Inversions

Master Ralinge said the first words that I could recall in detail since the Doctor had read out the note in her apartments, half a bell — and an entire age — earlier.

"First things first, madam," he said. He climbed up on to the bed the Doctor had been strapped to, his swollen manhood held poised within one fist.

The Doctor looked into his eyes quite calmly. She made a clicking noise with her mouth and her face took on a look of disappointment. 'Ah," she said, matter-of-factly. "So you are serious." And she smiled. Smiled!

Then she said something that sounded like an instruction in a language I did not know. It was not the language she had used with the gaan Kuduhn, a day earlier. It was a different kind of language. A language from somewhere, I thought, even as I heard it and closed my eyes — for I could not bear to see what was going to happen next — beyond even far Drezen. A language from nowhere.

And, well, what happened next?

How many times I have tried to explain it, how many times I have attempted to make sense of it. Not so much for others, but for myself.

My eyes — as I hope will seem understandable given the feelings I lave attempted to imply through this journal — were closed at the time. I simply did not see what happened during the next few heart-beats.

I heard a whirring noise. A noise like a waterfall, a noise like a sudden wind, like an arrow as it passes nearby one's ear. Then a long gasp which I realised later must in reality have been two gasps, but in any case a long exhalation of sound, and then a thud, a punch-like concussion of what, in retrospect, was air and flesh and bone and… what? More bone? Metal? Wood?

Metal, I think.

Who knows?

I felt a strange, dizzying sensation. I may have been senseless, for a while. I do not know.

When I woke, if I woke, it was to something that was impossible.

The Doctor stood over me, clad in her long white shirt. She was bald, of course, having been shaved. She looked utterly different. Alien.

She was undoing my bonds.

Her expression seemed cool and assured. Her face and scalp were freckled with red.

There was red on the ceiling above the iron bed where she had been secured. More blood was scattered almost everywhere I looked, some of it still dripping from the nearby bench. I looked at the floor. Master Ralinge lay there. Or most of him did. His body, up to his lower neck, lay on the stones, still twitching. Where the rest was… well, there were quite sufficient pieces of red, pink and grey distributed around the chamber for one to re-create something like what must have happened to his upper neck and head.

Simply, it was as though a bomb had exploded inside it. I could see half a dozen teeth of various sizes and colours scattered about the floor, like shrapnel.

Ralinge's assistants lay nearby in a single great spreading pool of blood, their heads almost severed from their bodies. Only a strip of skin still co

I swear, they blinked, once. Then they slowly closed.

The Doctor released me.

Something moved at the hem of her loose shirt. Then the movement stopped.

She looked so steady and so certain. And yet she looked so dead, so utterly overpowered. She turned her head to one side and said something in a tone I swear to this day was resigned and defeated, even bitter. Something buzzed through the air.

"We must imprison ourselves to save ourselves, Oelph," she told me. She put her hand on my mouth. "If that is possible."

Warm and dry and strong.

We were in a cell. A cell set within the walls of the torture chamber and separated from it by a grid of iron bars. Why she put us in here, I had no idea. The Doctor had dressed herself. I had hurriedly undressed while she looked away, cleaned myself as best I could, then dressed again. Meanwhile she had gathered up the long red hair Ralinge had shaved from her head. She looked at it regretfully as she stepped over the master torturer's body, then threw the gleaming red bundles on to the brazier, where they crackled and spat and smoked and flamed and gave off a sickening smell.

She had quietly unlocked the door of the chamber itself, before putting us both in this small cell, locking the door from outside and throwing the keys on to the nearest bench. Then she had sat calmly down on the dirty straw floor and put her arms round her knees and stared blankly out at the carnage in the chamber outside.

I squatted down beside her, my knee close to where her old dagger protruded from the top of her boot. The air smelled of shit and burned hair and something sharp that I decided must be blood. I felt sick for a little while. I tried to concentrate on something trivial, and was inordinately grateful to find something. The Doctor's old battered dagger had lost the last of its little white beads round the top rim of its pommel, under the smoky stone. It looked neater, more symmetrical now, I thought. I took a deep breath through my mouth, to escape the smells of the torture chamber, then cleared my throat. "What… what happened, mistress?" I asked.

"You must report what you feel you have to, Oelph." Her voice sounded tired and hollow. "I shall say that the three of them fell out over me, and killed each other. But it doesn't really matter." She looked at me. Her eyes seemed to drill into me. I had to look away. "What did you see, Oelph?" she asked.

"My eyes were closed, mistress. Truly. I heard… a few noises. Wind. A buzz. A thud. I think I was out of my senses for a short while."

She nodded, and smiled thinly. "Well, that's handy."

"Should we not have attempted to run away, mistress?"

"I don't think we'd get very far, Oelph," she said. "There is another way, but we must be patient. The matter is in hand."

"If you say so, mistress," I said. Suddenly my eyes filled with tears. The Doctor turned to me and smiled. She looked very strange and child-like with no hair. She put her arm out and hugged me to her. I rested my head on her shoulder. She rested her head on mine, and rocked me to and fro, like a mother with her child.

We were still like that when the chamber door burst open and the guards rushed in. They stopped and stared at the three bodies lying on the floor, then hurried on towards us. I shrank back, convinced that our torment would shortly be resumed. The guards looked relieved to see us, which I found surprising. One sergeant picked up the keys from the bench where the Doctor had thrown them and released us and told us that we were needed at once, for the King was dying.

22. THE BODYGUARD

Still the Protector's son hung on to life. The convulsions and his lack of appetite had left Lattens so weak he could barely lift his head to drink. For a few mornings he seemed to be getting better, but then he relapsed and seemed once again at the very door of death.

UrLeyn was distraught. The servants reported that he raged round his apartments, tearing sheets and pulling down tapestries and smashing ornaments and furniture and slicing ancient portraits with a knife. The servants started to clean up the destruction when he went to visit Lattens on his sick bed, but when he returned UrLeyn threw the servants out, and from then on he would let nobody into his rooms.

The palace seemed a terrible, bleak place to be, the atmosphere contaminated by the powerless fury and despair of the man at its heart. UrLeyn remained in his wrecked apartments during this time, only leaving to visit his son every morning and afternoon, and the harem each evening, where he lay, usually with Perrund, collapsed in her lap or bosom while she stroked his head until he fell asleep. But such peace never lasted long, and he would soon twitch in his sleep and cry out and then wake, and subsequently rise and return to his own rooms, old and haggard-looking and sunk in despair.