Only your imagination, he told himself.

Down below them, workers slaved away driving more sharpened stakes into the great pit that now lined the base of the walls. Behind them, more labourers reinforced the outer wall of the city with buttresses. Gotrek had done more than his share of supervising them. Under normal circumstances, Felix would have been hard put to believe these massive fortifications needed any augmenting. The walls of Praag were ten times as high as a man and so wide you could drive a wagon along the top. Towers bristling with siege engines spiked the walls every hundred paces or so. Felix could smell the acrid reek of alchemical fire coming from some of the towers. He shivered to think there was a weapon nearly as dangerous to its user as any enemy, but so desperate were the Kislevites that their alchemists guild had been producing it night and day since news of the invasion arrived. They were preparing containers of it for the siege engines.

To their credit, Felix thought, the Praagers and their duke had taken the news seriously. They had done everything in their power to reinforce the strength of a fortress city many thought impregnable. These monstrous outer walls were but the first line of defence. Within the city was another wall, higher and even more formidable, and above that, on a massive spike of rock jutting out of the endless plains, loomed the titanic fortress that was at once the citadel and the duke’s palace.

Felix glanced back over his shoulder. That citadel was a thing to give anyone nightmares and did as much as anything to maintain the reputation of Praag as a haunted city. Its walls were as strong as those of any Imperial fortress but they had been carved with many strange figures. Leering monstrous heads emerged from the stone. Massive tormented figures supported buttresses. Titanic dragon heads tipped tower tops. It was a work of art created by an insane sculptor. What sort of mind could have conceived and executed such a design, Felix wondered?

After the citadel, the whitewashed walls and red-tiled roofs of the rest of the city came as a relief. Even they looked strange and foreboding to Felix. The roofs were higher and steeply sloped, doubtless to let the snows of Lord Winter slide more easily off them. The temple spires were topped by minarets and onion domes. This was not the architecture of the Empire. The sight as much as the guttural accents of the soldiers around them told Felix that he was a long way from home. He felt like an outsider here. The strangeness of the city allowed his mind to give credence to the tales of horror about the place.

It was said that ever since the last siege of Praag, when the city had been sacked by the forces of Chaos, that the place had been haunted, that all manner of eerie things happened here. It was said that on certain nights when Morrslieb was full that the spirits of the dead walked the streets and that sometimes the stones of the buildings could become animated. New statues could emerge from the stone. New gargoyles appeared where none had been before. Under normal circumstances, Felix would have found this hard to believe, but there was something about the atmosphere here that told him that there was at least some truth in these old tales.