Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [11]
At its heart stood the symbol of its birth. Carved from a fallen bough of Yggdras, the world tree, ringed by a single bench with room enough to seat one hundred and fifty knights. Arthur’s table, at which all men were honoured and equal. Where even the king had no throne.
Still standing after an age, a deep crack ran from the table’s heart to its edge, where in later days, the single bench had been cut away to allow for the inclusion of a throne carved from a single block of obsidian. Rank after rank of S’rax battle standards hung from the vaulted ceiling, a tapestry of conquest in azure and scarlet. On the marble wall behind the throne, a map of the heavens was picked out in sapphires and platinum wire.
In this chamber, the council of state assembled at places once reserved fror Arthur’s knights. Men and women who had grown old in the service of Deathless Morgaine, as had their forebears, generation after generation for twelve centuries. An alliance of thirteen worlds without end.
A sudden gust of wind stirred the banners. From a region unknown echoed a distant growl that was not thunder.
To the castle’s leeward side, through the rent torn like a black banner in the clouds, lay the dark world, beset by storm, lit only by the play of the lightning below.
Lights burned at every window of the High Tagel like the torches of the holy vigil. The castle was awake. It awaited news from the one chamber where no light dared flicker.
Darkness burned in the lowest turret under the Tagel and above the world. Every shadow was summoned and clustered there. Forced and refined by ancient sorcery into a pool of pitch so black that it reflected other worlds for its mistress.
‘How long? How long have you kept me in waiting? But I have never relented in my watch. And at last we shall have one final meeting!’
A gateway that overlooked the curving world slid open.
Out of the under vaults of the Tagel swooped a flying machine. It cut an uncertain path, squealing at the inky storm into which it had launched. Finally its Flightsman kerbed the ornithopter’s terror and forced its unruly wings to spread with a steady beat.
On a mission of the utmost urgency, the machine sped away across the night.
The Doctor sifted through the heap of books that lay tumbled on the floor of the TARDIS’s library. The longevity of the pile was uncertain. The TARDIS had lurched so often lately that it had hardly seemed worth the effort to replace the books on the shelves, especially when another trip to the floor might be imminent at any time.
With a cry of triumph, he extracted a copy of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur from the heap. He blew off the dust. It was Volume 1: Books I to IX. Exactly what he wanted. He pocketed the book and headed back to the console room.
As Ace worked amid the debris of the TARDIS
laboratory, she heard the note of the ship’s engines alter.
The Doctor must have finally decided where to take them.
Now that they were in real flight again, she didn’t have long if the Doctor wasn’t to catch her. But he did need someone to watch his back.
She prayed that the TARDIS wouldn’t give another of its habitual lurches. This was the delicate bit. Using only her fingertips, she began to ease the tops on to the canisters that contained her latest and most wickedly-volatile-so-far batch of nitro-nine.
Lightning flickered through the windows of the Gating Pard, the furthermost inn of Gore. But the thunder never came. The storm was elsewhere.
‘Landlord!’ yelled Sir Dornard de Breunis. ‘Where’s the Prince’s ale?’
Mordred stared sullenly into his empty tankard. ‘You have no need to shout,’ he said. ‘You remind me of my mother.’
He always wore a plain jesseraunte on these trips, because even the most daffish peasant would recognize the Prince’s armour. But what did that matter now Dornard had given his rank away?
He had spent most of the night drinking and he was still not drunk. But it was better to be in an