At last, feeling exhausted but somehow cleansed, Romilla leaned back and looked at Eleanora. The engineer’s hair was still plastered to her face with old sweat, but her fever had broken, and the black lines had vanished from beneath her skin.

‘Let me see your leg,’ said Romilla, then winced at the sight. Fire had burned Eleanora’s flesh, but it looked to have done so many weeks ago, not mere minutes. On closer inspection Romilla realised that she could find no sign beneath the gnarled and silvered scar tissue of the corruption that had been spreading there before. Instead, she realised with growing wonderment, the burns on Eleanora’s leg described a jagged, scything pattern that wound around her injured limb from foot to thigh.

‘Lightning,’ breathed Romilla.

‘It aches, but not like before,’ said Eleanora in bewilderment.

‘And your fever is gone.’

‘How can that possibly be?’ asked Eleanora.

Romilla held up her hammer amulet for Eleanora to see. It was cracked right down the middle, and its blue glow was gone. They stared at one another in mute astonishment, and even Eleanora, for once, could offer no rationalisation for what had happened. Romilla looked up at the crumbling ruin of the pipehouse, at the place where, by rights, she and Eleanora should have died.

‘Let us get out of this awful place,’ she said to Eleanora. ‘Can you walk on that leg?’ The engineer took a few tentative steps, wincing with pain, then nodded and picked up another twisted spar of metal to serve as a makeshift shiv.

‘We need to find our friends,’ she replied.

Walking the streets of Draconium in the light of that blessed evening was the most surreal experience of Romilla’s life. All around her was the evidence of slaughter, destruction and butchery. Bodies lay in chewed heaps. Buildings lay in ruin, or slumped crumbling and broken across the streets. Yet the Bad Moon was gone, banished, Romilla assumed, by Sigmar’s divine might. Or perhaps it had simply turned its gaze elsewhere when its worshippers’ plans were undone, she thought; if the gods of Chaos could be so fickle, could discard their followers’ lives so lightly when they were not appeased, then why not the gods of the greenskins? For surely the Bad Moon must be a foul god. What other being could have wreaked so much unnatural misery and ruin?

‘The fungi are entering an accelerated state of decomposition,’ Eleanora said as they limped down a cobbled street between shattered shop-fronts. Romilla saw she was right; everywhere she looked, foul toadstools were bubbling with rot and collapsing into blackened slurry.

‘Perhaps they cannot live without the light of the Bad Moon,’ she suggested.

‘Good, I hope they all rot,’ said Eleanora with more venom than Romilla had ever heard in her voice. ‘The fungi, the insects, the greenskins, all of it. And I hope the Bad Moon suffers worst of all.’