‘Move,’ she hissed, and the small group burst from the mouth of the tunnel at a run. Morthan and her watchmen had thrown up their hoods and pulled cloth masks up over the lower portions of their faces, so they had precious little skin on show. Aelyn was not so fortunate, still clad in her blood-stained feast garb, and she felt the immediate crawling prickle upon her skin again as fungus began to push through her pores.

She tried not to think about it, nor about the onrushing tide of insects now only a hundred or so yards distant, nor about the fungal abomination overrunning the palace and the spore-sickened now vanished into the streets and causing Sigmar alone knew what carnage. Most of all, she tried not to think about the vast presence that loomed above her and radiated such a crushing weight of malice and hate.

They made straight for the fuel wagon. So vast had the fungus grown that it had wholly buried the palace steps, and was now only a few dozen yards from the bowser and its braziers. Aelyn hurdled the fallen body of a mummer with half his grease-painted face missing and skidded to a halt beside the bowser. Olt reached her a moment later, followed by a puffing and blowing Borik. Morthan and her watchmen formed a loose cordon around the three Swords, pistols out and eyes alert for danger.

‘The insects are getting closer,’ one of the watchmen sang out.

‘Borik, get that bomb onto–’

Aelyn was interrupted by another tectonic lurch, this one so ferocious that it almost knocked her from her feet. Cracks erupted across the square and loose cobbles flew a dozen feet into the air before clattering back down.

‘What was that?’ gasped Morthan.

Her answer came in the form of an explosion of cobbles and mortar, which blew skywards like a geyser directly in the path of the insects. Something huge moved amidst the drifting dust, and Aelyn made out an arm as thick as a tree trunk pushing up from the hole. Huge, blunt talons sank into the ground, and a lumpen figure hauled itself into the moonlight. She saw rubbery flesh thick with fungal growths, grotesquely large ears, nose and jutting tusks, small eyes that glittered with idiot malevolence, and a gigantic body corded with ropey muscle.

‘Troggoth!’ yelled a watchman. ‘That’s some kind of troggoth!’

‘Biggest damned trog I’ve ever seen,’ breathed Borik.

The troggoth threw back its boulder-like head, opened its jaws and gave vent to a deafening roar. As it did so, smaller figures squirmed out of the hole around it. There were dozens, Aelyn saw, perhaps the size of a human adolescent, clad in mouldering black robes with pointed hoods, their green skin pale in the moonlight and their red eyes gleaming.

‘Borik, the bomb, now!’ she urged. The duardin hurriedly twisted the clamp on Eleanora’s device and slapped it into place.

‘How long?’ he asked.