Oltyx has only ever seen the commoners’ belt from above, as he had that morning. From his chamber it is a great blurred sprawl, spread out from the necropolis like blood from a puncture wound. It is pleasing enough, he supposes, when he happens to regard it. But from the ground it is a drab, messy place. Everything is a shade of brown, and the narrow streets are crowded. The smell of the place is hard to parse. After a life spent among the spotless halls and bath-chambers of the necropolis, in fact, the stench is almost too large to be registered at all.

In contrast to the soaring tombs and monuments of the necropolis -citadel, the buildings here seem barely able to lift themselves above the dirt. And despite being at the heart of a civilisation which knows how to stop the heart of a star, or siphon away a planet’s iron core without touching its surface, they are still built from mud bricks.

‘What is the point of permanence,’ Djoseras says, when Oltyx asks why, ‘for people about whom there is nothing worth remembering?’