Doctor Who_ St. Anthony's Fire - Mark Gatiss [4]
He felt his shoulders sink and rested his head miserably against the studded fabric of the chair.
The room was in darkness now. He stood up to reach for the gas jet but then checked himself, letting his arm fall to his side. All supplies had been requisitioned for the barricades. On his orders. Couldn’t he even remember that?
He ran a claw over his wrinkled crest, feeling tiny beads of white sweat springing from his pores. Glancing out of the window at the vista below, the old man sobbed.
Porsim. The most beautiful city in the world. The place where he had been hatched, sired seven litters and risen from Local Menx to City Menx to the undreamt of heights of Pelaradator within twenty years.
In the days before his rank had excluded the possibility, he had loved to walk through the teeming streets, admiring the sandstone palaces and ancient wooden crescents. It had always been a wonderful, faintly magical place. Even the war had scarcely touched it and that had been dragging on – God – longer than he could remember. Fourteen? Fifteen years?
As Pelaradator, he was justifiably proud of his part in the peace negotiations: had been confident enough to boast that the conflict was almost over. In the back of his mind he had nursed a secret dread that everything was going too smoothly, that a price would have to be paid sooner or later. He could never have imagined it would be like this.
The Pelaradator’s rheumy eyes looked out on a shattered, devastated city. The proud palaces and eight‐hundred‐year‐old streets lay flattened as though by the fists of vengeful gods, crushed by forces he couldn’t begin to comprehend. Fires bloomed everywhere and a vast pall of sickly black smoke hung over Porsim like the night – dark folds of the Reaper’s cloak.
Perhaps it was true. Perhaps they had come back.
* * *
The infirmary was long and low. Its walls, built from concave wooden struts, groaned under the pressure of the wet mud behind them.
Huge, looming shadows danced about, thrown by the flaring of two dozen gas jets fixed precariously to the ceiling. The distant corners faded into stygian darkness, a suggestion of tattered uniform or the glint of a fevered eye the only indication that they were occupied.
Rising like an altar from a mass of bunks, mattresses and stretchers was a cast‐iron operating table, its pocked surface mottled with dark stains. Injured and dying soldiers filled the room, their agonized moans booming around the cramped quarters, limbs outstretched in hopeless appeal.
Maconsa, standing at the operating table as though presiding over an infernal last supper, stepped back and hurled a scalpel into a porcelain dish by his side.
He was an elderly, well‐built man, his lined face and crest grizzled with spiny white hair. White‐coated orderlies shrank back as Maconsa gave a low grumble of exasperation. He pointed a claw at the scarcely breathing form stretched on the table before him.
‘No, son, you’re not getting out of it that easily.’
The soldier’s chest already had a brace fixed into it, the spliced rib‐cage cranked partially open. Maconsa examined the soldier’s pulse and dilated pupils. The lad was in a bad way, his breathing shallow.
A large brass machine by the side of the table was fixed to his throat via three heavy cords, curled into liver‐coloured pigtails through much use. A drum of paper spun slowly round, the soldier’s heart‐rate registering as a thin, spiky line of black ink. All at once, the line sank to an ominous horizontal.
Maconsa cursed as the soldier began to thrash about on the table, his muscular arms scrabbling at the iron surface. Spasms wracked his open chest and his legs kicked out as panicking orderlies clustered around their chief.
‘Damn!’ barked Maconsa. ‘He’s arresting.’
The old man cranked