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'Great. I thought I'd heard the name before. I went to a seminar on Felophitacitel Major, a few years back. There was a Draconian who had this theory about various cults springing up across the universe, all worshipping the same gods. We all laughed at him.'

'He was on the right track. The Great Old Ones are those gods. There's Cthulhu, who we met in Haiti, if you recall, and the Gods of Ragnarok, who Ace will tell you about if you ask her nicely, and Nyarlathotep, who I sincerely hope never to encounter. And Dagon, who was worshipped by the Sea Devils, and the entity known as Hastur the Unspeakable who also goes around calling himself Fenric and who Ace will not tell you about no matter how nicely you ask. And Yog-Sothoth, who I met in Tibet and again in London, and Lloigor, who settled quite happily on Vortis . . . oh, there's a lot of them. All alien to this universe and its laws, both moral and physical.'

'It's amazing, the stuff you can remember sometimes.'

'I wish I could remember more,' he scowled. 'I failed practical theology, back in the Academy.'

'Did you pass anything?'

'I was highly commended for my landscape gardening.'

'Very useful.'

'You should have been with me when I fought the Vervoids.' He suddenly looked confused. 'You weren't, were you? No, of course you weren't. I have a bit of trouble with that period in my life: bits of it appear to be in the wrong order. Never mind, many a mickle makes a muckle, as somebody once said to someone else.'

'What does that mean?' I asked, confused by the rapid changes in conversational tack, just as I suspect he intended me to be.

'I don't know. I just like the sound of it. I wish I knew who said it - was it Robert Burns? My previous incarnation would have known: he was very good at obscure quotations.'

'And you don't know anything else useful about this Azathoth character? Or what his connection is to all of this?'

'I've got a book that might help, back in the TARDIS. Every Gallifreyan Child's Pop-Up Book of Nasty Creatures From Other Dimensions. You'll like it.'

'Don't you think I'm a bit old for a pop-up book?'

'Not compared to a Gallifreyan child. And besides, the pop-ups are four-dimensional. But I really think that we should discuss it later.'

'Why?'

'Because we've just found Maupertuis's army.'

At that moment I walked into Watson's back. He had stopped, and had been gesturing to us to do the same.

We had been walking for some time and had penetrated some distance along the floor of the valley. The mountains rose to either side of us.

Although it was beginning to get dark, I could make out the beginnings of a plain, far ahead. At its edge, a splash of colour and movement stood out.

'They're setting up camp,' Watson murmured. 'Smart move on Colonel Warburton's part: keep them moving after they go through the gateway so they don't have a chance to worry about where they are, then pitch tents when they're good and tired.'

'I suspect that there is a small native town across the plain,' Holmes said, surprising us all.

'How can you tell?' the Doctor asked. I got the impression that he wasn't so much questioning Holmes as giving him a chance to explain his thought processes to us.

'The sky appears to be reflective,' Holmes replied, more hesitantly than usual. 'Perhaps, like Dante's inner circle of hell, we have ice above us. If you look closely, you will see a reflected glow from something over the horizon. The nearest Earthly equivalent would be the lights of a town or city' He coughed. 'I am merely speculating, of course. It could be an incandescent chicken the size of the North Riding for all I know.'

'Maupertuis is probably intending to attack it on the morrow,' Watson said.

'We must bypass the camp and warn the natives.'

'I think they already know,' said the Doctor, pointing up the slope of the left-hand mountain, just above Maupertuis's camp. For a moment I couldn't make anything out through the gloom, then, squinting, I began