‘Where are the watchmen?’ asked Aelyn, thinking that if anyone was likely to have seen what took place, surely it would be them. Her hopes were dashed as Toftin raised a shaking hand and pointed down at the mounds of oozing sludge. Aelyn followed his gesture and felt a twinge of horror as she realised that what she had first taken to be a clotted lump of spoiled food was in fact a pale hand rising from amidst the foulness. It was as bloated as the grain, thrice the size it should have been with taut skin purple and blue, slime and worms slicking it.

‘Oh, Sigmar’s throne…’ gasped Romilla.

‘No one has dared touch the stuff, in case…’ Toftin shrugged helplessly again. ‘But no one has seen either watchman since we left last night and, well, it seems a safe assumption.’

Romilla began to pray for the departed souls of the watchmen. Borik craned over the railing to peer at the befouled grain, then looked back at Toftin with his helm-lenses glinting.

‘How much of the city’s food reserve is this?’ Borik asked.

‘There are three warehouses, each a private concern endorsed by the regent militant’s office,’ said Toftin as though reciting from a script. ‘You’re stood in the main warehouse for Grange Grain. The Hazyrtein and O’Phennik families own the others.’

‘About a third, then,’ said Borik, turning back to the railing with a grunt. ‘Anyone know if it’s like this at the other warehouses?’

Aelyn hadn’t thought Toftin could look any more alarmed, but the thought clearly hadn’t occurred to him and now he turned white as a sheet.

‘Do you think it could be?’ he asked. Aelyn could see fear for the city warring with the selfish thought that, if all the warehouses had suffered a similar fate, he would not receive sole blame when fingers began to point. None of them answered, too busy staring down aghast at the slime-ridden crops.

Romilla concluded her prayers for the dead. ‘What now?’ she asked. ‘There’s no way that this is natural. Is it the work of the Plaguefather, do you think?’

Aelyn heard the careful control in Romilla’s voice. The priest had never fully recounted what happened to the army she accompanied out of Azyrheim all those years before, but Aelyn knew that it had been some curse of Nurgle that had spread through their ranks.

Romilla alone had survived.

The experience had plunged her into a crisis of faith, a spiralling descent into alcoholism and self-abuse in the slums of Hammerhal Aqsha that had almost been the death of her. Varlen, Hendrick and Aelyn had pulled her from her pit of self-recrimination and despair and helped her to find her faith and purpose again. Still, the priest’s horror at disease and decay remained, a spiritual canker that she could only keep locked away behind ironclad gates of faith.