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Throwing back her head, she opened her toothless mouth wide
and uttered a long incantation made up of croaks and snarls,
shrieks and whinings which merged and echoed in the vaulted
chamber. She clattered the two bones together above her head
in a complex rhythmic tattoo, and then stretched out her arms
sideways and began to spin round faster and faster...
‘Primitive mumbo jumbo,’ Sholakh scoffed under his breath.
The Graff leaned towards Sholakh without taking his eyes
from the rapidly spinning figure in the circle. ‘The Captain
assures me that it never fails,’ he murmured.
The Seeker stopped abruptly and began to chant in
unexpectedly sonorous tones. ‘Bones of our Fathers, bones of
our Kings by the Spirit that once moved you, seek and find. Seek
in the Ice Time. Seek in the Sun Time. Seek and find. Come into
the Circle, Spirits of the Ice, Spirits of the Sun, show what I seek.
Show... Show...’
Suddenly quite still, she let the bones clatter on to the
flagstones. They came to rest exactly in line and as they did so
the brazier to which they pointed flared up momentarily with a
fierce roar. The Seeker stared into the flames until they had died
down again. ‘I see him... I see him...’ she whispered. ‘At the
place of the fires.’
The Captain stepped forward. ‘The Concourse.’ he
exclaimed. ‘But we have searched there. We found nothing.’
The Seeker turned blazing eyes upon the Captain. ‘Then
seek again,’ she muttered hoarsely. ‘He is there.. I see him.’
Stooping, she gathered up the bones. Then with a sudden
hissing sound she whirled round once: all the fires were instantly
extinguished.
Holding the bones at arm’s length, the wizened hag slowly
left the chamber, closely followed by the Captain and his Guards.
As she shuffled along she repeated under her breath, over and
over again: ‘I see him... I see him... I see him...’ in a hypnotic
refrain.
‘It’s just trickery,’ Sholakh muttered, gazing at the ring of
rapidly cooling braziers.
The Graff Vynda Ka shook his head. ‘We shall follow. Fetch
my faithful Levithians, Sholakh. If the thief is found we shall
take the Jethryk and our gold. But be prepared: we may have to
fight our way out of the city...’
Romana paced agitatedly round and round the fire in the Graff’s
quarters while the Doctor and Garron sat at the table chatting
together like two old cronies whiling away a long winter evening
over a bottle of whisky. Occasionally the Doctor crept to the
door, listened intently for a moment and then blew several blasts
on the dog whistle.
‘... but I had a spot of bother with a dissatisfied client and
was forced to leave Earth to seek my fortune elsewhere.’ Garron
smiled, shaking his head over his reminiscences.
‘What happened?’ the Doctor enquired.
‘He was an Arab, of course,’ Garron went on, ‘and when I
offered him Sydney Harbour Bridge for fifty million dollars he
got greedy and insisted I throw in the Opera House as well. Well
naturally I refused.’
‘Naturally,’ the Doctor smiled ironically,
‘I could hardly let that priceless monument to our cultural
heritage fall into his hands,’ Garron protested with a shocked
frown. ‘Unfortunately the Arab took umbrage and showed all
the impressive documents I’d cooked up to the Antartican
Government—so I had to emigrate.’
The Doctor padded over to listen at the door. ‘No doubt
your victim came looking for you,’ he murmured.
‘With a posse of Bedouin touting neutron guns,’ Garron
nodded ruefully. ‘I’ve never been back.’
The Doctor chuckled sympathetically.
Romana’s exasperation boiled over. ‘Doctor. How can you
gossip with this petty confidence trickster when there are people
out there intending to kill us?’ she exploded.
‘Don’t you worry yourself about that, my dear,’ the Doctor
replied gently. ‘I’m keeping an ear on them.’
He sat down again at the table and leant towards Garron.
‘But what really intrigues me is how you first got your hands on
that piece of Jethryk,’ he murmured, gazing in flattering
admiration.
Garron eyed the Doctor warily but could not help swelling
with pride. ‘I... I acquired it,’ he smiled evasively.
‘You stole it,’ Romana corrected him sharply.
Garron’s fleshy lips curled with contempt. ‘That is a very
damaging remark,’ he retorted, ‘but only to be expected on a
Class Three Planet such as this.’
The Doctor’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Class Three Planet?’ he
exclaimed. ‘What do you mean?’
Garron drew himself up in the chair and beamed. ‘Just a
technical term, sir,’ he said condescendingly, ‘a convenient
method of classifying properties.’
The Doctor stared wide-eyed. ‘Properties?’ he echoed.
Indeed sir: I deal in planetary real estate,’ Garcon
explained. ‘I sell planets.’
The Doctor’s jaw dropped a fraction of a centimetre. ‘Of
course at first I thought you were Alliance Security,’ Garron
continued. ‘They’ve been on my tail ever since I sold Mirabilis
Eighty-One to no less than three different purchasers... That was
my greatest deal,’ he sighed nostalgically, before lapsing into
silence.
‘What about your latest customer—the Graff Vynda Ka—or
whatever he calls himself. What does he want Ribos for?’ the
Doctor asked, going once more to the door and listening.
Garron outlined the Graff’s ambitious scheme. ‘It’s a
hopeless madman’s dream,’ he chuckled. ‘but his gold is real
enough.’
‘He may be a madman but he certainly saw through you!’
Romana snapped with scathing irony.
‘Young Unstoffe’s fault entirely, dear lady,’ Garron replied.
‘He went right over the top. He’s a dreadful ham at heart, I’m
afraid.’
The Doctor returned and sat by the table. ‘And the
Jethryk... Just bait?’ he suggested innocently.
Garron nodded. Then he looked very hard at the Doctor.
‘You seem to be extremely interested in that nugget, sir. You
haven’t told me what your racket is yet,’ he said slyly.
The Doctor threw his arms up in the air vaguely. As he did
so the Locatormutor Core flew out of his sleeve and was instantly
caught by Romana before it could crash into the fire.
‘You could be extremely useful in the slips, my dear,’ the
Doctor said, turning to her with a broad smile. Then he
answered Garron’s question with a casual shrug: ‘Oh we’re just
here on holiday, but we seem to keep getting caught up in
things...’
‘Things which do not in the least concern us,’ Romana
snapped, examining the Locatormutor for any sign of damage.
‘Indeed,’ the Doctor agreed, jumping to his feet. ‘We really
ought to be moving on. However there doesn’t appear to be a
convenient window, the chimney is much too hot to climb and
our Round Table friends outside sound rather...’
The Doctor stopped in mid-sentence and listened to the
muffled noise of activity suddenly penetrating through the
sturdy wooden door. Pulling out his ear trumpet, he crept over
and applied its tarnished horn to the gap running between the
hinges. He listened as Sholakh briefed the Levithian Guards,
telling them that the Shrieves planned to raid the Concourse
again at dawn and that the Graff’s forces would be expected to
recover the Jethryk and the gold. ‘We shall vanish before they
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