Chrístõ looked up the sheer face of grey-blue rock to see his brother climbing expertly several metres ahead of him. He was pleased to see him doing well. Garrick had only learnt to rock climb in a few very recent years. Chrístõ had been doing it for more than a hundred and fifty years.

Those were the good times with his father, times he remembered with a smile. Just the two of them tackling the sheer Melcus Bluff in the southern wilderness with a pair of hang gliders folded away in their back packs which made the descent breathtakingly spectacular – to say nothing of shorter.

Garrick hadn't really had a chance to spend that kind of time with his father. Valena's tendency to want to protect him from danger, a hang up from the War, was part of it. Besides, their father was busy with his work in the Diplomatic Corps and all too often offworld.

Chrístõ was sure their father would make the effort to give Garrick the same quality time and the same experiences. But in the meantime he was enjoying the big brother role and Garrick was getting all the benefit of their time together.

The boy reached the top of the cliff face and Chrístõ lost sight of him until he, too, climbed the last metres to the flat ledge where they could rest and break out some food and drink.

The food was, of course, rehydrating packs. These were still a novelty to Garrick. He laughed as a flat foil circle expanded into hot tomato and basil soup. Chrístõ had gone on enough out of bounds treks to take the technology for granted. He was less impressed by the taste. He could tell that no fresh tomato, grown on a vine, had ever been near this food.

But it was nutrition and it was far easier to carry than most survival rations he had ever come across. He accepted the slightly manufactured taste for the sake of eating tomato soup halfway up a mountain.

After his soup, Garrick drank rehydrated coffee with a real oat biscuit from a packet that Chrístõ had bought on Earth for this adventure. There was also a slab of genuine Kendal Mint Cake for when they reached the summit. That was going to be an exciting new taste experience for his kid brother.

With crumbs still on his fingers Garrick pulled out his ultra thin info-tablet and studied the pages about the mountain. It was on a planet called Vixia in what humans called the Cepheus constellation, which was more exciting than the Gallifreyan system of numbers and letters that designated it as 43p?B.

The name of the mountain was complicated because it wouldn't translate into Gallifreyan. The culture of his home world had no concept of heaven and hell or any concept of a mythical fiery underworld except in purely geological terms. There were no words to describe the seat of a vengeful devil.

"In the Human culture where they do have concepts of hell, it might be called Demon's Peak or Mount Hell," Chrístõ told his brother. "The whole area around us was created by seismic activity millions of years ago. The peak itself is an exposed volcanic plug over a vast caldera."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Garrick asked. "Won't it be under a lot of pressure?"

"The pressure was released over there," Chrístõ said, pointing to a craggy mountain that was below where they were sitting. "In Human translation, Son of The Demon. The lava escaped so forcefully and for so long that it built up a new mountain."

"That would be a sight to see," Garrick noted.

“Let’s just use our imaginations,” Chrístõ told him. “Taking you to see the birth of a new volcanic mountain would be on the list of things your mother wouldn’t approve of.”

Garrick made a childish face that reminded Chrístõ how young his half-brother was. But he couldn’t let the thought that flashed through the boy’s head go unchallenged.

“She’s your mother and she loves you. You love her. And… be glad she’s there for you when you need her.”

Garrick looked at his older brother and felt immediately guilty.

“You’re thinking about your mother?”

“No, not really,” Chrístõ assured him. “I’m a Time Lord. We don’t get sentimental about our mothers. But you’re still a boy. You are allowed to be as sentimental about yours as you like. At least on the side of a volcano. Don’t do it in the dorm at the Academy. That’s the place for stiffening the resolve and keeping those kind of thoughts behind your own mental walls.”

Garrick nodded and folded that piece of advice into the same part of his mind he kept all such advice from his brother. Then he tidied up the foil wrappers from lunch and buried them in the bottom of his bag.

“The volcano has been dormant for about thirty thousand years,” Chrístõ pointed out as they set off again on the next leg of the climb. “So it’s demonic status is not entirely justified any more, but I don’t think there’s a word in any language for a retired demon.”

Garrick laughed as he was intended to do and set his mind to a new name for the mountain that was demonic only in its grade one climbing sections. This part was a little less tricky and they could walk easily, taking in some of the magnificent view across a landscape created by ancient volcanic activity.

“The people of this world don’t come here?” Garrick asked. “There ARE people, I suppose?”

“A thriving technologically advanced civilisation live on the other continent. They consider this region as an extreme sports holiday destination. I believe their special forces train in these mountains, too. But nobody has lived here for centuries.”

“But people DID live here?” Garrick asked.

“The troglodyte native that made their homes in the cave systems died out more than a millennia ago. All that remains are some interesting examples of cave paintings that fascinate visiting anthropologists.”

“Cave paintings?”

“We’ll see some of those tomorrow as long as we reach the summit camp before nightfall. The next part of the adventure is inside the mountain.”

Garrick accepted that as an interesting itinerary for tomorrow. Meanwhile there was plenty of climbing to do. He started to contemplate the near vertical edifice they were going to tackle next when something else commanded his attention.

“What was that?” he asked, pointing at the apparently flat and featureless cliff.

“What was what?” Chrístõ answered warily, ready and able to imagine any sort of trouble.

“I thought I saw something… or somebody… over there by that cleft in the rocks.”

“An animal… bird… or another climber? I don’t see any equipment about.”

“A person… I think… humanoid…. But blue…. Mostly blue. Feathers on the head… fur…”

Garrick’s rather absurd description couldn’t be entirely discounted. There were blue-skinned people in the universe. There were people with feathers and fur.

But he wasn’t expecting to see any of them on this mountain.

They investigated the cleft. It was a narrow entrance into what might well have been a cave.

“It’s not on my map,” Chrístõ pointed out. “But it is hard to spot and might not have been explored.”

“Then… let’s explore it,” Garrick suggested. “We can be the first.”

Chrístõ laughed. That was exactly what he would have said. His half-brother was more like him than he ever expected him to be.

“We’ll have trouble getting our backpacks through the gap. Not worth it if it’s just a cave. Let’s have a quick look, anyway.”

They both squeezed through and were relieved to find a wide cave they could stand up in easily. It went back a good twenty metres before narrowing to another cleft. Chrístõ shone his sonic screwdriver’s penlight into the darkness beyond and saw a sloping passage.

“We should bring our gear if we’re going further in,” he said. “You stay here. I’ll go.”

It took him two minutes at the most. It would have been less if the buckle from one of the backpacks hadn’t caught in the narrow entrance.

But when he got into the cave, Garrick was gone!

“Idiot!” he said aloud, though he suspected he’d have done the same when he was as young and impetuous as Garrick was.

Actually, he thought he WAS young and impetuous, still. Was it being a married man that made him feel so steady and mature or just being responsible for his younger sibling?

He was considering the question as he squeezed through the inner cleft into the rock passageway beyond. He was also vaguely wondering if the passage was formed by natural forces or by those ancient troglodytes that used to inhabit Mount Hell.

He wasn’t looking out for anyone lying in wait for him in what was a mere slit in the side wall. He had a vague impression of blue skin, feathers, fur, and a primitive weapon raised against him, but it was too late to defend himself and he went down hard onto the rocky floor.

When he came to, his head hurting and his mouth peculiarly dry he cursed his own stupidity.

“They got me, too,” said Garrick telepathically. That surprised him. They had got into a habit of speaking out loud when not among other telepaths. The low voices coming from somewhere close by, presumably the people who captured them, was the obvious reason for the subtlety.

“Try not to let them know you’re awake, yet,” Garrick suggested. “It’ll buy us a little time. I think they’ve got some sort of plans for us… probably nothing good.”

Chrístõ kept still and kept his eyes shut. His head ached, anyway, and he was glad to do so. He looked around through his brother’s eyes instead. They were in a large cave or cavern with flickering firelight illuminating the space and casting odd shadows on the rock walls and the roof high above.

“My throat is dry,” he said. “How long was I unconscious?”

“Only about an hour, but it’s really very hot in here. There’s a sort of vent… I think it goes right down to the caldera.”

“There’s a lava-filled caldera? Mount Hell is more like its name after all. Not so very dormant.”

“It would seem that way. There’s a smell to it, as well. I don’t think you’re awake enough to notice it, yet. Like hot sulphur.”

“There must be air vents branching off down there somewhere, then,” Chrístõ concluded. “Or we’d all be dead from the fumes.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Garrick admitted. “I was concentrating on listening to them… trying to hear what they mean to do with us. The leader is called Erris. He isn’t pleased about us being here.”

“No kidding,” Chrístõ remarked as one of the voices was raised in sudden anger. “Mind you, the feeling is mutual. Beyond a certain interest in alternative lifestyles, I’m not thrilled to be in their company, either.”

“The one who grabbed me… he’s called Harri… he said we’ll be all right if we keep quiet and behave.”

“I don’t know about you, but that’s not a promise I’ve ever made to anyone,” Chrístõ answered. “At least not for long. Did you notice that they speak an understandable language - not primitive? The TARDIS translation circuits don’t work with really early forms of proto-speech.”

“Yes, I noticed,” Garrick answered. “The blue skin is a kind of paint, in patterns on their skin. Not tattoos, but painted on. And the feathers and fur are just clothing. It’s not part of them.”

“Those kind of garments are not usually accompanied by those advanced speech patterns. Something is really odd about those people. I notice you seem to be on first name terms with at least two of them?”

“I don’t think they have more than one name. I heard them talking to each other. There’s a Keenan and a Stah, too. I’ve seen about a dozen of them, but they haven’t all talked.”

“Those could be given names or surnames. I wonder….”

He paused and listened to the voices again. There was a grammar and idiom that suggested education, civilisation. There was no indication of a devolved language which might be spoken by the descendants of a group of people who had been stranded here and forced to adopt a simpler way of life. They might be the first generation of such strandees, but their adoption of the wild look almost contradicted that idea.

“Are there any women among them?” Chrístõ asked. “Or children.”

“I haven’t seen any. They could be somewhere else. I can’t tell. The rocks are a bit magnetic. I can’t see beyond them. I thought about maybe getting the TARDIS by remote summoning, but I can’t get through.”

“It wouldn’t do it for you, anyway,” Chrístõ admitted. “Maybe if we tried together…. But not yet. My head is really sore, still. I think the attempt would knock me out.”

“We’d better think of something. They really don’t sound friendly.”

Chrístõ had been aware of that for some time. The debate about what to do with the two ‘intruders’ was heated to say the least. Chrístõ wondered how many of them he might be able to fight if they came towards them in a hostile manner.

The answer was three, each knocked out by skilful martial arts. But there were just too many of them. He and Garrick were both dragged forward to where the group of oddly dressed men were holding their council.

He got a closer look at the vent Garrick had mentioned. It was about a metre across and looked as if it went down to the very core of the planet. Well, perhaps not quite that far, but the glow of superheated lava was ominous.

“Why did you come here?” demanded the man Garrick had identified as being called Erris.

“We came to the mountain for its challenging climbs and interesting caves,” Chrístõ answered. “We were brought HERE to your part of it as hostages. We would never have bothered you if you hadn’t bothered us.”

That wasn’t quite true, of course. They had indulged their curiosity after Garrick had spotted one of them and identified the cave entrance. They may well have found the mountain community under their own steam. But if he could convince them that they had never had any intention of disturbing the residents it might just help their case.

Or not.

“You entered the cave. You trespassed upon our ground.”

‘There was no sign to say we couldn’t….” Garrick protested. Chrístõ touched him on the arm and bid him keep quiet. One diplomat should be enough.

“We admit that we trespassed,” he said. “Inadvertently, at least. We will take care not to stray from the designated route in future.”

“You mean that we should let you go without punishment? Let you return to the ‘civilised’ world and tell of us?”

“We would not do that,” Chrístõ assured him, though he began to see the trap. “We are not even of this world. We have no interest in telling anyone about you.”

“He may be speaking the truth,” said the one called Harri.

“He might,” Erris conceded. “But can we be certain?”

“You can,” Chrístõ assured him. “Yes, you can be certain. On my honour. On the honour of my House.”

“Prettily spoken,” Erris said. “But we can’t afford to take the risk. We have chosen to live apart from civilisation, away from ‘society’ with its rules and conventions. We have no desire to be ‘found’ by anyone.”

“And as I said, we have no interest in exposing you,” Chrístõ insisted.

“And as I said, we cannot take the risk. Either you remain with us as our prisoners or join with us willingly….”

“Or….”

Erris looked meaningfully at the ominous vent.

“Or your body will never be found… not when it falls into the lava deep below the mountain.”

“I’ll stay….” Garrick said quickly. “Willingly. I’ll join you. Not because of the threat you just made…. But if it means I don’t have to go to the Prydonian Academy to be bullied by teachers and students, not allowed even to miss my mother even in my own head in the dark of night in the dormitory… I’d rather live like this…. Without rules.”

“Garrick… no!” Chrístõ was appalled. He had no idea that going to the Academy worried his brother THAT much. Not so that he would consider not going home at all.

“You didn’t stop the Malcannon brothers from choosing a different life,” Garrick pointed out.

“That was different,” Chrístõ answered, though in truth he couldn’t think of a reason why it was different except that they weren’t HIS brothers.

“If you could let them choose, then why not me? Why should I be forced into that miserable, stultifying life of a Time Lord?”

“It’s not miserable,” Chrístõ protested.

“Not for you… but for most… I don’t want to spend two hundred years in the Academy and then the next five thousand in some office of the civil service. I can’t…. I won’t.”

“It seems as if your brother has decided,” said Harri. “What do you say?”

“I say… never!” Chrístõ answered, then took a step forward and jumped feet first into the deadly vent.

He heard Garrick’s anguished scream as he fell, and he would have saved him that if he could, but it had been a desperate decision made in the spur of the moment.

It had been a crazy thing to do, and the first fifty metres of free fall down the vertical vent were proof of that. But between the thermals rising up from below and a concerted effort at levitation he began to slow his descent. He reached out and touched the soot covered walls as he moved ever more slowly down. He knew what he was looking for, and he would know when he found it.

He was right. There were air vents. Most were too small to be any use for anything but handholds to further confound the forces of gravity, and he started to feel just a little anxious. The air temperature was rising and the glow from below brighter.

Then he found what he was looking for, almost hidden by the build-up of soot and ash. He got a foothold and pushed through the hole into a roughly straight tunnel just wide enough for him to walk with his hands by his side and high enough to move with his head bent slightly.

It got darker the further away he was from the main vent. That worried him, because he had hoped to see daylight after a while. Still, there WAS fresh air on his face, a relief after the cavern, not to mention the vent itself.

The fresh air got fresher, then he stepped out into the open and realised two things at once. First, it was night, which was why he didn’t see daylight. Julia would call that a ‘dur’ moment if he ever got a chance to tell this story to her. They HAD been in the cavern for quite a long time, after all.

The second thing he noticed was that he was inches away from stepping over a sheer precipice. He was on a very narrow shelf some considerable way up the mountain.

“Like I needed another challenge,” he told himself with grim humour. “I jumped into a volcanic vent, rode the thermals against the laws of physics and crawled through a mountain.”

Well, not crawled. It hadn’t been that bad. But he still had to get down the mountain, in the dark, with no climbing equipment.

It was just possible that he could have used levitation again. But he wasn’t confident of defying gravity quite that blatantly. The highest he had ever levitated was a couple of stories of the New Canberra High school’s science building when an earthquake threatened to pancake it before everyone could get out. That was nowhere near as high as he was right now.

Not that he could see how far down it actually was. The night was moonless. The stars served only to show where the mountains ended and the sky began. But as he slowly climbed down, finding footholds and handholds by sheer dumb luck, he could sense just how high he was and how steep the descent.

He was still slowly inching his way down the mountain when the dawn started to lighten the sky, though the mountains were still in deep shadow. Finally, the sun itself rose in the south-west, the bizarre direction that it came from on this planet. Being able to see where he was proved a mixed blessing. Now he could see how far he had yet to go…. But that meant the dismay of seeing how far he had yet to go. He was tired and aching, and as the sun rose even further, it just made him hot and thirsty.

But the lower part of the mountain was not so steep and challenging. There was a path of sorts that could be followed even by amateurs. He was still tired, aching, hot and thirsty, but the danger of falling to his death was less acute – and after all he had risked that quite enough in the last few hours. He just had to keep on going, pushing himself to keep putting one foot in front of the other without thinking about rest or cold drinks or, increasingly, about food.

The TARDIS was at the foot of the mountain, disguised as what the Scots and Irish of Earth called a ‘bothy’, a hut where travellers could get the very rest he desperately needed. The only trouble was that he didn’t come down the mountain by the same path he climbed up. He still had about a mile to walk even when he reached the scree and rough grass of the ground level.

Garrick was not having a particularly happy time. He knew he had made a mistake in saying he would stay with these mountain men. They really didn’t want him. They gave him food - a tough meat of some unidentifiable animal – and told him to sit in the corner, well away from the vent, in case he got any bright ideas about following his brother.

He didn’t, and the hard lump of pain and grief he felt overwhelmed everything else. He kept telling himself that he could be dead, too, but his conscience kept telling him he would have been better off, and he was almost sure his conscience was right.

Chrístõ was dead. He had to be. Nobody could survive a fall like that. He always thought he would know in his soul if his brother was dead, and he was surprised that he didn’t, but there was no getting away from the fact. He had plunged straight down. There were no handholds, no desperate climb back to safety. At best, he might have suffocated before plunging into the lava that would incinerate him in a few seconds.

He slept fitfully, aware of the bad air and the hard voices around him. His body clock told him it had to be morning just before he was given some more food – cold meat from last night - and told he would have to work for his keep.

“Work at what?” he asked and several unpleasant thoughts came into his head at once, especially when nobody bothered to explain further.

Then, just as he was as miserable as he thought it was possible to get – more miserable than a Prydonian tyro in a cold, dark dormitory or the lowest clerk in the lowest office of the Gallifreyan civil service - he heard a sound he never thought he would hear again.

The TARDIS! He stood up as the materialisation sound filled the cavern, echoing off the walls and roof like the cry of a huge wild animal. Then he saw a wide rectangular shape with a huge door like a double garage solidify across the wall. The door opened and the cavern was suddenly full of black clad paramilitaries with weapons pointing at the mountain men. Chrístõ stepped between them. He was clean, freshly showered and in neatly pressed clothes and he grinned at Garrick.

“Are you ready to concede that there are worse places than the Prydonian Academy?” he asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “Yes, I am.”

“Then get in here,” Chrístõ said. Garrick ran into the TARDIS and was mugged by the enthusiastic but amorphous shape of Humphrey.

“Who are those men?” he asked, pointing to the paramilitaries who were rounding up the mountain men and bringing them to the TARDIS.

“They’re this planet’s armed police service,” Chrístõ answered. “They’ve had an alert out for ten years, now, for a group of hardened criminals who escaped from their polar penal colony. I made a guess about our not too friendly hosts, and it looks like I was right.”

“I think I’d rather a penal colony… even a polar one… to living inside a mountain.”

“I suppose it was a kind of freedom,” Chrístõ conceded. “But unlike you and I, they weren’t meant to be free. Every one of them has committed a vile crime. You don’t need to know the details.”

Chrístõ showed the Vixian police a secure room in the interior of the TARDIS where the prisoners could be kept for the duration of the trip back to their designated prison. Garrick took a bath and had a long sleep while the formalities of the handover and subsequent witness statements were gone through.

When he woke, they were no longer on Vixia. He wandered through the console room and out through a normal sized door to find the TARDIS was another ‘bothy’, but on a much less hellish mountain side. A clear blue sky was above and a glorious lake was below.

Chrístõ was sitting at a picnic table enjoying the view. Garrick joined him and was given a flat circle of brown-white substance with a minty aroma.

“Kendal mint cake,” his brother said. “On the side of Coniston Old Man, a much less demanding mountain not far from where the mint cake is made.”

Garrick liked the taste.

“I’ll give you a nice big box of it when you go off to the academy. Sharing it out should make you popular in the dorm on the first night. After that it’s up to you what you make of it. The homesickness does go away after a bit, even for boys from the southern continent, and there ARE some good things. There ihuge library you can lose yourself in, the music department, lacrosse practice, weekends with the scouts trekking in the Red Desert. But you should have told me or father, or somebody that you were THAT worried about going to school.”

“I’ve been an idiot.”

“In the words of any fictional English school boy, you’ve been a prize chump. But it’s all sorted out, now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Garrick managed a weak smile. “Chrístõ… I thought you were dead. I felt so… so… I…..”

“If you say you love me, I’ll subject you to an educational trip to the Derwent Pencil Museum, also not far from here,” Chrístõ told him. “As I’ve told you before, we’re not Americans in a Disney family movie.”