Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (7 page)

7. THE MAN-LION AND THE DWARF

I
N A COURTYARD
between the seventh and sixth rings of the complex, two men approached.

They were a study in contrasts.

One was African, long-limbed and tall, seven feet if he was an inch.

The other was Caucasian and short, three feet if that, a dwarf.

The African had a regal bearing and a shock of frizzy hair like a lion’s mane. His fingers were tipped with nails so long and pointed they resembled talons.

The dwarf had an easy smile, but an air of self-importance, too. I knew him from the TV. He was an actor. He’d featured in a BBC sitcom, and a Channel 4 documentary about the trials of being a little person in showbusiness. His name escaped me just then.

Both men wore plain black jumpsuits and combat boots. They greeted the Trinity Syndicate with nods, the tall man deferential, the dwarf not so much.

“Zak?” said Bhatnagar. “This is Murunga Kilimo and Tim VanderKamp.”

“Tim VanderKamp,” I said to the dwarf. “Yes. That’s who you are.”

“Yeah, yeah, him off the telly,” said VanderKamp, sounding slightly bored. “BAFTA-nominated. Winner of a
People’s Choice
Award. Also an Olivier for my Macbeth at the Young Vic. And you are...?”

“Zak Bramwell. Better known as Zak Zap.”

“Daft name.”

“Not a comics fan, I take it.”

“Why would I be? I’m not eight years old.” VanderKamp turned to the three men. “Who is this loser anyway? Is he why you asked us to meet you here?”

“Zak’s going to be working on costumes for you,” said Lombard, although I hadn’t agreed to it yet.

“Sewing them?”

“No,” said Bhatnagar, “designing them. We hope.”

“Oh,” said VanderKamp, unimpressed.

“We’d like you and Murunga to show him what you can do,” said Krieger.

“Like performing monkeys, you mean?”

“Like indentured employees of the Trinity Syndicate,” said Lombard, with a broad grin full of latent menace, “who’ll do whatever’s asked of them by the blokes who sign their paycheques.”

VanderKamp shot him an insolent glare. There was a very large ego packed into that very small body.

But he knew which side his bread was buttered on. He turned to Kilimo.

“Why don’t you go first, Murunga? I need a few moments to prepare.”

The African gave a bow of consent. “How do you wish me to display my skills as Narasimha the Man-lion?” he asked the Trinity trio.

From the back of his waistband, under his cream-coloured linen jacket, Krieger drew an automatic pistol.

He levelled it at Kilimo. “I’m a Texan. We tend to settle matters with guns.”

He cocked the hammer and snaked his forefinger round the trigger.

Kilimo, staring down the barrel of the pistol at point blank range, was admirably unperturbed. Me, I was alarmed just being
near
a gun. I cringed away from it.

Lombard and Bhatnagar lodged their fingers in their ears. I copied them, just in time, as Krieger loosed off a shot at Kilimo.

Who was no longer standing in front of him.

Who was, indeed, nowhere near us.

Krieger looked up. We all looked up.

Kilimo was clinging to the side of a second-storey balcony. His fingers were dug into the fabric of the building like climber’s pitons.

Krieger drew a bead on him and fired again.

The bullet ricocheted off the spot where Kilimo had been holding on. He wasn’t there any more. There was only a set of gouges.

Krieger spun. Kilimo was now on the opposite side of the courtyard, even higher than before, hanging upside down from the base of a skybridge. He had leapt faster than the eye could follow, covering a distance of some thirty feet in a single bound.

My jaw was halfway to my chest by this time. It would drop still further in the coming moments.

Kilimo alighted back in front of us before Krieger could get off another round. The pistol seemed to vanish from the Texan’s grasp. Next thing I knew, Kilimo was holding it out to its owner, partly dismantled. He had the bullet clip and the slide in one hand, the rest of the gun in the other.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” Krieger said, taking the pistol from Kilimo and reassembling it. “That’ll be all.”

Kilimo stepped back. His expression was impassive. He wasn’t even out of breath.

“Masai warrior,” Bhatnagar confided to me. “Used to hunt lions, but there’s been a number of conservation programmes started up in the Serengeti lately, using Masai tribesmen to monitor the prides rather than decimate them. Murunga was a part of that, before he came on board with us.”

“And here comes Dopey,” said Lombard, pointing. “Or is it Grumpy? It certainly isn’t Bashful.”

VanderKamp reappeared, now naked save for a pair of very baggy Lycra shorts.

“Not the prettiest sight,” Lombard added in a murmur. “A fucking bare-arsed dwarf in a black diaper.”

I’m not ashamed to say I sniggered.

“I suppose you want me to go all Vamana now,” VanderKamp drawled.

“If you’d be so good,” said Bhatnagar.

VanderKamp scowled in concentration. I swear to God he looked like someone trying to take a dump, straining against a constipated lower colon.

And then he grew.

Muscles warped. Skin distended. I heard a
creak
and a
crack
like a falling tree, as bones elongated and gained mass and density.

VanderKamp swelled to the size of an average man, and just kept on going. Tendons writhed like snakes. Veins engorged to the thickness of vines. He grimaced and grunted. This was not a pleasant procedure, clearly.

Now he was ten feet tall and proportionately wide.

Now fifteen feet.

He topped out at twenty-five, a genuine giant. The shorts had become a tight thong restraining a set of genitalia so large it still makes me shudder just thinking about them.

VanderKamp reached for a palm tree planted close by. It was only slightly taller than he was. With a booming growl he wrenched it out of the soil, braced the trunk across his knee, and snapped it in two. Then he waved the halves above his head like a caveman brandishing a pair of clubs.

“Let me have war, say I,” he intoned, megaphone-loud. “It exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.”
¹

He dropped the broken tree.

“Is that all right?” he asked his three bosses archly. “Seen enough? Any notes on my performance? Or can I return to my dressing room?”

“Fine, thank you,” said Bhatnagar. “You may go.”

VanderKamp turned and strutted off, shrinking with every step until by the time he reached the exit from the courtyard he was back to his original squat dimensions, waddling rather than striding.

The Trinity Syndicate were all looking at me expectantly.

I groped for a response.

“That was... just... fucking... I did see all that, didn’t I? I wasn’t imagining any of it? It actually happened? One guy moved like greased lightning, the other
grew?
”

“Now are you convinced?” said Lombard.

“Well, yeah. Super powers. People with actual, honest-to-fuck super powers. How?”

“That’s not important right now. What’s important is, do you want the job?”

I laughed, hoarsely, perhaps a little hysterically. “Are you kidding? Does the Hulk wear purple trousers?”

Blank stares.

“That means yes, I’m in,” I said. “Just tell me where to sign.”

¹
Coriolanus
, Act IV, Scene 5.

8. WHAT WOULD JACK KIRBY DO?

F
OR THE NEXT
fortnight I worked like I’d never worked before. I was no shirker to begin with, but for those first two weeks I put in hours that were downright ridiculous, twelve a day, often more. I stuck to my usual method, tried and trusted. I’d rough out a pencil draft, hand-ink it with brush and technical pen, then scan the result into the computer, polish it up, add grayscale and colour and effects overlays and whatever else, and hey presto, bingo-bango, job done.

I loved every fucking minute of it.

Perhaps I should rewind a little. At the very least I should fill in some background detail. I’m an artist, not a writer. I tell stories with pictures, not words. This business of stringing sentences together is still pretty new to me. I’m not sure I’ve got the hang of it yet. Bear with.

Dick Lombard you know. But what about his two accomplices? I should fill you in on them, at least in brief.

R. J. Krieger had made his fortune in biotechnology. He owned a couple of dozen laboratories worldwide and had registered around three hundred patents. GM crops were his forte, but he was involved in gene therapies and other medical applications of DNA manipulation as well. Not long before I met him, scientists on his payroll had made a breakthrough in creating stem cells that exhibited a heightened resistance to anti-cancer drugs, thus improving the success rates of courses of treatment, and another breakthrough in synthesising an artificial human growth hormone to help children with restricted physical development.

So, depending on your viewpoint, he was either Albert Schweitzer or Victor Frankenstein, all wrapped up in a drawling “aw, shucks” down-home package, a Southern gent with his hands on the building blocks of life.

As for Vignesh Bhatnagar, the “merchant of death” label wasn’t undeserved. He was one of the world’s most successful arms dealers, with extensive contacts and contracts in every trouble spot around the globe. He supplied weapons to dictatorships and insurgents, oppressors and freedom fighters, tyrants and rebel militias, admirably even-handed in his distribution of the tools of war. For him there was no good or bad, no right or wrong, no politics, no sides. There was only the buyer. As long as the bank transfer cleared, he didn’t care who he sold what to.

But he wasn’t merely a middleman. Bhatnagar manufactured as well as dealt. He prided himself on being able to offer ordnance that no one else could, exclusive items which were superior to most of the product available on the market and therefore commanded premium prices. These included grenade launchers with programmable targeting and range-finding, portable railgun rifles, cluster munitions with “smart” bomblets capable of distinguishing friend from foe, and recoilless electrical guns that could fire over 100,000 rounds per minute.
¹

So that was the Trinity Syndicate. Lombard, Krieger, Bhatnagar. Three plutocrats, each a genius in his own way, rich beyond imagining, masters of all they surveyed. Men who were as close to being gods as it was possible to get. Divine thanks to their wealth, their power, their status. Not subject to the same laws as you or me. Set apart. Unassailable. Untouchable. An elite.

And I’d been hired by them to work exclusively for them.

The studio they gave me to use was every comics artist’s dream. For a start, it was mostly glass, and was flooded with steady equatorial sunlight all day long. Then there was the equipment: a fully adjustable glass-topped Futura drawing table, an ergonomic stool to go with it, and an iMac with a twenty-seven-inch screen, Intaglio graphics software, a Wacom drawing tablet and a Xerox DocuMate scanner. The art supplies were top-drawer, too, from Dixon Ticonderoga pencils in every hardness to Strathmore vellum Bristol board, from brushes tipped with Kolinsky sable to the whole spectrum of inks from good old Windsor and Newton, from kneaded rubber erasers to the most comprehensive set of French curves I had ever seen. I was in “doodler” heaven. I even had my own cappuccino maker sitting right by my desk, and if I wanted anything else to drink, or eat, all I had to do was pick up a phone, dial an internal extension, and within a quarter of an hour one of the Maldivian domestic staff would have brought whatever I’d ordered.