Part 1 (2/2)

Crippled fool, he thought, remembering the vendor.

Thinks he's the only one to have suffered.

He glanced up at the sign above his inn.

The World Turn'd Upside Down.

Aye, that it had been.

He brushed the freshly fallen snow from his shoulders and shouted at a young boy who stood at the trap-door entrance to the cellar.

'Come on, lad! Look lively! I don't pay you to dawdle.

Look lively there!'

The boy sighed and struggled on, rolling barrels and blowing into his numb hands to warm them.

Kemp turned back to his contemplation of the sky, wiping his hands on his ap.r.o.n and muttering under his breath.

Suddenly, among the plethora of strange smells that whirled through the street, something particularly evil began to a.s.sault his senses. It was like the worst kind of rotten vegetable, mixed with a dreadful, sewer-like odour. An image suddenly flashed into his mind of himself as a boy, playing in his father's barn and uncovering the tiny corpse of a rabbit, its hide suppurating with maggots. The stench from it had been nauseating but this...

Kemp turned to see a strange, crook-backed old man crunching cheerfully through the snow drifts towards him. He groaned and placed his broad, splayed fingers across his face in a none-too-subtle effort to avoid the smell coming off the newcomer.

'Good day to thee, Master Kemp,' said the old man, his voice high and cracked with age.

Kemp did no more than grunt in reply and slowly shook his head at the fellow's rough appearance. His tunic and breeches were black but so stained and filthy as to appear almost like a new colour altogether. His collar, ingrained with grime, had not been white for many a year and his holed and wrinkled stockings hung like loose skin around his ankles and ruined shoes.

'Good day, I say!' said the man again.

This time Kemp acknowledged him. 'You may find it so, Master Scrope. For myself I have things pressing on my mind.'

Nathaniel Scrope let out a funny little giggle and smiled, exposing a gallery of loose black teeth. 'See a surgeon, Kemp.

They say water and all manner of things can press on the brain.'

Kemp ignored him, his eyes rolling heavenward again.

'This weather, I mean. It'll keep my customers abed, mark my word. And if they're abed they're not drinking and, as a consequence, Master Scrope, I am not a happy man.'

Scrope shrugged. 'Nay, man. A little frost never harmed no one. I'm living proof.'

Kemp let out a short, unpleasant laugh. 'Living proof that a little muck never harmed anyone, that's for sure.'

Scrope looked affronted and ran a liver-spotted hand through his mane of matted hair. 'You know very well, Kemp, that the work I do is vital to this country's wellbeing.'

Kemp suppressed a smile. The nerve of the man!

'Oh, aye, Nat. I was forgetting.' He gave a formal bow.

'Please excuse me.'

Scrope nodded, apparently mollified. A stiff wind blew a wave of snowflakes in their direction and Scrope suddenly stiffened. 'What's this?' he muttered.

Kemp listened. In among the cacophony of street sounds they could make out something else. A regular, drumming beat, flattening the virgin snow and echoing around the squalid lanes of the city.

Both Kemp and Scrope turned swiftly as the sound coalesced into the unmistakable tattoo of horses' hooves.

There was a shout and then a troop of soldiers clattered into view, perhaps thirty in number and dressed in heavy breastplates over thick, buff, skirted leather coats. They had on huge, thigh-length boots over their crimson breeches and each wore a segmented helmet that tapered down his neck, revealing almost nothing of his face.

As they pa.s.sed, breath streaming like smoke from the mouths of their horses, all work in the little street came to a sudden halt. It was as though the violence in the air had suddenly taken on solid form.

Kemp shuddered and it had nothing to do with the cold.

'G.o.d a' mercy,' he whispered as the soldiers disappeared in a tight pack around the corner. 'What next for this benighted land of ours?'

Nathaniel Scrope wiped a drop of moisture from the tip of his nose and watched the last of the mounted men vanish into the freezing fog, his face as grave as an effigy on a tomb.

Nearby was an alley even narrower and more disreputable than the one where Kemp's inn stood. The buildings that ab.u.t.ted it were black, wet and grimy, the upper window cas.e.m.e.nts on either side so close that they almost touched, forming a dingy archway over a muddy floor strewn with slimy straw and manure.

There were many things a pa.s.ser-by might expect to find in such a place. A seedy gaming house, perhaps, or a den of thieves. Beggars might cl.u.s.ter in its shadows and dogs find a rough meal of greasy bones in the litter-fouled snowdrifts. But there was one thing no one could rightly expect to find: the rectangular blue shape of a twentieth-century police box was nevertheless there, materialising out of thin air with a strangulated, grating whine.

The light on top of the police box stopped flas.h.i.+ng and the unexpected arrival stood there in the diffuse morning light, snowflakes collecting in the recesses of its panelled doors. A sharp wind blew up, almost disguising the fact that this battered blue box was humming with power.

No one pa.s.sed by to inquire what was amiss and so the TARDIS remained unmolested, its occupants, for the moment at least, undisturbed.

Inside, in defiance of at least the laws of terrestrial physics, was a vast, white chamber, its walls indented with translucent roundels. At its centre stood a six-sided console, the panels of which were covered in a bewildering array of b.u.t.tons and switches. In the middle of this was a cylindrical gla.s.s column which was normally to be found rising and falling when the TARDIS was in flight. Now it was still, as still as the rest of the strange room, save for the constant hum of power.

Suddenly the calm was shattered by the arrival of three young people from the interior of the craft.

The first, a brawny, good-looking boy in kilt and cable-knit sweater, walked straight over to a chair and sat down, brus.h.i.+ng his black hair out of his appealing brown eyes.

'Would you no' hang on a moment, Ben,' he complained to his companion. 'I cannae understand you.'

Ben, a skinny, blond young man with the face of a disreputable cherub, threw up his hands in frustration.

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