‘We just want to deliver our warning and then be on our way,’ said Hendrick. ‘I can see something’s got your militia jumpy, but honestly, captain, I don’t even know what you think we might be complicit in.’

‘I hope that’s true,’ she said as the carriage began to slow. ‘Because I’m about to put you in front of the ruler of the city, and if you harbour any hostile intent whatsoever you’ll soon be found out and drowned in scaldwater for your troubles.’

Hendrick and his companions stepped down from the carriages to find themselves on the edge of a wide plaza, surrounded by magnificent buildings, patrolled by tabarded militiamen and lit by copious ornate lamps. Hendrick saw a column-fronted structure, huge and boxy with statues of Stormcast Eternals battling daemons running along its frontage. There was a great structure of glass and banded iron, lit from within and housing what looked like a captive jungle. Tall mansion houses jostled one another self-importantly along one edge of the plaza, and beyond them through the rain Hendrick could see another, lower wall with its own ramparts, towers and patrolling guards.

However, his attention skated from these lesser sites of magnificence to the awe-inspiring monolith that reared over all of it on the plaza’s eastern edge.

‘The Palace of the Regent Militant,’ said Captain Morthan, sounding, Hendrick thought, somewhat sardonic.

The palace looked more like a castle or fortified cathedral, its buttressed walls and high towers wrought in black and white marble and gleaming gold. Beautifully worked frescoes decorated its walls. Braziers burned all over the structure, making it glow like a star brought to earth, and Hendrick could smell incense and hear plainsong floating from within.

He couldn’t help but notice an especially prominent fresco of a heavily-thewed warrior in the robes of a Sigmarite novice, striking the head from a grotesque Chaos champion directly above the palace’s main doors.

‘The regent militant?’ he guessed, gesturing. Captain Morthan snorted.

‘In his younger days, he was quite the hero,’ she said. ‘Now, come on, I sent Lieutenant Grange ahead with word of your coming. We’re expected.’

They might well have been expected, but that didn’t mean they were considered important. After being marched through the piously opulent interior of the palace, Hendrick and his retinue wound up in a richly appointed ante-chamber to await their audience. Under the stares of the watchmen and the gold-robed palace guards, surrounded by beautiful crystal lanterns, ornate furnishings and religious statuary and artworks, Hendrick became more conscious than ever of his and his companions’ appearance.

They dripped rainwater onto the thick crimson rugs and tracked marsh-mud across them. They looked ragged, patched and dirty. He was in little doubt from the expressions of their guards that the Swords of Sigmar could all have used a bath, not just Bartiman.