Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [49]
If the kami had any magic, it wasn’t using it. If it had any magic at all, and it wasn’t just a trick to frighten away gullible bushi.
As far as Aoi could see, the only power it had was the power to make men greedy, and to rain destruction on them. They ought to bury it deep beneath the ground and forget about it.
∗ ∗ ∗
99
The Doctor had been working on Penelope’s time conveyance for hours. It was starting to get dark, but once again the dim light didn’t bother him.
Penelope glanced towards the door. Their guard had his back to them –
one of the older samurai now, she saw. She wanted to borrow the Doctor’s flashlight, but she didn’t want to risk attracting the warrior’s attention.
She peered at the time traveller’s scrawled diagrams, hoping they would begin to make sense. He had jotted them down on the back of a cafe menu, a flier from an organization called Greenpeace, and a parchment covered in writing she couldn’t understand. And then he had rolled up his sleeves and gone to work on the engine of her time conveyance.
Half the components were scattered across the floor in bits, including the futuristic battery which Mr Cooke had concocted for it in 1996. The other half had assumed an angular shape, no larger than a typewriter. It looked as though he had preserved the central calculating device, but had removed all of the parts necessary to input or output information. She felt a pang. Her child was shrunken, blind and helpless.
The Doctor sat back, evidently having finished his. . . modifications. He took the strange little eggshaped device from his pocket. It was evidently deactivated, silent and colourless.
The screaming child had at last fallen silent, nestled in its exhausted mother’s arms. Kame was snoring, the arrow still clutched in one hand. The other peasants watched the Doctor and wondered what he was doing.
He rolled the egg in amongst the cogs and gears of the engine. Now he could reach into the angular mass and touch the device. And yet somehow it had become part of the machine. How he had made the two technologies mesh was beyond her.
‘They should be asleep by now,’ he whispered, ‘for the most part. We only need to worry about that one guard.’ The Doctor nodded at the back of ‘their’
samurai. ‘I think it’s time to wake Chris up.’
Penelope bolted out of the house, clutching the flashlight to her chest. ‘Stop!’
shrieked the guard, leaping to his feet, as she nimbly jumped down to the ground.
She turned. He was on his feet, hand on the hilt of his sword. She lifted the flashlight and shone its beam full in his face.
He was startled by the bright light, but only for a moment. Long enough for Mr Cwej to come up behind him and take hold of his neck.
The Doctor had muttered some explanation about nerve compression. However the fighting technique worked, it was certainly effective. The samurai’s eyes rolled up and he dropped into Mr Cwej’s grip.
100
The Adjudicator gently lowered the man to the veranda. Penelope was already scrambling back up, aware of the samurai’s shout. Mr Cwej propped the warrior up against the wall and followed her back into the hut.
The Doctor hovered in the doorway. After a moment, a shout came from somewhere below them, in the courtyard.
The Doctor called out. Penelope didn’t think it was a very good impression of the samurai’s voice, but it seemed to calm whoever’s sleep had been disturbed.
They waited a few more minutes, ears straining at the night’s silence.
‘All right,’ said the Doctor. Penelope jumped at the sound of his voice. ‘Now for the tricky bit.’ He sat cross-legged in front of the modified time conveyance and thrust a hand into the clockwork.
A pale light filled the room as he made adjustments to the ovoid. ‘The tricky bit,’ he murmured, as the peasants watched in awe and Mr Cwej watched in fascination, ‘is to take the pod with