She peered through the thick crystal at the figure within. Like the armour they had seen earlier, it was tall, and big, the shoulders broad and powerful compared to the elongated, almost willowy bodies of the extinct race. ‘They must be, but . . . this one’s much larger than the mummies we found in Eden.’ She carefully crossed the inclined floor to another sarcophagus. All the coffins, she noticed, had the same recess for the mysterious key at their foot. ‘So’s this.’

Eddie shone his light at the debris below. ‘You want a proper look at one, I think there’s a body down there.’ A long, pale arm protruded from beneath one fallen sarcophagus. ‘Must have come from the open coffin.’

‘A body?’ cried Imka from the top of the stairs. ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s not anyone from the Dionysius,’ Nina hurriedly told her. ‘This is . . . a mausoleum, I guess. The bodies of the people who built this thing are here.’

Cheng made his way down the steps, flashlight beam darting excitedly from one coffin to another. ‘The shells aren’t broken! They’re intact!’

‘Most of them,’ said Nina. ‘I think some came loose when the iceberg rolled over.’

Eddie made his way to the elaborate sarcophagus at the room’s centre. ‘Must be their king in here. Looks like he’s wearing a crown.’ Metal glinted around the head of the entombed figure as he swept his light over it, and he noticed secondary reflections from other items around its feet. ‘They buried him with his stuff.’

Nina picked her way over to him. ‘It’s definitely an important figure. Although some of the others have things in their coffins as well. Maybe they were like the ancient Egyptians, and were buried with their greatest treasures?’

‘That’s not a treasure.’ The sudden alertness in Eddie’s voice made her look around. He was again aiming his torch at the bottom of the chamber. ‘That’s a weapon. It’s a bloody trikan!’

‘It can’t be, they’re Atlantean—’ she began – but he was right. The beam was fixed upon a convex orichalcum disc resembling a yo-yo, three curved blue blades sweeping outwards from its rim. Macy’s toy was based on a real example found in the sunken ruins of Atlantis . . . but now it seemed that that in turn had been modelled upon one even older.

And larger. The Atlantean weapon was sized to fit in a person’s hand. This was more like a dinner plate, each sweeping blade almost a foot long. The weapons of the lost race were as super-sized as their armour – and themselves.

Cheng followed Nina’s path down into the chamber. Imka hung back on the stairs, not wanting to enter, while Vorster took up station at the upper threshold. ‘So if they’re not from Atlantis, where are they from?’ the shipowner asked.