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A tiny figure stood at the end of the street watching as the guards fled. He stepped forward uselessly as the Shonnzi guard staggered past him. He was ignored. The ginger-haired kid was left, petrified with fear in the monster's path.

Going back to the past was going the wrong way to save Shonnzi. She turned to the Doctor and saw Vael smile as he slammed the door in the wall behind them.

23: The Pythia's Curse

She watched them as they came and went. Some of them she knew, others were strange. They barely interested her. Today it was Lord Dowtroyal from the Court of Principals. He brought petitions from across the Empire. There were calls for military aid which needed her seal. Demands for independence from the Aubert Cluster.

The Council would find ways around this. They would sustain her. She was sacred and her cook and her latest taster were trustworthy. As long as she endured, she was still the figurehead. They said that civil unrest was mounting against her. The people would not do that. She was their Pythia, their guardian.

The Admiralty was in a dudgeon over restrictions placed on the space fleets. The Hero Prydonius had publicly denounced the Pythia in Council, pledging his allegiance to the Rassilon clique. Prydonius had always sulked like a spoiled brat, but he was popular and therefore dangerous politically. In an unprecedented gesture of esteem, the Council of Principals created him a hereditary noble and packed him off to Funderell on the asteroid archipelago. Conveniently far out. She approved of that. He was to act as an independent observer in some minor territorial dispute between Ruta III and the Sontara Warburg.

If she had still had her powers of course, she would have foreseen the situation and headed it off long before. In the circumstances, the Council were handling events better than she had imagined.

Rassilon had been held under house arrest, accused of misappropriation of Academia revenues. The charges were trumped up of course, but the investigation forestalled his plans for a while. They would never hold. The little man's political record was impeccable. But she knew he was not to be trusted. He had stolen her steel comb.

"Excellency, we must have your decision."

The tedious Lord Dowtroyal was droning at her from just below her basket. His cowl was pushed disrespectfully back so that she could see his pudgy, grey face. Beside him, muttering in his ear, was her personal physician. They stared at her as if she were a curio in the Academia Library.

"Highness, you must name a successor. The constitution is adamant on this point."

So that was their scheme. Once they had a successor they could be rid of her. She had chosen long ago, but there was an impediment. That was why they waited.

Dowtroyal and the physician looked as if they would never leave. They irritated her.

"Her name, Highness. One name. One word, then. For the security of the future."

He was clutching the reliquary of accession, defiling with his man's hands the epiphany scrolls of Soneuramos. Ancient sacraments entrusted to the two hundred and seventeenth Pythia in the sacred firelake of Rag-Finish. What did she care? Next they would bring out the invisible armour of Troppolsabler, or the holy icons of the Bright Past. Finally the Great Book of Future Legends itself. She spat, picked up her bowl of fish tongues and flung it at him.

After that, they left her alone for the day. No more despatches to ignore, or strangers who stared. They were all ushered out of the Cavern and Handstrong barred the door.

She picked at the weavework of her basket and counted the talismans on her robe, waiting for the evening devotions to begin in the Temple above. Living from moment to moment, each one an achievement, where once she had seen all that would be and marked Time as it passed.

At the stroke of the crepuscular gong, she heard a side gate to the Cavern sing on its hinges. A figure emerged from the shadows. One of her older vot'resses, wearing muddy sandals and wrapped in the fur robe