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The Pythia stared at the destruction around her. All the detritus of the Universe had accumulated in this place. All the flotsam of Time was cast into this grey limbo. These images filled her with dread. Why was she watching? If this was the Future, she did not want to see. She willed herself to return to her cage and her cavern, but could not break away. This reality beyond Time stayed lodged in her head and she was fascinated.

And then, in her distress, she knew.

Vael had driven her to look. Just as she had watched through his eyes, he now watched through hers. His was the idea, inserted unbidden into her head. His burgeoning power was greater than she had anticipated. Vael Voryunsti Sheverell, her chosen successor, was an inspired but dangerous choice. The pupil now taught the tutor. One day, when he is Gallifrey, the Empire will quake before his power.

"Vael," she cried. "I await your return!"

"When I am ready," came his dismissive reply.

Ready? He was a prisoner, trapped in a monster's web. Whatever else Vael was, her little novice was not a Hero. He needed her wisdom to escape. And she needed him. The brittleness of her aged bones and the excruciating pain in her eye were becoming unbearable. She would cling fast until he answered.

There was no further response. He had broken her link. Alone, the Pythia searched for his thoughts. A lost spirit, blown by the winds of Time in this empty wasteland. The winds that howled like the banshee.

Instead she caught the strata of other thoughts in this place — whisperings of the lost Chronaut crew, all honoured as martyred Heroes at home. Their thoughts were preoccupied with the fate in which they had been sealed.

Riding above that, came the angry compulsion of the brute that ruled this void.

"The new Now. The old Now, it is purged. The World, it is reshaped!"

As she listened, she found that there were two voices, or the same voice twined with itself, but they were not in harmony.

"The Beginning, it starts again," cried the second against the first. "From a new Beginning, a new World."

And then she heard the brute's third voice. The scream of frustrated anger. The cry of something as yet unborn.

She sought to find a direct link with the Doctor, but her thoughts glanced back. There was a mirror across his mind. A surface that reflected back her probes and concealed the devious complexities beneath. She was certain this unknown voice had dogged her before. It lurked in the shadows of doorways just beyond the torchlight, full of hidden gestures and soft insinuating whispers. She recognized the mockery with which it predicted what she was forbidden to foresee — her own fate. Somehow this world of monsters was its world.

And in the wind, on the lowest strata of thought, she caught a feeble drone. Sequences of figures and equations were running in a sluggish stream, possibilities and statistics in continuously faltering assessment. This was another mind, barely existing, that she had not encountered before. Her own thoughts swept the City for its source, but found nothing. It was everywhere, in every shape and form. The place itself was thinking.

The moon overhead, having attained its apogee, had begun its inexorable descent upon the Tower.

28: The Worst Monster

The spherical Universe was contracting visibly. The Phases of the ruined City arched in over the party of guards and prisoners like the roof of a shrinking cavern, a fist that closed around them. The route they took was rising out of the crumbling mass like a rib that led to the cage of the Tower. Mercury was flooding the streets. The surviving flowers were fading, their sea of tiny lights glimmering out. The devastation was such that the Phases of Now, Past, Present and Future were becoming indistinguishable.

The blood from Pekkary's eye wound was already staunching, but he had to be carried by Reogus. Ace was following on with Chesperl, Amnoni and the older Captain. No one spoke, but she caught the glances between them