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The tower from which the spiralling stairway sprouted, crumbled away below. Its tumbling masonry scattered the guards in the glimmering street at its foot.

"Look at the view," he called, but Vael never shifted his eyes from the Doctor.

Three stolen segments of parallel Time, three versions of the same City were laid out around them on the inner sphere. An equivalent of Dante's Circles of Hell. One new, one ageing, one crumbled into ruin. Temporal tectonic plates set to grind together along their faultlines in a gargantuan timequake. It would crush his ship. His TARDIS, dying and already patterned throughout by a phosphorescent web of flowers when he hadn't even ordered a wreath.

From both of the other City segments, fixed to a future or past tower, an identical spindly stairway was coiling up. Three stairways, defying the constants of gravity and Time, arching across the black gulf of inner space to form a new Now. Time and the infinite possibilities that ran from every second became a flood of impossibilities in a conformity of frenzied havoc. No law left un-overturned.

At the northern meeting point of the mercury streams crouched the vast, malignant edifice that the Doctor guessed to be the Processes' fortress.

At the opposing inner pole lay a wide delta land devoid of buildings, but dense with the flowers: a fluorescent bloom of mould on the corpse of his ship. The ballooning of the area had increased markedly since he had first seen it. Cracks were opening up across the swollen land. The mercury streams, unable to flow up in their original courses, were flooding the local City.

The sensations of rushing air and the turning panorama so elated the Doctor that he clambered to his feet on the turning stairway to get a better view.

Vael yelled a warning, but was ignored. These final powers, available to the Doctor only in this ultimate crisis, had to be observed. He was manipulating just three dimensions at present. How many others were available? He was tempted to seize the Temporal dimension, rolling it back to crush the invaders of his ship that way. He could manipulate the relative dimensions of Imagination and Inner Space-Time to create whatever he liked.

So many possibilities.

It was no good. The dizzying rotation of the stairway was slowing like the end of a fairground ride. Across the black sky, the other stairspirals were converging to meet his own. The steam had run out and the organ music in his head faded.

The stairways came together at last in the centre of the sky. A fragile triad bridge was formed, a graceful union of the three segments of the sphere they trisected.

The turning stopped with a jolt that caught the Doctor off balance. His hands flailed out as he stumbled sideways and tipped over the side.

He caught at the edge of a stair, dangling over the drop, his legs swinging wildly.

Vael got to his feet and crouched by the Doctor. "Will it save you?" he said.

"What?" gasped the Doctor. "Help me up! Help me!"

"Your ship. Will it float you down to the ground, the same way it caught Ace and Shonnzi?"

The Doctor grappled with the stair, his fingers slowly slipping. "Help me up, Vael! No power left!"

Vael's cold, cruel eyes again, like the eyes of a big cat. A female. The females were always the hunters.

"Tell me about Rassilon," said Vael's voice in his head.

The Doctor took a calculated risk and let go of the stair.

He fell for several thousand nanoseconds longer than he would have liked before Vael's hand lashed down and gripped his arm. The strength that lifted him easily back on to the stairway was scarcely natural.

"Thank you," he said, sitting down on a step. "I didn't want to hang around all day." He pulled at his jumper; it was torn and unravelling at the seam under one arm.

"You have an unbelievable mind, Doctor," Vael said. "How do you ever find anything in there?"

The Doctor smiled grimly. "Let me know when you find a genius with a tidy workbench." He pulled at a string of wool and the seam unstitched itself further. "Why Rassilon?" he said casually.