Empress of the Sun (8 page)

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?’

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 damaging 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.

The coffee cup fell from Charlotte Villiers’s fingers. Black coffee splashed the pale carpet.

‘God help us each and every one,’ Charlotte Villiers breathed.

The strike was beautiful. From the edge of the penalty area, it lifted and curved in defiance of wind, weather, physics. Team Red defenders stood gaping as it went past them; Team Sky Blue strikers, Mr Armstrong the referee, even Mr Myszkowski the groundsman, all stopped to stare. Even Mia Sarpong, who had kicked it, stood astounded. She had never struck ball like that before and knew she never would again. It was the strike of a lifetime. Beckham would have killed to have bent a ball like that. It was inswinging, unplayable. It arced down towards the top-left corner of the Team Red goal. Everett M hadn’t seen it.

Mia, Team Sky Blue, Mr Armstrong, Mr Myszkowski, all had
Gooooaallll!
on their lips.

At the last instant it came into the edge of Everett M’s peripheral vision. It would have beaten any human goalkeeper.
Everett M fed a surge of power into his enhancements. Thryn cybernetics kicked in. He leapt. At full stretch, he caught the ball with the tips of his gloves, knocked it behind for a corner.

The roar died. No one moved as the ball rolled across the goal-line. Mia’s mouth was open in disbelief. She looked about to burst into tears. Her girlfriends rushed to fold her in hugs. Something utterly unbelievable had summoned up something even more unbelievable.

Everett M felt a little twinge of guilt as he went to retrieve the ball and roll it out to the Team Sky Blue player for the corner kick. He could as easily have punched it clear. That would have been too super. He gave a shy half-nod to Noomi and Gothy Emma. Noomi took a photo.

‘We’re making a Facebook page!’ she called.

Since the Coke-can-crushing incident, Noomi and Gothy Emma had been spectators at all Everett’s Bourne Green Year Ten League games. They had been the only spectators. The two of them haunted the dead-ball line, directly behind Everett M in his net. They weren’t in his sight line, but Everett M was always conscious of them. He didn’t like them being there. They made him feel watched. He suspected they were photographing his arse.

Jake Hughes took the corner for Team Sky Blue. The ball went out to a soft header on the edge of the six-yard box. Everett M need no Thryn assistance to scoop the ball up in
both hands and roll it out to Aysha Haddad making a long run up the right wing.

Team Sky Blue’s spirit was cracked. Team Red overran them for the final ten minutes of the game. It was a rout. Everett M had broken them. With every goal that went in, Everett M felt worse about his cheat. And it had been a cheat. He couldn’t help himself. Every time he used the Thryn power, he wanted to use it again, use it more. By the time the final whistle blew he felt condemned by Cora Sarpong, Cora’s friends, Team Sky Blue, the whole of the Year Ten League. The gods of football sneered down at him.