Doctor Who_ The Death of Art Part 13

'This keeps me alive.'

Ufudo, the Tortoise, blinked its rheumy eyes. 'They all say that. But you know what I say?'

' N o ? '

'If you don't take it off sometimes, you won't feel the benefit.' It wheeled to the left, plodding downhill now towards a spring of sulphurous aquifers. It drank noisily, breaking the dark, frozen surface of the pool with a yellow-stained claw. After a while it turned round and climbed laboriously back up the slope to her armoured feet.

'One more thing.'

'What?' Roz said.

'I've known Tsuro the hare for a long time.'

Roz waited. ' A n d ? ' she asked.

The Tortoise spat a piece of silicate out of its leathery mouth.

'He's not as tricky as he likes to think. I should know.'

It winked.

151.

A sharp pain struck Roz in the cheek. The sounds she was not hearing stopped. The memories of her long, eventless, trek across the Culaan Patera burst in an orange-red haze. She thought briefly of tortoises and wondered why. Probably because of Montague's face, she decided. It was as cracked and broken as old tortoise sh.e.l.l, and it was only millimetres from hers.

'You wouldn't believe me if I told you,' Chris said. In his head he was working through the dialogue of the film noir cla.s.sics he had watched alone in the TARDIS cinematograph.

Jarre would say, 'Try me.' Then Chris would lie again. Pretty soon, thugs would come in and beat him up, or Jarre would fire the gun. He was fairly certain that it would not affect a non-psionic, but it was an alien weapon and it was making him nervous. There had to be a way to short-circuit this whole interrogation.

'Oh yes, I would,' Jarre said. 'You think I can't tell when a man's telling the truth. Particularly, if you will forgive me, such a transparent man as you seem to be.'

Chris felt his face turning pink. Good, turn it into anger, tell the truth and make it seem a lie. H e ' d seen the Doctor work this trick.

' I ' m a policeman from the future. The safety of the Earth is at stake.'

Jarre nodded thoughtfully. 'Agent Gris's theory. He thought you would come.' He stared at Chris hard, appraisingly. 'I must admit I was expecting someone shorter. You play the part of a simpleton most convincingly, Monsieur Doctor.'

Jarre motioned and slim female hands began to untie Chris's bounds. He heard giggling as the hands untwined the ropes from around his thighs, pressed on his hard muscles.

Embarra.s.singly, he felt a reaction. That would never do, not if he was supposed to be the Doctor. He thought about wet fish and the Carnival Queen. That did it.

Inspector Jarre was still staring at him. Chris met his gaze.

I ' m the Doctor, he thought, I can do this. Jarre looked away first.

152.

'I am sorry for this misunderstanding,' he said. 'The resources of the Shadow Directory, such few as remain, are at your disposal.'

In sheer panic, Chris yelled, 'Get me something to eat, I ' m starving.'

Pain, burning, blindness. Then light. Zig-zags of colour searing the retina. Still greater pain. Henri dragged himself up onto the bed. His forearms collapsed under him, shaking. His side was a single vast scar. The room's healing aura must have re-energized when the psychic attack broke off. He was still dying, but there was a chance. If he could only find the box.

Clumsily he fumbled in the pocket of his blood-stained yellow coat. His hand found nothing, and a moment's confusion threatened to overturn his reason. Why was it not there?

Why was his coat yellow?

He racked his crippled memory. Setting the decoy, fleeing with Mirakle. The decoy, the new Tomas he had grown, had died too slowly, sending its pain cascading outwards into him. Tormented by the pain, his body had failed, its nerves tortured into sympathetic death. Of course, that was it. He had died, and his pain had broken down the barrier between him and the nearest person that he had subjected to his domination. He was Major Henri now.

As Henri he remembered. The Doctor's spurious pontifi-cating changed nothing. Perhaps the Shadow Directory could be subverted from its aims so easily, riddled as it was with Jews and Freemasons, a mere shadow of the covert arm of the Revolution that had once answered solely to the Directory; but the Brotherhood, he, he, could not. France would not fall before the Germans. It would establish its culture over Earth and beyond, and G.o.d would bless it and make it prosper. could not. France would not fall before the Germans. It would establish its culture over Earth and beyond, and G.o.d would bless it and make it prosper.

Not that he cared what a mythical G.o.d might do.

If only he could find some way to stabilize this form without the power in the chair. If only he could avoid another death.

153.

Montague's breath did not have a smell. It was clean as steam, inhuman. He slid a liver-spotted finger under one of the leather straps that criss-crossed her face and tw.a.n.ged it.

Its edge caught the fresh graze on her face. Lower down, the bonds dug into her shoulder. 'Please pay attention,' he said.

'It's quite rare I have an audience for my court.'

Roz snapped fully awake; her mind ratcheted into the conversation as if she had extensive practice of lying on rock altars, wrapped in black knotted hide. 'Other than them?' she said. There was precious little neck movement available to her but she could glimpse the shuffling of Montague's creatures out among the bones.

He laughed. Good, she had amused him. Prisoner training.

First, be awkward, be interesting. Get involved. Give the jailers a challenge, but a slight one. Give them someone they think they can break. Boring prisoners are disposable. They are usually killed early to show the authorities the terrorists mean business. There were studies that showed captives grew to depend on their captors, and a trained adjudicator could work that backwards, sow dissent, get them at each other's throats. There was a snag, of course. She remembered asking Konstantine who got killed first. Prisoners who are too interesting, he had said.

Montague was waving his gnarled hands in the air, indicat-ing the things that moved just out of eyeshot. 'Perhaps I should say it's rare I have a perceptive audience. My followers are shockingly limited intellectually, with one or two notable exceptions. They seem to actually prefer stupidity.'

'Force of habit?' Roz said sweetly. Under the bindings she conducted a few isometric tests of the wrapping's strength. It was tough. Animal hide, she hoped.

'Oh hardly, they were among the greatest minds of their generation. Artists, painters, philosophers. I ' m very proud of my little collection.' Something gruesome moved wetly at the edge of Roz's vision. Montague sn.i.g.g.e.red. ' I ' m afraid they have rather run to flesh. But that is the privilege I have brought them: the power to make their bodies their canvases.

To live their every impulse on the outside.'

154.

He was getting chatty, Roz thought. Perhaps he was even telling the truth about his freaks. Stimulation of the psi-centres of the brain could cause all sorts of knock-on biochemical effects. Acromegaly, Mitch.e.l.l's Syndrome, even cla.s.sic paranoia. Not that Roz had anything against paranoia.

Chris had never realized its value. H e ' d need an induced psychosis just to reach a sane level of caution. Oh yes, she thought. That's why he's on this slab, and you're about to rescue him, of course.

Montague's unnaturally hard hand gripped her jaw, twisting her head a fraction sideways. The wound on her jaw tore open again. The warmth of her blood made Montague's hand seem even colder. 'I would prefer your full attention.' His voice trailed off into a rasping coughing fit, spraying spittle onto her cheek.

Roz gauged the time between coughs, without flinching.

The wrinkly was on his last legs. Unfortunately some of his friends had brought extra. She needed to preserve his temporary good humour. 'Who are the exceptions?' she asked.

Perhaps she could get some sense out of them.

Montague smiled. Roz caught a sour smell from the gaps in his yellow teeth. 'Here's one now.' A grey ma.s.s veined with silver moved into Roz's eyeline. A bone tree? No, a multi-headed serpent. No, a ma.s.s of crystalline fronds piercing up towards the arched roof of the catacombs. This was a great intellect? A frantic scratching from its upper spires reached her ears. Impaled on the pointed rods of living gla.s.s a more humanoid figure writhed, crystal spears through its shoulders and through its eyes.

'A critic,' Montague said. 'He drew my attention to an offensive painting. A shame really; generally his judgement was sound.' He tapped the crystal form lovingly. It made a sound like wind chimes. 'Lefevre here volunteered to be his gallows tree.'

155.

Chapter 13.

2 9 N o v e m b e r 1897: 00.15 a.m.

In one of the luxurious guest rooms of the Cafe Fantomas, Chris held his head in his hands and groaned. All he'd wanted was to get Jarre off-balance. All h e ' d wanted was the misdirection of some honest disbelief. Instead h e ' d got mistaken ident.i.ty, a bottle of wine, a plate of steak and potatoes, and a big dose of conspiracy.

Jarre had been only too keen to unburden himself. It seemed he, or the people he represented - who were a secret branch of the French police - had somehow got hold of the Doctor's diary when Ace disappeared into the time rifts.

Naturally they had expected the Doctor to turn up eventually looking for her. Now they thought he, Chris, was the Doctor, and they were likely to look on a companion as being distinctly second best. A companion would just be Doctor-bait. Possibly short-lived Doctor-bait. He had to run with the deception.

The trouble was that Chris didn't feel like the Doctor.

He knew he didn't understand how the Doctor thought. He hadn't got a chance in Gehenna of being taken for him. Not if Jarre's people had any firm intelligence. His best hope was that they hadn't, but Jarre's crack about expecting someone shorter had been worrying. He might stand a better chance of being taken for one of the earlier Doctors. The Doctor's fifth regenerated self had seemed pleasant and open when Chris 156 had met him. Fresh-faced. Chris had had to live down that very description during the whole of his career; surely he could use it now?

Except what he knew about cricket could have been written on a not very amusing tea-towel.

Downstairs, Jarre re-read the file on the Doctor. It was one of the duplicate records he kept in the Cafe Fantomas in case he had to take the Directory fully undercover, out of the sight of the Ministry of War. It was scanty, scarcely a dozen sheets of foolscap.

One thing was known for certain: the Doctor could change his appearance.

He ran through the known possibilities. Too old, too short, too fancy, too strange. He paused. Could Armand be the fifth of the Doctor's known bodies? No, Jarre decided. The arrogance in the man's voice when he had demanded food spoke against his being the quiet, gentlemanly fifth ident.i.ty of the Doctor. That confirmed it. This boor must be the sixth persona of the mysterious traveller. There was even less about him in the file than the others, but what was clear was that he had been a large, overbearing figure, quick to speak his mind and not worried about seeming a fool. Still, Jarre knew he should on no account be underestimated. Even the little that was known of him suggested that he had lost none of the Doctor's guile or cunning.

'Behold,' Montague smirked. 'I have .. .'

'Nothing up my sleeves?' Roz muttered, and knew in a second that she had pushed too far. He smashed her across the face, left-handed. A crack of broken bone sounded loud in her ears. G.o.ddess, that really had hurt him more than it had her! His little finger hung at an angle. Distracted, he tugged at the flaccid skin and the yellow sliver of bone, worrying at it with flat worn teeth.

The impatient cries of the audience galvanized him. He took the finger in his right hand and snapped it off, throwing the grisly morsel to the dark shapes. Scuffling broke out, until 157 he quelled it with his coughing laugh. 'An old trick first, my children.'

He held his left hand out into the light. Gradually, like a plant reaching up to the sun, his finger grew back. First a skeleton of bone, then veins and flesh and muscle. It was still old though, no patchwork here.

Where was the ma.s.s coining from, Roz wondered. Or the energy, for that matter?

'Next, my second oldest trick. The first real power I mastered. My dolls will dance for us, and then I have a task for them. A multiplicity of murders.' With a curious delicacy he caressed Roz's face. 'It is your fault that I must do this.

If you had not killed Tomas on his cross, the pain, the resonance, of that death would, I believe, have reached out to kill any remains of his mind that he might have left in those he had infected with himself. Now I must kill again.'

Roz craned her neck to get a glance at the list he held. A week in Paris tending bars had given her a fair grasp of current politics. The names read like a roll-call of the French Government.

Chris dug into the steak, secure in the knowledge that the earliest strain of BSE was almost a hundred years in the future. Jarre, who had entered the room while he was eating, fidgeted with a gla.s.s of white wine.

'Well, don't tell me that you didn't expect me to eat and drink,' Chris said. 'When you disturbed me at my hotel, I was just sitting down to a grilled turbot. The least you could do was feed me.'

'When you can tear yourself away from your midnight feast, Doctor, there's something I think you should see.'

'What?'

'I suppose you might call it a historical re-enactment. One of my few remaining agents has just reported it to me. One of the public figures who changed their positions soon after Mayeur's death has been found dead.'

'Poisoned like Mayeur?'

158.

'No, crucified.'

Marcel turned the notebook over and over in his hands. He hated late-night duty at the Caserne de la Cite. At night all the drunks, wh.o.r.es and madmen came out and whined for justice. 'Tell me again what you have here. Vital fresh evidence about Dreyfus, wasn't it?'

'Not just Dreyfus, it's bigger than that. It's vital I talk to Anton Jarre. The Government and the Ministry of War have been subverted.'

The man panted, rolling his levantine eyes behind his pathetic half-moon spectacles. His greasy black suit, with large silver cuff-links showing vulgarly at the wrists, made him look like a down-at-heel lawyer. Marcel hated lawyers, and Jews. He toyed with the notebook. 'This is so vital that a particular inspector of the Surete has to be got out of bed by messenger, plucked from his wife's thighs if need be, so that the information can be conveyed straight away to the authorities, both here and at the Ministry of War?'

'Yes.' The man's eyes were large and bright behind his spectacles.

'Really.' Marcel weighed the book in his hands once more, and threw it against the wall. It hit hard and spilled down the wall, shedding pages.

'Trust a Jew to excuse treason.' He reached across the desk and dug his hand into the fabric of the man's black coat, twisting it up in his fist. ' I ' m holding you . . . '

A strained, hysterical laugh burst from the man. The gendarme flushed as he loosed his grip. A curious mixture of shame and guilt washed over him. Dreyfus and the Jews were a distant threat. This man was real, and in pain. The gendarme found himself saying, ' . . . for your own good, mind.

I'd hate it if anything happened to a good citizen of France.'

A ghost smell of aniseed pierced his head. That was it: the man was drunk, merely drunk. Sapristi! Marcel knew what it was to have one drink too many. Suddenly the shabby man seemed friendly, admirable. Marcel could not even remember why he had thought he looked Jewish.

159.

He came round the desk. 'The cells are quiet and dry. Sleep off your drink and we'll talk in the morning. If, if, if, mind you, there's anything in what you say, I'll get an inspector to look into it, but you must sober up first.' mind you, there's anything in what you say, I'll get an inspector to look into it, but you must sober up first.'

In the cell, August cradled his aching head. His magic had suppressed an emotion, pushed at another. The influence would not last until morning. He could only hope that the gendarme's superiors would be more understanding. He had the certain feeling that he had made the wrong decision.

What a time to turn into a public-spirited citizen, he thought sourly. He poked at the straw-stuffed bedding, and settled down to get what sleep he could.

'Are you coming, Doctor?' Jarre shouted, his breath white as frost in the chill night air. The old servant had gone before them, and now stood in the illuminated doorway of the chapel that rested among the trees.

'In a moment.' Chris moved the oil lamp in his hand, letting the warm organic light and heat spill out. Something was wrong here. H e ' d felt it since Jarre had knocked in a measured pattern on a door in a dark wall, and they had been shown into this wilderness. The roses were frozen, and they were black.