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

You hear the blast. You turn. No light at the window. All silent on Davies Street .

‘… even if you wanted to.’ He frowned. ‘Sorry, what demonstration?’

‘You’re right not to go. It’s all scare-stories.’ As the Andalian shook his head crossly he looked a little like an aged chicken. ‘I have lived and learned for thirty thousand years, my mothers for three times that. The eldest of us have watched the birthing of suns and shall live to see them sputter out.’ He nodded, turned back to the statue. ‘Scare-stories. Just scare-stories.’

‘Yeah, I know a few of those …’ The Doctor was eager to talk some more, but he knew how it was: even with all eternity to live through, time could be hard to come by. So with a wave of farewell he turned, stuck his hands in his pockets and strode towards the exit. His trainers squeaked on the stone floor. Squeak! Squeak! That helped dispel the gloom gathering over him – as did the intense sunlight as he stepped outside.

‘Whoa!’ He shielded his eyes. ‘And to think they call it the Dark Times …’

Andalia baked slowly in the glare of two suns, one red and one almost blue: different indifferent eyes in the sky, unblinking through a swarming veil of flies. The midge-like creatures were everywhere; huge leaves of burnished copper rose here and there and hummed in unearthly tones to attract them. The Andalians only had to open their beaks and snap at the air to snaffle the mini-beasts down their throats.

‘Eating on the fly,’ the Doctor murmured, as a couple blew into his mouth; they tasted like burnt cinnamon as he stuck out his tongue to release them.

Beyond the copper leaves, the buildings that lined the plaza matched the people who used them: tall, weatherworn and ancient. Each sprouted towers and turrets festooned with metal spires and shields that sparked like flashbulbs (sunlight conductors, the Doctor supposed, converting it into energy). The walls of these skinny castles wore pale glazed tiles like armour, chipped and cracked. A strange grey moss flowered from the fault-lines, and the broad slabs of the walkway fruited with it too.

The Doctor watched the Andalians pitter-pat in their long, skinny stride, dressed in silk sarongs of different faded hues, gulping habitually at the black-buzzing air as they went. Others rode in long, rusting cars that looked old as the encircling desert: harpooned by sparking aerials, the vehicles hovered low to the ground on grumbling motors, spluttering dust as they parked alongside the vast plaza and disgorged their drivers.

‘Here for the demonstration,’ the Doctor supposed, and waved at a frail couple hobbling past. ‘Excuse me! What are we demonstrating against?’

‘We’re watching a demonstration,’ one of the women explained. ‘If you want to go on, you should watch it too.’

‘Excuse me?’ The Doctor frowned. ‘Some people do say I go on a bit at times, but …’

The women were already pressing on, puffing for breath. The Doctor sensed a heightened feeling of purpose in the crowd as if this hurrying was quite out of the usual. There was tension too, unfamiliar and untoward, simmering in the plaza beneath the hum of the fly-swarm. Everyone was making for a large, rusting structure, squatting like a giant iron cockroach, far out of keeping with the rest of this world.

‘Take a peep at an actual Dark Times spacecraft? Don’t mind if I do.’ Smiling to himself, the Doctor went with the flow. The gravity was light and the Doctor felt tall as he walked, blowing cinnamon flies from his lips. He would’ve been the first to admit – well, the third or fourth, anyway – that he didn’t know so much about the Dark Times: those millennia that came creeping out of the endless night as the first stars switched on in the universe. Most of what he remembered came from childhood storybooks (and most of what he’d forgotten from sage professors at the Academy). He knew of the First Proliferation, of course – life’s opening lunges from impossible planets circling frozen stars and black suns. And he’d not only read about the rise of the Old Ones, he’d stumbled across the remnants of a fair few: once-giants of the universe like the Exxilons, the Eternals, the Jagaroth and the Racnoss. But all those other worlds, from this time when life revelled rather than endured, they were a celebration of regeneration and renewal, aeons before his own civilisation emerged upon the scene. Why wouldn’t he come here, despite the funereal peal of the TARDIS’ cloister bell, clanging as she took him back through that obliging fracture in time?

With a twinge of guilt, the Doctor realised that the TARDIS rang that bell a lot these days, like a child crying in the dark for someone to hear.

He looked at the Andalians around him, loping along in their big thronging groups, holding hands. I wonder if the whole world’s as good as this? Free food wherever you went, there for all in a warm and sheltered climate. The uniformity of dress, transport and residence all suggested a united people of equal status. How better to endure forever together? That handful of deaths long ago, still so strongly commemorated, had perhaps driven a civilising process here; the Andalians had gone on to conquer life, not each other. Slow-baked by eternity, old in years but middle-aged in mind, they drifted on through their civilisation’s endless noon.

And now this big metal cockroach had fallen into the middle of it, a rusting alien amid the shabby strangeness of the landscape. It emitted a deep and eerie chime, like a note from a giant’s kalimba.

Then, to some intricate clockwork orchestration, the metal cockroach cracked open and slowly began to fold itself outward. The crowds quickly backed away. Unearthly music piped from somewhere within, drowning out the grind and scrape of gears and metal plates as a stage was created.

The Doctor was ready to applaud the Harryhausen charm of the self-assembling stage, but the atmosphere in the plaza had grown darker despite the strange suns-light. He took in the fear and uncertainty etched into so many faces, the tightness of the handholds in the crowds. Parents and children, friends and lovers, waiting for the demonstration to start.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked the group beside him. ‘What’s the demonstration about?’

‘Lifeshroud,’ a man said.

‘They’ve been promoting this demonstration all over our world,’ said a younger woman. ‘Thought-speaks, pod-sights, leaflets. They say it saves you from “death”.’

She spoke the last word like it was foreign to her tongue, and the Doctor supposed it was. ‘Death?’ He glanced back at the imposing swoop of the Tombs of the Ended, a Gaudi cathedral in tiled blue pumice, half-melted in the suns. ‘Andalians don’t die very often, do they?’

‘Of course we don’t,’ said the woman. ‘But you can’t be too careful, can you? I mean, it only makes sense to take precautions when those Kotturuh things are coming.’

The Doctor felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. ‘Kotturuh?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The bringers of Death.’

Chapter Two

The Doctor had known of the Kotturuh since boyhood. Their legend shrieked throughout the cosmos: pathological destroyers from the darkest corner of the universe, beings born to haunt the voids between the galaxies, bringing death to all species they came across. He knew they existed still in his own time, though he’d never seen them: hidden in the dark void, snatching jealously at life like obsessive spinsters.

This is a time when Death is young , he realised.

A hush fell as a figure rose from beneath the stage in the plaza, spinning slowly like the figure of a ballerina in a music box. It was a basic humanoid frame with the image of an Andalian mapped onto it in flickering light; the Doctor supposed it was some sort of AI designed to present in the image of its audience.