‘And if it does come on fast?’

‘Be glad Bone Readers are too valuable to send into baubles.’

The others took this development in their stride, keeping a watch on the rate of decay, measuring it against Loftling’s accounts, but not allowing it to change their plans. They’d been expecting it, and like the heaviness of our steps in the shaft, treated it as an irksome but unavoidable aspect of the job.

Mattice had broken into two connected vaults that had eluded Loftling. They’d made only one trip back to the launch, so most of the treasure was still waiting to be claimed, and it lay around the vaults in great jumbled piles, all glitter and confusion, and almost none of it was anything I stood a hope of recognising. I stared in numbed wonder, bewitched by all the colours I’d ever imagined, and a few that had never crossed my mind. Shapes and textures and materials that were like nothing in my common experience, and all of it piled high in mad abandon, like the untidiest toy room of the most spoilt child in all the childhoods that had ever existed in the ten million years of the Congregation.

I looked at all the loot, then at the eight of us, and thought of how much we could carry back up the stairs. It was a cosmic joke. We could visit this room a hundred times and there’d still be too much.

But the Assessors were already pawing through the loot, sorting things into sub-piles, scornfully tossing this or that treasure aside as if it was beneath contempt.

‘Everything in these vaults has some value to someone,’ Jastrabarsk said. ‘But not necessarily to us. We take what we can easily carry, and what we can easily get a price for back in the worlds. It’s hard, knowing you can’t have it all. Harder still when the clock’s ticking. That’s why we have Assessors. They make the hard choices so I don’t have to.’

We were in the vaults for three hours, and then it was time to be on our way back up the stairs. We all had to carry our share of the burden. The suits had nets, baskets, hoppers and panniers, now bulging with plenty. I could barely move under the load, and my share was nowhere near as bulky as Jastrabarsk’s. The first twist of those ascending stairs took everything out of me. But we rested, and resumed our ascent, and slowly I found a mindless rhythm, concentrating only on the step ahead of me, and forbidding myself to think about the thousands still to come.