The boxes were covered in skulls, and ribs, and spines and pelvises, and jawbones and sockets, and knuckles, and none of these things were joined up to the others in any way nature intended. There were skulls with fingers coming out of their eyes, and ribs with skulls locked in them, and jaws coming out of pelvises, and that wasn’t the worst of it. The gold was worked up into meat, muscle, tendon, skin, brain, blood vessels, eyeballs, lungs, tongue, windpipe, guts, and all this gore and gristle looked like it was about to peel off the bones like cooked meat and form up into boxes of its own, just so it wasn’t missing out.

I swallowed. I didn’t think I was the only one.

‘They’re just boxes,’ Trusko said after a while.

‘But I don’t want to be in the same room as ’em,’ Strambli said, in a low, quiet voice, all the indignation gone out of her, and the worst part was that she’d just put into words exactly what I’d been feeling.

‘At least we’ve found something,’ I heard myself say. ‘The rumours said there was loot, didn’t they? Now we know it’s something big. No one’d go to the trouble of those boxes for a few bits of lookstone or catchcloth.’

‘Maybe,’ Prozor said, ‘it would help if we opened one of ’em?’

Prozor went over to one of the horizontal boxes, and we followed her. Each step that I took closer to that box felt harder than the last, as if the ground was steepening, or the box was putting out a magnetic force that pushed against our suits. But I didn’t think it was anything that would have shown up on Strambli’s instruments. This was something getting into our brains, plucking the lowest, deepest strings of fear.

Prozor knelt by the box. The top was hinged along one side, with a handle made out of golden bone. She lifted it open. Everything was silent about that vault, because there was no lungstuff. But my imagination filled in a slow, forbidding creak as the hinges worked.

Prozor leaned in to aim her lamp into the box. Trusko and Strambli bent down to see what was there.

‘Huh,’ Strambli said. ‘After all that. After the door, and all this fancy carving . . .’

‘Empty,’ Trusko said.

He moved to the next box, lying beside the one Prozor had opened, and tugged on its lid.

‘What’s inside?’ Strambli asked.

‘Nothing. As empty as the first.’ Trusko left the box open and went to one of those which was stored on its end, leaning against the inward curve of the wall. He opened the lid like it was a door, and that box was empty as well.