‘It’s just a bite, it just hurts sometimes,’ said Eleanora, ­looking uncomfortable. Romilla had tried to get a proper look at her friend’s bitten foot for the best part of a week, but Eleanora had been remarkably cagey about it. She did this, sometimes, if something she mentioned was not immediately paid attention to; Eleanora had an odd habit of assuming if something wasn’t addressed instantly then it must be unimportant and should be stringently ignored. If Romilla was honest, Eleanora had many strange habits that they had all simply adjusted to. They were just part of her genius, a side effect of the gifts that Sigmar had given her. But this one had caused her to hide injury and illness before, and if Romilla hadn’t been so distracted by darker matters, she would have insisted she be allowed to treat Eleanora’s foot before now.

As she knelt and stripped off the engineer’s footwear, she cursed herself for not checking sooner. Eleanora’s foot and ankle were both badly swollen, the flesh mottled red and blue and warm to the touch. Gently holding the foot still despite Eleanora’s uncomfortable squirming, she found a green-black lump near the arch of the foot, presumably the original bite. Tendrils of the same unclean hue had spread out from the bite mark and begun to make inroads on Eleanora’s calf.

‘Damnation, Eleanora, this looks awful!’ she exclaimed.

‘It’s just a spider bite,’ repeated the engineer, brushing her hair out of her eyes and sounding less certain.

‘Does it hurt?’ asked Romilla.

‘More since the moon rose.’

Her blood ran chill at Eleanora’s quiet reply.

An image flashed unbidden into Romilla’s mind, of Hendrick staggering to his feet, the spore sickness already ravaging his features. Behind it lay another memory, deeper buried, hidden behind a wall raised in self-flagellation and shored up with alcohol and self-hatred. It was one she hadn’t seen in a long time, a glimpse of Freeguild soldiery sprawled about her feet, flesh thick with stinking pustules, bodies slowly mutating, mewling groans filling the air. Her friends, dying around her; she herself untouched yet utterly powerless to stop their demise.

Guilt nearly choked Romilla for an instant, but she forced it back, remembered all the tests of her faith she had passed to reach this point. She looked up at Eleanora, who was staring uncertainly down at her with the beginnings of real alarm in her eyes. Romilla forced her expression into something reassuring. She quietly promised herself that she would not let some horrible infection take Eleanora too. Sigmar’s blood, she thought, I will fail no more of my friends.

‘I have tinctures in my bag, and anti-inflammation unguents,’ said Romilla, patting Eleanora on the knee. ‘We’ll apply those now, and then–’