Once the gap was wide enough to slip through it became an effort not to start forward. But Pike waited, with epic patience, as the vast weight of steel inched towards them, and past, and the vault of the Adua headquarters of Valint and Balk finally stood open.

It wasn’t that big. A room slightly wider than the great door itself, lined floor to ceiling with shelves. And on the shelves, as Vick stepped after Pike, through the vast doorway and into the heavy silence beyond, eyes gradually adjusting to the gloom…

Nothing.

It was entirely bare.

Vick had faced some disappointments, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced so intense an anticlimax.

“They moved the money long ago,” murmured Pike.

Vick touched a fingertip to one of the shelves and drew it along, leaving a neat trail through a light layer of dust. Sealed up in here, it might’ve taken years to form. Decades. “If there was ever any here.”

“The power of Valint and Balk comes down to an empty vault.” Pike sounded almost impressed. “Just promises, just lies, just…”

“Nothing,” said Vick.

Pike had started making a sort of gurgling wheeze. At first, she thought he might be choking. She was on the point of calling for help when she realised it was laughter. Of all the unexpected things she had seen since the Great Change, its chief instigator laughing his arse out in Valint and Balk’s empty vault might’ve been the strangest.

He straightened, with a final shiver of mirth, dabbing his running eyes. “Ah, dear me. A vast fortune in gold would certainly have been helpful.”

“It usually is,” said Vick, her mind on the bribes she’d already arranged with Princess Cathil’s jewels, and the ones she still had to engineer.

“But… all this really changes is the timing,” Pike was saying. “How is your conspiracy coming along, by the way?”

For a giddy moment, it didn’t quite register. Vick stood there with the puzzled frown of someone who sees blood squirting but hasn’t yet realised it’s their own throat that’s slit.

Her first instinct, once she picked back through his words and gathered their meaning, was to run. Her second to fight. A habit from the camps. Her eyes darted to the vault door. Her fingers twitched to her weapons. But the place was crawling with Constables. She wouldn’t make it five strides. And with that certainty came an odd calm. She’d always expected to be found out. Every moment she wasn’t had been coming as a surprise. She closed her eyes and took a breath.

Would they kill her here, on the spot, her body found floating by the docks as her old master Arch Lector Glokta had been so fond of saying? Would they drag her off to the House of Purity for questioning, then the Court of the People for judgement, then the Tower of Chains for the long drop? Or would Pike make an exception in her case, for irony’s sake, and send her back to the camps in Angland?