Bloodsong

  Bloodsong

  Other Simon & Schuster books

  by Melvin Burgess

  Bloodtide

  Sara’s Face

  More Simon Pulse books

  to challenge your imagination

  The Uglies trilogy

  by Scott Westerfeld

  Tithe and Valiant

  by Holly Black

  The Immortals series

  by Tamora Pierce

  The Farsala trilogy

  by Hilari Bell

  Tripping to Somewhere

  by Kristopher Reisz

  The Fallen series

  by Tom Sniegoski

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2005 by Melvin Burgess

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2005 by Andersen Press, Ltd.

  Published by arrangement with Andersen Press, Ltd.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Mike Rosamilia

  The text of this book was set in Times.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Simon Pulse edition August 2007

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Control Number 2007920430

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-3616-9

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4424-4692-2

  For Mary, Queen of Publicists

  Contents

  Chapter 1: SIGURD

  Chapter 2: THE SWORD

  Chapter 3: THE JOURNEY EAST

  Chapter 4: DESPAIR

  Chapter 5: REGIN

  Chapter 6: SIGURD

  Chapter 7: 1ST DEATH

  Chapter 8: REGIN

  Chapter 9: SIGURD

  Chapter 10: THE TREASURE

  Chapter 11: BETRAYAL

  Chapter 12: DESTRUCTION

  Chapter 13: THE GIRL

  Chapter 14: MEETING

  Chapter 15: BRYONY

  Chapter 16: LOVE IN THE MACHINE

  Chapter 17: THE SEARCH THROUGH CRAYLEY

  Chapter 18: MOTHER

  Chapter 19: PARTING

  Chapter 20: THE SURFACE

  Chapter 21: HOGNI

  Chapter 22: plots

  Chapter 23: THE MONKEY’S PAW

  Chapter 24: HOGNI

  Chapter 25: SIGURD

  Chapter 26: FAME

  Chapter 27: WAR WITHOUT CONFLICT

  Chapter 28: SIGURD

  Chapter 29: GUDRUN

  Chapter 30: THE MOTHER OF THE HOUSE

  Chapter 31: 1ST STRIKE

  Chapter 32: THE OLD HOUSE

  Chapter 33: 2ND DEATH

  Chapter 34: THE CLONE

  Chapter 35: GUDRUN

  Chapter 36: DEEP DOWN BELOW

  Chapter 37: CONSOLIDATION

  Chapter 38: MARSHALL DE LA LA-DE-DAH DE PORTOBELLO ROAD

  Chapter 39: THE CLONE

  Chapter 40: THE ENTRANCE

  Chapter 41: RESCUE

  Chapter 42: BRYONY

  Chapter 43: THE HUNT

  Chapter 44: DAYLIGHT

  Chapter 45: MEETING

  Chapter 46: SIGURD

  Chapter 47: GUDRUN

  Chapter 48: BETRAYAL

  Chapter 49: TRUTH AND LIES

  Chapter 50: CLEANSING

  Chapter 51: 3RD DEATH

  Sara’s Face

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bloodsong

  Regin said, “It’s time.” He smacked his lips. An old guy like him, it’s all he can talk about. Adventure! And all the time there he is scowling away like it was a problem with the carburetor.

  “A monster, Sigurd. A real live en. It’s perfect.” He licked his face like it was dipped in gravy.

  “I’m too young,” I said.

  “Too young!” he scoffed.

  “I’m fifteen. Just a boy.”

  “Some boy. Sigurd! What about it?” Regin crossed his arms and flopped down. He’s a skinny old pig, Regin, but not stiff like most of them. He has a long bendy neck like a dog, so he can lie flat on the ground and lift his head up in the air and stare straight at you.

  “I’m not going to do anything marvelous, Sig,” he told me. “I just want to be around watching you do it.” He tipped his head to one side and smiled. “What’s up? Scared of it?” he teased.

  “You won’t get me into any of your crazy plans like that,” I said.

  For a practical person, Regin’s very romantic. He crosses every “t” and checks everything twice and makes sure you have enough spare pants packed, but really he’s living in fairyland. Killing dragons! I’ve got an adventure in mind, don’t doubt me. I’m a Volson. It’s what we do. But slaying dragons? Come on!

  Look around you, what do you see? Not much, you might think. It’s a beautiful place here—sand dunes, sea, the river winding its way down. Alf’s a good ruler. My father Sigmund knew what he was doing when he sent my mother and me here when the war broke out.

  Sigmund was a great man. He made friends out of enemies, peace out of war. He healed this country. That’s what good government does.

  Then the foreign planes came and nuked London flat, and my father and all his plans and organization with it—vaporized the lot. Even the foundations of the buildings in central London melted, they say. No one lives there anymore. Even the dust has blown away. There are trees charred with the heat of the blast as far away as Slough, but the Volson principles are still alive here in Wales. There’re children playing and people going about their business, all at peace with one another—at least until the next little tyrant wants this stretch of beach and a few slaves, or until some foreign power decides we’re getting above ourselves.

  I want everywhere to be like this. That’s my adventure. I want to put this land back together. I want the kids to grow up knowing that their kids are going to have more than they had, not less. Glory? Stuff that. War is the only dragon I want to fight.

  “It’ll make your name,” said Regin. “They’ve been trying to finish Fafnir off for years. He’s the real thing. It’s your chance! You can show everyone what you’re made of.”

  “There’s no such thing as monsters, just people gone wrong,” I said. It’s an old pigman proverb, but in this case it’s true—Fafnir really was a man gone wrong. He’d changed a lot, but you can always tell where a creature began. He’d grown enormous, given himself all sorts of wired-up senses—infrared, sonar, radar. He was about the most technologically advanced organism on earth, but he’d been a man once.

  It makes you think. Who’d want to do that to themselves?

  You know the story. The dragon on Hampstead Heath? Everyone thought it was nonsense until the first dodgy-looking photos began to circulate. That’s when Regin went off to investigate. He’s a clever old pig, Regin. He came back with proper evidence.

  “Grrru. Must be ten meters long,” Regin croaked. “Armor-coated. Some sort of liquid crystal. Look.”

  He dug in his pocket and pulled out—well. It looked like a limp jewel, that’s the best I can do to describe Fafnir’s scale. It was flat, three-lobed; it glinted and shone like a gem. Colours shot out from somewhere inside it as he draped it lightly over his fingers. Later I discovered it did that even in the dark. Maybe it was still alive.

&
nbsp; “Diamond won’t scratch it, bullets won’t pierce it, but it’s as flexible as skin.”

  “Wow.” That set me off. I wanted to go straight down to the beach and try to shoot holes in it, but Regin wouldn’t have it.

  “Nah, nah!” he said. “I need to run some tests on it.” He took the scale back and waved it in the air. It was like tissue paper. If you threw it up in the air it floated down like a leaf. You could roll it up like leather. That was some piece of engineering.

  “This is the secret of beating him,” he snorted. “Once I find out how to get through his skin, I can make a weapon that’ll kill him.”

  I laughed at him, but I felt a thrill go through me despite myself. “It sounds like a lot of danger for not much gain to me,” I said.

  “It’s not just the glory. It’d be a good deed, Sig! He terrorizes the whole area.”

  I shrugged. “There’s a lot of suffering nearer home. Why start with him?”

  Regin stood up. He shook himself. “He’s got the bullion,” he said, and he cocked his head at me with a little smile.

  I looked up at him. I wasn’t smiling now. “You know that?”

  “Sure as I can be.”

  “We better get going then.”

  A nation needs gold. How do you build roads? With gold. How do you build schools and hospitals? With gold. How do you feed and clothe people? How do you get them the good things of life? How do you raise an army? Fight disease? How do you make a people grow? Gold, gold, and more gold. That bomb didn’t just destroy the centers of business and government. It destroyed our gold reserves as well. We’ve been living like beggars every since.

  Some people say the gold just melted away to nothing, vaporized. Another story is that my father’s first son, Styr, came back to take it away before the bomb fell. All I know is this: A nation needs gold. Sigmund spent a lifetime raising the wealth to make this country hold together. If Regin was right, I could get it back overnight.

  The gold. That’s the beginning of everything.

  Regin got to work straight away, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Fafnir was cutting-edge stuff. He’d been using viral-recoding— using viruses to carry DNA into the cells to change you from the inside. Easy as catching a cold, much superior to the old womb-tanks. A lot of people didn’t like it at first—you might remember the fuss in the papers. Viruses mean disease, and people found it hard to accept they could be used for our benefit. But it’s clever stuff. You can just get on with your normal life while the changes take place. Very superior. What’s more, with recoding you never had to stop. You could change day by day. As time went by Fafnir was only going to get bigger and deadlier and harder to kill. A lot of people had already tried and failed to work him out—but they weren’t Regin. If anyone could do it, it was him.

  First problem: That scale was more or less indestructible. We couldn’t dissolve it or burn it, we couldn’t file it or scrape it or chip it. It had no reactions. Regin couldn’t get so much as a molecule off it. If you couldn’t get a sample, how could you run tests? On he went, poor old Regin—genetics, physics, chemistry, reason—nothing could get to grips with it. It drove him mad because—well, as he kept saying, if it didn’t react with anything, it couldn’t be there. You wouldn’t be able to see it because light would go straight through it, you wouldn’t be able to touch it, because it wouldn’t react with your skin or flesh. It wouldn’t even make a noise. But the scale did all those things. Nothing reacted to it—but there it was. Impossible!

  Now, where did something like that come from?

  You know those old stories about the lift shaft in the old Galaxy building, where my grandfather used to have his headquarters? Nothing could scratch it or dent it, it never even got dirty because nothing would stick to it. It was still glittering like it was brand-new when it was a hundred years old. That disappeared after the bomb, too—so maybe it wasn’t indestructible after all. What if Fafnir got his hands on that? Nothing else I ever heard of was as tough as that scale.

  Regin’s theory was that it was some sort of crystalline structure, diamond most like, but bound together in another way.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Like the breath of a fish. Or the sound of a cat walking, or the roots of the mountain,” he grunted, and then started laughing down his snout to himself, “Grun grun grun!”

  “Really? Really, Regin? Are you joking?” Godpower! Regin says this world is full of objects we can never see or hear. He says the gods walk about among us all the time, but we can never know it because we can’t react with them—only they can react with us. That’s how they guide lives and affect us in ways we can never tell. He says there are many universes, all packed up together in exactly the same place as this one. Someone—some god—had made this scale move across from one universe to another. It was a god-object.

  “Can Fafnir only be killed by a god? Is that what you’re telling me?” I said.

  Regin looked at me over his specs. “No. I’m saying he can only be killed with something from another world. Now what might that be? And didn’t I tell you? This is made for you.” He nodded. “It’s time to find out.”

  I felt a thrill go through me then. He was right: This was mine. He must have known the whole time. What was the only thing that ever cut into the Galaxy lift shaft? What else could cut a hole in Fafnir’s hide but my father’s knife? What was left of it, that is.

  The knife was given to my father by Odin himself. On the day my aunt was married to King Conor, he appeared and plunged it into the lift shaft and only my father was able to take it out again. Everybody knows that story, and the story of the terrible war that followed. But not so many people know the story of how the knife came to be destroyed.

  It was the dawn of the final war. My father was confident that morning, according my mother, Hiordis. The population was loyal, we were well armed, he was a brilliant general. There had been many wars before in his long reign and he’d won them all. There was no reason to suppose this one was going to be any different until Odin showed up.

  He appeared in their bedroom—don’t ask why, it’s not the sort of place you’d associate with him. My mother was sitting up in bed watching my father do his exercises. I tease her about that. She looks down her nose at me and lowers her great eyelids and purrs slightly—she has some lion in her, my mother—and she says nothing, but I think maybe she liked to sit there in bed watching the king limber up. She was younger than him by what? Eighty or ninety years? Oh, kings can live a long time without getting old. He used the tanks for that. In another ten years he would have ruled for a century.

  Then Odin opens the door and walks right in. A smell of carrion came in with him. My mother pulled the covers up to her face. He walked right up to my father and held out his hand.

  And my father’s face just crumpled. That’s how my mother described it; he crumpled. Suddenly he looked all his one hundred and twenty years. He knew at once that the god wanted his knife back. It meant the end.

  He was never too keen on the gods, old Sigmund. Mother says that whenever the subject came up, he used to hold his finger to the side of his nose and say that there were a few questions needed answering before he was going to have any dealings with that bunch of crooks. He only had one prayer. “Have the grace to leave us to our own affairs. Amen!”

  You can’t blame him. A god who loves warfare and death and calls it poetry? What’s that about? A god who steals secrets from the dead? Whose side was he on? Not the living, that’s for sure. So, instead of quietly handing it over, Sigmund snatched the knife from the table where it lay close at hand and stabbed him instead. That was my father. He tried to murder God! And you know what? I think the god loved him for it.

  That knife had cut diamond and tungsten for him as if they had been bananas. Odin turned away, but sure enough, it grazed his neck and left a long red scratch. Calmly Odin took it out of his hand. He didn’t seem angry at what had happened; he just smiled. Then he rubbed the knife between
his hands. A fine gray dust fell to the floor—all that was left of the indestructible symbol of Volson power.

  “See you later,” said Odin, and he turned on his heel and walked toward the door.

  But Father wasn’t done yet. Naked as he was, he ran after Odin, grabbed him by the shoulders, heaved—and flung him to the ground.

  “I told you,” he hissed. “Stay out of our affairs!”

  “I am your affairs,” growled the god. He stood up, pushed Sigmund to one side, and left the room. By the time Father got up and opened the door, the corridor was already empty.

  He told Hiordis that at least he had met his god naked, just as a man should.

  That same day, Sigmund sent Hiordis, still pregnant with me, out to stay with Alf on the far coast of South Wales. The next day, they dropped the bomb on London. Puff! All gone. Hiordis says they picked up radar traces of planes, high up in the stratosphere. We thought they’d just come to keep an eye on things, same as usual. But we were getting too powerful, and this time, they came to squash us.

  Hiordis and Alf didn’t want to give it to me at first. I was too young, I could wait a few years, Fafnir would still be there when I was older. Blah blah blah, wait wait wait. They had a point—I’d made it myself to Regin. Okay, okay—I want to go and fight the worst monster you ever heard of because my mother says I shouldn’t—so maybe I’m young and stupid. Well, maybe you have to be young and stupid to do a thing like this. To fight a dragon! As soon as she started, I felt the strength inside me, I felt the certainty. I was ready.

  “You’re not at your full strength,” complained Alf.

  “It’s my time,” I told him. And in the end I got my way. Neither of them could refuse me anything. People can’t. I don’t know why, no one ever says no to me. So I’d better be bloody right, hadn’t I?

  My mother went to fetch the dust. When she gave it to me my life began. I was stepping onto a road that stretched from now to my death. There were no diversions, no way back. I’d started up, and nothing could ever turn me off till I was dead and gone. I could feel the weight of years gone and the weight of the years to come passing through that moment. Destiny was there, and not just mine, either. I am the destiny of this whole nation.