All that she could really take in was that the Queen was beautiful and poised, and there was a melodious shimmer whenever she moved. For all the Queen"s indefinite beauty, and for all that Sam was awed and quite flattered to be meeting her, she also made Sam wish she were anywhere but here. She couldn"t say why.
"You are welcome, Samanthajones."
"Pleased to meet you."
"Perhaps. But I have bread here in my lap, and a flagon of fine wine. And, ere my subject returns you to your friends, you may rest and you may dine."
Sam flushed, without quite knowing why. "It rhymes," she said, trying to find a neutral answer. "Is it a traditional greeting?"
"Yes, but it also means what it says. This is a feast, so feel free to drink as deeply as you need."
"Thank you," said Sam, "but..."
Galastel smiled. "Are you thinking of human stories? That mortals who eat or drink in our realm can never leave? Or that a hundred years would pa.s.s in your world to a mere hour in ours? Or that we enslave unwary mortals who venture here?" Sam hadn"t been. She"d been more into the Melody Maker Melody Maker than the Mabinogion. But now he"d brought the subject up... "You"re going to tell me that those stories are just stories, right?" than the Mabinogion. But now he"d brought the subject up... "You"re going to tell me that those stories are just stories, right?"
"Stories are more than just stories. They"re history that didn"t quite happen at least not yet. But the unwary remain only seven years, not one hundred."
"I don"t wish to offend you," Sam said simply, "but I suddenly feel a little wary."
"Why?" the Queen asked. "You need not fear. You have walked the paths of Time with the Evergreen Man, and are not constrained by them quite as much as other mortals. Besides..." She drew a hand between Sam"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s and pa.s.sed it over her hip and thigh all the areas where Sam had noticed that new and different skin blended with her own. "You share our blood now. You are our kin. And so you are not..." She visibly searched for the right word. "You are not troubled by this place, or by anything in it."
Sam heard Galastel"s agreement beside her. "A mortal human would not speak here, nor be able to eat or drink, but you may do so without fear. You have my word on that."
"And mine," the Queen said.
Sam nodded hesitantly. All right. Innocent until proven guilty, she reminded herself. The beings at the feast shifted aside, leaving a s.p.a.ce for her.
She sat, and sipped the wine politely. She wasn"t much of a drinker, but there didn"t seem much choice. Besides, she got the feeling she had pushed her luck as it was.
The Queen watched her sit, only mildly disappointed. The girl wasn"t worth any real effort, but there was no harm in making the offer. The Queen phased herself in such a way that Sam couldn"t discern what was being said, and communicated with Galastel alone. "She is adjusting?"
"Quite well, Majesty. She is not of us, but at least the Celestis do not have her."
"Indeed... She lives, and the cycle continues. I will visit the Evergreen Man again and speak to him."
"Only speak?" Galastel asked mildly.
"I do not imagine he will be so easily led a second time. Samanthajones must adjust to what has happened to her. Perhaps you should take her on another path, and show her the possibilities she is offered."
It was a more subtle dismissal than she might have used, but no less a command of finality.
Wiesniewski and Garcia had finally found a moment in which to sit and brew some coffee. The populace of the cellar had settled after the Doctor had led Bearclaw aside, and it sounded like the bombing was dying off above.
"You got a family?" Wiesniewski asked.
Garcia shook his head. "Just an ex who prefers the sin of divorce to so much as giving me the time of day. Probably just as well."
"Sounds like you don"t miss her."
"Only "cause I"ve learned to hit straight," he scoffed. "Bad joke, sorry. Though, G.o.d knows, there were times when I..."
Garcia trailed off. "We were two teenagers who thought marriage would make us adults, and it didn"t. I might be real clever, might have a medical degree, but that doesn"t mean I can"t be dumb half the time."
Wiesniewski nodded and smiled. "Being dumb"s a basic human right. I always felt they should put it in the const.i.tution that everybody"s allowed to make an a.s.s of himself from time to time."
Garcia couldn"t help but chuckle. "Yeah, guarantee every citizen the right to be a dumb sonofab.i.t.c.h whenever he chooses."
Galastel was waiting when Sam finished the meal. While she"d pa.s.sed on the many small roasted animals being carved up and pa.s.sed around, there had been more than enough vegetables and breads and buckwheat pancakes to fill her.
There was no fruit that she could see. Perhaps the trees were already too rotten.
"Are you well?" Galastel asked.
"Pretty good for a dead girl," Sam admitted.
"Good. I have something to show you."
"Yeah? As long as it"s not puppies or etchings, I guess that"s fine."
"Come and see." He stepped forward, and she followed. There was a sudden jarring sense of motion, and she was in a completely different place. She had been through transmats before, but this felt completely different. It was like simply being hurled from one place to another too fast to see anything in between.
She was still in a forest, but it was hard to tell if it was still the same one. There were half-glimpsed things all around that disappeared when she tried to look at them. If she focused too hard on something, she would find herself noticing not just its colour and texture, but tiny pieces of grit, and still tinier swirling particles that were both there and not there. Like molecules, or atoms almost...
Whatever they were, they were weird, and they were distracting. It was like looking at a Mandelbrot, she realised. Everything kept getting smaller and smaller, but their scale and patterns repeated, for layer upon layer until she began to feel dizzy and had to close her eyes.
"Is something wrong?" Galastel asked.
"No..." She grasped her head, in the hope of stopping it from spinning. "Maybe it comes with the territory. I didn"t think being dead would be so much like having stepped off a roller coaster and left my stomach behind."
"You are not dead."
"Hang on a minute. You said I was!"
"You were," Galastel agreed. "But not any more."
Sam raised an eyebrow. "Look... I don"t know about you, but I was brought up to believe that death was a fairly permanent arrangement."
The bombing had stopped, at last. The Doctor had taken gentle charge, making sure that everyone got back out of the cellar safely. Bearclaw had helped him. Solve what problems you can, the Doctor told himself.
He followed the others up to the hotel"s ground floor, intending to make that visit to Lewis now always a.s.suming Lewis was still alive. He was surprised to find the lobby gloomy and empty despite the daylight. The doors that had been blown inward now opened only on to darkness.
It wasn"t the darkness of mere night, but a starless velvet, like the inside of a shadow. The street was different too. There was no rubble on the main road in fact it looked as if it had been swept clean. The alley to his left was jammed almost solid with thorns and briars. "A bit of a giveaway," the Doctor muttered.
He turned with a sigh, to find that a side street had opened up. It wound away tightly, making it impossible to see all the way along, and there were huge ferns where once there had been lampposts. The Doctor marched into the side street, until he found the single remaining street light.
It cast a leafy glow of sunlight in a glade, and there was a familiar figure leaning against it. "I always did admire your sense of humour," the Doctor told her as he approached. She was wearing the same dress, sprinkled with bells. The Doctor didn"t need to count to know that there were fifty-nine of them. "I was wondering when you"d come back."
"You were expecting me?" The figure looked amused. "For the most part, it is I who wait for others."
"I"m afraid so. You don"t catch me so easily this time," he said apologetically. "I wasn"t expecting you yesterday you bamboozled me. The same trick won"t work twice."
She gave him a radiant smile. Literally. "I meant you no harm, Evergreen Man. I was simply enjoying a little game."
"Mind games?"
She leaned forward. "Everything"s a game. Reality"s just one of the players."
"Some games aren"t to my taste," the Doctor told her.
She grinned. "Not always. You have played before, many times."
"You must be confusing me with someone else. Me, probably."
She didn"t seem put out by this apparent contradiction. "Anything"s possible, Evergreen Man."
"I prefer to be called "Doctor". And I imagine I should think of something to call you... t.i.tania, I suppose. It seems appropriate under the circ.u.mstances, and I doubt you would give me a real name to call you."
"t.i.tania," she laughed, and it caused faint music to hang in the air. "Like everything else in the universe, you change so much... Yet your heart remains the same."
"Both of them," the Doctor agreed.
"Everyone has one heart, Doctor. The body may have two, or none " she pressed a finger to the centre of his chest "but everyone has one true heart."
"Even the Leannain Sidhe?"
"Even me. And even the Lord of Time."
The Doctor met her gaze with equanimity "There are many "Lords of Time" as you put it. I"m really nothing special."
"There are many who claim claim Lordship over Time," t.i.tania corrected, "but only one who behaves like a true Lord. Someday you"ll make someone a fine husband." Lordship over Time," t.i.tania corrected, "but only one who behaves like a true Lord. Someday you"ll make someone a fine husband."
The Doctor looked a little embarra.s.sed. "Well, I "
"I imagine that finding a soulmate can"t be easy for the Lord of Time. These mortals age and die so quickly... You begin to get to know them, then suddenly they"re a faded memory brought on by summer sunset." She caressed his shoulder. "It need not always be so."
"Indeed?" said the Doctor, neutrally.
"Would it be so bad? We of the Sidhe have always had the best of relations with humans."
The Doctor gently shifted to the side. "I"m not human. Flattered, but not human."
"Part of you is. That"s enough."
The Doctor gave a tight smile. ""That"s debatable" would be more accurate."
Galastel had brought Sam out into the countryside, and she felt strangely heavier now that she was back in a recognisable section of reality.
Although she recognised their surroundings as being a wood on a cold winter"s night, she didn"t immediately realise that it was the place where she had first arrived. Perhaps it was because of the slight differences that became apparent from this perspective, such as the b.a.l.l.s of light that occasionally rose from the ground, and the eerily semisolid columns of shadow and darkness that stood here and there across the fields below.
Galastel didn"t mention them, and she didn"t want to ask, but she got the impression they were both natural and somehow watching her.
Despite the obvious snow and ice, she didn"t feel the least bit cold. "Look," Galastel said, pointing to a bridge nearby. "It"s beginning." Sure enough, the air began to quiver with a discordant resonance.
Suddenly, probing metallic tentacles slithered out of the air, and got a solid grip on reality. Then there was a triumphant ba.s.s note, with some very sinister undertones, and the tentacles levered a pulsating biomechanical crustacean out of a gap that didn"t exist anyway.
The thing paused there, its fluid skin shifting and changing constantly as filaments stretched out to taste the air. It was certainly technological, but its fluidity of movement was strangely organic. To Sam, it looked like something Lovecraft and Giger might have designed after a bad hit.
Sam shivered. Whatever it was, perhaps it had something to do with what was harming the Sidhe, so she paid as close attention as her stomach could bear. Suddenly the fluid skin split, disgorging a figure. It was like watching someone step into a vertical sheet of calm water, but in reverse.
The shock of seeing that it was herself who emerged almost knocked her down. "What " She swallowed a couple of times, trying to ask the question she didn"t want answered. "That"s never the TARDIS...?"
"Do you not recognise your own travelling carriage?" enquired Galastel. "That of the Evergreen Man?"
"No, it"s... Does it always look like that to you?"
"Should it not?" Galastel seemed baffled by her question.
"No! I mean, the outside"s just, you know, a box."
"Ah... To your limited perception, perhaps. Could a mere box travel through time and s.p.a.ce? Of course there must be more to it than you can perceive. Or at least more than you could perceive before now. There are many things that you can perceive now, if you wish, that you could not before. Places, the feeding creatures that swarm... Many things."
As she watched, the Doctor emerged from the... well, from what she supposed she"d better accept was the TARDIS. Unlike herself or Fitz, he too looked strangely different: taller, more powerful, and somehow more real. It was like looking at a piece of TV or film where one person was in colour and the rest monochrome.
"The Evergreen Man," declared Galastel. It was weird, Sam thought: she knew that she and Galastel should be visible from here, yet they still couldn"t be seen.
"Is that what you call him?"
Galastel remained admirably inscrutable. "It is who he is."
"I never really looked at it that way. Couldn"t we just go down now, and "
"No. There are rules about such things. Even we cannot flout the rules."
Sam thought about this. "Are there rules about tweaking what people see and hear?"
"Rules," Galastel confirmed, "but it"s not forbidden. Why?"
Sam grinned. This was more like it. "There"s somewhere else we have to go."