Romilla groaned with agony at the effort and felt fresh blood spill down her side. Then Thackeray was there, ushering her gently but firmly aside as he and Aelyn reached down for the last watchman. Romilla rolled aside, sprawling on the dusty boards and staring up at the arched ceiling, half visible in the gloom. Her vision swam, but her hearing was still keen. There was no escaping the screams of the last watchman as the greenskins reached him. Romilla felt all the worse that she didn’t even know his name.

‘Damn it!’ cursed Thackeray as he and Aelyn ducked back from the hatch. Several crude arrows and a flung blade whipped up to embed themselves in the joists overhead. The lost watchman’s screams turned swiftly to bubbling gurgles, which were drowned out by cruel grot laughter.

‘We can’t stay here, they’ll figure a route up,’ said Aelyn. When Thackeray didn’t show any immediate sign of movement, the aelf shoved him none-too-gently towards the back end of the attic. ‘Watchman, where is the route up?’ she asked.

Thackeray took a last angry look at the open hatch, then turned wordlessly and led them to the far end of the attic where a section of boarding had been levered aside. Romilla hobbled after him, praying to Sigmar that her bandages would hold long enough for her to get somewhere safer. She had no desire to bleed to death out here.

They crawled one by one through the hole, then up a tight crawlspace that emerged through a gap in the brickwork of a large chimney stack. Everything was badly eroded by exposure to the city’s acid rains, and Romilla was glad of her gloves as she crawled through damp patches. She was doubly glad of them as she emerged onto a rooftop thick with worm-like fungal fronds. Those, she would not want to touch, she thought.

‘The rooftop road,’ said Thackeray, gesturing to an arrangement of badly rain-eaten boards that ran along the downslope of the roof and bridged the gap to the next rooftop along.

‘How delightfully perilous,’ gasped Romilla, wishing that blood loss had not left her feeling so woozy and light headed.

‘Come on, that must be the guild hall,’ said Aelyn, pointing to an imposing fortress of a building some way upslope across the rooftops. It was slab-sided, built from rain-treated granite and boasting what looked like a battlement’s crenulations at its peak.

‘We’ll get our view from there,’ said Thackeray. ‘But we’ll need to enter two floors down. That’s where, Sigmar willing, they’ll be dug in.’

‘Very well, let’s move,’ said Aelyn and set off along the boards at an alarming pace. Romilla followed, her heart lurching at every creak, groan and sudden lurch of the boardwalk.