At times, they rattled along empty cobbled stretches where the only signs of life were the detritus dropped by fleeing crowds, and the occasional suggestions of pale and fearful faces peering through blinds and curtains.

Yet for every abandoned space, there was a square, or street, or alley or bridge drenched in gore and thick with heaving bodies. Romilla saw black-clad greenskins pouring along the streets in such numbers that they looked more like swarming insects, overrunning those who fled them and burying them in heaving, stabbing bodies. She saw an obese grot riding atop a many-legged toadstool as large as a man, pointing his glowing staff at people and transforming them into fungal statues with cackles of glee. Beyond them, lunatic greenskins with froth spilling from their jaws whirled through militiamen wielding massive iron balls at the ends of long chains. These fanatics clearly had no control over their direction of travel, for she saw more than one smash into a wall or spark-lantern and meet a bloody end. Yet where they ploughed through human bodies the results were sickening.

They crossed an arched bridge that spanned a dirty offshoot of the canal between looming houses, and as Romilla looked up she saw flesh-crawling shapes silhouetted against the skyline. Arachnid things the size of ponies picked their way across the rooftops, the exaggerated care of their many-legged gait belying the speed with which they moved. Sat astride each huge spider she saw the hunched silhouette of a grot, and as their wagon thumped down on the far side of the bridge a hissing hail of barbed arrows struck the cobbles behind its wheels.

They sped across an intersection, scattering snarling greenskins as they went, and Romilla felt the cart lurch as bones broke and bodies split beneath its wheels. She heard shrieks and saw several of the spore-sickened dashing madly after the wagon, gaining by the second, their yellow eyes locked on her.

‘Behind us,’ she cried over the whipping wind. Romilla hefted her hammer and tried to turn in her seat as the first of the creatures leapt high with gangling agility and thumped down on their fungus-thick tarpaulin. There was a loud crack, and the spore-sick wretch’s face dissolved in a red blizzard. Its body was flung back from the wagon to thump bonelessly to the street in their wake.

Romilla glanced sideways and saw that Eleanora had pulled a heavy firearm from her back, some fusion of coglock pistol and ferocious-looking blunderbuss that was churning with mechanical motion as it reloaded itself.

‘Hendrick told me to make plenty of guns and bombs,’ said Eleanora, as though apologising for something.