They were standing in a stone passage, claustrophobically tight and with only the faintest grey glow in its corners. Thackeray lit his spark-lantern, painting everything in harsh white illumination. Romilla nodded her thanks and let him lead the way, gesturing for Eleanora to walk between them where she was least likely to be attacked. Eleanora had assured them this was the entrance to one of the pipe network’s monitoring stations, a site through which the pipes ran all the way from their source and then on in a radiating spread to the more well-to-do businesses and homes of Marketsway.

Sure enough, the tight corridor quickly emptied out onto an iron gantry that ran around the inside of the tower. Above, metal stairways and more gantries vanished up into darkness. Below, they dropped two more floors into a circular pit that was dominated by a huge ironclad device that looked to Romilla like an overly elaborate boiler. Thick forests of pipes spewed from one wall to plunge into the device, which spat them out as a tangle of thinner conduits that vanished off in many other directions.

‘Down there,’ said Eleanora, over the rumble and hiss of the machinery. ‘We need to follow the big pipes back to the pipehouse.’

They descended swiftly, their footfalls clanging hollow on the metal floors. Even here, the metal of the gantries and stairs was slick with slime and the walls furred with mould. Bioluminescent fungi sprouted around the boiler-machine’s base.

‘Is it still in operation?’ asked Romilla, surprised.

‘The function of the pipehouse is at least in part automated,’ replied Eleanora. ‘It has to be. If everyone got ill, or the building was evacuated or whatever else, if the system couldn’t regulate itself, it would soon explode and cause substantial damage.’

‘Which is precisely what we’re going to do to these filthy greenskins, isn’t it?’ asked Thackeray, scowling. His eyes had taken on a haunted, slightly manic look that Romilla both recognised and did not like the look of.

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘We just have to steel ourselves and do our duty in Sigmar’s name, no matter how painful that duty might be. You did the right thing, Thackeray.’

‘Don’t need your approval, knew what I was doing and why,’ said Thackeray stiffly. ‘Doesn’t mean they won’t all be waiting for me in the Land of Endings when my time comes though, does it?’

They stood in silence for a moment, their ears full of the hiss and bang of the boiler mechanisms. Eleanora swiftly checked over some dials and gauges, frowning and shaking her head.

‘Problem?’ asked Thackeray.

‘This doesn’t look right,’ she said, sounding distracted. ‘There’s… some damage… somewhere… We need to get moving, right away. The system’s pressure levels are slowly dropping, and if they deteriorate much further then the plan won’t succeed.’

‘Of course,’ sighed Thackeray. ‘Where?’