The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [20]
Steven looked again to his right, where a body was lying crumpled up on the stone embankment. Ribbons of blood curled away from it, seeking out the cracks between the stones and trickling towards the canal.
Catching his breath, he crouched down beside the body and cautiously felt for a pulse, but the skin was cold and his hand came away sticky and dark with blood.
"Brilliant," he sighed. "I knew we shouldn't have accepted that invitation."
Something scraped against stone behind him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sandy's scales were rough under her hands, but Vicki loved the way he growled as she stroked him. His blunt little body wriggled when she tickled him under the chin, and his little antennae stood perfectly upright. He was the only thing left that loved her. The only thing left that she loved.
She stood up, Sandy nestling at her leg, and gazed out across the Didonian plain. The sun was just setting behind the mountains, sending plumes of scarlet and gold up into the atmosphere.
Beautiful. She took a deep breath. The air was so clear and so cold that her lungs tingled. It was all so different from Earth.
Bennett hated it here, but she had got used to it. So quiet, so peaceful. So undemanding.
It wouldn't be long before it was dark. She should be getting back to the ship. Bennett didn't like her to be out after sunset. He said that the Didonians were savages who would cook her and eat her, and he wouldn't be able to lift a finger to help. Besides, it was time to prepare dinner. He'd get angry if she didn't have it on the table on time. It wasn't as if he could do anything to her - he'd been paralysed in the crash - but his tongue was sharp, and his voice was loud, and she could not manipulate him with flattery and smiles the way she could manipulate everybody else: he didn't react in predictable ways. Sometimes she had to run all the way to Sandy's cave before she couldn't hear him shouting and cursing.
Vicki took a few steps away from the cave and towards the ship, but the smell of cooked meat stopped her. It couldn't be dinner -
she hadn't even put it in the rehydrater yet. Surely Bennett couldn't have got to the kitchen by himself?
There was a noise behind her: a pitiful, mewling noise. She turned, and took a step backwards. Sandy was lying there in the cave mouth, his chest burned to a cinder. His foreclaws scrabbled in the sand as he crawled towards her, crying her name.
Screaming, she jerked awake.
She was lying on an upholstered couch in a room with lots of paintings, and someone had covered her with a blanket. For a moment she didn't know where she was, but then the memories fell back into place. Her name was Vicki, she was in Venice in Earth's past, and Sandy was dead, killed by Barbara Wright.
Bennett was dead too, killed by the Didonians, who hadn't been savages after all. And Bennett hadn't been paralysed: he'd only been pretending. Things had been so simple before she met the Doctor, and sometimes she wished that they could be that simple again. But they never would.
"Unhappiness like smoke above this sleeping city rises your," a strangely musical voice said from the window. "No one as beautiful unhappy should be as you."
Her head jerked around so fast that she felt a tendon pull to its limit. That hadn't been the Doctor's voice. Or Steven's.
A dark shape sat on the window ledge. The flickering light from the square outside haloed its edges, and all she could make out were its claws on the wood of the window ledge and the faint suggestion of wings.
"Who are you?" she asked. For some reason she was perfectly calm. She tried to work up some fear, but there was nothing there.
Nothing at all.
"Name Albrellian is my," the creature said. Its voice was like a flute playing.
"I'm Vicki," she said automatically, still worried by the fact that she wasn't worried. Perhaps she was still asleep, just surfacing briefly into semi-consciousness as she slipped from one dream into another.
"Universe a better place is now that met you have I," Albrellian said, shifting