Montague had triumphed? The memory surged into her skull. The trap neatly sprung, the rescuers confounded.
Everything logical and inevitable, and false. She remembered a different past confrontation underneath the other memories, as if twin streams of consciousness had blended in her head.
The Doctor had finally turned up; by inference the cavalry had been on its way.
Then everything had changed.
Then they were here.
She wondered what the others remembered. The same two memories? Other memories? The ghost scar on her chest itched abominably; this business was too close to her old nightmares. Only one way to get an answer to a question like that. Ask it. Okay, excuse me please, is anyone else here going mad?
She settled for "Would someone please explain, just how we got here? My head"s splitting." She was quite pleased with that. A nice simple question, and a coded bit of wordplay for the Doctor to pick up on, if he was the only other prisoner to have the two sets of memories.
The result was disappointing: four incoherent accounts that confirmed one thing. Everyone else, even the Doctor, seemed to remember only Montague"s version. Roz watched the Doctor"s face carefully for any hint that he really had 224 remembered; he might be concealing the fact temporarily for some operational reason. But though she thought he looked as introspective as she had ever seen him, he finally shook his head sadly. She noticed he was speaking slowly, pausing more than usual, like a laser message on relay. As if he was thinking really hard before each word, or as if he was waiting for some internal trigger. He looked old, she thought. It was easy to believe he was over a thousand years old when that bleak emptiness settled behind his eyes.
A diffident cough drew her attention along the row of prisoners.
Clarissa bit her withered lower lip. "I know what he did."
"No!" Dominic shouted. "Be silent, wife. I won"t let you kill yourself."
"Let her speak." The Doctor"s voice was only a quiet suggestion but, impossibly, Dominic subsided. His brow was furrowed with concern or anger. Roz thought he looked like a man pulled two ways. It was a look she had often seen on the faces of criminals who were considering trying to cut a deal.
Shop their mates, or stay loyal through five years in an isolation cubicle. Whether to betray one person or another.
She distrusted his display of feeling, couched as it was in terms of bullying dominance. Had he been more concerned to rea.s.sure himself that he was still in charge of something than to protect his wife?
Slowly, Clarissa continued, "It"s a power I have myself.
The power I have. I can see how things went wrong, reach back, change them. Make it all better." power I have. I can see how things went wrong, reach back, change them. Make it all better."
"It kills her," Dominic snapped. His eyes sought support from Roz. Why not the Doctor, she thought. Were they already that much at odds? What had Dominic done to turn the Time Lord so against him?
"Look at her," Dominic pleaded. "How old do you think she is? Seventy, eighty? She"s forty-one years of age, younger than me. Every time she alters things, she breaks down a little inside."
"Mon dieu," the Doctor broke in. "The house on the rue Morgue, my two memories." Roz was lost. What was the 225 Doctor going on about now? Her instinct told her this was part of the quarrel between the two. Something that had happened while she had been in Montague"s domain? Or before? Had the Doctor been to Paris earlier than this?
"Yes," Dominic spat. "That was my doing. I had lost my temper in my workshop. I was younger, less trained in how to hold in my power. I combusted. The power was loose in my body, consuming me. I would have melted like a candle in a furnace if she had not given twenty years of her life to put things right."
Clarissa tried to interrupt but Dominic"s gruff voice drowned her out.
"That wasn"t the worst thing. The worst thing was that for ages I did not even know what exactly she had done. It wipes the memory, this power of hers. Then I began to dream, and gradually I remembered. Do you want to know what sent me over the edge, what cost my wife her youth, what led to me sending . . . " His voice broke down for a second. "My sending Emil out alone, and almost caused his death? Do you?" He glared around the tombs defiantly, almost in tears. "I hit my thumb with a hammer while banging in a nail. That was all it took."
The Doctor"s face was ashen white. Roz did not think she had ever seen him this pained; gripped by so simple and honest an emotion. He looked as if he was going to blurt out a rea.s.surance, but his voice was slow and strange as ever.
"Nor was her action without wider consequences," he said. "The web of time resists change; but some powers are irresistible. Imagine the time as beads strung on a wire.
Strum the wire and the beads j u m p back and forth. She created such a harmonic in 1884. An area of s.p.a.ce-time pushed out of the stream of history and held, for a moment or two, parallel to the onrush of the past. Within the bead the normal restraints on rewriting the past failed to hold. There was no past to exert time-pressure; nor any Blinovitch effect. When the altered bead was eased back into the string of time, the changes wrought in it progressed normally along the time-stream."
226.
"That was the first of the disturbances you detected in the TARDIS," Roz said. "But the power required to do that must be astronomical; I"ve seen no sign of any technology advanced enough to do that."
"Nor will you," said the Doctor. "Not even my people have the power to turn a past back on itself and rewrite it. Our lives are as linear as those of humans; the line merely moves through rather more dimensions. Attempts to prove otherwise have been uniformly disastrous."
"Are you saying that my wife can do something that you cannot, Doctor?" Dominic said, torn between fear and pride.
"Using the power that is in her, yes," the Doctor agreed.
"And Montague used the same power, now, to turn our triumph on its head?"
"Yes."
"So what is that power?"
"Yes indeed, Doctor. What is my power, in your opinion?"
The voice was a throaty susurration like the murmur of innumerable bees trapped in a jamjar. It was as inquisitive as a small boy"s. Montague lounged nonchalantly against one of the tombs, dressed like a gentleman out for an evening"s entertainment. An image from an old flat black and white film flashed into Roz"s mind: Frankenstein"s monster getting ready to sing "Putting on the Ritz".
Even so, Roz thought he looked more in control; less mad than he had before. His irrationality was not fixed. d.a.m.n, that made it impossible to rely on it. She wondered if it could be affected by the number of his creatures in attendence on him: he had been at his maddest when playing to that ghastly audience under Montrouge.
"Put simply?" the Doctor asked politely. "To enable you to understand it?" That"s right, Roz thought, rile him. Get us all killed. She had to admire the Doctor"s methods. Sheer b.l.o.o.d.y-minded suicidal gall. Spot on, that Gallifreyan.
"When the Universe began, there were many physical dimensions. There were ten to be precise: all at right angles to each other. Within the very first microscopic fraction of time all but the four with which we are familiar, the ones you 227 might call forward and back, left and right, up and down, and forward and backward in time, collapsed into the world of the atom. Folded up too tiny to interact with the normal dimensions with which we are familiar, but just as real, just as able to support life."
"Life too small to see; which can never contact us,"
Montague sneered. "This is not the source of my power. You are a humbug, Doctor. You and your pet Negress both.
Mountebanks and charlatans. I felt your presence in Paris like heartburn in my chest, but I see now there was no reason to fear you. You smell no different from the mewling family and their sanctimonious cowardice. I have no doubt that any power in you is that which came from me, from my handiwork." His gaze lingered over Roz"s face. "Your facto-tum here told me you served the G.o.ds who sent my power, but you are nothing." He sn.i.g.g.e.red. "The dark messenger indeed. Heh, heh, heh." His laugh sounded like the noise an executed prisoner makes at the back of their throat when their windpipe closes. Death-rattle, Roz thought. He"s almost dead.
The Doctor turned watery blue eyes towards Roz. He looked as if he was in pain. Then the shadows gathered about him, and dark lightning played about his head, and his eyes turned inward, and he began to grow. Throwing his head back as if in homage to the moon, he howled. A high inhuman note. His hands clawed at the skin of his face, plucking and peeling it away. Underneath, flesh as black and deep as ebony gleamed with the ant.i.thesis of light. He was twelve feet tall when the chains, now stretched tight across his chest, began to burst.
Roz felt her sense of reality backflipping in her head. The bones were real under her hands, but nothing else was. Surely that thing could not be the Doctor. It had to be Montague, turning his power on the Time Lord, forcing him to resemble the mythological being that she had claimed he was.
She twisted her head to look at Montague.
He was running for his life.
228.
Montague ran through the tombs, bones scattering underfoot.
He had to get into the light. That thing was a beast of darkness. It would shun the day. Wouldn"t it?
Guards parted, scrabbling out of his way as he ran. He tried to order them to close ranks behind him; to protect him from the demon, but the words stuck in his throat. He could only flap his arms wildly and briefly curse their stupidity. Muscles on legs: brains of sinew. Brutes. Heart pounding, he ran on.
Blood frothed from his lips onto the long staircase.
When the sound of bells exploded shockingly into his consciousness, he thought for a moment that his heart had burst. Then he realized that the bells were ringing in the lodge. The sacred peal of four bells, signifying the Tetra-grammaton. The four-part name of G.o.d. A Masonic signal that the Grandmaster was in residence.
Impossible. Impossible. Demons were one thing, but he had killed Tomas. Nailed him! Crucified him. Surely, despite the prisoner"s interruption, nothing could have survived that death; a death heavy with history, designed to break spirit and body alike? He did not believe it for a minute.
The sneers of the Grandmaster filled his head, louder than the bells. The demon below could wait; it could only eat the world. This was personal.
Released from her chains after the situation had been explained to her, Roz stretched her arms up to restore the circulation, and slapped the ten-foot demon in the face. Not too hard, of course; its skin looked like it would abrade rock.
"You conniving b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You might just as well be the Doctor." She paused. "Ever considered a career in law enforcement?"
"I thought he was splendid," Clarissa said.
"I thought he was stupid to grow bigger than the door,"
Dominic muttered.
Emil grimaced with his razor-sharp teeth. " I " m shrinking as fast as I can." He snapped his mother"s chains, and turned to tug at the ones binding his father. Demonic muscles still bulged.
229.
Clarissa glanced out of the doorway. "Something"s coming."
"Anything we know?" Roz asked sarcastically.
Montague burst into the inner sanctum. The strength needed to throw open the two great iron-studded doors left the muscles in his arms trembling, and his heart felt bisected in his chest, but still he held his head high. He would not bow.
Neither to the Grandmaster, nor to the pains that shot through his body. They would pa.s.s. They always pa.s.sed. Since the power had come to him in 1797, he had proved the philosopher"s dictum, except of course for himself. All things pa.s.sed, save Montague. He choked back a laugh as something tore in his lungs.
The room was dark, panelled with hard wood, just as he remembered it. From behind the partly pulled-back blue and gold curtains, thin streams of light full of dust motes fell onto the dais and its ceremonial chair. He was not surprised to see the man who occupied it, his face familiarly masked with the bronze featureless mask the Grandmaster adopted, a pure samite robe draped over his slight form.
Let the ending come here then, in this supposedly sacred room, where the so-called Grandmaster had lorded it over the Brotherhood. Usurping the blind obedience that should have been Montague"s by right. The blind obedience his dolls had always given him. He opened his mouth to shout for his guards: his internal examiners; his whipping boys; and his moving gallows tree.
The Grandmaster held his finger to his lips. "Don"t say anything yet. If you speak now it will only be a threat or a curse. Not speech. Sit down. There"s fresh tea in the pot on the little table. You"ve been useful to me. I"d like our a.s.socia-tion to end amicably. Not with your death."
Montague hesitated. The man sounded so a.s.sured, so confident. More so than Montague remembered. Without his conscious volition a growl built deep in Montague"s throat, and his voice when it came sounded hoa.r.s.e and broken. "I do not feel this amiability you so suddenly profess. We have not 230 been allies; I have been your prisoner."
"Protective custody merely," the man said from behind the mirror of bronze. "You"re too much a creature of habit, Montague. For years you did what you wanted, when you wanted.
Killed anyone who got in your way with your dolls. Drank and drugged yourself into a stupor with your stolen gems and gold."
Montague looked into the unfathomable bronze mask.
"Morals, Grandmaster?" he said mockingly. "Let us not delude ourselves in this sanctum. The gratification of the flesh is the end of all our desires. What else is power for?"
The figure on the dais moved clumsily and jarred the table next to it. The tea things clattered. Montague thought he had disturbed its conceit. So much the better. The Grandmaster should bow down before he died. He should lick Montague"s feet.
The Grandmaster sighed like someone explaining to a dull-witted child. "Such behaviour is against your own interest in the long term. It attracts attention, like it did in London. Do you remember that? The Shadow Directory cutting through the city"s underworld like an obsidian knife through an Inca"s chest. Burning out the outre, the rum and the esoteric, making it a haven for themselves after the Bourbon restoration in Paris. What did they use to hunt you down, I wonder? Chirurgeons? The Men in Plaid? The Four Kindly Spinsters?"
The creature pushed its way into the holding cell, and Roz hit it with an edge-of-the-hand chop that would have crushed the windpipe of an ordinary man. She followed it up with a left-handed blow to where the nose should have been, designed to drive bone splinters into the brain.
It made a grunting sound and its flesh gave under her hands with the nauseating heaviness of rubber, but the blows seemed to confuse it for a second.
"Get past it quickly," Emil shouted. "I"ll hold it back." He dug his claws into the expanded muscles of the guard, tearing at the coa.r.s.e-grained tissue. His parents slipped past, and Roz 231 saw an expression of wolfish satisfaction flit over the old man"s face as he watched his son"s struggles. Now she knew that Emil was not the Doctor, but was only linked to him telepathically by someone called Aunt Jessica, it was clear that the antipathy she had sensed was between father and son. Some things did not change between the centuries. She hefted a length of chain, ready to come to Emil"s a.s.sistance if necessary.
Dominic seized her arm. "Come on, we have to get out of here." For a second she met his eyes. Little pits of polished fire, spinning between scorched lids. She let herself be led on, but she did not drop the chain.
Emil"s hands burrowed under the thing"s skin, feeling for a crucial knot of muscles or for the underlying skeleton.
He hated this, but he could not let the creature raise the alarm. Not with his parents in the Brotherhood"s domain.
His fingers, moving through meat like fish through water, touched the spinal cord. He twisted it between his hands.
The thing went into shock, thrashing its body from side to side, almost crushing Emil against the rough stonework of the tomb. Clinging on, simply because letting go was more frightening than holding fast, Emil felt the body collapse under him. The thing"s mouth gaped wide and Emil flinched, expecting its needle teeth to fasten into the side of his head.
Instead it whispered, "Claudette," and lay still. A pulse beat in its neck, and Emil considered severing the artery. In the end it was the image of the approval in his father"s face that stopped him. With the creature"s purple blood dripping from his hands, he set off after his parents.
The figure in the bronze mask stared at Montague. There was sweat on the old toy-maker"s brow, and a twitch in the muscles of his upper arm. Only tiny reactions, but significant.
There was real fear there. That was good. Fear was an entirely rational response to the Shadow Directory"s a.s.sa.s.sins. The masked man had felt it himself, a long time ago.
From what he knew of Montague, any sensible reaction 232 was a hopeful sign. A sign that under the layers of madness laid down by years of the gratification of every whim, there was still a hard core of sanity. Fear meant that Montague might be salvageable.
He had to tread carefully though, and the desire to over-elaborate was a strong one. The Men in Plaid, indeed. The Shadow Directory suffered from its own pretentiousness so much that it was almost a duty to poke fun at it.
He took a sip of cold tea.
"These are what I have been protecting you against. I"ve used your power, yes, but to keep you safe. I"ve built up a faction of backers in the Government, discredited the remains of the Directory in France. I " v e taken good care of you. All I ask is that you give up this rebellion against me, heal the artists you have mutated, and live simply until my schemes reach their fruition. Is that too much to ask?"
Montague"s head tilted slightly, as if considering, and then he laughed his organ-grinding, creaking laugh. "Bravo, bravo. A masterpiece. Almost convincing. But I have killed too many of the real Grandmaster to be taken in by an imposter now. Unmask, my entertaining friend, so that I may see your face before I have my acolytes kill you."
233.
Chapter 22.
Monsieur Jules Balmarian, deputy for the fourteenth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, heard the door to his study swing open and a soft tread fall on the wooden floor. Expecting his personal secretary, he did not look up from the speech about the scandalous independence of the churches which he was preparing, but spoke over his shoulder: "Just put the correspondence down on the desk, Marceau, and I"ll read it later."
The cold barrel of a revolver pressed against his cheek.
"Give me one good reason why I shouldn"t just kill you now,"
the man holding the gun said. Jules felt the barrel vibrate slightly against his face. Either he or the man with the gun was shaking. He glanced down at his hands. It was him.