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Nothing moved in the smothering emptiness of the blood-warm water.

Panic struck at her without warning. She needed to breathe. Horrors lurked in this darkness. She needed to breathe. Unimaginable things were behind her. She needed to breathe. Pertanor was gone and she needed to breathe.

She needed to breathe.

She turned towards the surface. And then she saw it.

Something moved under the shelf of the bank which had been at her back. The shock of it went through her like a jolt of electricity and the panic turned to fury. She swam at the movement with her knife held out in front of her. There was nothing in the dark she could not kill, nothing in the dark like the furious fear, and she found it and she grabbed it and it struggled weakly, and she realised it was Pertanor. Without thinking she dragged at him, swimming hard for the light and the surface. His unconscious body moved easily at first and then tugged to a stop. With panic gone and fury fading, Leela found she really did need to draw breath soon. But now she could not move Pertanor. Why could she not move Pertanor?

And then he did start to move, but away from her, away from the surface, and down into the dark.

When she saw why it was happening the panic almost took her again. Pertanor was being dragged inexorably downward, drawn by a broad, pinkish ribbon of slowly contracting flesh which was wrapped round his right leg, totally enveloping it. It was a tongue. Leela slashed at it with the knife, cutting deep into it, and cut again and again and the water was filled with blood and lashing and the tongue whipped away.

Leela pulled Pertanor free and swam for the surface, towing him by the collar of his tunic. The skin of light seemed too far away ever to be reached and breached. Her need for air was a painless ache which emptied her chest and filled her bones and hollowed out her skull. She reached for it, and reached and reached and reached.

Below her in the darkness something huge shuddered and raged upward, hungry mouth wide.

The Doctor was conscious that the vine rope was cumbersome, and he had been doing his best to feed it out quickly enough to avoid hampering Leela’s swimming. At the same time there was no point in having it tied to her at all if he left it so slack that it gave no indication of what was going on down there below the water. At a pinch he felt he ought to be able to haul her up and out if she got into serious trouble.

On the other hand he could put her into serious trouble himself if he started hauling at the wrong time. In extremis, if there was absolutely no alternative, he would have to swim and use the rope to guide him to her, but he preferred not to think too closely about that. He had seen straight away from the movement of the rope that the lake was probably tear-shaped: wider at the bottom than at the top with undercut shelving and banks. He hoped Leela spotted that the thing would have places to hide which were not obvious from the surface. The thing? Was it likely there would be only one? A shoal of fish would prove nothing. A lot of smaller amphibians would compete among themselves and in a lake this size it would have shown. No, this was a static trap; a test like this called for one animal.

The Doctor was still trying to reason out what it was they were facing when the rope went slack suddenly. He waited for a second or two. Nothing happened. He waited for a few seconds more. The vine drooped away in the cloudless water until it disappeared out beyond the edge of the shelving bottom. It wasn’t moving. He made up his mind: she had been under too long, and he started to pull it in. Relieved to have made the decision to get her out of there he hauled rapidly hand over hand but as fast as he did so, it wouldn’t go taut. It seemed he was dragging nothing but wet vine from the lake.

‘Where are they?’ Rinandor keened, staring intensely at the water as if she thought she could draw them back up into the air by will alone. ‘Where are they?’