Menagerie - Martin Day [24]
'The creature. My friend is only interested in the creature.'
The fat man scratched his chin. 'Four huge arms, claws, some sort of vicious snout, long legs. The casket is frosted-over. I think the animal is grey or silver. Looks like its skin's been flayed off.'
'And it's genuine?'
Argaabil nodded. 'As far as I can tell.'
'I'll tell my friend. Anything else?'
'No. But I'm very glad the thing is dead.'
The Doctor lay quietly in his cell, listening to the drip of water and the insistent whispers of fear. Not for the first time he wondered where Jamie and Zoe were.
Perhaps he should look within himself for some of the peace of Det-Sen. If he liberated his mind from its earthly confines he would be better prepared to face whatever evil lay within the menagerie. Although the Doctor did not greatly believe in the veracity of mere feelings he knew that something deadly rested beneath the city. He caught a sense of the evil from time to time, not from the source itself, which seemed dormant, but from the fears of the humans.
The tenor must have derived, perhaps over the centuries, from something very tangible indeed.
He let his mind wander still further. He allowed phrases and images from the recent past to reform into something new. 'Bloodthirsty . . . I cannot agree to that request .. .
Outside is ... Nothing . . . No one believed . . . A war they cannot win . . . Immediate results . . . If you kill me .. . Want to return . . . The Doctor's going . . . Evacuate the area . . .'
Faces, images he had not even seen — all began to blur in his mind, forming a pattern, an image, a sensation. And —
Someone shouted from a cell further down the corridor. A guard clanged on the door until the noise subsided.
Sighing after the interruption, the Doctor struggled to remember his mind's composition. When he relaxed it returned to him once more. It was an image and a phrase, from so far in the past the Doctor could not count on its accuracy.
It was a woman's face, talking earnestly into a computer recording device. Her face was grey with worry. Her words repeated over and over in the Doctor's mind.
'I request immediate evacuation.'
Five
Diseaeda had seen countless marvels on his travels. On this trip alone he had explored a towering city of glass, crossed a lake of fire, and examined at first hand what was claimed to be the claw of some huge reptile. He was privileged enough to have been the first outsider to smoke the legendary urparfel plant in the company of the elders of Tebrain, after which they took him to see the famed backwards-running river at the top of the mountain.
However, by then his vision was so distorted he wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking at.
All these things he had seen, and more. And yet nothing amazed him more than the excruciatingly slow pace of his horse. The animal was well fed and excessively pampered, and she repaid her master with a slow, resolute pace.
Extremes of terrain and temperature did not affect the animal in the slightest. Plod plod plod. Diseaeda's horse was about as accurate as the ticking clocks of Hacoruin.
As the nameless city of the Knights of Kuabris began to creep into sight down in the valley, spreading like a grey mould, Diseaeda jabbed with his spurs, to no avail. He didn't like visiting the city. He was always keen to pass through as quickly as possible. As a man whose mind had been expanded by travel the awful insularity of the knights cast a dark chill over him. He was not a superstitious man, but he made a few signs in front of himself, accurately copied from the preparations of his acrobats. He wasn't sure what they meant, but he needed all the help he could get.
The city had turned up many an interesting exhibit or act in the past, and he couldn't afford to skip it, but on occasions he woke up with a nightmarish vision of the Knights of Kuabris still fresh in his mind.
Just get in, he reminded himself, check with Xaelobran at the market, and get out again. Avoid trouble