Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire Read online

  Whole vistas of medical and mental science began to open up before me. I was entranced.

  'Telepathy, of course,' Holmes said, frowning. 'From the ,Greek for feeling at a distance. Telekinesis, therefore, would mean movement at a distance.

  Most intriguing.'

  Bernice's expression suddenly changed.

  'What it is?' I asked.

  'The Doctor always warned me about interfering in history. "Don't reveal more than they already know," he said. "Such gifts don't come cheap". And I think I've just done it. He won't be pleased.'

  'I'm not,' said the Doctor from behind us. We whirled around. Bernice flushed a bright red.

  'Good Lord,' exclaimed Roxton, who was standing beside the Doctor and peering at Surd's corpse. 'What a poacher that feller'd make!'

  'You seem to have a remarkable facility for turning up when least expected, Doctor,' Holmes said.

  'You don't seem pleased to see me,' the Doctor replied. His linen suit was stained with a pinkish fluid and his hair was covered in some sticky substance. He was a mess.

  'What happened?' I inquired.

  'Ask Bernice.'

  Bernice frowned. 'I don't. . : she began, and then started to laugh. 'Oh no!

  You can't be serious!'

  'I'm always serious, even when I'm being trivial,' the Doctor snapped.

  I just looked from one to the other. Eventually the Doctor saw fit to put me out of my misery.

  'I was underneath the last rakshassa that you shot down. It knocked me out. When I woke up, everything was dark and sticky. I thought I'd gone to Time Lord hell. It was only when I heard your voices that I realized I was lying beneath its wing.'

  'What's Time Lord hell like?' Bernice asked.

  'Earth,' the Doctor replied.

  There was no answer to that.

  Holmes dragooned us all into a search of the cavern, but we found nothing of any import save odd scraps of clothing and a few personal possessions left behind by the departing army. I tried to imagine where they were now and what they were engaged in, but my mind would not stretch that far.

  How would the men stand up to Ry'leh? How well had they been trained?

  Would K'tcar'ch's people be waiting for them or would their entry be unopposed?

  I could hear part of a conversation between the Doctor and Bernice concerning his period of captivity. Apparently his flight across India had taken almost as long as our train journey. He had only arrived a day or so ahead of us, and had been held captive in the Nizam's palace. The books, of course, had been taken from him.

  'There's nothing here,' Bernice said finally. She sounded dejected. 'The action's moved on and left us all dressed up with nowhere to go.'

  'The lad's right,' shouted Roxton from his little area of ground. I looked around for a moment before realizing that he meant Bernice. 'We're on a wild goose chase.'

  'I have no choice but to follow them,' the Doctor said decisively. 'Thank you for your help so far.'

  'We will accompany you,' Holmes said. 'Watson, can you remember the words of the chant?'

  'You have to be joking.'

  Holmes just stared at me.

  'You're not joking,' I said finally.

  'You've heard it three times now, Watson.'

  'But I've got a tin ear.'

  'I'm not exactly one of the De Reskes Brothers myself, but it's the only chance we have.'

  I walked across until we were standing virtually nose to nose.

  'Holmes,' I said quietly, 'has it occurred to you that we could just turn around and go home? We've done our bit. We can't be expected to do any more. Alien planets are outside our bailiwick.'

  'I accepted a commission. I shall see it through. And besides, can you really see the Doctor succeeding?'

  I glanced over to where the diminutive man was shaking rakshassa blood out of his umbrella, and sighed.

  'Well, I had to try.'

  Holmes smiled.

  'The better Roman Emperors had servants who would whisper in their ear,

  "You too are mortal". I value your level-headedness, Watson. Don't ever think that I don't.'

  I didn't, of course, and I never have since.

  'Lord Roxton!' Holmes called. Roxton came over.

  'You'll be needing an old shikari like me,' he said. 'I've shot everywhere on Earth. Might as well have a crack at baggin' game up in the heavens.'

  'I'm afraid not.'

  Roxton sighed, and nodded.

  'I thought as much. You'll be needin' someone to report back to your brother, and you can't trust Moriarty.'

  'I'm glad you understand.'

  Roxton held out a hand and Holmes shook it.

  'You're a credit to your country, Mr Holmes, and there's not many I'd say that about.'

  As he shook my hand, I wished him a safe journey.

  'Gad, I hope not!' he cried, and laughed.

  Bernice took his hand and pumped it vigorously.

  'I hope you'll seek me out and tell me the outcome of this adventure when you get back to Blighty,' he said.

  'Oh, Doctor Watson is the teller of tales,' she said diplomatically. 'I'm sure he'll be only too pleased to turn a minor skirmish into a major adventure.'

  The Doctor saluted Roxton with his umbrella.

  'Fare thee well,' he said.

  Roxton looked one last time at us, saluted, and walked towards the stairway which coiled up the side of the cavern. I felt as though some vital force had been drained from our enterprise.

  'Well,' said the Doctor finally. 'Let's get on with it.'

  'How do we start?' I asked.

  'We must all do our best to remember the words which were used in the ceremony,' Holmes snapped. 'I have trained my memory to the point where it rivals the Daguerreotype for accuracy. You, Professor Summerfield and the Doctor may be able to aid me in problems of intonation.'

  I rummaged around in my pockets.

  'I'd better write down what I remember, then.'

  Pulling out a piece of paper and a fountain pen, I was about to start writing when I realized that it was the piece of paper Moriarty had given me. I tried to decipher his scrawl. The words were meaningless gibberish. Gibberish like . . .

  'Holmes! Moriarty has written down the words of the chant!'

  'Indeed. What a fortuitous piece of luck,' Holmes said dryly, walking over and taking the paper from my hand. 'Indeed, these are the words as I remember them, with phonetic notes as well.'

  'I remember him writing something just before the attack,' Bernice said, 'but why would he want to give it to us? Could it be a trap?'

  'I think not,' said Holmes after a moment's thought. 'I am an irritant to the good Professor, and he has already tried to kill me on a number of occasions. How convenient for him if we died on this alien planet, and thus allowed him to continue extorting, blackmailing and terrorizing his way through England and ultimately the world?'

  'So you trust him?'

  'In this instance, his aims and ours coincide. Now, to business.'

  Like members of a choir, we gathered around Holmes and the piece of paper.

  'On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three!'

  'I-ay, I-ay,' we managed before Bernice and I collapsed in fits of giggles.

  Holmes and the Doctor stared at us with lips pursed.

  'When you have quite recovered...' Holmes said.

  'That's quite enough of that...' the Doctor barked.

  Without daring to look at one another, Bernice and I clustered around them and tried again.

  'I-ay, I-ay Naghaa, naghaighai! Shoggog fathaghn! I-ay, I-ay t - '

  The phrasing was wrong and we stumbled over the unnatural words, but there was something there. We tried again, and again. Under Holmes's tutelage we must have spent a good hour rehearsing that damned chant.

  Even now I can hear it echo in the labyrinthine passages of my mind: a dark, malevolent sound that has a life of its own and induces feelings of dread in me whenever it pops into my mind. />
  'I-ay, I-ay. Naghaa, naghaighai! Shoggog fathaghn! lay, I-ay tsa toggua tholoya! Tholoya fathaghn!'

  After a while, we were confident enough that we could introduce a phasing in the chant, with Holmes coming in a beat after Bernice and myself, and the Doctor's fine baritone soaring high above on the descant. The nature of the chant altered in subtle ways: sometimes Holmes's voice was a powerful engine behind us, pushing us on, and sometimes it seemed to be dragging us backwards. Our voices seemed to be echoing in a deeper and larger space than the cavern.

  And then, after what seemed like an eternity but must have been only half an hour, I thought I could detect other voices singing along with us: soft, sibilant voices pronouncing words in a subtly different way. A hallucination?

  Perhaps, but we took our cue from them and tried to shape our palates to form the same sounds as they did. It was not easy. I suspect now, so many years later, that if they were real then they were not human in form. We must have produced a close enough approximation, however, for it was shortly after that when Bernice plucked at my sleeve and indicated that our shadows were being cast in front of us from a bright source of light behind.

  Still singing, I turned to look.

  Through the gates of delirium I saw an alien world blazing in all its glory. A wide plain spread before us, curling up in the distance to form tall mountains of knobbly purple rock. The sky was white and glowing, and seemed to cut the mountains off as if it were solid. A citrus-scented breeze ruffled my hair.

  Still chanting, we walked into another world.

  Interlude

  GGJ235/57/3/82-PK3

  V-ON, BRD-ABLE, WPU = 1.244

  VERBAL INPUT,

  COMPRESS AND SAVE

  MILITARY LOG FILE EPSILON

  CODE GREEN FIVE

  ENABLE

  They know I'm watching them now. I made too much noise getting down from that window the other day, and attracted a bit of unwelcome attention.

  It ended up in a chase through the alleys. Since they can fly and I can't, I reckon it was a bit one-sided, so I brought one of them down with a sort of home-made bolas and another two with smart missiles.

  I keep having to move my base camp. They're very good at searches: that's what flying does for you, it gives you a different perspective on where people might hide. For a while I hid out in nooks and crannies that couldn't be seen from the air, but they caught on and started using packs of those three-legged rat things with the red eyes. I had to look for somewhere else.

  Base camp's only a rucksack anyway, so moving isn't too much hassle.

  Time to get back to the plain, l guess Hope the Professor makes it through okay. If not, I guess it's chocolate flavour animal for tea forever.

  DISABLE.

  2757/3/FF43 PIP.

  Chapter 13

  In which our intrepid heroes arrive in the New World and Watson takes up scouting.

  Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield

  I suspect that midnight has passed by, back in India, so distinguish this entry with a new date. I've been awake for almost forty-eight hours and I feel ready to drop. In fact, I keep falling asleep in the middle of writing this diary entry. Four times I've tried to start it now, but each time I get a few words in and suddenly my pen will start sliding down the page. When I snap back to wakefulness a few moments later, I don't know where I am and I've only got a sketchy idea of who. So: if you've just woken up, Bernice Summerfield, and you're reading this for some clue as to what's happened, the Doctor's made some coffee and I think I can cover the past few hours before the big black bag goes over my head again.

  First question: where am I? Well, it's an alien planet. Not just any alien planet, either. This one's stranger than most. Stranger than Moloch, the hollow moon of Lucifer that's linked by a bridge to its sister Belial. Stranger than Eusapia and Zeta Minor, half in this universe and half in another.

  Stranger than Tersurus, with its clone banks and its singing stones.

  Stranger even than Magla, whose crust is a shell covering a vast, dreaming, creature. No, Ry'leh is the strangest planet I've ever seen. I'm not a geologist, but I suspect that it's an old world. At some point in its past the local star must have gone nova, blasting much of its matter away into space to leave a colder, smaller core. Soon after that Ry'leh's atmosphere must have frozen, leaving it looking like a great cue-ball hanging in space.

  The frozen jacket doesn't fit tightly though: the heat from the planet's core has melted the interior layers of ice back into an atmosphere, leaving valleys, fissures, channels and plains with an oppressively solid sky hanging above them, supported upon the pillars of the mountains. And that's where you are, girl: sandwiched between rock and a hard place.

  The wind whistles through the canyons like a demon. It plucks at your clothes and whips your hair into your eyes. It snatches things from your hands and whirls them gleefully away from you. It hates you.

  The plants hate you too. Only the strongest and most stubborn life-forms survived the sun going nova. Their razor-sharp bruise-coloured vanes catch at your clothing as you clamber past them, and make rents for the wind to get in and sap the warmth from your bones. Some of them hiss and thrust their roots between your feet as you pass. High above, up where the sky is hard and cold, small black specks wheel. Rakshassi? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

  You get the picture? Ry'leh is not a nice place to be.

  As we emerged from the gateway the wind snatched the words from our mouths, and it collapsed behind us. When we turned, India had vanished.

  We were just a step away from Earth in one direction, a million light-years in another.

  We were standing at the foot of a mountain range. The dusky purple ground rose gently for a few miles, then jabbed sharply upwards into a set of harsh peaks, all of them truncated by the ice sky. The sun was a lighter spot through the ice, too weak to cast any shadows. Turning, I could see that we were surrounded by the mountains. Valleys led away in three directions. It was as if we had been dumped in the middle of a giant's maze.

  Gravity seemed to be about Earth normal. I find it difficult to tell - I've been on so many worlds that I forget what my body was designed for sometimes

  - but neither Watson nor Holmes were falling down or falling up. The Doctor walked around as if he owned the place. Which he might well have done, of course.

  Holmes gazed around in some shock. I think that the reality of an alien planet was turning out to be completely different to the theory. He bent down and investigated the ground, then plucked a small weed-like flower from a crack. It bit him, and he dropped it with a cry. Watson tended to the wound. It wasn't serious, but I think he might have been worried about poison. There's a theory I once heard suggesting that there is no logical basis for alien poisons to work on humans, and vice versa, because the two ecologies would have evolved different chemical bases for life.

  Personally, I don't believe it. Summerfield's First Law of Planetary Evolution states that anything not specifically designed to hurt you will still manage to find a way. Or, to put it another way, the buggerance factor of the universe tends towards a maximum.

  Watson was turning gradually around, a bit like a weather vane influenced by the wind. Eventually he came to a halt facing down one of the valleys towards a misty horizon half-glimpsed through the distant mountains.

  'That way,' he said. 'Maupertuis's troops went that way.'

  'How can you tell?' the Doctor asked.

  'Not sure. It's a matter of instinct, more than anything. I spent some time talking to an old Afghan tracker during the war, you see. He was a prisoner of ours, but he'd been injured and I had to treat him. Picked up some tips on hunting.' He smiled boyishly. 'I rather fancy his skills at treating wounds improved as well.'

  'Fascinating though this is,' I interjected, 'where do we go from here?'

  'We try and get in front of Maupertuis's troops,' Watson said, 'and alert the appropriate native authorities to the fact that they ar
e being invaded. We then request their help in taking Maupertuis into custody.'

  'Of course,' I said. 'Simple, isn't it?'

  Watson shrugged.

  'Well, as a broad plan I think it has its strong points. Obviously there are some details which remain to be ironed out...'

  'Such as: how do we persuade a peaceful, philosophical race like K'tcar'ch's to join together to fight Maupertuis's marauders?'

  'We shall have to play it by ear,' he said stiffly.

  'But back in the Nizam's cavern you said that you had a tin ear.'