Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [87]
Roz kept her head down. The energy cone from the gun twisted the air molecules above her into peculiar patterns, but missed her entirely and stripped the leather from the seats of the carriage. Roz crashed into her duplicate, who toppled over awkwardly, her gun hand trapped under her body.
‘We’re lousy shots,’ said Roz, grabbing Daniel by the shoulder.
They vanished around the nearest convenient corner.
Behind them, the energy cone of a flenser gun turned the surface of a brick wall to powder.
A shadow fell across Paris Street. A kite flew overhead.
Raphael looked up, wondering who but the crazed Benjamin Franklin would fly a kite in a storm like this, and saw that it had arms and legs. It was making sickly gurgling sounds in the back of its throat.
It was all around him. The madness, the work of the caillou. Rain splashed screaming peasants, and where the water touched them they changed, in ways too subtle even for an agent of the Directory to properly grasp. Baptized in chaos.
‘What did you do?’ Raphael croaked.
‘Do?’ The caillou’s voice was all innocence. ‘I didn’t do anything. I told you, Raphael. I’m not the one you want. I’m not the enemy here.’
Raphael closed his eyes. He tried to remember the training.
He pictured himself, in the days when he still had an identity to call his own, strapped into a chair in a room with leaden walls. Symbols were being flashed in front of his eyes. Codes of resistance. How to overcome a caillou’s influence.
‘You-are- caillou.’
But there was no reply. Around him, the sounds of Woodwicke blurred together and became one long death-rattle. The scalpel shook in his hands.
Raphael opened his eyes. The caillou was gone, of course.
Vanished. The scalpel wasn’t content, though, and it whirled Raphael around, forcing him to focus on the townspeople.
Rioters found their weapons blending into their arms, growing fingers of steel and thick new limbs of wood. Their victims bled onto the pavements, and the blood-stains formed letters that spelled out messages from deceased and forgotten gods. A world of the caillou. A world of the impossible.
Raphael’s scalpel turned him around, faster and faster, trying to guide him towards his first target without knowing what that target should be. So many monsters. Where to begin?
There was a city, buildings carved into gigantic tusks of ivory that sprouted from the ground and formed arches a mile high, great arcs laced with crystalline clouds. The streets were made of cobweb, glittering pathways spun by mechanical spiders, and between them hung enchanted gardens tended by men of stone. Down on the ground walked the skeletons of mammoths, their ribcages stuffed with steam-powered engines, scholars and philosophers riding on their backs.
Chris had seen enough in his travels to know that a great many unlikely things were possible. Aliens could look like pixies, bio-machines could be made to resemble dragons, cities could be built out of sound... but there were things in this place he couldn’t even name, things he had no experience of, that seemed at odds with even the most exotic of alien technologies. Things that were impossible. Yeah. Impossible.
Things even the Doctor couldn’t have shown him.
He was seeing it all in the face of the Carnival Queen.
– Once upon a time, she said, this was your universe. Long before your time, before any time that you could measure. A place of endless miracles, non? No harsh sciences here, no mundane little laws of physics, no guiding principles. There was just possibility. An infinity of possibility. Now. Look.
Chris wasn’t watching the city any more. There was a different world etched into the Carnival Queen’s expression now, a world inhabited by people; people he could recognize as people, not monsters or automatons. The cities were just as large, but there were less of the impossible