The footing was treacherous as they tramped over slimy cobbles and through thick outcroppings of fungi. A spore-thick mist drifted between the buildings and reduced visibility to a hazy suggestion of shadows through which the Bad Moon’s light shone, diffuse and leprous. It made it hard to avoid tripping over the rotting corpses that lay scattered about the streets, their bodies thick with mould. The effect was worsened by the waves of strange energies that pulsed from the Bad Moon above, causing them moments of sudden dizziness and confusing aural hallucinations, and making it appear that ghosts wrought in psychedelic hues flickered through the mists around them.

The pipehouse stood on the edge of the Pipers’ District, a good half-hour’s trek through the city streets under such conditions. Eleanora had suggested another route, however, one they were now approaching. Thackeray stopped as snarls and jabbered words echoed through the muffling fog. He motioned for them to close up, and backed carefully into the shadows of a half-collapsed eatery. Romilla glanced through a shattered window into the eatery’s dark interior as they hunkered outside. A rudimentary barricade had been raised here, she saw, fashioned from heaped tables and benches. It was sundered at its centre, smashed apart, its splintered wreckage damp with rot and seething with burrowing worms. Further back, she saw the suggestion of flyblown corpses.

Romilla’s attention snapped back to the street as something moved in the spore-mists. She saw dark shapes, short and hunched with pointed black hoods and glinting red eyes. The grots picked their way along the street in a ragged column, a dozen or so chattering in their crude, spiteful voices. One near the front hefted a tattered flag depicting a leering half-moon on a field of black. Romilla saw freshly flensed skulls dangling from the banner’s cross-pole, crude twine looped through their eye sockets and beetles skittering over their surface. Several of the greenskins looked to be arguing with one another, while one near the back was carrying a human-sized helmet upside down like a bucket, plucking small objects out of it and popping them into its mouth with gusto. Romilla did her best not to look any closer. She had no desire to find out what such creatures considered a delicacy.