Age of Legends 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 • Age of Heroes

  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

  First published 2019 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

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

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-191-6

  Copyright © James Lovegrove 2019

  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.

  Huge thanks to Eric Brown, without whose assistance and expertise this novel would not have been possible.

  Chapter 1

  THE SOLDIERS MOVED in a line through Hyde Park, sweeping east to west. Each was separated from the next by a gap of five yards, strictly maintained. When one of them spied a target, the soldier shot without hesitating. The sound of rifle discharges rippled across the park, sometimes single reports, sometimes clusters, like a mad drummer struggling to keep the beat.

  Every time a 5.56mm round found its mark, a parakeet toppled out of a tree or plummeted from the sky in an explosion of feathers. The lawns were soon littered with mangled bird bodies and drifts of jade green plumage.

  A few of the parakeets had fled at the first sign of gunfire, seeking sanctuary in roosts at the top of neighbouring buildings. The majority, however, stayed put, frightened by the noise but failing to recognise what it signified. For several generations the flocks of parakeets had lived in the park unmolested, their only enemy the occasional peregrine falcon. They were tame by the standards of wild birds. Their forebears had all been caged creatures which had either escaped from captivity or been released by their owners when the cost of upkeep became too high, and this domestication remained somehow inbred, a hereditary conditioning. The parakeets simply weren’t prepared for a slaughter.

  The media outlets were not calling it a slaughter, of course. The preferred word was “cull”, usually prefaced by “necessary”. The government’s own press statement referred to it as that, and lauded the exercise as “a robust disposal of interlopers from overseas who have no place on British soil”. None other than the prime minister himself had sanctioned the action. Interviewed on a breakfast radio show that morning, Derek Drake had cheerily opined that the elimination of the parakeets would pave the way for “our own proper pigeons” to return to their rightful homes in Hyde Park’s trees.

  In all, the killing lasted three hours. By the end, over a thousand parakeets lay dead. The cordon that had been set up around the park was lifted, and pest control vans filed in along West Carriage Dri
ve. A small army of men and women in head-to-toe coveralls disembarked to collect up the corpses in thick polythene bags.

  Major Dominic Wynne, who had overseen the operation, took questions from a pack of TV reporters assembled at the Albert Memorial. Since he was head of the Paladins, the prime minister’s personal protection squad, Wynne’s presence carried weight. It didn’t hurt that, with his forthright nose, piercing blue eyes and shovel-sharp jaw, he was marvellously telegenic.

  “We came, we saw, we culled,” he said, flashing the grin that had earned him an army of devoted admirers on social media. It wasn’t a pleasant grin but it was perfectly rectangular and revealed white, even teeth, so it was admired for its geometrical regularity as much as anything. Some said it made him look dumb. Others swooned.

  “And let what we have done today stand as a warning to all immigrants,” Wynne added, his brow furrowing sternly. “Avian, Asian, whatever. You will not be tolerated here. This is not the place for you. Thanks to Prime Minister Drake, our nation has been brought back to its senses. Mr Drake has truly made Great Britain again.”

  AJIA SNELL, WATCHING a live feed of the broadcast on her phone, grimaced.

  “Made Britain grate again, more like,” she muttered. “Tosser.”

  She swiped the image of Major Wynne’s face off the screen, wishing every annoyance could be erased at the touch of a finger. How could a man so handsome spout such bullshit? It was almost as though some law of nature was being defiled. The same genes which gave Wynne his movie-star good looks also gave him the IQ of a drooling moron, and that just should not be.

  Ajia slowly finished the cup of tea in front of her. Across the road from the café where she sat was the site of a former Starbucks. She would much rather have been over there enjoying a vente skinny latte than here at a formica-topped table, sipping weak milky tea from chipped chinaware, surrounded by the smell of frying bacon. But there wasn’t a Starbucks left in London, let alone the entire UK, not since the election. The company had upped stakes and abandoned the country, citing “an atmosphere uncongenial to business” as the reason. All that remained were hundreds of empty premises with adhesive mermaid logos peeling away from the windows.

  She missed Starbucks. She missed a lot of things. At the age of eighteen, Ajia pined for a lost past as keenly as an eighty-year-old might pine for the simplicities of a long-gone youth. It had been scarcely half a decade since Derek Drake came to power, and in that time the country she had grown up in had changed beyond all recognition. And not for the better.

  Stoically she stood, paid, and went outside to unlock her road bike. Within moments she was veering through the midday Shoreditch traffic, her legs pumping, her head low. Astride the saddle, in her skintight compression wear and streamlined helmet, her courier pouch slung over her back, Ajia was a demon, a thing of pure velocity and trajectory. Her world became narrowed down to the essentials: the spin of the pedals, the click of the gear shifters, the thrum of tubeless tyres on tarmac. Everything around her was either a conduit or an obstacle. Her brain was performing calculations at lightning speed, on the alert for every variable, every potential hazard. Was that pedestrian with the pram about to step off the kerb without looking? Was that number 26 bus going to pull out in front of her? Was the boy racer in the twin-exhaust hatchback really going to change lanes without indicating, like a complete dickhead? Could she avoid the drain grating sunk into the roadway ahead of her or would she just have to steer straight over it and ride out the disruption with her knees bent like shock absorbers?

  When she pulled up in front of Benny-Boy’s Independent Couriers, off Bethnal Green Road, she was barely out of breath, in spite of having covered a mile and a quarter in under four minutes. She padlocked the bike to the rack outside and went in. Behind the counter, Benny-Boy glanced round at her and one look at his face told her she’d had a wasted journey.

  “How was your lunch break?” he asked. His fingers were greasy from the sausage roll he was eating, bought from the bakery on the corner—previously a Chinese takeaway.

  “Fine. Nothing for me, then?”

  “Nothing for anyone,” said Benny-Boy with a half-apologetic shrug. “Not a single booking.”

  “Shit. And only one run this morning. What the hell’s going on?”

  “Nobody seems to want biking stuff today. Must be the parrot killing or something.”

  “Parakeet.”

  “Whatever. It’s got people keeping their heads down. Soldiers firing rifles in a public place will do that.”

  “It’s a ridiculous PR stunt,” Ajia said. “That’s all it is. Derek Draconian making a big song and dance about some bloody birds nobody even cares about, all so he can show us what a tough guy he is.”

  Benny-Boy chuckled. “Derek Draconian. That’s never not funny. Did you come up with it?”

  “No. Private Eye. They called him it back when the Resurrection Party were first starting up and Drake was a political joke, and they kept calling him it all through the election and beyond, right up until he shut them down and put the editor in jail. Because, hey, taking the piss out of the rich and powerful, that’s just not on.”

  “You know, Ajia, you need to be a bit careful with this sort of talk.” Benny-Boy’s expression turned serious. It looked incongruous on him. He had babyish features––round head, pudgy cheeks, button eyes––which was why his school nickname had stuck well into middle age. His face didn’t naturally lend itself to solemnity. “I mean, when it’s just you and me, no one else around, fine. Mock our beloved leader as much as you like. I don’t mind. But say the wrong thing when the wrong ears are listening…”

  “I know.”

  “We live in dodgy times. People disappear, you know that. Poof! Gone in the night. Especially people with a touch of the tar brush, like you.”

  She didn’t kill him for using that expression, although she ought to have. Benny-Boy wasn’t a racist. At least, not by current standards.

  “All right, you old fart,” she said. “I appreciate the lecture.”

  “Hey. Less of the ‘old’,” said Benny-Boy. “I’m just looking out for you, that’s all, girl. Got your best interests at heart. And mine, ’cause you’re the fastest fucking thing on a bike I’ve ever seen.”

  Ajia nodded noncommittally. “Not much use when I’m not being paid to ride it.”

  “Want to hang around, in case any work comes in? I’ve sent the other guys home, so if maybe a job comes up, it’s yours.”

  A couple of hard plastic chairs. Some ancient newspapers. A coffee-pod machine producing beverages that tasted like burnt cork. Daytime television wittering away on a wall-mounted set. The office was not exactly paradise.

  “Nah,” she said. “Tempted, but I’m going to cut my losses and call it a day. See you in the morning.”

  “Mmmph,” said Benny-Boy agreeably through a mouthful of sausage roll.

  AJIA RODE BACK to her bedsit, collected her stencils and spray cans, and headed off on an art spree.

  Biking was her hobby, one which brought in a trickle of income. Street art was her passion.

  She rode to one of her favourite spots, the back of a row of garages just west of Brick Lane. A dozen street artists shared it, using the brick walls as their canvas. The styles ranged from glorified graffiti tagging to sticker art to fully-rendered murals that had all the sophistication of an Old Master.

  There was perpetual competition for space at this outdoor gallery, and no image survived longer than a month. An artwork was allowed a reasonable amount of time to be seen and appreciated, before someone would ruthlessly paint over it.

  Her own most recent contribution was already gone, subsumed beneath a large composition consisting of crude, multi-coloured figures dancing. She recognised this as the work of someone who went by the pseudonym Blue Cat. She quite liked Blue Cat’s stuff, even if it was derivative of Keith Haring. He or she had a striking primitivist aesthetic. There was something compelling about those cavorting figures. Th
ere was glee on their crude faces, but also pain, as though to be this ecstatic was an effort. You could almost hear the music they were moving to, some piece of pounding, rhythmic plainchant underscored by thunderous percussion, Carmina Burana to a taiko beat.

  Ajia found a patch of wall adorned with a shoal of tissue-paper fish. The delicate little cut-outs had been battered by rain and were barely clinging on. She removed them with a scraper, showing what she hoped was due reverence even as she destroyed them. Then she took out a set of A3-sized stencils and got busy.

  She sprayed six shades of paint through six separate stencils, pausing for a couple of minutes to let each layer dry before applying the next. During these intervals she checked to see if anyone was watching. The site was overlooked by several houses and a tower block, but it wasn’t civilians she was worried about so much as the authorities. Police routinely patrolled here, hoping to catch people like Ajia in the act. Any kind of street art, for all that it brought brightness and vivacity to a drab environment, was considered vandalism. Especially the kind of street art she did.

  The picture, when complete, portrayed Derek Drake. The image was derived from one of his publicity headshots, which she had altered and stylised, creating a cartoonish version of the prime minister. Drake had froglike features to start with, but she had made him look downright batrachian––eyes protruding, cheeks bulging, double chin a great fleshy hammock like a membranous vocal sac––while still being recognisably him. He had his mouth open as though to speak, and Ajia had added a long, projecting tongue. The tongue was lashing out greedily towards a passing insect, a butterfly with patterning on its wings that spelled out the word OTHER.