Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [57]
‘Craig a duir,’ he muttered, and felt embarrassed at how half-hearted he sounded.
‘You’ve come to kill me?’
An echo, a whisper.
Wayun felt it more than he heard it, like it was a shiver in his blood, a coldness of the bones.
He squeezed the bone knife in his fist for reassurance, for guidance. ‘You’re a monster,’ he hissed, addressing the dark figure, whose head was still indistinguishable. ‘You’ve gone too far.’ He sounded like a teacher admonishing a naughty child and the ludicrousness of the idea robbed him of more of his dwindling purpose.
The Krallik was laughing. A distant, off-kilter laugh as if the Krallik were not here at all, as if he were removed from this time, this place.
‘This is war,’ the hushed echo came again. ‘Nothing can go too far. War is kill. Blood dribbling from the mouth of the victor as he tears the throat in his hands. It is dismemberment, it is total denigration of foe. It is to convert warm flesh to cold.
To revel in fear. Instil it in all. Fear is control. Both sides must fear. Fear the Krallik.’
The words were barely comprehensible to Wayun, and he must dismiss them if he was to do what he had come to do. He had to fill his mind with the one thing that mattered.
‘You killed my brother!’ The words met no reply, as if the Krallik were thinking about them, or maybe he had gone? Had he ever been here? The shape was there, although the head had not moved since it had initially lifted in response to Wayun’s presence.
‘There was no need!’ He was shouting now, and the thought that the guerrillas below might hear him and come up to stop him made him lower his voice. But then they knew what he was doing anyway, and none of them had made any attempt to follow him. Why? Because they were so afraid of the Krallik – or because they wanted Wayun to do it? In a more controlled voice, he continued: ‘There was no need to kill my brother. He revered everything you stand for. He believed in our independence as much as you.’
A pause, then a shudder of words, sometimes faint, sometimes strong. ‘There was every need. He questioned an order.’ Now there was another laugh, more of a crackle as of a bonfire devouring twigs, and with a jolt Wayun realized he could see the Krallik’s eyes dimly in the semi-darkness. Pale bleached eyes, holding a thousand-yard stare that did not blink. Empty, empty eyes. The laugh was suddenly unnaturally loud and then cut off, and the hiss was back.
‘An order? Discipline in war.’ The figure was moving. It was beginning to rock gently, then more urgently, the head twisting from side to side as if succumbing to some meditative silent chant. ‘Rules. Morality. Sickness. How can there be rationality in obscenity? Obscene. Carnage. Obscene!’
This was an open display of madness, and Wayun needed no further prompting to carry out his purpose. He was moving forward automatically, raising the knife, hardly even thinking what he was doing any more, only that he had to stem the flow of insanity, of wrongness.
The body of the Krallik continued to rock in the darkness and as Wayun reached for it, the face looked up into his, and then he could see it all.
And the Krallik was still repeating:
‘Obscene. Obscene.’
Obscene.
Chapter Nine
The headhunter was Julius.
The museum curator had returned then, no longer a keeper of the past, but a living embodiment of it. He still wore the fierce body mesh and mask, one of the human jawbone necklaces was still around his neck, and a stone axe was in his hand. All relics from his previous vocation, now called into use in his new role.
Father Pieter could not see Julius’s face through the mask, only the eyes, but he knew it to be his friend. Strangely, he felt almost calm.
‘Have you come to kill me, old friend?’ he asked, and his voice too was without fear, resigned, weary.
Instead of replying, the headhunter lifted something for the missionary to see. A lump of purple fungus, the edible growth that had become so popular as a delicacy