Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [63]
The strange, flaxen-haired knight gently touched the wound on her arm.
‘My lady?’
‘I told you not. Oh, never mind.’
Shou Yuing squinted into the turmoil of the vortex tunnel.
Its two dimensional surface stretched impossibly into infinity just in front of the fireplace. A wafer-thin illusion that had swallowed the Doctor and Brigadier whole.
‘They’re going to be killed,’ she said to Ace. ‘You saw what the Destroyer could do.’
Ace had been turning over the wreckage of the bar.
‘Morgaine could control the Destroyer. She had it chained up. With silver chains. Get it?’
‘The silver bullets,’ exclaimed Shou Yuing. ‘I thought that was for werewolves.’ She glanced back to the vortex.
Darkness was starting to flicker in its deeper regions. ‘Ace, I think it’s starting to fade.’
‘Got them.’ Ace reached under an overturned armchair and extracted the case of silver bullets.
‘It’s going,’ warned the Chinese girl.
Ace moved back to get a clear run at the vortex.
‘Are you going to throw them through?’ Shou Yuing said.
‘Do me a favour,’ said Ace. She ran like a bowler at the flaring crease in time/space.
‘Geronimo!’ The vortex wrapped around her and closed up like a slammed door.
Shou Yuing stood on her own. She was only a bystander in the game and now the action had moved elsewhere. She wondered if she should wait in case another demon turned up and needed sorting out. Shou Yuing and the Monkey King. She hadn’t stopped to think until now; she wasn’t sure she wanted to think. Monsters and knights and soldiers. Her car was written off and people were dead.
Suddenly she wanted to go home and have a good row with her parents.
A storm of darkness loomed above the priory.
Morgaine watched the Destroyer as it did her work. It struggled against her adjuration, as she knew it would. In the real world, where her power was stronger, the demon would be helpless. In Avallion, every struggle it gave loosened its mask a little more. Its glittering reptile eyes sought a means of release. They never left her as it worked out her orders. The Beast beneath its visage was laughing.
Its human features soured and twisted. Its close curling horns reached outward. It was strong and growing stronger.
The sword Excalibur rested on its point at the centre of the octogrammaton, held in a tapestry of spells that the demon wove around it. The globes of ancient light at its sides flickered once more with energy drawn from another universe.
Almost complete. Then only she, Morgaine, could touch the weapon. And Arthur would be powerless.
The Destroyer, its breath coming in hot hungry gusts, turned towards her. ‘You would do well to release me.
Morgaine.’
‘Release you?’ she said contemptuously.
‘Merlin is mighty and cunning. I cannot destroy him while I am chained.’
‘And let you run havoc? No. I have Excalibur. Merlin cannot touch me ere I am gone from here. See. The gateway is almost complete.’
The Destroyer’s blackened lips twisted into a grin. ‘He comes even as we speak.’
‘How? He cannot come through the vortex...’ Suddenly she knew that the fiend, even bound to her, played with her fate as its toy. ‘You have allowed him access... Why?’
But she knew the answer too well.
‘So that you will be forced to release me.’
And if she lost control over the demon, she would be the first that it carried off. She tested her will against the monster, it was still her slave. Its trickery waxed stronger, but she could turn an advantage from that as well.
In the corner of the derelict hall. the air wavered and opened like a flower of swirling energy. Out of its heart stepped the Doctor and the Brigadier.
‘Morgaine,’ said the Doctor, raising his hat.
The Brigadier instinctively raised his pistol and released a volley of rounds at the looming menace of the Destroyer.
The demon snarled and looked down with irritation at the bulletholes in its suit.
‘Brigadier!’ snapped the Doctor.
Lethbridge-Stewart sniffed dimissively. ‘Nothing ventured. Doctor.’
‘Nothing gained,’ growled the demon. It flung a taloned fist into the air in a gesture