'Young ladies? Oh, I get it. You must mean Bernice.'

She stared strangely at me.

'Are you for real?' she asked.

'Indubitably. Shall we go?'

She lowered the gun and, with a couple of quick twists, disa.s.sembled it into components which she hung off her belt.

'Show me the way.'

I pointed, and without another word she moved off. I took a last glance back at Baron Maupertuis's ruined body. I could not find it in my heart to regret what Ace - I supposed that I should call her by that appellation - had done to him, but something in me had responded to his fervent, if misguided, patriotism.

But what now? Would his invasion fall apart with his army scattered and its general dead, or would the mysterious hooded man that Holmes and I had seen in Euston weld it back together again? Only time would tell.

We moved across the ravaged landscape, trying as far as we could to avoid the bodies. The explosions seemed to have ceased, but I could see a large number of survivors forming up into lines closer to the slopes of the mountain. It looked to me as if they were preparing to take the fight to the Ry'lehans.

Ace quickly impressed me with her skills. She moved quickly but carefully, maintaining a constant watch upon our surroundings. She threw questions back over her shoulder and, under their prompting, I told her the story of how we came to be there.

'He shouldn't meddle,' she said at one point. 'He doesn't know the half of what's going on here.'

'What do you mean?' I asked, but she gestured impatiently for me to continue.

I finished talking as we pa.s.sed the last row of tents, and persuaded her to wait for a few moments whilst I found the beast which had been roasting as I entered the camp. The spit had been knocked over during the attack, but the carca.s.s was still in one piece, and I managed to pull two of the legs off.

They did not look appetizing, but I was ravenous. I rejoined Ace, who refused the food I offered with a secret little smile. As we walked off I asked her how she came to be there. Whilst I ate the tender, spicy flesh, she explained in a few terse sentences that the Doctor had left her on Ry'leh in the same way that he had left Bernice in India, and for the same reasons.

She was meant to scout out the area, prepare the way for the Doctor and report on anything interesting that happened. Having seen my confrontation with Maupertuis, she had decided to act.

'Does he always do this sort of thing?' I asked.

'What sort of thing?'

'Move you and Bernice round like pieces in a game of chess?'

'You don't know the half of it. Trouble is, I've seen him play chess, and he's c.r.a.p.'

By now I had finished both legs and discarded the bones. My stomach was beginning to rebel against its unfamiliar contents, but I ruthlessly suppressed the incipient insurrection. I would not give Ace the satisfaction of seeing me ill.

The camp was a few miles behind us now, and we were approaching the area where I remembered leaving my friends. Looking round, I could see no sign of Bernice, Holmes or the Doctor. I caught hold of Ace's arm to stop her whilst I got my bearings. At the touch of my hand she whirled and knocked me to the ground. My head slammed against rock: I blacked out for a moment, and awoke to find her fingers pressed into my windpipe.

'A word of warning,' she hissed. 'Don't touch me. Too many people have done that already, starting with a sc.u.mbag named Glitz. I don't like it, and these days, what I don't like, I stop. Violently.'

'Glawp!' I said. It was all I could manage to get out of my compressed larynx.

'I'm glad that's understood.'

She stood up and looked around.

'So where's the party, then?'

I rolled over to enable my arms to take the strain of lifting my body, bruised and battered by recent events, to its feet. A dark stain on the ground caught my attention. I touched it tentatively, and my fingers came away sticky.

It was blood.

I ran a hand across the back of my head to determine whether I had hit the ground harder than I had thought, but my scalp was clear of any wounds.

'Ace,' I said.

'I know.'

I rose, to find her holding the torn remains of the Doctor's paisley-pattern scarf.

'Why is nothing ever easy where he's concerned?'

To that I had no answer.

Casting around, we found little else to indicate that they had ever been there. The most significant discovery was a patch of charred ground where a fire had obviously been lit. The ashes were still warm.

As a pearly, directionless sheen spread across the sky, heralding the approach of a new day, I sat down upon the hard, cold ground. A patch of moss squirmed beneath me, so I shuffled sideways. It tried to follow, so I stood up again and watched it cast itself unsuccessfully upon my boots.

Sounds of gunfire suddenly drifted across the plain. Maupertuis's shattered army had regrouped enough to go on the offensive. I wondered who was leading them now.

Hearing a sound, I glanced round to where Ace was talking softly into a small box. I wondered if it was some marvellous form of communication, but I soon realized that she was leaving no s.p.a.ce for a reply. A dictation machine, perhaps, akin to the phonograph but much smaller.

I glanced around at the harsh landscape now emerging from the shadow of night. The murmur of Ace's voice ceased.

'Who do you think took them?' I asked.

'How do I know?' She sounded bad-tempered. 'It could have been this Baron's men, or it could have been the spindly sack-things with five legs, or it could have been those winged creatures with the spiky tails. We won't know till we find them.'

'I doubt that it's the raksha.s.si,' I said patronizingly. 'They're only animals.'

'Raksha.s.si?'

'The winged creatures. The red ones.'

'Who told you they're only animals?'

I frowned.

'Well . . . it seemed obvious.'

'Nothing obvious about it, mate. They're as intelligent as you or me. Well, you at any rate.'

I didn't know what to say for a moment.

'But...' I stammered finally, 'they've never shown any sign of intellect . . .'

She looked pityingly at me.

'Well they're not going to do crosswords on the train, are they, d.i.c.k-brain?

Remember that seance you told me about? The one in Euston with this hooded geezer?'

I nodded.

'Well, I was listening to the other end of it. There's a large township a couple of hundred clicks away...'

'Clicks?'

'Kilometres. A bit over a hundred miles. Anyway, I was scouting around a big temple-type building, and heard something big inside opening hailing frequencies. The town itself was occupied by the raksha.s.si.'

'Occupied? You mean, they were living there?'

'Yeah. Worshipping at the temple, too.'

'Worshipping what?'

'I don't know, but it wasn't Sonic the Hedgehog.'

She took pleasure in watching the stunned expression blossom on my face.

Foolishly, perhaps, I had made certain a.s.sumptions about the nature of the new reality in which I had found myself. Now, one by one, those a.s.sumptions were being overturned. If only Holmes were there to make things clear for me.

'They could have taken him anywhere,' I whispered to myself, disheartened.

'Not quite,' Ace said. 'The plants here kip during the night, and they get a bit ratty if something disturbs them. If we're lucky, we can tell which way the kidnappers went by checking how quickly the plants react to us.'

'How do we do that?' I asked stupidly.

'Stick your finger out and see how long it takes them to bite it.'

Ace watched on, a sardonic smile upon her face, as I hesitantly knelt and tempted the mosses with my outstretched digit. It quickly became apparent that those lying towards the distant mountains responded significantly faster than those in any other direction. So quick were they that they almost ripped my nail out with their th.o.r.n.y little mouths.

'Well,' she said, 'that settles it.'

'Do you think they're poisonous?'

'I wouldn't have thought so. They're probably more at risk biting you than you are being bitten.'

'Somehow that fails to rea.s.sure me.'

'It wasn't meant to.'

We set out shortly after that.

The walk to the lower slopes of the nearest mountain took us some hours.

Every few minutes I would check the plants in the vicinity to ensure that we were heading in the right direction, but our course was as straight as a die.

It was hard to tell when we actually began to climb the mountain slopes: it was only after I complained to Ace that I was tiring, and she agreed that the going suddenly seemed to have become hard, that we realized we had been walking uphill for some little time. We rested for a few moments, and I took the opportunity to appreciate the view in the manner of a tourist, rather than a tired doctor.

The slope fell away from us, blending gradually into the purple plain below.

I could see Maupertuis's quondam encampment and, through the haze of distance, men in blue and silver uniforms in close combat with fivelegged Ry'lehans. Further than that, the ground rose up to form more mountain ranges whose tops were lost to the ice. Ry'leh seemed to be a planet composed of peakless mountains. From where we stood I could see along three major valleys. It was like standing in Cheddar Gorge back on Earth, and looking between the stalact.i.tes and stalagmites, but on a far vaster scale. What was G.o.d thinking of when he created this place?

We seemed to have risen above what, on Earth, I would have termed the tree-line. The vegetation had died away, but we had been moving in a straight line for so long that we saw little point in altering our course.

We were closer to the sky now, and I could see features upon it: patches of shadow, deep gouges and little black specks that seemed to move.

'Animals,' said Ace when I pointed them out to her. 'Good to eat, too. I shoot them down with a bow and arrow when I get the chance. They taste of chocolate.'

'But how can . . .?'

'They're like big balloons full of some gas that's lighter than air. They float up against the ice.'

'I see. So how do they move around?'

She looked at me as if I was slow-witted.

'Skates,' she said succinctly.

We moved on. The going was getting rougher now: we were having to use our hands, more often than not, to pull ourselves along. Sometimes, when I looked up, the sky was a milky white wall towards which we were crawling.

At one point I grasped at a rock which came away in my hand and rolled down the slope with an increasing clatter of smaller stones following it until it was out of sight. The echoes of its pa.s.sage lived on for some time.

It was getting colder. Much colder. I turned the collar of my coat up and bound strips of handkerchief round my hands, but it was of little use. Ace did not seem to be bothered by the cold.

'You should try doing route marches on Ragnarok,' she snapped when I offered her my jacket. 'The only inhabitants are a tribe of bra.s.s monkeys who all look like they've lost something.'

I did not understand her meaning, so I smiled and climbed on.

By this time I was forced to seek out crevices with my hands and feet to anchor myself before taking a step. The sharply edged rocks tore at my fingertips, and the blood seeping from the wounds made my handholds difficult. I wished that I had brought gloves. The weight of my body constantly threatened to tear me from the rock and send me hurtling down the slope. I dared not look down. My world was a few square feet of rock, my one aim to find enough purchase to enable me to pull myself onwards to another world: another few feet of rock. Every so often, but not often enough, Ace called a halt. In those periods I gazed ahead, toward the oppressive ice barrier. Wavelike formations of thin clouds seemed to chase each other across its surface and crash against the mountainside where it penetrated the ice. The inflated bladder-like animals skated across the sky in flocks of ten or twenty, looking rather like fat pheasants, or perhaps puffed-up goldfish. The thought of chocolate began to obsess me.

We pa.s.sed a stream of some viscous turquoise substance that wound its way through the rocks. My throat was dry, and so I made as if to drink some. Ace warned me off.

'It's not water,' she said. 'More like a liquid atmosphere. Oxygen and nitrogen, mainly, although it should be gaseous at this temperature.

Probably some kind of allotropic form that we don't get on Earth. A-level chemistry's all right for a few bangs, but not much use on alien planets.'

Over the course of a few minutes, I found it increasingly difficult to breath.

My lungs seemed to be on fire, and I felt as if spikes were being driven into my temples. Finding handholds was almost impossible: I seemed to be able to concentrate on a smaller area of ground than before and my hands were having to scrabble in the grey areas on the edges of my vision until they found something which would take my weight. Twice I found nothing, and had to retrace my path and find a new one. I cursed myself for eating that alien creature. Its flesh was obviously poisonous, and I had obviously ingested an incapacitating, if not fatal, dose. It was only when I noticed that Ace was also having problems that I remembered the symptoms of oxygen deprivation, and suggested that we go back and dip handkerchiefs in the stream. If we tied them around our necks, I reasoned, the heat of our bodies should cause the liquid to evaporate back into a breathable vapour.

Although sceptical, Ace complied with my suggestion. I am glad to say that it worked, and we were able to climb onwards refreshed. We made sure that we climbed alongside the stream, and when the effort of drawing a breath became a ch.o.r.e again, we would re-moisten our handkerchiefs. Ace took me more seriously after that.

We were constantly attempting to find the easiest path up the side of the mountain, choosing those sections which appeared to have more cracks which we could use as hand-and footholds, detouring around large outcrops of stone and sections of friable rock, always trying to look ahead and predict which channels, chimneys or ledges would lead to fresh paths and which would lead to dead ends. Sometimes we got it right, and could gain ten or fifteen feet in a few minutes: sometimes we got it wrong and would have to retrace our steps and find another path. Frequently we would have to spend as much time travelling sideways, edging along precarious ledges, as we did climbing upwards.