Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [23]
Then her spine was alight again, tongues of ozone-flavoured heat forming tight spirals around her backbone.
Every inch of her skin was damp with sweat, and every ounce of flesh could taste the rotting dampness of wooden walls that had been christened with splashes of blood and spit and piss.
There was a woman chained to a shelf, five feet above the floor. Her eyes met Duquesne’s. They were white and empty.
Medieval magicians had starved themselves, flogged themselves, exposed themselves to alchemical flames, thinking that it would purge their bodies and purify their souls.
The pain and the hunger made them more receptive, more sensitive to the ebb and flow of the cosmos. Or so they’d said.
There were perhaps eighty blacks in the cargo hold.
The pain and the hunger. Scent of delirium.
They could feel it. Just as Duquesne could feel it, corkscrewing up her back.
She had once met the priests of the Temple of Hermes, who claimed descendance from the mythical King Priam and believed that their family line had been instigated by the gods themselves...
... she had felt it then.
She had seen the High Lama of the holy ghanta in the foothills of the Kunlun Mountains, who could lift objects with the merest flicker of his will, a storm of stones levitating around his body like the seven planets around the sun...
... she had felt it then.
She had heard the stories of Hsen Ling, the ‘mad Chinaman of Vienna’, who told of his abduction by the trickster-god No Cha, and how he beat the deity in an unearthly game of cards...
... and she had felt it then. Each of them had been a caillou, the word her employers in the Shadow Directory used to describe an individual around whom the world itself would shift and change, one so out-of-tune with the natural order of the universe that even history would warp and buckle around him. Caillou. Maker of distractions. Changer of rules. A pebble dropped into a pond.
‘Can you feel him?’ Duquesne asked the woman-in-chains, suddenly realizing that she was speaking in French, and wondering if the woman even understood English.
Dead eyes looked back at her.
‘ Caillou,’ Duquesne said. ‘He has arrived.’
And the fire burned her spine like a fuse, reaching her neck, igniting every neural pathway, heightening every sense.
And the smell was inhuman. And she passed out.
‘Attempted murder!’
They were stomping through the wooded areas that bordered the town, those small expanses of green that marked the boundaries of the civilized world, where the planners and the architects lurked in the shadows and waited for their moment to come. It had taken them ten wet minutes to get this far. The Doctor pushed his way through the undergrowth like a force of nature, faster than his little legs should have been able to carry him, Roz maliciously trampling on the nettles as she kept up the pace.
‘Attempted murder, my arse. You were supposed to stop me.’
‘And what if I hadn’t been there?’
‘You’re always there!’
‘You couldn’t be sure of that.’
‘Yes I could. Because you had to protect the time-line. All right, so I got the wrong man.’ Not the first time I would have shot an innocent bystander, she thought, but she didn’t say it.
‘There’s no such thing as the right man. Not when you’re pointing a loaded weapon at him. Or doesn’t thirtieth-century legal procedure cover these little details?’
She was about to snarl her reply when the obvious question finally hit her. ‘Wait a minute. If you hadn’t stopped me, I wouldn’t have done any damage –’
‘No damage?’
‘No damage to the time-line. Samuel Lincoln isn’t important.’
The Doctor didn’t say a word, didn’t even scowl.
‘So, if I wouldn’t have changed anything if I’d hit him, how come you turned up in time to stop me? What I’m saying is –’
‘Is irrelevant.’ He batted at an overhanging branch with his walking-cane, as much to punish the cane as to push back the branch, perhaps irritated that it couldn’t keep the rain off