‘I’m warning you–’ he began, then something struck his legs from behind with tremendous force. Tobias felt hot agony sear its way up from his calves, felt himself flung forwards and a sudden crunching impact as the floor rushed up to meet his face. He tasted blood. His ears rang. His throat closed over the winded shriek of pain that tried to escape his lips.

Something was ripping at the flesh of his legs, like a dozen knives driven into his calves and thighs all at once. Tobias tried to cry out, to yell for aid, but shock seemed to have sealed his voice inside him as sure as a stopper rammed into a bottle. He heard grunting, felt a wash of stinking breath, felt warm wetness, the slither of something muscular and slick across his flesh and a crushing weight.

No.

Not knives.

Teeth.

‘Oh, Sigmar,’ croaked Tobias, swinging his pistol down to point at whatever had surged from the hole and sunk its fangs into him. There came a violent dragging motion, a wrench that hauled Tobias across the dirt floor and cracked his chin against the lip of the hole. His gun spilled from his nerveless fingers. Consciousness wavered.

Tobias felt another ferocious tugging sensation, a crushing pressure and an explosion of unbearable agony from his legs, then a deeper darkness swallowed him whole.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

OMENS

‘What in the realms am I to make of all this?’ Captain Helena Morthan of the Draconium City Watch asked her lieutenant, Taverton Grange, gesturing at the three-dozen parchment missives glaring up from her ironoak desk.

‘Captain?’

Outside the heavy leaded windows of Captain Morthan’s office, the sounds of the city bustled by. Cart wheels creaked. Voices rose in song or shouts or as the cries of hawkers. Animals brayed and instruments played.

Inside her office, however, the air was stuffy and still, and resonated with the captain’s frustration.

‘There’s thrice the normal number of fresh reports here, Grange. Sigmar knows Draconium is a border city, and it’s always been a touch wild. Our city has spirit! But this?’ She gestured disgustedly at the reports, picked one up at random. ‘A break-in at the Alchemists’ Guild,’ she read aloud, eyes scanning quickly over the parchment to pick out the pertinent details. ‘Entry forced from below, through the bottle cellars. Supposedly some kind of tunnel that has since collapsed. No money taken but they were cleared out of alembics, test tubes, glass beakers…’

‘A peculiar theft, captain,’ said Taverton, his expression neutral. Helena nodded, raised her eyebrows, snatched up another report.

‘A wild animal attack inside the common grazing paddocks on Westslope,’ she read. ‘The herdguards swear nothing crossed their fences, yet three runtin were, and I quote here, Grange, “ripped to pieces and scattered about the place as though a gargant had got hold of them”.’