'Well, yes. Exactly. We could just head back now...'

'Never,' snapped Angela.'Our party is not complete yet. We need one other. We can't return to Hyspero with our tails between our legs. I won't allow that. We go back at full strength, with vengeance in our hearts, or not at all.'

'Vengeance,' muttered Iris sarcastically. She had never been given to such things. Her style had more to do with getting out of things unscathed. Looking out for number one was her bottom line and she found it easier not to keep too many principles. You only lose them in the end, she thought. She was about to deliver Angela a lecture in this vein when the dense wall of foliage parted suddenly and the Doctor re-emerged with a triumphant look about him. A slightly less enchanted-looking Sam was in tow and behind them came the worst spider that Iris had ever seen. It was purple and black, with a vile head twisting in the feeble sunlight. It was almost half the size of her bus. She held in a squawk of dismay at the sight of the thing.

'What's happening?' asked the frustrated Angela, and Iris quickly filled her in. 'We didn't say befriend the b.l.o.o.d.y thing, Doctor,' she cursed.

Then she had a savage silver dagger in one hand. 'We said get that gateway open.'

He hurried over. 'Angela, Angela, Angela! The spider has agreed to accompany us.' He gave a low bow in the creature's direction. 'Would you like to do the honours?' he asked.

As the spider stretched out its legs and hauled its oily bulk across the road to the stone arch, Sam could only think of minor celebrities opening supermarkets and cutting taut ribbons on the doorstep. The spider lowered itself before the arch and the others drew back. Gila and the d.u.c.h.ess went rather reluctantly, staring up at the coa.r.s.ely haired thorax of the guardian. The spider set to work, tracing various indented nines with the sensitive undersides of its legs.

'It's really going to open for us,' breathed Iris. She wheeled around and hauled herself out of the chair, back into the driver's cab. 'Everyone, get in!'

'Diplomacy!' the Doctor congratulated himself.'What am I?'

'A genius,' Sam told him.

The stone archway was suffused with sapphire light. It was molten, cracking apart the sandstone chunk by chunk, opening hairline cracks and jamming them further apart so that the stone seemed to dissolve into dust, melting like sugar in tea. The ice-bright light burned into their eyes as they stared out from the bus. Burned into their retinas - even Major Angela's - was the afterimage of the spider, suspended and frozen in ma.s.sive silhouette.

Then the terrible glare died. The way was clear.

The spider dropped on to all eights and appeared to regain its thin, reedy breath. It turned to give an oddly human, beckoning gesture for them all to follow it through the archway.

Iris clamped her hat down on her head and gunned the engine.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Going Down

They were inside the confined chrome-plated s.p.a.ce of a lift. The walls threw back alarming distorted versions of themselves, the spider and the bus as the doors shunted closed behind them. They could see their faces stretched in surprise, repeated and repeated in the oily metal. The lift was only just big enough.

Then there came the clunking and thrashing of ancient machinery as, above and beneath the metal box, vast linked chains shouldered their weight and braced themselves to operate. The slick floor beneath the tyres of the bus and the spider's sensitively haired legs shuddered and lurched and everyone aboard felt the unmistakable sagging, dragging sensation of the elevator beginning its descent. The spider clutched itself to the sides of Iris's vehicle, its stomach being by for the least resistant of them all.

'I never expected this,' Sam said, as the bus lights flickered and dimmed, as if startled.

'It's like being in a department store; said the Doctor delightedly.

'I'm only glad there was room enough,' Iris sighed, 'for a whole bus and a giant spider.'

'It's mad, though,' said Sam, staring out of the panes of dirty gla.s.s at the spider, squashing its ample body and spindly legs against the exterior hull of the bus. Those dark eyes stared back at her and she tried not to think of them as malevolent. The spider's head quivered and its tiny mouth worked and Sam turned away as a gush of livid vomit spurted and slid down the windows.

She turned to Gila, who was chuckling at the spider's discomfort.'So this whole planet is on different levels and connected by lift shafts?'

'Among other things,' the alligator man told her. 'We're lucky. Other places you have to run and jump between levels.'

'This place gets worse.'

They watched in silence, tense and bracing themselves, as the lights continued to wobble and strobe, and the interior of Iris's ship and its freight of oddments shook. 'You should nail everything down,' the Doctor told her.'Or get your dimensional stabilisers looked at.'

She tutted.

Major Angela, blind and unimpressed by the strange new environment, seemed to be fretting still about leaving behind her bears. She wasn't the type of girl, she told herself, to get all sentimental, but nevertheless she clutched her golden furs to her and stroked them.

The d.u.c.h.ess gleamed and whirred and seemed stoically fascinated by the new turn of events.'How deep are we going?' she asked, matter-of-factly.

"That cyborg,' Sam hissed at the Doctor, 'has a habit of making everything sound as if it doesn't matter.'

The d.u.c.h.ess overheard this.'It doesn't; she said, startling Sam.'I cannot be damaged, you see. Nothing can impinge upon me and so, in a very real sense, nothing matters to me. This exoskeleton protects the only mortal, fleshly part of me. If I sound uninvolved to you, to your mortal ears, that is the reason why. I live through everything at a certain remove.'

'You're lucky,' the Bearded Lady said.

'I would give a great deal,' said the d.u.c.h.ess solemnly, 'to feel endangered. To wear flesh on the outside once more.You do not know how precious that is.'

The Doctor sighed. 'I don't think I've ever met a semi-cybernetic individual who was entirely happy.'

Iris said, 'Did you ever meet my friend Kroton? He was a Cyberman whose kill-kill-kill-enslave-destroy function had never quite kicked in.

Now hewas a poor, tortured soul. Lovely boy, though.'

There was a resounding crash of old chains and the bus suddenly jolted them off their feet. They steadied themselves.

'I think we've made it,' Gila whispered.

Then they jumped as one of the spider's legs rapped gently at the window nearest Angela. Its voice came sibilantly, filling the interior of the bus. 'This is our stop,' said the spider.

Now we could see why we needed these heavy old golden furs. I was already very attached to mine.When this whole escapade was over with I was going to make sure that this furry little number was finding its way into my wardrobe on the top deck of the bus, along with my other costumes, trophies, treasures and diaries. Oh, that's if we ever get off Hyspero.

The heavy Art Deco doors groaned open arthritically. we watched the spider twist and unfurl its elegant self out of confinement.

It led the way out on to the new level.

Gone were the trees, the musty heat of the woodlands of Kestheven.

Everything had changed. How would I sum up the next leg of our journey? How would I account for those next few days?

Ice, ice, ice. Ice floes, ice fields, bergs and glaciers, shifting perilous tectonic slabs of pearly grey, violet, indigo, purest aquamarine with odd briny life-forms frozen and perplexed within sculpted blocks of ice.

Verdant green ice, even, for the oldest ice, the ice that had remained unthawed, unflawed for millennia. In the ice fields you could start to see how old Hyspero really was. Its history was frozen before your eyes.

Maybe it was a whole week we spent trekking out to our next rendezvous. I never realised till then, till our sojourn in the frozen wastes of Inner Hyspero, that winter came in so many colours.

All the while the keen wind hustled us along, making our collective eardrums whine and burn, as if somewhere out there, in all the snow, someone - perhaps the wolves we occasionally heard by night - were talking about us. Even aboard the bus those frigid winds got to us and we sat wadded up in our furs. Goodness knows how our human contingent was faring; I'm Gallifreyan through and through and even I couldn't feel my more extreme parts. I felt like I had snow inside my boots the whole time. My favourite compilation tape froze inside the machine and so we couldn't even drive with music. We tried tuning in to radio stations, but what we picked up was too weird and disturbing to listen to, so we left it off.

Each morning the Doctor trudged outside the bus to check out the lie of the land. He loved the wastes. I'd always suspected that he was, deep down, a chilly old soul. He had a penchant for Sartrean moments. The rest of us would be having breakfast, huddling round the gas fire and a fry-up. It was on this trip that I rediscovered my love of potato cakes, black pudding and deep-fried Christmas cake. And in came the Doctor from his latest arctic sortie, stomping clods of frost and snow off his shoes like Doctor Zhivago, pushing closed the doors against the freezing gales. His face was keen and hawklike every time, his eyes glittering.

'How's the spider?' I asked one morning, mumbling through a mouthful of mustardy sausage. Slowly I was getting my strength back.

'Oh, fine,'he said.'She gets chattier and more approachable by the day.

She seems to think we only have a day or so to travel before we get to the coast.'

And then we were going sailing. The cryptic Major Angela - so inscrutable behind that mask of her beard and her opaque eyes - had already informed us of this. I was dreading it. A terrible sailor, me.

'I think the spider's quite enjoying all the attention,' Sam said, squinting out of the windows, which were thickened and crazed with a coating of ice.

Out there, the d.u.c.h.ess was hovering stationary on the wind, arms busy at her sides, juggling b.a.l.l.s of flame that she had generated herself. She was using them to warm the spider's limbs, rubbing a gentle incandescence along her body like soap. The creature was holding up her legs one at a time and flexing them gratefully at the warmth.

'Who would have thought it?' Gila said dourly.'That those two would bond like that.' _ Iris looked thoughtful.'I think romance is in the air.'

Now the cyborg had stretched out into flight, fledging her arms and describing arabesques on the gloomy air. A nimbus of flame coated her body and she floated lazily around and about the colossal arachnid.

'Don't be ridiculous,' Major Angela snapped, her face a picture of disgust. 'A cyborg can't fall in love with a spider.'

The Doctor shrugged. 'A cat may look at a queen,' he said, mystiryingly.

'It's perfectly repulsive,' said the Bearded Lady. A revolting notion.'

'I think it's amazing,' Sam smiled.

She watched the mirror-ball eyes of the spider glitter as they followed the leisurely flight of the d.u.c.h.ess. She saw that Iris had been right: the two least humanoid in the party had fallen quite drastically for each other.

'This all just gets crazier,' Gila sighed, chomping at his toast. 'Do you always have this effect when you arrive in a place, Doctor?'

'Always,' said the Doctor absently.

'So do I,' put in Iris.

She was staring at the alligator man. How sharp his teeth looked now.

His hide was greener, more livid, the cracks between scales oily and dark. His shoulders and neck had become thicker seemingly overnight.

Even his eyes had a wilder look. No one had mentioned these recent alterations to his physiognomy. He had that look about him - that if any of them mentioned that he was slowly reverting to his alligator self, he would bite their head off. But all of them had their private suspicions as to what was happening.

The old bus was holding up pretty well, considering. Her battered external sh.e.l.l kept out the worst of their environment and she squealed her tyres on the thick ice, ploughing and plunging onward.

One night the earliest Empress slipped her bonds once more to congratulate Iris on her ship and her motoring skills. By then they had covered a hundred miles or so of sheer and icy wastes.

'Oh h.e.l.lo, you,' said Iris. She was sitting up in the cab, warming her hands round a double gin and a Cuban cigar. The others were sleeping.

'I was wondering how long before I got my very own psychic visit from you.'

The Empress sighed.'And I thought I was taking you all by surprise, popping into your minds like this, unbidden, silent, slippery as a shadow.'

'Doesn't the Bearded Lady mind you gadding about like this?'

'Why should she mind?'

Iris shrugged inside her heavy furs and exhaled bright-blue plumes of smoke.'You're her property, after all. Or so she keeps telling us.'

She could feel the earliest Empress bridle and seethe with irritation. 'I'm no one's property, Iris Wildthyme. Least of all that blind, hairy, militaristic -'.

'All right!' Iris laughed.'So what are you doing? What do you want to know?'

'I'm just after company,' said the Empress. 'Wouldn't you be, after a decade with that woman and her hairless bears, then before that, countless millennia stored in a jar with my eight-hundred-odd daughters?'

'I see your point,' said Iris, whose feet were always itchy.

'Tell you the truth, honey, I'm having the time of my life. I've never been among such a crowd.'

'Hmm. Me neither.'

'Your memories tell another story,' said the Empress, as if browsing through magazines. 'You've been mixed up in all sorts of crowds.'

That night went on quite easily, with the two countlessly old women swapping reminiscences as Iris sipped her gin. She poured some more and popped out briefly to chip off some ice. Then she heard what it was like to grow up in the Scarlet Palace, to be the first princess of a line that was to continue - so the viziers had predicted - for nine hundred generations. It turned out that the earliest Empress had once been called Ca.s.sandra and she happily gave permission for Iris to call her that now.

She had been imported from another land, one in which people could fly; they could actually fly. When they visited the earthbound peoples of Hyspero - people who were caked in sand because their world was caked in sand, and they had never been bothered to shake it all out of their hair, their boots and blankets - they found that they were revered.

The hawklike flying visitors were actually revered and asked by the populace of the desert world to stay and act as their demiG.o.ds.

The visitors had better fish to fry, however. They claimed the arid world nevertheless, adding it to their stock of tame worlds, and leaving behind a particular family to rule it for them. They transformed the world, sculpted and preened it so that it wasn't quite as inhospitable as it had seemed to them. They made Hyspero into a dream world, a world where tales might unfold, a world of desire.

So they left behind the infant Ca.s.sandra and her keeper, a rather arch and sour old man. Ca.s.sandra grew up knowing that the world that was being so elegantly reconstructed all about them would one day be hers.

The Hysperons looked on her as their prize; they grovelled at her childish feet as if she really had been left behind by the G.o.ds. And they saw to it that in the city of Hyspero was built for her the Scarlet Palace.

Its turrets were set with rubies and their humble blood and flesh went into its mortar and masonry. The crimson pinnacles of the palace would last for thousands of years.

Ca.s.sandra had loved being Empress at first. When she first grew she loved to explore the various luxurious terrains that the scientists of her homeworld had brought into being with only, it seemed, the slightest tweakings of meteorological factors. She took a ship around her world on a stately visit and surveyed all that she owned. She encouraged offworlders to visit and so they came - in multifarious droves. Hyspero made a name for itself.

But the planet was never stable. Prompted and triggered into a state of reconstruction, it was set on a course that would be unstoppable. The world was forever in a state of change and flux. It was said by the alien visitors in those early years that anything standing still for too long on Hyspero was swallowed up and swept away by the bewildering rate of change.

It was Ca.s.sandra who introduced the splendid tradition of tattooing the Scarlet Guard. And didn't they look marvellous, in all their agonised finery? Although, she admitted to Iris on the night they swapped life stories, the tattooing had got out of hand. It was her descendants and not she who had ordered the skinning, curing, stretching and hanging of the guards' gorgeous hides. Ca.s.sandra thought these practices utterly barbaric - one of the many evils she had sensed being perpetuated through the centuries, and another she was determined to put to rights once they returned to the city and the palace. 'Because that's what we're about to do, you see,' said the earliest Empress, 'Sorting out the various wickednesses of the current Empress.'