Amy stopped. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and blew it out. Her mind was in totally flippant mode because she was trying to block out the idea that she had just seen the Doctor fall to his death, along with two other people she didn't know particularly well but had good reason to believe were nice and entirely undeserving of death by highspeed ground.
She opened her eyes and started to climb down again, breathing hard, trying to bolster her confidence.
The steady, brutal clanging from the hatch far above wasn't helping much.
They wanted in, and they wanted in now, did those Ice Men. Warriors. Warriors.
She ignored the banging and scraping, and kept going, one rung at a time, hand-and-foot, hand-and-foot, down and down. How far did this place go?
Amy became aware that there was something different about the shaft below her. It was hard to tell what at first. She grimaced and really hoped it wasn't a decorated with splatted bodies type of different.
Fortunately, it wasn't.
The ladder was coming to an end. The rungs ran out at a point where the whole shaft began to gently tilt to the left, like a drainpipe. It went from a straight vertical to a 35-degree drop with a very smoothly engineered bend like a joint in a piece of guttering.
She felt a distant breeze, cool and fresh coming up from below. The shaft seemed to be full of sound, sound just waiting for a chance to echo.
She stepped off the last rung and steadied herself on a sloping floor that, three metres higher up, had been wall.
'Doctor?' she called.
The echo came back to her. She edged forward.
It was quite tricky to walk on the angled floor. She struggled to keep her balance. The Ice Warriors continued to hammer and gouge at the hatch high above her.
The tube reminded her of something. She realised what it was. It was like a giant version of those water slides they had at big leisure centres, those great big, slaloming tube rides that Rory loved so much. It was just like that.
Or it was like an oversized version of those hamster playpens people bought from pet shops on the assumption that hamsters liked that sort of thing.
She wasn't convinced they did. If this was typical of the experience, it wasn't much fun and she could begin to appreciate the generally surly demeanour evinced by many hamsters.
She edged her way along. There was still no sign of the Doctor or Arabel or Samewell. They must have come all the way down and then shot off around the bend like Rory on a monster waterslide. Or a surly hamster doing hard time in a transparent plastic penitentiary.
'Doctor?' she called again, leaning forward to peer into the darkness, combing her hair out of her eyes with her fingers. 'Doctor? Give us a shout if you're OK, yeah? Doctor?'
Behind and above her, the Ice Warriors turned their sonic blasters on the unyielding latch and blew it to pieces. The awful noise of the blast reverberated down the shaft to her and made her jump. Her foot slipped.
She kept her balance.
She looked back the way she had come. She heard the ruptured hatch shriek open and saw shadows move in the light shining down the vent shaft.
The Ice Warriors were in. They were Ice Warriors, and they had opened the hatch, and they were inside the shaft, and they were coming after her. There was not a single part of that summary that didn't utterly terrify her.
She had to hurry. She took another step, another, moving faster.
Her foot slipped. She steadied herself again. Then both feet slipped at once, and this time she did not keep her balance.
Amy went over on her backside.
'Ouch!' she cried. Then she realised that falling on her bum was not going to be the worst of it.
She was moving. She was sliding. She was travelling down the shaft.
She protested aloud, to no one in particular, and started to paddle and scrabble with her hands and feet.
To no avail. She was picking up speed. She was sliding down the shaft as if it was a chute, on her bottom, like Rory on a monster stupid waterslide. She couldn't stop herself. She couldn't get up.
Gaining speed with every passing second, Amy rode the slide, helplessly, deeper and deeper underground.
Snow was falling. It was the blackest kind of night Rory had seen in a long while, cold and enclosing, giving nothing back. Big flakes of snow just seemed to hurtle blindly out of the darkness, zooming at him.
He was following Vesta through the snowy woods.
She had brought her little solamp, but they had agreed to try travelling without it on for as long as they could.
A light could attract the wrong kind of attention. Vesta had assured Rory that she knew which way to go. She knew the woods. She knew how to get them to Beside.
Rory believed she meant it, but he was still worried.
They had left the comforting heat of the autumn mills -
automills, surely? - behind them and set out into a frozen night. There was a very good chance they would die of cold before they got anywhere, and that was without factoring in the it with red eyes that was out to get them.
His clothes had dried out during their stay in the warmth of the mill. He was glad of his coat. He wasn't convinced it had been worth going back to the TARDIS for it. Maybe the day would have turned out to be rather less energetic if he'd stayed with Amy and the Doctor. Then again, he had no way of telling what sort of adventures they'd been getting up to. He had a fond notion that they would arrive at Vesta's village, Beside, and find the Doctor and Amy already there, already firm friends with everybody, telling stories, sitting by a hearth, eating hot food. His fond notion had a giant Christmas tree in it too, so he knew some of the details were completely fanciful, but he had hopes.
Rory was also a realist. He tried to count the number of times they had arrived anywhere, by accident or design, and not stumbled into some predicament or other. The only answer he could come up with was zero. It was inevitable, as inevitable as the wheeze of the TARDIS's console, as inevitable as the Doctor's sudden grin of insight. These predicaments, Rory believed, naturally attached themselves to Time Lords. In fact, with only one Time Lord left, there was probably a serious backlog of predicaments waiting to be attached. Danger, problems, plight, peril... He wouldn't be particularly surprised to learn there was some sort of detector circuit aboard the TARDIS that automatically drew them towards trouble. The Doctor would probably admit it one day, casually, as though he thought they already knew. 'You mean I didn't tell you about the Predicament Seek-O-Matic Module? I didn't? I could have sworn... Should I switch it off for a change? Yes, why not? I'll switch it off.'
Snowflakes continued to stream out of the darkness, become suddenly visible, and hit him in the face. They were like stars. It was like rushing through the cosmos.
It was piercingly cold and blindingly dark, and all he could see were little bright white objects speeding by.
It was like travelling through the universe in the TARDIS and, like the TARDIS, there was no way of knowing exactly where you were going, or how safe it would be when you got there.
Amy was travelling at speeds in excess of anything she was comfortable with, especially given the fact that she wasn't riding aboard anything like a bike or a skateboard or a luge or a rocket ship, and she wasn't in any way in control at all.
The lining of the tube felt frictionless, and resisted her frantic attempts to grab hold of something or stop herself. The pitch was also increasing, dropping her down a raked slide even steeper and more alarming than before. Eyes wide, hair flying out behind her, she zoomed down the tube. She realised it was the sort of ride that she might have enjoyed under other circumstances, none of which were presently operating. She also realised she was making desperate, strangled noises like 'agh' and 'eek' and 'yrk'.
Then she flew out of the mouth of a tube and landed on a bed of soft, dusty material. She bounced and came to a halt. Coughing, she slowly got to her feet. Her impact had puffed a huge cloud of dusty fibres out of the mass. She was in a sm
all metal chamber, and the dusty material was a thick mass of leaf mould and vegetable fibres that had been sucked into the vent system and had accumulated there to rot. It had probably saved her from serious injury.
Still coughing, she glanced back up the dark tube of the vent system.
'I am not doing that again,' she said.
Her feet, striving for some autonomy, chose that moment to skid out from under her and prove her wrong. She slipped, fell down on her rear end again, and shot away down the next extension of the tube system, 'eek'-ing helplessly.
'Not fun!' she yelled at the top of her voice, experiencing an even sharper, steeper, faster ride than before. The tube twisted at one point and almost inverted her, before finally ejecting her into another chamber lined with deep, springy and slightly musty leaf matter.
Amy got to her feet a great deal more carefully than she had after her previous landing. She thought for a moment that she might have damaged her shoulder or back, because it was difficult to straighten up, but then discovered that this had less to do with a sprain or dislocation, and more to do with the fact that she was standing on one of her elasticated mittens.
She let the mitten ping out from under her foot, straightened up properly, and stared into the gloom around her whilst combing bits of dead leaf out of her hair with her fingers.
'Doctor?' she called. 'Doctor?'
The metal chamber, plain and grey and boxy, had several exits, all of which were further tube mouths.
She edged around, making sure not to slip and plunge off on another escapade.
'Doctor?'
One of the vent tubes ran for a horizontal section, and there was a kind of fluted duct to one side that she clambered through. She was now in a hallway. It was long, metallic and dark. The air was cool but dry. A small amount of ambient light was issuing from recessed lamps in the wall. The lamps looked like smaller and more sophisticated versions of the lights the Morphans used, the devices they called solamps.
The glow reminded Amy of the output of solar garden lights that had been on all night and were beginning to tire.
'Doctor? Hello?'
There hadn't been much opportunity to argue with where the tube was taking her, so she wondered how the Doctor, Bel and Samewell could have ended up anywhere else.
Amy listened hard to see if a faraway voice might be answering her calls, and realised she could hear something. It was a humming, a deep resonance. She could feel it more than she could hear it. It was the sound immense machinery made, the steady industrial purr of automation, heard from a distance. It felt as if she was inside a huge factory, the biggest factory ever built, and all the machinery, whirring and chugging away, was hidden from view behind the metal skin of the walls around her.
Then she thought, Maybe I'm inside the actual machine. Maybe I'm inside some kind of pipe or tube or channel, and it seems giant to me, but that's only because the machine's so big. Maybe it's going to suddenly fill with... water or oil or liquid waste or atomic sludge or energy. Maybe it shoots down here at regular intervals as part of the machine's operation, and I've simply arrived between those intervals, and if I stay here much longer I'm going to get drowned or washed away or burned to a frazzle or irradiated, or—
Amy began to panic. She began to feel very, very claustrophobic. She hurried along the hallway-that-might-also-be-a-pipe looking for an exit, or a door, or at the very least something to get up onto.
She found something else instead.
A scratching sound, a skittering noise, a flash of light in the shadows, just a glint.
'Who's that? Who's there?' she asked boldly.
Experience had taught her that being bold often helped. Well, not so much as bolshie. Whatever, it made her feel better anyway.
Then she saw what was making the sound. She saw the rats.
They weren't actually rats. She realised that straight off. But rats were what they made her think of, and rats was the word that registered in her brain.
They had too many legs to be rats. Too many legs, and not nearly enough eyes or hair. Plus, they were the size of terriers, which was quite unusual for rats.
But by golly there were a lot of them.
Chapter
10
Underneath the Mountain
They were going to eat her.
There was no doubt in Amy's mind about that. They were scurrying towards her along the hallway floor in a great tide of wrinkled, grey-pink bodies, with chattering teeth that looked like they were coated with metal and designed for biting through wire.
She wasn't exactly sure why she thought they were going to eat her. It wasn't as though they had a malicious look in their eyes, because they didn't have eyes. They just had sockets where eyes were supposed to be, sockets that looked like surgical excisions, sockets that had been emptied and then packed with brown material the texture of foam, like the covers to headphone buds or a voice mic. They had claws that resembled bird-foot articulations built from old compass and divider sets. They had tails that looked like the coating of black electrical cable stretched over bike chain.
'Oh my god, you're all completely horrible!' she exclaimed, and began to retreat very fast. They responded by accelerating towards her, rushing in a sudden flood, the larger rats pushing smaller ones aside or trampling them. The nasty, wrinkly grey flesh on their bodies was taut enough to reveal the outlines of their ribcages.
'And you're hungry!' she yelped, finally understanding what had tipped her off. They were famished, and they were behaving the way any hungry creatures did when they detected food.
She started to sprint. They were after her. Their jaws snapped wide, ready to bite, revealing dentition that would have looked much more at home on posters for a film about memorable summers on Amity Island.
One of the rat-things leapt at her. It missed, but it nearly took a chunk out of her left calf with a snap of its teeth. Another leapt. She swatted it away with her hand. A third sprang at her and she struck at it but failed to connect, and it seized her mitten in its mouth, attaching itself to her through-sleeve elastic like a fish to a line.
'Get off!' she yelled, and swung the thing hard so that it bashed into the hallway wall. It took two fairly deliberate smacks to make it let go of the mitten and fall onto the floor.
By then, the main portion of the rat flood had reached her. She screamed in horror. What was about to happen was going to be unpleasant. About as unpleasant as unpleasant ever got.
What actually happened next was unpleasant, but not in the way she had been expecting. There was a shrill noise, like some kind of alarm or whistle. It stabbed into her ears like knitting needles and made her cry out in pain and stumble to her knees. It was an awful sound. It was the sort of sound that felt like it would break your ears, microwave your brain, and make smoke come out of your nose.
It actually did that to several of the rats. Some dropped dead in their tracks. Others fell, twitching and writhing in pain. The rest simply recoiled and fled.
Their frantic metal claws made skritchy, squealy, teeth-on-edge noises as they fled down the metal hallway, noises that Amy would not have enjoyed at all if she'd been able to hear them. Her ears, however, were still ringing from the monstrously shrill sound.
Shaking her head, she got up. The Doctor was standing right behind her, with Arabel and Samewell, both looking scared, behind him. The Doctor was smiling.
'______ ,' he said.'______.'
'What?' Amy asked.
'______,' the Doctor replied, still smiling, but looking concerned.
'Give me a clue,' she said. 'Is it a book? How many words? Why aren't you talking to me?'
The Doctor turned and said something equally inaudible to Arabel and Samewell.
'It's my ears, isn't it?' asked Amy. 'That sound knackered my ears, didn't it?'
The Doctor turned back to her. He pointed to his sonic screwdriver, and made a sad face. '______,' he said.
She could read his lips. She knew what sorry looke
d like.
Sol Farrow was a strong man, noted for his labour in the fields and heathouses. Sol was not quite as big as Jack Duggat, for Jack Duggat was the biggest of all Morphans in Beside, but he was an ox of a man nevertheless. Elect Groan have given him the task of nightwatching Beside's westgate, and offered him his choice of arms to take. Sol had chosen a fine, longhandled shovel with a shipskin tongue. He'd also taken a good sickle from the tool store, and hooked it into his belt under his heavy winter coat. Sol did not intend to be found wanting. He'd heard the stories over the past weeks, all of them: the tall figures glimpsed in the woods, the killed cattle and sheep, the stars that did not stay still. What were those things in the woods?
Were they real, real giants of the forest, regarding the plantnation with evil intent? Or were they just figments of the imagination, sprites conjured by the fearful mindset of the Morphans?
Sol Farrow was a sound man, and would have normally supposed the latter. People jumped at shadows, and at sounds in the night. They saw things sometimes that weren't really there. The hard winters and the snow, well, that was a misfortune, a hardship they had to bear, but it was making people agitated, and in that agitation, their minds raced and imagined.
Now he was not so sure. There was too much that couldn't be accounted for, more than could be explained by imagination and a rogue dog.
How many men had not returned from the search today? There was no trace of them. If they'd been taken by something, like the livestock had been taken, then the population of Beside had suffered a mortal blow.
Nightwatching had not been done in his time, or his father's, or his father's father's. According to the practices listed in the word of Guide, nightwatching had been done in the early times, when the Morphans first came to Hereafter. Nightwatch had been posted around the first camps, while the towns were being raised and constructed. Back then, the Morphans had not known much about the world Hereafter, and had no idea what hid in the dark when it fell.