‘That could have been you,’ she mouthed, pointing, and Eleanora nodded back in shock. They had been phenomenally lucky, Romilla realised, that none of Eleanora’s bombs had been triggered by the blast. She offered up a prayer of thanks to Sigmar and dug through the rubble and dust for her bag of medical supplies. She didn’t know what had caused that blast and right now, she didn’t care. Romilla would attend to her duties first, and then face whatever trials Sigmar had in store for her next.

She was still seeing to Eleanora’s cuts and doing what she could for the engineer’s foot when Bartiman pushed his way in through the buckled door.

‘We need to move,’ he barked. ‘Those things came down all over the city. I think one of them hit the square.’

‘What things?’ asked Romilla, her words marginally clearer to her own ears, now, as the whine there receded.

‘Projectiles, meteorites – great lumps of rock from that accursed moon!’ exclaimed Bartiman. ‘Have you not looked out the… what’s left of the window?’

‘I was busy,’ said Romilla shortly, but now she hastened to stare out of the ragged hole in the side of the chamber, being careful to avoid the sickly moonlight that spilled through.

Her heart almost stopped as she beheld the ominous clouds of smoke, dust and dimly-glowing green spores that rose over the city. They were billowing upwards from multiple impact sites, she saw, swelling and spreading even as they slowly tattered apart. The clouds looked for all the realms like vast and horrible mushrooms fashioned from the stuff of ruin and nightmares, and where their pall drifted over the shattered cityscape the spores they carried fell like sickly embers. Romilla felt dread at the thought of what might happen, were they to settle upon human flesh.

‘Our friends were somewhere in all of that,’ she breathed.

‘Precisely,’ replied Bartiman as he came to stand next to her. Romilla turned to see Eleanora dragging her boot back on with a wince of pain and shouldering her sack full of explosives and weapons.

‘We have to go and help them,’ said the engineer, looking scared but determined. Romilla nodded and, pausing to scoop up what she had managed to salvage of Aelyn’s wargear, she made for the stairs.

In the glass-scattered shadows of the inn’s common room, Romilla made for the front door but Bartiman grabbed her arm and pointed out the back. They passed Gathe and several of his serving staff, huddled behind the bar in terror. The man gestured at them, his intent clear. Go away. Leave us alone.