‘Know… a… secret… you… want… to… know…’ he gurgled, and Skragrott held up a taloned finger. Nukkit paused with the potion before Borik’s face.

‘If this is you bein’ funny again, you’ll regret it,’ said the Loonking. ‘Go on, what’s yer big secret? Never know, might even save ya yet.’

‘I took another… in case the first one… didn’t work…’ croaked Borik, then as Skragrott blinked at him in confusion he wrenched his arm backwards with all his strength. Skin split and stalks tore. Blood sprayed in stinking squirts, and with what remained of his strength Borik bent his rubbery arm around behind himself and pressed one thick thumb down upon the firing stud of Eleanora’s spare bomb.

‘I’ll greet my ancestors with your skull at my belt,’ spat Borik. The last thing he saw was Skragrott’s face twisting in an expression of horror, and something huge slamming into the Loonking from the side. There was a searing blast of light and heat, and Borik Jorgensson made good his escape.

The echoes of the blast subsided. Black smoke filled the chamber. Little remained of the duardin or the chair he had been strapped to, barring blackened ruin and drifting cinders. A bloated grot lay in a heap of smashed glass nearby, his flesh dissolving in the soup of lethal compounds that had spilled from his alembics to douse him.

Another corpse lay beside him, a huge one so badly blackened and burned that even its troggoth flesh could not regenerate the damage. Still the body stirred, the stump of one arm lifting slowly up and then flopping aside.

Skragrott the Loonking crawled out from under his slain troggoth bodyguard with a look of pure, murderous rage on his scorched features.

‘They’re all going to suffer fer that, stunty,’ he snarled, waving off the scorched and frantic grots that swarmed to help him up. ‘I’ll make zoggin’ sure they all suffer fer that…’

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

PLANS

‘We agree, then? We blow it up?’ asked Romilla. She leant over the desk in the safehouse office, her expression grim and her injured side tightly bandaged. The wound was painful, but she had found the sensation brought clarity and revelation. So often did one have to suffer for Sigmar’s gifts, she thought.

‘Seems the only safe way to dispose of so huge a quantity of such a perilous poison,’ replied Watchman Thackeray. ‘Sigmar knows we can’t risk physical contact with the stuff. Can’t exactly tip it away, either. It’d end up in the canal one way or another and we’d end up doing the grots’ work for them.’

‘If I knew more about its composition, I might be able to formulate something that could neutralise its potency?’ suggested Bartiman, who sat on a stool with a spare cloak bundled around his shoulders.