Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [149]
The palace isn’t a mere incidental detail. Everyone on the island, once they’d learned of its existence, would somehow realise that all roads led there. In the days (or hours, or weeks?) that followed, the lodges which had been transported to this Kingdom would all find themselves converging on the building. And so, too, would the apes.
Some time after Katya’s arrival, the King of Beasts conducted the ‘ceremony’ described in the Masonic stories. The King was declaring war on the humans, in his own grunting language, letting his followers know that the humans and their protectors would be torn limb from limb. This animal rite was witnessed by none other than Lucien Malpertuis, who acted as a spy for the Maroon-Mason army by concealing himself in the wreckage of a great Venetian cathedral overlooking the King’s square. But no square in Europe could have been so caked with dung, so full of creatures so repulsive, so thick-skinned, so eager to tear into each other’s skins to achieve the approval of their leader. Lucien reported that several apes in robes, tattered and torn pieces of leather which looked as though they’d been flayed from the backs of men, came forward then to ‘anoint’ the King in the blood and dung of his followers. If everything the apes did was a reflection of humanity, then this unpleasant ritual was like nothing so much as a parody of the formal blessings of the Church.
It was only after this that the apes began to pour out of the square, swarming in a horde that numbered hundreds, climbing over each other with razor-sharp nails as they headed through the narrow, disintegrating streets. Lucien mentions their great cry of war of sheer animal malice. They would rend all intruders. They would slay the elemental and his cohorts. Lucien ran ahead of them, in the hope of joining up with the other humans before the wave of flesh and hair could reach them.
At around the same time the Maroon-Mason‐elemental alliance arrived at the ‘courtyard’ of the grand palace, having finally found their way from the forest. Fitz and Anji were there, and when he saw the shape of the palace it’s said that Fitz ‘recognised the place for what it was… as he’d seen this world before’. There was no sign of Katya, or the Doctor, or Juliette: by that point Katya and the Doctor were deep inside the building, while Juliette (who, despite bringing the Doctor to this place, had not been made to feel welcome by Katya) had once again disappeared. Fitz announced that he felt this was a site of great import, and when asked why he simply said it was an ‘elemental kind of feeling’. Most of his new followers nodded sagely. Anji just clacked her tongue.
It was only after this that Lucien arrived, with his Paul Revere-style warning. Within moments the assembled humans, no more than two-dozen in number, could hear the sounds of the ape-horde tearing its way through the city towards them.
Fitz ordered the humans to stand their ground and prepared to fight. Though all of them were dressed in their wedding-clothes, they were at least unmasked and prepared for war. The Maroons had fashioned spears from the raw material of the forest, while several of the Masons and Servicemen carried firearms, though nobody was tactless enough to ask why they’d brought weapons like that to the wedding ceremony. All weapons were now welcome, and all of them were drawn, trained on the streets around the palace as the humans lined themselves up inside the gaping maw of the building’s gateway.
While they waited for the first wave of animals to arrive, none of them could have guessed that help was on its way in three very