Steve Cole - Doctor Who - The Knight, The Fool and The Dead

‘What … did you do?’ hissed the Doctor.

‘Mr Ball suggested I distract you from appraising the markings in the cavern,’ said Brian. ‘He believed your sanity was being affected.’

‘My sanity?’ Painfully, the Doctor got back up. ‘So you attacked me and …’ He spluttered. ‘What even was that you dripped on me?’

‘The tips of my mouth fronds are laced with a mild poison.’

The Doctor frowned. ‘Poison?’

‘Used in sufficient measure, it halted your fit and restored your senses.’ Brian paused. ‘I definitely knew the safe dose to administer. Definitely.’

‘Deliberately or not, you saved my life.’ The Doctor risked another squint at the markings in the cavern. ‘I think we can guess what the writings on the wall are, then, can’t we?’

‘The wellspring of the Kotturuh Design,’ Brian suggested.

‘Reckon so. A schematic for bringing suffering to the universe.’ Even from a couple more glances, the Doctor could feel the alien hieroglyphs again trying to gain footholds in his mind. ‘This has to be the Kotturuh’s sanctum sanctorum.’

Brian was suspicious. ‘Left unguarded?’

‘What’s to guard? Graffiti that drives you out of your mind? It guards itself.’ The Doctor shook his buzzing head. ‘Question is, what happens to you then?’

Brian tilted his head to one side, as if listening to something else. ‘Doctor, may I have your attention? We are not alone.’

‘Eh?’ The Doctor fell quiet. As he did so, he heard the footsteps.

They came in different sounds and sizes, scratching, slithering or beating their way slowly across the rock. A rank smell was filling the air, along with a whispering, clicking, groaning noise that slowly resolved into words: ‘… two-seven, tau, six-heaven-two, sky-alpha. Fixed. Iota. Eight-zero-zero …’

Then more words in a lower register: ‘ Nine-zero-omega, four-al-hrb, one-zero-zero …’ And higher voices, different words and numbers, all carrying.

‘Speaking in tongues?’ the Doctor wondered aloud.

‘They belong to a different speaker,’ Brian informed him. ‘Although, it is the same language.’

‘That’s just the TARDIS translating.’

‘No.’ Brian held up his sphere, as if it knew better; perhaps it did. ‘Mr Ball is insistent on this point. Different creatures, but the same language. Or rather, the same kind of information.’

Before the Doctor could follow up, the first creatures came into sight, led by something tall and angular, a mass of spiky limbs and ceremonial armour – like a mantis made from rawhide and dressed in industrial machinery. ‘ Two-seven, tau, six-heaven-two ,’ it mumbled, ‘ sky-alpha. Fixed. Iota …’ Its head perched on a broken neck, its limbs hung down by its side. Others followed, a fetid menagerie of rotting alien forms, the once-bright colours of the skin bled by the darkness, no two the same. Each of the creatures before them had bulging, pellucid eyes, but their sight seemed poor. They knocked into each other and scraped against the walls, twisted, shambling shells, muttering constantly as they stumbled forward.

Brian held out his translation sphere. ‘Mr Ball believes these life forms constitute a threat to our mission.’

‘Wait.’ The Doctor performed a sweep with the sonic, then stared at Brian. ‘I don’t think these poor creatures are life forms in any natural sense of the word. Not any more. They’re just revenants, animated in some way …’ He stepped forward and smiled at the Mantis. ‘Hello! I’m the Doctor …’

The Mantis jerked to sudden attention. It raised arms with vicious barbs and swung them down at the Doctor. He dived clear, almost knocking down Brian.

‘Fair enough,’ said the Doctor, scrambling back up, ‘they’re a threat.’

The other revenants, too, began to shake off their zombie aspects. With a creak and crunch of bone and sinew they drew upright, became more purposeful. The Doctor saw an Andalian among them. Its voice grew deeper as it chanted on: ‘… Ra-betel zero-seron-two … kaffa eight one-sky sexagesimal …’

‘I recognise the formula,’ said Brian. ‘I have been navigating by it.’

‘What?’

‘These beings are imparting precise astrotemporal information: the positioning of a planet relative to its star, its star’s position relative to its galaxy, its galaxy’s relative position in the wider universe …’

The Doctor frowned at the implications – then dodged again as another revenant lunged for him, its goliath claws swishing past his head and smashing shrapnel from the wall. ‘Come on – run!’

He darted back down the tunnel they’d taken – and ran smack into another pack of mismatched, muttering creatures, blocking the way ahead. The stench almost made him retch. ‘No good! Back the way we came.’

They dashed back to the rocky balcony overlooking the abyss. The Mantis, the Andalian and the rest shuffled forward hungrily.

Brian unleashed crackles of energy from his translation sphere, and the Mantis was made more macabre in a halo of electric light. But a tentacle lashed out from somewhere in the scrum and knocked the ball from Brian’s hand. It swung from the cable attached to the Ood’s mouth, jerking his head aside – which was the only reason he avoided a further tentacled blow. The Doctor grabbed his arm and dragged him into a further run as the revenants kept coming, their jumble of coordinates growing louder.

‘It’s like they’re drawing strength from the words,’ the Doctor panted.

‘I believe it is no coincidence that the Andalian is reciting the recent orbital position of Andalia.’

‘What?’

‘Mr Ball set most similar coordinates for our arrival there this morning.’

‘Describing the exact time the Kotturuh descended …?’ The Doctor glanced back, saw the two packs merge into one horrifying mob. ‘That’s it, then! The Kotturuh Design! Each creature a part of it, reciting the position of its world when the Kotturuh descended.’

‘Or when they will descend,’ Brian told him. ‘One is reciting the position its planet will be in many years from now—’

Brian stopped short as they nearly ploughed straight into another party of the revenants. Hissing, clicking and whispering, the creatures shambled from the dark with a graveyard-stink and pale, glowing eyes. A gargoyle-like animal with two sets of arms grabbed Brian’s leg with vicious talons, but the Doctor kicked it clear. He turned back desperately – but the Mantis was almost on top of them, leading the other mob, claws and pincers raised to cut down and kill.

‘Side tunnel,’ Brian announced, and ducked into darkness.

The Doctor used his sonic as a torch, brilliant blue lighting the way.

Soon that light was playing over bare rock.

‘Backs to the wall, then,’ the Doctor said quietly.

Brian drew himself to his full height. He smoothed down his rumpled jacket and stood beside the Doctor, facing the pack.

The gargoyle, still muttering, was leading the advance now, four sets of talons ready to rake through flesh and bone. What had begun as a slow, stubborn stumble was ending in an over-cranked frenzy of misplaced limbs as the gibbering revenants packed out the tunnel. The stench was overpowering. The Doctor looked around wildly, incantations filling his ears with babbling echoes, but there was nowhere to run, and nothing the sonic could do as the living dead closed in.

Chapter Seven

‘We surrender!’ the Doctor shouted, but the revenants kept coming. ‘By the Kotturuh code, you have no right to kill us – we are outside the Kotturuh Design!’

Brian held up his translation sphere like a charm against witchcraft. ‘I believe a creature animated by the Kotturuh can kill anything it chooses.’