Age of Heroes Read online

  Praise for the Pantheon series:

  “A love poem to both comic books and the Hindu faith. As always, Lovegrove’s style is easy going and draws you in quickly... One of the best series in urban fantasy available today.”

  – Starburst Magazine on Age of Shiva

  “Lovegrove is the as-yet-undisputed King of the Godpunk Throne... Action-packed, engaging, well-paced and with a great concept, it’s probably the best introduction to Lovegrove’s works to date.”

  – Strange Currencies on Age of Shiva

  “Lovegrove has very much made ‘godpunk’ his own thing... Another great example of Lovegrove’s skills as a writer of intelligent, fast-paced action adventure stories. The fact that he is equally adept at writing novellas as full-length novels is a very pleasant surprise; I hope he returns to the form soon.”

  – SF Crow’s Nest on Age of Godpunk

  “This is smooth, addictive and an amazing ride. If you scratch the surface of the writing, there is plenty of depth and subtext, but it’s the fun of having spies fighting monsters that will keep you enthralled throughout.”

  – Starburst Magazine on Age of Voodoo

  “A fast-paced, thrill-filled ride... There’s dry humour, extreme gore, tension and large amounts of testosterone flooding off the page – and a final confrontation that leaves you with a wry smile.”

  – Sci-Fi Bulletin on Age of Voodoo

  “5 out of 5. I finished it in less than three hours, yet have pondered the revelations found within for days afterwards and plan to reread it soon.”

  – Geek Syndicate on Age of Aztec

  “Higher on action and violence than Lovegrove’s previous books, the novel still manages to portray convincingly the psychology of its two antiheroes, and paint a vivid picture of Aztec lore.”

  – The Guardian on Age of Aztec

  “Lovegrove is vigorously carving out a godpunk subgenre – rebellious underdog humans battling an outmoded belief system. Guns help a bit, but the real weapon is free will.”

  – Pornokitsch on The Age of Odin

  “I can totally see why The Age of Odin made it onto the New York Times Bestseller’s List; I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw it on the big screen in a few years from now.”

  – Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review on The Age of Odin

  “A compulsive, breakneck read by a master of the craft, with stunning action sequences and acute character observations. This is the kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write.”

  – Eric Brown, The Guardian on The Age of Zeus

  “The action is just unbelievably good.”

  – The Fantasy Book Critic on The Age of Zeus

  “Mr. Lovegrove is one of the best writers out there... Highly, highly recommended.”

  – The Fantasy Book Critic on The Age of Ra

  “Lovegrove’s bluntness about the gods’ Jerry Springer-like repugnance refreshingly reflects the myths as they must appear to modern eyes.”

  – Strange Horizons Magazine on The Age of Ra

  “One of the UK SF scene’s most interesting, challenging and adventurous authors.”

  – Saxon Bullock, SFX on The Age of Ra

  Also by James Lovegrove

  NOVELS

  The Hope • Days

  The Foreigners • Untied Kingdom

  Worldstorm • Provender Gleed

  Co-writing with Peter Crowther

  Escardy Gap

  THE PANTHEON SERIES

  The Age of Ra • The Age of Zeus

  The Age of Odin • Age of Aztec

  Age of Voodoo • Age of Godpunk

  Age of Shiva

  THE REDLAW SERIES

  Redlaw • Redlaw: Red Eye

  NOVELLAS

  How The Other Half Lives • Gig

  Age Of Anansi • Age of Satan • Age of Gaia

  SHERLOCK HOLMES

  The Stuff of Nightmares • Gods of War

  The Thinking Engine

  COLLECTIONS OF SHORT FICTION

  Imagined Slights • Diversifications

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Web: Computopia • Warsuit 1.0

  The Black Phone

  FOR RELUCTANT READERS

  Wings • The House of Lazarus

  Ant God • Cold Keep • Dead Brigade

  Kill Swap • Free Runner

  The 5 Lords Of Pain Series

  The Lord Of The Mountain • The Lord Of The Void

  The Lord Of Tears • The Lord Of The Typhoon

  The Lord Of Fire

  WRITING AS JAY AMORY

  The Clouded World series

  The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson

  Pirates Of The Relentless Desert

  Darkening For A Fall • Empire Of Chaos

  AGE OF HEROES

  JAMES LOVEGROVE

  First published 2016 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-047-6

  Copyright © James Lovegrove 2016

  Cover Art by Naj Osmani

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  PROLOGUE

  Taklamakan Desert, Northwest China

  A HOARSE SHOUT brought Holger Badenhorst from his tent, where he had been treating himself to some alone time with the internet and a box of tissues. As he stepped out into the saffron glare of a desert sunrise, he checked to make sure his shorts were zipped up. He was thinking – hoping – that the shout had been a yelp of triumph. The labourers had finished clearing the way to the third door at last, and someone was keen to bring him the news.

  When he saw the face of the man running downhill to the campsite, however, Badenhorst adjusted his expectations. It was Ehmetjan Kadeer, the only member of the workforce who had any English and who was therefore, by default, foreman – or at least go-between, Badenhorst’s conduit to the others – and he was not ecstatic. He looked panicked, horror-struck. There was blood on him, too. A lot of it, streaking his hands and smearing his shirtfront in bloom-shaped patches like grisly tie-dye. So much blood that it couldn’t have been his own.

  The fact that it wasn’t Kadeer himself who had been injured came as some relief to Badenhorst. He relied on the man. He even, in as much as he could a non-white, liked him.

  Kadeer skidded to a halt in the sand in front of the tent. He was panting hard.

  “Sir, up at dig place. In tunnel. Come see.”

  “What is it?” said Badenhorst. “Whose blood is that? What’s happened?”

  Kadeer beckoned. “Come see. You must, sir. You must come see.”

  BADENHORST FOLLOWED KADEER upslope, the pair of them toiling through shin-deep sand against a steep gradient. Badenhorst, pushing fifty, had at least twenty years on Kadeer, who was wiry and fit. Yet he had no trouble keeping pace with him. Toughness and stamina had been bred into him from birth. He had grown up on a kraal some two hundred kilometres west of Johannesburg, on the fringes of the Kalahari, with three older brothers and a widowed father whom a lifetime of farming had hardened to a sinewy tightness, and who prized the body far above the mind. Young Holger had learned from an early age that indolence w
as not an option. If his bullying brothers hadn’t taught him that lesson, his father – free and easy with his belt, especially if he had been drinking – had. You got up, got going, stayed active all day, did your chores, rounded up the cattle, mended the fences, drove into town for supplies, whatever you were told to, and you didn’t slack, didn’t give up, didn’t complain, not ever, not if you knew what was good for you.

  He and Kadeer arrived at the mouth of the cleft splitting the face of the rocky escarpment that loomed above the campsite. Within lay a snaking, broad-bottomed valley, which had once housed an ancient town. The remains of habitation were to be seen all around, in the worn, sun-bleached timbers protruding from drifts of sand in irregular rows like the bones of dinosaurs.

  This place, whose name was long forgotten, had once been a stopover on the northern branch of the Silk Road. Sheltered in its valley, it had thrived as a staging post and watering hole for merchants and their caravan trains as they crossed the Taklamakan Desert, the most inhospitable and treacherous leg of the journey.

  Then, like so many other pockets of civilisation in this arid wilderness, the town had died. Who knew why? Perhaps the subterranean aquifer that fed its cisterns had dried up. Perhaps an unusually severe sandstorm had engulfed the valley. Perhaps the Silk Road itself, its route altered by the Taklamakan’s eternally shifting dunes, had veered away, taking with it the passing trade the town relied on. This desert was not somewhere man was supposed to live. It had proved that time and time again, if the ruins of countless other towns which littered the landscape were anything to go by. Taklamakan, in the local dialect, meant “Once you’re trapped, there’s no escape.” The desert was also popularly known by the nickname the Sea of Death.

  Badenhorst and Kadeer entered a large chamber hewn out of the valley’s side. This would have served as the town’s meeting hall, or marketplace, or possibly temple. Badenhorst didn’t know its original function and frankly didn’t give a shit. What was he, an archaeologist? The chamber was big and centrally positioned – that much he did know – and it had no doubt been important to the townsfolk. Even so, it was little more than a rough-floored manmade cave that could have held fifty people at best, with everyone standing.

  Currently it was occupied by Badenhorst’s workforce, which consisted of a dozen men. Like Kadeer, they were all of them Uyghurs, a Turkic minority principally found here in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, its people having colonised the Tarim Basin during the tenth century. They were gathered around something on the floor, and their voices were raised in a babble of consternation.

  At a command from Kadeer, they parted ranks, and what Badenhorst saw lying at their feet set his heart plummeting. He had pretty much suspected that this was what he would find; the blood on Kadeer’s shirt had been a clue. That didn’t make it any less dismaying.

  A body.

  The man, sprawled on his back, had a round, ragged hole in his torso. Something solid, with the diameter of a drainpipe, had punched into his chest. Within the gory cavity, Badenhorst glimpsed the shattered end of a rib and the glistening fascia of some internal organ. He had seen worse sights in his life, but still he had to fight down nausea.

  “Fokken hell,” he said under his breath.

  Already he was making mental calculations. This was going to cost money. There would be compensation for the dead man’s family. There would also be a salary hike for the remaining labourers. From past experience, Badenhorst knew they would not go back to work without some form of incentive. The question was how much? How much would they hold out for? How much palm greasing would be required to get the whole show running smoothly again?

  Cash flow wasn’t a problem in itself. Badenhorst’s employer had astonishingly deep pockets. “Money,” Badenhorst had been told more than once, “is no object. Getting the job done, that’s all that matters. Whatever it takes. Whatever the price. Blank cheque.”

  What Badenhorst found galling, though, was being held to ransom, being blackmailed by a bunch of unskilled shovel-jockeys. They were already being paid well. Accidents happened. It was only to be expected. Poking around in ancient, long-lost ruins was a hazardous occupation. They had known that when signing up. They should just grow a pair and carry on.

  “How did he get this?” Badenhorst said, pointing to the hole in the dead man’s chest. “Did he slip and fall onto a sharp rock or something?”

  Kadeer looked nonplussed. “Big hurt. He cry out. Men take him here. I try to help him. Stop blood. Too late. He dead already.”

  Badenhorst simplified. “Yes, but how did he die? What happened?”

  Kadeer understood. “This way. I show. Is good thing.”

  “You mean bad, surely.”

  “No, sir. Yes, bad,” Kadeer said, with a nod at the corpse. “Bad thing for Abdulkerim. But also good thing. For us.”

  Kadeer set off, and Badenhorst, intrigued – and now just a bit excited – followed.

  BEYOND THE CHAMBER, through a narrow exit in the rear wall, lay two tunnels. One of them led to the town’s cisterns, now just a row of empty hollows gouged out of the sheer rock. The other, branching off from the first, had until recently been blocked by a cave-in. Or so it appeared. Badenhorst had overseen enough of these difficult retrievals that he knew not to take anything at face value. While it looked as though the tunnel ceiling had collapsed due to natural causes, there was every chance it had been brought down deliberately. He was dealing with a devious, tricky mind, after all, the mind of someone who had devoted decades of his life to stashing valuable artefacts in far-flung locations around the world in such a way that nobody would stumble across them by chance, or be able to unearth them without considerable expenditure and sacrifice.

  The blockage, at any rate, had been no match for a few pounds of mining explosive. But what lay on the other side was a sequence of obstacles, each more obstructive and challenging than the last.

  There had been doors. The first was made of a single slab of granite so thick and hard that a jackhammer barely made a dent in it, and only by drilling dozens of holes and packing each with a shaped charge was Badenhorst able to reduce it to rubble.

  The second boasted a complex locking mechanism and had pictograms carved into its surface. The images constituted a cryptic code, the solution to which might enable the decipherer to open the door by rotating the concentric stone rings in the middle to the correct configuration, rather like tumblers on a safe.

  Having been confronted with a number of similar devices before over the past two years, however, Badenhorst knew better than to attempt to crack the code. It was a hoax, a swindle. Setting the rings in any permutation would spring a trap of some sort. He resorted to explosives again, accepting that the upshot was going to be some new deterrent. In this instance, no sooner was the door breached than ancient gearing groaned into life and huge quantities of sand began to pour from reservoirs embedded above the tunnel, both on this side of the door and beyond, filling it to the ceiling. The unwary explorer might have been swamped and suffocated, but Badenhorst had taken the precaution of detonating the charges remotely by radio signal.

  After that it was down to manpower. The labourers cleared the sand away bucketload by bucketload, over the course of a week, until they revealed a third door lying some ten metres along from the second.

  It was while excavating the last of the sand from in front of this door that Abdulkerim had met his grisly fate. And Badenhorst could see why.

  There was a hole dead centre in the door, of the same diameter as the hole in Abdulkerim. Lying on the floor nearby was a cylindrical chunk of stone, roughly half a metre long. It would have fit snugly and precisely into the aperture in the door, like a plug. One end of it was spattered with blood.

  Badenhorst squatted onto his haunches and, with great care, examined both cylinder and hole. Kadeer waited patiently beside him. The portable halogen lamps illuminating the tunnel buzzed softly.

  Within the hole, Badenhorst could make out a kind
of spring-loaded propulsion system, an elaborate ratcheted catapult that had launched the cylinder outward at high velocity, making it a lethal short-range projectile. A last-ditch attempt to dissuade intruders from venturing any further. Abdulkerim must have inadvertently tripped some switch or trigger... Yes. Down at floor-level, in the door’s base. A protruding knob of stone. Badenhorst tested it tentatively with the toe of his boot, making sure beforehand that neither he nor Kadeer was in the line of fire, just in case there was another missile secreted within the door.

  There wasn’t. But the knob gave under the least pressure, nudging inward. All Abdulkerim would have had to do was touch it with his shovel – which now lay on the ground, blade end first towards the knob – and blam! Instant death by blunt force trauma.

  “Ag sies, man,” Badenhorst muttered. “Poor bastard.” It was the closest he would get to a eulogy for the Uyghur labourer.

  “Look, sir.” Kadeer indicated the hole. “You see? Inside?”

  “I’ve seen. It’s a hell of a blerrie contraption, all right.”

  “Inside. Inside. You look.”