• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

She struggled on through the mud, reaching for the Gate and the gap. The doors slammed in her face again.

She grasped at the great handle on the Gate and clung to it, carried forward with the advancing wall.

There were ornate grilles in the doors and wall. Metal gratings decorated with beautiful carved spikes. Figures moved behind them. Heads clustered at the openings to stare out at her. There was laughter.

The wall rose up and up until it was lost in the heavy clouds. Carrion birds nested on its ramparts. A cold wind had started to blow from the past.

The Pythia beat her hand against the Gate, but it stayed firmly shut. She, most adept of the Wise, who once held the key to all the sights of the Future, was denied entry.

She knew the voices that laughed. Rassilon and his ignoble confederates had barred the doors against her.

She opened her eyes and stared down from her basket at the sisters who were in attendance below. They took it in turns to sit and watch her. Her servant, Handstrong, never left his place at the cavern mouth.

Let them wait. Fifteen days now since she had spoken a single word. And she had stayed locked in her cage above the crevasse all that time. Private audiences and public levees had to be cancelled. Anmers-Tonanstide, the Festival of the Timewright, went unblessed. The sisters daily turned a crowd of petitioners away from the Temple gates.

She had always travelled in the City in her State palanquin, ready to meet the people in the streets. Each morning she had walked in the herbal knot gardens of the Temple. These rituals meant nothing to her now.

Nor did she watch the City from her screen. It showed only a flickering pattern of static, a reflection of the emptiness in her head and heart.

Yet she ate well enough, existing on the diet of fish tongues that was the staple food of a Pythian seer.

The sisters read any news aloud to her each day, unsure if she could hear or comprehend their words. Her withdrawal from public life was causing anxiety and speculation throughout Gallifrey. The mutual pool of people's thought, impossible to ignore, chittered with unquiet rumour. It was reported that she had lost her powers. Speculation became fact in the media, which vomited out quarter-truths and exaggerations and then fed greedily on its own spew. The neo-technologists were already making political capital out of it. There were rumours that Rassilon would be called upon to challenge her authority. Worried communiqués arrived from governors on the farthest reaches of the Empire. The suet workers threatened to strike. At noon on the sixty-third day of spring, it snowed.

The Court of Principals patched over the day-to-day running of the state, but the Pythia was Gallifrey and its Empire, both constitutionally, by divination and by the investiture of the Gods. The cracks started to widen.

Rassilon remained silent, apparently content to observe where the situation would lead without further interference.

And the Pythia waited too. Or so it seemed. Only her hands moved, picking over the jewels and talismans on her smoky robes.

All would be well when the Scaphe returned.

In her mind she searched for Vael. Turning and returning every memory, searching for a chink in the wall that blocked her sight.

She was locked in with herself. In her thoughts there was no passage of Time.

The Scaphe was due at any moment now. Ninety minutes would soon be over. Time dragged slowly sometimes. But when the Scaphe returned, she would put things to rights.

Vael was there somewhere. Her pawn. She had only to find him in her thoughts. But there was a figure in the shadows who had mocked at her powers. She thought it was Rassilon. He pried among her thoughts like a thief sifting through stolen booty. She would drive him away out of the shadows, and out of her head.

She thought of torches and stars, but the veil of shadows grew denser until the darkness was complete.

The night in her head was cut by a venomous hiss. The voice of the Amphisbaena: the terrible