The Roots of Evil Read online

  THE ROOTS OF EVIL

  Philip Reeve

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About Philip Reeve

  Books by Philip Reeve

  THE ROOTS OF EVIL

  About Philip Reeve

  Philip Reeve was born in Brighton and worked in a bookshop for many years before becoming a full-time illustrator and then turning to writing. His first novel, Mortal Engines, won the Nestlé Smarties Gold Award (2002), the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for both the Branford Boase Award and the Whitbread Children's Book Award. He has since won many more awards and accolades for his works including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 2006 and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for A Darkling Plain and the 2008 CILIP Carnegie Medal for Here Lies Arthur. His most recent titles are Goblins (2012), which was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and its sequel Goblins vs Dwarves (2013). He lives in Dartmoor, England, with his wife and son, Sam. For further information and to explore the author’s own curious world visit www.philip-reeve.com

  Books by Philip Reeve

  Novels:

  Mortal Engines

  Predator's Gold

  Infernal Devices

  A Darkling Plain

  Here Lies Arthur

  Fever Crumb

  A Web Of Air

  Scrivener's Moon

  No Such Thing As Dragons

  Larklight

  Starcross

  Mothstorm

  Goblins

  Goblins vs Dwarves

  Oliver and the Seawigs (with Sarah McIntyre / NYP)

  Prologue

  Above the dead surface of a nameless world, far out among the Autumn Stars, the Heligan Structure hangs alone in the hard, cold light of space. A tree that has never known the tug of any gravity, except its own, it has grown immense, stretching out its massive branches in all directions. Among its glossy leaves the people build their homes and halls and galleries, but the tree does not notice them. It is sleeping, as it has slept for centuries, dreaming its long, slow, bitter dreams of vengeance …

  1

  As he walked down the steep trunk-roads, which generations of his people had bored through the living wood, Ven could hear the great tree creaking, shifting, muttering. He hated those noises. He hated the shadows that the dim bio-lamps on the ceilings cast. These deep places had always made him uneasy. But someone had to go there. Someone had to check the central trunks for canker and seek out the honey-hives and meatberry bushes, which the people needed to supplement their food supply. Ven was fifteen now – in the first year of his manhood. Even the Justiciar’s son had to take his turn among the inner branches.

  Nervously he made his way along the twisting passages, shining his glow-beetle lamp into crevices, listening out for the buzzing of the small black bees that might lead him to a honey-hive. He found an out-sprouting of woody shoots that would soon block the road if they were left to grow: he marked the place with a red thread and made a note in his bark-book to report them to the pruning squads.

  The creaking of the tree grew louder. It was restless tonight, Ven thought, grumbling in its sleep. And then – just when he had almost made himself believe that those noises were nothing to be frightened of – a new one reached him. A roaring, snoring sound, like some vast saw tearing at the tree: a wheezing that grew louder and louder, as if some terrible thing was rushing towards him out of the Heartwood.

  Ven dropped his lamp and covered his ears with his hands. One of the lamp’s precious glass panes broke and the beetles inside escaped, circling his head in a storm of dizzy little lights before scattering away into the shadows.

  The noise grew louder and louder and … stopped.

  Ven took his hands from his ears and listened. The mumblings of the great tree were all that he could hear now. They seemed quiet and comforting after that terrible new sound.

  His first thought was to run back to the out-branches. But what would he say when they asked him why he’d left his work unfinished? That there had been a scary noise? He could imagine how the others would tease him about that. He was the Justiciar’s son. It was his duty to show courage, and to set a good example.

  So instead of hurrying away, he went towards the place where the noise had come from, around a bend of the passage and down a flight of shallow carved stairs to where a hollow space opened among a mass of vast trunks.

  Ven had been to this place before. It was directly above the digestion chamber, and was used for funerals. He remembered, as a small boy, watching the shrouded body of his grandfather being lowered down through one of the dark openings in the floor to become one with the tree. The place had been empty then, nothing but the ring of mourners. Now something waited in the dim, silvery light. It was more than man-high, and a colour that Ven had seldom seen before; a rectangular thing, with windows and a door, like a small, lost room. Or a box …

  Ven’s mouth felt dry. It can’t be! he thought. Not now, not here! Not appearing to him, after all the years of waiting …

  Yet here it stood, solid, impossible and terrifying: the Blue Box.

  2

  ‘Leela!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘We’re here!’

  He was in one of his excitable moods. Leela threw aside the furs she slept under and went out of her cabin to find him. She had travelled through years and light-years with him, but she still didn’t understand the turnings that his temper took. Sometimes he was like a child, sometimes a god. Often he seemed to be both at once.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted, his voice echoing as he strode ahead of her somewhere through the strange, too-big spaces of the TARDIS. ‘Don’t you want to take a look?’

  She hurried past the swimming pool, up the long spiral of a staircase and down a corridor to the control chamber. The rising-and-falling thing that told her when the TARDIS was in motion was still, so she knew that they had landed somewhere. The Doctor waited by the door, his long scarf wrapped three times around his neck, his hat pushed back on his brown mop of curls, a wide grin on his face.

  ‘Where are we?’ Leela asked.

  ‘Surprise!’ the Doctor said. ‘You know you were complaining that you missed trees?’

  ‘I did not complain,’ said Leela. Though it was true: she was a forest-dweller, a warrior of the Sevateem. But since the Doctor had taken her from her jungle home, their travels had mostly been to treeless places: the crystalline cities of Ix, the steel hives of the Sun Makers on Pluto. Part of her longed for the dappled light of forests and the smell of growing things.

  ‘Of course you complained!’ said the Doctor. ‘And you were quite right to. It reminded me that I’ve always meant to visit this place. It’s called the Heligan Structure.’

  ‘And there are trees here?’

  ‘Oh, better than that! The Heligan Structure is a tree; one enormous, genetically engineered tree, the size of a small moon. Earth people in the twenty-fourth century use these things to help terraform alien worlds.’

  ‘Terror … what?’

  ‘Terraform: to make Earth-like. I’ve seen whole forests of Heligans hanging high in the upper atmospheres of planets in the Cygnus Sector, slowly breathing in carbon dioxide, breathing out oxygen. The leaves act as solar collectors. This one’s different though: much bigger, and all alone.’

  He put a picture of it on the TARDIS’s screen for her. It did look like a moon, she thought. A moon of spiky green leaves, with spires and windows and covered balconies and jutting pointy bits poking out all over it. It was floating above a world that looked as lifeless as a cinder.

  ‘It doesn’t look like a tree …’

  ‘No,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘More like a giant Christmas decoration built by squirrels. The tree’s inside: root ball in the centre,
trunks and branches radiating out in all directions. And people live on it! There’s no life on the planet below, but here they are, hundreds of them, living in this tree. A whole city of tree houses, slowly linked together over hundreds of years. It’s a space station, Leela. A wooden space station!’

  Leela stared at the thing. ‘Why would people want to live there?’

  ‘Do you know, I have absolutely no idea!’ said the Doctor, his grin growing wider, as it always did when he arrived in some new place. ‘Let’s find out!’

  He unlatched the door. Leela checked she had her knife, and looked round for K9. The robot dog was parked under the main console. Multicoloured wires trailed from one of his hatches to a port on the console’s underside. He was motionless, his single eye unlit, but when Leela called his name he raised his head and the antennae on top swivelled towards her.

  ‘Recharging batteries, mistress,’ he said. ‘Estimated time remaining: two hours, thirty-seven minutes, fourteen seconds …’

  ‘All right, K9,’ said the Doctor. ‘You wait here. There’s a good dog.’

  ‘Affirmative, master.’

  ‘But, Doctor!’ Leela protested. ‘What if we are attacked? The little metal one fights well!’

  ‘I don’t need K9 to look after me,’ the Doctor assured her. ‘I’m sure there’ll be no danger here anyway.’

  He might be sure, but Leela was not. She could never understand why the Doctor was so careless of danger. It was a good thing he had her to look after him, she thought, as he opened the TARDIS door and they stepped out together into dim, green light and the earthy, warm-compost smell inside the great tree.

  The TARDIS had materialized in a sort of woody cave, its walls formed by thick trunks, which had twined and fused together over centuries. The floor was a latticework of roots. Here and there a dark hole opened between them. The Doctor bounded around this space delightedly, running his hands over the smooth silver bark, saying things like: ‘Grown from heavily modified holly DNA, I think!’ and ‘Too small to create this much gravity on its own … They must have a generator somewhere. That’s how they stop the atmosphere escaping into space …’

  Leela ignored him. He might know about DNA and gravity and space, but she knew trees. She’d known each individual tree within a day’s walk of her home village. Even as a child she’d understood that trees each had their own character, like people. She looked around her at the scarred and knotted trunks, and listened to the way that this tree creaked and stirred and shifted. It seemed to her that it was ancient – and evil.

  And she could feel eyes on her. Someone was watching them. She turned, reaching for her knife. A narrow passageway opened between the trunks nearby, and from the darkness there a boy stared out: wide, scared eyes in a brown face.

  ‘Doctor …’ she whispered.

  The Doctor saw the boy. ‘Hello!’ he said.

  The boy seemed unable to move, unable to speak. He cowered a little deeper into the shadows as the Doctor walked towards him, but that was all.

  The Doctor looked pleased to see the boy. He always looked pleased to see everybody. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled paper bag. ‘Would you like a jelly baby?’ he asked, holding it out to the boy.

  The boy looked down at the bag, then up again at the Doctor’s reassuring grin. He didn’t look at all reassured. He said, ‘You are really him! You are the Doctor!’

  ‘That’s right. And this is Leela. What’s your name?’

  ‘Ven,’ said the boy.

  ‘Ven? That’s a good name. Catchy. Easy to remember.’

  The boy said, ‘It’s short for “Vengeance-Will-Be-Ours-When-The-Doctor-Dies-A-Thousand-Agonizing-Deaths”.’

  The Doctor’s grin faded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that is a bit of a mouthful. I can see why you shortened it … Are you sure you wouldn’t like a jelly baby?’

  A tremor rippled through the tree, making all the trunks and branches creak and whisper, shuddering the roots underfoot.

  ‘There is danger here,’ said Leela firmly. She turned back towards the TARDIS. But in the few seconds that her attention had been focused on the Doctor and Ven, the chamber had changed. New shoots were sprouting silently from the floor and twining around the TARDIS, enclosing it in a cage of living wood, which grew thicker with each passing instant. Leela ran forward and tugged at a shoot. It was young, green and pliable, but as fast as she pulled it away from the TARDIS another grew to take its place.

  ‘Do something!’ she shouted at the Doctor. ‘Use your magic!’

  ‘The sonic screwdriver, you mean?’ The Doctor took off his hat and scratched his head, staring at the mass of branches and tendrils where the TARDIS had been. ‘It has no effect on wood, I’m afraid.’

  Leela gave a cry of frustration and drew her knife. The thinner tendrils parted easily enough, amid sticky splatterings of sap, but more were sprouting all the time. The ones that had grown first were already thick and woody.

  ‘You will never free it!’ shouted Ven. Outraged by what Leela was doing to the tree, he forgot his fear of the Doctor and ran to her, struggling to pull her away. ‘The tree has awoken! You will never get your box back! You will die here! Let justice be done!’

  Leela wrenched free of him and spun round, cursing, ready to drive her knife through him despite the Doctor’s shout of ‘No!’ But before she could strike, another tremor shook the tree, far worse than the first. Caught off-balance, she pitched forward, and would have fallen had the Doctor not caught her. Ven was not so lucky; stumbling backwards, he slipped into one of the ominous dark openings in the floor and vanished with a terrified scream.

  As the shaking ceased, the Doctor and Leela ran to the edge of the hole. It opened into a shaft, smooth-walled and sticky with sap. Far below they could see a greenish glow. It seemed to Leela that they were looking down into a lake of thick green fluid. The composty smell came strongly up the shaft, and so did the whimperings of Ven, who was clinging to some tiny handhold halfway down.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ called the Doctor. ‘We’ll soon have you out of there!’

  Leela could not see why they should help him – he was their enemy! He had attacked them! – but she wanted to please the Doctor, so instead of arguing she leaned into the shaft, stretching down both hands towards the terrified boy.

  He was far beyond her reach. The Doctor pulled her out again. ‘No, no, no … We don’t want you falling in after him.’ He peered down at Ven again. ‘What’s down there?’ he called. ‘Is there any way out at the bottom?’

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘Doctor!’ said Leela, tugging at his sleeve. ‘There are forest plants at home that trap small creatures and dissolve them in pools of slime among their leaves. This tree must be the same, but bigger!’

  The Doctor looked at her, his eyes very wide, his expression deadly serious. ‘Heligans aren’t usually carnivorous. I suppose this one is just too big to sustain itself on sunlight alone. Someone has been monkeying about with its DNA sequences … That must be the digestion chamber down there. I expect they shovel all their waste into it. Their dead too. Making the tree stronger. Very efficient …’

  ‘Doctor, what about the boy?’

  ‘Eh? Oh yes …’ He peered down the shaft again. Ven was still clinging there. ‘How far down do you think he is?’ the Doctor asked. ‘I’d say about twenty feet; that’s about six metres, or roughly … let me see … two and a half Rigellian floons … Yes, this should do it …’

  As he spoke, he was unwinding the long, stripy scarf from around his neck. He tied one end firmly around a protruding root at the mouth of the shaft and lowered the other carefully down towards the boy.

  ‘Catch hold of this, Ven!’

  The boy looked as if he’d been asked to touch a poisonous snake. Perhaps he thought it was a poisonous snake, it occurred to Leela. ‘It will not hurt you,’ she promised. ‘It is called a “scarf”. It is like a cloak, only pointless. Take it! He is trying to save your life!�
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  The boy still looked just as scared. ‘But the B-Blue Box,’ he stammered. ‘And he said … He’s the Doctor!’

  ‘Now catch hold,’ said the Doctor cheerfully. ‘There’s a good chap.’

  For a moment Ven just hung there, staring up. Then, with a yelp of fear, he let go of his precarious handhold and snatched hold of the scarf. He dangled for a moment, flailing for a foothold on the shaft walls. Little flakes of bark, dislodged by his boots, went tumbling down to splash into that green lake below.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t stretch it,’ the Doctor whispered to Leela, as they watched him scramble towards them. ‘Still, that’s one problem solved. Now to think about untangling the TARDIS … There’s always a solution to these little emergencies. You just have to think sideways at them.’

  Leaving Leela to keep an eye on the boy while he climbed back up, the Doctor rolled over onto his back and clasped his hands behind his head. He always thought best when he was relaxing. But just as he was about to turn his mind to the problem of the TARDIS, he noticed that he and Leela were no longer alone. While they had been busy rescuing young Ven, three men and a girl had crept silently into the chamber behind them. All four wore what appeared to be wooden armour, and all carried spears. The girl, who seemed to be their leader, was pointing hers at the Doctor’s throat.

  The Doctor beamed at her. ‘Hello! I think you’ll get on rather well with my friend Leela here.’

  Leela glanced round, saw the newcomers, and sprang up, reaching for her knife. The Doctor gestured at her to keep it in its sheath. If his young companion had a fault, he thought, it was this habit of hers of trying to stick knives in people as soon as she met them. Personally, he much preferred to get them chatting. People were generally much less inclined to want to kill you once you’d chatted for a bit, and if they weren’t, well, at least you could use the time to think of an escape plan …