‘You want pleasant, go back to the inn,’ said Borik, stomping away past a gaggle of cloaked city folk who were hauling a cart down the cobbled street. Rainwater sluiced about its wheels, splashing up their legs, and Aelyn believed she could almost see the wood of the cart smouldering where the acidic rainwater worried at it.

‘Why did Varlen hire him again?’ asked Romilla as she and Aelyn set off after the duardin.

‘The big gun,’ replied Aelyn.

‘Of course,’ said Romilla, and Aelyn fancied she could hear the priest rolling her eyes.

Eleanora VanGhest sat at her workbench, enjoying peace, an absence of other people and the familiar comfort of a workshop. Hendrick had instructed her to go and take advantage of the facilities in the Ironweld Guildhouse to which Captain Morthan had granted her access. It had been all Eleanora could do not to run there flat out, and she had returned every day since. Hendrick would call on her if they needed her skills. It had been turnings since the Swords of Sigmar had last worked out of a civilised location, and while the presence of her friends and her bag of tools gave Eleanora familiar touchstones with which to reassure herself, the uncertainty and anarchic conditions had made her ever more unsettled.

Of course, there had been stares and mutters when she entered the guildhouse. There always were. Eleanora had endured the unfriendly scrutiny of artisans and engine-smiths ever since her father had first brought her in to test for the Ironweld Academy in Hammerhal Ghyra. She found their glares uncomfortable, and of course there had been more than one such supposed man of learning willing to impede her progress simply because of her gender.

That sort of thing had typically just been an inconvenience for her; Eleanora couldn’t really connect with most people, couldn’t empathise with the unfriendly engineers around her, and so their discomfort at her presence didn’t increase or decrease her own in any meaningful way. And even the most obstreperous old-guard master couldn’t deny her ability with mechanisms and machinery. It was as though the pieces already fitted together in her mind’s eye.

She had never been able to articulate any of this to her proud but frustrated father, or to the jealous peers who had eventually torched her workshop and caused her expulsion from the Academy. Eleanora’s father had died in that blaze, as had several other engineers, and after the entire thing had been pinned on her supposed carelessness, Eleanora had been exiled.