Doctor Who_ Battlefield Part 10

In a pool of their own unnatural glare stood two orbs on tripods of ancient iron. Mordred set his sword between them and knelt on the stone flags. He felt the source of his own power grow closer and spoke its words in the stillness.

'Here is the convocation. This is the place of meeting.

The point between two worlds, two universes, two realities.' Like a traced line of gunpowder, an octogrammaton burned its pattern across the floor before him. The air turned sickly and sulphurous.

He grasped his sword and slowly raised it above his head. 'By this sword, brother to Excalibur, I part the curtain of night.'

'n.o.body is to go outside,' said the Doctor. He stood by the hotel bar and lectured his astonished audience.

Elizabeth Rowlinson sat stock-still on the settee gripping her husband's hand. 'I heard gunshots,' she said.

'Exactly,' said the Doctor.

Pat Rowlinson was not a demonstrative man, but there were limits and his hotel was full of mad people. He wanted to close up early. 'What is this, Doctor? You can't just walk in here and impose siege conditions... '

The Doctor tutted at him irritably. 'Did you see how quickly darkness fell? There are things out there in the night that you don't want to meet.'

'What things?' scoffed Peter Warmsly. He was not paying tonight and was already on his third pint.

The garden door banged shut. Ancelyn, his hands cuffed in front of him, was pushed into the room by Winifred Bambera. She held up her UNIT ID and announced her rank.

The Doctor looked in surprise at Ancelyn. 'What happened to you?'

The knight slumped down into a chair and cheerfully showed off his bonds. 'She vanquished me, and I threw myself on her mercy!'

Distant thunder rolled and Elizabeth tensed.

Bambera ignored Ancelyn's grin and went on with her routine. The situation made it doubly important. 'As of now I am in charge here. Everyone remain calm and we'll soon have everything under control.'

'I doubt it,' said the Doctor. 'It all depends on what Mordred has in mind.'

Peter had been staring in astonishment at Ancelyn.

'Mordred?' he said in total disbelief. As an archaeologist, he restricted his fantasies to dreams. He had never considered his reaction should they walk up to him in a hotel bar.

He was suddenly aware that no one was speaking.

Everyone was staring across the room at the ancient scabbard. It rattled in its mounting above the fireplace, apparently trying to tear itself in a frenzy away from the wall.

There was a flash of lightning not necessarily outside the room. The scabbard flung itself off the wall in a shower of plaster. It travelled across the room like a spear and embedded itself in the panelled wall inches from Peter's head.

Thunder boomed and the gla.s.ses on shelves behind the bar began to launch themselves over the edge like lemmings.

Peter's tankard dribbled beer as it cracked and finall shattered in his hand.

The walls of the hotel shuddered. Ace and Shou Yuing burst in from the hallway yelling.

'What's happening?' shouted Bambera.

They all looked at the Doctor. The Doctor looked at Ancelyn.

'She is coming,' said the knight.

'Across the abyss, life calls to life, bioma.s.s to bioma.s.s, energ to energy. To Avallion I summon thee from beyond the confine, of this universe.'

Plumes of energy spiralled like snakes along the blade of Mordred's raised sword. Lightning played among the bare timbers of the priory roof. It cracked between the two light rippled orbs.

The prince yelled and plunged the steel blade into the flagstones with a shower of sparks. The grinding mechanics of two cosmoses in spiralling collision began to grate out of the air. The octogrammaton before him surged with light like the furnace of a dragon's heart.

As a child delights in playing with fire, so Mordred played with natural energies, the science of magic. The flames of Creation were summoned and focused between the two orbs. Bound to his will, the forces coalesced and ripped a hole in the fabric of existence. A burning wind blew into his face. He clung to the hilt of his sword and stared into the gaping abyss between realities. Lit by the harsh glare of his power. he began to laugh with elation.

His summons was a hand that reached in need from one world to another. As light calls to darkness, as hunger calls to greed, and as a boy calls to his mother.

'Who's She?' said Ace.

Thunder, or worse than thunder, rumbled outside the hotel. The Doctor fingered the trembling scabbard as he listened to Ancelyn's words.

'She holds the thirteen worlds under her yoke. Twelve centuries has she held them to her avail. It's true the lands are fruitful. The fields and champaigns spill with grain and fruit, but by dread is that earned. For she won the crown by her black arts and by those arts she has secured her power. Her worlds are built on the pretence of plenty, but they are stacked upon a foundation of darkness and evil.

'And those she rules, she milks through tributes and tailles. Her subjects, for all their wealth and righteousness, lived in that same dread. They are slaves to their queen.

'She is Morgaine, the immortal one. She who brought ruin to Arthur the High King. It is she whom Merlin opposes. And it is his summons through Excalibur that I answer.'

The Doctor touched the scabbard again; it was icy cold.

'But now Morgaine follows you, Ancelyn,' he said. 'For she fears that Merlin will fulfil the final prophesy. And then the High King will rise again and cast her into the abyss forever.'

'Yes, Merlin,' said Ancelyn.

'I thought so. She must be desperate.' The Doctor tried to focus down the length of the scabbard. He felt the strands of time beginning to fray under the a.s.sult of mighty power. 'Which way does this wall face?' he said.

'What's that got to do with it?' exclaimed Pat Rowlinson. 'What's happening?'

'It faces north,' said Elizabeth quietly. 'Towards the lake.' The hotel shuddered under a fresh onslaught of elemental fury. Above it all carne a great rending sound, a tearing asunder of the veil of Eternity, the clamorous opening of the gates of h.e.l.l.

The Doctor, pale as a corpse, fell forward to the floor in a swoon.

Alone in Doctor Warmsley's cottage, the wolfhound Cerberus trembled and yelped beneath the security of his master's bed.

Deep in the cavernous halls of the s.h.i.+p, the sword changed the notes of its signal. Beside it, the armoured figure that lay on the bier remained unmoving.

In the comfort of the warm helicopter, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart woke from his nap with a start. The lights of London moved below him and an inky pall of night spread across the dusky sky from the west. He felt a sudden chill of anxiety and shuddered.

Mordred saw a shape moving in the white depths of the rent between existences. It took on human form as it grew larger. The Prince bowed his head as the female figure stood silhouetted against the light.

'Immortal Morgaine. Ageless and Deathless.'

She stepped through the rent on to the stone of Avallion. Crowned and armoured with gold, she raised her head and drank in the air. Behind her, a dozen men-at-arms emerged from the light and took up positions of honour to their Queen.

Morgaine lifted her crown away with slender fingers and shook out her long red-gold hair, the mark of the seer.

'Mordred,' she said, her voice charged with ice. He lifted his head. 'Mother. Merlin is here.'

'Yes, I can feel his presence.' She maintained the calm that always unnerved him. It meant that she was angry.

'And he has a new countenance.'

Morgaine smiled. 'Oh, he has worn many faces.' She stared up into the dark air beyond the bones of the roof. He had issued his challenge to her, so she must respond.

Merlin, she thought. Hear me now!

Humans dwell too much in the past; their extent of vision rarely spreads beyond the present. But that is an occupational hazard for any species that lives within the constrictions of time's pa.s.sage. Happy the creature that can remember the future. The Doctor wished that he was blessed with such facility, if only to avoid the paradoxical confusion of being accused of some act he had yet to perpetrate.

He lay semi-conscious on the carpet, trying to clear his head of temporal disturbances and human witterings.

Merlin. Hear me now!

A voice in the darkness of his head. Not a moment's peace, he thought. A woman's voice, cold and domineering.

'I can hear you, Morgaine,' he said out loud.

Do not stand against me this time, Merlin. For your soul's sake. sake.

The Doctor sat up oblivious of the concerned faces that surrounded him. 'I cannot allow your interference,' he said.

And he could see her now. A proud and regal warrior armoured in gold, lit by torchlight. She raised her hand aggressively and made a fist. Then let this be our last Then let this be our last battlefield! battlefield!

The thunder roared. She was gone. The torchlight in his head and the lights in the hotel bar blacked out simultaneously.

His human companions screamed.

Chapter 2.

Pilot Lieutenant Francoise Lavel sat and waited in the warmth of her helicopter. The early morning air was crisp and clear over the river. After the storm rescue operations of the previous day, Thames Barrier Heliport was deceptively quiet. Lavel watched the freight barges that had rid the roads of innumerable lorries moving on the water.

'What's he like then? Over,' said the familiar voice at Docklands ATC.

'A bit crusty,' said Lavel. 'L'ecole antique, you know?

But he's not as old as I'd thought he'd be. Over.'

'And does he live up to the legend? Over.'

A black saloon car was moving across the tarmac towards the helicopter.

'Can't talk now, ATC. Here he is. Over.'

'Roger Valkyrie 7. You have clearance from London Central. In your own time. Have fun with la grande fromage la grande fromage.

Over and out.'

He's getting cheeky, thought Lavel to herself in English. She opened the pa.s.senger door and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart climbed into the c.o.c.kpit.

'Morning, Lavel.'

'Good morning, sir.' She started to run the rotors up to speed. As he fiddled with his safety belt, she noticed that he had cut himself shaving.

The helicopter rose from the pad and took its flight due west over central London. The buildings cast long shadows in the dawn light. The Brigadier stared down at the toy landscape, remembering action he had seen around St Paul's, Fleet Street and Covent Garden.

'How did it go, sir?' asked Lavel.

'What's that?'

'The briefing, sir.'

'Oh. Usual bureaucracy. Inch-thick forms and about half a pint of blood.' He returned to the view. The river beside Stanbridge House Conference Centre was a smooth grey, its surface undisturbed by anything larger than a single speedboat.

The briefing had gone better than he had imagined.

Within reason he had been given carte blanche with available resources.

He had requested a two-kilometre exclusion zone around the convoy outside the limit of radio jamming. The area just cleared the edge of Carbury village. With the bulk of European UNIT handling the Azanian ceasefire, the Czech engineering group had been spared from flood relief in the low countries. They were being flown into the DOZ that morning.

'Funny how even London looks beautiful at sunrise.'

'I never noticed, sir. Seen one heliport and you've seen them all.' She punched up the Mapscan on her j.a.panese monitor. 'Straight to Carbury, sir?'

'That's right,' he said with a look of satisfied antic.i.p.ation. 'Where the action is.'

Lavel punched in the village name. The monitor presented a one inch to the klick ordnance map of Cornwall.