We went down that tunnel in single file, torches pushing light ahead of us, and it was another thirty or forty minutes before we reached the start of the vaults. They branched off in both directions, like ribs off a backbone. Some of them were sealed off behind doors, while others were open, inviting us to step through. Except nothing about that place felt like it was giving off any kind of invitation. There was a cold, crawly feeling at the back of my neck.

‘Someone was here,’ Trusko said, studying the sealed doors and comparing them against the open ones. ‘An Opener party. They even left some of their tools, Strambli.’ He kicked aside a coil of electrical cable, ending in the snakelike head of an inductance pad. ‘Openers wouldn’t normally leave a place without sealing up all the doors they got through, would they?’

‘Not unless they were in a hurry to leave,’ Prozor said.

‘Well, it’s good that we’re not,’ Trusko answered. ‘But I don’t mind admitting: the sooner we’ve said goodbye to this place, the better.’

‘There are gold boxes in here,’ I said, stepping through into one of the vaults, and trying to make my statement come out all casual, as if I had no idea of what I’d found. ‘Lots of ’em. Chests and boxes and sculptures. Nasty-looking, too. You want to take a squint, Captain?’

The four of us assembled in the room. It had a flat floor and an arcing ceiling that came down to form the walls, so that the cross-section was semicircular. It was about sixty spans long. We had come through one end wall and there was a door in the opposite one, looking through into a similar chamber, and perhaps another one beyond it.

I’d formed a mental image of this place while listening to Prozor’s story, but none of it had prepared me for actually being here. The boxes were everywhere, laid out singly or stacked up in piles, or up on their ends, resting against the walls. Most of them were about the size of a coffin, and they were all done over in elaborate gold carvings. At first glance, the way the boxes glinted and gleamed back at us, you could almost think they were pretty, like big versions of the boxes a rich person might have for jewellery or keepsakes. The carving was ornate and as far as I could tell none of it was the same from box to box.

But the one thing it wasn’t was pretty.