'I can see the structure!' shrieks Romana.

Pelham cannot prevent herself staring into the Doctor's eyes. Despite their mirth and good humour they accuse, knowing she has secrets she should be imparting. 'You shouldn't have come here,' he says softly. 'You have no idea what you will unleash.'

'It's a palace!' Romana cries joyfully. 'A big golden palace, floating in the sky!'

The Doctor finally looks away, grinning again. Pelham guesses they are seeing the gigantic, ludicrous thruster-nozzles, spinning furiously, keeping the baroque structure on an even keel. Home, she guesses. Home after what was on the surface of Ashkellia anyway.

Suddenly she feels cold, a trembling building up inside her.

It's hot in here, hot and stale. Sweat on her brow, Erik turning round after the light... his eyes... gone...

'She's going into delayed shock,' Miranda Pelham hears Romana say as the rushing noise starts up, somewhere deep in her ears.

Soon their little craft, hauled up to the long crane arm, has been swallowed up by the bright searing glare of the palace.

The palace.

How to describe its bulbous ramparts, its smooth acid-dripping skin? The palace of the Old Ones, as big as a ship, spinning inexorably round in the magma heat, sending spraying sheets of smoking vaporous droplets out into the liquid sky...

'All right, all right,' says Ponch. 'How can a palace float, eh?

In the sky? You must take us for mad.'

'Perhaps it's magic!' hisses Ofrin, eyes wide as a child.

'It's perfectly simple, so I believe,' says the woman. Difficult for Ponch to see her and the Miranda Pelham of the story as one and the same. Difficult for him to do anything as a critical ma.s.s of camr'ale has reached his brain and has commenced stuffing that organ with animal hides. 'This is how a floating palace works...' he hears.

Ponch gets up and staggers to the doorway, past snoring trappers who have already found the story too slow and demanding. He hauls the door open and shivers as the cruel wind grips him. He is sick, dizzy. It has been a long hard summer out there. He had forgotten what camr'ale could do to a man.

As Ponch looks over at the Black Mountains, already tinged with the cold pink of the late summer sun, he thinks of those sleds, those gigantic sleds, featureless, metal-green, that will arrive over the slopes from who knows where and demand their tribute. He wonders for the first time who is inside, how do the sleds work, why must they take the trappers' furs?

The woman is working on him, he can feel it. This story, this daft story, it is something new, something different, a conglomeration of elements familiar yet strange. He does not know how a man can think of things that never were, have never had existence in the real world. Perhaps like Ofrin says, it's magic. Perhaps out there, somewhere, there is a realm where palaces float and bathyscapes can be pulled on seemingly limitless chains and men's eyes turn black...

Ponch eats some snow to wake himself up. He needs to know more. Not the story, that's for children, but what the story is doing for him.

He turns and walks back inside. The heat and the smoke are beyond belief. He feels these elements tear at his eyes.

The woman, her husky voice rising, is completing her explanation. As Ponch reseats himself she is sitting back, that tiny smile playing over her cracked lips. 'So you see, gentlemen. The principles are simple...'

Ofrin and the others, he still can't get their names to come, lean back nodding to each other. 'Ahh...' says one.

'Like I said magic.' Ofrin looks around in triumph.

The Doctor is not one to hang around. As soon as the telescopic crane has retracted and the bathyscape becomes still inside its cylindrical chamber, he is out and pacing the dimly-lit, functional docking airlock.

Frowning at her companion's lack of manners, Romana helps herself out through the hatch, her flimsy, gauze cloak catching on the handle. With a dismissive sigh, she unhooks herself. She turns and helps the shaken Miranda Pelham.

'Incredible,' says the Doctor. 'Humanity didn't build this.

The dimensions are all wrong.'

'We found it on a sensor sweep,' Pelham says.

Romana is trying the airlock hatch. She realises that she will soon tire of this constant orange and bronze.

'Just an accident. If we hadn't, we'd never have known about the tomb.'

The Doctor gives one wall a kick. 'It's aged well. Doesn't look a day over fifty thousand years.'

'It's aged incredibly well,' says Romana. 'How?'

'It's perfectly simple,' the Doctor explains. 'Self-maintaining, self-regenerating low-grade power status.

Barring accidents or tampering there's no reason why it couldn't stay here for ever. It's not uncommon. Same principle as the city of the Exxilons. Mind you, it seems you haven't managed to get the power above minimum. That would get the lights brighter.'

Romana flashes him an icy smile. 'You're showing off, Doctor. If you really want to impress us, how about opening this door?'

'Oh, I'm sure someone will be here very soon to open it for us, eh Miranda? Someone very curious I expect. This expedition has cost somebody an awful lot of money and I'll bet it wasn't you.'

Pelham seems to have turned an odd shade of green.

Valdemar! Valdemar. The spring she had uncovered, the oil well she had drilled. Why had she chosen not to understand?

Mess with monsters; they bite back. Her father had always told her that books would get her into trouble, and annoyingly he had been right. More than once. But this was the worst.

Valdemar. Finding him, finding him him had been so simple. had been so simple.

Almost as if he wanted to be found.

She had never heard of Valdemar, the fifteen-year-old Miranda Pelham bored beyond her years. That had been a different age, ancient history; it felt like a life lived by someone else, someone fictional. Before the civil war changed everything.

She had gone 'travelling' on her 'year out' round the sector.

'Year out' being a synonym for loudly and cheerily imposing yourself upon serfs and races on planets whose GPP was less than your annual allowance, demanding entertainment and 'native food' with a bunch of other like-minded, highborn, self-righteous, smug idiots, then going home and washing the filth of the planets' poverty out of your well-worn clothes before moving on to university.

Except Miranda Pelham had never gone home. She found Valdemar instead.

It was on the unlikely planet of Proxima 2 that first of the settled worlds, now deeply, unfashionably familiar, little more than a stopover that she discovered Valdemar.

She had been wandering the bazaars, her rucksack digging into her thin designer vest, looking for knick-knacks and a good novel. She was dying for something to read. Through crushing whitewashed hovels, dirty and bright in the sun.

The shrieks of caged animals, the stink of slaves. All around, people were shouting, entreating her to come into their hovels and get ripped off for a rug.

The heat had been intense and her pale skin had marked her out as highborn as brightly as a flag. Her friends had gone drinking somewhere, under the official pretext of visiting some ancient native ruins in the mountains. They would be ruins when her companions finished with them.

Pelham already knew she was starting to irritate these colleagues.

The thought of university was hanging over her like a middle-cla.s.s eagle waiting to pounce. Thanks to her father's position as orthodontist to some minor highborn d.u.c.h.ess, she had been accepted by some lowly provincial college somewhere at the back end of the empire for some tedious, drudging technical degree. Only the most n.o.ble were allowed to do anything interesting.

She was a voracious reader. Books had never really disappeared, despite numerous predictions heralding their imminent demise. People liked books, liked black print on white paper, liked holding something heavy in their hands, liked the fact that, unlike the digitised print that the serfs were exposed to, once type was on a page it was impossible to change it. Miranda didn't know all that she wanted but she knew she wanted books.

And then the parade, in the distance, through a maze of streets and alleyways. A procession like nothing she had ever seen. Despite the hoods, the racial mix was evident and surprising. Large wooden poles carried by colourful monks; humans, nu-apes, the lithe Kordszz and even a multi-limbed Centauri, its giant eye blinking moistly beneath its hood, under the hot Proximan sun.

Curious, jolted out of her boredom, Miranda followed. The monks, if monks they were, were oblivious to all around them. Oblivious despite the laws prohibiting religion in the empire. Mind, she hadn't seen a single militia soldier anywhere outside the s.p.a.ceport.

Pushing her way through the begging, pinched serfs, Miranda watched as the parade halted outside what looked like a set of stone steps, then descended in single file down into something very, very black.

She remembers staring down those steps, afraid to follow.

She remembers hearing the chants, unintelligible, nonsensical, full of pa.s.sion and ardour. They believed, they really believed. Only one word stood out. One alone: 'Valdemar! Valdemar! Valdemar!'

She had already left Proxima 2 when the news came in. A ma.s.sacre, somewhere in the shanty towns of Proxima City.

Hundreds butchered, a wave of carnage. It seemed the perpetrators had gone on a random spree, hacking away, carving flesh to suit some arcane, unimaginable purpose.

And then the perpetrators doing the same to themselves. No one knew who these people were, although the racial mix was surprising. Only the black clothing marked them out.

Undoubtedly something in the water, said the news liars, a sign of the times. Something that made them crazy. It happens.

She knew what made them crazy, she realised. It was Valdemar.

Miranda Pelham had stopped at the next s.p.a.ceport, jumped ship and gone right back to Proxima 2.

There wasn't much evidence; the barest of clues. It didn't matter. Something had sparked in Miranda's brain; a creative force had been awakened. She was going to write the true story of Valdemar the legend, and the bits she didn't know, she would make up.

And she did it too. Didn't take long. Didn't sell particularly well, though at least the book wasn't banned by the high born. Not on most planets anyway. But only the uber-n.o.ble still lived on Earth, and whatever they got up to probably had nothing to do with writing.

She made enough to never have to go to that university. To go and live on a nice nice planet with planet with nice nice weather and get on with the writing she really wanted to do that no one wanted to publish. weather and get on with the writing she really wanted to do that no one wanted to publish.

For thirty years, that had seemed to be it. Contented, mildly bored, comfortable.

And then the highborn picked up on it all. What had that press thing said? What was it called? 'Valdemar, Miranda's mirror' or something.

' Miranda Pelham, with her fables of ancient races and Miranda Pelham, with her fables of ancient races and terrifying star G.o.ds, has tapped into a need amongst the terrifying star G.o.ds, has tapped into a need amongst the children of the Elite. For the people who have everything, what children of the Elite. For the people who have everything, what is left but destruction? Pelham's stories of the all-consuming is left but destruction? Pelham's stories of the all-consuming Valdemar are just the type of nihilistic violent fantasies that Valdemar are just the type of nihilistic violent fantasies that tap into the paranoid fears of those at the highest social tap into the paranoid fears of those at the highest social echelons of the empire, especially in such conflict-and echelons of the empire, especially in such conflict-and conspiracy-driven times. The opportunity to destroy reality conspiracy-driven times. The opportunity to destroy reality itself is something an adolescent could only sigh longingly for. itself is something an adolescent could only sigh longingly for.

With Valdemar, they now have a literal image to hold up for themselves. A mirror, in which all their doubts about themselves. A mirror, in which all their doubts about themselves and their status are reflected. themselves and their status are reflected. ' '

She had moved from comfortable to super-rich, from n.o.body to somebody. She even bought herself a share in an island on Earth. It seemed all over. Valdemar had made her, given her everything.

And then, inevitably, it fell apart.

First, civil war and the overthrow of the Elite. Second, Paul Neville.

Miranda Pelham looks up as Kampp, the butler, opens the door of the airlock for them. 'My dears,' he says, a lithe, sparkly-eyed man, 'How lovely.'

Miranda wishes the Doctor and Romana well. Once they've met Neville, she'll probably never see them again.

With a bow, Kampp ushers them out and along through the eye-breaking contours of this palace of the Old Ones. The Doctor whistles, still trying to get that tune. Romana's wincing reveals that she has not noticed how he is taking in everything as he walks. He looks first at Kampp's back, his silver livery, the muscles concealed beneath the effeminate, affected demeanour.

He sees the vast array of technology lying dormant: screens, power points, transmat-sensors. Sees the weird and unguessable aesthetics behind the curves; garish materials and colours that haven't aged a day in a million years.

Pelham feels the rough pull of gloved hands on her shoulders and is steered away by guards down a tributary corridor. If the Doctor sees that, he doesn't let on.

Kampp leads what is now a trio into a small shaft. The Doctor waits.

'Going up?' he quips.

'Going up,' Kampp replies.

The Doctor shrugs to Romana. 'Shouldn't be too much trouble to get the lights on. Then we'd better be on our way, lots to do.'

Kampp turns, his teeth white and apparently artificially sharpened. 'Oh no, Doctor, Mr Neville wouldn't hear of it. He is most anxious to meet you. Make yourselves at home.'

'Very kind of you, Mr Kampp,' Romana replies. The anti-grav kicks in, and they find themselves rising.

'Very good,' smiles the Doctor. 'I'm almost impressed. And what do you do here, Mr Kampp? Apart from ferrying guests around of course. Run errands? Laundry?'

If the barb strikes, Kampp does not let on. 'I am Mr Neville's high footman. A kind of ersatz administrator.'

'A kind of ersatz administrator, eh?' The Doctor's eyes are wide as he mouths the words. 'Jack of all trades.'

'I especially like medical work, Doctor,' the butler goes on.

'The kind that involves surgical instruments. You might say, it's a hobby of mine. I am told I have a certain talent in this area. A... relish. I like to think I am doing good. Giving something back.'

'You know, Mr Kampp, I believe you.'

'Where are we going?' asks Romana, once she has shuffled in closer to the Doctor.

'The guests are waiting for you,' sniffs Kampp, for once a note of... what is it?... disapproval in his voice. 'They should keep you entertained whilst we await the master.'

'The Master?'

'Mr Neville.'

A metal plate slides out beneath them and they feel the anti-grav lower them on to it. The lights are muted in the vast piazza that surrounds them.

The Doctor's first impression is of luxury, too much luxury.

The air is thick with perfume and incense, the decor stuffed with exotic rugs and hangings and bowls and pictures, so much so it is impossible to gauge any details clearly.

'This way,' says Kampp.

There is laughter, there is movement and suddenly they all leap up in front of the trio, delighted grins on their faces.

They are dressed as animals.

'Surpriiiise!' they all scream at once.