‘Oh, Sigmar save us,’ exclaimed Hendrick as they rounded the end of a table and came into sight of the regent militant through the scattered crowd. Here, those first infected seemed to have completed whatever horrifying transformation was overtaking them. Their jaws had stretched and cracked, yellow tusks forcing their mouths open and allowing froth to pour constantly over their blackened gums. Purple veins stood out all over skin gone waxy pale and somehow spongy, like the flesh of a mushroom. A pack of five were hunched over several more feastgoers and one of the regent militant’s aelven guards; by the busy way their jaws were working and the wet crunching sounds they were making, they were enjoying an entirely different feast of their own.

Beyond them, Hendrick got a fleeting glimpse of Selvador lying spreadeagled on his back, chest bulging as though he had breathed in as far as he could, eyes rolling and more glowing motes billowing up from his mouth.

Then the spore-sickened realised that he and Romilla were there, and spun with vicious howls. They charged as one, scrambling and leaping like simian monsters. The first fell to a thunderous blow from Hendrick’s club, the second to a meteoric impact from Romilla’s hammer. The priest reversed her momentum and brought the weapon back down to crack the skull of another luckless feastgoer, while Hendrick grabbed the fourth by the throat before it could leap and stove the side of its head in with his club.

He hurled the body aside and looked for the last one. He got a fleeting impression of a crouching figure atop the table to his left and spun in that direction, raising his guard. It was pure instinct, and Hendrick’s eyes widened as he realised his mistake a moment too late. Warm, putrid slime hit him in a gushing torrent. It spewed into his eyes. It squirted up his nostrils. It spattered into his mouth as he cried out in horror.

Instantly, Hendrick’s body prickled with fever-sweat. He felt something wrench inside him, something bilious and squirming that began in his guts and spread through every fibre of his body like poison. Hendrick spat a lukewarm mouthful of someone else’s vomit, feeling his own gorge rise at the sensation.

‘Hendrick!’ he heard Romilla’s yell of shocked horror, but it was as though it echoed to him from the other end of a tunnel that was growing longer and darker by the second.

‘Romilla… get… away from…’

His mind wasn’t with her anymore, wasn’t in the receding chamber with its echoing screams and dim shadows of pandemonium. Hendrick was in the darkness, searching, staring, feeling something rushing up towards him along the tunnel like a warm wind or a tide rising. He thought he could see something down there, something that glowed with pallid light, something with staring eyes of jaundiced yellow and a leering maw full of fangs.