Free Doctor Who: Planet of Fire by Peter Grimwade, British Broadcasting Corporation

could wish,’
    said Timanov, sweltering under his ceremonial robes, ‘that the Outsider had contrived his arrival a little nearer the city.’
    The Watchman led them straight to the lookout point from where he had spotted the blue box. As they approached the ruined belvedere, the old men suddenly stopped. They cried out with sudden joy and all fell to their knees. In front of them, between two broken columns of the pavilion, stood a man suffused with unearthly radiance.
    The Master, trapped inside the buried TARDIS, was near despair. He had lost control of Kamelion who was stuck, halfway between his robotic and metamorphic state. He glared angrily at the shining image in the coherer glass. He could even feel the sense of confusion in the mind of his alter ego , but he was powerless to break the inhibition. It was all the fault of that girl. But she would live to regret her interference...
    The Master’s hands moved swiftly to the controls of the metamorphosis projector. Something was happening to Karelion. ‘There is energy around you,’ he called to the stranded automaton. ‘Use it!’ He boosted the machine to the overload threshold and groaned as the power went out of himself. ‘Come, my slave!’ he cried. ‘Be at one with me!’
    Kamelion, glittering like a Maltese tinfoil Saint at Festa time, turned slowly to the six old men prostrate in the dirt before him.
    ‘Welcome to our city, Outsider,’ said one of the old men in a trembling voice.
     
    ‘Who are you?’ asked the robot.
    ‘Timanov, Chief Elder of the Sarns.’ His outstretched arms shook. Tears filled his eyes. ‘I have struggled to keep the faith alive.’ He looked up at the seraphic figure. ‘I never thought I would live to see this day, but Logar is just...’
    The Master laughed. ‘We shall use these superstitious fools.’ He gazed at the coherer which now gave back the true image of the renegade Time Lord.
    The Elders gasped as the radiance died and revealed a stranger in a dark suit. A complete Outsider.
    The Kamelion-Master, secure again in his identity, was more than willing to be escorted to the city, where he was sure to find the girl Peri and the Doctor, to whom she would have gone running with the comparator. His old enemy was in for a considerable surprise.
    ‘We have grown lax with our observances,’ said Timanov penitently as they walked back towards the city.
    ‘But all that will change. There will be regular burnings.’
    The protestations of loyalty from the Elders delighted the Master and he smiled, for the prospect of burnings pleased him mightily. ‘You must root out the enemies of Logar,’ he exhorted the Chief Elder. turning to take hold of one of the old men’s staves. (He could only guess how laser guns had come into the hands of primitives but he would enjoy explaining their proper use.) ‘There is one supreme enemy...’ the Master chuckled. ‘He calls himself the Doctor.’
    It was a mistake, the Doctor decided, to have left Professor Foster in the TARDIS. He would have appreciated the archaeologist’s company walking in the ancient streets of Sarn, and he would have relished the connoisseur’s opinion of the faded grandeur of this desert metropolis. It reminded him (the professor would surely have agreed) of the old Roman city of Ephesus, with its crumbling stones and quake-toppled columns–the face of imperialism made acceptable in elegant decrepitude.
    Turlough, who must have known something of the colonial history of his forebears, said nothing throughout the journey from the bunker to the Hall of Fire. The Unbelievers were also silent, nervous that any moment some zealous citizen might come forward to denounce them.
    The Doctor and Turlough with Amyand and his group of dissidents halted in a side street just beyond the main entrance of the Hall. Amyand nodded to his men who drew swords and knives from under their clothes.
    The Sarns assembled in the Hall of Fire thought for a moment that the Elders had