‘And what are we doing, Hendrick?’ asked Romilla as the others began to shove their way towards the exits, bellowing at those around them to do the same.

‘You know,’ he said, reaching down and wrapping both hands around the leg of a fallen bench. Hendrick’s muscles bulged like rocks under his dress shirt as he heaved at the leg, snapping it off with a loud crack of splintering wood. Hendrick hefted the three-foot club, testing its weight. It was no hammer, but it would do.

‘The regent militant,’ said Romilla, hoisting herself up onto the table and sliding off again to land next to Hendrick. The guards had let her keep the smaller warhammer she carried at her belt, on the understanding that it was purely ceremonial.

It was not.

Romilla unhooked the weapon now and brandished it, her other hand going to her hammer pendant.

‘Sigmar, lend us your strength and your protection,’ she intoned, glancing at Hendrick with serious eyes. ‘Realms know, we’re going to need it.’

The two of them made for the banqueting table beneath the pulpit where Selvador had fallen. The human herd had thinned slightly, allowing them easier passage, but that only meant that the spore-sickened could come at them all the quicker.

Hendrick saw the first one coming, scrambling along a tabletop on all fours and scattering food and cutlery in all directions as he came. The man wore a priest’s robes, but nothing holy remained in him, nor anything remotely human. His face was contorted in a rictus of hate and Hendrick realised with revulsion that the man’s flesh was covered in bulging white lumps. His teeth seemed to have elongated, also, until they resembled yellowed tusks, and his nails had twisted into jagged talons.

‘What is this?’ shouted Hendrick as the spore-sickened priest sprang at him. Hendrick swung his improvised club double-handed, throwing all his strength behind the blow. It caught the leaping man in the face with an appalling crunch of bone and a spray of blood. His momentum through the air violently arrested, the priest crashed to the floor and thrashed like a dying insect before lying still.

‘Something dreadful,’ replied Romilla, swinging her hammer in time to catch a charging nobleman in the face. Yellow teeth sprayed through the air and the nobleman crashed backwards onto a table with a tinkle of shattering glass. ‘Something unclean and corrupt. Surely something sent by the Plaguefather.’

‘Are you all right?’ Hendrick asked, sidestepping the next shrieking attacker and ramming the splintered end of his club into her gut to double her over. A brutal upward swing caught her under the jaw and flipped her onto her back, heels drumming the marble.

‘You mean can I remain stalwart in the face of Nurgle’s foul works?’ asked Romilla. She spared him a momentary glance, a pallid smile. ‘I must, for that is the task Sigmar sets before me.’