Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [42]
Sesehaten shook his head.
78
Ace stepped down, lit up a torch. ‘Come on,’ she said, and ‘What the hell was that?’
Sesehaten said, ‘What was what?’
‘Didn’t I – didn’t we –’
Sesehaten shook his head.
Ace stepped down, lit up a torch. ‘Come on,’ she said, and ‘What the hell was that?’
Sesehaten said, ‘What was what?’
‘Didn’t I – didn’t we –’ Ace spun, the torchlight waving over the ground.
‘You didn’t notice anything weird just then?’
‘Nothing,’ whispered Sesehaten, alarmed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Let’s find out.’
She led him down the rough path into the valley. There was the water hole, dried up now. Good. Armed with only her torch and the khopesh, she wasn’t in the mood for wild animals.
No sign of the Ants. Damn. Where were they? Had they left any tracks?
Slow down, slow down. The problem with the easy way out is that it’s been mined.
Her hackles were standing up, but it was more than just grunt caution.
There was some sort of distortion here, the sort that only someone who’s crossed the time field dozens of times can sense. Like a sphere talking to a circle, she thought crazily, I’ve got perspective.
They were walking up the ridge she had rolled down, all those months ago.
She’d been over the place with a fine-toothed comb, looking for clues. How could she have missed something?
There was a popping sound in the air, just ahead, as though something were frying.
Sesehaten grabbed her hand and pulled her backwards.
She dropped the torch, yelling. The red flames went out as the torch rolled in the sand. She struggled with Sesehaten, who was still grabbing at her, trying to drag her away from the sound.
BANG! Pop! Splitch! BANG!
Ace ripped herself free of the scribe’s hands and leapt up the ridge. The air was distorting, shafts of intolerable light exploding out of a point perhaps five feet above the sand, Coming out of nowhere as the popcorn noise intensified and the burring in her brain made her stomach twist and her hands ache.
Cornwall, she’d felt this before in Cornwall, when the sky had torn like paper, and she’d felt it on the organic ship, lying on a floor made of flesh while Benny tried to drag her into a rip in space-time.
With a silent explosion the rift opened above her.
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Wind screamed into the hole in reality, whipping dust over her crouching form. She couldn’t help looking into the hole, like when there was an eclipse when she was a little girl and they told you not to look at it in case you went blind and she spent the whole day staring at her shoes in case she saw the eclipse and her head just couldn’t get itself around what she was seeing inside the hole!
She was being dragged across the sand, lifted into the air. Sucked in, she thought dizzily.
Sesehaten caught her ankle and pulled hard. Somehow she struck the khopesh into the hard ground, like an anchor.
The rift imploded, and they both dropped to the ground, dust and tiny stones falling onto them in a layer. They lay there, winded and dazed.
Then Ace hauled herself to her feet and ripped the sword out of the ground.
‘You son of a bitch!’ she screamed at Sesehaten. ‘You knew! You knew all the time!’
He scrambled backwards across the sand, out of range of her rage, convinced she could see him in the pitch blackness.
‘You knew how I got here! You knew about the rift! You bastard, you knew the whole time! Why didn’t you tell me, you – Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Tepy!’ he screamed.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she breathed, and suddenly she was on the other side of him, and he couldn’t see which way to run. ‘If you’re working for the people who killed the Doctor, I’ll gut you. I swear I’ll slice you up. Come here.’
‘Tepy,’ said another voice.
They both looked up.
Torches, a dozen torches, flickering in a dozen hands. Red light reflecting from shaved heads. White robes. Eyes watching.
What Ace wanted to do was come at them with the khopesh and wreak havoc. Vengeance for seven months in hell.
Instead, she said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Who are you?’
‘The gods are banished,’ gasped Sesehaten from the dirt. ‘Banished