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How come it always worked for the Doctor? Next time she'd do it her way. A can of nitro had a unique diplomacy all of its own.

"At least they haven't got Shonnzi," she added.

Vael was shoved ahead by the guards, but she saw his face. Tears were streaking the dust on his cheeks like war paint. "I delivered Shonnzi to the Tower myself."

"Bastard!" she muttered.

A whip cracked, forcing them forward.

"It's all sewn up," he said. "We're scrubbed."

"What do you mean?"

"You're an alternative to the Process's plans. It thinks it's God. Anything that opposes it gets blotted out."

"Great," said Ace.

The whips cracked and they were forced out into the open.

A vast area had been cleared to allow for the presence of one mountainous edifice. It squatted like a repulsive mechanical growth, black and immense against the blazing sky. Girders and struts jammed together like stacked wreckage. A tangled web of iron. The structure swept upwards at impossible and harsh angles in a crude scaffolding of spires and peaks. Any flesh had decayed and dropped from the Watch Tower long ago, but there was still movement inside the metal skeleton. Machinery clanged and squealed. Wheels, spindles, cogs, springs and pendulums turned and swung in insane and pointless industry. Ace had never seen anything so cruel and heartless.

The silver line of the mercury stream flowed out from the black pit of a gate between the Tower's extended fingers. From its summit came the cracked notes of the broken chimes.

The guards pushed Ace and Vael onwards towards the Tower.

High on the buildings above, the cat observed the guards' progress. It leapt across the Street again to watch another creature looping its way to the Tower on a separate route.

The cat mewled, running this way and that in a sudden agitation. It stopped and mewled again, unable to see for the tall buildings what it also knew to be approaching.

A dark figure walked the arteries of the City. It was clothed in shadow even in the broadest starlight. A robe billowed wide from its shape, but there was no wind. A circular collar rose above its head like a cowl of darkness.

Thunder rumbled. The spectre glided inexorably forward like a bolt of dark mist, a gaunt terror, moving pace by pace towards the grim mountain of the Watch Tower.

The mechanisms of the Tower clanked around the guards and their prisoners like a chorus of untuned anvils. The passages were walled like an open maze of iron ribcages through which they could see the perpetual grinding motion of wheels and chains in their unwieldy matrix. Occasional swathes of slimy weblike cocoons wound between axles and shafts. They had a dull sparkle like tarnished glitter, reminding Ace of rotting Angel Hair on an iron Christmas tree.

She and Vael were eventually herded to the end of a passage blocked by a curving wall. The guards waited while Ace stared up at the crisscross of girders and machines that towered above her. The Eiffel Tower had been crossed with a Victorian iron foundry and allowed to run wild.

"Now what?" she said impatiently, but Vael had long since given up talking.

With a jolt that made Ace yell, the floor detached itself from the tunnel and became an unsteady platform. It pivoted upwards on the rim of a vertical metal disc, carried like one of the swinging baskets on a fairground Big Wheel.

Ace crouched low on the platform, experiencing the vertigo that she normally never knew. Beside her, Vael stood upright, taking short breaths as if expecting judgement to strike from the girders above.

His voice, thin and frightened, whispered, "Don't antagonize the Process. Leave the talking to me."

This time Ace didn't say a word.

Oh Professor, she thought, where the hell are you now?

The platform topped the disc's summit and attached itself to a level silver plate wedged like a nest between a splay of girders. It was pocked with slimy green footmarks. Ace recognized the stench. A massive red-brown arch of rippling tissue stood at the far side of the area. One footmouth reared up with a hiss and the ring