Then their wagon was up over the rise with a lurch, and ploughing into thicker black clouds of smoke and dust.

‘Stop, stop,’ urged Romilla as their wheels hammered over rubble and bodies. Bartiman hauled on the reins, but their gnarlkyd was mad with fear and tried to keep going. Something burst wetly beneath their wheels, then there came a tremendous crunch and a violent sideways lurch. The wagon swayed madly, threatening to overturn and hurl them into the ground with violent force. Romilla cried out as another deafening crack sounded right beside her ear. The gnarlkyd convulsed and fell forwards, ploughing into the cobbles face first. Their wagon thumped into it from behind and they skidded to a bloody halt.

Romilla stared at Eleanora, whose gun was still smoking as it reloaded.

‘We had to stop,’ said the engineer. ‘What if we ran over our friends?’

They disembarked from the wagon, which Romilla doubted was ever travelling anywhere again. Its panels were thick with fungus that was prying the boards apart, wet rot was spreading through one axle and the front right wheel was a shredded mess where they had struck some lump of rubble or wreckage.

‘Quickly, gather the equipment and let us search,’ she said. Yet Romilla felt far less hope than she did dread. Amidst the swirling smoke, the ashes and dust and glimmering spores, visibility was a matter of yards. The ground was split and crumpled as though someone had grasped one end of the square like a huge tablecloth and given it a violent tug, and dirty water swilled across it. Chunks of glowing moon rock and smashed fragments of statuary lay everywhere, and between them were heaped corpses. Grots and humans sprawled, their limbs snapped like twigs where the blast wave had flung them, their skulls crushed, or their bodies burst like gourds by the force of the meteor’s fall. Some seethed busily with insects, which worried at flesh and scuttled in and out of nostrils and eye sockets. Others were thick with fungal growth, entire heaps of corpses disappearing rapidly under multicoloured groves of swaying spore-blooms.

‘This is a nightmare,’ intoned Bartiman. ‘I can see scant chance that they are still alive amidst all this.’

‘They’re alive,’ replied Romilla with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘Until we see them laid out dead on the ground, Bartiman, they’re alive.’

‘The longer we spend here looking for them, the greater the chance we’ll join them in the underworlds,’ said Bartiman. Still, he hefted the satchel that he had recovered from his room and stalked into the gloom with his staff pointed out before him.

Romilla followed the death wizard, motioning for Eleanora to stay close. The engineer nodded, handing her a leather bandolier into which were tucked several metal orbs with cogwork innards. Romilla quickly buckled it around her waist.