‘This must be the way, Sigmar be praised!’ she gasped.

They burst into a huge open space. Romilla had an impression of masses of pipework, flowing into the chamber from every direction and meshing with enormous machines at its heart. The din of rushing steam and groaning metal was loud here, and even she could see from the shuddering of pipes and the whistling jets of steam that all was not right. Thick webs and desiccated corpses of humans and duardin were scattered around the huge chamber, visible in the fiery light that spilled up from a stone-edged trench that ran along the chamber’s heart. It was into this man-made crevasse that the largest pipes plunged. The infernal glow blended with the sickly moonlight that fell through the arched glass roof high above, the two sources of illumination creating a curdled haze like blood mixed into spoiled milk.

‘Up there,’ said Eleanora, pointing one wavering finger at a gantry high up near the chamber’s ceiling. Romilla’s eyes traced the broken tangle of iron staircases, ladders and walkways they would have to traverse to reach the pipeworks’ controls, and her heart sank.

‘God-King, we ask your aid in this time of trial,’ she began, then stopped as something huge shifted at the lip of the fiery trench. Romilla’s eyes widened and her heart almost stopped as a spider the size of the city’s south gatehouse dragged its bloated form up into the chamber. It moved on legs thick as ironoaks, its mottled red and grey body so huge that it almost drove the sanity from her mind. A vast marking spread across the spider’s pale underbelly, a leering moon shape picked out in bioluminescent pigmentation. Its eyes transfixed Romilla, orbs as wide as wells and thrice as dark and deep.

‘Hendrick would have tried to fight them all, wouldn’t he?’ said Romilla, her hand closing reflexively around her hammer amulet as hundreds of smaller spiders spilled up from the trench around the monster’s legs. ‘He would have fought for a way we could all survive this and prevail. Damn him, he would have hoped for us, even if he couldn’t for himself.’ Romilla felt an answering tingle through her palm and looked down to see a faint blue light radiating between her fingers.