The Tomb of Valdemar Read online

‘That’s impossible.’

  That word again. If there is one thing the Doctor finds tiresome above all else, it is this re-explaining of himself that he always has to go through. He tries to use the word to his advantage, find out what’s going on. ‘What do you mean, impossible?’ he snaps.

  He is surprised when Pelham bites back. Not as stunned as he’d believed.

  ‘Because this is Ashkellia and you mentioned Valdemar.

  Put those two together and the “accident” thing seems, shall we say, unlikely.’

  ‘Mmm. Good point. How do you explain us then?’

  ‘I think Hopkins sent you; you’re New Protectorate agents.’

  The Doctor considers this.

  ‘I’m sorry but –’ Romana starts. The Doctor cuts her off, instantly.

  ‘New Protectorate agents. I suppose it’s possible. If we were, would that be good or bad?’

  Pelham eyes him suspiciously. ‘Don’t play games with me.

  I’m in enough trouble already. When we get to the palace, Neville isn’t going to be best pleased. If you tell him you’re Protectorate agents he will kill you. Eventually.’

  ‘We’re not New Protectorate agents,’ says the Doctor cheerily.

  ‘Which is what I tried to say from the off,’ sniffs Romana.

  ‘What is a New Protectorate agent anyway?’

  Pelham starts to back away. ‘You know, I have the feeling that perhaps I didn’t escape from the tomb at all; that this is all some sort of hallucination and I’m still back there in the tunnels...’

  The Doctor senses the cracks in her composure. She has been damaged by the experience. He has to know. ‘What happened to your friends?’

  Pelham is staring into space, trying to remember. Or trying to forget.

  ‘I... Erik found a huge hall. A great gateway. It had to be the entrance to the crypt itself. We felt like something, someone, was guiding us. Like they wanted to be found. I was afraid, hanging back...’ Her eyes clear momentarily. ‘I told them not to, you understand? I know it’s my fault but I tried to stop them. Together, Erik and Prahna, they opened the tomb. The light... the cracking noises and the light...’

  ‘The energy wave?’ asks Romana.

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor says, feeling the weight of his words in his mouth. He looks at Pelham. ‘You didn’t get it open did you, not fully?’

  ‘How... how do you know that?’

  ‘Because if you had, the consequences would have been catastrophic. You would have released forces that are infinitely more powerful.’

  ‘And they... started to scream,’ says Pelham, disbelieving her own words. ‘I ran to help and then... then they turned round. Prahna and Erik turned on him, attacked him, started to... I ran. I panicked. I’ve never been so afraid in my life.’

  She lapses into silence. All the Doctor can hear is the grinding of the chains that haul them up and up.

  ‘Where are we going anyway?’ asks Romana. ‘Who is pulling us up?’

  Pelham smiles but with little humour. ‘You may wish you had stayed in the tomb.’

  ‘What do you know of Valdemar?’ asks the Doctor abruptly.

  ‘He would have been destroyed millennia before the birth of humanity.’

  ‘Over a million years.’ Her reply is muted. The Doctor hopes he is taking her mind off the horror she experienced in the cavern. ‘And Valdemar is my job. I found him and I re-invented him.’

  ‘Would someone mind explaining to me,’ Romana asks patiently, ‘just who this Valdemar is?’

  The Doctor and Pelham begin to speak at once, both eager to tell their stories.

  ‘Valdemar was a god...’ says Pelham.

  ‘Valdemar was a cancer...’ says the Doctor.

  And all the time the chain pulls and pulls... lifting them higher, to Paul Neville.

  For the Doctor, memory is a hazy thing. He recalls events and names more clearly than he recalls himself. Who was the man who found the Daleks on Skaro, ready to emerge from their metal city and make war with the universe? Who was the man who tricked the Great Intelligence, deep in the tunnels of London? Who was the man who solved the riddle of Peladon? He does not know.

  Someone, it must have been him because he remembers, was once young. Centuries young.

  He recalls the two students hooked up to the Matrix, their joint consciousnesses wired into headsets for the illegal terminal they had lashed-up, to prove that they could. Two students, in Prydonian robes. One dominant, clever, cunning. The other cautious, patient, thorough. Him.

  At the Academy. Where his friend, the Time Lord who went bad and became the Master, revealed to him: Valdemar.

  When the universe was young, younger than he, younger than even the range of a TARDIS, a race now known only as the Old Ones (a translation, but typical of the colourless, literal and long titles ascribed by the Time Lords. Old Ones was a name they gave to any long-dead, highly technologically advanced alien beings with incredible powers.

  As if they were afraid to give them real names) disappeared.

  Exterminated.

  Why?

  Valdemar.

  The Doctor and the other student had travelled back, through the Matrix safeguards, tapping back through Gallifreyan history, through universal history.

  Nothing was left of the Old Ones, except warnings.

  They had released or created something, some black mass of life. Valdemar may have been the name of the first Old One, which it took for itself, or perhaps it was always called that. No one knew. For the two students, analogues of Valdemar portrayed it as a stain, blotting out stars, consuming planets, transforming races into servitors to sustain itself. Valdemar the Unstoppable, the Destructor, the universe at its mercy.

  And then, somehow, the remnants of the Old Ones defeated it. No record survived of how. It just stopped. Correlations from dozens of races’ mythologies were processed by the Matrix, the result an aggregation of them all: Valdemar was killed and its body placed in a tomb. The tomb was sealed for ever under acid skies, lest Valdemar transcend death itself and return again to complete its destruction.

  The students had emerged from the Matrix, the eyes of one them shining. ‘The power.’ he shouted joyously, ‘Think of the power.’

  The Doctor had stared at his friend and wondered just who, what kind of person, would gain so much unrestrained pleasure from such a nightmare.

  Pelham, for her part, is finding life a little too much. She can’t... won’t remember what happened down there in the tomb... Erik and the other one, she has already forgotten his name. Her worst fears confirmed. Then these two strangers.

  The woman in a mishmash melange of styles from the last two decades and the man with no recognisable style at all.

  Both talking gibberish. Is this some plot by Valdemar to drive the last remnants of sanity from her, an arcane revenge for all those stories she wrote about him?

  They have to be from Hopkins, they have to be Hopkins’s agents. There is no other sane explanation. Which, as it’s true because it must be, means that more trouble awaits them in the palace. She feels the bump as the bathyscape is jostled by the core updraught. Suddenly their ascent, already speedy, becomes stomach churning. The updraught of gases pushes them on, threatening to loop the giant chain.

  The Doctor is staring out of the porthole, eyes a-goggle, staring at the rushing coloured air pulsing upwards. ‘You know Romana, I do believe I know where we’re going. That is a core updraught. Superheated gases from the planet’s core rising in a high-yield energy stream.’

  Romana stops preening herself to rise and look upwards through the glass. ‘I’ve seen it proposed as a theory, but never realised on any kind of scale.’

  The Doctor turns to Pelham and suddenly she finds that her hand is in his, being warmly shaken up and down.

  ‘Congratulations, Ms Pelham,’ he beams. ‘You’ve discovered the principle of atmospheric flotation, about six hundred years early. How did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t un
derstand,’ she stutters.

  ‘How did you ensure stabilisation?’ asks Romana curiously.

  Pelham believes the woman is serious. ‘Wide-band streaming? Retro thrusters? Rotational spin?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ she replies, suspiciously. ‘And to answer your question, we didn’t do it – we found it.’

  ‘Ahh. That explains a lot,’ says the Doctor.

  ‘Not to me it doesn’t.’

  ‘You knew the tomb was here didn’t you?’

  ‘We guessed.’

  ‘You’re some kind of historian? Archaeologist?’

  ‘Novelist.’

  ‘Really? That’s interesting.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘I can see the structure!’ shrieks Romana.

  Pelham cannot prevent herself staring into the Doctor’s eyes. Despite their mirth and good humour they accuse, knowing she has secrets she should be imparting. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ he says softly. ‘You have no idea what you will unleash.’

  ‘It’s a palace!’ Romana cries joyfully. ‘A big golden palace, floating in the sky!’

  The Doctor finally looks away, grinning again. Pelham guesses they are seeing the gigantic, ludicrous thruster-nozzles, spinning furiously, keeping the baroque structure on an even keel. Home, she guesses. Home after what was on the surface of Ashkellia anyway.

  Suddenly she feels cold, a trembling building up inside her.

  It’s hot in here, hot and stale. Sweat on her brow, Erik turning round after the light... his eyes... gone...

  ‘She’s going into delayed shock,’ Miranda Pelham hears Romana say as the rushing noise starts up, somewhere deep in her ears.

  Soon their little craft, hauled up to the long crane arm, has been swallowed up by the bright searing glare of the palace.

  The palace.

  How to describe its bulbous ramparts, its smooth acid-dripping skin? The palace of the Old Ones, as big as a ship, spinning inexorably round in the magma heat, sending spraying sheets of smoking vaporous droplets out into the liquid sky...

  ‘All right, all right,’ says Ponch. ‘How can a palace float, eh?

  In the sky? You must take us for mad.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s magic!’ hisses Ofrin, eyes wide as a child.

  ‘It’s perfectly simple, so I believe,’ says the woman. Difficult for Ponch to see her and the Miranda Pelham of the story as one and the same. Difficult for him to do anything as a critical mass of camr’ale has reached his brain and has commenced stuffing that organ with animal hides. ‘This is how a floating palace works...’ he hears.

  Ponch gets up and staggers to the doorway, past snoring trappers who have already found the story too slow and demanding. He hauls the door open and shivers as the cruel wind grips him. He is sick, dizzy. It has been a long hard summer out there. He had forgotten what camr’ale could do to a man.

  As Ponch looks over at the Black Mountains, already tinged with the cold pink of the late summer sun, he thinks of those sleds, those gigantic sleds, featureless, metal-green, that will arrive over the slopes from who knows where and demand their tribute. He wonders for the first time who is inside, how do the sleds work, why must they take the trappers’ furs?

  The woman is working on him, he can feel it. This story, this daft story, it is something new, something different, a conglomeration of elements familiar yet strange. He does not know how a man can think of things that never were, have never had existence in the real world. Perhaps like Ofrin says, it’s magic. Perhaps out there, somewhere, there is a realm where palaces float and bathyscapes can be pulled on seemingly limitless chains and men’s eyes turn black...

  Ponch eats some snow to wake himself up. He needs to know more. Not the story, that’s for children, but what the story is doing for him.

  He turns and walks back inside. The heat and the smoke are beyond belief. He feels these elements tear at his eyes.

  The woman, her husky voice rising, is completing her explanation. As Ponch reseats himself she is sitting back, that tiny smile playing over her cracked lips. ‘So you see, gentlemen. The principles are simple...’

  Ofrin and the others, he still can’t get their names to come, lean back nodding to each other. ‘Ahh...’ says one.

  ‘Like I said – magic.’ Ofrin looks around in triumph.

  The Doctor is not one to hang around. As soon as the telescopic crane has retracted and the bathyscape becomes still inside its cylindrical chamber, he is out and pacing the dimly-lit, functional docking airlock.

  Frowning at her companion’s lack of manners, Romana helps herself out through the hatch, her flimsy, gauze cloak catching on the handle. With a dismissive sigh, she unhooks herself. She turns and helps the shaken Miranda Pelham.

  ‘Incredible,’ says the Doctor. ‘Humanity didn’t build this.

  The dimensions are all wrong.’

  ‘We found it on a sensor sweep,’ Pelham says.

  Romana is trying the airlock hatch. She realises that she will soon tire of this constant orange and bronze.

  ‘Just an accident. If we hadn’t, we’d never have known about the tomb.’

  The Doctor gives one wall a kick. ‘It’s aged well. Doesn’t look a day over fifty thousand years.’

  ‘It’s aged incredibly well,’ says Romana. ‘How?’

  ‘It’s perfectly simple,’ the Doctor explains. ‘Self-maintaining, self-regenerating low-grade power status.

  Barring accidents or tampering there’s no reason why it couldn’t stay here for ever. It’s not uncommon. Same principle as the city of the Exxilons. Mind you, it seems you haven’t managed to get the power above minimum. That would get the lights brighter.’

  Romana flashes him an icy smile. ‘You’re showing off, Doctor. If you really want to impress us, how about opening this door?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure someone will be here very soon to open it for us, eh Miranda? Someone very curious I expect. This expedition has cost somebody an awful lot of money and I’ll bet it wasn’t you.’

  Pelham seems to have turned an odd shade of green.

  Valdemar! Valdemar. The spring she had uncovered, the oil well she had drilled. Why had she chosen not to understand?

  Mess with monsters; they bite back. Her father had always told her that books would get her into trouble, and annoyingly he had been right. More than once. But this was the worst.

  Valdemar. Finding him, finding him had been so simple.

  Almost as if he wanted to be found.

  She had never heard of Valdemar, the fifteen-year-old Miranda Pelham bored beyond her years. That had been a different age, ancient history; it felt like a life lived by someone else, someone fictional. Before the civil war changed everything.

  She had gone ‘travelling’ on her ‘year out’ round the sector.

  ‘Year out’ being a synonym for loudly and cheerily imposing yourself upon serfs and races on planets whose GPP was less than your annual allowance, demanding entertainment and

  ‘native food’ with a bunch of other like-minded, highborn, self-righteous, smug idiots, then going home and washing the filth of the planets’ poverty out of your well-worn clothes before moving on to university.

  Except Miranda Pelham had never gone home. She found Valdemar instead.

  It was on the unlikely planet of Proxima 2 – that first of the settled worlds, now deeply, unfashionably familiar, little more than a stopover – that she discovered Valdemar.

  She had been wandering the bazaars, her rucksack digging into her thin designer vest, looking for knick-knacks and a good novel. She was dying for something to read. Through crushing whitewashed hovels, dirty and bright in the sun.

  The shrieks of caged animals, the stink of slaves. All around, people were shouting, entreating her to come into their hovels and get ripped off for a rug.

  The heat had been intense and her pale skin had marked her out as highborn as brightly as a flag. Her friends had go
ne drinking somewhere, under the official pretext of visiting some ancient native ruins in the mountains. They would be ruins when her companions finished with them.

  Pelham already knew she was starting to irritate these colleagues.

  The thought of university was hanging over her like a middle-class eagle waiting to pounce. Thanks to her father’s position as orthodontist to some minor highborn duchess, she had been accepted by some lowly provincial college somewhere at the back end of the empire for some tedious, drudging technical degree. Only the most noble were allowed to do anything interesting.

  She was a voracious reader. Books had never really disappeared, despite numerous predictions heralding their imminent demise. People liked books, liked black print on white paper, liked holding something heavy in their hands, liked the fact that, unlike the digitised print that the serfs were exposed to, once type was on a page it was impossible to change it. Miranda didn’t know all that she wanted but she knew she wanted books.

  And then the parade, in the distance, through a maze of streets and alleyways. A procession like nothing she had ever seen. Despite the hoods, the racial mix was evident and surprising. Large wooden poles carried by colourful monks; humans, nu-apes, the lithe Kordszz and even a multi-limbed Centauri, its giant eye blinking moistly beneath its hood, under the hot Proximan sun.

  Curious, jolted out of her boredom, Miranda followed. The monks, if monks they were, were oblivious to all around them. Oblivious despite the laws prohibiting religion in the empire. Mind, she hadn’t seen a single militia soldier anywhere outside the spaceport.

  Pushing her way through the begging, pinched serfs, Miranda watched as the parade halted outside what looked like a set of stone steps, then descended in single file down into something very, very black.

  She remembers staring down those steps, afraid to follow.

  She remembers hearing the chants, unintelligible, nonsensical, full of passion and ardour. They believed, they really believed. Only one word stood out. One alone:

  ‘Valdemar! Valdemar! Valdemar!’