Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [56]
And on its great shadowy head, there clustered a crown of curling horns.
‘What did the Doctor say?’ said Shou Yuing. ‘ "At the first sign of something strange..."’
Everything in the past two days had been strange; so strange and so fast that she hadn’t had time to draw breath and think. ‘Strange’ had suddenly become ‘normal’; so how would she know?
Outside the deserted hotel, the daylight flickered. Above the empty bar, a hand-scrawled sign was pinned. Under New Management.
Ace pulled open an ammunition case and held up one of the silver bullets. ‘Looks like Colonel Blimp has a fancy taste in hardware.’
‘You don’t like him much, do you?’ said Shou Yuing.
Ace rested the bullet upright on the bar. ‘I like being treated as a person. Not a "latest one". Anyway, I don’t trust him to guard the Professor’s back. That’s my job.’
She flipped the Doctor’s hat up her arm and on to her head the way she’d seen him do it. ‘And if he really is Merlin. You know what that makes me, don’t you?’
Shou Yuing giggled and shook her head.
Ace lifted Excalibur and held it out like a wand. ‘The sorcerer’s apprentice,’ she cried.
Inside and outside, the light dimmed noticeably.
‘Do you think that counts as strange?’ said Shou Yuing.
Her voice had taken on a fresh tremor of fear.
Ace fumbled in her jacket pockets for the chalk.
They dragged the furniture to one side and pulled up the carpet. Behind the bar, Shou Yuing found a length of string. They attached it to the chalk.
It was getting too dark to see. The sky had turned to a threatening bronze that seemed to suck away the light.
Shou Yuing held one end of the string to the stone floor, while Ace circled her slowly with the chalk. It took three attempts to produce something approaching a perfect continuous circle.
Standing together in the centre, with the sword and scabbard between them, they watched the darkened room beyond the circle.
‘Do you think we should sprinkle holy water or something?’ said Ace.
‘I don’t know,’ Shou Yuing said. ‘I’m Chinese. It’s not my mythology.’
Ace lit a candle she had found. She sorted through the dozen packets of crisps she had lifted from the bar as supplies. ‘What flavour do you want?’ she asked.
‘But it’s the middle of the afternoon, isn’t it?’
Ace swallowed hard. ‘It was the last time I looked.’
‘Then why is it so dark?’
It was a bizarre sensation, decided the Brigadier. On the few occasions when he had driven Bessie, the car’s superdrive facility had always been removed by the Doctor, forcing him to stay within the speed limit. Now, as the Doctor opened the superdrive up, the countryside became a blurr that flowed smoothly past with unreal velocity.
The speedometer indicated only thirty mph, which was ludicrous until the Brigadier realized that the needle was going round for the second time.
He glanced behind them and saw a sudden darkness growing like a thundercloud above the land towards Carbury. Ahead there was black smoke rising.
As they topped Bedivere’s ridge, Bessie’s wheels locked and she skidded to an abrupt halt. The Brigadier threw out a hand to steady himself, but the veteran roadster’s drive system neatly absorbed all inertia. Its passengers, one of whom expected to be hurled through the windscreen and halfway along the bonnet, were left safely ensconced in their seats.
The Doctor stood up and stared over the top of the windscreen.
‘I think we’re too late, Brigadier,’ he said grimly. He climbed out of the car and gazed down the hill in fascination.
There was battle by the lake. Explosions and gunfire through the drifting smoke. He heard men shouting, screaming and dying.
The Doctor was already angry with himself. He had felt the strength of Morgaine’s power and knew her forces would not be confined to human soldiers for long. Soon she would summon darker powers. The chalk he had give Ace might be the correct response to any attack that Morgaine unleashed, but it was also exactly what Merlin would have done.
Every way he turned, however much he tried to resist, the answer was always the same.