Falls the Shadow (37 page)

‘You,’ the grey man said, ‘were wrong.’

Tanith looked at her brother and he looked back at her.

‘Oh shit. Yeah,’ she said. ‘We never thought of that. Shit.’

Benny surveyed the gathering before her. The Doctor stood on the fringe of the chamber, his face calm and thoughtful as if he was sifting his way through the grey man’s words to find the meaning. The light in his eyes was neither triumphant nor defeated. Tanith prowled warily round the grey man.
He
seemed relaxed, his shoulders slumped and his expression confident. Gabriel looked uncertain, introspective. He still held Ace tight in his grasp. For her part she remained inscrutable. Typical Ace.

Winterdawn was dead. He lay at the grey man’s feet.

‘Excuse me, please,’ Benny chipped in, hearing her voice brimming not so much with confusion as with enthusiasm.

‘Bernice, I’m glad to see you safe.’ The man turned to her graciously. ‘I apologize for the behaviour of the Mandelbrot Set after my death. I was in a poor position to help.’

‘I cried,’ Bernice mumbled, wondering whether she should feel betrayed and then wondering why she didn’t. ‘No, I’m sorry. I, er, is this over?’

‘Oh yes.’ The grey man nodded, removed his hat and bowed slightly. ‘Gabriel and Tanith no longer feed from the world’s pain. There is no other source forthcoming They live now by force of will.’

‘Like everyone else,’ Tanith’s voice was husky, horrified.

‘There are some who’d envy you,’ the Doctor told them. Tanith scowled and waved her revolver at him. Benny could see how crudely and desperately she moved.

‘This hasn’t changed anything,’ Gabriel announced.

The grey man shook his head smartly.

‘Oh it has. Now you face the world on its own terms.’

‘Hey! Yeah.’ Ace was smiling broadly, wickedly. ‘Awright.’

She wrenched hard on Gabriel’s arm, letting her head drop and her teeth sink into his hand. He gasped. The knife handle was clasped in his hand, but now there was a second, smaller hand clawing at it.

‘Ace! No!’ the Doctor was yelling, his voice bursting out like a wall of meaningless sound. He sprang forward. Tanith too was whirling, her gun spinning to find a target, her eyes darting like a frightened animal’s. Benny felt a sudden sickness, a sudden panic. She saw the knife slip out of Gabriel’s grip and slide into’s Ace’s. She saw the blade zig‐
zag before Gabriel’s face.

There was a scream that seemed to emanate from everywhere, blending with the distant siren note. Gabriel’s hands leapt to his face.

Ace weighed the knife in one bloody hand. Its blade was scarlet.

Three stabs in quick succession. Chest. Stomach. Groin. Spots of blood leapt into the air. Gabriel howled and his voice was desperately human.

Tanith’s gun hand came up. There was a burst of sound and fire.

Ace threw the knife without blinking, then flinched, then clutched her shoulder, then balanced herself, then pursed her lips.

The knife touched Tanith’s hand as it flew. The revolver leapt from her fingers, though there seemed to be little blood or pain. Tanith stared at her hand, then at the gun on the floor, then at Ace’s determinedly satisfied expression. A thought ruffled her face. She turned and sprang for the exit, barrelling past the grey man at high speed.

Ace leapt, pouncing on the fallen revolver. She sprinted after Tanith.

‘Ace.’ The Doctor offered a quiet warning. Ace stopped in the door and looked back, her face expressing indifference. She slipped out of the Cruakh and away.

Gabriel stumbled, falling against Benny. His white suit and his white skin were turning a damp, sick pink and his fingers left a sticky red trail on Benny’s face and chest. She closed her eyes and swallowed and waited until she felt his body sink to its knees, to the floor, to its death.

Dear Diary, You know I’m not the screaming, vomiting and fainting type but please bear with me in these testing times…

She started to laugh, which puzzled her because she had seen the crude tears across Gabriel’s dead face and it hadn’t been funny at all.

Someone took her by the hands and gently led her away. She opened her eyes and saw the Doctor, his face grim but sympathetic. The grey man was out of her sight, maybe tending to the corpse. She didn’t want to think about it.

‘Are you going after Ace?’ she asked.

The Doctor’s features seemed older and more pained than she remembered. He pressed a hand under his eyes, stroking his face. He was tired too.

‘Yes,’ he said wearily. ‘She’ll kill Tanith. If I tried to stop her, I’d fail, so I won’t try.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you,’ Benny told him, but she smiled in sympathy. He was still holding her hands and his skin was warm.

‘I’m weak,’ the Doctor said, and he smiled to prove it.

The grey man slipped unobtrusively into Benny’s view, blending into his surroundings as if he had always been there. And, she realized, in a way he had. His forehead was furrowed and his lips pursed.

‘Gabriel had a jewel, set in a ring,’ he said. ‘Now it’s gone. How strange. Still, since I delight in loose ends I should be happy…’

‘Gabriel and Tanith? Are they dead?’ Benny asked.

‘Dead in all the senses you would understand,’ the grey man said. ‘The pain that gave rise to them endures. It cannot end, so long as there is time travel. But so long as there is no Cathedral that pain cannot be expressed.’ He sighed. ‘It is an ending, though not a satisfactory one.

‘Doctor, I was impressed by your solution. You perceived patterns which I did not. I may command time, yet it binds me and you are free. I brought you here because I believed Time Lords had the insight I lacked, a clarity of vision beyond me. But I suspect yours surpasses even that of your fellows.’

The Doctor snorted. He released Benny’s hands and she felt instantly isolated.

‘I have friends,’ he said in a ground, dangerous voice, ‘who in the past few days have been tortured and intimidated. I met a man whose home has been invaded, despoiled, destroyed. He’s dead, his family is dead. And the people who did this are also dead. I’m not happy with what I’ve done. Everything you’ve said is…
perverse
!’

‘Ah,’ the grey man said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry.’ The Doctor’s eyes were shadowed, turned away from the man’s. ‘Oh yes. I don’t like being used. Not by you, not in your metaphysical war. I don’t care what you do now, I’m going to find Ace.’

He turned and walked to the exit. Benny hung back, casting wistful glances between the two men. There was a tension between them, pushing them apart. Benny tasted the air – it was sharp and foul and upsetting. But she was too tired to raise much emotion over it.

‘Doctor,’ the grey man called. The Doctor stopped, turned back.

‘I’ve… never been dishonest Doctor. I’d be happy if our paths never cross again,’ the man said softly. He nodded to Bernice and frowned. ‘Benny maybe, I’d count you as a friend, and remember you fondly… But it may be that my metaphysical war will force us together, as allies, as enemies, as something other.’

‘I don’t…’ the Doctor blustered. The man silenced him with a smile.

‘I have never deceived you, but you have allowed yourself to be deceived, in the past. Be careful Doctor, please. When you return to the TARDIS you will find it restored.’ The Doctor turned brusquely, slipping through the door. The grey man called after him:

‘And Doctor, thank you.’

The Doctor was gone. Benny glanced after him, then turned to the man. He squatted on the floor looking wretched and lonely.

‘You two shouldn’t be fighting, you know.’

‘That is what I’ve been saying for a very long time,’ the man said. He laughed gently. It was a beautiful sound, as cool as the first drops of rain to fall, as fresh as spring flowers, as young and as light as life. When the grey man had spoken, or laughed before, it had been false or forced. Not this time. Benny slipped to her knees beside him.

‘What will you do now?’ she whispered conspiratorially.

‘I’ll leave,’ he said. ‘The cosmos is large. I shall walk and watch, and help where I can. There are people out there who would destroy me, but so many more I would like to meet… Perhaps I have more in common with the Doctor than I imagined.’ He shuddered. Benny placed a hand on his shoulder.

‘You can count me,’ she said, ‘as a friend.’

‘Thank you.’ The grey man looked away, distracted. ‘Cathedral will collapse soon. Winterdawn’s house will be expelled back into physical space, and there will be nothing left here but dust. Dust was all it ever was. I must remain and mourn its passing, alone.’

‘You won’t try and build another one?’

‘Frankly Benny, you must be joking.’

‘Haven’t you heard? I’m a funny girl.’

She looked round, seeing the bodies of Gabriel and Winterdawn lain across the cold floor of the Cruakh.

‘Most of the time,’ she added.

The siren‐
song of the Cathedral had dried away. The ground, the stone, the buildings were empty and silent. They grew vague, blurred round the edges, transparent in the distance. The city blazed as their substance drained – a glow harsher than day, harsher than the sun. But it grew dim, passing into blackness, into death. Ace paced through the shining streets, knowing that she walked in a corpse‐
city.

She didn’t think about it. She was single‐
minded. She was determined.

She imagined that Cathedral was the sort of city in which you only had to look to find something. No need for maps, no need for guides, no need for policemen on the corner – she doubted the geography was stable enough to be rigidly defined. In this city you walked until you found the building you wanted, the street you wanted, the person you wanted.

She’d dreamed about places like this, as a child.

She walked until she found Tanith, crouched in an alleyway. Her suit glowed like the wall around her. She hid in the light, almost invisible. Ace saw her, Ace had been
looking
.

Ace raised her revolver. There were five bullets in their chambers. The sixth had impacted badly on the shoulder of Ace’s jacket. The jacket had absorbed most of the smash, as it was designed to – but Tanith had been lucky. The bullet had torn the jacket fabric and broken Ace’s skin. The pain, the blood running down her arm, the gun‐
shape in her fist all helped concentrate her mind.

‘Tanith,’ she called. The name reverberated against the city walls.

Tanith. Tanith. Tanith. Tanith.

Tanith looked up. There were dark patches under her eyes, vivid against the whiteness of her flesh and the buildings round her. She squealed, dived out of her hiding place, into the alley.

Ace made four slight gestures with her forefinger.

There were four explosions, echoing against the city walls, howling.

Four wounds opened on Tanith’s back.

She stumbled, pitched forward, smashed into the ground.

Ace moved towards her, feeling nothing and thinking nothing. Her body trembled as she moved, perhaps with exhilaration, perhaps with fear. The alley walls soared about her, seeming to shake in time with her. The stone floor was like rubber beneath her feet.

Tanith was alive. She lay face down, moaning and stirring, her hands pushing at the ground as if trying to lift herself. Ace could see she lacked the strength even to crawl. She was alive, but she would die here.

Tanith looked round, looked up at Ace with wide, pitiful, desperate eyes. Ace met her gaze with a thoughtless stare. She knelt beside her and placed the barrel of the gun against Tanith’s exposed, smooth temple.

One bullet.

Ace squeezed.

There was a minute when she saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. At the end of the minute she rose and stepped back to look at what she had made. It was clumsy. It was messy. It was the sort of thing Page would have liked. Ace didn’t like it, and was grateful for that. She let the gun fall from her fingers.

She didn’t bother with regrets. Tanith was dead and her head was spread across the pavement. There was no way of changing that. Ace had squeezed and the squeeze was irrevocable.

She walked away. Behind her the alley grew dark and lost its shape.

Ace walked. She was looking for nothing in particular and the dying streets rolled past, allowing her to wander.

She came to a courtyard, to a plain fountain that still ran with clear, clean water. She paced up to it, pushing her hands into the stream and finding the water cool and lively. In Cathedral these qualities were rare.

She took off her jacket and let the thin stream play across her damaged shoulder. The water stung her wound and the thin trickle turned pink. She shook and splashed the water onto the bruises Gabriel and Tanith had made on her arm, on her chest, on her face. Her hands slipped into the water and she began to wash Gabriel’s blood from them.

‘Feeling guilty?’ asked the Doctor. He had appeared from nowhere beside her. ‘Lady Macbeth syndrome,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. Ace shook her head without feeling. She realized that the water and the air had become cold, too much like death against her skin. She pulled her jacket back on.

‘I was thinking about something Gabriel and Tanith offered me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think they were lying, not that time. But I said no.’ She shrugged. ‘I killed Tanith. It was easy. It didn’t feel any good. We’ve not
done
good, have we?’

The Doctor smiled sadly and offered no reply. They found themselves hugging briefly, bitterly, without knowing why.

They walked back to Golgotha together. Benny was there, waiting for them, waving to them. As they grew closer the wave became a point – a finger aimed towards the sky.

‘Look,’ she called. They turned. They looked. Behind them great cracks were forming in the dead black sky. The cracks intersected, making fragments, making jagged chunks. One fell from its place, disappearing at the horizon, leaving a cold blankness behind. Another piece fell, another, and another. A vicious wind screamed in the distance, toppling buildings.

‘The sky!’ Ace whooped, out of a sense of childish glee. ‘The sky is falling!’

‘Someone should go and tell the king,’ Benny murmured beside her.