By then we’d be cutting it plenty fine.

‘Strambli’s right, I think,’ I said. ‘Ordinarily, the boxes alone would be worth an expedition. But they’re too heavy for us to shift more than one at a time. I say we take this one, the one with the guns, and move the armour out separately. If two of us ride the bucket, we can easily squeeze four or five of those suits of armour on it.’ And seven would be nicer, I thought to myself: one for each of us. Six if we assumed Drozna wouldn’t fit, five if we took Surt out of consideration as well.

Trusko might not have taken kindly to his Bone Reader dictating the order of operations, but Strambli wasn’t going to quibble with me now that I’d thrown her a biscuit.

‘The guns it is,’ the captain said, cocking his head sidelong at the box. ‘Do you think they . . . still operate?’

‘There’s power in ’em,’ Prozor said. ‘Or whatever counts as power with the Ghosties. If there wasn’t, you’d just be looking at piles of twinkly dust.’

Trusko had one of the glassy guns between his hands. He looked like he was miming it, not actually holding anything, until you squinted away and caught the shivery sense of it, like a heat haze or mirage tricking itself into the form of a weapon.

Something wrong. Something against the natural order of things.

‘I wonder what one of these could do,’ Trusko said.

I reckoned he’d find out soon enough.

We only managed two return trips. On the first one, we took the gold box and the weapons, Trusko and me nursing it back up to the surface while Prozor and Strambli stayed behind in the vault to lighten the strain on the line and get the next load ready. We loaded the box onto the launch, and then went back down the shaft. I couldn’t say I much liked the idea of going back into the bauble. The squawk wasn’t working as well as it had when we landed, even from the surface, and I knew that squawk breaking up was often a herald to the field starting to thicken over. I was expecting it to make Trusko jittery, but he just put it down to the vagaries of his equipment, the cove still convinced he had a few more days of grace before the bauble closed up. At least we were still getting word to and from the Queenie, even with the signal breaking up. Drozna hadn’t given the captain anything to trouble his noggin over.