Dr. Who - Telos Novellas 02 by Citadel Of Dreams # Dave Stone

Author:Citadel Of Dreams # Dave Stone [Stone, Citadel Of Dreams # Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

BEFORE

The two patrolmen were dressed in uniform black, and with their close-cropped hair and the identical set to their faces they might have been twins. There was something unnatural about the way they moved, Joey thought, as they advanced on him: each limb moving independently of the others, in precisely controlled amounts that in sum total approximated human walking, in the same way that a mask approximates a face.

‘You are coming with us,’ one of them said, tonelessly. Again, there was the sense of disconnectedness, as if the patrolman were speaking the words by rote. ‘We are constables of the City Patrol – Black Watch Division.’

‘Black Watch Division,’ repeated the other. ‘You are coming with us.’

Despite the unreality of his circumstance, these words hit Joey Quine like a dash of slops in the face. Everyone – everyone, that is, who moved in what might be called his circle of acquaintance – knew of the Black Watch. They were a section of the Patrol who informally kept the streets safe and clean for respectable folk, by the simple expedient of removing, quite terminally, those they found disreputable. Hardly a night went by but in the morning some derelict was found, knifed and floating face-down in the canal, as an example to others. Funnily enough, despite all the Watch’s best efforts, there continued to be a healthy supply of street beggars and derelicts for such unfortunates to be an example to.

Backed against the paint-sealed window, Joey looked down again at the man Smith. Quite apart from the obvious fact of being dead, the body, he now noted, bore no resemblance at all to the dapper little man he had encountered on Market Hill.

The patrolmen took hold of him. The flesh of their hands touched him – and, quite by reflex, Joey felt the Thing in his mind stir, and open its inner eyes, and cast them to the minds of his captors – – and Joey Quine was running through the streets again, with a certain extra degree of exertion than before. There is a world of difference between running after some stranger in the vague hope of preventing him from killing some other stranger, and fleeing from concrete forces who you know damned well are intending to kill you.

It was times like these that you let the City help you, spoke to it and let it guide you through its alleyways and hidden plazas, trusted in it to fetch you in the end to safety

Joey stopped. Where had that thought come from? Where had that manner of thinking come from?

In all his years of living in Hokesh, one Joseph Quine hadn’t had the slightest feeling that the City wanted him to be there at all – quite the reverse, in fact. One day had followed another, nights had followed one another, occasionally under shelter, and the City was the just the place in which he spent them. He’d never once thought of the City as a living thing, except – Except

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