At least twenty people.

‘Ms Carnarvon said it was down here,’ a man’s voice called.

Nobody turned away from the tunnel, thinking fast.

He figured they had about thirty seconds.

‘There’s too many of them to fight, so we have to hide,’ he said. ‘This way.’

A few seconds later, a heavily armed Knight of the Golden Eight entered the secret vault inside the Roman emissary, flanked by some Squires and a dozen bronzemen.

The vault was empty.

There was no sign of Iolanthe, Nobody or Bertie.

‘We’re in the vault,’ he said as he scanned the room with a cell phone, as if filming it for someone on the other end of the line.

‘Stop. Turn back to the left,’ a woman’s voice said from the phone. It was the voice of Chloe Carnarvon, Iolanthe’s old assistant. ‘That table in the middle. Show it to me.’

The Knight obeyed, stepping over to the table and holding his phone over the ancient documents on it.

‘Zoom in on that scroll.’

He leaned in closer and Chloe read it from wherever she was, translating the Latin aloud.

‘The location of the Orphean Bell . . . the Crown of Priam . . .’

There was a pause.

‘The Crown of Priam . . .’ Chloe’s voice said thoughtfully. ‘Historically, it was kept at the Land King’s hunting estate in Wales. Grab that scroll. I’ve been called to Salzburg, so bring the scroll to me there as soon as you can. I need to examine it more closely. I’ll call the Hall of Royal Records and get our people there to do some further research about the fate of that crown.’

The Knight snatched up the Domitian scroll and hustled out of the vault with his team close behind him. And just as quickly as they’d arrived, they were gone.

A few minutes later, as the splashing footsteps of the Knight’s team echoed away up the tunnel, the heavy stone lid of Khufu’s sarcophagus moved slightly, pushed off from within, and Nobody, Iolanthe and Bertie peered out from inside the priceless stone coffin.

‘She knows about Wales,’ Nobody said.

‘She does.’ Iolanthe frowned. ‘Chloe was my assistant. She knows almost everything that I do about the secret royal world. But while she may know about the Land King’s estate, she may not know about that fire in 1871 or that Priam’s crown was destroyed in it.

‘We might’ve just caught a little break. If Chloe has to wait for that scroll in Salzburg, that’ll give us a head start, maybe as much as half a day. We go to Troy and find the copy. By the time she discovers the truth about the destruction of the original crown, we will have got the information we need from the copy and be on our way. Come on! We need to hurry. We might have just taken the lead in this race.’