'That is correct,' said the Doctor decisively.

'Perhaps I will have the eyes of you both pecked out,' mused the wren.

'And your livers plucked out, and -'

The Doctor flung up both his hands.'Wait!'

All the birds - who had become rather excitable at the sound of their leader's bloodthirstiness - eyed him beadily.

'I have much more to tell you,' he said hastily, frantically bargaining. He ran his fingers through his hair and gabbled.'Have I mentioned the vicious slime-like beast in the pit that only I could befriend and talk to?

Or when I was forced to battle a multi-legged fiend that secreted acid from every pore in an arena watched by some million or more? Or the world at the edge of the cosmos where I fell into a puddle and met the last known and very strangest creature in the world? Or when I went to the centre of the world and met people for whom time had stood still? Or the demon who lived under a church and unleashed himself one sacred night when -'

'Enough!' cried the wren. 'We believe you may divert us further, Doctor, with your follies.With your tales of made-up adventure.'

'Made-up!' he said hotly.

'You will eat with us and rest. Then you will resume your tale-telling through this night. Take advantage of your time to rest, Doctor.'

The air was filled with busyness and feathers then, as the birds went off to prepare for the feast. The Doctor and Iris were left to wait where they stood. As she looked at him, they heard the distant squeals of their one-time cellmates being stuck and made ready for the pot. 'Made-up adventures,' he muttered. She smirked.'See how you like it.'

'All of mine are true!'

'It's all relative!' she shrugged.'Listen, I've been thinking. We should take advantage of this pause.'

They looked around the wooden council chamber. They had been left without guards. They were on a small podium and all about them was empty air. They couldn't even see the ground from here. The birds' city was one, quite naturally, with very few floors and, equally naturally, their prisoners weren't likely to go running anywhere.

'Good job we don't get vertigo,' the Doctor grinned. Then he sneezed again, and grabbed Iris's elbows for support. She tutted.

'So I've been thinking,' she went on.'It's only your stories that they're interested in, apparently. They seemed to go off mine.Why don't I...

escape.'

'And leave me to face the music?' She nodded. 'I think that's a rotten idea.Why can't we both escape?' The Doctor was used to being the one giving out the orders and making up the plans.

'Because they'll realise we've gone and they'll all come flying after us. No - if I go, they won't give a monkey's. They'll be happy listening to you, being the wonderful raconteur.' He sighed deeply. 'Look,' she said. 'I'll go back to the bus, drive back and rescue you...' He raised an eyebrow.'I will!'

He remembered their rows about bow she had abandoned Gila and Sam. He was sure she wouldn't waste time on rescuing him. For some reason Iris wasn't letting anyone or anything stand in her way. She was intent upon some other goal. This still had the Doctor perplexed and for the moment he couldn't see any other way but to give in to her. 'So help me escape,' she prompted. 'And you will come back for me?'

'Girl Guides' honour.'

He rolled his eyes. Then he pointed out the thing that she was sure he would have noticed. He'd always been such a dab hand at finding escape routes - a skill she had never picked up. He nodded at a hole in the rough timbers way above their heads. 'The only way is up,' he smiled. 'Up into that black hole in the rafters, out on to this roof, and then down along the branches. I hope you're a good climber.'

'I can climb,' she said grimly. 'Maybe not as well as Greta Garbo, but good enough.' Then she started off. 'Iris,' he said.

'What?' Even though she was getting her own way, she looked cross.

She made ready to jump from this platform to the next, and then to haul herself into the rafters, up to her escape route. He was looking at her.

'What?' she asked, more softly this time. 'I don't know what it is that you're up to...'

'Don't ask.'

'I won't. But whatever it is, I wish I knew why it meant you can't confide in old friends. Why you have to leave them by the roadside like this.Why it's made you so... ruthless.' She shrugged. "Times are tough.'

Then she leaned forward and placed a quick, audacious kiss on his smooth, pale cheek.'See you later, sweetie.'

He watched as she, with surprising grace and agility, dragged her aged bulk up into the rafters and to freedom beyond.

'I think,' said Gila as they trod wearily through ankle-deep leaf mulch,'I think this means that we're close to our objective.' His scaled shoulders were slumped as he walked along, ahead of Sam. Evidently it was some blow to his alligatorish ego to give in so easily to capture. He was trying to make himself feel better by saying that this capture, this being marched through the dark forest towards the home of'the Major', was all to their good.

Sam agreed. She also couldn't see any other way of carrying on at this point. The pink and grey, almost hairless bears were immensely powerful, gruesome-looking creatures. They carried scimitars and golden axes. They thrust aside the overhanging branches and vines with a careless ease. She shuddered at the memory of how, once she and Gila had dropped clear out of the RiverMouth, the bears had plucked them out of the water as neatly as if they had been hunting trout. She could still feel those cold talons of theirs tearing through her clothes, nicking her skin, as they hoisted her on to the wet rock of the bank.

"This Major they've been talking about... are you sure it's the woman we're looking for?'

Gila gave a wry smile.'Oh yes. Angela used to call herself Major Angela back in the old days. By the sounds of it, she's busy here living out all her dreams of having her own little realm. And her own private army.'

The forest petered out soon after this and they had to follow a ledge down a crumbling cliff face, slipping along single file. Sam thought that the soft brown rock looked just like Jamaican ginger cake. Below them, hundreds of acres of woodlands were steaming lushly.You could lose yourself in that mess for the rest of your life. When they paused for a moment - the bears were fussing about something in their strange, mumbling dialect - Gila seized her arm and pointed out a building deep in the forest below them. A whitewashed colonial mansion, it looked like to her. The kind of thing mad millionaires constructed on distant islands on Earth when they wanted to get away from it all. They resumed their shuffling gait down the mountainside.

After some minutes of quiet trekking there was a tremor from deep within the rock face. Pebbles rattled and bounced across their path. Sam looked at GUa and they stopped in their tracks. The bears let out one simultaneous bellow of panic. Then a gout of red flame spurted out of the rocks ahead of them. It rose and bloomed magnificently, lighting up the darkening stormy sky, and then it shrank back, almost as quickly, almost coquettishly, into the black hillside. Its noise had momentarily deafened them all. Then the leader of the hairless bears, Giselle, barked out her rough commands that they should press on quickly.

As they did so the rock underfoot was blistering hot.

There was another brief and deadly expulsion of flame behind them, back up the trail where they'd already been.

'What is it?' Sam asked as they hurried, the procession losing all of its bizarre dignity by now. She wasn't given an answer. They had only a few hundred yards downwards to go before they hit the woods again. In those few, perilously steep yards, however, there was a great rent in the rock and the flames rushed out like a hand to claim Giselle and only Giselle. She vanished in a single incandescent howl. The flame retreated, swallowed in one gulp again by the rock, and Giselle's black, broken remains fell with a ghastly clatter. The remaining bears howled and dragged Sam and Gila at full pelt into the cover of the trees.

They plunged into the forest's oily, crepuscular dark and carried on running. The bears kept up their panicked and brutish hullabaloo until they came to the white mansion in the clearing.

On the wooden veranda, a rifle slung expertly over her shoulder, stood the blind, bearded Major in her white uniform. She was waiting for them to come out into the open of her cultivated lawn.

'Giselle! Giselle is dead!' howled the bears.

Angela hefted her rifle.'Giselle?'

'The fire from the hillside claimed her! She is gone!'

For only the briefest moment the Bearded Lady looked stricken. Giselle had been the oldest and most loyal of her accomplices. Then her expression hardened. 'Who have you got with you?' Her eyes were sightless, but she could sense things, as the bears already knew. She motioned for Gila and Sam to be brought before her.

Gila had regained his breath. Suddenly he was at his most daringly laconic. He executed a swift, sweeping bow on the neat green lawn.

'Major Angela,' he said graciously. 'We meet again.'

She c.o.c.ked the rifle.'And who might you be?'

He straightened.'I'm Gila. You know me.'And then he stared straight into the milky blue opacity of her eyes and realised that she was blind as the moon.'Remember?'he asked, more gently.

She looked grim.'We'll have to see about that.'

'You can't have forgotten me.'

'It was all lies!' burst Sam.'You don't know her at all, do you?'

'It was true!' he spat.'She's forgotten everything. And she's blind."

'I remember everything,' cried Angela. 'And I remember a surly alligator man called Gila. Who's to say that you are he?'

'I am,' said Gila stolidly.

"This is a world of illusions,' she declared.'And that's why I'm glad the Scarlet Empress struck me blind. I won't be taken in by illusions.' Then she told the bears to put Gila and Sam into the museum of arms.

The Doctor was back on. They stood him on his podium and gathered again in the rafters. His throat was tight and raw with talking.

The wren commanded him again. 'Begin with the beast that gave poison off its skin.When you had to do battle with it in the arena.'

'Ahm,' said the Doctor, thinking back. 'Oh yes. It was in a kind of Ancient Rome, the heart of the Empire that had never collapsed and had instead developed transdimensional travel.'

The birds were fl.u.s.tered.'Too obscure. Explain!'

The Doctor shrugged. His tiredness was making him reckless.'listen, I've been thinking. Do you know anything about the morphology of the folk tale? No? Well, it's a human concept, a very twentieth

< p="">

'We still do not understand,' said the wren heavily, flexing her small talons.

'His idea was that any story can be reduced to thirty-four functions. Any tale I can possibly tell you is basically a variation on hundreds of others.

All you need are lots of variables to fill up the s.p.a.ce. And you get endlessly renewable stories. So what I'm thinking is... maybe I could give you a plan of the thirty-four stages in any story, and then a whole list of variables, hmm?'

'Go on.'

'The variables might be Sontarans, Aggedor, Zarbi, Sarah, Jo, Metebelis Three, Solos and so on. And then I could give you a whole lot of plot devices, such as building a hot-air balloon to escape, finding a ventilation shaft to shin up, sabotaging a computer in someone's control room with a display of confounding illogicality, or hypnotising a possessed lackey to discover an enemy's secrets. Then you could rea.s.semble as many stories as you like, one after the other, and they would never have to be the same one twice. And then I need never be here! You just need to randomise all my elements, as if in a big... um, blender, and then I can slip away quietly!' He grinned. 'What do you think?'

There was a general kerfuffle of protest.

'But we like your voice,' said the wren.'It has about it a certain ring of authenticity, as if you have actually lived these ludicrous events which you describe. We want you to tell us everything personally.'

'I was afraid of that. But you see, I can't always be here. I'm a fly-by-night. The whole world is calling out to me. Listen! Fidelity has never exactly been my forte.'

'We want you here always, Doctor. We have decided.' The Doctor shook his head, dropping leaves out of his tangled curls. 'It's all very flattering, but -'

'But nothing. Continue with the tales.'

Below the parliament of birds, beneath their floorless city of twigs and clay, a small army was approaching. The Scarlet Guard of the Empress were orientating themselves by the glimmering lights of the lofty buildings in the trees.

Their captain nodded and called his troop to attention. He told his tattooed men to gather the driest wood they could find and ama.s.s it under the trees that supported the birds. He produced from his bag a small, silver tinder box.

"The Empress,' he said,'is becoming impatient.'

Iris watched the troops with mounting horror. She had only just managed to extricate herself from the trees and set herself down on relatively solid ground with great relief. These days she wasn't well enough to do as much climbing and romping about as this. This whole trip was taking too much out of her. She crouched in the undergrowth and watched the Scarlet Guard set their fires.

The smoke spiralled, plumed and began to plummet upward towards the city of the birds. She watched and held her breath. She didn't think there was anything she could do. Then she turned and ran into the forest, through the gloomy and lumpen vegetative forms that lurched and shook and tried to snag her back. She tried to home in on the bus, beating back her panic in an attempt to pick up the ship's psychic trace.

Then she saw it. Her bus waited patiently, as ever, in the same clearing where they had left it.

But there was someone on board, waiting for her. Or, rather, half a person was waiting for her.

By the time Iris had flung herself through the concertinaed doors, that person looked up from its business and stared at her out of ten blazing eyes, and gave a single mechanical blink. The intruder was strapping arms on to its own torso, making minute adjustments and listening with satisfaction to the hiss and spark of its myriad connections coming together.

Iris stared at this silvered, half-completed beast.

Out of a face in which only the essentials had been re-formed, a smokily androgynous voice addressed her. 'I am your quarry, Iris Wildthyme. I have elected to come to you. I am the d.u.c.h.ess, and I am at your service.'

The creature's mercurial hands spread out towards her in supplication.

The council chamber of the birds filled quite rapidly with dense and sulphurous smoke. They lifted from their perches and swarmed in the air, shrieking their alarm. The Doctor fell back forgotten, as they wheeled and careered out of the blanketing smog.

'This is your doing!' he was raucously accused.

It was getting hotter. A whole wall cracked and blackened and fell away.

It let the night stream in.

The birds dashed at the open s.p.a.ce, making for the clearer air.

The city was on fire and the Doctor was left clinging to his podium, feet dangling over the gushing blackness. Out on a limb again. Someone was smoking them out.

Chapter Nineteen.

They're All Weird Places

They were held in the round tower of the museum of arms. Gla.s.s cases displayed the most startling collection of knives and swords. In the half gloom they glinted and shone. Sam and Gila spent some time examining these weapons, until they grew restless and bored.