Hendrick sat, closing his eyes and letting out a small sound of contentment as the warm light soaked into his skin. His head was still pounding, and his mouth had that ‘ogor’s latrine’ flavour that too much drink brought on, but he couldn’t deny the daylight felt good.

‘So, no need to state the obvious,’ he said, glancing meaningfully up at the sky.

‘Aelyn felt the change in the early hours,’ replied Bartiman. ‘She’d been out into the streets and come back before I even rose. Apparently, people have been out from first light giving thanks to Sigmar for their salvation. The shrines on Pole Hill are thronging, from what she observed.’

‘Where is she now?’ asked Hendrick.

‘Gone back out to do some more scouting,’ said Bartiman. ‘Our aelven friend doesn’t trust this sudden meteorological miracle one bit, was the impression I got.’

Hendrick’s next question was interrupted by the appearance of a serving girl, the first he had seen turn up to work at the Crown for two days. She quickly took his order of toasted oat-bread, fried runti haunch and metha, then bobbed a curtsey and hurried back inside.

‘Well the smile on her face suggests that she has no such reservations,’ said Romilla. ‘One would suspect that is true for most of Draconium’s folk.’

‘Just like that?’ asked Hendrick, frowning. ‘Days of dark omens and gruesome deaths, and suddenly the rain lets up and they’re all celebrating their salvation?’

‘The regent militant put out a decree at dawn’s first light,’ said Romilla. ‘Cryers carried it through the streets. He’s pinned everything on the Shrine of the Last Days’ Warning, and made it known that he commanded them with Sigmar’s own voice to martyr themselves, that the curse on our city might be lifted. He’s opened the gates, he’s stood down the militia… and, I mean…’ Romilla gestured at the beautiful blue sky above.

‘People whose houses were disintegrating around them will be out on their ladders with rain-wash, treating the walls and roofs, saving hearth and home,’ said Bartiman. ‘Folk who couldn’t perform their trades will be out making coin again. People who thought they were going to starve, or scald to death, or die of disease crammed into overcrowded poor-shelters, have all just breathed one great big sigh of relief and stepped out into the light of a dawn I suspect many feared they wouldn’t see.’ He gave a sudden, surprised laugh. ‘That tenacious bloody bargeman probably got let in this morning, eh?’

‘For the first time in days, I didn’t have the dream last night either,’ said Eleanora.

Hendrick blinked as he realised that his sleep, too, had been untroubled.