Within heartbeats they were at the palisaded wall, Cullen racing up a stairwell, but a burst of wind and Sig’s warning shout made him pause – a spear hurled from the sky above thrumming into the stairs just before him. She raised her shield and caught another spear aimed straight at Drem’s heart. Sig hacked the shaft away, but the blade still embedded in her shield dragged her arm down. She dropped it on the ground. Gulla’s half-breed daughter alighted on the palisade walkway.

‘Not so easily,’ she hissed, voice as twisted as her body.

Feet thudded behind them, Sig turning to see acolytes and Feral men swarming after them. They stopped a dozen paces from Sig and her companions and a figure stepped to their fore, the shaven-haired woman, Fritha, the Starstone Sword in her hand. Wings beat and a Kadoshim landed beside her: Gulla, a spear in his fist, veins in his body dark and bloated, even his wings seeming to be heavy, weighted with the blood he had consumed. Crimson lines trailed down his pale chin.

‘You cannot leave us,’ Gulla said. ‘I have someone to introduce you to.’

Behind the swarming acolytes a dark shadow loomed, wider and taller than Sig. A great bear appeared, muzzle and head emerging from the darkness, a hint of madness in its eyes. And upon its back sat a giant, broad, wrapped in leather and fur, still masked by the shadows. A war-hammer was slung across its back.

‘Ah, well,’ Sig snarled, ‘if it’s time for introductions, let me introduce you to Hammer.’

Sig put two fingers to her lips and whistled, and to her right the palisaded wall burst asunder, timber exploding in a spray of splinters, and Hammer’s two front paws crashed into the compound. Her dark fur was covered by a coat of chainmail, harnessed and buckled with leather, gleaming and sparkling in the starlight like a coat of diamonds. She roared a challenge, spraying spittle. Acolytes scattered like flotsam before a tidal wave. With a swipe of her paw she eviscerated one that moved too slowly, her head lunging forwards, jaws grabbing another, the sound of bones cracking, a scream cut short.

The half-breed on the palisade took to the air as it collapsed beneath her feet and swooped on Hammer, hurling a spear, but it was stopped by her coat of mail, skittering harmlessly away.