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The Doctor's thoughts still babbled into Vael's head, registering no reaction to their salvation at all. He squeezed the Doctor's arm spitefully. It was rough and hard in his grasp. He was somehow holding a narrow stone column instead. The Doctor had vanished, although his chaotic mind was still loud enough.

The spiral stair was the only way he could have gone. Vael put out a junk thought, a tracker. "Remember Rassilon."

"Rassilon?" said another voice.

Vael choked. A thrill of cold terror ran through his body. An ever-present eye, long denied, was opening in his mind. An eye like a cat's.

"So I find you skulking here at last," she said. "Vael, my pupil. What is this place? Who knows of Rassilon here? Tell me!"

The Doctor tried to rail in his wandering thoughts, but the strangest notions kept popping into his head. It made him feel extremely uncomfortable. He needed Shonnzi and Ace, although Vael, whom he did not trust, at least clarified a few matters.

From a window near the top of the tower, he saw the stars slowly glimmering out one by one. The enclosed sky was going dark. Above and below on the curving surface of his ship, the streets were traced out as glowing lines in the darkness. Madevinia aridosa in flower. An iridescent desert flower that bloomed profusely after infrequent rain storms, turning the Gallifreyan wastelands into starfields. Because of its brief and frantic life span, it was regularly used in scientific experiments and early space missions.

He tried to concentrate. The whole environment was contracting, which accounted for the fresh tremors. Either this was the start of the Process's new Beginning, or his ship was dying. The TARDIS's inner dimensions were slowly compacting. The buildings in the City would soon be grinding themselves into each other. Eventually it would crush them all.

No sign of the cat or the Banshee. The infinitely variable safeguards that Rassilon had installed in every TARDIS from the Type 1 were collapsing as well. The survival of the Doctor's ship rested solely with the Doctor — if the Doctor was ever restored again.

The glowing crisscross of the streets below and the dimensional strings of the cat's cradle. The Ancient Gallifreyans had excelled in entrelacement. Motives interwoven under and above, back and forth, until the start of the design was lost. Patterns and threads, ornate stone ridges on the great Houses, intricate lines of coloured plants and soil in the knot gardens, polyphonic voices in the thought pool, repeated steps in the lordly dances. A net in which they were all entangled.

The strings stretched across all Time like a web. He had seen it reflected everywhere from the rich patterns of the redoubtable Miss David's carpet shop in Antalya to the ration queues of Boom City after the Great Soul Rush of "831 had failed. The universe was all enmeshed.

Yet out of that chaotic fantasia of form, Rassilon had translated the TARDISes and fashioned the Matrix.

Rassilon again. Remember Rassilon. The most celebrated of Gallifrey's Heroes, who led his world out of the Dark Time the Time of Chaos. The architect of the modern world, whose father was a suet shredder.

But that was the stuff of legend, millennia before the age into which the Doctor was born. One of forty-five cousins from the loom of the gloomy House of Lungbarrow in the southern mountains. One of the accursed children of Rassilon.

And Rassilon decreed that no Time Lord shall travel into Gallifrey's past. One of the laws of Time.

The Doctor had met him once, but that was in his tomb, long after he had died. The past was always with the Time Lords, locked in their age-old, stultified constitution, remembered in fragmentary race memory. Sometimes it came too close.

The Doctor had also met Omega, another legendary Hero. Poor Omega, whose vainglorious sacrifice had created the Time Lords and marked the point where Rassilon's Intuitive Revelation all started to go wrong. The start of the slow decline of Gallifrey. But these figures were both