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

But the tracker had flown above them now. It smashed down against the hovercar’s roof and they dipped lower, skimming the rooftops like a boat over a stone ocean. Ancient stone exploded into dust beneath them. A hunk of rubble struck the windscreen and the outside world was lost in a spider’s web of fractures.

Estinee shouted her frustrations at the controls. ‘They’re going to take us down!’

The Doctor climbed into the passenger seat and punched a hole in the splintered windscreen. Thousands of flies blew straight inside, blinding, suffocating. The landscape outside corkscrewed past through the black swarm; the Doctor glimpsed ancient temples raised from the blue desert sands. Estinee’s mouth was wide open in a fly-choked scream.

Like a dying beast in its death throes the hovercar ploughed through a sand dune and smashed sidelong into a pyramidal shrine steeped in spires and bell towers. The noise of the impact was deafening, gut-punching. The Doctor felt his bones turn to stabbing pains. The world went dark, and when his eyes snapped back open he realised some protective field must’ve kicked in to save him from injury. Estinee lay sprawled upside down in the footwell, but she was breathing, and the coils of the Lifeshroud were flickering gold.

‘Estinee?’ The Doctor spat out thick mouthfuls of flies. ‘Estinee, you all right?’ He realised the bronze rugby ball was back, hovering at the broken window beside him, scanning again. Sore and exhausted, he jabbed the sonic at the drone and in the blaze of baleful blue it dropped to the ground. ‘Who sent you?’ he demanded. ‘Well?’

‘You destroyed our temple,’ came a sad, ponderous voice.

The Doctor looked up to find Andalians emerging from the other strange church-like buildings in this quarter of the world. They stared at the wreckage and clung together in shock, chanting a dirge under their breaths.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Doctor began. ‘No one was hurt—?’

‘Nothing is destroyed on Andalia,’ said the man, his beak turned down in almost pantomime dismay. ‘We outgrew our gods in childhood but we honour their place in our history.’

‘Oh, me too. I honour history like you would not believe …’ Then words seared into his head with such force he gasped. Words on a tombstone, a legend glaring from a screen: Captain Adelaide Brooke, 1999–2059 …

It was Estinee’s voice that made him open his eyes. ‘Help.’ She was stirring in the wreck. ‘Someone, help …!’

The Doctor turned from the shell-shocked crowd. Waving his arm through the flies, he staggered over to the shattered hovercar. ‘It’s all right, Estinee. I was trying to help, remember? I’m the Doctor.’

‘Can’t get me.’ She was gazing past him, mumbling, up at the sky. ‘Not again. Please. Not again …’

‘What not again?’ The Doctor turned to follow her gaze.

The sky rained down on him: a hard, sudden scatter of bits of black. The Doctor pulled his coat up over his head until the bombardment stopped. The Andalians’ dirge died out in gasps and whispers.

And he saw then that the air was clear of flies. Because the insects lay now in a thick carpet of black all around.

They were dead.

‘Please, not again!’ Estinee screamed.

The Doctor stared as dark shapes and symbols scratched themselves impossibly into the sky. He couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t decipher them consciously. But he sensed a vast, inchoate power building in the atmosphere. ‘Estinee, what is …?’

He never finished, as the Andalians about him started to scream and shake. Skin sagged from their shrivelling forms and limbs twisted into bony sticks – as if age and decay held back for millennia had finally burst their banks. The Doctor saw a woman nearby collapse, reached out to her – but she was dust in a moment. He doubled over as if every cell in his body had been stuck with pins.

Suddenly a creature stood, bulky and intimidating among the dying and dead. The Doctor saw it through a haze, as if even the air and light were trying to shy away.

The creature stood two metres tall on thick tentacle-legs that squirmed like maggots, giant and engorged. Jellyfish eyes, lit like dying embers, swivelled behind an intricate veil. The hard carapace of its body was dressed in scarlet velvet embroidered with skeins of ash that flashed and glittered. Six fingers flexed on both skeletal hands, as though beckoning the dark to come down over Andalia.

As distant screams and shrieks rang out to silence, the creature’s voice was like a breath from the morgue: ‘Judgement has been passed. The gift is given.’

‘Who are you?’ The Doctor took a bold step towards the creature that stood so haughtily among the fallen and chose his pronoun with more precision: ‘ What are you?’

‘You know us, little one.’ The whisper curled like winter leaves. ‘We are the Kotturuh.’

Chapter Four

The Doctor held very still. ‘I wondered all my life if I’d ever meet you. The bringers of death.’

‘Death is our treasure. Our blood. Our doctrine.’

‘Just as the legends say.’ The Doctor felt physically sick standing so close to the creature; he could feel her will pushing into his mind, shifting his cells like beads on an abacus, but did his best to keep the pain from his face. ‘You killed everyone here?’

‘The Andalians are indolent. They have little to contribute to the greater universe. Judgement has been passed.’

‘You killed everyone ?’

‘Life will still endure. But in a pattern of our choosing.’

The Doctor looked around beneath a sky that writhed with shadows. He saw a single Andalian child crawl from the sprawl of bodies. It peered around, mindless of the devastation, then scooped dead flies from the ground and ate hungrily before running away.

‘From this day, the Andalian lifespan endures a single lunar orbit,’ the Kotturuh announced. ‘Born. Feed. Reproduce. Die.’

‘A span of, what – seventy, eighty days?’ Heartbroken, the Doctor shook his head. ‘The Andalians have endured for millions of years … and you’ve left them barely more than mayflies?’

‘The living time of Andalia’s flora and fauna has been adjusted also, to help support this new life cycle.’

‘Adjusted,’ the Doctor sneered. ‘Curtailed! Ended! Why?’

‘One day this world will be of strategic value. If won in war, the death would be worse. This is our gift.’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘It’s like trying to fix a broken watch with a sledgehammer.’

‘Our hearts beat to the Kotturuh Design.’

‘These people have a whole civilisation, a history, a culture. Who are you to sweep all that life away!’

‘Who are you to save it?’ she countered softly. ‘Who here on Andalia chose when the existence of a fly was ended? The superior form of life.’

‘A plague of locusts isn’t superior to a field of wheat because it destroys it.’ There among so many dead, the Kotturuh’s cold-burning eyes upon him, the Doctor felt horribly exposed, but refused to let it show. ‘Prove your superiority: reverse that process. I mean, if you’re using some kind of airborne DNA-altering retrovirus—’

A chill voice sounded in his ear: ‘Be silent.’

‘Whoa!’ The Doctor started, spun round – another of the Kotturuh had drawn up behind him. This one was bigger, squatter, wearing velvet garments adorned with complex patterns that seemed to shift as he tried to take them in. While the first Kotturuh had regarded him with a hunter’s cold indifference, the Doctor sensed an appetite in this one. He held very, very still, as the creature’s damp eyes took him in and grey fingers, marbled silver like a slug’s trail, hovered at his temples.