'You were right then, about the Old Ones having a transmat.'

'Indeed, although I had my doubts. I half had a horrible thought that they could simply fly down here. I'm glad I was wrong.'

Pelham winces and looks down at her arm. 'Oh G.o.d, I'm going to die...'

The Doctor is forced to admit to himself that this is a distinct possibility. He gingerly wraps the arm in a strip of her torn clothing. 'Oh, don't be silly,' he says cheerfully.

'There are far more unpleasant potential deaths waiting for us.'

She is drifting away from him, her mind seemingly fixated on the image she unexpectedly described earlier. 'I'm cold,'

she says. 'Cold in this tomb. I can see myself. Already dead.'

He thinks about saying something, then thinks better of it.

He doesn't really know what is wrong with her, but can't escape the notion that somehow the vaccine isn't all it's cracked up to be. Her human mind seems to have reacted with its arcane formula after all. Like an overloaded computer, Miranda Pelham has crashed, her brain frozen on one single image. It's probably worse because she's storyteller, her imagination over-sensitive and abnormally fertile. At least, that's how he presumes writers are.

How long before he is affected in the same way?

'What am I seeing?' she asks, almost delirious. 'Please, don't let me die. I don't want to be nothing.'

'It's the pull of the higher dimensions,' the Doctor replies, seeing no sense in lying. He has never been very good at these personal moments.

'What... are these higher dimensions? Valdemar? Is that it?'

How to explain, when even Time Lords can't be sure? He looks up at the cavern around him, trying to understand the Old Ones and what they had unleashed. Did they know?

Even at the end when it swallowed them, had they understood?

'Doctor?' Pelham moans, 'Where are you?'

'I'm here.' Perhaps talking about it would help him He tries to find some definition. 'The higher dimensions,' he says after a long think, 'are everything we do not understand. The raw universe, its symbolic code broken. The total and absolute perception of primal reality.'

'I thought you were explaining this to me.' She attempts a laugh.

'I can't explain. No life we know of can. There is a myth among my own people, among many peoples, that says the universe sprang from one single ent.i.ty. Not a thing, not anything we could understand, just a singularity. The Time Lords call this "the Kinetic Dance". Unusually imaginative for that lot. Others personify this force and give it names: Eru, Azathoth, take your pick. Gradually, the singularity grew and grew until it was unable to sustain itself as a single ent.i.ty. It divided, split, like...' he searches for an appropriate image, but can only rely on the facile, 'like chunks of ice falling from a glacier.'

'Ice... glacier...' She is listening. She is forcing herself to listen, he understands that. This is helping her.

'Only these chunks didn't separate from the singularity, they just became different. And these chunks kept splitting and splitting until they forgot where it was they came from.

They began to form their own rules; rules we now designate the proportional dimensions time and s.p.a.ce and so on up to the full ten.'

'Ten?'

'Never mind. Anyway, life got itself going, not remembering that it had ever belonged inside the singularity. Well, not entirely. Many species, many individuals, feel a sense of loss, of being apart from something greater than themselves. Of being away from home. Many individuals spend their lives trying to find it again. We call this separation 'mortality'. And inside us, even inside the lowliest amoeba, dormant organs lie unused, atrophying. Organs which once bound us to the singularity. Until now, of course.'

'So... so you go back to the singularity when you die... is that it? Is that's what's going to happen to me?'

With her good arm, Pelham clutches the Doctor's coat. 'Is that what happens?' she yells, and there is fever in her voice.

He takes her hand. 'I don't know, Miranda. Perhaps.

Perhaps.'

She falls back. 'I don't want it to happen to me; don't let it happen. I don't want to lose myself, in a singularity or anything.'

The Doctor cannot answer. He is unable to rea.s.sure her.

Because, deep down, he feels exactly the same way?

Don't think about it. Action. There must be action to take his mind off this painful subject.

'The thing is, the Old Ones didn't want to wait until they died to find out. Perhaps they had even conquered mortality but still needed more, nearly destroying the universe in the process. We have to act to stop it happening again. Get up, you're not dying. We've got work to do.'

She is going again, head slumped back, mouth moving in cold, cosmic horror. He must break this seizure once and for all. 'Pelham!' he barks. 'Get up! I won't have you turning all weak and feeble on me! You started this whole Valdemar affair and it's up to you to stop it.' He looks around in theatrical self-righteousness, as if the idea has just come to him. 'This whole thing is your fault!'

She reacts; she has heard him. Her eyes begin to focus once more. Best keep going, he supposes. He stands up and declaims to this ancient, long-abandoned stone monument.

'The universe will end! All life will be altered beyond recognition! And all Miranda Pelham can do is sit here and whinge in her own self-pity...'

He doesn't need to go on. He grins as he hears her scrabble up to her feet. He spins round.

'Who the h.e.l.l do you think you are? I'm dying here!' She is shouting, but stops as she spots the smile.

Actually, he realises, she looks dreadful. Face grey and ashen, eyes shrunken with agony. Her clothes are in shreds and he is doubtful she will ever use that left arm again. Still, she is up. Amazing what a bit of willpower can do in moderation of course.

'I can't believe you did that,' she says, grumpily. 'That's low.'

'Shall we go?'

She staggers and he rushes to help her. Pelham pulls away from him. 'I can manage, thank you very much.'

'Funny, I have the uncomfortable feeling you're not the first who's said that to me.'

'I'm not surprised. Where are we going, anyway? I'm not quite sure where I am any more.'

The Doctor points a finger towards the only way out, a dark tunnel leading down into blackness.

'Oh, right,' says Pelham. 'Look... look, before we go rushing around getting into more trouble, can't we use this stuff in here to blow everything up? There must be something in all this fancy machinery with dials and countdowns and things.

I mean, that'd stop this higher dimensions whatever, wouldn't it?'

She already appears to know the answer. Her expression is hopeful rather than realistic.

'It might,' he replies. 'It might. But it's the boy we need. I doubt if Neville understands his importance. He is the key to everything. The power of the palace is all that has been released so far and it's all flowing through him. Immense power. In fact, I'm surprised the gateway isn't already open.

Huvan could easily have done it. I'm hoping that's Romana's influence, calming him down. We're going to have to be extremely careful dealing with him. He's undoubtedly been driven mad and probably possesses the ability to destroy the entire solar system. It's a comforting thought, isn't it?'

There is a tremendous thump from somewhere. The cavern shakes even harder than it has shaken before. That tickle, that fear in the back of his mind hardens into certainty. He's too late. The boy knows, knows everything. The roof feels like it is about to cave in. Dust and blocks of stone rain down on them. Pelham has fallen over again and he rushes to help.

The Doctor can guess what has happened. Somehow Neville has found out about Hopkins's incursion into the palace, probably from Huvan. With his fear of the New Protectorate official, Neville would immediately have ordered the palace to be destroyed. What they're getting here is the resulting energy wave. This whole situation needs getting under control, and never mind the blessed Key to Time for now. He knows it's going to have to be his job to sort the whole mess out. Once again, he'll be the one who has to get his hands dirty.

'Doctor,' groans Pelham, sinking to her knees. 'Leave me.

I'm dying. I mean it this time.'

'Nonsense,' he replies and lifts her up. He is certain she has more to contribute in this game. He'll carry her if he has to.

He does have to. With the aeons-old cavern falling to pieces behind him, he makes his way to confront Paul Neville and the boy who has become a G.o.d.

Miranda Pelham is starting to forget who she is. Some of the time she is aware that she is being carried but, much more of the time, and increasingly so, she is certain she is staring up at a cold, grey, marble stone, sealing her in her coffin.

You can't be dead yet, she muses, your arm still hurts. And anyway, there's no room in death for the Doctor. If anyone had been chosen to represent life in its most energetic form, it would be this manic bohemian with his buoyant hair and lunatic manners.

He represents the only colour in her increasingly small and grey universe. What the h.e.l.l good is she going to be anyway?

Fear wants her. It really wants her, burning its way through her skull and down into her stomach. A cold, sharp fire that never lets go. She is going to die the tree and the black bird perched on this hilltop, the eternal nothingness. Feeling the Doctor's arms gripping her, she wants him to help, wants him to make everything better. If anyone can cheat death it's him, she's sure he's done it for himself. Why can't he do it for her? Because when it comes to death, you're on your own.

She thinks of the black nothing waiting for her ( that is going that is going to happen and there's nothing you or anyone else can do to happen and there's nothing you or anyone else can do about it, whispers a dry, dusty voice about it, whispers a dry, dusty voice) and the ice freezes her solid.

And then something, some impulse, awakens inside her.

It's been buried deep one h.e.l.l of a long time, so deep she'd forgotten she'd ever had it. Now it has woken up, perhaps stirring in Hopkins's torture chamber; she can feel its warmth. What it it is, is a refusal to go quietly. is, is a refusal to go quietly.

For what seems like her entire adult life, she has been threatened, criticised, ordered, attacked and scared. Well, no more. She has had enough. Sod you Paul Neville, sod you Robert Hopkins, sod the lot of you.

She realises the Doctor is carrying her. The caverns are booming with explosions of some kind. She opens her eyes and feels free for the first time in thirty years.

'You can let me down, Doctor,' she says. He gapes in surprise. Her legs feel strong as they touch the ground once more. She ignores the pain in her arm, and the blood. 'I've got something to finish that I should never have started.'

'That's my line,' he replies in astonishment.

She strides along the tunnel, following its upward slope, leaving the Doctor behind.

Only when he doesn't follow at all does she turn, her breast full of grit and determination. 'Well?' she demands.

The Doctor puts his hands in his pockets. 'Well, I'm so glad you're feeling better,' he says, almost regretfully. 'But that's the way we came.'

Chapter Fourteen.

The old woman is dead.

She, Miranda Pelham, died in the snow, on her way back to the inn, her story uncompleted. Ponch, the last listener, had submitted to her final wish and carried her to the Janua Foris, forgetting to make the sign of vigilance as he set her down on a table. Why she had wished to be brought back to this place, he cannot imagine. He had tried to tell her that once the others of his settlement knew of her death, they would descend on her corpse like jackal-birds. She had just smiled in that mysterious way of hers.

'This body is a mere sh.e.l.l,' she had replied. 'A way station.

Don't worry about what will happen to me. You know what you have got to do.'

With that, she had closed her eyes and fallen into a snowdrift. Ponch had watched as life left her. Her skin so pale, papery and white as the thin chest ceased its fragile movement. He couldn't resist touching her face and had been surprised at how warm it still felt.

Much to his amazement, Ponch does know what he's got to do.

He walks around the growing town for a while, watching as his companions argue and fight and rob each other. He is so tired of this life. Even his own hard-gained, once-treasured furs are now revealed as nothing but shabby, rotten hides.

Why does he have to collect them for these unknowable guild sleds? What does whoever is inside do with them?

He cannot help returning to the inn. Only an hour has pa.s.sed since he left it but already the scavengers have done their work. She is gone clothing, flesh, bones; nothing remains. Nothing is wasted here.

As time pa.s.ses, Ponch cannot concentrate on his work. The feeble orange autumn drags on. Oh, he helps Ofrin, Tavron and the others because they will kill him if he does not. He digs the pits, sc.r.a.pes the stinking hides, soaks them down, spreads them with dung and stripped bark. He melts snow and carries bucket after bucket after bucket of water for the endless boiling. He covers this year's skins with earth, and hauls the previous year's hides, now tanned leather, from their mounds. Ready for transportation to the sleds. Ready for that food and the little bags of coins left in shabby sacks for those strong enough to take them. All the time he is wondering why.

The story has worked on him He believes now that it is about seeing things, seeing the world around you, the smallness you create for yourself. The Doctor and Romana and Neville and Hopkins and Huvan and the others, they all have to force themselves to look beyond their own needs. The ones that make it to the end are the ones with the courage to search for a wider... a wider... what did the old woman call it?... perspective.

One day, a cold morning in this endless cycle, Ponch makes up his mind to go into the mountains. There is something there he needs to see.

He is aware that Ofrin will attempt to prevent this desertion. He antic.i.p.ates this, so the night before he leaves, he creeps up on the giant and splits his skull with an axe.

Ponch returns to the place where he buried his pony all those weeks ago. He carves enough meat from its sad old bones to last him a fortnight. If he hasn't found what he is looking for by then, he will be dead.

As he walks up into the foothills, he thinks about the old woman's story, about how it must have ended.

The three groups that mad Neville with his idiot boy and Romana, the vengeful Hopkins and Mr Redfearn, and finally the Doctor, desperately wanting to reverse the wrong he has done, with the wounded and bleeding Pelham, the instigator of the entire business.

Ponch cannot fully comprehend what it is all about, but is aware that there is some kind of symmetry here, three points merging to create a whole, all converging on this mysterious gateway of the Old Ones. The tomb of Valdemar.

How does it end? The final riddle, a riddle he must solve, for it feels like the key to his own life, to his whole existence.

Why couldn't she just have told him?

Where he wants to get to is not far, but it will take him a week. He knows the others will come looking for him and he must stay out of sight. He has broken a code, the only code they live by that no one deserts; everyone must stay in the township after summer's call. You may get yourself killed in a brawl over a crust of bread when you're there, that's perfectly all right, but you can never, ever leave. Clearly, this rare and astonishing pact of communal agreement exists to guarantee mutual survival. If the hides are not delivered, the guild sleds might wipe out everyone instead of the annual few whom the guild, in its obscure wisdom, decides has come in under quota. Another stupid thing he has never thought about before.

How does it end?

The question pursues him through the scrubby tundra.

Somehow, the old woman has convinced him; he feels the outcome is within his grasp. It is there, at the edge of his consciousness accurate, inevitable. He needs time, time for the end to come. And after a while, after a day or two of exhausting walking, it does come.

The Doctor, he is the key; has to be where you start. Walking with the collapsing Pelham down that long black corridor to the gateway. Throughout, the Doctor has been the focus, the point of contact. He seems to know so much, to be so aware, despite his funny ways.

What would he do in this situation? Ponch feels he knows so much about how the Doctor would deal with this situation. He has a... what is it?... a goodness about him. You always know what he's going to do. Yes, that's it, he'll try and do the good thing.

Start there and you can't go far wrong.