Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [71]
"Up here!" yelled Ace, and she started to push the Doctor and the Phazels in their heavy, sodden clothes up the steps towards the trapdoor.
"Reogus!" shouted Chesperl from halfway up, as he scooped up a rock. He hurled it at Vael, who ducked instinctively from practised experience. Reogus cursed and ran up the steps for cover.
"I want him!" shouted Vael.
A scorpion whip cracked through the air and coiled round Reogus's ankle as he reached the top. He stumbled back, striking his head against the edge of the trap, and fell the length of the ladder.
His massive frame lay face down in the mud.
Chesperl cried out and ran back down.
In the street, the advancing guards froze in their tracks and were silent. Vael leaned over the balcony in apparent desperate concern. Like terrified kids, thought Ace, when a game gets murderously out of control. Behind her, the other Phazels waited. The Doctor stood beside her, watching intently.
Reogus's hand moved for a second and then was still. Chesperl fell forward with a shriek.
One of the guards, a massively built creature, stood shaking and bewildered as its fellows backed away from it.
Then it simply dissolved into thin air like candle smoke and ceased to exist.
The other creatures clutched their claws to their insect heads and let up a chorus of raucous chittering. Vael yelled after them as they fled away up the street.
The horror struck at Ace. "What's happening?" she whispered.
"I said it was too soon, much too soon," muttered the Doctor and then he tensed. His voice suddenly took on the old authoritarian tone that she had longed for. He looked down at Chesperl, weeping over her dead lover. "Destroy the present and the future ceases to exist," he said.
He stalked down the steps. "Vael Voryunsti!" he called. His slight form, dripping hair matted down, clothes wringing wet, was suddenly a focus of power. An opposition to all the nothingness, the miehrrvre of this place, a world apparently dead before it had even lived.
"Take a message to your masters. Tell them that Wilby is here. Tell them that Wilby challenges them for control of the City! And inform them that I am Wilby!"
Vael sneered and didn't wait to hear any more. He turned and vanished from the balcony. The other Phazels were descending the steps to gather around the body of Reogus.
Ace didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Doctor Wilby? she asked incredulously.
The Doctor looked sternly at her and snapped back, "Will be the Doctor!"
19: Superstrings
Vael ran until his body ached. Mud splashed up his stolen moleskin trousers. He was driven by terror. He had to be the first to reach the Tower.
The Processes could draw on a bottomless pit of rage, a black lake of hatred and undernourished greed that drove them. Only Vael understood that. Only he had the wit to feed them just enough morsels and hold a final cataclysm at bay. He had saved the Phazels' lives more times than they'd ever know — and for all that he received only curses and ingratitude. But he could only imagine the revenge the Processes would wreak on the mutinous guards. The monsters followed their own instincts, fighting between themselves as readily as they might turn on their slaves.
The death of Reogus Teleem only emphasized the dilemma. Since the Beginning in the first Phase of the City, he, Vael Voryunsti Sheverell, had walked free. He need only jump a silver stream to see five young Phazels grown old in the enslavement of the Processes. But a doom hung over him too. In the Tower, he had seen his own future: a comatose weakling wound in a cocoon as a surety of his cooperation.
Counting Captain Pekkary, there had been five Phazel slaves. He had walked free. Yet there were seven insect-head guards, counting their Captain, snatched from the third and oldest Phase of the City.
So there was no hope at all. Not for any