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Bystanders who helped me, perhaps for just a moment or two, and suffered for it. I’ve died myself, six times over.

‘I have a responsibility. To every one of them, the living as well as the dead. If I let you succeed, if I let you make a world without reasons, then every sacrifice they’ve ever made in my name would be for nothing. They would have suffered, and died, and triumphed... all for no purpose.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘That’s all,’ the Doctor concluded.

And the Carnival Queen just nodded.

– Then your own reasons have damned you. You’re as trapped as I am. You’ll always be a Watchmaker.

The Doctor pointed towards the un-city with the tip of his cane. ‘Chris is over there?’

– Naturally.

‘Good.’ He began the long walk across the desert, leaving the altered shape of Marielle Duquesne behind him. ‘Then let’s get this over with.’

Cardinal Catilin was just completing the new inventory of the Collection of Necessary Secrets when the commotion began.

There was an unfamiliar sound from the hall where the great reptile bones were held, rattling things slamming themselves against the walls. Catilin hurriedly unlocked the doors, convinced that the ever-zealous Cardinal Tuscanini was venting his anger on the ‘unholy relics’ again.

When he saw that it was the reptiles themselves making the noise – the skeletons climbing out of their glass cases, the fossils unpinning themselves from the walls, the lizards walking upright like men – he immediately lost a sizeable portion of his sanity. However, when the creatures began crawling towards him, asking him to hear their confessions and begging God to forgive them their sins, the Cardinal could do nothing else but go entirely mad.

They had done everything they could. The townsfolk had been evacuated from Burr Street, and dozens of people had been escorted to the outskirts of the town; a mass exodus, in a place the size of Woodwicke. Rain-sodden families with bawling children, confused and frightened as they’d been forced out of their neighbourhoods. A few members of the Renewal Society had formed a kind of military-style escort, brandishing flaming torches to hold back the wolf-headed things that were rumoured to be at large in the woodlands.

The remaining members of the Society – the core of the group, Erskine Morris among them – had been on Eastern Walk when the Corpse Children had arrived, picking through the smoking (and, in some cases, melting) ruins, looking for any of the wounded who might have been trapped under the rubble. None of the men had seen where the first of the monstrosities had come from, but now the damned things were crawling out of the woodwork on all sides. Literally, crawling out of the woodwork. Like huge beetles, cowled by thick black shells that clicked and clacked as they moved.

They were surrounded. Erskine wasn’t in the least bit surprised. Half a dozen or so men, trapped by a circle of damnable shell-backed horrors, waved burning sticks in futile gestures of defiance. Erskine saw Walter Monroe, his fat face lit by torchlight, grumbling at the monsters as if they were inefficient store-tenders.

‘Surrender,’ the Corpse Children buzzed, grinding their mismatched teeth together with a crunch-crunch-crunch.

‘Give up what you believe. Surrender.’

They had done everything they could.

He was missing his umbrella again. It would have kept the cold sun off his back, and shaded his eyes from the black lightning. He would have been able to flap it around a bit, too, and that might have scared off the gynoids. They were jabbering around him, diving in and out of the ground in a way that reminded the Doctor of frolicking dolphins. Some of them gurned at him in five dimensions.

Not just gynoids, he noted. Other things were lurking behind the dunes now, waiting for their moment to come.

Blank-eyed machine people and monsters with eye-stalks. If history was wiped away, these might be the things that replaced the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Quarks and the Sontarans, new predators for an irrational