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Sherringford leaned forward earnestly.

'Have you heard the word of God?'

There was a moment of silence as we tried to work that one out. The Doctor was the first person to come up with an adequate response.

'Were you thinking of any god in particular, or would a general chit-chat with any deity suffice?' he piped up eventually. 'You see, I've come across enough gods in my time to stock several pantheons and still have a few left over for a Gotterdammerung or two. There's even a planet I could point you to where they worshipped me for a few generations, but then, I suppose that's understandable. I hope you don't want references, because I'm not on good terms with very many of them. Apart from myself, of course, and even then we had our differences.'

He frowned, as if rerunning the spiel in his mind to check that it all made sense. I knew that the whole thing was a trick to give him time to think, and to make Sherringford underestimate his intelligence, but I couldn't help thinking that he was overdoing it a bit.

Sherringford had heard the Doctor out in good humour.

'You are a heathen, Doctor, but that will change.'

'I doubt it,' the Doctor said. 'I've bandied words with bigger megalomaniacs than you without any noticeable change in my opinions.'

The rakshassa took a step forward. Its claws gouged holes in the wood and its spiked tail swung ominously. I'd felt the strength in that tail, and I didn't particularly want to come up against it again.

'You will regret those words, heretic. . .' it whispered.

'Worry not, Brother K'tcar'ch,' Sherringford said soothingly. 'God will protect me.'

'K'tcar'ch?' the Doctor exclaimed. I could see he was surprised, and suddenly remembered the name. K'tcar'ch was the alien that they had all met in the Library in Holborn, but I thought the Doctor had told me that it looked like a large walnut with five legs, like the Ry'lehans fighting on the slopes of the mountain.

'We have already met, Doctor,' K'tcar'ch hissed, 'but now I know the Peace of God, and have abandoned my body of flesh for this spiritual form!'

'Brother K'tcar'ch has been converted to the One True Faith,' Sherringford said with some pleasure. 'Another of Her miracles. Once you have heard the Word, you too will know Peace.'

'Peace?' spat the Doctor, 'I've seen more, bigger and nastier wars than you've pulled wings off flies, and most of them were the result of the members of one faith thinking they were better than the members of another. I abjured religion a long time ago. You may have come across some creature that claims to be a god, but I will eat my hat if it is the real thing.'

'You will meet Azathoth shortly,' Sherringford assured him with a benign smile, 'then you will understand.'

Now there's a familiar name, I thought, as the rakshassa made a complex sign across its armoured and studded chest, and the Doctor's face fell.

'Azathoth?' he said.

Sherringford beamed.

'Not the Azathoth?'

'Indeed.'

'Not the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity, coexistent with all time and conterminous with all space?'

Sherringford's face broke into a joyous smile.

'Doctor, I had no idea that you had studied the Faith!'

The Doctor cocked his head and gazed up at Sherringford.

'Oh, I've come across some of your sales literature in dentists' waiting rooms and the like,' he said with a straight face. 'I may even have attended a jumble sale or two. What confused me is what an omnipotent, omniscient god like Azathoth is doing here on Ry'leh.'

'This is hardly the time for a theology lesson,' Holmes muttered.

'On the contrary,' his brother corrected him, 'your transubstantiation will be easier if you are prepared and if you understand what hearing the Word truly means.'

Holmes sneered and turned away. Sherringford turned to the Doctor and me and smiled.

'After giving birth to the cosmos, Azathoth drifted, discorporate, through the void,' he said in the tone