Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire Part 26

A cramp hit me as we traversed one such section: a fairly broad lip of rock beneath a jutting boulder made of some striated element more impervious to the weathering effect of the wind. I fell to my knees, clutching at my calf.

The pain was agonizing, as if a ligament had snapped or a muscle had torn. I was familiar with the sensation - I used to play rugby for Blackheath - but it as no more welcome for that. Fortunately Ace was also familiar with cramp, and forced me to lie flat whilst she ma.s.saged my calf until the muscle relaxed.

'Are you sure that we're headed in the right direction?' I asked as her fingers probed my leg.

'No. I haven't seen anywhere for them to have diverted, though, so it looks like we're headed for the top.'

The wind picked up as we climbed higher. It attacked us first from one direction and then from another, circling around to find our weakest spots, sometimes insinuating its cold, hard fingers into our clothes and sapping the strength from our limbs, sometimes buffeting us hard and making us lose our precious fingerholds. There was no mercy here: the elements were pitting their strength against two pygmies who had dared profane this sacred place. Perversely these natural attacks gave me some small measure of comfort, for compared to them the evil of men such as Maupertuis and his mysterious master were as nothing. If we could defeat the mountain, I felt that we could defeat anything.

That epiphany proved to be the turning point of the climb. Perhaps the cold had finally got to me and numbed my marrow but I felt warmer and more confident after that. Even when the rock vanished, to be replaced with a sheer wall of black ice, I did not quail. Ace and I took turns with her miraculous weapon, which she had set to produce a thin knife of sunlight, cutting steps into the ice. I took my cue from her: each step that she cut was precisely the right size, no deeper than it should be, and s.p.a.ced apart from its neighbours by a comfortable distance. My own initial attempts were farcical but I soon learned how to wield the device, and I found that I could match her delicacy of touch.

At one stage, when Ace was above me, cutting away, and I was clinging to the steps that I had recently cut but which had refrozen within seconds, I looked past her. The mountain could only have been a few hundred yards in diameter at that point, and I was shocked to discover that the sky was only a few body-lengths away. At that range the ice was pitted, rough and grey. Gaps existed between the ice and the mountain: black voids, like wounds in reality. The river of liquid atmosphere, just a trickle at this elevation, emerged from one of them. The view was half-hidden by tendrils of mist which curled around us. Looking down, first a few inches, then a few feet, and then further, I found that I could no longer make out the ground.

We were suspended between heaven and h.e.l.l, coc.o.o.ned in the mist.

'Jesus, I didn't realize we were so close.'

Ace's voice surprised me out of my reverie. I climbed past her and took the lightgun.

'A few more minutes should see us to the top,' I grunted, and set to work cutting a set of steps and then a rough platform for us to stand on, side by side.

Reverently, I reached up and touched the sky. It was as hard as the mountain had been, and as cold. I craned my neck and looked out, upside down, along its surface. My mind played funny tricks with perspective, for a moment I couldn't tell which direction was up and which was down, what was surface and what was sky. Some primitive part of my brain kept screaming that I was going to fall, but only for a moment.

And then a distorted face thrust itself out of a patch of mist at me, and I did scream.

Ace laughed.

'It's only one of the skaters,' she said.

Catching my breath, I looked closer. The face, which looked so much like a gross caricature of a well-fed, gout-ridden d.i.c.kensian gentleman, or a rector straight out of Trollope, gazed with an expression of bovine stupidity straight from a spherical, semi-transparent body some ten feet in diameter.

Three stubby limbs rose from the top of the body, each terminating in what looked for all the world like a skate, made of some bony substance. A pouch of skin drooped below the creature. I wondered for a moment what its function was, but I was enlightened when the creature grew bored with me and unfurled the pouch to form a sail with which it caught the breeze and skated away across the surface of the ice.

'Your face,' Ace said, and laughed again.

'They taste of chocolate, you say?'

'Yeah. They have these big macho dominance fights, sometimes, and they use those skate-things as weapons. The loser gets his balloon punctured and falls all the way down to the surface. I got hungry one night, and one just dropped out of the sky, virtually into my lap. "That's 'andy, 'Arty," I said, and bunged it on the fire. After that I made myself a bow and arrow. No time to eat now, though. We've got a job to do.'

'Where do we go now?'

She looked around.

'Where else is there? Onward and upward.'

'Upward where?'

She indicated the gap where the ice did not quite meet the rock.

'Up there. To the real surface. To the outside.'

'Are you mad? There's no reason to think that they've been taken up there!

The chances are that we missed the signs of a camp or a cave further down the mountain, and we've been climbing blindly ever since!'

Ace nodded to a larger fissure some thirty or so feet away.

'Look at that. The edges aren't natural. They've been clawed away. That's where they were taken.'

'But..' I was searching round for excuses now. I did not want to climb any further. Every muscle in my body ached with the acc.u.mulated toxins of fatigue. '. . . But the air is too thin. How will we manage to breathe? How did they manage? You must be mistaken.'

'That's a bit of a poser,' Ace admitted, frowning. 'You're right of course. If the atmosphere's this thin here, it'll be non-existent if we climb much further. They probably had suits of some kind. We'll have to improvize.'

I didn't like the sound of that.

'Improvize?'

'What's the matter, never seen Blue Peter?'

'No.'

'Lucky man. Now think: how do we ensure a supply of air for ourselves?'

'We've managed with the handkerchiefs so far,' I offered.

'True, but the path might move away from the mountain side, like in a tunnel through the ice or something. We can't rely on still being able to use the stream to refresh them.'

'So we need a larger supply,' I mused.

'Good thinking, Sherlock.'

I frowned at her and she blushed, embarra.s.sed.

'What about the animals?' I asked, as an idea suddenly struck me.

'The animals? You mean, cut a couple of them open, get rid of the gas inside and replace it with air?' She grinned. 'Ace!'

Luring the creatures over was, paradoxically, the easiest part. They were not wary of humans in the way that animals on Earth might have been. We had a few teething troubles in the butchery department: Ace used her lightgun on the first one, and it exploded with a surprised expression upon its face, singeing my eyebrows. The gas inside appeared to be inflammable, as well as lighter than air. The next one was almost as bad. I held it whilst Ace made a slight incision in its tough but flexible skin with my pocket knife. It burst in my arms, splattering me with a gelid blue substance. If I hadn't been so cold and so tired, the farcical elements of our actions would have set me laughing. As it was, both of us were getting increasingly angry. By the time we had captured a third creature, we had evolved a strategy. I pinched a section of its skin, and Ace cut off the protruding section. I could then gradually let the gas out using my fingers as a crude valve. It died struggling, and in confusion. The gas made me slightly light-headed, but I welcomed the feeling as it cushioned my tiredness somewhat. It also made me feel slightly better about what we were doing. I did not enjoy killing them, especially in such an undignified manner, but we were desperate.

Once we had two deflated skins, we set about cutting away the limbs and protruding members and refilling the remaining bladders. We carefully held the rents beneath the surface of the stream until some liquid got in. Whilst I held them closed again, Ace filled two oddly shaped canteens with liquid as well, and hooked one onto my belt.

'Additional supplies,' she said, then climbed inside one of the skins. I did likewise with the other. We knotted the rents from the inside. As we had hoped, the warmth from our bodies vaporized the liquid and inflated the skin.

Urgency had lent skill to our endeavours: the scheme had worked, and we were left standing within two tough, translucent, taut spheres that used to be living creatures but now functioned as crude reservoirs of breathable air.

Ace waved at me. I waved back, and followed her as she carefully climbed up towards the dark opening. The skin of the life-preserving integument deformed beneath our fingers and feet, enabling us to climb, but was tough enough to resist tearing against the rock.

We entered the dark channel. A tunnel led upwards through the ice at a shallow enough angle that we could walk along it in comfort. Ace turned and bestowed a triumphant smile upon me. I pretended not to see it.

We walked for what seemed like hours. There were no side tunnels, no choices of path. Although the walls were rough ice, I gained the impression that they had been carved, rather than formed naturally. They glowed with what I first took to be an inner effulgence, but later realized was the light from the planet's sun, refracted through the ice. It got brighter as we walked, and more directional. Upon Ry'leh's interior surface I had not been able to tell where the sun was, merely that it was up. Now I could have pointed to it with some accuracy. I stumbled numerous times, but each time I managed to pick myself up and carry on. My friends were depending on me. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I kept on putting one foot before the other, slogging away like a trooper. The air within the balloon became stuffier and stuffier, and the skin grew tauter and tauter as the pressure outside reduced, but the trapped warmth of my body combated the cold which stung my fingers whenever I inadvertently touched the skin. I was on the verge of pa.s.sing out when I remembered the canteen that Ace had provided me with. With clumsy fingers I untied the knot and tried to bleed some of the stale air away. The reduced pressure outside s.n.a.t.c.hed at the rent, but I managed to hang on. I retied the skin when the balloon was half empty and carefully poured some liquid from Ace's canteen. Within seconds the balloon had reflated, and I felt refreshed.

I glanced over to where Ace had stopped. She was engaged in the same activity. From the haggard look upon her face, she had almost left it too late.

We started walking again along the monotonous tunnel. I had completely lost track of time, and was dreaming about roast turkey and plum pudding, when Ace stopped. I b.u.mped into her, and rebounded. She pointed ahead.

There was an irregular black opening some ten feet away. Cautiously, we crept closer and peered out.

We had emerged at the base of a sheer cliff. The landscape that surrounded us was like ill.u.s.trations I have seen of the surface of the moon.

Tremendous spires of rock -the tops of the mountains - soared into the jet-black, starspeckled sky. Broken escarpments and jumbled, irregular cliffs vied with large expanses of fiat ice. A bloated red sphere, spotted with black, hung above our heads, casting a maleficent light across the terrain.

I have reconstructed the view at my leisure, to set the scene for the adventures that were to come. At the time, it was not the alienness of the landscape that captured and held our attention but rather the group of wooden caravans that sat not twenty feet away from us. Their seams were sealed with some black, sticky substance and they sat upon huge metal runners that cut deeply into the ice. The central caravan was cathedral-sized and ornate, with symbols carved deeply into its sides and ten or eleven doors s.p.a.ced around its circ.u.mference. The others were smaller, cl.u.s.tered like ducklings around their mother. Great grooves in the ice led away towards the horizon. They had been brought here.

Surrounding them: hundreds of raksha.s.si. They too were encased in inflated skins, forcing them to fold their wings up against their backs. Some of them were busying themselves with ropes, a handful of others were connecting the larger caravan to one of the smaller ones with a tube which seemed to have been sewn together out of the same flexible skins that Ace and I wore, and inflating it.

As we watched, a door in the largest caravan opened and a figure emerged wearing a hooded robe. Climbing down from the caravan to the ground, the figure walked calmly through the tube towards the smaller caravan. Two raksha.s.si followed it. It was hardly a shock to me, but a shiver still ran up my spine as I recognized Maupertuis's mysterious superior, the person at the seance in Euston.

Ace touched her balloon against mine.

'Well,' her voice said faintly, 'it looks like a party. Shall we gatecrash?'

Chapter 15.

In which Holmes discovers that all things are relative and Watson sees the face of G.o.d. face of G.o.d.

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield Well, despite having two of the best brains this side of the planet Arcadia on the team, we've been captured. Comprehensively and unquestionably captured. Imprisoned. Shut up in a wooden caravan. The tinkle that I heard just after the door slammed was probably them throwing away the key.

I could write a traveller's guide to places not to be locked up in. This one gets three stars: it's clean, at least, and you can stand up without hitting your head but, as you can probably tell from the handwriting, it's dark. I'm writing by the light of the Doctor's everlasting matches, but they flicker too much to let me write in a straight line. In the shadows I can hear Holmes pacing up and down and muttering to himself. I can't say I blame him: he's had a h.e.l.l of shock. All I can see of the Doctor is his eyes gleaming in the darkness. He doesn't move or make any noise for ages, then he murmurs something, like, 'Of course, the Anglo-Saxon name for a council of kings was a micklemote,' and subsides into silence again.

But I'm getting ahead of myself (so easy to do when you're a time traveller).

Where did I leave us at the end of the last entry? Oh yes, camping out on the plain, waiting for Watson to return. Well, I fell into a fitful sleep, punctuated by bright blue flowers that bloomed noisily across my mind's eye. It was only when the Doctor shook me awake that I found that there was some sort of attack going on in Maupertuis's camp. The Ry'lehans on the mountainside were firing at the humans down below. There was general confusion, and I can't say that I blame them. My heart flip-flopped a couple of times when I thought about Watson being caught up in it. I mean, he's such an innocent abroad, I'd hate it if anything happened to him.

'As von Clausewitz so nearly said,' Holmes muttered dryly, 'war is the continuation of philosophy by other means.'

A movement overhead caught my eye. I glanced up. A bat-winged silhouette was dropping rapidly towards me. b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, I thought, it's a raksha.s.sa! I shouted at Holmes and the Doctor, and tried to dive out of the way. The creature's claws. .h.i.t the ground where I had been sitting, striking sparks from the rock. I rolled sideways, but it was too fast for me. With an ungainly hop it straddled my body, blocking any escape with the shrouds of its wings. I recoiled in disgust as it lowered its spiky face toward mine. In the valleys between the spikes I could see small red orifices fluttering open and shut.

'So. . : it hissed, its breath rancid and steaming, 'we have the unbelievers who killed our brothers. We forgive you. We forgive you.'

The shock of hearing it speak, and realizing that it was intelligent, made my head whirl. I glanced to one side, looking for Holmes and the Doctor, hoping that one of them at least had managed to put up some resistance, but the creature's crimson wing blocked my view.

'Don't worry...' Its voice was warm in my ear. 'We have the other two heathens.'

'Let me go!' I shouted.

'Or what?' it asked, amused. Small droplets of its spittle rained down upon my face. I tried not to gag.

'Or I'll . . . Look, what do you want with us, anyway?'

It c.o.c.ked its head slightly.

'You will see the light,' it said.

'Oh, great. And this will happen when?'

'Worry not, human. The ceremony of innocence will soon begin.'

Before I could move, it reared up on its wing tips and wrapped its tail tightly around my rib-cage. Springing into the air, it spread its wings wide and flapped, gaining height rapidly. I tried to take a breath but the d.a.m.ned thing was holding me too tight. The world stared to fuzz out, like static on an open comm-link. Air buffeted my face as the raksha.s.sa's wings clutched at the air and pulled us aloft, but I couldn't seem to get any of it where it would do the most good. I tried to prise the segmented coils of its tail apart, but they were unmovable. I hit out at its cold, hard body but it didn't even seem to notice.

And then a gust of wind caught us and it shifted its grip on me slightly.

Enough to breathe. I sucked in great gulps of precious air, too concerned with staying alive to bother about the sudden and catastrophic turnabout in our fortunes. After a few minutes of that, after my heart settled down and stopped threatening to jump through my chest, I took a look around.

And wished I hadn't.

The camp was a small blot on the landscape. Below us, and slightly to one side, another raksha.s.sa soared upwards with the Doctor held tightly beneath it. He waved rea.s.suringly at me. Irrationally, I felt like punching him on the nose. Morose for no reason and cheerful in a crisis. I don't know how his other companions managed to stand him for so long. Or maybe they didn't. Maybe they're all in therapy now.

'The battle is still going on,' Holmes cried faintly from somewhere above me. 'Maupertuis's men appear to have successfully counter-attacked.'

As we rose higher, I could see that although most of the tents were on fire, Maupertuis's men in their bright shiny uniforms were putting up quite a fight out on the plain. They had a number of Gatling guns set up, and were raking the Ry'lehan lines. Although the Ry'lehans had superior firepower they appeared to be surprised at the resistance they were getting. A number of little fivelegged shapes were lying dead upon the ground.

Something odd was happening on the far side of the camp. I could see winged shapes - raksha.s.si - diving down and picking up the occasional figure. They were very selective, swooping low over the heads of the soldiery and choosing only the occasional victim. Gradually I realized what they were doing.

'It's the Indian fakirs!' I yelled. 'The raksha.s.si are only picking up the Indian fakirs! The rest of Maupertuis's men are being left to fight the Ry'lehans.'

'I cannot see Watson,' Holmes shouted. The Doctor remained silent, but I could see the scowl on his face.

We flew higher, and higher still. The fires of Maupertuis's camp dwindled until they were just a bright glow on the ground. As I saw more of the landscape of Ry'leh, I began to appreciate its raw, uncompromising beauty.

Valleys snaked away in every direction and the ice sky reflected the mountains so that it looked as if we were rising from the surface of one world, past twisted pillars, towards the surface of another. After a while I became disoriented, but as we got closer and closer to the ice I could see that it had its own topography and its own ecology. Looking around, I saw that we had been joined by a number of other raksha.s.si, each clutching a bewildered fakir in its tail. Some of the fakirs were chanting prayers, others appeared to have pa.s.sed out. I thought I could see Tir Ram, the Nizam of Jabalhabad, dangling from the tail of a raksha.s.sa in the distance, but it was difficult to be sure.

Eventually, the raksha.s.si settled onto the upper slopes of a mountain like a flock of birds congregating on a church steeple. I tried to take a breath, but the air was so thin that I found myself gasping. My eyes streamed but I could see a large crack in the ice where the mountain pierced it. A translucent tunnel poked out of it like some bloated worm. It looked like it had been made from circular patches of material or skin sewn together. It bulged, as if filled with air, and there was a zip-like arrangement at one end. It looked to me remarkably like a crude but workable pressurized corridor. The raksha.s.si were picking up their prisoners, one by one, flying them up to the mouth of the tunnel and throwing them in, then pulling up the zip after them. Dimly, through the skin of the tunnel, I could see another raksha.s.sa inside the corridor operating another zip. Okay, it was a crude but workable pressurized corridor with an airlock. I had to admire their ingenuity, if not their good looks and personal hygiene.

Eventually it was my turn, and not a moment too soon. I was on the verge of pa.s.sing out. After a short flight I was thrown into the tunnel, and after the zip was fastened behind me the raksha.s.sa inside opened his zip and pulled me through into the main body of the corridor. A sudden rush of oxygen made me dizzy. Where was it coming from?

I reached out to touch the walls. They were smooth and leathery, and marred every few feet by a rough st.i.tched seam. Beyond them, the smooth walls of an icy tunnel led upwards at a gentle angle.

My fingers ran over what felt like a distorted nose and a puffy cheek. I didn't want to know.

The raksha.s.sa at the tunnel mouth grabbed my shoulder and pulled me past its hard body to join the end of a line of turbaned and breech-clothed fakirs. We all trudged along through the dark and the cold. The fakirs were singing some kind of gentle song, but I didn't know the words. I tried calling out for the Doctor or Holmes, or even Tir Ram, but there was no response.

For the first time I felt truly alone.