Colonel Wu led the way through a minor maze of corridors. He strode past a door, but Hui stopped at it, calling out to him. He gave her an impatient reply, but halted. ‘I wanted to show you this,’ Hui told Nina, entering a code to open the door. ‘It is our main archive.’

‘It’s very cool,’ Cheng added with enthusiasm.

Nina and the others followed them in. He was right; it was impressive. The archive contained bank upon bank of relics, presumably recovered from the buried Nephilim fortress. She recognised some immediately: fired clay cylinders inscribed with fine lines, the same kind of primitive audio media used by the Veteres.

Also on display were hundreds of clay tablets. Many were damaged, but still intact enough for her to make out what was written upon them. It was a mixture of languages; some were in the elaborate Veteres alphabet, while others used the more angular proto-Atlantean script cut into one side of the resurrection key. The switch between the two seemed to have taken place over a long period – some of the ancient records revealed intermediate states. The Nephilim had developed their own system of writing over time.

Eddie took an interest in something more sinister. ‘Ay up. They’ve got some of those spears over here.’

Nina came to look. The weapons were like those she had seen frozen inside the fortress’s armoury, long golden rods with seed-shaped metal pods on one end, carrying chains running half their length. One of the pods had been dismantled, the components laid out inside a glass case. ‘What are they?’

‘We call them qiguns,’ said Hui. ‘Somehow they release raw earth energy.’

Nina looked more closely at the pieces. Inside the golden cover was a fragment of crystal and a sliver of purple stone, contained inside a spiralling cage of dark metal. Ordinarily she would have been dismissive of Hui’s words, but she had just minutes earlier mentioned the Atlanteans’ attempts to do the same thing. ‘Are you sure?’

‘That’s what their own records say,’ Cheng told her, gesturing towards the tablets. ‘We don’t know how they work, though. We’ve never been able to activate them.’

‘But you’ve tried, eh?’ Eddie noted acerbically, moving on to examine a clutch of trikans. The golden discs had their long blades retracted, the oversized weapons stowed in their metal handgrips. ‘I bet Macy’d love to play with one of these.’

‘I’m glad she can’t,’ Nina replied. ‘She’d probably take somebody’s arm off!’

Colonel Wu gave a brusque command. Hui reluctantly ushered everyone back to the door. ‘The colonel wishes us to move on.’