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

Steve Cole

DOCTOR WHO: THE KNIGHT, THE FOOL AND THE DEAD

TIME LORD VICTORIOUS

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

First Interlude

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Second Interlude

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Third Interlude

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

About the Author

Steve Coleis an editor and children’s author whose sales exceed three million copies. His hugely successful Astrosaurs young fiction series has been a UK top-ten children’s bestseller. His several original Doctor Who novels have also been bestsellers.

For Christine Gordon

With Twitter thanks to Natalie Robyn – Molto bene!

‘Death is a great evil and the gods have judged it so: for they choose not to die.’

— Aristotle, after Sappho

Prologue

The skies over Destran were horrid with phantoms, wheeling in the wind. Estinee watched their wild dance of dark and colour from her bedroom window, clutching to her chest the doll she’d grown out of, long ago. She couldn’t make sense of the shifting patterns; if they were monsters come to claim the living, or spirits of the new dead taking flight from their bodies. The visions spun and shifted like scraps in a hurricane, but the dread they brought was deep and slow.

Though she wanted to, Estinee couldn’t stop watching the haunted sky. If she did, she knew her eyes would be drawn to whatever was causing the screams in the cropfields. And if she didn’t look then she would never remember. It wouldn’t have to be real. She could close her eyes, of course. But Estinee knew that if she did, she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t alone behind the locked door, in darkness.

It was already growing so dark.

Estinee couldn’t take it in. Minutes ago this had been a day like any other: Mother and Father and all their workers, out in the fields for the harvest. Then the skies darkened and the sun was swallowed, just as in the old stories. Stories she’d been told since she was tiny, but had never believed till now.

The Kotturuh. They had come.

Shock had been squeezing her voice box shut, but now words and tears came together. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ Estinee whispered aloud.

‘There’s no need for fear, child.’ Her mother’s voice from the talk-circle in the wall, quiet and calming. ‘The Kotturuh bring meaning to Destran.’

‘Mother!’ The spell of the skies was broken; Estinee jerked and ran to the white mesh disc in the wall. ‘Meaning? How can you say that? Where are you? I’ve been so scared, what’s happening, where’s Father—?’

Her mother didn’t seem to hear. ‘Death is the Kotturuh’s gift.’

‘We must hide from the Kotturuh, Mother.’ Estinee clutched the doll tighter, but it was cold and hard against her chest. ‘Please, come to me?’

‘I am coming to you,’ said her mother slowly. ‘I am nearly here.’

There was the loudest scream from outside the window. Don’t look , Estinee told herself. If you look, it’s real. It’ll always be real .

But now she couldn’t help but look. Because the scream was her father’s. Her father was outside beneath the storm-grey panic of the sky, running through sticks of cinder where the cropfield had stood minutes before.

‘Father!’ She dropped the doll, threw open the window, shouted to him.

He was looking wildly behind him. Estinee caught a glimpse of something – a quivering shape of shadow reaching out to him – before she closed her eyes. Only a glimpse, but that was enough.

Now it’s real .

The shape vanished, a shadow blown away on the wind, and her father’s final scream died as quickly. Estinee turned from the window, faced her bedroom door.

It swung open. Her mother was there. Her smooth, rosy skin tightened and split, her body grew hunched and shrivelled, her rust-red hair turned white – all in seconds. Estinee opened her mouth to scream but her mother shook her head, put a finger to emaciated lips.

‘The harvesters are harvested.’ Her voice was like the creak of an old door. ‘You shall know forty summers and no more, my love. Time enough …’

Mother had known so many summers. Her bleached skeleton dropped to its knees and she pitched forward.

Everything is real .

Estinee wanted to scream but the sound wouldn’t come. There had been something in the shadows behind her mother. Something making her talk, so it could get closer. A veiled creature, thick tentacle legs blooming from its midriff, the flesh purple-black like bruises. More horrible than any of the pictures in her storybooks.

Kotturuh .

It stared at her through a thick veil and Estinee felt a buzzing pressure inside her head. Overwhelmed, she fell back against the bed. One hand closed on the doll.

The visitor’s voice was like the writhing of worms in the soil: ‘We are here for you, child.’

Estinee turned and tried to scramble through the window. Something touched the back of her leg. The Kotturuh’s six fingers, grey diamonds, were pressed to her skin. A feeling like burning flared through the flesh. Estinee pulled away and felt she must be trailing fire.

As she fell from the window she imagined that she must look like a comet blazing to earth, like a shooting star.

But there was no one on the farm left alive to see her as she struck the ground and the Kotturuh drew their veil about her.

Chapter One

‘Oh, yes!’ The Doctor grinned like a wolf as he strolled around the Tombs of the Ended, this monument to the dead of Andalia. ‘Oh, this is brilliant. Just what the Doctor ordered.’

It was cold in the halls of shadowed marble, and the Doctor was glad of his long brown coat with its deep, deep pockets. As a rule of thumb, tombs weren’t a laughing matter, but this one, rather like the Andalians themselves, was something special.

He saw an Andalian male, jade-skinned and painfully thin, sitting cross-legged before an enormous statue of an Andalian seated in the same position – like the tiniest Russian doll placed beside the largest. Both seemed carved from translucent stone. Through panes of cracked and coloured glass, streams of sunlight stirred luminous veins in both figures.

‘Hello!’ the Doctor called cheerily. ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it! Only cemetery on the whole planet and just fifty bodies interred here since records began. Talk about room in the tomb. You Andalians, you’re so alive …’

‘Please!’ The Andalian turned to him, beak raised in gloomy dignity. ‘I am in contemplation.’

‘Oh.’ The Doctor pulled a face. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Thought you were just admiring the statue. I’m contemplating, myself. Sort of.’

‘I see. Well—’

‘Only, life got out of hand a bit. On Mars. Course, Mars won’t exist for a few billion years …’

The Andalian smiled as one would at a dim-witted child. ‘I suppose you don’t know our customs, seeing as you’re from off-world.’

‘The past is a foreign country,’ the Doctor agreed, ‘and I’ve come a long way back. Further back than I’m meant to, but, well. I’m getting away from …’

She enters the dark house. Closes the door. Snow falling. You’re already walking away. You hear the blast—

‘You’re getting away from the demonstration?’ the Andalian suggested.

‘I’m getting away from the old haunts. From fixed points in time. The universe is a better place here and now. So many races like you Andalians – just brimming over with life! Whatever happens, you pretty much can’t die, even if you …’ He closed his eyes.