Through a haze of pain, Borik heard footsteps move closer. He smelt weird, acrid smells and heard low, muttering voices all around him. Suddenly a part of him wanted his hood to stay in place. It was irrational, it wouldn’t help anything, but he just wanted to be left alone. Part of him was working furiously on anything that would offer him even the remotest chance of escape. But the first part just moaned over and over again that he be left alone. That whatever was coming next would be even worse than this.

He thought for a moment of his comrades and wished that he could have made them see sense. If they’d been together, perhaps they could all have escaped. But he had left them behind, and now he was here. Borik felt anger at being abandoned, and shame at his own act of abandonment, and then suddenly sharp talons were raking the flesh of his face.

He tried to recoil, and his head banged against something cold and hard. He tried to cry out, and instead gave a spit-wet gurgle. The clawing fingers closed in a fist, ripping at the material that covered his face and clawing it away in a thick fistful. They left stinging lines of pain across his cheeks and forehead.

Borik forced his eyes open, cringing back in his seat for fear of what he would see. He took in a shadowy room, a cellar maybe? Or a cave? He was strapped into a metal seat and in the half-light he could see a group of grotesque figures leaning over him. Grots, certainly, but freakish and distorted creatures. One wore a huge fleshy toadstool on his head like a hat, whose roots, Borik saw, had squirmed through the grot’s scalp to emerge like wiggling worms from around his eyes. Another was scrawny and hunched, his pale red eyes saucer-huge in his wizened face. Borik saw his own bloodied visage reflected in those foul orbs, and his head began to spin. He looked away hurriedly and the creature chuckled to itself. Another of the grots was bloated and leathery, its skin covered in scar tissue from what looked like burns. It wore a bizarre arrangement of bottles, alembics and pipes on its back that jutted well up over its shoulders. Fluids gurgled through them, heated by glowing coals in a metal dish that the grot wore strapped to its head. The sight would have struck Borik as humorous, were it not for the faint stink of burning flesh and the cruel delight in the greenskin’s piggy eyes. It was this one who had clawed the covering from Borik’s face, and the duardin felt ill as he realised the grot was holding a fistful of thick grey spider’s web.

‘Oozit?’ snarled the boggle-eyed grot in a shrill voice, poking at Borik’s chest with a long talon. ‘Wassit doon skarprin? Zoggin sneak, grokkit dunno. Kummon, zogger. Krakya jawz open.’