by Cavan Scott
As soon as she opened the confessional door and stepped into the TARDIS, Missy detected another distinctive odour.
‘Have you been smoking in here?’
Antonia shuffled across the darkened TARDIS, her frightened face pale in the half-light that spilled in from behind Missy. ‘I thought you were never coming back. Please let me out.’
‘All right.’ Missy beckoned her through the confessional door and out into the aisle of the basilica.
Antonia’s nose wrinkled at the smell. Missy swiftly hooked her around the elbow with the curved handle of her furled parasol, before pushing her around the corner of the confessional and into the Vortex void.
The girl uttered a dismayed little scream, and vanished into the whorl of soft colours.
Missy studied the nails on her free hand. Counted to ten. Then tugged on the parasol.
Antonia burst back into the aisle, and bumped into Missy. She hugged her, until she felt Missy tense up.
‘Seems to be safe.’ Missy detached herself from the girl.
Antonia was blinking with disbelief. ‘I saw light and water and people! Is that where Mario is? We have to find him!’
The girl was interrupted as a grubby figure stepped out of the void behind her. His clothes were torn scraps, and beneath a filthy face his neck bulged with ugly blisters. Well, that explained what was wrong with all these other people in the cathedral: the Black Death. Fourteenth-century bubonic plague.
Missy stepped smartly aside as he passed. ‘Two-way traffic! Come on, dear. Let’s find your boyfriend.’
Fourteenth-century Venice …
… welcomed them with a bump. The other side of the void wasn’t in the cathedral. Instead, it swirled and roiled in an alleyway that ran alongside a small canal.
Scattered candles and a wooden chair floated near the surface of the water. And was that a discarded wimple?
If anything, the stench from the canal was worse than in the cathedral. Despite the clear blue skies, Missy heard approaching thunder.
She unfolded her printout, and realised she hadn’t got a clue where she was. ‘No street signs in fourteenth-century Venice,’ she told Antonia.
They cut across a small bridge into a main thoroughfare. A stream of people – men, women, beggars, merchants, nobles – ran in a panic towards them, stumbling, knocking each other over. Some went down and didn’t get up again.
A spear of laser light seared down the thoroughfare, and Missy realised it wasn’t thunder she’d heard. The light cut down the slower Venetians and showered the street with debris from buildings.
Two grotesque, leonine figures trotted along the opposite bank, and stopped to stare straight across at them.
‘Lions.’ Antonia’s incredulous voice was barely a whisper. ‘Lions with lightning.’
‘Gryphon warriors,’ snapped Missy. ‘Big game hunt. And I’m the prey.’
Antonia clutched Missy’s arm. ‘They can’t reach us from there.’
One of the Gryphons shook its long mane, flexed its shoulders, opened its wings, and took off towards them over the canal.
Missy shoved Antonia aside. ‘Run!’ she hissed. With any luck, the Gryphon would be drawn to the fleeing girl first, and she could avoid any personal unpleasantness. What did she have at hand to defend herself? Nothing that would stop this flapping feline. Not like that time she’d used her brooch to escape from a lecherous lungfish on Pomfret IV, where she’d deflated both his ego and his swim bladder.
Missy shrank back into the cover of a doorway. The Gryphon had shown no interest in her. A device in its paw scanned for a time signature.
With a rustle of soft wings, a female Gryphon landed beside him.
‘Hermione!’ breathed Missy.
‘The time signature is near,’ the warrior reported.
The Gryphon captain gave a curt nod. ‘Then we shall soon have the technology to repair our timeship.’
Around the corner from Missy, Antonia unsuccessfully attempted to stifle loud sobs of fear. Too late to strangle her into silence, and the Gryphons were getting nearer …
In the distance, Missy spotted a cohort of Venetian soldiers making stealthy progress in the shadow of buildings alongside the canal. Missy raised her parasol, and sent a sonic pulse the length of the street that made the nearest soldier yelp in alarm and pain.
The Gryphons wheeled around at the noise, and rose into the air for a better look. With their position revealed, the soldiers yelled and charged. The Gryphons responded, raining down a withering series of killing shots.
Missy beat a swift retreat in the opposite direction, and bumped into Antonia at the corner.
The girl dried her tears. ‘Will those soldiers be OK?’
‘Unlikely. They brought swords to a laser fight.’
‘We must find Mario, before he gets hurt, too.’
Missy unfolded her printout. ‘If we can work out where we are …’
Antonia uttered a cry of dismay. ‘Never mind your stupid map. We should just ask people!’
Missy’s glare was as withering as a Gryphon attack. ‘Excuse me, have you seen a boy who’ll look like a famous footballer 700 years from now?’
‘Oh, come on, signorina!’ In any other circumstances, Antonia’s contemptuous look would have got her killed. ‘This is fourteenth-century Venice. He’s black. He’s wearing Reeboks and a Nice football shirt.’
They steered clear of the sporadic fighting and, between them, asked a succession of well-dressed merchants, ragged beggars, and armed soldiers if they’d seen an unusual-looking child. Missy’s frustration built into a cold fury at the slow progress of having to ask idiot human strangers for help.
At last, as the freezing night closed in, a priest helped them narrow their search to a battered construction in the west of the city. An old school building. Finally, the curator’s stupid map made sense.
‘I’ll check inside. Shout if any of those creatures appear.’
Missy strode down the street and in through a dilapidated doorway. It was a fleapit off a tired, forgotten square. She pulled on her gloves and negotiated broken wooden stairs that led up to an uncurtained room of exposed boards with a cramped row of single beds.
Mario was sprawled on one of the bare frames. His dead eyes stared at the ceiling, and his body was a mass of sores. On the floor beside him sat a lamp that contained an unlit, half-burnt candle.
Next to that, a sheet of paper on his battered clipboard was annotated in biro. A futile list of names of those who might be interested in his stolen goods. Before he’d got to any of them, the plague had got to him.
And standing on that scribbled sheet was the dematerialisation circuit.
As she descended the rickety stairs, Missy nearly collided with a dark-robed figure in a beaked mask. The plague doctor paused, and the mask’s nose pointed at her as if in accusation.
‘You’re a bit late.’ She scribbled a brief note on the clipboard as the doctor pushed past. Missy completed a more cautious descent of the staircase. ‘Unless you’re peddling miracle cures …’
At the end of the street, Antonia was waiting. Missy saw the girl take a drag on a sneaky cigarette, drawing unwelcome attention from passers-by. She snatched it from the girl’s lips, took a hungry drag herself, then spat out smoke and threw the thing in the filthy gutter.
Missy tugged her jacket straight. She could feel the reassuring shape of the dematerialisation circuit in the inner pocket. ‘Come on. It’s getting dark.’ She lifted Mario’s lamp, and lit the scrap of candle with Antonia’s cigarette lighter.
‘Didn’t you find him?’
‘He’s gone.’ Missy flourished the clipboard. ‘But look! He left a wee note. Vado all’altro mondo.’
‘The other world,’ repeated Antonia. Her eyes glittered in the candlelight. ‘He must have gone back home through that … temporal portal!’
‘And so must we.’ Missy looked at the paper. ‘Such neat handwriting.’
‘He’s the educated one, out of the t
wo of us.’
Missy dropped the clipboard to the ground. ‘You’re telling me.’ She set off down the dark street at a brisk pace. ‘Hurry up, now. Long journey ahead. Hundreds of years, in fact.’
Now …
… they stepped out of the Vortex void. It had expanded to dominate the confessional, and cast its eerie colours across the whole basilica.
Missy dropped Mario’s extinguished lamp by the TARDIS door, and trod a wary path to the opposite aisle. In the dappled light, the statue of Saint Michael seemed to wave his wings in an unfelt breeze. Slumped in chairs or sprawled in the nave, accidental escapees from fourteenth-century Venice had found their final rest seven centuries after their own time.
Venetian escapees weren’t the only new arrivals. Because it wasn’t the statue of Saint Michael that loomed into view from the side chapel. A Gryphon warrior had traversed the void ahead of them.
The warrior surged forward, his wings whipping up a fierce squall of air as he swooped across at them. He batted Antonia to one side, and spun to face Missy, blocking her access to her TARDIS. He pulled back his lips to reveal ferocious teeth, and his shattering roar reverberated around the whole basilica.
The Gryphon raised one massive paw, and for a moment Missy thought he would strike her down where she stood. But instead, he had lifted a comms device to his savage mouth. ‘She’s here, Captain.’
‘I want her alive. But not necessarily unharmed.’ Hermione’s electronic voice crackled in the still air. ‘I’m on my way.’
Muscles flexed under the warrior’s fur as he bore down on Missy.
She brandished her parasol. ‘What are you staring at, Aslan?’
He swatted it from her, and it rattled off into the distance.
Missy smiled her fiercest smile. ‘C’mon. You’re a bit of a pussycat, aren’t you? Well, mostly pussycat, with a bit of budgie mixed in.’
The warrior reared back as a lit candle struck his head from behind, and the hair of his mane crinkled and burned. He spun around in a furious attempt to extinguish it.
Missy felt herself pushed forward. Antonia was steering them down the aisle to the exit in a frantic flight through the darkness, ‘Come on!’ She shoved the parasol back into Missy’s hand, grabbed another offertory candle, and flung it at the warrior. ‘We’re getting out of here.’
The recovering Gryphon pounded through the cathedral. He caught up with them at the exit, intimidatingly large even as he folded his wings to pursue them outside.
Missy and Antonia heaved at the huge, ornate cathedral doors, and managed to close them on the warrior. Feathers scattered as one delicate wing crunched and crumpled between the carved doors. The Gryphon bellowed a shattering roar of pain and anger, and fell back inside.
Missy hurried into the main square. ‘That’s why I never let my daughter have pets. Once they outgrow the house, you just have to put them down.’
Antonia wasn’t listening. She stared in horror across the piazza.
Venice was in flames. Broken remnants of the Carnivale had scattered over the devastated space, bright clothes and masks trampled into damp ground and stained with blood. Ragged corpses slumped against the cracked columns of the Biblioteca. The bricks of the Campanile were scorched.
‘Those lions aren’t the only things that came through the rift,’ gasped Antonia.
‘People and plague.’ Missy paused for breath. Running was so not her style. ‘Time has moved on ahead of us here. And the big cats have been on safari.’
Around the corner she surveyed the Piazzetta. At the far end, the shattered combs of sunken gondolas jutted from the soiled lagoon. From his granite column, Saint Theodore looked down on the devastation. And above the other column, swooping over the unicorn statue and towards them out of the smoky sky, came Hermione.
Missy turned on her heel, and fled back into the square, desperate for cover. She flinched at the sudden, brutal chatter of automatic weapons – then laughed in delight when she saw a brace of Italian troops. They emerged from the cover of the Biblioteca to fire at Hermione, who banked left to retaliate.
Missy and Antonia reached the piazza again. The cathedral doorway was now blocked by the Gryphon warrior, nursing his broken wing and an enormous grudge.
‘No way back in.’ Missy stamped her foot.
Antonia tugged her sleeve. ‘Let’s try something else.’ She led them around the side of the cathedral, taking careful steps to avoid the scattered debris – abandoned bags, a staring corpse, the smashed remnants of a Hasselblad. Torn flaps of a museum fly-poster on the scaffolding featured a corroded candlestick.
Antonia grasped the rungs of a propped ladder. ‘Up we go.’
‘Up the scaffolding, you mean?’ Missy bridled. ‘Do I look like I’m dressed for mountaineering?’
‘Do I look like I care?’ Antonia held out her hand, and together they climbed the scaffolding.
The platform at the top ran alongside a large stained-glass window. Supplicant women knelt piously, and gazed up in their glazed adoration of an indulgent deity with a halo. Missy clucked her tongue.
Antonia ran her hands along the frame. ‘It doesn’t open.’
Missy wielded her parasol, and the lower window shattered in a rainbow spray of broken glass. ‘It does now.’
Fragments tinkled onto the floor far below. It was a vertiginous drop into the dark. Missy stood on the parapet, popped open her parasol, and hopped through the gap.
‘Wait for me!’ squeaked Antonia, and jumped after her.
Missy tensed involuntarily as Antonia clung on. The parasol descent was somewhat faster than she’d have liked, and they landed on the basilica floor with quite a jolt.
‘It’s designed for one person.’ Missy shrugged off her embrace.
Antonia’s eyes narrowed in the gloom. ‘You didn’t think to use that to climb up the scaffolding?’
‘Only does down, dear.’ Missy snapped the parasol shut. ‘It’s a work in progress.’
A guttural growl echoed through the quietened cathedral. Far down the aisle, the Gryphon warrior struggled painfully in their direction. He loosed off a wild laser shot. The pulpit beside them exploded into flames, and its ornamentation melted into a pool of brass on the floor.
They scuttled across to the confessional, wrenched open the door, and threw themselves into the darkened TARDIS.
‘Safe,’ breathed Antonia.
‘Trapped.’ Missy attempted to drop her parasol into the umbrella stand, but a clattering noise told her she’d missed. ‘Hey, this is no time for a cigarette!’ Antonia had sparked up her lighter. ‘Oh my?God, is this what human parenthood is like?’
Antonia’s exasperated sigh almost blew out her lighter flame. She lit the old lamp she’d retrieved from outside. ‘Human. You said that earlier, too. Like …’
‘Like I’m not? Oh, come on! Flying lions. Holes in time. Big space in a little box. Impossibly good-looking woman in couture clothing. Do keep up.’
Antonia considered this. ‘At least it’s brighter in this thing than when you locked me up.’
‘Well, all those smellies coming through the tear generate Vortex energy, and the TARDIS just soaks that up. Ooh … Maybe not trapped, after all.’ Missy looked at the control gauges. ‘Could you flick that switch, dear?’
Antonia reached across the panel and did so – then shrieked as a lightning spark of blue-white energy illuminated the whole room and made her leap a foot into the air.
‘Yes,’ noted Missy. ‘It does seem like power has got through. That should be enough.’
Antonia sucked her burned finger. ‘Enough for what?’
‘Remote activator. Wireless.’ Missy waggled a control box in the air. ‘It’s all the rage.’
She pressed the button.
The transmat packs that Missy had placed earlier all activated simultaneously. In the blink of an eye, whole sections of Ugo Esposito’s Tidal Barrier flipped out of existence and reappeared at random a mile and a half away.
&
nbsp; The waiting water of the Adriatic saw its opportunity, and surged through the abrupt breaches in the barrier in a catastrophic failure of the defence system.
Klaxons hooted a futile warning in the chief engineer’s control suite. The facility quivered and rattled around Esposito as the water approached. His framed museum poster, showing an encrusted candlestick, dropped off the wall. That was the last thing Esposito saw before Missy’s bomb went off under his desk.
The aqua alta gushed unchecked in a tsunami that raced across the lagoon. Speed boats were thrown into the air like scraps. A cruise ship took a violent lurch to one side, throwing deckchairs and occupants overboard. Vaporetti vanished as if vaporised.
The raging sea reached Venice. It streamed across St Mark’s Square, and engulfed everything in its way – plague victims, soldiers, Gryphon warriors, street furniture from restaurants, the detritus of the Carnivale. The scaffolding around the cathedral collapsed into a cacophonous chiming heap of tangled metal.
The tide carried its grim cargo through the main entrance and across the basilica. Pews and prayer books, candles and corpses washed down the nave towards the confessionals.
The glowing maw of the Vortex void expanded to swallow it all, glowing brighter and fiercer.
The TARDIS lights flickered on. Missy watched Antonia’s reaction as the shadows melted away to provide her first proper look at the cavernous interior. The girl blinked into the light that spilled down from the arched roof’s recesses, higher even than the basilica outside. Was that astonishment or fear in her eyes?
‘This place … What’s happening?’
‘Hush, dear, mamma is working.’ Missy retrieved a small mechanical item from her pocket and blew fluff from it. ‘Dimensional stabiliser. Let’s pop that into place. You know, I really should get a spare.’
Antonia wasn’t really listening. She stared open-mouthed at a succession of images displayed on the screen. Venice was awash. Buildings and vessels and people alike were being consumed by a merciless torrent of filthy ocean water. Now, that was fear in her eyes.
Missy focused on the controls. ‘I have enough power to enter the Vortex. But the Gryphons can follow through that rift as easily as I can, and that leads them straight to me.’