Their brief had explained that the previous tunnel dug into the Alchemists’ Guild had collapsed by the time the watchmen arrived. This time, that was not the case.

Hendrick rather wished it had been.

He, Olt and Bartiman stood in one of the dusty sub-basements of the guild, in a section that the alchemists themselves referred to as the bottle-shop. The chambers down here were lined with shelf upon shelf of alembics, potion bottles, cut-crystal beakers, lead crucibles and other, stranger receptacles fashioned from substances of every colour. Some of the chambers appeared to be in regular use, but further back along the corridors, the bottle-shop took on a dusty air of disuse. Too many bottles, not enough alchemists creating potions to fill them, one of the old men had explained as they led the Swords of Sigmar down into the basement.

At least the disused chambers were tidy. Not so this one. Shelves had been torn bodily from the walls. Glassware and crystal had shattered, leaving sprays of glittering debris strewn across the floor. The jagged wreckage mingled with brick dust and rubble; much of the back wall of the chamber had collapsed inwards as though forced from without. Bare earth had been left exposed, and in this yawned a noisome hole a good five feet high and just as wide.

Olt touched his throat and muttered something in his tribe’s dialect. It sounded superstitious and fearful.

‘That is truly horrible, isn’t it?’ said Bartiman, still sounding too pleased by half.

A hole would have been alarming enough, but this gaping rent gave off a reek like wet mould, spoiled soil, faeces and what Hendrick could only think of as the feet of an entire regiment after a week’s hard march. Thick tendrils of mycelium billowed from the hole’s edges to dig eager roots into the surrounding brickwork. Pale fronds drifted in a cool and stinking breeze that blew from somewhere within the black pit, and fungal blooms of a dozen rotten hues jutted from the tunnel’s walls, floor and ceiling. Several had fibrous spikes growing from them, while others resembled flyblown meat, chitinous carapace and in one case a screaming human skull. Thick-bodied white mites crawled all over the fungi and spilled out across the chamber floor.

‘You believe that the thieves came through this tunnel?’ Hendrick asked the gaggle of nervous looking alchemists packing the doorway behind them.

Several nodded in reply.

‘And you believe that they used the same tunnel as their exit?’

More nodding.

‘Has anyone explored the tunnel to see where it leads?’ Hendrick asked, expecting the shaken heads and nervous muttering that he got in response. ‘Right, then,’ he said to himself.

‘Chief, that’s the home of the bad spirits down there,’ said Olt. ‘We’re not going down there, are we?’