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By Root 546 0

TARDIS to the House, and on the warship he’d seen a new way of approaching the problem. If the first chart the Doctor drew was based on Sabbath’s, then his memory must have been truly remarkable, as the detail is astonishing. Precise whorls, referred to as ‘walls of time’ (the tantrists’ ‘horizon’?), sweep across rough representations of the then-known world. In certain areas – primarily London, Hispaniola and the Americas – the contours are so dense that they seem impenetrable, as if those cities were being slowly surrounded by the strange, invisible forces of time. Later charts are variations, the Doctor’s predictions as to how the patterns might move, and alarmingly many of them show London and Paris completely cut off from the rest of the world. ‘Islands of time,’ perhaps.

While Fitz and Juliette reassured each other by firelight in the upstairs room, the Doctor set about his task of navigating a safe path through the storm. The House had already seen him open a way into the world of elementals, though admittedly he’d only succeeded in bringing Fitz and Anji through naked and without possessions (when the Doctor had ‘walked’ to London, he’d done so fully-clothed, which perhaps suggests that he saw his clothing as being as much a part of his identity as his flesh). Now he seemed sure that he could achieve something more ambitious. On the same day that Tula Lui murdered Johnny Lucifer-in‐Britches, the Doctor decided to test his new methodology.

Getting Somewhere, Going Nowhere

It was in July that the House announced its wedding list for the marriage of Juliette and the Doctor. As the thirteen guest-parties at the wedding were all organisations rather than people, it would have seemed churlish to ask them for expensive gifts, and as a result the items on the list had a somewhat fetishistic flavour. They were tokens more than anything else, like ingredients for some unthinkable magic potion, and this suggests a change of emphasis. In the past, the Doctor had only required mechanical parts for his studies. But suddenly there was a markedly ritualistic feel to his requirements. (then again, it’s feasible that he only wanted ‘the egg of a tartan bird, bred by the Lodges of the Highlands’ because he liked the sound of it… it’s even feasible that it may have been Juliette’s request.) At best, some of the items on the list were crossbreeds of alchemical ingredients and scientific components: for example, what’s anyone supposed to make of ‘six glass phials containing liquid mercury, of the type which might be used to forge the link between the worlds’?

On July 17, Juliette was alone with Fitz in her boudoir. The room was technically Anji’s as well as Juliette’s, but Anji spent as little time at the House as possible and generally used her days to feel her way around the streets of London. Fitz and Juliette were talking at length on that afternoon, though it’s not known what the subject matter was. However, the conversation was interrupted when Juliette abruptly clutched her stomach, complaining of ‘sudden cramps’. At first Fitz was merely concerned, but then he too became aware that something was very wrong.

The two of them stepped out of the room, to find that Katya was also at the door to her quarters. Scarlette (not even in the country, of course) would claim in her journal that ‘every woman in the House bled at once’, but this clearly isn’t supposed to be taken literally. Smoke was rising up the stairs from the ground floor, and all those present in the House began to move towards the salon, fearing the worst. Just before he himself reached the ground floor, Fitz heard a voice cry out and recognised it as the Doctor’s.

‘Magic words’ are important in ritual, as any form of ceremony is about the power of symbols more than anything else. Even hard-nosed Service lore held that Sabbath had learned a certain word which had allowed him to escape his initiation, but if Fitz was to be believed then the noise the Doctor made was a cry of alarm rather than an incantation. As Scarlette so vaguely puts it, ‘the Doctor needs no