In the whale’s cheek, a flap of skin was cast aside as dramatically as the curtains in a lyceum, and there came forth a titan of pestilence: a great unclean one, huge and jiggly in its ampleness of flesh, beneficent in disease and all morbidities. He smiled and waved and hallooed at his servants, full of bonhomie, even though his guts hung in sickly grey ropes from the ragged skin of his open belly. They dangled so low that the infected nails of his great feet snagged in them as he walked and tore them into shreds, whence leaked black humours and squirming worms.

His arms were long and disproportionate to his fat frame. The seven fingers on each of his hands were tipped with poisonous talons. On his back hung a long, filthy sword, dull of blade but envenomed with diseases to moulder the soul. Septicus’ baldrick of failing leather was lost amid his folds of skin, and he wore no other clothes or harnesses other than his weapon and its gear, but under his left arm he cradled the glistening stomach sac of some unfortunate creature, its top criss-crossed with thick, distended veins that pulsed still. Pipes of hollowed antlers had been set into the gut, and they clacked together as he shouldered his way out past the curtain of skin. He stopped at the brink and leapt to the ground, trusting to the bodies of his lesser kin to cushion his fall.

He cackled madly as he dropped, landing with a splattering impact that sprayed daemonic foetor everywhere, then rose up from the mud of Iax with a broad yellow grin. As he adjusted them, his pipes slipped around in the crook of his arm, letting out an ungodly wail. The music was of the most dreadful kind and pained the spirits of his daemonic host. They cringed from the racket, and the great unclean one laughed uproariously at the reaction of his servants.

‘Septicus is arrived!’ he announced. ‘I have come to guide you, my little ones. The others will be here soon, so I shall play you a merry song, children of Papa Nurgle, to speed you from your vessels and on your way! Tread with joy, for we do great work here – great work!’ And he set the long mouthpiece to his blistered lips, filled his rancid lungs and began to pump at the stomach pipes with one bent elbow. His rotten fingers danced with marvellous dexterity upon the sounding holes of the instrument, and he smiled as he made his music, but what came forth was as jolly as a dirge, and so redolent of fever pain and toothaches it agonised all who heard it.