Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [38]
A man with a jackal’s head was adjusting a set of golden scales, while another man with an ibis head wrote something on a piece of papyrus, the way she’d seen Sesehaten do it, moistened brush flicking across the paper.
There was something crouching under the scales, something she didn’t want to look at yet.
‘This,’ said Tepy, ‘This is the weird bit. This is the bit where it starts getting really weird. Not just normally weird, mind you.’
She knocked over her bowl of beer.
‘Next,’ said Bird-brain, who was suddenly wearing a suit and tie. His curved beak peaked out from under a bowler hat too large for his tiny head.
Dog-breath left the hall, stepping past Ace and the White Lady where they stood to one side. As he passed he momentarily became dizzyingly tall, as huge and fundemental as the moon. Names were banging away in Ace’s mind: Anubis, Osiris, Horus, Isis. She wished she could remember which was which.
But now each of the forty-two jurors was busily scribbling a label in the air beside them, like subtitles. They weren’t human gods any more, even though their pale, lean faces looked human, capped and collared in red and gold and heliotrope. Procrastination, one was labelled, sitting next to Predestination, who was chittering at Anachronism and Lull. Time, they were gods of time.
Ace risked a glance at the White Lady who had dragged her here. ‘Which one are you, then?’ she asked. But the Lady put an alabaster finger to her non-existent lips.
When the jackal-faced man came back he was accompanied by two ant-headed soldiers, marching at double speed, hands firmly gripping the arms of a captive being brought for judgment. The jurors hooted and shrieked as he was dragged in, the hall filling with their cries. The captive’s hands were manacled before him, and he wore a beige coverall, and you know perfectly well who he is.
‘Your friend?’ said Sesehaten. ‘The Sinu?’
‘Yeah,’ said Tepy.
∗ ∗ ∗
72
The Ant-soldiers pushed the Doctor to his knees before the scales. The jurors sat up, waving their feather-knives and cooing at the sight of the purple damage to his face. Someone had embroidered a convoluted rose over the left breast of his coverall, where a pocket might have gone.
A great silence rolled through the hall. The jurors leaned forward, listening intently. Dog-breath stood by the scales, arms folded, looking utterly grim.
The silence continued.
‘Well, come on, then!’ said Bird-brain from underneath his bowler.
‘Yes!’ cat-called one of the jurors. ‘Let’s have the negative confession!’
‘Have you robbed?’ squeaked Twilight, waving his feather-knife in an excited circle.
‘Have you destroyed supplies of food?’ Blue Moon insisted.
‘Have you stolen sacrificial offerings?’
‘Have you told lies?’
‘Blown up any planets lately?’
‘Tell us!’
‘Have you terrified people?’ Ennui wanted to know.
‘Have you been quarrelsome?’ shrieked Second Last.
‘You must protest your innocence!’ Dog-breath told his prisoner, tiny at the feet of the god of Death. But the Doctor just looked him in the eye and kept silent.
‘Tell us! Tell us!’ Haste and Quarter To started a pitched battle with their feather-knives.
‘Who cares for you?’ Ace heard herself shout. ‘You’re nothing but a pack of pen-pushers! We’ve faced worse than you!’
The Doctor was smiling, just the corner of his mouth turned up. In contempt of the court.
The bird-headed god glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Isn’t there anything you’d like to tell us?’
‘He died,’ said Ace.
Silence fell like a stone. The gods leant forward, listening.
It came out reflexively from her throat. ‘He died.’
‘We know that-bit,’ said Bird-brain. ‘Everyone here is dead. You’re dead, he’s dead. This –’ and he gestured with his brush ‘– is an ex-Time Lord. What’s your point?’
‘He left me,’ she said in a tiny voice. ‘He didn’t come back for me.’
The jackal-headed man stepped forward, carrying something Ace hadn’t been able to make out clearly before. Now she saw it was a pair of hearts.
In one of the scale’s pans an ostrich feather was sitting, heavy, dragging the balance