The Locksley Dagger, Part 1

I shifted my position, crossed my legs, and took a sip from my replenished glass. I was feeling a little lightheaded with the wine and a little sensual in my new frock: it was short and shimmery and loose and smoother than silk and seemed to flow over my skin like cool water. It was all the rage here, and the Doctor had insisted on buying it for me.

"You'll need it for dinner," he'd said with a smile. "We have reservations." He wouldn't tell me where he had gotten the credit chit that was paying for it all.

He was dressed in black, like a softly cut tuxedo, and he looked wonderful, but as he turned back to me, skimming a hand through his fair hair, all I could think of was getting him out of it. "I think it's hopeless," he said with a sigh.

He was a little drunk, too, so I dared try a little more intimacy than he was usually comfortable with in public. I leaned closer, touched his knee, gently kissed his mouth -- the musky alien scent lingering on his skin made my insides quiver. "We could just go back to the TARDIS."

His sapphire eyes got as bright as twilight's first stars. "That we could," he said with a grin, and then his gaze was distracted by something over my shoulder, and he rolled his eyes. "Oh no."

I glanced back. Silhouetted in the glaring light of the entryway, a large, muscular, humanoid figure turned its head to and fro, searching the room.

Too tipsy to be worried, I giggled. "What trouble have you caused now?"

The Doctor shielded his face from the searcher with one hand. "It's not what trouble I've caused, but what trouble I'll be asked to get into that I'm worried about. Perhaps we can slip out the back-- Oh good lord, she's seen us."

She? I looked back.

She waded through the crowded room toward us, a mountain of gray skin in a blue uniform. Her forehead bulged hugely with what looked like vertebrae -- as if her spine had continued up and over the back of her head and didn't end until the bridge of her nose -- and behind that was a mane of wiry, barely restrained, coal-black hair.

She stopped before us, standing at attention, and when she clasped her hands behind her back, her jacket fell away to reveal a weapon on her waist.

The Doctor acknowledged her with a tight smile. "Kroulka."

"Doctor." Her deep voice made it almost a growl. "Efass would like to see you immediately."

"Is it absolutely necessary?"

She seemed to straighten up even further. "He was quite insistent."

With a resigned sigh, the Doctor nodded and slid off his stool, motioning for me to follow.

"But Doctor, what about dinner?" I nudged his middle with my knee. "What about the TARDIS?"

"Ayren, one just does not refuse a Klingon." He turned a grin filled with mischievous charm on the woman. "Especially one as bewitching as Kroulka."

"Your sense of humour has not improved, Doctor," the Klingon rumbled, then spun on one heel and made for the door.

The Doctor took my hand as we wove through the sea of bodies after her, drawing me close and whispering to me, "I'm sorry, my love. I'll get us out of this as quickly as possible." He added a few words in Gallifreyan -- words I knew, words than made me shiver in anticipation.

Kroulka led us to a groundcar parked outside the restaurant and drove us off into darkened city streets. The walkways were clogged with tourists and citizens enjoying the warm spring evening, but vehicle traffic was light, and we sped along under Kroulka's steady hand.

I leaned back against the Doctor, and he slipped an arm around my shoulder. "Who's Efass?" I asked.

"He's the curator of the Souverane Museum of Antiquities--"

"We haven't seen that one, have we?" We'd spent the last week touring the planet's capital city and had seen several of its magnificent museums.

"No." The Doctor sighed, his chest moving under me. "I've been steering us clear of it, hoping to avoid precisely this situation. They have a wonderful collection of antique time technology that I'd love to see again, but Efass always has these little jobs for me..."

I buried a smile in his jacket. "And you can't just refuse him? Is he a Klingon, too?"

"Good heavens, no -- I'm not quite sure what he is. No, it isn't easy to refuse him, because... well, you'll see."

"And Kroulka?"

"Hmm? Oh, she's head of security for the museum... Actually, Efass seems to use her as his personal flunky." He breathed those last words into my ear so the woman in the front seat wouldn't hear -- it tickled, and I giggled, and he kissed my ear lightly.

I snuggled closer to him for a moment, slid my hand along the inside of his thigh. We'd come here just for this -- for us to be together, alone, and it hadn't lasted more than a handful of days. Somehow, I had a feeling it was always going to be like this. The Doctor only pretended to be free of obligations -- I was beginning to think that he was at the beck and call of the entire universe.

The Doctor leaned forward a bit. "Aren't we going to the museum?"

I looked out the window -- we'd left the busy downtown district and were speeding into the residential foothills outside the city proper.

Kroulka spoke over her shoulder. "Efass is expecting you at his home. We're nearly there."

"Oh good," the Doctor said with a smile. "I've never seen his home. I can't imagine what it must look like."

A moment later, we pulled to a stop at the end of a long drive stretching to a dome-shaped house of white brick. Orange light glowed in the many tiny windows and then spilled forth from the door as it flew open and a small creature skittered out toward us.

"Efass-- " the Doctor began.

"Doctor, I am being glad that you have come." Four round black eyes blinked up at me from a brown, leathery face that wasn't quite mammalian -- and then those eyes travelled up and down both the Doctor and me, taking in our clothing. "Kroulka was interrupting your dinner, yes? Oh dear, oh dear -- please to have dinner with me. Being that it is a beautiful evening, did you have enjoyment of the drive? Kroulka, a most skillful driver, is being very valuable to me. Ahem" -- Efass nudged me with one of the several elbows on his multijointed arm and chuckled -- "you should be to keep a watchful eye on Kroulka -- I am seeing for many years that she would like to being the Doctor's friend."

The Klingon behind us cleared her throat noisily.

"Thank you, thank you, Kroulka, my friend," Efass chattered on, still laughing. "Please to attend to that additional chore... Yes, yes, good-bye." He was already halfway up the drive and waving for us to follow. "Please not to stand in the evening -- come, come."

The Doctor and I had to duck to get through the door -- the ceilings inside were just high enough for us to walk upright, although they were dripping with twisty green vines that kept catching my hair. Efass led us through several small rooms with rough-hewn stone walls and diffuse orange light that seemed to come from nowhere -- rooms filled with piles of old paper books and wooden trunks held shut with bands of metal.

And then we were in what felt like the center of the house, a wide, round room like the others, with cushions on the floor and aromatic candles burning in tiny crevices in the walls. A skylight overhead was open to the clear skies and the evening air.

"Please to be comfortable. As humans say, please to make yourself at home." Efass ran around the room on all fours, plumping up the floor pillows, looking rather spiderish on his oddly jointed arms and legs. "I am knowing that humanoids are being happy with chairs and I am being sorry to not have these useful items, but many humans have been telling me that these are suitable. Are you feeling hunger? I am being anxious for food as well." And he scurried out of the room.

The Doctor cocked his head at me as if to say, See what I mean?, and he sat down cross-legged on a cushion.

Stifling a giggle, I lowered myself next to him as Efass was returning with a huge tray overflowing with luscious fruits and creamy white cheeses and breads with dark crusts. He set it down on the floor before us, slipped out, and reappeared again almost immediately.

"A most special delicacy which has come from Earth," he announced, holding aloft a bottle and three glasses. Plopping down across from us, he poured the dark, bubbly liquid and handed us each a glass with a frothy head.

I took a tentative sip and tried to place the familiar taste -- sweet but with a bit of a bite, and bubbles that exploded on my tongue. Gods, I had drunk this on Earth with Tristan!

"Coca-Cola," I said.

Efass barked a laugh. "Yes, yes! Oh good, my Doctor friend, you have been bringing a clever friend with you. I was being somewhat worrisome when I was seeing that you were not being alone, but now I am seeing that your friend is being okay."

The Doctor glanced from me to Efass and smiled. "I trust Ayren implicitly. Anything you say to me she may also hear." Then he shook his head and sighed. "But Efass, we're on holiday. Is this really so important that--"

"Doctor," Efass cut in, quiet and serious for a moment, "one of the selection of time hooks has been stolen."

"Good lord. How?"

Efass threw up his hands. "This is being a big mystery! Kroulka has many times examined the security systems and is being assuring to me that all things are functioning. But no alarms were being heard when the thieving most assuredly was being done! I am just seeing a display case with no time hook in it!"

The Doctor put his glass down. "Who has complete security clear--"

"I, for one..." Efass winked two eyes at the Doctor. "And you being the only other. Your clearance was never being deleted from the occasion in which you--"

"I don't think there's any need to go into that," he said with a scowl and a look to me out of the corner of his eye. What was this? But there was no opportunity to ask him about it.

"I am admitting," Efass continued, more calm now as he cut slices of cheese and bread and poured more Coca-Cola for us, "that you, my Doctor friend, were being the first to being under my suspicion, yet Kroulka was being -- how do humans say? -- was being to 'keep an eye on you' since you arrived on Souverane before the thieving was done and she was reporting to me that you were being to stay away from the museum--"

"Keeping on eye--!"

"And I am being glad that you are not the thiever for I am being in need of your help, being impossible to contact authorities in this matter. It is very clear to you, I have hope, that it would to be unfortunate for the museum if it was being known that our security is being so easy to elude."

There was a silence finally, so I asked, "What's a time hook?"

Efass handed us each a hunk of bread and nodded silently at the Doctor.

"Time hooks are the relics of an ancient time-travelling civilization," he explained. "The hooks are the only artifacts they left behind -- we don't know much about them."

"But if they were time travellers," I said, "someone must've run into them at some time or another."

The Doctor shrugged. "No one has, at least not knowingly. But they must have existed -- the hooks were already ancient when Gallifrey acquired time technology... I'm getting ahead of myself." He popped a piece of bread into his mouth and smiled. "The hooks were used for travelling along time rifts -- a sort of fixed, stable wormhole. They were very local and very specific -- one might connect, say, Efass's front yard to, oh I don't know, a clearing in a forest up in the mountains five hundred years ago. They were natural phenomena, scattered all throughout the universe."

"Like a time tunnel," I said as I broke off a piece of cheese.

"Mmm." The Doctor nodded, chewing and sipping his drink.

"The time hooks are being very innocent little objects," Efass said, "some item which is being indigenous to one or both of the periods of time at the ends of a time rift. They are having room for containing the time mechanisms, which are being at most a few grams of atomic circuitry." He shrugged, a gesture made sinuous and languid by his peculiar limbs. "Perhaps this could being an item of jewelry or a tool or other similar object. One was being able to travel along a time rift by carrying this item on one's person -- it was hooking onto the time rift to carry one along it to the opposing end."

I bit into a juicy apple. "You're talking about these time rifts in the past tense. What happened to them?"

"Well," the Doctor said, "one of the first things Gallifrey did after developing time technology was sew up all the rifts -- they were nasty navigational hazards for TARDISes." He shifted on his pillow and stretched to grab a slice of cheese. "At the same time, the Time Lords gathered up the hooks and stowed them away in a vault under the Panopticon, where they stayed for thousands of years."

Efass chuckled. "But a secret they were not being, and when my far-ago predecessor was hearing information about the hidden-away time hooks, she was lobbying Gallifrey for many years for releasing them. They are being a fine speciality in the time-technologies collection."

"So they've been in the museum for quite a while?" I asked, and drained my glass. Efass immediately refilled it.

"Oh yes." The Doctor grinned. "Hundreds of years. And I'm proud to say that voting to release the time hooks was one of the few accomplishments of my Council days."

I swirled frothy Coca-Cola around in my glass. "So why would someone steal one after all this time?"

"And why just one?" The Doctor cocked an eyebrow in thought.

"And who would to do this thing?" Efass exclaimed. "Doctor, you must to find it for me! You are being the only creature I am being able to ask."

"Efass--"

"Oh, I am paying your usual fee, Doctor--"

I choked on the Coca-Cola I was swallowing -- the Doctor rubbed my back and refused to meet my eye.

"--that is being not a problem. I am giving to you holograms of the hook and important information." Efass handed several small glass cubes to the Doctor -- along with a credit chit like the one he had used to pay for my dress. "I am thinking that perhaps you could to search both ends of where this time rift was using to be, for only here would the hook be having use in any possibility."

The Doctor slipped the cubes and the chit into a pocket without looking at them. "Of course we'll look for it, Efass. I was only going to say that it may be impossible to find -- the universe is a big place."

Efass sighed. "I am knowing this, Doctor. But I am knowing also that it must to be a Time Lord who has done the thieving -- for who but a Time Lord could be using such a thing?"

"Well," I said, "it may have been stolen simply because it's old and valuable -- perhaps to be sold for profit. I don't think we need to assume it was stolen for what it was once able to do."

The Doctor nodded. "That's an excellent point. Efass, I think you should have Kroulka go over the security systems again -- ask her to check for authorized entries, as well as unauthorized ones. There may be other security-clearance passes around -- stolen or counterfeit -- that you're not aware of."

"I will be doing that in the morning, my Doctor friend. And I am thanking you very profusely for your assistance."

And then the matter was dropped. I thought Efass would want to tell us more about the stolen time hook, and I said as much, but he assured us that any information we could possibly need was contained in the cubes. "It is being most fitting now to turn our talk away from business," he said.

The evening disappeared as we ate and drank and the Doctor and Efass compared their adventures since their last meeting, and we were all yawning as Efass finally escorted us back through his cavelike house to the front door.

"I am almost forgetting the time-hook disaster in all our reminiscence, Doctor." Efass's voice sounded tired. "I must to thank you again for this help you are offering -- and you as well, my new friend Ayren."

"I only hope we can find it for you," the Doctor replied. "But I'm going to need my TARDIS if we're even to try. Can Kroulka give us a ride back into the city?"

Efass cracked open the door and peered out. "This will not to be necessary," he said with a giggle. "Kroulka has done a better thing." He pushed the door open wide and pointed. The TARDIS was sitting at the end of the long drive. "She was bringing it here in a truck while we were eating. I was thinking it would to be good for you to not be having to return all the way to the city."

The Doctor cringed, and I took his arm and steered him through the door before Efass could spring any more of his little jokes. "Thanks, Efass," I called back to him.

"Good-bye, good-bye! Please to hurry back!" And he closed the door behind us.

The Doctor stood in the drive for a moment, scrubbing his face with his hands like he was trying to wash with the chilly air. I crossed my arms and looked up at the stars and let him moan quietly. "Why do I always let myself get talked into these things?"

I slipped a hand through his arm and leaned against him for warmth. "Come on, let's get out of here." We strolled down the drive, listening to our feet crunch on the gravel and the melodic chirps of alien insects hiding in the tall grass at the edge of the drive. "I never realized you were such a mercenary," I said quietly.

He pretended to be hurt. "Are you teasing me?"

"The 'usual fee,' Doctor? I'd never have imagined it," with a squeeze to his arm.

He sighed deeply, with long-exhausted patience. "Ayren, the first time Efass roped me into doing his dirty work, he tossed a wallet full of notes onto the table -- he wouldn't let me refuse it. So on my way out of the museum, I dropped it into the donation box near the front doors. And I did the same thing the next time. By third time, he'd caught on, and from then on he'd only give me credit chits keyed to my retina scan -- how he got that, I've no idea. But I figured that I may as well spend the money and enjoy myself -- Rassilon knows I've earned it. And you do look wonderful in that frock."

We stopped in front of the TARDIS, looking none the worse for its trip from the city. "It still makes me angry, though," the Doctor went on, "how manipulative he is. He didn't have the TARDIS brought here," patting the ship, "to spare us the ride back. He wants to make sure we leave straight away -- I can see him out of the corner of my eye, peeking out a window."

Resisting the temptation to turn around and look, I gave into another temptation, sliding my arms around his waist and drawing close to him. "So why do you let him rope you into these things?" But I already knew the answer.

He shrugged, his eyes dark and apologetic. "Well, this needs doing. The time hooks are an important piece of time-tech history -- we can't just let--"

I silenced him with a finger to his lips. "Once we dematerialize, Efass will have no idea where we go, will he?"

The Doctor shook his head, a little smile flirting with his mouth.

"Then this can wait till tomorrow morning, can't it?"

Barely a whisper: "Oh, absolutely."

Will

I was grinning like a half-wit.

I was getting to know this time of the morning pretty well.

The air was crisp with the smoke of the day's first fires and cold with the coming winter. Shiver. I pulled my cloak more tightly around me and quickened my step through the dry undergrowth. My boots were making a hell of a racket in the twigs and leaves -- I didn't care.

I stopped at the edge of the woods to look at Locksley Castle, rising again in the dawn. The old hate felt... strange... now -- it was refusing to just go away after all these years. My stomach twisted with a sick feeling.

There was a crunch of twigs behind me, and my hand shot to my waist -- to Robin's knife, the Locksley dagger. My dagger. Locksley. Shiver again, with pride this time. And grin again, when I saw Jenny coming through the haze of trees.

"And where did you disappear to, Will Scarlett?" She swung her hips as she came to me.

"Nature calls," I said with a shrug.

"And were you not thinking of coming back?" she accused with a grin. "The camp's th'other way."

"You know I have to get back to Nottingham. Don't want to scandalize the lord of the manor."

She pouted her red lips. "Oh, all right. At least give us a kiss before you go."

I grabbed her and tickled her through her heavy woolen cloak and planted a wet kiss on her mouth.

"Say it again, Will," she whispered, her nose cold against my ear.

Oh, how my new name was working miracles! "William of Locksley at your service, my lady," I growled, and bit her neck.

She sighed and giggled and clung to me. "O-ho, my lord!" And then she pushed me away with a playful smack. "And I don't care if you are Robin Hood's brother -- you stay away from all those other girls, Will Scarlett. Don't think I don't see what you're about."

Laughing, I ran from her, toward the Nottingham road, turning only to bow with a flourish, sweeping my cloak about me. "My lady!"

She waved from the edge of the woods. "You come and see me again tonight, Will Scarlett!"

Breathless with my own cleverness, I ran past the new southern wall of the castle, past my father's grave... I turned to glance at it, my feet never slowing, and crossed myself.

Did I trip? The world went black and fell upside down, and it seemed I was flying... And when I opened my eyes -- didn't remember closing them -- I was no longer on Locksley lands.

Bloody hell.

[Part 2]