The King's Dragon

by Doctor Who

  Rory sighed, bent down, and picked up the dish. 'No.'

  'So what now? We've got to keep them bringing out the metal.'

  Rory pocketed the dish. 'What we need is someone that's at least as good as you at getting people to do what they want. Seems obvious to me. We need Hilthe.' He caught the Teller's expression. 'Oh, don't you start!'

  'I feel I should I point out,' the Teller said silkily,

  'that I easily defeated Hilthe in the last election.'

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  'True, but then she's not the one that's caused two massive dragon-ships to come screaming over the city and raining fire down on it. I think her stock might be up.'

  The Teller stopped complaining, but he hardly looked happy.

  'Come on,' Rory said. 'Hilthe-wards.'

  'What shall we do?' Amy whispered. The huge image of Rory's face flickered and then disappeared.

  'We'll sneak over to the dragon,' the Doctor whispered back. 'Open it up. See if there's another dish. He has to go and talk to Hilthe. Get her to help.'

  'Oh, he'll like hearing you say that! All right, lead on.'

  They came out of the cover of the arcade and tiptoed towards the dragon.

  'Halt! You're under arrest!'

  Four of Beol's knights stepped out of the shadows, short swords drawn, and advanced on them. The Doctor ran, weaving around the columns of the arcade. Amy dived in the other direction, drawing away two of their pursuers.

  'I have to talk to Beol!' shouted the Doctor as he helter-skeltered round a pillar. 'He has to listen!

  Why won't any of you listen? Is it the jacket? The 180

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  mud's your fault! You should pave your roads! Is it the bow tie? Is it the face? How many times do I have to say it? Appearances can be deceptive! I'm nine hundred years old, you know!'

  Rushing past the main doors to the hall, the Doctor crashed straight into Beol, on his way in.

  'There you are! About time!' He smoothed down his jacket and straightened his bow tie. 'What does a man have to do to get an audience around here?'

  Beol seized the Doctor's arms, spun him round, and pinned him up against the wall of the chamber.

  'You have to listen!' said the Doctor, voice somewhat muffled now that his face was pressed up against gilded stone.

  Amy, at bay behind the dragon with two knights advancing on her, yelled at Beol, 'Stop being such a cloth-headed stupid lump of muscle and let the man speak to you!'

  Beol looked at her with a rather hurt expression and then, suddenly, his face changed.

  'What?' Amy said. 'What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?'

  'Amy!' cried the Doctor, trying to release himself from Beol's grasp.

  Amy looked down at her hands. Gold light was transforming the flesh on them, turning them 181

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  translucent.

  The Herald was coming — only this time she had not waited to be summoned.

  In sheer fury, the Doctor wrested himself free of Beol's hold. He ran across the council hall, but could not get close enough to the Herald to try to pull Amy back. Besides, it was already too late.

  Amy was enveloped in golden light. A strident harmony was building up, echoing off all the metal in the hall.

  Beol ran over to the Doctor. 'What's happening?' he shouted.

  The Doctor ignored him. 'Let her go!' he yelled at the Herald. 'This is a crime, a terrible crime! You don't have her permission! Get out of her body!'

  The Herald turned to face him, white light flashing from Amy's eyes. 'We have waited long enough,' she said, her voice harsh and belligerent, a terrible distortion of Amy's. 'Surrender the Enamour or we will destroy you. We will destroy this world.'

  Beol grabbed the Doctor's arm. 'What's happening? What has happened to your friend?

  What is this apparition?'

  The Doctor swung round to face him. 'This is your enemy!' he shouted at the young man and pointed at the Herald. 'Not Dant, not Sheal! This!

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  The enemy of us all! A power that uses other people as a means to her own ends! A mind that can only think of others as tools, as possessions!'

  'I know that enemy,' Beol said simply. 'What must I do to defeat it?'

  The Doctor did not reply. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out another device taken from the dragon earlier. It was a small black box. He dived forwards to set it on the floor a few metres away from the Herald and aimed it towards her.

  'What are you doing?' said Beol. 'What is that?'

  'This will defeat her,' the Doctor said, quietly, fiercely. 'It's done it at least once already.'

  A low howl rose up from the box.

  Beol started. 'I have heard this sound before many times.'

  'Watch,' said the Doctor.

  In bare seconds, a dark shape appeared and began to rise up, hands outstretched for the Herald.

  Beol, horrified, turned to the Doctor. 'But this is the beast I defeated only moments ago!'

  The howling got steadily louder, the scream of an angry, wounded animal. The King pressed his hands against his ears.

  'Defeated it?' The Doctor laughed hollowly. 'It was an illusion, Beol! They can make as many of these as they want. They'll keep sending them 183

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  down here to scream at you until you beg them to take their dragon back. But they'll set the city on fire first!' He had to shout to be heard over the cacophony, the discord between the Herald's martial music and the shriek of the Regulator that he was creating. 'Your victory was an illusion, Beol! You were never in danger!' The Doctor bent down over the controls, directing his Regulator to begin its assault on the Herald.

  The Herald reacted violently. She raised Amy's hands and sent waves of the golden rings of light out across the hall. They struck the two knights closest to her and sent them flying. They crashed against the big stone columns and fell to the ground, bodies crumpling as if they were nothing more than dolls thrown away by a spoiled child in a fit of pitiless pique. Beol ran to them, but the Herald, catching his movement, turned her wrath towards him. She lifted Amy's hand and prepared to send out another bolt of deadly light. Only the Doctor, turning the Regulator upon her, prevented Beol from being killed. The King took cover behind one of the columns. The Doctor turned back to the Herald and pressed his assault.

  Trapped within the Herald's sphere of influence, Amy knew from the moment that the Doctor put the box on the ground that his projection would 184

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  only make matters worse for her. Close now to the Herald's mind, closer than she ever wanted to be, she knew that the presence of the Doctor's Regulator served chiefly to enrage her. The Herald, Amy knew, would never let her go as long as the Doctor threatened her, and perhaps not even then.

  Tears rolled down Amy's cheeks as the alien used her hands to deliver the lethal blow that blasted Beol's knights across the hall. 'Switch it off!'

  she whispered, but her voice was overwhelmed by the Herald's cruel song.

  The Herald turned towards Beol, lifting Amy's hand against him, but the Doctor's Regulator pushed her back. The Herald recoiled and cried out in thwarted agony. Amy seized her chance.

  Summoning every ounce of her will, she screamed at the Doctor, 'Switch it off! Switch it off! It hurts!'

  The Doctor heard. He gave Amy an anguished look, then grabbed the black box and thumped it.

  His Regulator subsided and disappeared.

  But the Herald was not going to let Amy's act of defiance go unpunished. She turned all of her will and her fury inwards, battering against Amy's defences, her sense of self. Now Amy felt the impact of the emotional amplifiers in the hands of an expert, manipulated by someone who knew exactly how to wield this technology. This was their 185

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  full power, not the haphazard and accidental effects achieved by the Teller, and aimed at stimu
lating a terror vaster and more consuming than anything even the Regulator had tried to produce.

  All the uncertainty and apprehension that Amy had experienced since arriving in Geath, all the fear and loneliness she had tried to battle, surged through her, magnified a thousand-fold. All her sadnesses were amplified and turned into the theme of the Herald's song. The delights were drowned out; the sweet moments of joy that not only make life bearable but make it everything that it is. The Herald sang over them until only the sorrow remained.

  Amy's knees buckled; her soul buckled. This, she understood now, was how the Bright Nobles created their empire and kept their age-long rule intact.

  They had done it through fear, through separation, trapping their subjects in the isolation of a gilded changeless hell. Amy felt herself sliding into that chasm, horrified and enthralled in equal measure, unable to stop herself and uncertain that she even wanted to.

  Faintly, through the Herald's empty and encroaching music, Amy heard the Doctor. 'Fight it, Amy! Fight it!' But his cry grew more distant and his voice became that of a stranger, someone she had never really known. She was 7 years old 186

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  again, waiting for the man who had said he would come back and take her away, the little girl lost, sitting in the garden waiting for a knight in shining armour who had not returned. Amy pictured herself standing on the edge of oblivion and there was nobody to help her.

  Only herself. 'I'm not afraid of you,' Amy told the seductive void opening within her. 'I'm not yours. I'm me. I'm Amy. And I'm not alone!' She clenched her hands; hers, under her control. 'So you'd better stop using my body before I really lose my temper!'

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  11

  There was a blinding flash. The rings of light engulfing Amy pulsed outwards. She convulsed under the recoil and the Herald's grip on her slackened. It felt to Amy as if iron bands that had been slowly tightening around her chest - choking her breath, choking her self - suddenly slackened. Keeping this picture in her mind, Amy imagined herself gripping hold of the bands, pulling them apart, throwing them away. The chasm that, only moments before seemed to be opening ineluctably before her, started to recede, like a bad dream shaken off by the coming of morning.

  But the Herald would not give up easily. She made a last grab for control of Amy - to seize her, 189

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  if she could not persuade her — amplifying the harmonies until the hall itself throbbed with the noise. Amy sang back, random snippets of songs, anything that came to mind. With one last effort, and a rousing rendition of 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', Amy released herself. She pushed the Herald back for good — away, and out of her mind. The gold light shot upwards, coalescing in a ball high above. The Herald screamed in fury and outrage; sheer white noise that cracked the dome. Then she was gone.

  'Ta-da!' Amy said, and fell to her knees.

  She put her hands out to stop herself falling on her face. The Doctor and the King ran to help her.

  Amy stretched out her arms and let them lift her back to her feet.

  Beol bent over to kiss her hand. 'You are a lady of great courage.'

  'I'm not any kind of a lady. But if you do that smile again, I'll forgive you.'

  Beol obliged.

  Amy wrinkled her nose at him. 'So cute! I'd vote for you.'

  The King placed his hand upon his chest and bowed to her. Then he went to see to his knights.

  The Doctor pulled her into a hug. 'I'm impressed, Pond. You're impressive.'

  'I know.' She smiled at him. He smiled back. He 190

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  had come back, she thought - just later than he'd said. Still a mistake, though, to sit around waiting for the knight in shining armour. There was the whole of her life to be led.

  'What did you see?' the Doctor said softly. 'Can you talk about it? What did she show you?'

  'A bad place. The worst. A place where nothing changed.' Amy shuddered. 'For thousands and thousands of years, nothing changed. There was Enamour everywhere. It was in the food you ate, the water you drank, the air you breathed. It shaped everything around you, totally. It slid into every space. You were like a bird trapped in an oil slick.

  Trapped in a beautiful golden oil slick.' Then there had been the humming, the lulling... but behind that, almost extinguished but still constant, the whispering of fear... 'More than anything you wanted to get away from it, but you didn't dare. Where could you go? There was nowhere to go. You couldn't make a move, you couldn't get out, you couldn't save yourself... And - this was the worst thing - part of you wanted to stay there. It wanted what was on offer. Craved it. Not changing. Not having to grow. Handing that over. It felt like security

  - but it wasn't, not really. It was hell. A golden hell.'

  Amy sighed. 'I didn't defeat her, did I? Not entirely.

  She's coming back.'

  'I'm afraid you're right.'

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  'Then I suppose we'd better be ready for her.'

  The Doctor nodded slowly. His put his hands in his pockets and walked to the centre of the hall. He looked up at the dome, where the Herald's light had glowed moments before and where now only a long crack zigzagged from one end of the dome to the other.

  Amy joined him. 'You feel sorry for her, don't you?'

  'Hmm?'

  'The Herald. You feel sorry for her.'

  'Hmm.'

  'Why, Doctor? Why bother?'

  'I suppose...' Still staring at the crack, the Doctor screwed up his face. 'Because she's as trapped as anyone else. She has her masters, after all, and she's answerable to them. If she fails here in Geath, what will happen to her?'

  'She has a choice, too, Doctor. She could refuse to obey her masters.'

  'That's much easier said than done.'

  'The Regulator's people did it. The Herald doesn't have to obey these Bright Nobles, does she? Not now. Not so long after the end of their war.'

  'The Bright Nobles.' The Doctor's face screwed up in distaste at the name. 'Now, they're the real villains of the piece, aren't they? I wonder how 192

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  bright they really are, without Enamour. The Herald may be a few rungs up the ladder from the great mass of servants, but she's by no means at the top.'

  Amy thought about this. She thought about the Herald's pitilessness, the casual cruelty with which she had been seized and used. She thought about the strident music and the dead sound of despair at the heart of it. Was that also part of the Herald's song?

  'You know,' Amy said slowly, 'I think those extra few rungs make all the difference.'

  Beol came back to join them.

  'How are your two knights?' the Doctor asked.

  'Dead,' Beol said grimly. 'Both dead. Their bodies broken.'

  'Still sorry, Doctor?' Amy murmured.

  'Always sorry, Amy,' the Doctor replied. To Beol, he said wearily, 'Are you going to listen now?'

  'You have no need to speak. The metal must go.'

  Beol glanced towards the heart of the chamber, at the source of it all. 'The dragon, too. But not to the Herald's people.'

  'No, not there,' the Doctor agreed. 'To the Regulator, then.'

  'You're not with happy with that, are you, Doctor?' Amy said.

  The Doctor shook his head. 'Rory might have been speaking under the influence of Enamour, 193

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  but he was right when he pointed out that the Regulator has threatened us. Handing it over feels too much like being coerced.' His eyes flashed.

  'And I don't like being coerced.'

  'But it's the only option, isn't it?' Amy said.

  'Unless you're planning to take it yourself.'

  The Doctor glanced back over his shoulder at the dragon.

  'The howling creature has made its position clear,' Beol said firmly. 'The dragon must be delivered to it, or else Geath will suffer. We cannot allow th
at.'

  'Doctor,' Amy said, 'you might know as well as the Regulator how to dispose of the stuff, but I don't think that's the point.'

  For a fraction of a second, the Doctor seemed to be somewhere else, lost in contemplation. Then: `Nah.

  You're right. Imagine it in the TARDIS. Doesn't suit the new colour scheme, does it?' Shaking off whatever vision had briefly entranced him, he bounded off towards the doors. 'Come on! Time to check on Operation Dis-Enamour.'

  Rory looked up at Hilthe's back window with a familiar sinking feeling. He clasped his hands together and braced forwards. 'Step on here,' he said to the Teller. 'I'll push you up then you can reach down and pull me up.'

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  'Do you break and enter often?' the Teller asked in a censorious voice.

  'Do you overthrow legitimate governments and install puppet rulers often?'

  'Not under normal circumstances.'

  'Well then. There's your answer. Alien invasion.

  All bets are off. Besides, the window is open, so technically it's not breaking and entering. Now hurry up. I don't know how long we've got left but I'm guessing it's not long. It'll be morning soon.'

  The Teller made no further protest and stepped onto Rory's hands. Rory pushed him through the window, and then reached up so that he could haul him inside.

  'Where will she be?' whispered the Teller, looking down a dark bare corridor.

  Rory pointed ahead. 'Amy said there were some stairs. They should be up there, on the right. They lead down into a sitting room and chances are Hilthe's not getting any sleep tonight. Plus we've got an escape route back here. You know, in case.'

  The Teller nodded in agreement and Rory led the way down the corridor. They found the narrow flight of stairs by which Amy had escaped earlier that night.

  The doorway at the bottom of these was covered in a curtain. Rory twitched it aside and looked into a sitting room. It was the same one he had visited.

  Was it only a few hours since he had 195