She checked herself and glared at Samewell.

‘ Don’t correct me,’ she advised.

He shrugged and raised his hands.

‘Sabotage their sabotage,’ Amy said. ‘That’s what he said he was going to do. Sabotage whatever sabotage the Ice Warriors had caused. Get the Firmers working again. We need the Guide to do that, to set things right.

Rory’s going to get that for us.’

‘If he can,’ said Bel.

‘My husband won’t let me down,’ said Amy. ‘So the first thing we need to do is find a way to regain contact with Rory.’

She seemed galvanised and ready for action, as if she’d got her mojo back.

‘I think that’s the second thing we need to do,’ said Samewell.

‘Why?’ asked Amy. ‘What’s the first?’

Samewell pointed. Four Ice Warriors had appeared on another walkway high above them. The Warriors looked down, spotted them, and then began to search for the nearest route down.

‘I think getting away from here might be number one,’ said Samewell.

‘Amy! Amy! Doctor!’ Rory yelped. He clamped his hands to his forehead in hopeless panic, and turned in a full, bewildered circle. The centre of the assembly hall had become the centre of the assembly hall again.

There was no sign of the polished white room with the fancy console and the high-backed seats. There was no scintillating bleed of light coming out of the metal seams inlaid in the floor and the beams. There was no sign of the Doctor or Amy.

There was no sign of the axe-wielding Ice Warriors.

‘I don’t believe this!’ Rory exclaimed.

‘Where…’ Sol began. He frowned. ‘Where did they go? They were just here. Where did they go? Come to that, where in Guide’s name did they come from in the first place? That’s conjury, that is! Cat A conjury!’

‘Oh, get over it!’ Rory moaned. ‘Did you see? Did you see what was happening? Those tilings! Those Ice Warrior things! They were right there! They were going to capture them!’

He looked at Sol. A flicker of true and terrible realisation crossed his face.

‘They could be dead already,’ he murmured.

‘What happened? What happened?’ Vesta asked, rushing back into the room. Bill Groan and the rest of the council followed after her.

‘Rory, where did it all go?’ Vesta asked, grabbing him by the arms.

‘Never mind,’ Rory said.

‘I will strike you on your sorry head with a mallet again, so I will!’ she declared. ‘Where did it all go?’

‘It got cut off,’ Rory told her. ‘Just cut off. The Ice Warriors got them.’

‘The Ice Warriors?’ asked Vesta.

‘Yes, the thing from the woods!’

‘With the red eyes?’

‘Yes!’ said Rory.

‘Oh, Guide preserve me, they got Bel too?’ Vesta asked.

‘It was hard to tell,’ said Rory. ‘But it didn’t look good.’

Vesta looked like she was going to burst into tears.

‘Explain this commotion to me now,’ Bill Groan insisted. ‘Vesta came banging on the Incrypt door raving about a window into another place, with people in it!’

‘What unguidely horror have you perpetrated?’

Winnowner asked Rory.

‘Do me a favour!’ Rory snapped, rounding on her and the other muttering council members. ‘Give it a rest with the unguidely this and the conjury that, OK?

OK? It’s not helping! My wife, and my friend, and her sister Rory pointed at the anxious Vesta - ‘and some other bloke, just got captured by the same creatures who are messing your world up and trying to kill you off. Captured… or worse.’

‘What did your friend call them?’ Vesta asked quietly.

‘Ice Warriors,’ said Rory. ‘The Doctor said they were called Ice Warriors.’

‘But how,’ Bill Groan asked, struggling, ‘did this happen here in the assembly?’

‘It was a technological link,’ Rory explained.

‘Transmitted hologram images. A communication system. Do any of these phrases mean anything to you?’

‘Some of them are words that we know from our Guide Emanual,’ said Chaunce Plowrite nervously.

‘That is true,’ admitted Winnowner.

‘It was like they were here!’ declared Vesta.

‘It was, Elect,’ said Sol Farrow. ‘I would not have believed it except I saw it with my own eyes. As big as life, here in the hall. They spoke to us, and could hear us and see us. It was Arabel and Samewell, and the strangers from this morning, the odd fellow and the girl with the red hair.’

‘What did they say?’ asked Bill Groan.

‘I swear I did not understand much of it,’ said Sol.

‘He speaks fast, the odd fellow does, and uses words I haven’t the notion of. But it was clear to me that it was Cat A urgent.’

‘I understood what it meant,’ said Rory. ‘These things are called Ice Warriors—’

‘These things with red eyes, like we both saw in the woods?’ asked Vesta.

‘That’s right,’ said Rory.

‘I said they was monstrous,’ Vesta said, nodding and looking earnestly at Bill and the council. ‘Most ferocious thing I have ever seen, it was. I barely escaped with my life.’

‘The Ice Warriors have their sights set on Hereafter,’

said Rory. ‘That’s how the Doctor explained it. They want to colonise the planet themselves.’

‘They are invading our world?’ asked Jack Duggat.

‘They are,’ Rory agreed. ‘They’re going to wipe the Morphans out. This plantnation… all of the plantnations. They want this world to be colder, to suit them. But that means that the Morphans will die out, because it will be too cold to survive.’

‘They cannot have our world,’ murmured Bill Groan in horror. ‘We have worked so hard for it. So many lifetimes have gone by, toiling to shape Hereafter. They can’t have it.’

‘The Ice Warriors have got into your Firmers, Elect,’

said Rory. ‘They’ve mucked up the way they work.

They’ve… sort of made them do the reverse of what they were built to do in the first place.’

‘They’re making everything colder?’ asked Chaunce.

‘Our own Firmers?’

‘That’s why the white has come,’ said Bill. ‘That’s why winter has claimed us.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rory.

‘We will stop them,’ Bill Groan said firmly.

‘That gets my vote,’ said Rory.

‘What did the Doctor say we should do?’ Bill asked him.

Rory shrugged. ‘He said that your Guide Emanual had the answer,’ he replied.

‘Of course it does!’ said Winnowner.

‘The Doctor said that if he could consult the Guide, use it, he could reset the Firmer systems to undo the damage the Ice Warriors had done.’

‘And how would this be achieved?’ asked Bill Groan.

‘He wants me to look at the Guide,’ said Rory. ‘He wants me to access it, and be ready for him when he communicates again. If he communicates again. Look, he said he was going to find another part of the communication system to use, to talk to us. Of course, that was before he got captured… Look, the Doctor’s pretty amazing. He won’t let us down. Let’s get the Guide ready for him when he links through again. And if he doesn’t, then we come up with some other plan.’

Bill Groan thought hard and then, grudgingly, nodded.

‘You’re proposing to let this stranger into the Incrypt?’ Winnowner asked Bill incredulously. ‘You’re suggesting we let him read direct from our Guide Emanual and show it to others?’

‘This man is a Nurse Elect!’ Vesta exclaimed.

‘I don’t care what he is,’ replied Winnowner. ‘This cannot be permitted.’

‘If our world is under attack,’ asked Bill Groan, ‘and our way of life also, and this is the only way to save it, then who are you to say that it cannot be?’

‘Who are you trusting, Elect?’ Winnowner asked.

‘Guide have mercy on us all, you’re trusting the word of these strangers! We have only their say that there are any of these menacing Ice Warrior things! None of us have seen them.’

‘I have, actually,’ said Sol Farrow.

‘Rubbish, Sol!’ said Winnowner. ‘You can’t even say what it was you saw!’