Doctor Who: Lungbarrow (2 page)

Omega, despite his sacrifice, still had a hand in their affairs.

It was rather a good joke, he thought, but Rassilon didn't find it funny at all. One night, they had stood among the roses on the tower and watched Omega's death again. The light of the dying star burnt out suddenly in the constel ation of Ao, nine point six years after they had watched it on the monitor screens in the control chamber.

Rassilon had wept again. Everything the man did was done for love. But sometimes love was remarkably short-sighted.

5

 

The figure on the Memorial shuddered and drew his cloak about him. The splash of the supernova was still clear in the sky above the city, or would have been were it not for the smoke. Lately the box, the Hand of Omega as it was known, had taken a shine to him. It had started to follow him about, often appearing at the most inopportune moments. It disrupted his affairs and drew attention to private business that was better kept secret.

Besides, he was bored, achingly bored, with manipulation and power. He longed to be away, free of schemes and other people's ambitions, and, more than that, free of himself. He could cast off this dark, brooding persona more easily than a serpent sloughs its skin. But if he did go, there would be no way back. And Rassilon would be left with absolute control. No checks, no balances.

In frustration, he took off a shoe and threw it at the box. The Hand of Omega dodged so fast that his shoe seemed to travel straight through it. He stood with one stockinged foot out over the drop.

'Well? What wil you do, eh, if I step off?'

Pointless to ask real y. The box would be there under his foot. Ready to catch him.

So much for suicide.

'Selfish brute!' he complained.

Below, he could see figures skulking in the shadows around the Memorial. No rebels these, but agents of Rassilon sent to arrest him. He supposed he should feel flattered. Too good to lose, apparently.

In the air he caught the scent of burning flesh. A decision had been made for him, but there was much to prepare and a difficult farewell to make.

Ignoring the box, he lowered himself down the stone curve of the Omega symbol and dropped to the ground. The shadows came at him fast out of the dark. He was surprised by their knives.

They were surprised by the bolts of energy that flung them like dolls out of his path. The box whirred in beside him with that unnerving knack of seeming to move faster than its own shadow. He drew a cut bloom out of his cloak.

The rose's milky scent reminded him of children and the lost future. He laid it at the foot of the monument and bowed his head. The box, taking an uncharacteristic moment to decide its course, settled down beside the flower.

He knew it was watching as he hunted for his shoe in the gloom. Unable to find it, he threw away the other shoe and walked barefoot down into the burning city.

***

'I am the Doctor. I am. I am. I am!'

Chris Cwej lies slumped against the wooden wall, watching the room reel around him. Dizzying. Pale tree trunks frame the walls, reaching up to a black ceiling that eases out of their branching curvature like a natural growth. It flickers orange in the lantern light.

He closes his eyes - all the better to see.

His heart, trying to beat enough for two.

His fingers touching and clutching things that were not there.

His mind remembering things, gargantuan things that he has never known before. He wants them to leave him alone. To cruk off out of his head. He pulls off his boot and throws it.

The room swims around him. Only metres away the women sit huddled over something. The foot of their victim emerges from the circle. It is encased in a brown and cream lace-up shoe.

The new memories trickling into his head are getting paler. Ebbing away.

6

 

Eighth man bound

Make no sound

The shroud covers all

The Long and the Short

And the Old and the Loud

And the Young and the Dark

And the Tall

The women hold hands. The President and the Tearaway and the Cousin and the Warrior. They mutter incantations that lay his thoughts bare to them. His mind is an écorché: flayed sinews, stripped naked of the skin of consciousness.

'Why did you leave?'

'Where have you been?'

'Who are you? Who the hell do you think you are?'

Chris wants to let go, but a thread holds him, spinning slowly over the abyss.

I am! I am! I am!

They are tearing into his mind with carrion beaks.

'Vultures!' shouts the victim lying in their circle. His voice has a Scottish burr.

'Can't catch me,' it whispers in Chris's throat.

As the women start to feed on his dreams, it all goes dark.

***

The House is full of sunlight. Shadows are banished to skulk in corners. The panelled walls, polished with wax from the sugar-ant hives on the estate, gleam darkly between the white trunk columns and arches. Now and then, there is a lazy creak from the floorboards or the tiles on the gabled carapace of the rooves. Sometimes a chair shuffles slightly to avoid the passage of a Cousin on the galleries. Momentarily, a deep sigh trembles through the arborescent architecture from one end of the House to the other. It sounds like a breath of wind rustling through leaves.

The House is dozing. But it is listening too.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

'... and Rassilon, in great anger, banished the Other from Gallifrey that he might never return to the world. Then there was great rejoicing through the Citadel. But the Other, as he fled, stole away the Hand of Omega and departed the world forever.'

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

The pupil was needling his name into the varnish of the big desktop. Cousin Innocet's hairgrip was considerably more adept at this task than the clumsy Chapterhouse mess-blade that old Quences had given him on his last name day. The trick was to see how deep you could carve before the desk protested.

'Are you paying attention?' boomed his tutor.

'Yes, thank you,' he intoned, completing another tricky top stroke. 'And the Other departed the world forever.'

'Correct.'

7

 

There was a pause. He was aware of the huge bulk of his tutor approaching the desk, but he had to get the final letter finished. 'You see, I was listening,' he added, vainly hoping to ward off the inspection.

The sunlight from the tall window glistened on his looming mentor's fur. Serrated black stripes on its creamy pelt.

The pupil felt the intense scrutiny of the glass eyes as they peered down over fearsome tusks.

Flustered, he jabbed a quick accent stroke over the final letter. Too fast. The varnish flaked. The big desk shuddered. It gave what sounded like a woody cough of protest and snapped its lid indignantly, just missing his fingers.

'Why are you not paying attention?' The tutor's voice drummed out of its chest rather than its throat. The horns that curled from either flank of its head were big enough to hang a coat from.

The pupil swung his legs. 'Why can't we do something else?' He had formed the habit of answering the tutor's endless badgering with queries of his own. His feet didn't even touch the floor.

'What does the curriculum state?'

The pupil shrugged and looked out of the window. 'What about a field trip? We could go down to the orchards. It's so hot, the magentas must be ripe by now.'

He opened the desk and fumbled through the chaos inside in search of his catapult. 'I can shoot them off the branches,' he called from under the heavy lid.

'Repeat the Family legacy...'

He groaned. 'Then can we go out?'

'What was your birth?'

'It's boring.'

'Where were you born?'

He closed the desk lid with a sigh. 'I was born in this House.' His singsong approach, armoured with a growing contempt for the whole mechanical business of learning by rote, was wasted on the tutor. 'The House of Lungbarrow one of the many Houses founded in order to stabilize the population after the Great Schism when the Pythia's Curse rendered Gal ifrey barren I was born from the Family Loom of the House each Loom weaves a set quota of Cousins defined by the Honourable Central Population Directory at the Capitol.'

He paused to take an exaggerated breath. Beyond the whitewood-framed window, the noonday sun dazzled off the silver foliage of the trees.

The tutor tapped the desk with a yel ow claw. 'The quota…?

'The quota of Cousins allotted to the House of Lungbarrow is forty-five when a Cousin dies after her or his thirteen spans a new Cousin wil be woven and born as a Replacement.' He stopped again and regarded his tutor.

'Continue,' it said.

'I can remember waiting to be born.' He said it deliberately to see how much reaction he could get.

'Impossible. That is impossible.'

'You're just a machine. What would you know about it?'

The robotic tutor dithered. But the pre-programmed awkwardness wasn't convincing. It was too precise to be really lifelike. And yet the huge furry avatroid, with its prim and proper manners, was more absurd and endearing than any of the Family in the House.

8

 

The young pupil continued: 'It was like being al strung out. All unravelled inside the Loom. I was spread really thin.'

'Perhaps now you are teaching me,' said the tutor. His bulky shoulders sagged a little.

'I couldn't think. Not put thoughts together.'

'Grammar,' complained the tutor.

'But I knew where I was and what was happening. I couldn't wait to get out. And then I was born. My lungs nearly burst. The first rush of air was so cold. And they were all there, of course. All forty-four of them. All laughing, because of. . . because...'

There was a hurt that he could never ease. They say your first sight after birth, the first thing that looms into view, is the one that governs your life - but when it's forty-four Cousins staring down at you from al sides, laughing and sniggering and prodding, then what do you expect?

He avoided the subject, as had become the custom. 'And Satthralope smacked me so hard I could barely walk.'

'When were you told this? How can you real y remember?'

'I do remember too. And don't badger me. You always badger me. I'm not newly woven, you know. I'm nearly five and three-quarters.'

'And you are very precocious.' The tutor indicated a coloured glass core that was sitting on the desktop. 'Turn your book to the Triumphs of Rassilon.'

'What happened before the Great Schism? How were people woven then?' He smirked, half hoping the answer would be rude. 'What were... mothers?'

'Mothers were women who gave birth to children.'

'What, like the Loom does?' He gave free rein to his smirk. 'I bet Satthralope couldn't do that. Did the children grow inside their mothers? That's what the tafelshrews do. There was a nest of them at the back of the pantry, but the Drudges found it before I could get them outside. Or did mothers spawn in the river like the songfish?'

'It is
my
job to ask the questions.'

'What's the point when you know all the answers? How did the children start growing? And why don't all the animals have Looms? Why is it only the people?'

'We are studying -'

'Did they have sword fights then with monsters and reptile pirates?'

The tutor lifted the data core in its heavy paws and began to screw it into the desk's console unit. 'We are studying the provenance of Gallifreyan culture.'

'It's that nursery verse, isn't it?
... And now al the children are born from the Loom.
You whistle it and I'll sing it.
Isn't
it dark, Isn't it cold, Seek out the future...'

'Housekeeper Satthralope does not allow singing during lesson times.'

The young man grimaced. 'She smells like old cupboards. Quences wouldn't mind. And he gave you to me.'

'Ordinal-General Quences programmed me to encourage your brainbuffing. You wil repeat the Triumphs of Rassilon.'

'Not again. You promised.'

'The Triumphs.'

9

 

'They're really boring.'

'Commence.'

The pupil glanced down at a wooden screen that had slid eagerly up from the desk.

'Without looking,' instructed the Badger. 'By rote..' The desk retracted its screen with a little whine of disappointment.

The young man sighed too and began,
'Hear now of Rassilon and his mighty works. He, who single-handedly
vanquished the darkness and...'
He peered across the room beyond his tutor. 'Cousin Innocet, what are you doing?'

The tutor lumbered round with difficulty in the tight space. The big desk flinched.

The room was empty. A magenta kernel, fired from the catapult, pinged on one of the Badger's curling horns.

By the time the furry machine had turned back, its charge had hoisted himself up to the sil , slipped through the open window and was clinging to a vine that grew up the outside of the House.

'Tell Innocet that I'll be late for supper,' he grinned, sticking his head back round the frame. 'She always makes the best excuses when Satthralope's on the war-wagon.'

Leaving his shaggy tutor in a state of bumbling perplexity, he scrambled down the vine and ran out into the sunlight through the long, lush grass. 'Can't catch me!'

10

 

C

hapter One

Paris Cubed

'A gold-coded security dispatch, sir,' announced the young Chancellery Guard captain and formally handed over the courier pod.

Surveil ance Actuary Hofwinter, a veteran of some nine hundred and ninety-six years in the Space/Time Accession Bureau, generation and regeneration, logged the delivery on his cartulary register. The pod buzzed and opened like a black flower, allowing him to extract a single crystal datacube from its heart.

He weighed the device in his hand and sniffed its surface. 'Classified,' he observed. The captain, resplendent in his scarlet and white uniform, had not moved.