Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [14]
‘Ah...’ The car slowed to negotiate the gap left by a fallen beech which covered most of the road. The topmost twigs scraped along the car’s flank. ‘Of course the dig is just a hobby.’
‘Of course,’ said the Doctor.
‘It was a battlefield judging from the patterns of arrowheads and the disposition of the bones. From about the eighth century... ’
Cerberus, who was slobbering on to an elegant handkerchief that the Doctor had placed apprehensively over his trews, pricked up his ears, scrambled to his not inconsiderable full height on the back seat and barked.
The other passengers were practically deafened.
‘Be quiet, you wretched hound!’ Peter took a blind swipe behind at his dog and narrowly missed the Doctor.
Cerberus clambered over the Doctor and planted his nose against the open gap at the top of the window. He gave a muted whine which mingled with the distant scream of air as something hurtled to earth nearby.
‘I hate that sound,’ complained Peter. ‘Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking it might be... ’
‘The start of something terrible,’ interjected the Doctor as he struggled out from under the dog.
There was the dull roar of an impact explosion. Ace flinched in the front seat. ‘What was it?’
‘The military use the area as a firing range. I’ve never understood why.’
The Doctor peered out of the mud-flecked window. He pointed his tracker device in the direction of the explosion.
It registered a high burst of chronon particle activity; not the sort of thing normally associated with clodhopping military manoeuvres.
‘Blowing the occasional chunk out of the ground keeps them amused,’ he said to reassure the others.
Ace twisted round in her seat to look at him. ‘It didn’t sound like a shell.’
‘No.’ He gesticulated vaguely with the tracker. The signal was coming from over the next ridge. He wondered who or what else it might have attracted.
The knight’s black jesseraunte lifted him slowly out of the smoking impact crater.
The leap had been simple. It was the armoured suit that leapt, not the leaper. And it was the suit that carried him high into the upper atmosphere, leaving the bright world behind; up above the clouds, far beyond the hovering, turretted Tagels into the star-sprinkled sky; along the silver arc between realities.
And as the muscled joints of the suit began to wail in protest, the forces of gravity tore against the vaulting escape velocity.
Then in a glorious moment of planned inspiration, the suit slipped between the two grappling energies, sideways into another existence.
The leaper laughed at its simplicity.
The shade of the world shifted from darker to paler blue. The cloud patterns swirled into new forms. The leaper began to fall headlong, the ablative shield of his armour seething white-hot in the atmosphere. Back to the world; not his world, but his world changed. To Avallion, the Isle of Apples, the ordained battlefield.
The air had screeched around the jesseraunte. The velocity energy of the impact exploded out in a roaring plume of flame.
Runes and figures danced on the inside of the black knight’s visor as the silver filigree of his armour surveyed the new world he had just entered.
Rumours had been rife in the corridors of the High Tagel: a summons from the older time. And he must seek out the voice that called across the spaces between worlds.
He was the knight errant and this was the quest. He had his own past to serve as well. The burden that his parage bore down the centuries passed from vat-father to vat-father until its fulfilling rested with him. But he must be swift. His quest wore no favours. He would be missed by now. Errant absence without leave. But family bonds were ever knotted tighter than oaths of knightly allegiance.
Others would soon follow to answer the summons. And they would welcome his presence as an excuse to be rid of him for ever.
The Range Rover had pulled out of the storm-battered woods and was driving across a high open heathland area, bright with purple heather. As they topped the ridge, the Doctor and Ace saw the lake spread below them