by Steve Cole
As he turned, decisive at last, Consus saw the witch-woman hovering behind him, her clawed hands outstretched. He opened his mouth to scream, but her dirt-caked talons were already pressing into his temples and heat was coursing through his body. The witch’s narrowed eyes blazed like molten gold.
‘You are poisoned,’ she said, in what sounded like two voices, her own and something deeper. ‘The harvest must be pure.’
Then Consus saw nothing but the flames that consumed him.
From over Vitus’s shoulder, Graham watched Consus die and the Tenctrama leave the blaze like a wizened old phoenix, nursing his palpitations in the undergrowth. He’d hoped the woods would be safer now with the dead men all migrating to the battlefield, hoped that they might just make the journey back to Legion of Smoke HQ without something horrible happening.
Stupid, Graham told himself. Why would you ever think that?
‘The witches have begun to murder for its own sake?’ Even Vitus seemed shaken by what they’d seen. ‘Is there not enough death for them this day?’
‘Consus wasn’t poisoned,’ Graham said quietly. ‘I healed him.’
‘May his soul rest well,’ said Vitus, ‘wherever he has gone.’
Graham nodded, troubled, as Vitus dug his heels into their horse and they broke through the bracken, galloping away, stirring flecks of ash as they departed.
Inkri nodded with satisfaction as Mekimma and Enkalo returned to the lair.
‘The Visigoth king is removed,’ said Mekimma.
‘And the slave of Aetius,’ Enkalo said. ‘Now, Attila must be removed.’
‘Not yet. His army will lose its spirit and flee without him. Let him fight on to the last as the bodies build around him … then let the last Huns fall in despair as they watch their king burn.’ Inkri closed her eyes, wheezed a long breath inwards as if inhaling the horror far below. ‘We are so close to the trigger point … so close.’
‘The location of the Doctor and her friends is less clear,’ Enkalo said. ‘They do not carry our corruption. They are harder to trace.’
‘They will be found,’ Inkri said. ‘They will burn.’
Now the Doctor and Yaz were back, Ryan didn’t want to let either of them out of his sight. They’d swapped the barest details of their adventures and experiences, but now the Doctor was off striding ahead as always, like she was trying to outrun her own coattails. She stopped abruptly, attention taken by something on the glowing wall – knowing her, probably a ladybird or something. Ryan took the moment to check on Yaz. She looked tired and strained, shivering in the dank atmosphere of the catacombs. Ryan pulled off his hoodie and tried to put it round her shoulders.
Yaz shook her head, shrugged it off. ‘I don’t need it.’ Then she sighed, turned to face him. ‘Sorry, Ryan. This has been a tough day.’
‘For me too.’ He forced a cheeky smile. ‘I had to walk through a ton of tunnels and make awkward conversation with this Roman girl.’
‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’ Liss said behind him, making him jump. ‘And so caring.’
‘Wow!’ Yaz raised her eyebrows. ‘Clearly you two have been getting along very well.’
Ryan felt bashful. ‘Yeah. It’s all good.’
Liss pointed to the Doctor. ‘And you both get to travel with her.’
‘It’s me who gets to travel with them!’ The Doctor’s smile faltered as she grew pensive. ‘I wonder if I should pop back out and find Attila. Try to make him stop the fighting.’
‘Huh?’ Ryan was glad of the change of subject but not its implications. ‘What are you on about?’
‘We need to stop the killing.’
‘He’s Attila the Hun, he’ll kill you!’ Yaz protested.
‘What about Aetius?’ Ryan looked at Licinia. ‘Liss, you called your boss and told him about the Doctor – can’t you make him see reason and stop fighting?’
‘I can’t imagine he’ll listen. Perhaps if Vitus tells him too?’ She produced her talk-box. ‘Vitus? If you can, lend me your ear …’
‘Ha!’ At this, the Doctor swung round, delighted. ‘I swear the TARDIS telepathic circuits have a sense of humour. Wait, you shouldn’t have anachronistic technology like that, Liss! Just like you shouldn’t have dioxylithium glow-algae from the Cygnus cluster on the walls, here. Naughty Roman lady. I think you’re probably nice, though, aren’t you?’
Liss beamed. ‘Probably.’
‘I knew it.’ The Doctor swiped the talk-box and peered at it. ‘Well! This looks like a Velucron comms-link.’
‘Velucron?’ Licinia gazed at her in still more awe. ‘You can name the relics?’
‘Yes, and with really big words! It’s a gift of mine. I’m the Doctor, by the way.’
‘Of course you are. That’s why we came for you.’ She frowned suddenly. ‘You know, you really look nothing like your votive effigy.’
‘My what?’
Suddenly the metal glowed blue. ‘Licinia,’ Vitus’s voice came from inside, ‘are you all right?’
The Doctor adopted a cut-glass posh accent. ‘Liss can’t come to the phone right now, who’s this?’
‘Doc?’ Graham’s voice came over loud and clear, and there was instant pandemonium as Ryan and Yaz burst forward to grab the Doctor’s wrist and lean in to speak to him.
‘Graham!’ Yaz cried.
‘You’re all right?’ said Ryan.
‘How did he know it was me?’ the Doctor marvelled.
‘I’m a whole lot better for hearing you lot!’ Graham told them. ‘Doc, Yaz, we saw you on the battlefield, and Ryan, when I lost you—’
‘If I might be allowed to continue?’ Vitus must’ve snatched back the comms-link. ‘Liss, I take it you’ve found my target.’
‘He was gonna kill you, boss!’ Graham shouted.
‘He had orders to kill you.’ Deftly Liss swiped the metal plate from the Doctor’s grip. ‘He was never going to act on them, though.’
‘I was there, I can vouch,’ said Ryan.
‘Vitus,’ Liss went on, ‘I’m in the catacombs with Ryan and his friends. The Doctor says we need to—’
‘How is our great enigma?’ Vitus asked eagerly. ‘Is it the man or the woman?’
‘The woman!’
‘And what’s she like?’
‘Impatient!’ The Doctor snatched the comms-link. ‘Vitus, hi. You must get hold of Aetius and tell him to stop the fighting. Liss will do the same.’
‘Stop fighting? But Aetius will never surrender to the Huns.’
‘That’s what the Tenctrama are banking on, but we need the battle to stop. The more dead there are, the better things go for the witches.’ The Doctor closed her eyes and squeezed the comms-link tightly. ‘Now, get on to him, persuade him, one of you, both of you, please!’
‘All right.’ Vitus paused. ‘Liss, we’re making our way back to base. Careful if you go outside – there are Tenctrama active out here. We saw one appear from nowhere and burn up a deserter at random.’
‘Burn up? That’s new.’
‘She said he was poisoned,’ Graham put in, ‘but he was tip-top, I’d used the healing gel on him earlier. S’pose it might’ve been revenge for the one that died in Aetius’s tent …’
Yaz took hold of the comms-link. ‘She was poisoned. Healing gel in the water. I dunno how it works but her energy was all messed up. They had to vent her energy from the Pit.’
You could almost hear Graham’s frown. ‘Come again?’
‘No, she couldn’t,’ said the Doctor, thoughtfully. ‘That was it for her.’
‘Get here as soon as you can, Graham, yeah?’ Yaz held the comms-link up for Ryan.
‘Bye,’ he said. ‘And take care, all right?’
‘Half-left,’ said Graham.
Yaz rolled her eyes in perfect tandem with Ryan.
Liss stepped between them and took the comms-link. ‘I’d best try and call the old man.’
‘Yes. Do.’ The Doctor pushed her hair off her forehead, deep in thought
. ‘Vented from the Pit, energy lost, not to be recycled … Perhaps because the gel brings life and the Tenctrama feed on death and decay.’ She gestured around. ‘That’s probably why they took over these catacombs, way, way back and turned them into a secret hidey-hole.’
Liss stared at her, gobsmacked. ‘What?’
Yaz shook her head. ‘Doctor, their base is in the sky, not underground.’
‘Sure, now it is. But ten, eleven hundred years ago, no. A grub stays in the mud till it’s grown. Only then does it poke its head out and fly up to the tree.’ She mimed a wriggling thing with her finger. ‘See, newborn, or freshly projected from inside this Pit of theirs, they’d need a place to hide underground and grow stronger. Right here, down among the dead, with access to a quiet little town of the living nearby. Growing. Learning. Gathering samples and intelligence. Adapting their DNA to fit in with the locals, beginning the cycle.’
‘Where’s your evidence?’ Liss demanded.
‘Hidden.’ The Doctor grinned suddenly. ‘Luckily I have a nose for sniffing out alien tech. Honestly, I do!’ She tapped the wall, and now Ryan saw what she’d really been looking at there – a small slate barely visible in the algae-light. ‘Alien Tech 101: this is a door handle.’
She buzzed the sonic over it, and a section of solid rock rumbled open. Cold, stinking air wafted out from the hidden cave. Ryan cringed not just from the smell but from the scene revealed: there was an altar – or more like, a stone operating table surrounded by strange instruments – with a twisted human skeleton lying across it.
‘Who was that?’ Ryan wondered aloud.
‘A subject in a Tenctrama experiment,’ the Doctor supposed, nosing about. ‘There’ll have been so many over the years. Inkri and her kind checking that their genetic tampering was progressing correctly as it was passed on through the generations … Making corrections and adjustments.’
Liss looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’
The Doctor came out of the cave and explained all she’d learned from Inkri in Attila’s camp. Yaz watched as Liss grew greener in the pale light of the tunnel.
‘You were right, then, Ryan, about the grain the Tenctrama gave us.’ Liss was clutching her stomach. ‘And the Antonine plague they predicted – they started that, didn’t they? Those that survived were … changed somehow?’
‘Who knows what antibodies or proteins were generated by that infection …’ The Doctor looked Liss up and down and beamed. ‘Smart observations. I like her, Ryan. Well found.’
‘She kind of found me.’
‘I chased him for miles,’ Liss confided.
‘He’s so worth it, though, isn’t he?’ said the Doctor, slapping Ryan’s shoulder fondly.
Ryan’s smile faded as the tunnel shook with unknown things thundering overhead – horses? Strava? Thousands of soldiers running for their lives …?
‘Maybe we could all chase Ryan,’ Yaz said with panto enthusiasm, ‘away from here.’
‘Come on, then.’ The Doctor had found another small slate further along the tunnel wall, and now scanned it with the sonic. ‘Let’s explore Tenctrama technology a little further …’
Chapter 27
Sweating and tense as a bowstring at full stretch, Attila watched as his men swarmed over an injured Strava, trying to bring it down without falling prey to tusks or teeth. The beast looked to have bathed in blood, shrieking blind defiance as the blows rained down. Its victims stirred at its clawed feet, revived as glistening flesh bubbled up from inside to seal gaping wounds.
The scene had grown far too familiar.
Attila turned, took a flask from his bodyguards and drank deeply. Battle thus far had been joined in two successive waves, colossal and confused. The jerking corpses had seized the chance to rejoin the battle, until the once-parched mud of the plains now oozed blood with every footfall. The worst of it was that after all the horror and carnage, it was Roman forces that held the hill.
The Strava was finally dispatched, and a ragged cheer rose from the survivors of the work. Attila knew he must capitalise on any victory, however small. ‘You see how we triumph over the beasts of Rome!’ he roared at his men like the lion they knew him to be. ‘You see how panic drives the enemy to the high ground. They fear our might on the open plain. The glory of this battle is promised to us!’
And yet even as he harangued his dogs, he felt uneasy. The pale, gory dead still stood close in the ranks, murmuring and twitching. He’d always told his followers that victory was won through sheer force – hack through the nerves of the enemy and they cannot lift limbs against you. And yet here were warriors on both sides who could stand with the bones broken from their bodies. These dead Huns followed no order to retreat or repose, only to attack.
But he knew in his heart: It is not me these dead men follow, and not me they fight for. They are simply the puppets of witches. Like the Strava, that had no master but bloodlust, these creatures of dead flesh wore the masks of Huns and Romans over the faces of devils.
He looked up to the sky, and in the gathering clouds he seemed to see the laughing faces of Inkri and her Tenctrama sisters. If I am to die, Attila thought, let me be slain by men whose hearts beat with vengeance for all I have taken from their lands, not at the jerking sword of a brainless dolt.
The mutter of distant thunder proved to be hoofbeats across the plain, as the banners of Rome took flight towards the Hun front lines. Well, let them come! Attila was ready to lead a new charge. He rose on his magnificent white horse and signalled with his sword for his army to follow him, once again.
Fifes and horns swanked and blared, and drums burst the eardrums as they rolled, but soon all music was eclipsed by the shouts rising from fifty thousand throats in one overwhelming roar, Attila’s loudest of all: ‘Hoooy-raaaaah!’
As he followed the Doctor through the Tenctrama chambers hollowed from the rock, Ryan’s nerves were jangling hard enough to be heard. Yaz stayed close beside him while Liss brought up the rear, still trying to contact her Roman boss on the battlefield. Never any luck.
The Doctor had led them through more ‘operating rooms’ like the first they’d found, each with the bones of a different victim abandoned on the altar. Beyond those, a wall had rumbled open onto a long, narrow chamber bored out of the rock. Huge misshapen crystals hung down from the ceiling, while the floor was covered with soil and the wispy husks of ancient plants.
‘The Tenctrama’s crops.’ Liss surveyed the remains. ‘Their gift to us.’
‘Let’s hope you aren’t what you eat,’ Ryan murmured.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Because I’d be dead?’
‘I didn’t mean that!’ Ryan protested.
‘Smooth,’ Yaz told him. ‘Doctor, what’re you hoping to find here?’
‘Connections,’ she said vaguely, activating the next slate in the wall.
A new door opened, releasing a zoo-cage stink so thick it nearly choked Ryan. ‘Ugh, that’s well rank!’
‘What happened here?’ Yaz pointed to the distorted, desiccated bodies of huge beasts littering the floor of this latest laboratory. ‘What. The. Hell?’
Liss was clutching her stomach. ‘They look a bit like Strava.’
‘Steps along the way.’ The Doctor had stooped to inspect the bodies. ‘Putting evil into evolution. But how do they do it?’
‘Do what?’ said Yaz.
‘How do they twist death back into life in a form that they can control?’
Ryan reached out to touch a cracked and blackened outgrowth of crystal, projecting from the wall. A chunk of it fell away with a noisy crash that made everyone jump. ‘Sorry,’ he said quickly.
‘There’s something inside.’ Yaz pulled out a tube that looked to be made of some metallic stone. ‘They used stuff like this in their lair, for controlling things.’
‘Maybe the crystal was a holder,’ Ryan suggested. ‘Like the holster thing Nan had for her remote.’
‘Or a charger.’ The Doctor took hold of the weird
device, turning it over in her hands.
‘I don’t understand your words,’ said Liss. ‘You’re saying this is a Tenctrama tool?’
‘Yes, it is.’ The Doctor worked the sonic, and the tube glittered with golden light. ‘From the way Inkri was talking, I knew they had to have used something like this.’ Three holographic crystals grew from one end like blown bubbles, helical structures turning inside. ‘A genetic manipulator …’
Yaz worked out what the patterns looked like ahead of Ryan. ‘Is that DNA?’
The Doctor bestowed a brief but brilliant smile on her. ‘It is.’
‘What’s DNA?’ asked Liss.
‘Do Not Ask,’ said the Doctor. ‘But since I like you: basically, you can’t see it or touch it, but all life’s made up of it, one way or another.’
‘No, life is made up of the humours,’ Liss stated. ‘Blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile …’
‘Or you could call them adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. Same difference. Kind of.’ The Doctor tapped the manipulator. ‘In here we have the “humours” from several animals – lion, rhino, wolf, others – combined and augmented to create a hybrid creature. A Strava.’
‘The Tenctrama must’ve travelled all over the world,’ said Ryan, ‘finding the animals that made the deadliest killer.’
Liss nodded. ‘Some of the old depictions do show them with wild animals.’
‘But what’s the final ingredient?’ The Doctor was pulling at the glowing crystals, drawing out new ones, shifting them about like a juggler working on her act. ‘What kicks in at the moment of death to rewire brain and body in a new paradigm …?’ She plucked a different pattern from another crystal, a distorted shadow of the other DNA designs. ‘Oh, I see, you do. You kick in.’
Yaz shrugged. ‘Tenctrama DNA?’
‘A kind of genetic energy. Essence of Tenctrama.’ The Doctor winked at Liss. ‘A fifth humour.’ She rushed back to the dead plants in the chamber beyond, touched the other end of the tube to a withered leaf. A black spark jumped between the two, and the Doctor buzzed the sonic again, switching through the glowing bubbles with their spinning patterns. ‘There’ll be a match,’ she muttered, ‘there’ll be a match … there!’
