Orlen’s head spun. He was all but insensible, his senses overwhelmed by unnatural stimuli. For a time, he simply lay still as death, breathing and feeling his heart pump.

Then Orlen realised that something had changed.

He scrambled around into as best a crouch as he could manage in the tight space. He squinted against the glow that filled the mouth of the drain.

Not moonlight. Not the poisonous pale green rays that had sickened the city for so long now. Orlen saw the gold and rose shades of sunset spilling along the storm drain, and even that simple sight was enough to slow his hammering heart a little. Then, new sounds filled the tunnel, faint and strange and somehow painful. There came a sizzling squeal, a bubbling, popping sound that Orlen realised was emanating from the fungi growing out of the tunnel walls. The ragged bargeman watched in incomprehension as, one by one, the toadstools shivered as though caught in a brisk breeze. Their flesh squirmed and ran like wax, bubbles rising and bursting to release a reek of putrefaction.

Fresh alarm filled Orlen as stinking fumes built up in the air. Instinct drove him in a scramble along the drain, through sticky patches of rotting fungi that slicked his palms, and out into the open.

Just in time.

Orlen hissed at the sight of a rippling black carpet flowing across the cobbles towards him. Insects of every sort scuttled and squirmed frantically towards the shadows of the drain, thousands upon thousands of them. Panic lending his weakened frame strength, Orlen scrambled like an animal up a nearby heap of rubble and then into the branches of a withered and listing tree. For a moment he felt his grip fail him as exhaustion and malnutrition sought to pull him down into the seething tide of insects below.