Romilla managed a faint smile at her. ‘I’m glad that he did,’ she said, then snapped her head back around as thumping sounds heralded more of the spore-sickened landing on the tarp. The first, a mutated woman still clad in the ragged ruin of her former finery, reared up with a shriek, and her throat bulged with infected bile. Before she could spit it, Romilla lunged upwards and smashed the head of her hammer into the woman’s jaw. Tusks splintered, bone broke and Romilla’s victim was thrown backwards with frothing vomit geysering from her ruined face.

The other, a grotesque that had once been a noble palace guard, crawled hand over hand towards them only for Eleanora’s gun to roar again and fling him backwards in a tangle of limbs.

‘Shadows of Shyish!’ exclaimed Bartiman in alarm, and Romilla spun back around in time to see something bewildering hurtling towards them with the speed of a runaway avalanche. She had an impression of huge fungal forms, two spheroid monsters each a good twenty feet across that were all fang-filled jaws, madly-staring eyes and lashing talons. Her mind struggled to process the scene as she realised the two abominations had been chained crudely together, and that cackling grots had lashed themselves to the creatures as though attempting to ride upon them.

The monsters whirled around one another, pushing off with their stub-clawed legs, snapping their enormous fangs together with maddened fury, leaving cracked craters in building facades and street cobbles as they ricocheted closer.

‘They’re going to hit us!’ cried Eleanora.

Romilla cringed as the shrieking grots rushed closer upon their enormous wrecking-ball steeds. With a sudden furious spasm, one of the chained monsters launched itself skywards, dragging its bellowing twin with it and eliciting a chorus of furious cries from the greenskins. Chains snapped tight and the entire deranged mass shot over Romilla’s head, low enough that tusks as long as her torso snapped together a hair’s breadth from her shaved scalp.

Then the creatures were gone, past them and careening away down the street to smash through an alchemists’ tower at the far end.

‘What in the name of the Mortal Realms…?’ asked Bartiman, gripping the reins with one hand and plucking a toadstool from his robes with the other.

‘Don’t know, don’t want to know,’ said Romilla. ‘Just get us to the square.’

‘Almost there,’ replied Bartiman. ‘If I’m not mistaken, it’s just up this rise.’

As they climbed a steep street thick with a miasma of dust and spores, Romilla pulled cloth over her nose and mouth and tried to take shallow breaths, motioning for Eleanora and Bartiman to do the same. The cart’s wheels hissed through a shallow flood of groundwater that was spilling from the lip of the square above them. Romilla feared the worst as she saw red streaks polluting it.