A/n : Well, thanks to the favourable reviews and the fact that everyone who has reviewed it has added it to their favourites, I am writing some more of this a bit sooner than I might have done otherwise! Please bear in mind this is just a bit of fun and so might lack the narrative polish you have come to expect from my other, more serious, works. Also, this may undergo fairly heavy editing here and there. Your mileage may vary, objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are, the sonic screwdriver can always be used to get out of any situation.

In homage to the fact this is a TV series, the chapters are being called “Episodes” and are intended to be treated as such in the mind of the reader.

Episode One : Here There Be Dragons

The flame roaring from the Dragon’s mouth abruptly cut off as the monster levelled out, coming to rest on the tree canopy twenty yards from the Doctor and Rose, perching on the same level as the promontory they stood on. Impossibly, the branches and leaves barely bent under the weight of the creature, as if it merely floated in the air and simply seemed to hover on top of the tree-tops. Its hideous visage – all loops and swirls of cartilage and fibrous bone around fathom-deep eyes – stared at the Doctor and Rose as it crept forward, all previous violence replaced by a slow, ponderous watchfulness.

The Dragon looked leisurely at the two of them for some few seconds, the two of them standing immobile, staring slackly at the head of the creature – the body seemed to have been packed away behind it – as it slunk closer. Everything in Rose’s world had narrowed to those two huge eyes in that hideous, terrifying face. Her heart pounded like a trip-hammer in her ears and her limbs were leaden water, unable to obey her will even if she had had any left.

A stillness beyond terror took her, a dreadful sense of being asked a wordless question whose answer was obvious but just out of reach. Even within the mesmerism of the hypnotic Dragon, Rose’s rational mind digested it and regurgitated it to her forebrain;

Whoami? Whatami? Whyami?

She was . . . she was . . .

The Dragon crept ever closer, vast and yet almost fragile jaws stretching open wide enough to encompass her almost lovingly, the lower jaw dropping so that the burning eyes remained trained incessantly on the prey creatures in front of it.

She was . . . she was . . .

She was Rose Tyler. She was a time-traveller. She was about to be eaten by a Dragon.

She shook her head, snapping the final shreds of the Dragon-spell from her mind and shoved hard on the Doctor’s shoulder. He rolled one way, still dazed and confused, and she fell the other, rolling part-way down the slope they had just slogged up. With a roar, the Dragon abandoned all pretence of stealth and guile and a great geyser of crackling flame gouted from its jaws. It leapt into the air and – seeming to move like a fish through water – swam towards Rose with a speed that seemed impossible for a creature of such vast bulk.

The final cobwebs were knocked from the Doctor’s mind as a claw caught him in the chest as he tumbled and the monster swept past him. Surprisingly – or perhaps it was the lingering effects of the Dragon-sorcery – the blow didn’t hurt him as much as it should have, nor did it knock him sprawling. But he still stumbled back, ducking under the lash of the sweeping tail as the Dragon swooped after Rose, blue pilot flames bubbling along its jaws.

“Oh no you don’t, you overgrown lizard,” muttered the Doctor, reaching into his pocket as he regretted not thinking of a less-stock insult. He pointed the sonic-screwdriver at the Dragon and pressed the button.

In the tropical sunshine, the azure light was barely visible – and the reassuring hum was blotted out by the roar of the monster – but it wasn’t those that the Doctor hoped would work. Although he had only had a few seconds to take in details, he had noticed the ear chambers on the side of the creature’s head; delicate, effective, providing it with very acute senses if he were any judge. And, frankly, when you’ve been travelling the galaxy for nine-hundred years, you tend to think of yourself as not just judge, but also jury and – if needs must – executioner.

The sonic wave was disharmonic, at high amplitude and covering all the frequencies he could think of. Tightly directed, the end of the cone encompassed the Dragon’s head. With luck, it would disorientate or hurt it. Without luck, it would just . . .

“Oh, fantastic . . .” he bemoaned as the Dragon turned in mid-air and swept towards him. As far as a creature with an immobile face could be said to look angry, it looked narked as all Hell. He’d got its attention. Too well.

He briefly considered yelling something at it, but it already looked as if it was paying him far too much attention as it was. The only silver lining to a very cloudy day was the fact it seemed too enraged to try any hypnotism.

He turned to run, hoping to lose it in the trees. As he turned, he saw a figure standing at the tree-line – details were lost in the speed of his glance, but the figure was humanoid, dressed in a patchwork of colours and held a long stick in its hand. A stick with a notch in the end and held by loops to the figure’s fingers. And resting on that stick was a long javelin.

“Down!” translated the TARDIS, and the Doctor dropped to the leaf-mould floor as the atl-atl hurled spear passed through the space his head had occupied a second before. He rolled over onto his back as the figure leapt over him, drawing some sort of bladed weapon as it did so, and hacked into the Dragon’s flank. The fight seemed to have gone out of it when the spear went home in its chest. Gas and liquid bubbled around the wound and the great slashes in its side. The air began to smell sharp and acrid, like crushed ants or vomit, and steam and fume rose from the creature – a creature that seemed, if it were possible, vastly smaller than it had been a few moments before.

The beast seemed to sink down into itself, its head crashing to the ground, the wounds inflicted by the blade opening wider and wider as their edges seemed to burn and char. Patches of hide and muscle sloughed off, revealing bleaching bones that hissed like Alka-Seltzer, as the Dragon collapsed like a punctured balloon. A final sweeping stroke and the head of the creature span away from its body and the thing fell into decaying ruin.

Rose ran up to the Doctor, reaching down and helping him up as he stood. “You alright?” she gasped, brushing him down. He nodded, panting.

“Oh, yeah, I’m . . . good. Good. I had it all under control.” He ran a hand through his hair, dislodging multipedial creatures. “You know – dragons. All in a day’s work for a Time Lord.” The two of them turned to face the corpse of the monster.

There was practically nothing left – just a pile of melting flesh and twisted bone giving off a hideous stink. What bones were left were thin, brittle things – like those of a bird or a fish, seemingly insufficient to support the bulk of the creature. There was little flesh – and what there was was dissolving in what looked and smelt like bubbling acid – and the only suggestion of the Dragon’s size was the acres of puckered and decaying skin that lay over the blackened clearing being cut in the forest.

It was, frankly, inexplicable, and so the Doctor and Rose turned to their saviour. The only word that would come to Rose’s mind was “Amazon”, for the woman who had saved them was simply physically magnificent – a head taller than the Doctor and towering over Rose, with broad shoulders and long, straight limbs. There was an insolent and yet innocent pride in the voluptuous curves of her body – wide hips, a narrow waist and a jutting chest. It took Rose a second or two of jealousy to realise that the majority of the later was the great curve of ribcage and layered pectoral muscles.

She was dressed in a patchwork of clothes – most of them tough-looking plant-fibre material or what looked like brownish-green leather, but a fair amount were mismatched armour; some of it finely wrought chain, other sections plate steel or iron of varying degrees of technological achievement. Here and there it was rusted – the legacy of the hot, damp environment of the jungle – and there were sections of it that were pitted and scarred with what looked like acid marks; greens and blues deposited on the metal by chemical processes.

Holding a pile of partially crushed leaves in one huge hand, she was methodically and swiftly rubbing the sap onto the blade of her sword. Smoke and hissing bubbles rose from it. Abruptly, she pointed the blade at the two of them, staring down the pitted length of the metal with butcher-blue eyes. Rose stiffened.

“Hmm,” she mused, “still a while left in this one.” She sheathed the sword across her back next to the metal-tipped javelins that rested in a quiver made from woven-together leaves. “Who are you?” she asked curiously, looking at the little people in front of her – the female pale and swaying slightly, the male unnaturally thin.

“I’m the Doctor and this is Rose,” said the Doctor elegantly, smiling his winning smile and showing most of his teeth. He had given – as was his wont – a completely accurate and yet totally useless answer. “And you are?”

“My given name is Rhonda,” said the woman. Her voice – which could be heard behind the TARDIS-translation which was felt – was lilting and perhaps slightly Gaelic. “I am a Dragonslayer.”

“That much is obvious,” quipped the Doctor, gesturing at the smoking black scorch marks and out-flung wings that we all that was left of the Dragon. “Do they all do that?” Rhonda pulled a knife from her hip, fashioned like welded scissor blades, and strode purposefully over to the nearest wing. She knelt by the great expanse of green leather and began to methodically slice the membrane from the thin support struts.

“Do what?” she asked, rolling the first section of the wet hide into a surprisingly tight roll with her powerful hands and starting on another. The Doctor gestured at the acrid stink of the burned forest; charred to moist, black earth by now.

“Melt . . . dissolve . . . is that, erm, normal?” Rhonda laughed.

“For a Dragon, aye – you’ve never seen one before, then?” The Doctor shook his head.

“No,” said Rose. She moved forward and her practised time-traveller’s eye took in the details of Rhonda’s clothing – it was practical, covering her from ankle to neck except for a couple of rips in the legs and arms that exposed finely-tuned muscles. But there were no buttons, and certainly no zips or Velcro or press-studs. The materials were those that could be harvested from the forest – leaves and beaten plant fibres – with the exception of the leather. And that was the colour she suspected the Dragon’s wings – the only part of it that had not decayed – would cure to. Rose’s lack of formalised education stopped her putting a precise date on it, but she knew that the clothes and the armour were not from the same era.

The armour was – in the main – well-crafted, under the rust it was uniform-steel sheets and rings, but some of it was crudely made; beaten from darker metal with the matte-grey and black specks of slag still residing inside. Obviously, this metal had come from a more primitive forge.

The Doctor was poking – gingerly – with a long stick at the black acid reek that was all that was left of the Dragon. The tip of the wood was already smouldering and giving off acrid smoke. “What are those?” he asked, partially to himself, but Rhonda answered as she stood and came next to him.

“Crop-stones,” she said shortly, “the Dragons use them to break up the firerock – they can’t chew it, not with their jaws.” The Doctor scrabbled a dull sphere – looking like water-worn red glass – out of the blackness and held out his hand to Rhonda. She raised her eyebrow.

“Could I have one of those leaves?” he explained. “The alkaline ones that neutralise the acid?” The slightly queasy feeling in his mind confirmed what he suspected – that his words were being translated by the TARDIS, but that Rhonda did not have the technical knowledge to express such scientific concepts herself. She was hearing something quite different to what he was saying.

She smiled – the first time she had done, and it humanised the heavy lines of her face. She was pretty, but in a muscular, fleshy way – a strong jaw and a long, Roman nose below a high forehead and good Nordic cheekbones. “You learn fast, Doctor,” she said, handing him a leaf from a stack threaded on a loop of sinew hanging from her belt. He shrugged modestly, crushing it in his hand and using it to pick up the stone.

“Well, yes,” he said, rubbing the acid residue from the stone and then – when he was certain it was safe to touch – polishing it on his sleeve. It shone in his palm like a star and he whistled.

“What is it?” asked Rose. He tossed it to her and she caught it deftly, turning it over in her hands.

“A ruby big enough to buy a mercenary army capable of conquering a star system,” he said with relish. He pointed at a collection of other rocks where the Dragon’s crop had been. “And I suspect those would buy the army to conquer the rest of the galaxy.” Rose turned the jewel over in her hands for a few seconds and then, not without a twinge of regret, handed it to Rhonda. The Dragonslayer took it without comment and held it loosely as if it did not concern her. The Doctor rubbed his chin and marshalled his thoughts. “Firerock – whiteish, often found with shells of sea creatures in it, dissolves in . . . whatever you call the stuff inside Dragons?” he asked Rhoda. She nodded and he snapped his fingers. “Limestone, brilliant! Simply brilliant!” He turned to Rose with a joyful smile on his face. “They eat limestone and grind it up with these jewels – only jewels are going to be hard enough to do the job – like birds do with seeds and gravel.” He licked at the air with a slurping motion. “Taste that?” She shook her head. “Hydrochloric acid – produced by most vertebrates as stomach acid.” He pointed at the mess on the ground. “The Dragons need the calcium in the limestone so that it can react with stomach acid – which produces calcium chloride in aqueous solution but – most importantly – produces hydrogen gas!” His smile – if that were possible – widened. “Which is lighter than air – so the Dragon can float . . . if it’s big enough.” Rose was smiling and laughing at his infectious enthusiasm, but this final point made her think.

“Like airships!” she exclaimed, “They were really big because you need lots of gas to make something float.” The Doctor twitched his smile and made a “got it!” click in the corner of his jaw.

“And that’s why its bones are so light and thin, and why it didn’t knock me over – it’s not heavy enough! It’s mostly just inflated membrane!” His shoulders slumped a shade. “Kind of ruins the image of Smaug, doesn’t it? Bard the Bowman defeats a balloon.” But Rose had been thinking.

“And hydrogen’s a bit flammable, isn’t it?” she mused, inadvertently understating the facts. “Which is why they breathe fire – when they need to get rid of it they vent it and it ignites?” The Doctor nodded judiciously. “If they didn’t do it safely, I suppose they might just explode like that airship – what was it called?”

“The Hindenburg,” said the Doctor shortly, a spasm of pain passing over his face.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, concerned, kicking herself for forgetting his history went back – and forward – a lot longer than hers, “Did you see it?”

“See it?” exclaimed the Doctor indignantly, “I was on it!” He dusted his hands together and smiled again. “Well, that’s physiology draconis one-oh-one, but it doesn’t answer the most important question.” Rhoda stepped into the conversation, previously unwilling to add anything and almost forgotten by the TARDISnauts.

“Which is?” she asked. The Doctor turned to her.

“How they got here – this planet isn’t ecologically advanced enough to have produced the precursor species which would be required for their evolution.” He snapped the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and pointed it at Rhonda for a second. “And you’re human – and a fantastic physical specimen - so how did you get here?” He faced Rose. “Unless the TARDIS is in a very silly mood, this is the Deca-Hydronis system and we are well within the era of the Earth Empire; there were no colonies out here.” He turned to Rhonda. She shrugged.

“Much of what you say, I cannot follow,” she admitted with a depreciating smile. “You seem to know nothing of Dragons and you are small and puny, yet you speak of them with the lore it takes Dragonslayers years to amass within minutes of looking at one.” She scratched her long, tendon-corded neck. “I think your questions would be best answered at my village – it is not far from here – if they can be answered anywhere.” As a full-stop to her sentence, she casually tossed the ruby into the sticky black ash, it landing next to its crop-mates.

“What’d you do that for?” asked Rose. “Surely that’s worth a fortune?” Rhonda looked at her wonderingly.

“To a Dragon – aye; without it, they cannot break up the firerock. And if they have no firerock they cannot fly. Another Dragon will come here and eat those stones – probably a juvenile male. It will give him the ability to fly.” She shook her head. “No Dragonslayer would take those – not even if there were a buyer for them. It would be the end of the Dragons if there were no crop stones.” Rose smiled, remembering the terror of the monster.

“Would that be so bad?” she asked. Rhonda laughed, shouldering her rolls of dragon-hide.

“I would no longer have a job,” she said, moving easily through the jungle.

Shrugging expansively at each other, the Doctor and Rose followed.

oOo

The village plucked at something Rose didn’t quite remember from her history lessons, but which the Doctor remembered only too well – Neolithic or Upper Paleolithic era; roundhouses made of stacked flat stones in a clearing laboriously hacked from the jungle. He turned to Rose, ready to point out the various interesting facets of the civilisation – how it differed from and was similar to what was happening on her world one hundred centuries before she was born – but her expression reminded him that such history lessons hadn’t been that interesting when he’d travelled with his granddaughter.

However, he could resist pointing out two things – one of which she had noticed and one of which she had not. “Look at the natives – tall, strong, big lung capacities.” He shook his head admiringly. “This is what living on a higher-gravity, ox-low world does for you humans.” Rose smiled at him.

“Ox-Lo? Is that what happens to J-Lo when she lets herself go a bit?” He laughed, and then became more serious.

“Not going to be any oxen – or is it oxes? Oxi? – anyway, moo-cows, around here for a while – if ever. No agriculture,” he explained to her bemused look, “No domesticable crops – no real chance for civilisation to develop.”

“What? Surely . . . ?” He shook his head again.

“Nope. All independently arising terrestrial civilisations depended on the domestication of a wild cereal crop; wheat in the Near-East, corn in Mesoamerica, rice in the Far East. There’s none of that here – these people are going to remain hunter-gatherers unless they can find one somewhere. And I don’t think the bio-development of this planet is far enough along for a wild cereal.” Rose wrinkled her nose.

“Wild cereal? What – coming next on Channel Five - ‘When Cornflakes Attack’?” she laughed. The Doctor hooked his hands into claws.

“They’re grrrrrrreat!” he growled.

Rhonda had lead them through the village, ignoring the puzzled stares from most of the inhabitants who looked up from their work of weaving lianas into rope, or beating plant fibres with primitive stone hammers. Here and there, old men napped flints. The Doctor and Rose waved cheerfully at the villagers. “Hi!” “Afternoon!”

One of the villagers – a man, even by the standards of the natives, broad-shouldered and brawny, with great disproportionate forearms as thick as thighs and blunt, machine-tool hands – hurried forward to meet them, wiping his leather-bound hands – not gloved, Rose noticed, but merely with strips of leather wrapped around them – on a singed green-brown Dragon-wing apron. “Rhonda!” he exclaimed, taking the Dragonslayer in his arms and crushing her to his barrel chest, “you’ve returned!”

Their lips touched in a brutally intimate embrace – muscular bodies promising perfect dovetailing – that somehow lacked the false eroticism of the thousands of other kisses – and deaths – Rose has seen since she became a citizen of TARDIS. “And I have brought guests, Mikhail – this is Rose and . . .” She turned to the Time Lord, unsure of exactly how he should be introduced.

“The Doctor,” he said, sweeping off the glasses he had been using to examine a few of the iron implements hung on a frame standing outside the hut, “Did you make all these? Great work!” He picked up a heavy knife and tested the edge with his finger. “Given the technological level of this planet,” he added as a coda.

The massive blacksmith came forward and sized up the Doctor. He seemed to trust what he saw behind the generous eyes. “Yes, I did – do you know anything of ironworking?” The Doctor hung the knife back up and scratched his neck judiciously.

“Well, a little,” he admitted eventually. He peered around his massive torso and looked into the forge – seeing a very basic fire and rude clay crucibles. “Having problems with the metal being brittle and too heavy?” The smith nodded.

“Aye, the weapons I make don’t hold an edge, and are too-heavy to be thrown far.” Rhonda came to his defence immediately.

“But they do the job, Mikhail – and it means I don’t have to trade with the Ironmasters as much.” She smiled at him. “And the metal is getting better, it really is.” The Doctor moved past them and gestured at the forge.

“You need a hotter fire, then more of the slag will run off – and a good anvil and tempered hammer would drive more of it out. I’ll draw you some plans for bellows – you’ve got plenty of wood and that leather looks suitable . . .” He paused and turned to them. “Ironmasters?” asked Rose and him together, looking at each other from either side of the Dragonslayer and the smith.

“You have not heard of the Ironmasters?” asked Rhonda incredulously. Rose shook her head.

“We are from . . . far away,” she said eventually. “I’m not even sure how far. Who are they?” The smith gestured for the two travellers to seat themselves on rough-hewn rocks by the entrance to his forge and reached to the rafters, pulling down a couple of gnarled fruits the size of pineapples and with skin the colour and texture of galled acorns.

“You are hungry?” he asked. Without waiting for a response, he threw the fruits into the embers of the fire and sat down next to Rose. Rhonda took up a position on the other side of the Doctor as the fruits began to hiss and their skins blacken. Rose was almost certain she could see the surface of the skin writhe with a little more than crisping vegetation.

“The Ironmasters have skill at working metal – it is with them that we Dragonslayers trade for our weapons and armour,” said Rhonda. “They live and work far from here, and trade with them is expensive – sometimes they will accept dragon-hide, but more often than not they require demeaning work from those who would trade with them; labour and digging and so forth.” She sighed heavily. “But, we must trade with them – for flint weapons are useless against the dragons; only a metal blade can pierce their hide.”

“And the metal corrodes, doesn’t it?” asked the Doctor grimly. She nodded.

“Dragonblood is a vile substance – nothing will grow on an area defiled by it for years afterwards, and the wounds it leaves burn to the bone and often through it.” Rose looked at the Doctor.

“Acid?” she asked. The Time Lord nodded.

“Highly concentrated hydrochloric – it’ll eat though anything given time.” He turned to Mikhail. “And are you an Ironmaster?” The man laughed.

“No, no! Not I – they are far more skilled than I. The iron I make is crude when compared to theirs. They are said to have devices and engines which make their iron; theirs is light and flexible, perfect for weapons.” He gestured at the spears Rhoda still carried as he stood and raked through the ashes with a stick, scraping the fruits onto thick leaves that served as plates.

Rhonda handed a spear – its tip broad-headed and leaf-shaped – to the Doctor. He took it in his hands, flexing it gently and staring at it closely. He pursed his lips. “What does that look like to you?” he asked Rose. She considered.

“That spear point that immortal alien masquerading as a Centurion had?” The Doctor’s face dimpled.

“Well, less specifically, it’s a Roman pilum – and this is industrial-grade carbon steel, pattern-welded if I’m any judge. Good as anything Sheffield ever made.” He tossed it back to Rhonda who caught it deftly as Mikhail placed their meals before them, a flint knife with a handle made of leather-wrapped wood next to it. Rose smiled gratefully and sliced the fruit open – a steaming collection of inch-wide maggots, roasted inside the skin of the fruit, burst out, colourless juices oozing over the plate. Her colour shifted slightly towards the green end of the spectrum but – out of politeness – she plucked out a hot worm, wincing slightly as the juices burned her fingers, and bit into it.

“Tastes like chicken?” the Doctor asked soto voce. She chewed carefully and swallowed very deliberately, shaking her head.

“No,” she gulped, reaching into her pocket for her packet of gum. The Doctor turned to Mikhail again.

“But how did you get here?” he asked. This was the question that occupied his mind – for a human colony out here was impossible at this time. Mikhail shrugged.

“There are legends,” the brawny smith said eventually. “There are legends that the Ironmasters and we were brought through doorways in time from somewhere else. But, this has always been simply a legend – not in my or my father’s time has anyone known the truth. Perhaps the Ironmasters know more.”

“Doorways in time?” Rose stuffed a stick of gum in her mouth and looked for somewhere to put the silver paper – the Doctor plucked it out of her hand and put it in his pocket as his eyes defocused and he concentrated on something she did not have senses to appreciate.

“No time portals here now – and no residual energy as far as I can see. If it was time portals,” he told Rose, “they are long closed – a century or more.” He turned back to Mikhail and Rhonda, and then flipped his eyes over his shoulders, looking at the rest of the villagers standing suspiciously around in little muttering huddles. “You are the only Dragonslayer in this village?” he asked. She nodded.

“There are very few of us, Doctor,” she said with a self-depreciating grin. She shrugged. “Many girls want to be a Dragonslayer, but – fortunately for them – few have parents that let them try. And fewer of those survive – mine is a dangerous trade.”

Rose looked at her. “What about the boys? I'll bet all the boys wanna be a Dragonslayer, huh? Kinda sexy, isn't it?” The Doctor looked at her askance. “What?” she asked. “Every girl likes the idea of a Saint George.”

“Bridles and whips? Powerful animal between the thighs? Big lance?” asked the Doctor. Rose nodded.

“Yeah – I mean, no.” Rhonda interrupted her with a puzzled expression on her sculpted face.

“No boy would foolish enough to attempt to become a Dragonslayer, Rose,” she explained. Rose turned to the Doctor with a triumphal expression on her face, and the Doctor rolled his eyes. And then he turned to Rhonda with his face sharpened with interest.

“Why?” he asked. She looked at him as if he were mad or simply ignorant. “Why are all the Dragonslayers female? What is special about women?” The Doctor knew full-well that women were more valuable – speaking from a survival perspective – than men. Women could bear about a single child a year; a man could sire as many as he could charm women to his bed. To place a woman in a position where she might be killed made no sense – unless there was some very special, compelling reason to do so.

“Women are more resistant to the Dragon-spell,” Rhonda said briefly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and as if the two of them should know precisely what the Dragon-spell was. The Doctor's brows drew together in confusion, but it was Rose who realised first.

“The hypnotism,” she said, comprehension dawning. She turned to the Doctor. “It transfixed you and me both – I managed to snap out of it.” The Doctor nodded judiciously.

“Hmm, well – that could make some sort of sense, I suppose. Women have a more efficient corpus callosum – better communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. And some of the animals which hypnotise do it by giving out-of-phase feedback to the two halves of the squishy grey thing . . .” his voice trailed off as he considered something else. “And you trade with the Ironmasters for the weapons you need to hunt the Dragons.” She nodded. “Why hunt them at all? Why risk your life and very shapely limbs for a trophy you exchange for the tools to get more trophies?” Rhonda shook her head as if his question barely deserved an answer.

“It is not for bravado, if that is what you think,” she said defensively. “If no-one hunted the Dragons and kept their numbers in check, they would dominate the land. They would hunt us until there were none of us left.”

“Why not kill them all?” asked Rose. Rhonda and Mikhail looked shocked. “Seriously, why not kill them all?” Rhonda snorted.

“Because if we did, how would we get Dragon-wing for leather? What would we offer the Ironmasters for the tools we need to cut down trees and hack back the jungle?” The Doctor's eyes narrowed.

“The Dragons have nothing here that predates on them,” he hissed at Rose through bone-white teeth clenched tight, “and they don't need to eat massive numbers of humans because most of a Dragon is just hot air! These people and these Dragons were brought here by someone, brought here and set up in an artificial, dependent relationship that has to benefit someone.” The Doctor stood – and the other three followed suit, his excitement infectious. “Someone set this up – a whole planet worth of artificial environment that they control.” His gaze fell on the two types of metalwork that Rhonda was sporting. “And it all seems to come down to these Ironmasters,” he snarled. “Their control of the technology for working ore and making tools is what holds these people back.” And then dawning realisation, not unmingled with worry, crossed his face. “And Mikhail here is trying to break that cycle by forging his own iron.”

“Aye,” said an older man pushing his way through the curious crowd that had gathered around the forge, “and you well know you bring danger to us all by dabbling in forbidden technology, Mikhail!” He rounded on Rose. “And you, girl – what do you know of this, standing there with your mouth closed and ears open?” His face was a distrustful snarl that the Doctor was right in inside of a heartbeat.

“If you speak to her like that again,” he said in a voice as tempered and sharp as a blade, “I will show you the most terrible thing on this planet is not a Dragon.” Ageless eyes met the old man’s and he looked away, abashed and cowed. Rose stepped into the embarrassed silence.

“Forbidden by whom?” she asked, looking from face to face and seeing them turned away from her in fear and reluctance to speak. “Well?” she demanded. A few feet shuffled and words were swallowed before they could be said.

“There’s fear here,” said the Doctor silverly, “I can smell it.” His anger – not at the fact they were afraid, but rather at the fact someone had made them afraid – was a palpable force in the air. He skewered Mikhail with his deep eyes. “Forbidden by whom?” he demanded.

“No-one,” said Mikhail flatly. At the Doctor’s look of incredulity, he stammered to explain. “No – really, I speak the truth. There are no rules forbidding it – it is just that those who do are taken by . . .”

“Even speaking of them risks their wrath!” shouted the old man. Behind him, the village muttered and nodded their heads in agreement. Mikhail gritted his teeth and gave a low growl.

“It is this cowardice that keeps us pinned!” he yelled, “It is this that allows the Ironmasters their power! This is why so many are taken!” The old man – supported by the village – was shouting back at the smith. Here and there, knuckles tightened to white on the hafts of tools and implements. Rose took a step backwards, her hand reaching behind her for something metal, while the Doctor’s hand slipped inside his jacket.

Rhonda stepped forward and – with the natural grace of a born athlete and warrior – plucked the wooden shaft from the hands of one of the villagers. She casually snapped it with a twist of her thick wrists and shoved the broken pieces into the chest of the man who had held them. “Have we forgotten our hospitality?” asked Rhonda with a voice like a whipcrack. The villagers, cowed by the display of power shown by their Dragonslayer, stepped backwards, muttering vague threats to restore their own sense of self-worth. Mikhail snorted in anger at their cowardice and stalked away.

The Doctor flicked his eyes at Rose, an unmistakable gesture that said follow him and talk to him. He turned to Rhonda and began to speak quietly with her as Rose followed the smith. “Hey!” she called after him. “Wait up!” He turned, running a heavy hand through his thick hair.

“I am sorry – I should not have been so rude as to leave you,” he said. She shrugged.

“It's okay – it's easy to get fed up with people if they're not as brave as you.” He smiled and laughed weakly as she fell into step beside him, the two of them walking easily at the edge of the clearing hacked out of the jungle. “So,” she began, “who says you can't be a blacksmith?” Mikhail rolled his eyes and threw his hands up in exasperation.

“No-one! There are no laws saying no! It is just that those who do are taken – although many of us are taken anyway. Not working iron does not mean a man is safe – and I would rather try to live free from unfair trade with the Ironmasters than simply hide and hope I am not taken next!”

Rose pursed her lips. “Taken by who?” she asked. Briefly, she wondered if it shouldn't be whom – but she didn't let that thought trouble her for long. “The Ironmasters?” He shook his head, shivering slightly as he summoned the courage to say the name.

“No, by the Cold Ones – at least,” he added, “that is what we call them. They raid the villages, shooting beams that make men so cold they cannot move – so cold that they die before they can be warmed. Some of them they just kill, but most of them they take – I do not know where.” His face softened with long-held grief. “They took my father when I was just a boy – I was too young to stop them.” Rose considered that, given the technological level of the villagers and the concept of instant-freezing weapons, there was absolutely nothing Mikhail could have done even if he had been older and armed. She was about to formulate a response that would at least attempt to say this in a manner which would not belittle him or his people, and then all Hell broke lose.

The temperature of the warm, humid village seemed to drop several degrees as something massive eclipsed the sun. Rose's head snapped up to take in the enormous floating form of the Dragon above her – so gigantic that it would have been cartoonly comic had its threat not been so real. The creature simply hung in the air like a balloon, as if it were drawn on the sky. Rose froze in terror for a second, looking into the eyes of the monster – somehow seeming flatter and more docile than the Dragon she had seen a few short hours before. Around her, the villagers were screaming in terror. Mikhail grabbed her arm and dragged her unresisting form away from the huge shadow, even as her mind tried to process the noises she was hearing; odd screaming howls that sounded mechanical, a strange, almost sub-sonic warbling, and a crackling and grinding of solid objects against each other.

And then she saw the Cold Ones, and she understood what the noises were.

There were three of them - humanoid, shorter and slighter than the natives, and perhaps even a little smaller than the humans she had been used to seeing on Earth. Dressed in all-enclosing segmented exo-armour gleaming in metallic frost-blue, they bounded through the air on shimmering anti-grav jets, downward pointing graviton vanes emitting the screaming howls she had heard before. From exhaust vents that swept out and down like wings, streams of freezing air were gushing, condensing the moisture in the humid air into swirling clouds that haloed them in mystery and terror. Their featureless face masks turned and pointed, singling out one of the screaming, panicking natives – and then the slim, oddly-proportioned guns in the figures' slim hands glowed and pulsed, and – with a crackling, grinding noise – a beam of blue-white light joined the muzzle of the gun and the victim's body, and the villager froze and fell to the floor, a fine white mist drifting off their icy form.

The strange warbling noise, felt rather than really heard, changed its pitch subtly and then – as if waking from a drugged sleep – the Dragon started and lashed its tail, coming alive like a great clockwork toy, a huge gout of flame bursting from its jaws and incinerating one of the larger houses and burning those sheltering inside it.

Her eyes and lungs full of smoke, Rose ran, Mikhail at her side. Suddenly, through the fog and fume of the smoke and condensation in the air, the Cold Ones appeared – hovering sinisterly like ice-wasps. One of them levelled its gun at her, the other pointing its at Mikhail. For a second, her indecision froze her – and then the blast of super-chilled air did the job much more effectively.

The Doctor and Rhonda sprinted from the other side of the village square, the Doctor plucking the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and Rhonda hefting a javelin to hurl with her full weight. Even as they did so, the two Cold Ones who had frozen Mikhail and Rose into icicles bounded forward and, slinging their guns over their shoulders, grabbed their prey and jumped away, heading towards the horizon like scared jackrabbits. The final Cold One span in mid-air, its suit's jets swivelling so that the anti-grav discharged spiralled around it, and levelled the gun at Rhonda. A switch on the barrel was flicked, and a narrower beam of deeper blue slammed into her, impacting on her arm and shoulder and sending her crashing to the ground, her flesh haemorrhaging with frozen black-red blood and shivering uncontrollably. The Cold One reached to its belt and brought up a hand-held device that whirred and clicked as it pointed at the Doctor. Behind the floating, blue-armoured figure, the Dragon hovered, calm now, its jaws hanging slackly open amid the warbling that licked at the Doctor's hypersenses.

Even with the featureless mask, the Cold One looked as if it were smiling. “A Gallifreyan,” it said, its voice metallic, cold and artificial, “your organs will fetch a high price.” The glinting azure fingers flicked the switch back to the setting that had been used to cryogenically freeze the others and the barrel levelled it's ice-rimed mouth at him . . .

A/n : And, yes – this is one of those two-part stories! You'll just have to wait – although it will be longer than the week you have to wait for the TV shows, it will be shorter than the 8 months you've had to wait for this!