The Eleventh Tiger (27 page)

‘Ian Chesterton?’

‘I am. Who wants to know?’

‘I am General Gao. I have a message for you.’

‘I see.’

Ian stretched out his hand, expecting to be given paper or a scroll. Instead, Gao held up a wristwatch. Ian recognised it immediately; there were few enough of these in 1865. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘From its owner. The woman Barbara and the girl Vicki are in the custody of my master. If you wish them released, you will kill your brother by sundown tomorrow.’

‘My brother?’ Ian realised immediately that the man must mean Major Chesterton. Well, there was enough of a similarity between them, and Ian supposed it was a logical assumption for someone not acquainted with the idea of time travel to make. ‘You mean Major Chesterton.’

‘If he still lives by dark tomorrow...’ Gao left the words hanging. He flexed his lingers around the watch and, with a sharp crack like the splitting of a bone, his hand balled into a fist. When he opened it splinters of metal, and tiny cogs and springs, trickled to the floor.

‘You understand?’

The abbot’s face didn’t smile, though Qin felt it should. The male time traveller understood perfectly what Gao meant.

Qin didn’t understand how he knew this and nor did he care.

All that mattered was that his resurrection was going according to plan, just as the sorcerer had foreseen, and his generals were doing their jobs as well as if they were a part of his own mind.

Ian rushed into the surgery, telling himself he was delivering important news urgently and not panicking. He knew it was a lie.

‘Doctor!’

‘What is it, Chesterton?’ The Doctor was all business in response to Ian’s tone.

‘I’ve just had a visitor - he says he has Barbara and Vicki.’

‘You mean a kidnapper?’

As if it wasn’t blindingly bloody obvious, Ian thought, then realised this was the voice of panic and fear speaking. He forced himself to take a deep breath and approach the situation rationally. Anything else would just make things worse.

‘Who was this man?’ the Doctor asked.

Ian had hardly any idea of the personalities of this time and place. I don’t know. He said his name was Gao.’

‘Can you describe him?’

‘About your height, lean, short hair. The cloak he was wearing hung pretty oddly, as if there was more than just man under there.’

‘Weapons and armour, you mean?’

‘I couldn’t swear to it, of course, but, yes, I think so.’

‘Good!’

‘Good?’ Ian was stunned. ‘What’s good about it?’

‘For one thing, my boy, it means this abbot is convinced we are a threat to him, and hopefully that means we are.

Secondly, if they are using Barbara and Vicki as leverage they will be kept alive for the moment, and that is the most important thing.’

Barbara and Vicki had been fed steamed dumplings and vegetables. They had been given small cups of rice wine to wash the food down with, which tasted to Barbara like petrol flavoured with soy sauce.

‘We have to escape,’ Vicki said. ‘That abbot’s insane, worse than Bennett. You know it’s only a matter of time before he kills us. Or worse.’

Barbara looked at the door. ‘I’m not so sure, Vicki. There’s something about the way he talks. I almost half-believe him.’

‘That he’s possessed by the spirit of an ancient emperor?’

Vicki was surprised. Based on what she knew of Ian and Barbara so far, she hadn’t thought the citizens of the twentieth century were quite that superstitious or primitive.

‘But it’s impossible,’ she said. ‘At least it is without having access to machines and technology that haven’t been invented yet.’

‘I know that. But electric torches haven’t been invented yet either, and I know both the Doctor and Ian carry pen torches.’

Barbara laid her hand on the wall, feeling the roughness of the brickwork. ‘Vicki, do you know anything about this

“stone tape” idea the Doctor had when we told him about that little house?’

‘Well, I’ve heard of it, of course. It’s quite simple really.

Metallic oxides in...’

‘Yes, I’ve heard about all of that side of it from Ian as well. I was wondering if it could, I don’t know, work the other way.’

‘The other way?’

‘Yes. I mean, what if he really is Qin Shi Huangdi? What if he somehow recorded himself into one of these stone tapes, and then that recording was put into the abbot? Could that be possible?’

‘Neural technology wasn’t on my syllabus, but... an AI can respond to what you do,’ Vicki said. ‘An artificial intelligence,’

she added for Barbara’s benefit.

‘Artificial intelligence?’

‘AIs are sort of like recordings in computers, but they can think for themselves and hold conversations, fight against you in games... What they do or say will change depending on what you do or say.’

Light flooded across the room, interrupting their conversation. The abbot was standing in the doorway. ‘Computers,’

he said. ‘Neural technology. No-one on this insignificant world knows of such things. How is it that you do?’

Vicki felt as guilty as she was terrified. She had let something slip that she shouldn’t have, and it might well benefit their captor. Her face fell, sinking with her heart.

The abbot regarded her, but not as coldly as she had expected. Was there something he wanted from her? She hoped not.

‘You were borne to this time and this place by a TARDIS?’

‘Yes.’ Vicki was too surprised to hesitate long enough to lie.

‘Vicki!’ Barbara complained plaintively Vicki wanted to cringe away from the betrayed look in her eyes.

Barbara could have slapped Vicki for being so stupid. She might be from a more advanced time, and have had a more advanced education, but she was still a child.

‘What do you -’ She broke off as light flared from the abbot’s eyes. It was as if someone had thrown a switch to turn on the headlights of a car.

‘Then you are a traveller?’ his voice boomed. ‘You are both travellers?’

‘I am a teacher. A history teacher,’ Barbara said. ‘You know that. But I travel these days, yes.’

‘Through the space-time vortex?’

The voice was oddly inflected and not simply with a Chinese accent. It sounded mournful, the way the man in the moon might sound if he could talk.

‘Yes,’ Barbara admitted, too startled to say anything else.

‘You travel with this girl,’ he indicated Vicki, ‘and the one called Chesterton?’

‘Yes.’

The being - she wasn’t sure that it was the abbot, or even Qin Shi Huangdi - stepped forward. The glow inside his head was so bright it was beginning to show through the flesh of his cheeks and between the gaps in his teeth. The hairs on the back of her neck began to rise, twitched by some kind of electricity.

‘And the Doctor?’

Barbara gasped. How could whatever this was know about the Doctor?

‘How -’ She bit off the words, but it was too late. Booming laughter echoed around the room and through her head.

‘This Chesterton. This... other Chesterton? He is your husband?’

She started to say ‘Yes’, telling herself it was only a useful lie to discourage him from getting any lecherous ideas about her. But she decided that if he had such plans in mind she would have found out already. She had been in his bedchamber, after all. Besides, she was increasingly sure that this new voice belonged to neither Qin nor the abbot.

Something new was happening here that she didn’t quite understand.

‘No, he’s not my husband.’

It was an easy mistake to make. She and Ian had essentially been living together since they entered the TARDIS nearly two years ago. She supposed they knew each other as well as any married couple who’d been together for the same length of time.

‘Not yet, anyway,’ she added.

Barbara was determined not to give the abbot, or Qin, whatever it was he wanted. The light from his eyes and mouth bore down on her like the headlights of an approaching car that can freeze a rabbit in its tracks.

‘What do you want of us?’ she repeated, trying to sound more brave - or at least less afraid - than she felt. She tried to sound more like her father. ‘Whatever it is, I doubt it can be for the best.’

‘Your loyalty,’ the voice responded. ‘Join with us and rule in your time.’

‘What do you mean... join?’

‘We would have humans speak for us and carry our wishes to your people,’ the mournful voice boomed. ‘We offer you more than freedom.’ The voice seemed to echo metallically. It was as if the syllables were being beaten out on a gong. ‘We offer you your world.’

At first Barbara couldn’t believe what the voice had said, nor understand what it meant. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘We would have dominion over this world for all time. We would have rulers in all times. Our dominion over this world is inevitable. You will oversee it for us.’

Barbara didn’t know what to say, or whether to believe that this lunatic - or whatever he or it was - was offering her the rulership of the entire world. She couldn’t imagine why he, or it, thought she would have any idea what to do with the world.

‘Why us? What makes you think we’d want to rule the world, or even have any idea what to do with it?’

‘You are not like the other organic beings on this world.

You are more advanced.’

‘I see... You sensed that, did you?’

‘We know you are a traveller in time. You have seen many worlds, and many times.’ Qin, the abbot - whoever - turned away.

Barbara felt herself start forward to see if she could help, then remembered that he was holding her captive and was unlikely to be in need of her sympathy. All the same, she felt that he did need help of some kind, and not just the psychiatric treatment she had thought about earlier.

Then he turned back, the light gone from his eyes. ‘Walk with me, woman,’ he said to Barbara.

A guard appeared at his side and grabbed Barbara by the arm, dragging her out of the room.

‘I was ruler of China, woman! The first ruler of it all.’ He fell silent again.

‘Yes,’ Barbara agreed. ‘You were ruler of all China. But not this China.’

‘This China? Are there other Chinas?’ he sneered.

‘No, there’s just the one. But it’s changed since the time of Qin Shi Huangdi. Every map in the world has been redrawn thousands of times since those days. Different peoples and races have moved around, come and gone.’

‘This I understand,’ he admitted. I was listening while you and the girl talked.’

He seemed unsettled, much to Barbara’s surprise. He looked haunted and jumpy. Not at all like the image of hands-on dictator that he showed to his men.

‘You have said you could help me.’

‘Yes,’ Barbara stammered, feeling a little more confident.

Perhaps the abbot was just mentally ill after all, though she couldn’t think of an explanation for the glowing eyes. ‘I might be able to, if you let us go.’

‘That I cannot do,’ the abbot said immediately. ‘I still need your friend Ian to kill Major Chesterton - and don’t imagine I won’t kill you if I have to.’

Barbara’s fear came back with a vengeance.

‘I don’t even know who this body belongs to,’ Qin insisted.

‘A warrior monk, I’m told.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s as much as I know, or care, about him. Nothing of him remains.’ He hesitated. ‘At least, not here.’

‘Then where?’

‘Nowhere, I hope.’

‘If you want my help,’ Barbara said, ‘then I need to ask you something.’

He didn’t tell her not to ask, or otherwise try to silence her, so she pressed on. ‘If you really are the First Emperor, how did you come to be in this body? It’s not your original, surely?’

For minutes that felt like hours he simply stood with his back to her, not replying. She couldn’t see his face, nor could she read his body language particularly well, but she hoped he was thinking about what she had asked him.

It was clear he thought some part of his life was missing, or at least hidden from him, and she wished she could give it back. Unfortunately, she couldn’t even decide which he’ was the one with a missing element to his life. Qin? Or the abbot?

‘A great wizard of Japan told me how to cheat death,’ he said at last. ‘He told me the materials with which to surround myself. How my spirit could live outside the flesh. If you can call it living.’

‘He didn’t tell you how long it would be before you found another body?’

‘No. Nor how slowly time passes in the darkness when you have naught but your own thoughts for company. I followed the wizard’s instructions to the letter,’ Qin said. ‘My generals and I, and the Eight Thousand, took our assigned places in the sacred space that had been built to the wizard’s specifications.

‘At the seventh full moon of the year we watched the night swallow the moon, and then...’ He frowned, remembering.

‘Then there was darkness. No bridge of jade, no celestial temples.’

‘No heaven?’

‘No hell. But then, I imagine there wouldn’t be for the immortals.’

He shivered at the thought of the darkness. He had no idea how long he had been alone with his thoughts. No sight, no sound, no touch of silk or flesh, no taste of meat or wine.

Having only his own thoughts for company, yet also sensing that he was not alone, because his generals and his troops were with him. ‘I thought I would walk the earth for ever.’