Doctor Who_ Castrovalva Part 6

She rummaged in her flightbag to find some consolation-a piece of chewing-gum, perhaps, or even just a mirror, so that she could look at her face and rea.s.sure herself that she was Tegan Jovanka, and not just some forgotten fragment of somebody else's nightmare. She found two lipstick dispensers, but they were empty, their contents having been dispersed along the TARDIS corridors. Nevertheless, she managed to scoop out a smidgin from the base of one of them. Unfolding the small round mirror and propping it on a branch in front of her, she raised her red-daubed little finger to her face.

It never reached her lips. A breeze s.h.i.+fted the alignment of the mirror at that moment, replacing the reflection of her face in the silver frame with a glimpse of a huge white hill that rose up beyond the trees behind her. It was not the hill itself that made her mouth drop open with surprise, although she had until now received no hint that the edge of the wood was close. But surmounting the blanched rocks that formed the summit, outlined sharply against the deepening blue of the sky, was a neat townscape fringed with walls and turrets that fluttered with coloured flags.

'Castrovalva!' She turned round and stared up through the tree-tops: it was not a dream. But in her excitement she brushed against the mirror, which tumbled from its perch and shattered unnoticed against the log. If she had turned to the mirror now she would have seen in it the image of that hilltop town broken into tiny fragments, a warning of the worst that was to come.

But it was not a moment for reflection, and the mirror lay forgotten. The sight of Castrovalva had revived the spirits of the two friends, and now was a time for action and quick decisions. The two girls plucked up handfuls of bracken and broke off branches, then Tegan left Nyssa to cover up the Cabinet while she recced the route out of the wood.

When she came back, the Doctor was well hidden beneath the camouflage. 'It's a very steep hill-seems to be rough rocks all the way up. But people obviously live there, so there must be a path to it.'

Nyssa put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to the camouflage. 'All right, let's find it.'

'You're sure it's all right to leave him?' asked Tegan.

Nyssa explained again about the strong force interaction sealing the internal interface. 'Nothing can open this Cabinet unless the Doctor wants it opened.'

'I'll take your word for it.' Tegan was impatient to go.

'Come on. It'll be night before we know it.'

As the two girls moved off a nearby tree-branch stirred, s.h.i.+fted by an unseen hand. Once more watching eyes noted their departure, and then the stalker turned and, with the silent motion of the hunter, retreated into the undergrowth.

The wood suddenly debouched into broad sunlight at the foot of the great white hill. The two friends skirted the rough terrain, clambering upwards until they came on a narrow path among the rocks, which ran like an old scar through the chalky landscape until is disappeared around the jagged profile of the hill.

They paused to catch their breath and debate whether to continue their investigations or go back for the Doctor.

Nyssa pointed out that the path might well come to nothing, just as the one by the river had done. There would be no point in carrying the Doctor this far only to arrive at a dead end, so they explored a little further.

As it turned out, Nyssa's caution was well founded. The path began to ascend too steeply for comfort. Soon it was running beside a dangerous cliff whose ragged edge drew closer and closer to the sheer rock wall until the track they were following was squeezed between the two into nothing but a giddying view of the countryside below.

Tegan craned her head to look up at the white-walled town. 'There's got to be some way into this place.'

'We need the Doctor's help,' said Nyssa. 'We'll just have to go back.'

'We could certainly use some advice,' Tegan agreed.

'But how do we get in touch with him through the Zero interface?'

'We just have to sit and wait until he decides to open the lid,' said Nyssa, in the special matter-of-fact voice she reserved for alarming statements of that kind. 'Come on...'

But a lot had happened while they were away. The girls had not been gone long from where the Zero Cabinet nestled under its camouflage in the wood when there were whispering voices in the undergrowth again. 'And this is where you saw them?' asked one.

The other nodded, and the blood-coloured feathers that fringed the tall headmask s.h.i.+vered against the leaves.

'Mergrave must be told of this,' said the first speaker, whose attire was gaudier still, for in addition to the war mask he was wrapped in a robe of purple silk shot through with gold. A susurration in the undergrowth betrayed the presence of other warriors around them.

The gathered huntsmen had not yet noticed the heap of branches and bracken that concealed the Zero Cabinet.

Even so, it was not the best time for the Doctor to choose to unhitch the lid and edge it open. A pair of much refreshed eyes twinkled out at the world from beneath the camouflage.

Nyssa sensed there was something wrong with the Cabinet the moment she began to pull off the bunches of branches.

Tegan had hung back a little way off, her eye caught by something on the ground, and Nyssa decided to say nothing until she was sure. She touched the lid and it wobbled slightly. The Cabinet was open.

Tegan suddenly straightened up from her examination of the gra.s.s. 'Blood!' she exclaimed, waving across to Nyssa. There was a red stain on her fingers.

But Nyssa had no time to listen, for she had lifted back the lid and was staring into the empty interior of the Zero Cabinet.

'He's gone!' she called out in a hollow voice. 'The Doctor's gone.'

7.

Within the Walls Nyssa and Tegan were alone without the Doctor on a strange planet. In spite of his weakness and his wandering mind, just having him with them had given the two friends a sort of strength. Now they could do nothing but stare into the empty Cabinet, feeling a deep inner emptiness of their own.

Nyssa tried to be rea.s.suring, but her voice was small and uncertain. 'The Doctor must have opened it himself.

n.o.body else could have done it. So it must have worked, the Zero effect. He must be feeling better.'

Tegan tore a leaf from a tree and wiped the blood from her fingers. 'Until whatever happened... happened. We've got to find him.' Her eye followed the gruesome trail of red stains in the gra.s.s for as far as she could see. It ran towards the great hill surmounted by walls and turrets, and Tegan found the name forming slowly under her breath: 'Castrovalva!' The sun was sinking lower in the sky, and in the yellowing light the small town took on a less friendly aspect.

'And the data bank said it was going to be so simple!'

said Nyssa, as they set off towards it, following the trail.

But then, just as they were pa.s.sing beneath one of the squat trees that edged the wood, with hardly a sound except the rush of air and the rustle of foliage, a sudden horrifying stream of silver cloth and feathers dropped down onto them. They started back at the sight of the tall hollow-eyed mask that confronted them, but before the two girls had time to catch their breath a crowd of other warriors had sprung up from the bushes.

'Run!' shouted Tegan, and they headed back into the woods, darting in and out of the low trees like frightened fish among coral. From behind them, puzzlingly, came no sound of pursuit, but they did not dare to look over their shoulders. Then, when they had run their lungs out, they dived into a clump of bracken and lay low.

In the woods around them nothing stirred. After a moment Tegan's head reappeared above the green fronds...

and then Nyssa's. 'They're playing cat-and-mouse with us,'

Tegan whispered.

'Whoever "they" are.' Cautiously the two girls stood up, and Nyssa went on urgently: 'We've got to find the Doctor.

Until he's properly regenerated he's terribly vulnerable.'

Together, scanning suspicious-looking trees for any hint of movement, they made their way back towards the Zero Cabinet to pick up the blood trail.

It happened that at that moment the Doctor was lying unmoving on a flat patch of rocky ground on the far side of the big white hill where Castrovalva perched. Here the trail of blood showed more distinctly on the bare ochre soil, running in crimson splashes almost towards the point where the Doctor lay. Almost, but not quite, for it missed the Doctor's head by several feet, running on towards a winding road, hardly more than a wide, well-trodden path, that turned upwards towards the lofty townlet.

The Doctor opened one eye-he had closed them both to listen more intently to the ground, Indian fas.h.i.+on-and now squinted through the few tufts of gra.s.s in the direction taken by the trail. After a moment he sat up, gazing into the distance.

'Hmmm...' he hummed to himself. 'Twelve of them at least. War party, maybe.' And, with a child-like unconcern for the dangers, he set off after them.

The two girls were only too aware of danger. It didn't help that the wood was so misleading, unfolding corrals of open ground from time to time that made you think you were at the edge of it, only to wrap its thick foliage around you again as you stumbled on. Then suddenly, without ever coming across the place where they had left the Zero Cabinet, Nyssa and Tegan were grateful to find themselves returned to the wide sweep of the landscape, confronting the hill of Castrovalva.

As luck would have it, they had found the Doctor too.

Looking up, they saw the small figure clambering uncertainly high among the rocks. 'Perhaps he's found the way in?' said Tegan, as the pair of them hurried off after him.

In fact the Doctor had only the distant glimmer of an idea about where he was going-something deep and instinctive was driving him upwards towards Castrovalva.

Occasionally he stopped to examine the blood trail, and his eyes would wander over the edge of the path and down the steep hill to the hungry white teeth of the rocks below him.

But apart from the giddiness he remained unaware of the danger. His mind was filled with subliminal images of other dizzying heights: flashes of girders and gantries shaped like a great bowl in the sky, from which someone he had once known well was swinging on a single cable that stretched and snapped strand by strand.

A melee of echoing voices seemed to be calling 'Doctor'; voices from the past and from the future jangling together in a desperate cachophony. He was not to know that among the confusion of sounds in his mind were the real shouts of Tegan and Nyssa blown on the wind from far below.

'Doctor!' the voices called, all of them, in a ragged chorus, and he realised that he too was calling the Doctor, that he needed him urgently, and that somewhere among the white walls that crested the hill he might stand a chance of finding him.

Further up the steepening path at a place the Doctor had yet to reach the way was blocked by a sheer rock wall. Here the warriors in their wild attire paused, huddled around some large burden they had set down on the ground. One warrior with a mask that was taller than the rest, even allowing for its magnificent crest of peac.o.c.k feathers, unwrapped his arm from the gaudy cloth of red, blue and gold that hung about his shoulders, and held up his hand for general silence.

'Once again we wait for Ruther,' announced the imposing figure in a booming voice. 'Was there ever a man with such capacity to lose both his quarry and himself?'

The rhetorical question was greeted with a ripple of laughter.

The merriment died down again, giving way to the sound of the sharpening and cleaning of the many weapons of the hunt that the warriors carried. The sun had become a trembling orange globe touching the horizon when, unseen by the gathering, the Doctor's face appeared above a nearby rock. Curiosity fought with caution in his confused mind, but some instinct for survival made him duck down out of sight again.

But hiding and waiting did not at all match his restless mood. A sense of the quest was forming in him-although, like all the best quests, he had only the vaguest idea what it was he was seeking. It had something to do with the personality called the Doctor, with whom he had a vague connection, like a long-lost cousin. And these strangely apparelled savages, dangerous though they might look (and indeed be), were destined somehow to lead him to his goal.

He began to scout behind the cover of the rocks. His concentration, in his lucid moments every bit as sharp as the knives and spears that gleamed in the light of the sinking sun, was so drawn into trying to see what it was the war party was crowding around that he failed to notice a second group approaching up the hill behind him. It was the long-awaited Ruther, whose scout had first spotted the arrival of strangers on the planet. At last, hearing the sound of footfalls, the Doctor turned round to find the magnificent figures of yet more warriors fencing the sky behind him.

Instinct rather than natural courtesy drew the Doctor to his feet. He backed away awkwardly over the rocks-and found himself among the group he had been watching.

Ruther was pointing at him. 'This is another Stranger.'

Like Ruther's, the voice of the warrior who had been waiting was hollow and sinister behind the tall mask. 'Who are you, Stranger?'

'That, my feathered friends,' said the Doctor, 'is the strangest thing of all. D'you know, I'm not entirely sure.'

Only scores of feet below, though many times further by way of the path, Nyssa and Tegan had been given early warning of the danger closing in on the Doctor from behind. They had concealed themselves as best they could in the shadow of a boulder, helpless as they watched the late-arriving group carry past a familiar object on their shoulders. 'No wonder we couldn't find it,' exclaimed Nyssa under her breath. It was the Zero Cabinet.

They let the warriors go by, and resumed the struggle up the path, their lengthening shadows alternately trailing and scouting ahead as they wound to and fro up the hillside. Any moment they might be discovered, but they knew the Doctor was in urgent need of their help.

Then from the rocks above them, frightening them out of their skins, came the penetrating shriek of a hunting horn. Tegan, whose reactions were faster, pulled Nyssa against the cliff wall, where they pressed themselves into the shadows, feeling sure they must have been seen. But instead of cries of pursuit there came a terrible rumbling sound. The solid rock itself began to shake, and they had to clutch at the spa.r.s.e dry foliage to stop themselves falling.

It was not an earthquake that opened the hillside, the Doctor was gratified to see, but some huge concealed mechanism that levered back an expanse of the vertical cliff face to reveal a long flight of steps leading up inside the rock. The sun was no more than a fading red stain on the horizon, but the flambeaux that were being lit held back the enclosing blanket of darkness, and flashed sparkles of light from the cave walls.

The tall masked leader who had waited for the one called Ruther raised up a hand to his warriors, gesturing that the Doctor should be the first to ascend the steps. The bearers of the burden that had been the centre of interest before the Doctor's arrival picked up their load and went in behind him, followed closely by Ruther's group with their prize of the Zero Cabinet.

Nyssa and Tegan had overcome their fear and run the last few steps of the way to see what was happening. They arrived just as the straggling tail of the torch-lit procession disappeared into the cavernous entrance. Unthinkingly the two girls ran forward. 'Doctor! Come back!' they shouted together, but their voices were drowned under the sound of the rock entrance closing once more, blending into the cliff wall and leaving them in a sudden darkness.

The Doctor lost all track of the geography of his journey, but the steps at last gave way to even ground, and he found himself standing on flagstones under a star-bright sky. Shadowy buildings fringed the wide square, in the centre of which was a fountain. Beside it a great spit had been set up, with a pile of wood beneath it ready to be lit. They seated him on a bench that backed up to the fountain. The bustle and merriment around him came to his ears as a confusion of sound, but he could make out the hollow masked voices of his captors clearly enough.

'Shall I instruct the women to light the fire?' asked Ruther of his taller masked companion.

'We'll wait for Shardovan,' said the other, and then, addressing the warriors in general: 'Well, sirs, today has been a good adventure in the Wilds beyond the Walls.'

Several voices responded in a.s.sent, and among them the Doctor heard: 'And a quarry worth the name.' At this the one called Ruther intruded a note of scepticism. 'A fair kill, though I have seen better.'

A new voice, tinged with deep melancholy, joined the exchange. 'Ah, if we could cook your memories, Ruther, we would feast indeed.'

At that moment women were putting torches to the bonfire, and the flames that sprang up beneath the spit seemed to join in the general merriment at the newcomer's remark. The Doctor raised his head at the sound of the new voice, and in the firelight thought he saw a tall, slim, distinguished gentleman in dark, plain suiting and a spotless high-collared s.h.i.+rt. Had he been in his right mind the incongruity would have come as a great surprise, but the Big Dipper of the Doctor's consciousness was in the middle of one of its low swoops, and the part of his mind that retained a measure of control was sure he must be hallucinating.

The newcomer bent to look at the Doctor. Disappointed possibly at the air of vagueness in the eyes that met his, he said over his shoulder, not unpleasantly: 'I trust, Mergrave, you have returned from the hunt with something more edible than this lifeless unfortunate?' The Doctor took in the words, though their meaning escaped him, and he did not at all catch the reply from Mergrave, the hunt leader.

The dark-suited gentleman turned back to the Doctor with a strange gleam in his eye, although it may simply have been a trick of the firelight. 'You are fit for dinner, sir I trust?'

Tegan s.h.i.+vered. A cold wind had begun to gust around the rock face producing a curious moaning sound that very much matched her own mood. Nyssa, who always seemed capable of working on without complaint under any sort of adversity, was paying patient attention to where she guessed the great door fitted into the rock.

'Closed without a trace!' she announced eventually. 'If we had a three-micron beam wedge...'

'Well, we haven't,' Tegan snapped. The cold and the frustration were getting to her.

Nyssa remained calm. 'I said "if". You taught me about "if", remember.'

'It's not that sort of "if". It's what we can do with what we've got- if if we only used a bit of initiative.' Despite her despondence, Tegan had been surveying the possibilities of climbing the cliff. The white turrets, visible in the starlight, didn't seem all that far away. we only used a bit of initiative.' Despite her despondence, Tegan had been surveying the possibilities of climbing the cliff. The white turrets, visible in the starlight, didn't seem all that far away.

She signalled to Nyssa to give her a leg up. The rock was not as smooth as it looked, and there were easy handholds if you felt around for them. She found a convenient ledge and reached down for Nyssa's hand. That was how, without making any particular decision to do it, they found themselves engaged in the perilous ascent of the rock face.

They climbed for a long time, but the white walls of Castrovalva still seemed as far above them as ever. 'We'll never get up there,' said Nyssa, stating it as a fact.

'Do you want to go back?' asked Tegan.

Nyssa glanced down at the path below, which was now no more than a thin silver thread in the moonlight. The return journey looked even more perilous. 'We seem to be committed.'

From his position on the bench in the square the Doctor was beginning to see a little sense, and what he saw he did not like. For the past few minutes his still-confused consciousness had been wrestling with three disparate perceptions: the hunting garb his captors wore, the cooking arrangements being made so close by, and his own involuntary presence among them. In the light of the fires that were now flickering under the empty spit, the masked faces that loomed over him took on a spurious liveliness.