The engineer vented a yell of frustration and snatched at the switch. There came a rumbling groan from the machineries below them, which rose to a tea-kettle shriek. Three glass gauges on the console burst in quick succession, showering Romilla and Eleanora with shards. Then came a deafening bang that echoed from amidst the background roar of fire and steam and buckling metal.

A level below the platform, a fifty-foot-high support stanchion screamed like the damned as it tore loose in a cloud of steam. It toppled sideways like a felled tree and crashed into the chamber wall. Tons upon tons of metal hit the stonework like a battering ram and sundered it. A ragged wound was torn into the side of the structure. Sickly moonlight spilled through the rent. Romilla’s eyes widened as the stanchion ground to a halt barely a foot below them, sunk into the stonework at a drunken angle.

A bridge.

Eleanora had done it.

‘Eleanora, you are a bloody marvel!’ Romilla shouted, grabbing at the console as she hauled herself and Eleanora towards the platform’s upper edge. An awful sense of vertigo gripped her, and the drop to the floor below yawned cavernous and filled with dancing flames.

Steam jetted madly around them. Overstressed machineries howled. Spiders hissed and chittered as they scuttled closer, scaling the steeply tilted platform. Eleanora cringed.

‘We have to jump,’ urged Romilla. ‘Over the railing, we scramble along the bridge, and we get clear. You’ve given us a chance!’

‘I can’t,’ gasped Eleanora, looking imploringly at Romilla. ‘My foot.’

‘You can, and you will,’ Romilla replied, her voice like iron. Her amulet was glowing like a fiery blue star, now, its light reflecting in Eleanora’s wide, frightened eyes.

The engineer gave a mute nod. They hauled themselves atop the railing, snatched one another’s hands and, even as a tide of arachnid horrors bore down upon them, they leapt and scrambled across the bridge. Behind them, the overloaded machines vented a monstrous blast of energy through the pipes of Draconium’s heating system, sending it racing away towards Fountains Square. An annihilating tide of fire billowed up from the rift and consumed everything in the chamber.

Bartiman felt the ground shudder beneath him. Aelyn’s body still lay atop his. She, combined with the vermin corpses of the grots she had slain, had all but buried the elderly wizard and hidden him from sight. They had also pinned him in place, so feeble had he become, and it had taken him long minutes to squirm and shove his way up through the carrion heap.

Part of Bartiman just wanted to hide beneath the bodies until death took him. Sigmar knew he had no desire to see that damned moon again before he passed. But the fear of suffocation had got him moving, that and the horror of his friend’s corpse laying sprawled atop him.