Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [78]
'What now?'
She looked around.
'Well, there's not much option, is there? We have to follow to find out where they're taking Holmes. If we're really lucky, the Doctor might be there as well'
The path taken by the three Indians was quite clear. The damp marks of their bare feet on the marble flagstones had not yet evaporated, and we made good time. We turned a corner to find them some yards ahead of us, at a point where the corridor opened out into a large open space. Sunlight glared on stone, and the heat and stink of the outside world suddenly assailed us. In the centre of the space, a large circular pit seemed to absorb the light. I could make out the first few steps of a stairway which spiralled around its edge before the shadows lapped over it like black water.
The Indians carrying Holmes, Roxton and O'Connor did not hesitate, but plodded down the stairway into the pit.
With barely a hesitation, Bernice and I followed.
Stale air drifted up from the dark heart of the pit. The steps were almost invisible beneath our feet. Three times I wandered too close to the edge and would have fallen had Bernice not grabbed my sleeve. Gazing upwards I could see birds wheeling across the deep blue circle of the sky. I started to count steps, and got up to several hundred before I gave up. The comforting light above us receded to the size of a guinea, then a farthing and then a sixpence. My feet fell into a pattern - step, step, step and my mind wandered free. I suppose that I had fallen into some kind of hypnotic state, a dream land where logic is conspicuous by its absence. I seemed to be standing in a familiar city of tall buildings. There were people thronging the pavements and buckboard carriages manoeuvring through the refuse-laden streets. I was trying to warn passers-by of the danger they were in -
although I did not know what that danger was myself - but they were ignoring me. I screamed to them to take cover, to beware, but it was as if I was invisible to them. And then a huge crack opened up across the street, and buckboards fell into it, their occupants' faces contorted in terror.
Buildings around me wavered and crumbled. Chunks of masonry fell and buried themselves in the dusty ground. I stared at the devastation, knowing that I could have prevented it but uncertain how.
A hand tugged at my sleeve and woke me from my day-dream. I was in darkness. The stairway continued on as before. Bernice's face was lit by a flickering orange light.
'Are you all right?'
'I'm not sure . . . I think I blacked out for a while,' I replied.
'Can't say I blame you: She grimaced. 'I think we've arrived somewhere.'
She indicated downwards. A few steps past where we had stopped, the pit seemed to open out into a vast conical cave with us at its apex. I crept down a few steps. The stairway hugged the sides of the cone, descending in a spiral to a rocky floor some half-mile across its base.
The three Indian bearers carrying Holmes, Roxton and O'Connor were trudging down the sides of the cave like ants on the inside of a flower pot.
Pools of brackish water littered the plain like malignant sores. In between them, a host of men were sitting, lined up in rows with kit bags at their feet and rifles across their shoulders. There were larger weapons in evidence as well: Gatling guns, elephant rifles and the like. Some of the soldiery were British, some were Indian, but they were all wearing uniforms of bright blue and silver, but looked uncomfortable and self-conscious in them: more like dressed-up apes than soldiers. This, I presumed, was Maupertuis's army.
Around the edges of this ragtag invasion force, groups of Indian men of the type known as fakirs were sitting in groups around fires, staring vacantly into space. They were singing.
'I-ay, I-ay,' their voices echoed through the shadows, 'naghaa, naghaighai!
Shoggog fathaghn! I-ay, I-ay tsa toggua thola-ya! Thola-ya fathaghn! I-ay Azathoth!'
The chant soared through the vacant space, filling