by Steve Cole
Vitus didn’t answer, transfixed by the images of battle on the screens. ‘It’s uncanny,’ he murmured. ‘You know, Plato said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war”.’
Graham snorted softly. ‘Probably turning in his grave right now.’
Yaz pointed to one of the monitors. ‘Doctor …’
Ryan looked, and then wished he hadn’t. ‘Oh, my days.’
There were Roman zombies rampaging through the camp, far from the line of battle. A wounded Strava shambled after them. They were killing the workers, the blacksmiths, stable boys, cooks, the wounded, horses and oxen, everyone and everything they could find.
‘The Tenctrama have changed tactics.’ The Doctor looked away, sickened. ‘No notions of “sides” any more. Just kill who and what you can in one last push.’
Ryan nodded. ‘Whatever they’ve been planning all this time, they’re finally ready.’
‘Talking of sides, Doctor, isn’t that Attila?’ Yaz pointed to another screen in the corner of the Hall. With a buzz of the sonic the Doctor made the image larger. In the confused mass of Huns, one stood under a blood-splashed banner, swinging his sword, fighting off three more men attacking with maces.
Ryan’s heart quickened. ‘That’s not Attila, that’s Bleda.’
‘Bleda is Attila.’ Yaz nudged him. ‘Keep up.’
‘Whoa! Well, that’s definitely Alp, isn’t it?’ Graham chewed his lip. ‘Why is Alp trying to kill Bleda – Attila I mean?’
‘Because Alp died in the forest,’ Yaz told him. ‘You keep up too!’
‘Attila has to stop the fighting,’ said the Doctor. ‘Each life that’s saved sets back the Tenctrama, but his people won’t retreat unless they hear it from him.’ She stabbed her finger at the screen. ‘Vitus, Liss, where is this taking place?’
‘Close to where Ryan and I found you,’ Liss answered. ‘Eastern sector of the Plain.’
‘His army would’ve seen us,’ said Yaz. ‘Suppose he’s looking for a way in here.’
‘If we’re to save those soldiers we’ll need a bigger way in.’ The Doctor swept her piercing eyes around the room. ‘Here’s what I want you to do …’
His white mount cut down, Attila staggered away from the scrum of cavalry and climbed over the gory ruins of a Strava, pursued by three of the dead. Alp was one of them, clambering over the tusked corpse, wielding a mace.
‘You dare to turn on your king?’ Attila shouted. ‘We were like brothers, you stubborn idiot!’ He hacked the legs from under one of his attackers and smashed the second man’s mace aside with the flat edge of his sword, but Alp’s weapon whistled down to strike his chest. The wooden spikes didn’t pierce Attila’s armour but he fell to the muddy ground, winded.
Alp’s walking corpse loomed over him, no triumph on its ghastly face. But then a deeper shadow fell across both of them with a whinnying cry. Attila laughed with savage satisfaction as a black horse reared up and smashed its hooves against Alp’s chest, flinging him back into the bloody mêlée.
‘Bittenmane!’ Attila reached up for his horse’s bridle and used it to heave himself back to his feet. Bittenmane’s eyes were dull, his mouth dry and tacky and his flanks thick with scurf. ‘No, you were never one to run from battle.’
Another corpse came shambling closer, sword raised. Before Attila could recover himself, an axe thrown from behind him came whistling past his ear and struck the man in the shoulder. Then two Roman soldiers rushed forward and set upon the Hun with swords.
Attila turned to find Aetius, at the head of perhaps fifty men, holding him at sword-point. ‘Hello, old friend,’ the Roman said. ‘May I expect gratitude for saving your life?’
‘It is you who has grown old,’ Attila rejoined, ‘for your wits are surely lost if you think I sought rescue.’
‘Perhaps only I think clearly.’ Aetius lowered his sword. ‘We are all in need of deliverance, Attila. All our lives, we have waged war in order to gain advantage. Tell me, what advantage can be brought to us this day?’
Attila surveyed the fighting on the plain, the bulwarks of dead men and horses. ‘There is no glory here and still less purpose,’ he concluded.
‘Then let me propose a truce,’ Aetius said. ‘A new alliance.’
Behind him, Attila recognised Thorismund, the Visigoth prince, standing bloodied but bold before a band of his shag-haired people. ‘You agree?’
‘I do,’ Thorismund said. ‘Let us work together, and quit the battlefield.’
‘Spoken like a king, Thorismund.’ Aetius offered his hand to Attila. ‘Order your men to fall back with us.’
Attila only stared at the outstretched arm.
‘Come on, you stubborn ox.’ Aetius nodded to the fallen Strava. ‘Let us prosecute this war as true soldiers, not keepers at the Coliseum! Outride the dead and fight for each other—’
An ear-splitting explosion roared fire up into the evening sky. Horses reared up, nostrils flaring, while many of the living fell to their knees in terror and prayed in a rain of mud and stone. Attila raised his sword in warning as a figure emerged from the dust.
It was Yasmin Khan.
‘Witch,’ Attila groaned, ‘how you vex me!’
‘Less of the witch, less of the testosterone, and faster on that handshake – please?’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘You don’t let off an Arcturan grenade without people noticing. We need to get everybody inside.’
Attila smiled grimly. She and the Doctor were slippery witches. How had she got free from his guards? Well, perhaps he should trust to those powers of escape.
She was looking past him to where the dead were starting to advance.
‘Come on!’
Another girl, pale and wearing armour, followed her out. ‘There’s room for everyone in the catacombs but we need to seal them up again quickly to keep out the dead, so …’ She bowed to Aetius. ‘With your permission, sir?’
‘This one I trust,’ Aetius announced.
Attila was not to be outdone. ‘I trust the other – to talk us all to death if we don’t act!’ He surveyed the smoking hole in the ground into which the young witch was beckoning. ‘I will trust the old dead in the catacombs, too. They knew when to lie down.’ He climbed onto the dead Strava and raised his sword to rally his men. ‘This day is backwards,’ he shouted. ‘The dead find life above ground, and we Huns will find life below it if we join with our enemies. For now, let us work alongside those we would kill. I order you now – let us stand together as those who would live and die only once!’
Chapter 30
The last time Ryan had played usher was on Open Day in Year Eleven when the Year Sixes came to look round their prospective new school. He’d stood outside the entrance hall giving directions to parents, most of which he’d managed to get wrong, so here was a chance to up his game. Of course, at school the way to direct people hadn’t been straight through a solid wall that was glowing gold. There had also been fewer horses, but the ones like Bittenmane weren’t too much trouble. ‘Thank you for your service,’ he told the grizzled, unkempt horse, who looked at him as if affronted.
Understandably the soldiers weren’t happy about going through a shimmering barrier, but Liss demonstrated that it was safe.
Aetius greeted Vitus, who saluted him. ‘I’m glad you got my message to force open the catacombs.’
‘Actually, sir, I didn’t,’ Vitus confessed. ‘It was the Doctor’s idea.’
‘My witch!’ Attila laughed and nodded. ‘She has many ideas. I may cut off her head and count them all.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Aetius, ‘it’s a good thing she wasn’t killed.’
Attila grew more sombre. ‘Yet.’
The dead soldiers were shambling towards them now. Ryan fired the grey blaster that Vitus had found for him among the piles of junk. It looked cool – proper Star Wars hardware – but Ryan had already learned the hard way that when guns were around, things could go south fast. It’s brains over bullets, he told himself. In any case, he w
asn’t about to blast people even if he knew they were already dead, so he set the gun to its strongest setting and kept shooting the ground in front of the zombies, carving great craters and trenches into the landscape to slow them down.
‘Keep moving!’ Yaz was yelling. Licinia was sending most of the soldiers – Huns, Visigoths, Romans, whoever the hell they were, God knew they all stank as bad as each other – into the cloisters beyond the main hall, the idea being they could move on to defend the main entrance if need be. Yaz, meanwhile, would take Aetius and Attila straight to the Doctor like she’d asked. And as soon as the last person was gone, Ryan and Liss were to bring down the roof and keep out the dead.
‘All right, Ryan,’ Yaz called. She stood so calm and in control between these two giants of the ancient world, it was awesome; like they were just a couple of drunk-and-disorderlies she’d picked up outside the Millennium Gallery. But he knew how much doubt she hid behind that calm expression, and felt all the more impressed. ‘I’ll leave the weird impossible golden door open for you, ’kay?’
‘See you soon,’ Ryan said, as the three of them vanished through it. He turned to Liss and held up his gun. ‘Better get filling this hole.’
‘Better had.’ Liss pushed Ryan backwards and fired her own gun three times at points in the wrecked ceiling. He held his ears as the rubble fell in with a booming crash, closing off the improvised exit. She slapped him fondly on the cheek. ‘How’s that?’
‘No one likes a show-off.’ He winked to show he was joking, coughed on the thick rock dust in the air, and then squinted through a crack in the pile of rubble. The dead were standing, watching, waiting. Slowly, they turned, ready to target some other survivors. Gold sparks like fireflies danced in the atmosphere above them.
‘What’s going to happen to all those poor people?’ he said.
‘Living or dead?’
She looked at him. ‘Hard to tell the difference right now.’
‘There’s living, and there’s playing at living.’ He smiled at her. ‘I can tell the difference.’
Liss leaned forward and held him close.
‘Should we get back to the Doctor and everyone?’ Ryan wondered into the side of her face.
‘In a minute,’ she said.
Yaz left Graham and Vitus handling crowd control in the outer gallery of the crypt to check that the Doctor was managing OK with the bigwigs of the battle – and that Attila wasn’t exacting some horrible revenge for that old trick with the force-field generator. In fact, Attila was handing the thing back to her, or trying to, at least. The Doctor hadn’t looked up from sonicking Liss’s talk-box.
‘It was a weapon that does not kill, but makes the air itself play tricks.’ Losing patience, Attila dropped the generator on the altar. ‘I should have expected no less from you, Witch.’
‘Ooh, thanks.’ Absent-mindedly the Doctor stuffed it in her pocket and continued her work on the comms-link. ‘Shame that’s out of power, we could really use a force field right now.’ She blinked as if suddenly taking on board who had given it to her. ‘Aha, Attila! Glad you made it, History’s not done with you yet. And, look – ave, ave, Flavius Aetius. Nice to meet you.’ The Doctor grabbed the general’s hand and shook it, then turned to the pale youth, Thorismund. ‘Visigoth prince, right? Did I call it?’
‘Since the death of my weakling fool of a father, I am a king,’ he replied grandly. ‘Anointed in blood.’
‘You Goths.’ The Doctor shook her head, marvelling. ‘Anointed in Blood sounds like your difficult second album …’
Aetius’s lip was curling as he gazed around the Hall with its alien relics and tech strewn about the place. ‘To think I sponsor this Legion of shame. All of this should’ve been destroyed centuries ago.’
‘Quite glad it wasn’t. I’m hoping that something here could save a lot of lives.’ The Doctor held out a hand. ‘Talk-box, please.’
Aetius didn’t budge. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a good sort, really. History calls you “the last true Roman”, you know. I’d hate that nice bit of puff to become a statistic.’
‘Do as she asks.’ Attila sounded weary. ‘The alternative brings words enough to choke your strongest interpreters.’
‘Very well.’ Aetius handed the device to the Doctor, who had the back off it in seconds. ‘This horror, this spectacle … it must be stopped,’ he went on. ‘The world must not learn of what’s happened here.’
‘Why d’you say that?’ the Doctor wondered, wiring the talk-box into Liss’s.
‘Magicks erode reason. As the truth of their existence spreads, so too does fear and superstition among the people, a loss of faith in our laws, reason and governance. If the shadow of the barbarian is not to fall on our ordered world, then the common people must be protected from knowledge of magicks and the unknown.’
‘By sealing it in a crypt and pretending it’s not real? Fingers in your ears and la-la-la-la-la-laaa!’ The Doctor demonstrated this approach. Noisily. ‘How noble and enlightened. How very Roman.’
‘Perhaps you are on the wrong side, Aetius,’ said Attila. ‘The Tenctrama have a much simpler way of keeping the populace from learning anything ever again.’ His hand went to his sword hilt. ‘I can show it to you, should you wish.’
Aetius’s smile stayed a mile from his eyes. ‘Today, I’ve seen enough of it.’
‘But you ain’t heard nothing yet!’ The Doctor carried the comms-link lash-up over to the glowing spheres that ran the video feeds. ‘I asked you here because I need you to tell your respective peoples to go home. To run away. To run and don’t stop running.’
Attila looked appalled. ‘Flee the battlefield?’
‘One way of putting it,’ said the Doctor. ‘I prefer, starve the Tenctrama of fresh victims.’
Aetius considered. ‘So, in actual fact, you propose a tactical realignment?’
‘More of a strategic withdrawal,’ said Attila.
‘How can we command our surviving men from below ground?’ Thorismund protested.
Attila nodded. ‘My fastest zoltans and their horses have been slain and scattered.’
‘Try this.’ The Doctor waved the sonic screwdriver between the comms-link and the monitors and trails of gold appeared to join them. ‘Right! Patched in audio to the communication systems, and amplified the speaker potential in the comms-link. Which means … this.’ She leaned close to the cracked open communicators and spoke with am-dram passion. ‘Friends, Romans, country-folk!’ The ground actually shook with the volume of her voice outside, rumbling over the plains. ‘Stand by for a brief message from your generals.’ She pulled back from the communicator and looked expectantly at Attila and Aetius.
In fact it was Thorismund who stepped up to the mic first. ‘Visigoths, this is your new and rightful king …’
‘Speak faster,’ Attila warned him. ‘I wish to address my troops.’
Aetius shook his head. ‘Wait your turn, my lord Attila.’
‘It’s no problem if you go last to order a retreat, Aetius. Romans were ever better at running …’
‘Oh, the testosterone.’ The Doctor looked tired, rubbing her eyes as she left them to it and crossed to join Yaz. ‘Any good finds in the Legion’s relic boxes?’
‘Vitus found Ryan a blaster.’ Yaz held out two cylindrical objects, one bigger than the other. ‘And I found these.’
The Doctor blinked. ‘That’s a laser pointer. And that’s spray paint.’ She took the canisters and shook them. ‘If either of these still worked, we could create a mural and highlight it with the pointer! Perfect distraction tactic.’ She looked at Yaz. ‘How many were you able to save from outside?’
‘We got over a hundred men and maybe thirty horses before we had to close up,’ Yaz told her. ‘But there’s so many more out there. Good idea of yours, getting them to run for it.’
‘Thank you.’ The Doctor was staring into space. ‘I’m not sure the Tenctrama will agree.’
In the Tenctrama lair, I
nkri and Enkalo listened in a cold fury as the voice of Attila rolled across the fields below like thunder.
‘Like Aetius and the Visigoth, he orders evacuation of all troops,’ Enkalo hissed. ‘We need the dead, Inkri. We stand as the last Tenctrama, spent and exhausted. We are so close …’
‘The Pit will be nourished. We will be renewed. Our race will spawn again.’ Inkri raised her withered hands up to the darkness above. ‘Let it begin.’
The slow thump of a heartbeat sounded. Enkalo’s face hovered between excitement and fear as a hum of power filled the air. ‘Already? But Attila has not yet been located and destroyed. Nor the Doctor and her friend—’
‘Attila is isolated inside the catacombs,’ Inkri hissed, tapping a long finger against her nose as golden lights sparkled through the darkness of the lair. ‘We are safe to strafe the battlefield. Safe to take fresh strength – and, once restored, we shall take the catacombs – and the Doctor – by force.’
‘What’s happening out there?’ Liss was crouched on the floor staring through the little cracks in the rubble, and Ryan knelt to join her.
The voices of Attila, Aetius and the other dude had sounded loud as launching rockets out on the plains; Ryan had been afraid they’d start another cave-in. But now something else was filling the air. Light this time.
A golden light. Faint at first, trailing around like a whirlwind, sparking, sending flares out down to the ground. Growing brighter. Stronger. Big as a town house, and getting bigger.
It slowly lowered towards the plains. As it did, lassos of light struck out from it, one, a dozen, two dozen … searing lines of power that lit the figures on the battlefield. They stood and shook and seemed to bask in the energy blast.
Liss’s eyes were wide with fear. ‘That light. Is it giving them power?’
‘Or is it taking power?’ Ryan was watching Alp, just outside, as his flesh melted into his armour, like the end of a gory snowman accelerated a thousand-fold. The lines of power were like straws stuck into the corpses, allowing the Tenctrama to suck dry whatever energies animated the remains. But it wasn’t only the fighting dead affected. Dismembered bodies were struck too, severed limbs shaking as the secret essence inside them was torn free, leaving only dust.