Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [61]
It took several hours, riding between the stoical samurai, to reach the castle.
White walls rose behind brown stones, curved roofs and barred windows, tier after tier.
There was a massive gate where the samurai shouted for entry. The great wooden doors pulled slowly open – servants dragging the doors’ weight, servants kneeling in the dust as they rode in.
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Every eye was on her. She imagined she could hear the gossip drifting softly on the breeze.
Once inside the palace she had only one guard, and just a lad, and he had put away one of his swords. But one young samurai with one sword was more than enough. Even if she somehow got away from him, she doubted she could find her way, back to the gate – and who was going to let her through it?
He stalked the polished cedar floors in his slippers, doing his best to look forbidding, while she walked just behind him in bare feet. ‘Please excuse me,’
she said, ‘but where are you taking me, O-samurai?’
‘To your quarters, O-jochu,’ replied the boy. ‘Here we are.’ He slid open a door. Penelope had no idea how he’d recognized the right one in this maze of wooden passages.
The room was, as usual, large and empty. There was a screen at one end, delicately painted with an image of geese in flight. ‘I will see to it that you are brought food and drink, and whatever other comforts you require,’ he said.
He even bowed, a little. ‘Someone will always be on hand if you need them.’
She returned the bow, and he slid the door shut. He might as well have locked it.
Penelope slid to the floor, sitting European style, and put her head in her hands. Her mind was churning with penny-dreadful fantasies. She forced them down, feeling her rational mind struggling with her equally rational fear. No one had threatened her. Yet. No one had mistreated her. Yet.
She wasn’t important. What they wanted was the pod.
She felt suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. All she wanted to do was curl up on the thick straw mats and fall asleep. But even with her eyes closed she stayed relentlessly awake. Distantly she could hear the footsteps of people moving through the house, sometimes catch a shout from the courtyard or a raised voice from another room.
Trapped, she thought. Trapped again.
She blinked. The light had faded. . . or had the paper walls turned dark and hard?
Penelope sat up. She was in the Room With No Doors.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not again.’
Chris had been sitting in his room at the inn, eating shrimp and moping.
Whatever the Doctor had gone to investigate, it was taking him forever.
The cab chase had been great, just like old times, taking him back to when he flew a flitter for the Adjudication Service. Skimming through the buildings like a knife, scaring the bejeezuz out of some perp by being smarter and braver and fasten The poor cab had just managed to limp into Toshi town before the 125
back axle had finally and spectacularly snapped, nearly throwing them off the cab.
He’d got some paper, and dug a chewed-on ballpoint pen out of the Doctor’s satchel when the Time Lord wasn’t looking. After a while he started to write:
‘Dear Doctor, I didn’t always feel like this.’
He stuck out his bottom lip at the piece of paper. Goddess, it was like a
‘Dear John’ letter. ‘This is tragic,’ he said out loud. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
He decided to go and see how the blacksmith was getting along with the pod. He walked through the muddy streets of the town, peeking into shops and trying to ignore the stares he got. He should be used to it by now, after visiting a hundred different planets and times, and sticking out like a sore thumb in most of them. This time he wanted to shout, ‘Yes! I look weird!
Don’t you guys realize what a cliché it is to stare at me?’
Toshi was a lot bigger than the little town where he and Chiyono had bought the horses. Most of the people were what Chris guessed were middle-class –
craftspeople, bureaucrats, merchants. There was the occasional peasant, but he didn’t see any samurai. He guessed they