"Let"s hope it won"t be your last laugh," said the Doctor as he turned away.
Albrellian didn"t have a jaw to drop, but his palps visibly quivered.
"What mean do you, ship and all its weapon systems appropriated have you?" he hissed, hoisting his sh.e.l.l up at the front until it was almost vertical. "Cannot that do you: an envoy of the Greld am I!"
Vicki cast a quick glance to either side. They were surrounded by Jamarians - etiolated figures that had emerged from the shadows of the ship"s hold to encircle them. Most of them were carrying devices that trailed wires behind them, as if they had just been removed from the ship"s hull.
The lead Jamarian stepped forward from the group in the doorway.
"The Greld, the Greld, the all-powerful, all-arrogant, all-greedy Greld," it snarled. "When the revolution comes, your sort will be first up against the bulkhead."
"What is your name?" Albrellian said. "About this will hear Braxiatel."
"My name is Szaratak," the alien replied, and spat on the ground between Albrellian"s front pair of claws. "Do what you will - Braxiatel is nothing to us. He has served his purpose. We don"t need him any more."
Vicki felt a pang of sadness. She had liked Irving Braxiatel. He had believed that what he was doing might actually help, and now it was going to come crashing down in flames around his ears. Poor man.
"Purpose?" Albrellian reeled backwards. "What purpose?"
Vicki reached out and patted his sh.e.l.l. "Mr Braxiatel brought all the envoys together, didn"t he?" she asked, directing her comments more at the Jamarians than at the Greld envoy. "And he persuaded them to leave all their ships unguarded on the moon as a gesture of good faith. Their heavily armed ships, ready to be taken apart for their secrets." Something suddenly occurred to her, and she turned to the Jamarian. "It was you that tried to kill Galileo, wasn"t it? He was the only person capable of seeing that you were going to and from the moon. Braxiatel just tried to stop him from seeing anything, but you tried to kill him."
Albrellian was silent for a moment. "Very clever have been they,"
he said finally in a very quiet, very flat voice. "Badly underestimated them did we, and that is not something often do the Greld. Too paranoid they were, thought we, too psychotic ever to amount to anything in the universe. Scrabbling around in their play-pit of a planet, them watched we, no two of them ever agreeing with each other for long enough to form an alliance, and at them laughed did we. It was not even worth selling them weapons, knew we, because nothing to offer us apart from their obsessive fascination with detail and their amusingly vicious natures had they. When using them to arrange this Convention Braxiatel was heard we, that he"d stopped them squabbling for long enough to get them to do anything amazed were we."
" Psychotic? Psychotic? " Szaratak screamed, its little red eyes glinting with madness. "I"ll show you psychotic!" Dipping its head until its rapier-like horn was pointed directly at Albrellian"s palps, it lunged straight at the arthropod envoy. " Szaratak screamed, its little red eyes glinting with madness. "I"ll show you psychotic!" Dipping its head until its rapier-like horn was pointed directly at Albrellian"s palps, it lunged straight at the arthropod envoy.
As Vicki stepped back out of the way and into the lee of the huge zeus plug, the, other Jamarians started cheering and clapping.
Szaratak"s thin legs propelled it at Albrellian so fast that the sound of its feet hitting the deck was a continuous rattle and the air whistled past the sharp point of its horn.
And when Szaratak was about to plunge its horn deep into Albrellian"s mouth, the Greld reached out with his second set of claws and calmly snipped the Jamarian"s k.n.o.b-like head off. The Jamarian dropped to the floor, spouting blood from the stump of its neck.
"Quick!" Albrellian yelled to Vicki as the sh.e.l.l of his back folded open and two ma.s.sive fans of leathery skin burst forth. "To the skiff run!" The last thing she saw as she turned away and ran for the flattened disc behind them was Albrellian buffeting the Jamarians with mighty strokes of his wings. Light streamed from the open doorway of the skiff, its welcome glow pulling her on like a magnet. Her feet echoed like gunshots against the metal deck.
From behind her she could hear what sounded like a pavement being thrashed with a lot of sticks but which must have been the Jamarians jabbing at Albrellian"s hard sh.e.l.l with their horns as he ran. Time seemed to break into fragments which whirled confusingly around her in no particular order, and she couldn"t tell whether she was running, safe or dead.
And then a nightmarishly thin figure reached out of the shadows of a fighter ship and wrapped its bony fingers around her head. She screamed, and the sound seemed to go on for ever, echoing throughout eternity. Nothing was real but the insane glint in the Jamarian"s eye, and the way its muscles moved like eels beneath its warty skin, and the gut-wrenching stench of its breath emerging from its perpetually pursed lips.
A pair of claws grabbed her shoulders and wrenched her from the Jamarian"s grasp. Before she could register that she was flying through the air, Albrellian had landed beside the skiff and was bundling her through the door and into a seat. Ten seconds later, as they rose like a tossed stone away from the deck and the crowd of flailing Jamarian limbs and towards the hatch that was opening its petals far above them, she could still feel those thin fingers, cold and moist against her skin.
Shakespeare watched with awe as the magic mirror reflected scenes of another place. The mirror hung unsupported in the centre of the marble hall, and the view it reflected was one he recognized: the beach upon which he, the Doctor, Steven Taylor and the arrogant Italian had been washed up less than an hour before. A small group of men were churning up the sand as they moved aimlessly around, the sores on their hands and faces painfully evident. Boats were approaching the golden strand, their bows cleaving through the waves like so many ploughs through soil, and men were throwing themselves into the water in their frantic efforts to arrive at the island and join their compatriots.
Less than an hour. He had been here less than an hour.
Shakespeare groaned inwardly as he realized how his wits had turned to sand in that scant time. Had someone told him, as the mists parted and the island was revealed, that he would be standing beside demons watching a magic mirror then he would have called them mad. Now he was debating whether or not it was he who was mad.
The view was slanted now, as if the mirror was suspended above the waves. Shakespeare could have sworn that there was a rim of grey metal between the beach and the receding water, and sand was trickling over this rim and vanishing from sight. Some of the men had thrown themselves full length on the beach and had extended their arms over the edge towards the nearest swimmers.
As far as Shakespeare could see, there were three possible explanations for what was happening to him.
The first was that the mirror was devilish work - the creation of some dark-working sorcerers or soul-killing witches. He glanced over at Irving Braxiatel, trying once again to evaluate the man.
Braxiatel stood calmly next to the Doctor, a slight frown upon his face. He had the demeanour of an honest, G.o.d-fearing person, that much was true, but he certainly a.s.sociated himself with the sp.a.w.n of Satan.
Shakespeare caught the errant thought, and cursed. Just because these creatures were not pleasing to the eye, it did not mean that they were evil. In nature there was no blemish but the mind: none could be called deformed but the unkind. He kept telling himself that as his eyes strayed to the skeletal figures of Braxiatel"s a.s.sistants.
As Shakespeare watched, Braxiatel pressed a small stud on the box in his hand. A ripple crossed the mirror, and the reflected view shifted. Now they were looking across the water and towards the island. The curved hull of a small fishing boat obscured the vista to one side, and Braxiatel nudged at another stud until the mirror"s view shifted sideways by a few feet. The swimmers" heads were dark blobs silhouetted against a grey metal cliff that rose some thirty feet or more from the water until it was capped by sand. More and more of the cliff was revealed as the water withdrew, or the metal rose, a smooth expanse of a dull substance that was not iron, or bronze, not copper or bra.s.s.
Perhaps he had become brainsick. That was another possibility.
Perhaps his wits had become estranged from themselves and he was indulging in turbulent and dangerous lunacy. Had he not himself known men who believed that they were being followed by fabulous beasts, or women that talked to invisible companions?
The distance between sand and sea was increasing as the island reared up like an emerging kraken, but the swimmers were throwing themselves from the water and clinging to the metal surface, finding purchase on patches of barnacles or clumps of seaweed and scuttling like spiders up to the sand where their friends pulled them over.
It was also possible, Shakespeare considered, that he had eaten of the insane root that took the reason prisoner. Such plants were known of, and Shakespeare had eaten hurriedly of some strangely flavoured vegetables since arriving in Venice. Did they not say that men caught in the thrall of such food would find fragments of nightmare scattered through their waking lives like plums in a plum duff?
Looking upward to the beach, which was now fifty feet or more above the churning waves, Shakespeare could make out a ma.s.s of people, fifty or more, all standing together. The last few swimmers swarmed up the metal surface to join them. They waited, silent and still, all gazing inward to the towers and halls of Braxiatel"s palace. Shakespeare wasn"t sure, but he thought that they were holding hands. Somewhere beyond them was the blue of the sky, and Shakespeare thought for a fleeting moment that he saw something drop from the sky towards the island - a flattened disc with lights set equally around its circ.u.mference.
There was a fourth possibility, of course. It could all be true. Men from another star islands that could rise from the water: people with rocks in their heads that gave them the plague. Yes, it could all be true. And Shakespeare himself might be King Sigismund of Denmark.
Shakespeare sighed. At the end of the day, did it matter whether he was bewitched, mad, dreaming or sane? Would it affect what he did? What he said? What he had to do?
"I don"t understand," the Doctor was saying to Braxiatel. "They are all together now. If my theory that they are all part of one huge explosive device is correct then I am at a loss to know why they haven"t exploded."
"Don"t sound so disappointed," Braxiatel replied. "Perhaps they"re not all there. That was the point of raising the island - to leave a lot of them bobbing on the ocean, too late for the party."
"I think you were too late for that, my boy." The Doctor nodded sagely. "If I am not mistaken, everybody from the boats is now standing on that cliff. And they"re not waiting for Christmas, hmm?"
Braxiatel shrugged. "Then perhaps there"s something missing - a fuse of some kind that they require, an arming mechanism.
Something that is supposed to turn up at the last minute to ensure that they don"t go off when they pa.s.s each other in the street."
"Perhaps." The Doctor sounded unconvinced. "But if so, where is it, hmm? Where is it?"
The late afternoon sun shining through the stained gla.s.s windows of the Church of St Trovaso cast a jigsaw-puzzle of coloured light across Christopher Marlowe"s face. Steven had turned the hologuise off to see how badly Marlowe was injured. The rest of the church was in shadow, and in the darkness Steven could hear Toma.s.so Nicolotti"s triumphant laughter as he and his cronies left.
Within a few moments, they were alone.
Marlowe"s head was cradled in Steven"s lap. If Steven hadn"t known that the playwright and spy had been wearing a white shirt, he would have sworn that it was made of scarlet cloth. Whenever Marlowe shifted, the blood from the exit wound in his back sucked glutinously against the cold flagstones.
"While I had expected that you and I would end up in this position,"
Marlowe gasped, "I had not antic.i.p.ated that it would be for this reason. So does life imitate bad art. Too many times have I written duels not to be struck with the irony of dying in one."
"You"re not going to die," Steven said tightly. "I"m going to get you through this."
"You should never lie to a professional liar, Steven." Marlowe smiled, then winced as a pang of pain shot through him. A stain of bright arterial blood bloomed against the cloth of his shirt.
"Marlowe, the scourge of G.o.d, must die, but did it have to be in His house?" He leaned back, his eyelids fluttering and his breath coming in short gasps.
Out in the shadows of the church a door opened, spilling glowing light across the flagstones. A priest entered, his face floating above his black robes. When he saw Steven and Marlowe he crossed himself and withdrew, muttering.
"Maybe if I bandage the wound, or put st.i.tches in it, or something,"
Steven muttered, "it might help." Carefully he pulled at the tacky fabric of Marlowe"s shirt, peeling it away from his body until the torn skin was revealed. He winced. Toma.s.so Nicolotti had twisted the blade viciously in Marlowe"s stomach, turning a simple slash into a gaping hole through which he could see the taut membranes of Marlowe"s guts and And a flash of red-slicked silver. Steven bent closer to look.
Gingerly he pushed at a fold of intestine with his forefinger, moving it out of the way. Behind it was a smooth metal object with patterns incised into its surface, part of a larger device apparently hidden within Marlowe"s lower chest.
"Well, I guess you didn"t escape from the aliens at that colony after all," he murmured. "They"ve put something inside you."
"If my body fascinates you that much," Marlowe whispered, his eyes still closed, "then I pray you undress me further."
"Don"t you ever ever give up?" Steven snapped. give up?" Steven snapped.
The ghost of a smile fluttered around Marlowe"s lips. "Indulge the last wish of a dying man," he mouthed. "Kiss me, Steven."
"Well," Braxiatel said, clapping his hands together, "shall we repair to the refectory for drinks?" He collapsed the image field with a quick motion of his hand and, glancing over towards one of the Jamarians, he snapped his fingers. "Tzorogol! Take a party outside and bring the locals in. Try not to panic them. We"ll need to do a full medical scan, so alert the infirmary. Oh, and you"d better split the group into three and keep them apart, just in case the Doctor is right."
"Yes, Braxiatel," the Jamarian said as Braxiatel looked away.
There was something about the tone of its voice that made him look back, an underlying sense of repressed anger and barely concealed hatred, but there was nothing on its face to suggest there was anything wrong.
Somewhere overhead, up in the cloud-enshrouded heights of the Great Hall, he could hear the distant sound of wings. Either one of the envoys in the Armageddon Convention was taking a comfort break or a pigeon had got in, and if it was a pigeon then he would have to have it removed before it defecated on the marble. There was always something going on that he had to deal with, and all he had to work with was the Jamarians. "Are you sure you can manage to remember those orders?" he asked Tzorogol, "or would you like me to repeat them for you?"
Tzorogol didn"t answer for a moment. Its small, red eyes glared at Braxiatel with almost physical force. He had to keep reminding himself that it was part of the Jamarian"s physiology: they couldn"t help looking like that. It wasn"t as if Jamarians meant to be threatening.
"Yes," Tzorogol barked finally, "I can remember. I can remember very well."
The flutter of wings suddenly intensified, and a great shadow fell over them all as Envoy Albrellian settled dramatically where the image field had been. He was carrying Vicki in his claws, and as soon as her feet touched the ground she ran to the Doctor"s side.
Braxiatel was less concerned with their fond greetings than he was with the envoy"s actions. "Albrellian," he snapped, "you"ve gone too far this time - kidnapping one of the Doctor"s companions. Action will have to be taken."
"Too much action around here already going on there is,"
Albrellian said, glancing over at where Tzorogol still stood. "What your precious Jamarians are doing, know do you, Braxiatel? Our ships up on the moon gutting are they, the weapons out of them stripping are they! Stripping all the ships parked on the moon would not be surprised to learn I."
"They"re what?" Braxiatel exploded. "But that"s -"
"Absolutely true," Vicki said from the shelter of the Doctor"s arm.
She gazed at Braxiatel sadly. "I"m sorry, but it"s all absolutely true.
I saw it, and I heard them talking about it. Albrellian and I have just come back in a skiff." She shot the arthropod a nasty glance.
"Albrellian didn"t want to, because he"s planted a bomb somewhere on the island, but he can"t escape now that his ship is in the hands of the Jamarians. The rest of the Jamarians are following us in another skiff. We abandoned ours in mid-air and Albrellian carried me here."
"Only be a matter of seconds before the meta-cobalt bomb explodes, it must be," Albrellian cried, his eyestalks almost fully retracted in agitation. "All the pieces are a.s.sembled!"
"Not quite all." Braxiatel indicated the virtual screen. "According to the Doctor, there"s a piece missing. Some kind of fuse, he said."
Albrellian perked up a bit. "Is it possible that to the island carrying the fuse did not make it the carrier?" he asked. "That could only have happened if the hypnotic controller had from the brain been removed. Perhaps a chance after all have we - but only if those carriers off the island can get we." He shot a venomous glance at the Jamarians. "But first with your revolutionary little clerks to deal have we."
Braxiatel turned to the Jamarians. "Tzorogol, there"s obviously been some sort of-" He stopped abruptly when he became aware that the Jamarian was shaking its head firmly. "Tzorogol, what"s got into you?"
"Power," Tzorogol snarled. "You took a race without any influence or prestige, you put them in charge of technology that it would have taken them millions of years to build for themselves, and you didn"t expect them to take advantage of it? That sort of arrogance verges on stupidity." Tzorogol"s little scarlet eyes flickered back and forth over the stunned group. "We know what other races say about us. We know the sort of snide jokes that are made behind our backs, and you"re all wrong, do you hear me? Wrong! We"re as intelligent as any of you!"
Braxiatel felt as if the ground was swaying beneath his feet, and he was having trouble distinguishing the Jamarian"s diatribe over the sound of the blood rushing through his ears. How could he have been so... so monumentally stupid? "Look," he said finally, "this has gone far enough -" The words sounded fatuous as he said them, and he stopped in the middle of the sentence, rehearsing the possible conversations that could spool away from that point in time. None of them got him anywhere. The natural order of things had suddenly reversed, and the underdogs had the upper hand.
Nothing he could say would change that. He shrugged. "Yes," he said simply. "I"ve been arrogant and foolish."
"And not for the first time, hmm?" said the Doctor superciliously.
He stepped forward. "Now that you have this information," he said to Tzorogol, "you realize that it is useless? Your species has neither the infrastructure, the resources or the knowledge to exploit it. You"re in the position of a child holding the blueprints of a house: you may understand them, but you can"t do anything with them."
He clasped his hands behind his back and smiled. "It will still take generations of effort for you to climb out of your playpen. You may think that you have built yourselves an empire, but it is an empire of gla.s.s, a pretty bauble, too fragile to last."
Tzorogol"s horn flicked downward, as if it was thinking about running the Doctor through, but a disturbance at the back of the hall distracted it. A group of Jamarians rushed up to Tzorogol, glaring at Vicki and Albrellian.
"They killed Szaratak!" one of them exclaimed. "We tried to catch them, but -"
"Did you get the information?" Tzorogol snapped.
The Jamarian nodded, and handed Tzorogol a small control unit made out of curved metal and green gla.s.s. "Every weapon has been dismantled and scanned, and every computer databank downloaded. All the information is in there."
"You underestimate us," Tzorogol snarled at the Doctor. "We"re aware that it"s knowledge we need, not information, so we"re going to auction the information we"ve collected, sell it to the highest bidder - and we have all the potential bidders gathered here, at the Armageddon Convention." It held up the control unit. "Everything we"ve learned is in here - details of every weapon system and every stardrive in every ship on the moon. Every single sc.r.a.p of information. We"ll sell it in exchange for ships, and weapons, and defensive systems, and we"ll take our revenge for all of the slights, the insults and the insinuations. We"ll show everyone that we don"t just serve drinks and do accounts and run bureaucracies. We"re going to be a force to be reckoned with from now on!"
The Doctor gazed at the object with interest. "A telepathic storage unit," he said. "Very interesting: at the touch of a b.u.t.ton, all the information contained in the unit is instantly transmitted into the mind of whoever is holding it. I seem to recognize the design as Vilp - I presume that you stole it from an envoy"s room here at the Convention. I congratulate you - it appears that you have thought of everything."
"Not quite," a hesitant voice said from one side. Before anybody could move, William Shakespeare pushed past Braxiatel and s.n.a.t.c.hed the control unit from Tzorogol"s hand. Tzorogol lunged at him, but he backed out of the way. The other Jamarians weren"t sure what to do. Two of them lowered their horns, ready to skewer Shakespeare. He, in his turn, gazed wildly around the hall, his hair plastered across his sweaty brow. "Ignorance is the curse of G.o.d: knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven," he cried.
Holding the unit to his forehead, he pressed the b.u.t.ton.
The Jamarians stood stunned for a moment: just long enough for Shakespeare to drop the telepathic storage unit and run out of the hall. The Jamarians looked at each other and then, with a blood-chilling scream, ran after him. As their footsteps died away, peace settled once again on the hall. Braxiatel stepped forward to retrieve the telepathic unit.
"Are there any more surprises waiting to spring on us," the Doctor asked eventually, "or is this it for the time being?"
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
The carved prow of the gondola lurched to the left, and Steven desperately waggled the long oar to straighten it out before the boat hit the side of the ca.n.a.l. The sun had dropped below roof level, and the water was mostly in shadow, making it difficult to steer into the waves which seemed to spring up out of nowhere and ricochet between crumbling walls and around corners before knocking the gondola sideways. Steven was having problems steering straight anyway: the effortless motions of the oars that he"d seen other gondoliers demonstrate eluded him completely, and even without the waves his progress along Venice"s watery arteries was a bit haphazard. His muscles were aching with the strain of constantly heaving the thing back and forth, and the stench that rose from the water as he disturbed it made him want to throw up. If he did, he wouldn"t be making the ca.n.a.l any less sanitary than it already was.
He glanced down at Christopher Marlowe. The man was propped up in the bows, looking for all the world like an aristocrat out for a quiet trip, rather than a dying playwright and spy with a silver machine in his chest cavity.