City of Death

by Douglas Adams

  Which, he realised, as he paused in front of one of Turner’s boiling skies, included building the most complicated time machine this world had ever seen. Would ever see.

  His smile flickered and then fell. It should be fine. Kerensky, for all his annoyances, would do it. He was a brilliant mind. Scarlioni had made quite sure of this. He would carry out the new plans. Scarlioni had watched the Professor as he worked, and had thought, I know what this is.

  Sometimes children repeat classes. It happens. You move them from one school to another. They sit down in an unfamiliar room, surrounded by new and worrying classmates, and then the teacher begins to explain the lesson. At first the child feels utter incomprehension. Then the realisation dawns: ‘I know all this. I have done this.’ Then the child sneaks a glance around at his classmates, no longer terrifying and strange. ‘These poor fools. They know nothing.’ By the end of the lesson, boredom has set in and the child is flicking pens and setting fire to the desks.

  In much the same way, Count Carlos Scarlioni had realised that he was, at first, following Kerensky’s work, and then instinctively correcting it. He had felt no alarm at this. It was what he was supposed to do. And now the Patron had overtaken the Professor.

  It was all part of the plan. The plan was working perfectly. There were seven Mona Lisas. There were seven buyers. Equipment would be bought, power would be allocated, government officials would be bribed, power station employees would be paid not to go on strike. Everything would go marvellously to plan and eventually the world would never be the same again.

  He realised Hermann was now standing by his side and asked him to bring yet more champagne to the library. They’d never get through all of it, he thought sadly.

  A nagging doubt wandered into his mind. Something was wrong. Oddly not here and now. No, something was wrong five centuries ago. That Doctor, that prattling fool. Something to do with him. The uncertainty grew in Scarlioni’s mind. Had he dreamt it? Was that it?

  * * *

  Hermann watched the Count stride away.

  Hermann was puzzled. This should be the happiest night of the Count’s life. And yet, for once, his master did not seem happy.

  * * *

  The Countess noticed the change in her husband.

  Carlos swept into the room and barely acknowledged her. She had placed the ice pack theatrically on her forehead, and was managing her bravest wince. Carlos would glide to her, falling to his knees by her chaise, kiss the tender bruise in her forehead and promise her, oh so valiantly, that it did not mar her beauty. ‘And anyway, ma chérie,’ he would purr. ‘Real beauty is what’s inside.’

  Occasionally, Heidi indulged herself in such romances. It often seemed that she was living inside one. You could live in Switzerland, surrounded by money, but feel no romance. And yet, here she was, with a fabulous palace, a beautiful, dashing, clever husband. They were the stars of Parisian society and also pulling off the greatest crime the world had ever known.

  It was, she thought, all gloriously romantic. But Carlos sometimes behaved as though it was just a part he was playing. What was really going on inside his head? She sometimes wanted to ask him, but then her bracelet itched and she would think about something else.

  Hermann brought them champagne on a silver platter that a Crusader had pillaged from Jerusalem. Carlos smiled wryly as he and his wife compared notes on the escape of Duggan and his associates. Clearly, amazingly, that English idiot had done the best thing a fool could do—find some clever friends. So what, though? They didn’t matter. Hermann assured them the finest corrupt policemen in Paris were combing the city for them. Their quarry would soon be back here, grovelling, screaming and making a mess of the carpet.

  Facetiously, the Countess even suggested presenting the flamboyant one with a bill. What was he called, again? The Doctor, wasn’t it? The Count had smiled at that and then repeated the name, at first with a laugh and then with a far graver tone. What was troubling him? Déjà vu, or some forgotten memory?

  The Countess ordered him not to worry. After all, the hard bit, the audacious bit, had just happened. The Mona Lisa had practically stolen itself. The finest cat burglars in France were even now bobbing down a storm drain into the Seine. It was all going wonderfully to plan.

  To plan? Carlos had nodded. He’d been staring out of the window, looking at the twinkling lights of the wonderful city. In Paris’s long history, things very rarely went to plan unless you were ruthlessly determined. For a plan to work, it had to be extraordinarily thorough. They had left nothing to chance. The Count scratched at an itch above his right eye and then wandered over to the mirror. He stared at his face in the mirror and tried to work out what was wrong with it. Something was missing. Its absence was clear, and was obviously disconcerting the Countess. Hermann had looked at him strangely as well. The Count searched his reflection and he could not see what it was. Two eyes, sharp nose, a mouth, ears, hair. But something was out of place. Oh that was it. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost his smile.

  Try as he might, it would not come back.

  ‘Why do you still worry, my dear?’ The Countess appeared, draping an arm across his shoulder, puffing away at her cigarette holder. Her eyes were gleaming like jewels. ‘We have the Mona Lisa! We’ve done it! Think of the wealth that will be ours.’

  ‘The wealth is not everything.’ She really was such a petty creature, Carlos found himself thinking.

  The Countess took the dismissal in good stead. Of course, how bourgeois to talk about cash at a time like this. ‘The achievement,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, I know, the achievement!’ She tapped him on the chin fondly.

  Gently, he lifted her hand away and turned to her. ‘Achievement?’ He stared beyond her, attention fixed on the Paris skyline. ‘You talk to me of achievement because I steal the Mona Lisa?’

  He laughed then, and something in that laugh chilled her. It had been a long time since Heidi had been made to feel stupid.

  ‘Can you imagine how a man might feel if he had caused the pyramids to be built? The heavens to be mapped? Accounted for the movement of the planets? Created the first wheel! Showed the true use of fire.’ The Count gazed out at Paris and found it, after all, nothing. ‘To have brought up a whole race from nothing. To save his own race.’

  The Countess was baffled. Carlos was behaving oddly. She’d been expecting him to perhaps feel a little anti-climax, but this was something else. Gone was the dryness, the suave calm. Instead he was shaking with zeal. She felt a sudden thrill. Perhaps this vast crime was simply a way to open a door to something more shocking, even more daring. But she was also puzzled. ‘What are you talking about, my dear? No one can achieve everything!’

  ‘I do not ask for everything.’ Carlos didn’t seem to be listening. His tone struck her as so odd. Both magnanimous and yet humble. Like the rich man bargaining with death. That was it. They had a picture of that somewhere. Of course they did. Several. ‘All I ask for is but a single life . . . and the life of my people.’

  His people? What was all this? Was he trying to tell her something, something about the real origins of his family? Could that be it? The obsession with wealth, the recovery of hidden artworks. Spouting nonsense that sounded like the myth of the Wandering Jew. Really? Was that really what he was trying to tell her? Why even bother keeping something like that a secret? Like she would care. Surely there could be no secrets between them. She adopted a coaxing tone. ‘Are you feeling all right, my dear?’

  ‘Yes.’ The Count was years away. The room was fading around him. Little hooks were tugging away at the corners of his brain. Connections were forming. This strange body, this terrible face, this whole stupid world was a trifle.

  Heidi watched Carlos in concern. This wasn’t the first time he’d been like this. She’d once found him lying on the floor of a hotel room in Geneva, shaking off all attempts at assistance. The hotel doctor had called it the p
etit mal and told her not to be concerned. He was right. It had passed with no ill effects. Such things happened to great men. She should have seen it coming—the concussion caused by that idiot Duggan was just the sort of thing to set this off. She should have recognised the signs. This strange euphoria was the last of the tide rushing out before the big wave came crashing down. The vacancy and the shaking, the raving. At times like this, he seemed so small, so human. She needed to be with him always and yet, right now, it was as if she wasn’t there at all.

  The Count could hear only one word. One word burning across every pathway in his brain.

  ‘Scaroth.’

  He mastered himself with an effort. ‘Don’t worry. I am feeling quite well. Please leave us.’

  ‘Us?’ The Countess was startled.

  ‘Me!’ he thundered, desperately. ‘Please leave me!’

  He knew she was rushing to his side, wanting to comfort and hold him. There was an ice pack. There was champagne. There was a chaise. She would fuss around him as though he were a spoilt pet dog. Why wouldn’t she just go?

  ‘Leave me!’ he snapped, and then, with a ghastly attempt at a grin, softened his tone. ‘I will join you in a minute.’

  The last thing she wanted to do was leave him in this state. Not now. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’

  ‘Go!’ he screamed, jerking a hand towards the door. He wouldn’t turn around, wouldn’t even face her. His voice was little more than a croak. ‘Go.’

  She tried not to be, but she was hurt. It was annoying that she wasn’t allowed to be sympathetic. To show her kinder, truer feelings. If it was a romance, then he would have let her nurse him. But no. The Count always kept her at a distance. Always.

  Plucking up her glass, Heidi swept from the room, making sure the door slammed behind her.

  Carlos didn’t hear it. The lights of Paris had gone now. Everything had gone except for eternity. It was all rushing together into one single beautiful word that made complete sense of everything.

  ‘Scaroth.’

  * * *

  Five centuries earlier, Captain Tancredi was transfixed by the same word, by the stream of thoughts pouring through his head. The connection was forming, but just now it was quite inconvenient. What had earlier been the odd little trickle of thoughts now became a flood, facts racing through him between the beginning of history and its very end.

  Tancredi could sense himself starting to shake. His hand flew to his face, feeling for once how unreal, how unnecessary it was. Oh, to tear it off and show these fools what he truly was.

  ‘I say, are you all right?’ That was the Doctor, still prattling away. He must not show his weakness to him.

  Tancredi, swaying only slightly, cleared his throat and looked around for the Doctor. For a moment he was blind, and when his vision cleared there was no sign of him. Tancredi realised he’d somehow turned himself around, staring at a painted Medusa. He shivered. How long had he been in the trance? Seconds, hopefully.

  ‘Scaroth!’

  No. He focused on the Doctor, still sat there, smiling away, waggling the thumbscrews at him in a friendly wave. Tancredi advanced on him. What had they been talking about?

  ‘Continue, Doctor,’ he began, his mouth dry. Safe opening. Right. Yes. The Doctor had been speculating on how exactly his various fragments communicated. And now this happened. As if he could see it coming. How was that possible? Even for a race as old and cruel as the Time Lords? ‘You were saying the interfaces of the time continuum were unstable. I know that!’ Tancredi groaned bitterly. The guard was looking at him in concern. Tancredi waved him away. He needed neither help nor burning as a demon. Not just now. He pounded his fists desperately on the table. ‘Tell me something useful, Doctor!’

  He leant forward to twist the screws, and that voice called again, jerking him up in puppet twitches.

  ‘Scaroth!’

  ‘Wait,’ he pleaded with himself. Just a few more moments with the Doctor and he would have something of real value to tell them. He was interrogating a Time Lord! ‘Wait,’ he begged.

  ‘Righty-oh,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Not you! Continue talking, Doctor.’

  ‘Scaroth!’ the summons came again.

  ‘A moment,’ he whimpered. The Doctor was a Time Lord, a race as ancient as the Jagaroth. But so little was known about them—they were a race of unneighbourly observers, keeping themselves to themselves. How did they travel through time? It was all a mystery. One he could solve right now with the thumbscrews.

  He staggered furiously to the table, and stood over the Doctor, wavering. He licked his lips, or tried to. Something went wrong. Where was his tongue? At the edge of his blurring vision, he saw the guard flinch. The fellow had seen too much and would have to die.

  ‘I say,’ hissed the Doctor to the guard. ‘Is he always like this?’

  ‘It’s not my business to notice,’ the guard hissed back, barely hiding his alarm.

  ‘Ah,’ the Doctor sympathised.

  Tancredi steadied himself against the desk, motioning to the guard. ‘Hold him!’

  The guard, with a hint of an apologetic shrug, brought his rapier to bear.

  The Doctor had once, for reasons that were really very complicated, been banned from the Adventure Playground at Whipsnade Zoo. However, the skills he’d learned on the rope slide came in handy as he whipped the thumbscrews off the desk and plunged them onto the point of the sword. With dexterity that amazed the Doctor most of all, he’d threaded the thumbscrews onto the rapier without losing even a single digit. He now slid the thumbscrews down to the pommel. As the puzzled guard tried to tug away, the sword shattered with a satisfying snap. Always, the Doctor thought, use your enemy’s own strength against him. And pay the extra sixpence for a flake on your Mr Whippy. Those were two good rules to live by.

  The guard stood there, waggling the swordless handle around, piggy face crumpling with childish misery. He rushed at the Doctor. The Doctor bowed, smiled, and tripped him with the flat of the sword blade. The guard fell against Captain Tancredi, who didn’t even seem to notice.

  The Doctor moved quickly. With an unwieldy shrug, the blade fell to the floor. Meanwhile, the Doctor twisted open the thumbscrews with his teeth and, with what he hoped was a practised stumble, fell against the door of the TARDIS.

  The guard was close behind him, and, on occasions like this, the TARDIS key just wouldn’t be found. Holding up one hand to stop the guard, the Doctor hastily patted down his pockets. Breast pocket, outside left, inside left, outside right, inside right, trouser right, trouser left, back pockets, oh dear—

  The door sprang open. ‘Good dog, K-9,’ the Doctor breathed, falling in and slamming it shut behind him.

  The guard beat against the TARDIS door with the hilt. And then stopped. There was something about the box that was oddly reassuring.

  ‘Captain!’ he called.

  But Tancredi barely seemed to notice. The Captain’s face was twisted in misery and something worse. It was all askew. ‘Leave us!’

  ‘Us?’ The guard looked around hopelessly.

  ‘Me,’ Tancredi scowled, his whole forehead crumpling. ‘Leave me!’

  The guard, smartly sensing he’d rather be anywhere else, saluted neatly, turned on his heel and didn’t stop until he reached Padua.

  * * *

  ‘Scaroth!’

  Captain Tancredi fell into himself. At first it was a random jumble of thoughts zipping backwards and forwards, a frantic inrush of faces and identities.

  In the Vatican, a Pope dropped his chalice to the floor, and turned away from his Cardinals. He was speaking in tongues again.

  A crusader paused in ransacking Jerusalem.

  In Ireland an abomination screamed at the stake as the flames rose around it.

  At the Senate of Byzantium, friends rushed a senator hur
riedly from the chamber.

  In a Venetian palazzo, a slumbering English nobleman talked in his sleep.

  In a house outside Athens, slaves ignored the cries of their master.

  In Egypt, a labour gang stopped work on the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The awful figure of the architect stood atop the pyramid screaming at the sky.

  In Babylon, an astronomer fell forward across his star charts.

  On the banks of the Euphrates, the first wheel tumbled from its inventor’s hand.

  In a cave, the first firemaker spoke to the fire and the fire spoke back to him. The tribe watched in awe.

  * * *

  It was like the first day of sunshine after an endless winter. All those thoughts crowding in, extra dimensions looping and tangling. Questions answering themselves. Let there be so much light.

  The Scaroth had a litany of sorts. It was recited as they arrived and drew sense from it. Some of the splinters knew exactly who they were and what their part was in the great purpose. Others were lost in their own identities and found the process a shock. One could only ever enter the gestalt in dreams. And yet, he too worked for the purpose. Seeing it to its final completion.

  Scaroth. We are here.

  Together we are Scaroth.

  I am Scaroth. Many together in one.

  The Jagaroth shall live through me.

  Together we have pushed this puny race,

  These humans, shaped their paltry destiny

  To meet our ends.

  Soon we shall be.

  The centuries that divide me shall be undone.

  The centuries that divide me shall be undone.

  The centuries that divide me shall be undone.

  * * *

  Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor and K-9 looked at Tancredi’s figure babbling that last line over and over, staggering around Da Vinci’s studio, hurling chairs, scattering tables and smashing priceless models into matchsticks. Clearly the interface wasn’t the only thing that was unstable.