November 05, 2020
Out now is I Am the Master, a collection of stories featuring the Doctor’s best enemy.
The collection Doctor Who: I Am the Master - Legends of the Renegade Time Lord is out now. You can order here.
The Doctor and the Master’s conflict of light and dark has raged on across the universe many times. This collection of five short stories and a novella explores the darkness in the Master’s hearts; their secrets and sinister ambitions revealed through brand new adventures and encounters.
There are six adventures with six incarnations of undreamed evil: a quest to free alien warlords, a dangerous mission to save a vital ally, a meeting with Bram Stoker, a shattering of lives on a distant world, a trial of wits to gain untold power and also a story from the Master’s latest incarnation during his 77 years of imprisonment on Earth.
This story collection has a range of writers:
- Matthew Sweet
- Mike Tucker
- Jacqueline Rayner
- Beverly Sanford
- Mark Wright
- Peter Anghelides
And now you can read an exclusive extract from one of the stories contained in the collection below.
Anger Management by Peter Anghelides
The colour of captivity is grey.
This was evident to him after only his first week’s imprisonment. The concrete wall of the cell. The metal in the bedframe. The dead fireplace full of cold ashes beside an empty bookcase. Clouds scudding across a sunless sky were the only things visible from the single window high in the plain wall.
Even his prison uniform. Black was his personal preference for a collarless jacket, not the hooped greys of this itchy sackcloth.
The Master knew he’d have plenty of time here to contemplate the wisdom of his scheme to outwit the Hyrrokin dimension.
He stopped pacing around the space after the first three months. Beyond five months he gave up removing the stupid prison cap, because wherever he put it, the thing still somehow ended up back on his head.
By the first year, he had stopped trying to decipher what the murmur of distant voices might be saying behind the thick cell door. Its flyblown metal surface revealed the steel in his eyes and the grey in his beard.
One day, he felt a pressure at the back of his head, like a headache starting to build. And then the prison cell was gone.
His eyes adjusted slowly to the dappled light in the study. Across the heavy carpet from him the Hyrrokin biomechanoid stood by a wing-backed chair near the bookcase. Crackling coals spat and sparked in the adjacent fireplace.
‘Here we are again, Loge,’ said the Master. Loge flexed its long, curling fingers around a silvergrey control device. ‘How long was that? It was two or three minutes for me, I wasn’t really counting, so for you that would be—’
‘Three years,’ snapped the Master.
‘The blink of an eye,’ it told him. Its own eyelids nictitated in a reptilian manner as though to emphasise the point.
The biomechanoid was an incongruous presence. In the dark, it might just pass for a man. Uncloaked in the soft light of the college rooms, it looked like a snub-nosed lizard, two metres tall, its pale flesh encased in a glittering skin of dull metallic scales.
‘Now that you’ve released me . . .’ began the Master.
Loge waggled a twisted finger at him. ‘I didn’t say you’d been released. We have things to discuss.’
The Master barked a laugh. ‘I have nothing to say. And I certainly don’t have to listen.’
‘You really do.’ Loge raised the device again. ‘Because I can do this.’
He was back in the grey cell. The shelves were still empty, the fire remained unlit, the inaccessible high window showed clouds again.
The muffled voices from beyond the door became no clearer over the following weeks. A bowl of gruel, with its pewter spoon, remained by the bed, untouched, for nearly a month. No point trying to eat it – he was never going to starve.
A Time Lord experiences Slow Captivity just like anyone else. This Time Lord could spend time planning for his eventual release…
You can order I am the Master - Legends of the Renegade Time Lord here.
