they go as the yugas pass.”

“Until finally the Bull falls over.”

“More or less. In the third age, the Dvapara Yuga, it’s down to two: compassion and truthfulness. People have become jealous and competitive. They’re liars, and that leads to disease – sickness of body and spirit.”

“And in the fourth age, the Kali one, the Bull is balancing precariously on a single leg.”

“Yes. The rishi Markandeya – the ancient prophet and sage – said that during the Kali Yuga spirituality will have declined to such a level that it has more or less died out. There will be widespread hatred, a general ignorance of the dictates of dharma. Children will not honour their elders and betters. We’ll see mass migrations – starving millions on the move, searching for food. Fornication, drinking and drug-taking will be rife.”

“So, not all bad, then.” I waggled my furry capuchin eyebrows.

Her laugh was hollow. “Lust and intoxicants have their place, but Markandeya’s point was that they will have become goals in themselves, obsessions, lifestyle choices. He also said that our leaders will no longer be reasonable, just or fair. They’ll impose extortionate taxes and become a danger to the world.”

“If that doesn’t describe modern politicians, I don’t know what does.”

“The Kali Yuga is supposed to have begun in 3100 BCE, give or take, and if you do the math...”

I mimed counting on my fingers and mumbled about dividing by the square root and carrying the one.

“It’s now, dumbass,” she said. “The forty-eight centuries are up.”

“And what comes next?”

“Destruction. Fiery catastrophe. Everything is obliterated so that the cycle can start again and the world begin afresh.”

“Pressing the reset button.”

“The yugas are an allegorical way of looking at history, explaining why things invariably turn to shit and justifying why the world is such a mess. They’re a philosophy, not literal, empirical fact. All the same... You look at what’s going on and you do start to think whether there might be some truth in it.”

“This Kali,” I said. “Is that the six-armed goddess with the swords?”
¹

Aanandi shook her head. “Same name, different entity. The Kali of the Kali Yuga is a doglike demon, the source of all evil, anger incarnate. He’s an asura king who hangs around gambling dens, brothels, graveyards and slaughterhouses. Wherever there’s sin or death, there’s Kali.”

“I don’t suppose Korolev has made one of him, has he?”

“Let’s hope not. A Kali would be worse than any demon you’ve faced.”

“Worse than Takshaka?”

“Infinitely. That’s another good reason to catch the Trinity before they go any further. The world does not need a Kali. Or a goddess Kali either, for that matter. She’s as deadly as they come. She lives to kill demons, but when she’s in one of her battle frenzies, woe betide anyone who gets in her way.”

“I can’t believe you just said ‘woe betide.’”

“It’s a nice phrase. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. Just – who says that, these days?”

“I do, obviously. I must have caught it off my poppa. He used to use it a lot when telling me his Veda stories. He was old-school that way. He’d even start them with ‘Once upon a time...’”

I’d managed to lighten the mood, but thinking of her father reminded Aanandi of her concerns about him and her mother. Worry clouded her face again.

“Can’t we do
anything
about the war?” she asked.

“Directly?” I said. “No. I discussed it with Parashurama. How do we decide who to fight for? Or against? More to the point, how do we stop nuclear weapons? With swords and punches? We can’t. It’s out of our league. We handle what we can handle, and that means the Trinity. But it’s possible that fixing them will fix everything else.”

“How?”

Parashurama and I had roughed out a plan over breakfast and then shared it with the other devas. I couldn’t see the harm in running it past Aanandi and seeing what she thought. The plan hinged on several variables – not least, whether or not we caught up with the Trinity – but if by some miracle it worked, it solved everything in one fell swoop.

“It isn’t public knowledge yet that devas are manmade,” I said. “Same goes for asuras. Hardly anyone outside the Trinity’s immediate circle knows that the demons are, for want of a better word, artificial, created by the same process that gave the world us. We’re the good guys, but we’re still basically a lie, a con job, operating under false pretences. Were the public to learn that...”

“The Dashavatara would be completely discredited.”

“Yes. That would be a difficult enough pill to swallow, but knowing that theogenesis can lead to demons as much as it can to gods, that would be even more difficult. So the Trinity made a mistake, revealing the truth about asuras to us.”

“They presumed you wouldn’t be left alive to do anything useful with the knowledge.”

“Still, it was foolish, because it’s given us ammunition we can turn against them. The other group that would be discredited, you see, is the Trinity themselves. If word got out that they were the ones who unleashed Kumbhakarna in Moscow, Duryodhana in Venice, Rahu in Mexico City, and all those rakshasas and nagas and vetalas, responsible for so many deaths, there’d be an outcry. It would be hard for them to sell theogenesis anywhere.”

“Though not impossible.”

“Quite. There’d still be takers. Reputable governments would perhaps be forced by public opinion not to do business with the Trinity Syndicate, but there are plenty of
dis
reputable ones around. It’d be black market, but that’s still a market. So we’ll have to make sure that the technology is eradicated somehow. But mainly we’ll have to make sure that the Trinity themselves, and Professor Korolev, end up behind bars, judged and found guilty of criminal acts, utterly disgraced and humiliated.”