‘Watchman,’ snapped Helena. ‘What about Posver? Why do you need me?’ The watchman’s eyes snapped back to her as though she had just remembered where she was.

‘Captain, about ten minutes after your conversation with him, Enwin Posver purchased a second bottle of drakesbreath from his usual vendor on Wagon Lane. I followed him as per your instructions, and he returned to the square. I expected… he… Captain, Posver began shouting about a moon, so loud and frantic that I moved to pacify him as he was alarming the city folk. Before I could reach him, Posver emptied the contents of the bottle over himself then lit it on fire. I rushed to him, pushed him into the fountain, but it was too late. He’s dead, captain.’

Helena shook her head in mute horror. She’d known poor Old Posver a long while and, though he had come out with some impressive rants in his time, she’d never seen him so much as raise a hand in violence, to himself or any other.

What did you see? she heard herself asking him again. Enwin, what’s coming? What did you see…?

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

CLOUDS

Olt Shev pushed past a screen of ashenpine boughs. He stared through the rain, across a stretch of fuming marshland, at the city they had come to save.

Or warn.

Or fleece?

He wasn’t entirely clear on the details. Olt struggled with subtleties of the Azyrite languages, which shared only an ancient base root with his own Pyremouth Tribe dialect. Hendrick had definitely ordered the Swords of Sigmar to Draconium, though, Olt had made sure of that much when he rejoined the party south of Stonehallow.

Olt was tall and wiry, and if he was honest with himself only his scraggly brown beard stopped him looking about twelve kindlings of age. His spare frame was covered with tribal tattoos that depicted raging fire-deities and sigils of arcane warding, and all flowed into the screaming pyreskull design that covered most of his face beneath his short-hacked hair. He wore furs and leather armour scavenged from a dozen dead, wore a pair of curve-hafted axes at his belt that could be wielded or flung with equal ease, and bore a patchwork of scars and obsidian piercings across his flesh. In all, he was an alarming sight to the majority of civilised folk; there was a reason he had chosen to remain in his native wilds, rather than brave the small and fearful minds of Stonehallow.

‘No avoiding this place, though,’ he muttered to himself glumly. ‘Chief isn’t going to let me stay beyond the walls this time. Why these Heav’ners can’t learn to read their own maps I don’t know. They’d get lost in a sulphur swamp in a day without me, though.’