Doctor Who 815 - The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs

Author:Paul Magrs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T03:47:09+00:00

***

Already they had travelled some miles aboard the uncomfortable craft that Gila had knocked together from bits and pieces. There was something quite balmy and relaxing about simply letting themselves be tugged along by the boiling current like that. They hardly needed to punt themselves at all. Gila stretched out and dozed, content to give himself up to the elements.

Sam lay beside him. It was like being in somebody's bloodstream and heading for the heart. She couldn't quite be sure if it was any lighter yet.

Her eyes were playing tricks on her, and maybe she was just becoming used to this gloom.

A noise roused her out of her half-sleep. She saw those pale metal hands clutching themselves together again, flapping and wheeling like a rainbird. The eyeballs goggled curiously on the ends of their digits at Sam and the still-sleeping alligator man. The hands of the Duchess winged effortlessly over them, and then passed on ahead into the tunnel, as if showing them the way. Then the hands were swallowed up in the dark.

The next time she woke it was from a deeper sleep and she found her nose and lungs filled with burning, sulphurous fumes. The raft was beginning to rock wildly as the river buffeted them between the cavern walls. The yellow-tinged water boiled and heaved. It looked like lager, Sam thought, and smelled of rotten eggs. She shook Gila awake.

'What is it?'

"The going's getting rougher.'

'It's all right,' he grunted, wanting to rest some more. "This thing is sturdy enough...'

At that precise moment one of the perilous cross-currents caught them and pitched the raft into the air, sending it skimming across the swift, perplexing tides, and smashing it to matchwood. Sam and Gila were tossed deep into the river.

They fell like stones through the dense yellow and green, down to the more turgid currents.

Here moments took on their own momentum, and the two of them were flung into a different sense of passing time. They didn't know how to breathe. They thought they were dead. Sam couldn't recall the exact second of succumbing to the dark and giving herself up for dead, but it must have happened, because she had stopped trying to swim. She let the glaucous depths swallow her.

Then she saw the shapes moving uncertainly through the unclear water.

The light was only fitful and so she couldn't be sure of exactly what she was seeing. She started to swim again and held her breath hard and she steeled herself for accidental contacts with the creatures who shared the water.

And what would their flesh feel like? like a shark's, perhaps, so that she'd be flayed at the slightest touch. Or it would be like brushing the softly pliable transparency of jellyfish, and waiting for the jolt of a sting.

But none of the creatures were making sudden moves and she tried not to get sucked into a false sense of security by them. She moved steadily, coursing strongly towards the surface again, which stretched like rippled skin high above.

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