Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [72]
‘We have a message for you,’ one of them had said, caught awkwardly between curtsying and bowing. That had been a turn-up.
‘Her Highness Princess Sensimi asked us to give you this,’ the other one had said, pressing something into Trix’s hand. ‘She says to follow her and. . . Fitz?
to the Palace and to present this. They’ll let you in.’ And with a bit more bowing and scraping, as if Trix had been royalty herself, the two women had scuttled off.
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Trix had opened her hand to discover a silvery credit-card sized thing with a holographic picture floating just above the surface. She’d had to find a streetlight to read it by – and had been rather staggered to find that it was some sort of ID card, for, sure enough, Princess Sensimi Ruth Auburon – complete with picture.
A picture of Farine.
Trix knew there had been something wrong with Farine: something about how she dressed, how she acted. Amateurs! she thought. Her body language had been all wrong. It was obvious: ‘Farine’, despite trying to look like a normal, everyday person, had carried herself with an hauteur, an attitude, that suggested she thought she was better than everyone else.
But this just made it all the more puzzling: why did this Princess Sensimi want Fitz? Why was she taking him to the Palace? And, considering how snotty Sensimi had been, did Trix really want to be there too?
Oh. . . hang on, thought Trix, watching a couple of men trying to rope a particularly skittish horse. Palace. Palace equals money. Equals gorgeous things. Equals –
Someone jostled her from behind and she turned sharply – more sharply than she’d intended: the youth that had elbowed her jumped back in alarm for some reason and apologised. Trix just stared at him, memories of the three men that had attacked her still fresh in her head. For a moment, she wondered quite what had happened back there.
As the man sloped away, casting shifty looks at her, she turned back to the Palace. She’d been caught in the torrential downpour, and could almost feel the steam rising from her body, like the horses cantering around the arena.
Never a great fan of horses – they’d scared her as a child, and still managed to make her nervous as an adult – she found herself strangely drawn to them, and spent a few moments watching them pacing backwards and forwards as their riders set up some sort of jousting match.
To her side, she caught snatches of a worried conversation about a brush fire, out beyond the city, but the general consensus seemed to be that the rain would have put it out by now. She looked up into the sky – a few shreds of cloud obscured the stars, and Trix felt a quite explicable longing to be out there, back in the TARDIS, away from this place. She shook her head and took a breath. She needed to find the Doctor and Fitz.
Farine hated the cellar – which was hardly surprising, considering what Princess Sensimi kept in there, and considering what she expected Farine to do. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the princess had broken the main light switch so that Farine had to make her way down the steps in the darkness until she found the second one. The weight of the pan she carried was making her 131
arm ache, and so she was relieved to be able to set it down for a few moments while she felt along the wall for the switch. A rustling from the far end of the cellar made her stomach tighten, and she had to remind herself that the thing down there was safe behind bars.
The noise that suddenly issued from the old barrel storage room, just next door, was another thing entirely. Building up from almost nothing, it sounded like a whole herd of elephines, signalling to each other across the southern plains. As the noise rose to a crescendo, Farine abandoned her pan, abandoned her search for the light switch, and fled back up the stairs.
A few moments later, the door to the barrel room opened cautiously, and the Doctor’s head poked through.
‘The old girl must have a thing for cellars,’ he said to Calamee. ‘I think her melodrama circuit’s turned up too high,