The man with the revolver was old and greying at the temples, but he looked capable of carrying out his threat.
Bulges in his greatcoat suggested other weapons. A taller, younger man, as over-muscled as a wrestler or a boxer, stood in the doorway. He wore a similar coat, and Jules noticed that he had swept it back from his hips in a pose reminiscent of the hired killers of the Americas. A gun, the handle of which gleamed gold, rested on his right hip.
Jules felt a rivulet of sweat run down his face into his neat goatee beard. "Place, whatever it is, don"t kill me," he squealed, his voice an octave higher than when he spoke in the Chamber. "I can p a y "
The second man spoke: "We aren"t interested in your dirty money, Monsieur. Call us old-fashioned but we like to sleep at nights."
234.
"We like to sleep deeply," the older man interjected. "Like the dead we sleep sometimes, we sleep so deep. Isn"t that right, Armand?"
"Yes, and we hate to think that anyone might not sleep as well as we do."
"So we help them."
"Odd how few of them thank us."
"How many is it n o w ? "
"Roughly, Monsieur Armand?"
"Roughly, Monsieur Jarre!"
"Roughly, none."
"Unmask," Montague demanded. The rea.s.suringly heavy tread of his guards behind him sent a thrill through his body.
Whoever this man was he could be no threat. Whatever the thing in the cellar had been it could not find him here where he had his guards about him. He stifled the cough building in his chest and stared at the imposter. No movement towards the pale bronze mask, no sign of fear. G.o.d rot his bones.
Surely he must be impressed by the guards with their steel talons and spines for hair, their monumental strength and utter dedication. A desire to force admiration from this man seized him.
" D o you like them?" There was honest pride in Montague"s voice. They were the strongest and the stupidest, the most superst.i.tious and the most loyal of all his creations. He trusted them as a man trusts a mat to remain underfoot. If a demon from h.e.l.l appeared in the room, they would throw themselves beneath its claws rather than allow their G.o.d to be disturbed by its presence. It would never occur to them to believe that their G.o.d could be injured; but a sense of Montague"s dignity had been carved into their cells and bones.
"I"ve seen bigger." The stranger"s voice altered, becoming sardonic, and oddly familiar. The hair began to creep on the back of Montague"s neck. It was the voice of the unknown man, the one who had turned into the creature in the cell. The one whose servant had claimed to be a messenger of the dark powers. The Doctor. Fear warred with anger in Montague"s 235 glands. The habits of almost two hundred years made one response far more likely. Anger. Red rage seared through his brain. "I will not be mocked. Kill him."
"One question first?"
"Wait," Montague shouted, his voice cracking and buzzing in his ancient larynx. He wanted to hear the man beg. The guards stopped dead in their onrush like frozen tidal waves.
Montague could feel the power flowing out from his body, sustaining them. It was worth it.
"What do you want?"
Crouching in a concealing corner of the catacombs while a band of the Brotherhood filed past, Roz tried to formulate her next move.
She wished Chris was there so she could snap at him, secure in the knowledge that he would understand, knowing that he drew on the same pool of shared experiences.
She shook her head slightly and dug into the task at hand.
Available resources. Herself. A way too cheerful blind man with psychological problems that made him choose to live in a sewer. An old man who could burn things with his eyes. An older woman, apparently his wife, who was the source, at least partly, of the time disturbances; and a metamorph, their son, who had been pretending to be the Doctor, pretending to be an evil creature from Outside. Marvellous. Not a strong enough force to make a dent in Montague"s circus of mad psychic artists and disturbed dramatists. What would the Doctor do? What was the Doctor doing?
Ah yes, get captured, berate Montague, escape, turn the tables, s.n.a.t.c.h victory from the jaws of defeat. Standard operating procedure. The best she could do to a.s.sist him would be diversionary tactics. Tie down the Brotherhood"s peripheral resources in a series of terrorist-style attacks. Kick a.s.s.
"What do you get out of all this? I mean, yes, dedicated followers, applause of the intelligentsia - once they"re sucked into the Brotherhood - s.e.x, torture, intrigue, paranoia. Extra-large 236 portions of pommes frites. pommes frites. But look at the cost.* But look at the cost.*
"The cost?"
"You"re dying."
" N o , " Montague howled. "I live. I want to live forever."
"You"re not really living. Life is change. You haven"t had an original thought in a hundred years. All this rant, rant, rant is just going through the motions. Besides, the power needed to sustain these creatures is increasing towards the cusp of the catastrophe; without the Doll"s House you can"t last much longer."
"Soon I will have it in my grasp; then I will be supreme."
"You will never have it. If you are so powerful, why didn"t you twist time to give you the Doll"s House? To make all the Family drop dead, or always to have been your loyal servants? Distorting the history of the world just to dump five people in a cell! Is that the action of omnipotence, or of a spoilt brat? Be sensible. Surrender quietly, and I"ll try to put things back how they were. Carry on like this and there can be only one result."
"I"ll kill you."
"Two results, then."
Montague"s aged body tottered forward. The preternatural strength that had driven him here from the cells below; the fear that this insect had somehow managed to raise in him, by whatever trickery, was almost spent. A shuddering gasp sent a sharp pain bursting in his right lung. Was he dying? No, it could not be! The world was his toyshop now, and all the men and women merely dolls. Creatures without feelings or histories, to be bent to the shape of his desires. He would daunt this gnat yet.
"Unmask or die."
The Doctor sighed, and dropped his mask. You could not win them all. The mask made no sound as it hit the thick piled carpet, but a m.u.f.fled groan came from behind the draperies that covered the bow window.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," the Doctor said softly.
237.
Claudette lay on a pile of bones, weeping. She had been too weak to finish what she had started, and the pulse at the back of her mind, like an internal tide, told her that Montague still lived. At any moment his twisted mind might remember her attack upon him and demand vengeance.
If only the power burning through her had not sickened her with pleasure; stealing her resolve with fingers of perverted desire. She had always wanted to be idolized, to be loved, to turn the heads of a thousand men at a reception at the Sorbonne. Even now the pleasure was a tiny clenched fist in her stomach.
She should have freed the Negress. Any ally - even one of a lower cla.s.s and race - would have been preferable to this aching loneliness. At the time though she had not been able to resist draining the woman"s strength as she lay bound, feasting on the s.e.xual response she read in her dark eyes. If the longing had only stayed a second more in the woman"s eyes, Claudette thought she would have released her. Yes, surely she would have done.
But it had not stayed. Instead it had been replaced by pity.
Bland, tasteless pity. Something in her deeper than the things Montague had done to her revolted at the memory.
Following the quick, imperative movements of Montague"s head, the guard wrapped the curtain in its taloned fist and pulled. The curtain fell away, revealing the huddled body of a man stripped to his silk underclothes, his wrists fastened together with red wires, black gaffer tape stuck over his mouth. Behind him, through a sheet of gla.s.s set into the internal wall, the Doctor could see down the great stairwell into the shadowy depths under the Masonic lodge. A good fifty-foot drop, even if you could avoid the iron girders supporting the staircase. At the bottom, a sluggish stream of effluent cut through the catacombs, edged in tiles stained the colour of yellow bone.
Montague tottered up to the bound figure. "Well, well, Doctor. It seems I am in your debt. My greatest enemy, trussed up like a Christmas goose." He tugged at the black 238 tape, but it proved too strong for his fingers. Frustrated, he glared at the nearer of his two guards. It fumbled clumsily for the end of the tape and ripped it off. Blood and skin came with it, and the man swore through broken lips as the force of the guard"s pull wrenched the muscles in his neck.
Montague smiled, and the enamel on his teeth gleamed white. "Major Henri. Or should I say Tomas, or Jean Mayeur.
It seems that killing you is the nearest thing I have to a bad habit. You should thank the Doctor here that this time it will be relatively quick." He turned to the Doctor, and managed a crippled bow. "You inspire me." He made a gesture that only the shakiness of his hands robbed of ultimate authority. The guard hefted Major Henri over its misshaped head and turned towards the window.
"Montague, don"t do this," Henri gabbled. "The Doctor"s right. I heard what he said to you. Killing me w o n " t solve anything. I"ve already made preparations."
Montague yawned theatrically. "I think I liked you better as Tomas. You were certainly more impressive." He held the thumb of his right hand outwards, and slowly turned it down towards the ground.
The guard grunted. Then it threw Major Henri through the gla.s.s.
The Doctor watched the body fall. It bounced twice - no, three times.
"You disapprove?" Montague said winningly. "I thought I saw you eyeing the potential of the staircase. What was I supposed to do? Charge you like a bull, and go tumbling to my doom while you swished your jacket? I am not so mad that I cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw, Doctor." He peered down into the gloom and clapped his gnarled hands. "Look Doctor, your friends from the cells. What can they imagine they can accomplish, I wonder? I will have to arrange a reception for them."
"These stairs seem to be the main access point to the upper part of the catacombs," Roz said. "If we can destroy them, we will cut Montague off from the members of the Brotherhood 239 currently in the tombs."
"Leaving them free to attack us," Dominic muttered.
Roz glared at him, and a hail of bullets clattered off the iron stair just above her head.
"Get down," Pierre shouted, pulling Roz back. She shook off his hands irritably; she needed to see.
The shots had come from a figure hovering in mid-air.
No, not hovering. As Roz watched the figure flickered and seemed to elongate briefly, before stabilizing and letting off another salvo from the rifle it carried. It was a teleporter, flicking itself upwards to counter the pull of gravity. To add insult to injury it was using the rifle she had tried to kill Montague with, or one very like it.
Roz glanced around, seeking cover. The motion of shapes in the hollows told her that reinforcements of the Brotherhood were closing in on them. The crack of the rifle heralded another bolt. This one missed Clarissa by a whisper.
A scream followed the rifle"s crack, so soon that she wondered if someone else had been hit. It was Emil. He was lying on the floor, curled in a foetal position. The clothes in the region of his chest were turning into black fire.
240.
Chapter 23.
The Doctor watched the teleporter lay down a barrage of fire on the base of the staircase. Someone was going to get killed in a second or two. Besides, if he had to listen to Montague for another second he was going to lose his temper.
Side-stepping the guards. Goodness, how could things that big be so slow? He swan-dived through the broken gla.s.s.
Below, the Brotherhood and the Family didn"t stop trying to kill each other to watch him plunge to his death.
"Of course," he thought as he curved through the air, arms outstretched before him, "if the teleporter had a squint, or wasn"t a good navigator, or changed his mind." He accelerated by another thirty-two feet per second per second, and wondered if it was too late to do anything about the Universal Gravitational Constant. The tiled edges of the sewer looked particularly hard this time of year. A parody of a poem crept through a corner of his mind: "I never had a piece of toast, particularly large and wide, that fell upon the sandy floor, but always on the b.u.t.tered side."
Then s.p.a.ce rent itself apart ahead of him and he smashed into the returning teleporter, knocking the breath from the man"s body. The teleporter"s rifle went flying. So did the teleporter.
Scrambling in mid-air, his descent arrested by the impact with the psionically induced "rising flicker" that the teleporter had been using to hover, the Doctor hooked an arm around the teleporter"s waist. The weight of his body and the shock broke the "flicker". They started to fall again. The floor was forty feet below.
241.
The Doctor felt the teleporter start to tense, to get his bearings. He was getting ready to "jump" out of his grasp.
The changes in the brain that allow a humanoid to break down its body and encode it into a stream of quantum events are many and complex; in particular the thalamus, the pineal gland and the language centres of the brain are generally re-routed into a single hypertrophied organ: a kind of superlocator, reading magnetic fields like the flecks of iron in a homing pigeon"s cortex, feeling neutrino-flux like the sand whales of Askelion. The organ is a marvellous aid to teleportation, letting its owner judge unconsciously the rotational velocity of the planet, the air density at its intended jump-point, the weaknesses in s.p.a.ce-time that its power exploits. In the thirty-sixth century, during the age of the Intentional Engineers, its properties had been intensively studied.
The biorhythms of the thalamic core of the locator were open to optic stimulation. Shove a hat over the eyes of a person with such an organ and manipulate it to cast a certain frequency of light and shade across the person"s eyes, and their location organ would shut down entirely. Then they would be at your mercy. Thirty-five feet up, tumbling through the foul air, the teleporter suddenly found he barely knew which way was up. Falling like a stone, clinging to a different, panicking stone, the Doctor started work on the second part of his plan.
A churning vortex of negative light. A lens of shattered s.p.a.ce and time. It hurt Roz"s eyes to look at it. It thrust up pseudo-podia of breaking s.p.a.ce like the death spasms of an amoeba.
Emil"s face was a rictus of pain and horror.
Clarissa reached out for her son.
" N o ! " Dominic yelled. "You"ll kill yourself."
Clarissa turned towards him, tears in her eyes. "I must, my love."
Roz brought a rock down hard on Clarissa"s head. For once the Doctor"s instructions, relayed via Emil, were almost a pleasure. If she"d had to listen to any more of that, she would 242 have needed fine-tuning of the genes controlling insulin production.
Dominic stared at her, and a glint of strange admiration showed for a second in his eyes. "She"s going to be so mad."
Then he turned back to his son, cradling him in his arms.
"Merde, merde, merde," Denis yelled as the ground hurled itself up at him. The madman was on his back, flapping his hat in Denis"s face. Everything was wrong. He was going to die, and he did not know where anything was. Ever since he had joined the Brotherhood, he had known where he was, where anything else was. His very dreams had been masterpieces of cartography. N o w he was lost. And dead.
Then a soft voice seemed to whisper in his ear. "Think of a cathedral in a blue box."
Fear of death shorted out the restraints on his apportation.
The air, the man clinging to him, part of the iron stairs; all vanished in the b o o m of an uncontrolled teleportation. The heavy slap of the closing air smashed into the vacuum left by the vanishing man.
Shards of gla.s.s from the broken observation window, drawn by the pressure into the vortex, rained down on the combatants.
Tied in his chair, Jules Balmarian twitched, and a look of new cunning spread over his face. Jarre, going through the papers on his desk for the third time, did not see it; nor did Chris, but it was there for an instant before it was replaced once again by his usual expression of peevish discontent.
He cleared his throat. "You"ve evidently failed to find whatever you were looking for. So I suggest that before you make this any worse for yourselves, you untie me."
The black lens hovered above Emil"s chest and then, twirling around itself like a mechanism built out of smoke, it zoomed off into the shadows. One of the Brotherhood screamed; the sound of an animal caught in a trap.
243.
Chris leant over the desk and patted him commiseratingly on the shoulder. "We will be done soon." He hoped. He was beginning to regret their heavy-handed entrance. Jules showed no sign of turning into anything.
Then Jules was scrabbling for Chris"s gun, his hands shockingly untied, his face taut with hatred. Chris seized his wrists. They were incredibly strong. Inhumanly so.
Jarre came back into the room, arms piled high with more papers. He saw that the Doctor and the deputy were struggling for the golden gun. First the Doctor had it, then Jules. A finger - Jarre could not see whose - depressed the trigger.
The gun flared, casting shadows high on the moulded ceiling.