At the sharp end was an electrical winch, and a reel holding one and a half leagues of line. The line was hooked onto the bucket, which was actually a flimsy-looking platform with openwork sides, large enough for four of us to squeeze on plus a little room for loot. One of the sides could be dropped down to form a short connecting bridge, if we happened to be lined up with a doorway in the shaft.

‘We’ll set it here and reel down,’ Trusko said, standing on the lip of the hole with his hands on his hips. ‘Once we’ve identified the orientation of the doors in the shaft, we can reel back up and move the frame accordingly.’

‘Do you have a robot eye you can send down ahead of us?’ Prozor asked.

‘Machines don’t take well to baubles, Proz,’ Trusko replied, as if he was the old hand at this lark. ‘They can’t be relied upon, any more than you can rely on squawk or power augmentation. No, we’ll do it the slow and reliable way – one step at a time. It’s served me well in the past and it’ll serve me well now.’

‘Yes,’ I muttered, as if Gathing were inside me, stuffing snidey thoughts into my mouth. ‘Why change a winning formula?’

By the time we were ready to lower the bucket, we were down to twenty-three hours. Prozor would have laughed at me, but I swore I could feel a premonitory tingle in the vacuum around the bauble, as if it had already started to thicken up, curdling over with the perplexing energies that would eventually mesh together and form an impenetrable surface.

Or maybe she wouldn’t have laughed.

The bucket went down slowly. A league isn’t any kind of distance in a tram or a train, but vertically, it’s a different story. The line wasn’t one piece of line, either. It was twenty different bits of yardage, joined together with spit and prayers. They’d put the strongest sections at the top, where they’d be taking the most strain. The weakest, most frayed lengths were just above the bucket, where we could dwell on ’em and consider the drop under us were they to snap.

I’ll spare you the worry of that. They didn’t snap, and we didn’t drop.

But it still took us an iron eternity to get down to the level in the shaft where there started to be doors branching off, leading into horizontal tunnels and sub-shafts and chambers of imagined loot.

‘Perhaps this’ll do us,’ Trusko said, as we ended up lined up with one of the doors. ‘Get us through this, Strambli, and we can be up and on our way . . .’