Eleanora gave a piercing scream. The stairwell filled with thunder and light as her guns fired again and again. The spider recoiled, dropping Thackeray’s body and giving a piercing shrill as shots punched deep into its face. Several of its eyes burst. One of its forelimbs sheared off halfway up, the wound gouting sticky black ichor. Clots of matter splattered from its body as Eleanora’s pistols hammered it relentlessly. The thing tried to retreat, tried to rear up and spread its legs wide, but it had trapped itself in its hunger to reach them. Another shot ruptured chitin and sprayed gore across the walls.

Another.

Another.

The spider’s shriek climbed to a pitch Romilla could barely hear, and at last it managed to drag itself backwards out of the stairwell. The damage was already done. It thrashed and flopped, a flailing mass the size of several carriages that bled black sludge. It rolled onto its side and its remaining legs pulled inwards like a hand forming a claw. The spider gave a final, convulsive lurch that sent splatters of black slime oozing from its body, then lay still.

Romilla’s ears rang. Her heart hammered. She turned to look at Eleanora, who was staring wild-eyed at the dead spider, her guns still outstretched. Smoke wafted from their barrels.

Romilla drew breath to say something, though she didn’t truly know what. Then she heard the sounds she had been dreading. In the gunfire’s fading echoes, she caught noises of skittering and of heavy bodies dragging themselves over stonework.

‘There’s no time, we have to move,’ she said, and grabbed Eleanora by the wrist again.

They ran up the last flight of stairs, leaping over Thackeray’s decapitated corpse and splashing heedlessly through the acrid filth that had squirted from the dying spider. Past cracked windows that looked out onto a corpse-strewn street, past an ironoak desk that might once have served as a station for the building’s receptionist, Romilla saw the corridor that Eleanora had spoken of. It stretched away from them in the half-light. She dashed along it, ignoring the drag of snapped spider’s webs and the itching pain from her dozens of bites.

Perhaps the creatures had been poisonous after all, she thought. It hardly mattered now. Only doing Sigmar’s work mattered, before they were overrun.

The two of them burst out of the end of the corridor, and several gnarlkyd-sized spiders came at them from the shadows. Romilla swung her hammer into the face of the largest, eliciting a crunch of chitin and sending the horrible thing skidding away. Eleanora dropped one of her guns, snatching a smaller pistol from her belt and pointing it at another spider that was dropping down from above on a line of silk. She squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened.