Nord was cloaked in a shawl of papa scalps and war chief locks draped over his shoulders and hung from his iron helmet by his departing brothers. Behind him, into the tree to his back, were stuck three axes of the throwing weight, and one of the back-spiked kind. Under his hanging shield arm was sheathed his great broad knife, as long and broad as Cull’s forearm, sharpened to a keen notched edge by Singe before the others marched home.

The red sun blinked like a coal out of the darkening west, illuminating this fallen field for his one good eye, the right one, the one that lined up with his throwing arm.

They came to the place that could not be given, jaws dripping.

The sniffers, hair sleek and reddish, ears flopping—two of them—leapt the dead, sniffing the air above for the living, unable to make him out with their dim eyes in the falling dusk, his back to the tree, but smelling his breath like Hel sniffing out a sinking shade to dine upon on its way to Nightland. They brought what must come to release his soul to Nightland on raven wings.

The sniffers, he would not spend his life on these. Trek would deal with them in his own cunning way.

The runners, two by two, surged ahead on each flank, hurdling the dead in the bounding way, more beautiful in their gate than any wolf. They would be coming in from his flank while the sniffers stood back and yelped, giving his location to those who would come. Their gray brindle coats, long sleek snouts, gracile bodies warped by man’s interfering hands into an unparalleled beast of the chase, struck a melancholy note among his belly chords. How he would have liked to pet one, to throw a bone for it to chase.

The runners could await the knife.

Between the now lagging sniffers, baying and bounding high, and the astoundingly swift runners forward and outward, loped the lanky crunchers, one to each flank, mighty-snouted beasts, as heavy as a man, who had been known to crush arms and heads in their jaws. They did not slash with fangs like a true wolf, but bit and broke bone, bearing their prey to ground so that the lesser hounds might rip it to living shreds.

These two, one to left, one to right, must die.

At the heels of the loping crunchers scurried the low, thick-muscled rippers with their double-hinged jaws, sleek black coats and slathering tongues flapping even as their beady eyes fixed on his form with singular intensity. When he went down, they would be upon him in a surging, ripping mass—flat-faced wolves of the Mud Lands come to feed on his dying body. They scurried over the heaped bodies of friend and foe, with no thought of carrion in their tiny brains, for only the living did they eat.

They could not be stopped, near ten in number as they were.

Behind the sniffers, at the point of the advancing inverted spearhead, ran the tall, black-skinned, Mudder Hound, one of the human beasts kept by the papas. His long knots of thick braided hair bounced, weighted with human teeth, finger bones adoring his armlets, a black leather bound codex of the papas strapped to his chest as a kind of armor, great hollow eyes regarding Nord with a vicious hunger, his pointy teeth lining his open mouth with vile intent, a needle knife in either hand.

Nord lost his composure at the sight of a human enemy. He had time to throw two axes, not the four behind him. Snatching the first, he heaved it straight away at the Mudder, tumbling once under the great iron weight of its head even as Nord’s left testicle fell within his girdle with a burning rush singing down his inner thigh. The oak axe handle revolved again over the heavy iron head, and again, as Nord grabbed the other axe in hand and they closed.

The Mudder was taken full in the codex, the leather bound sheaf of parchment blasphemies saving the runner from instant death, but knocking him flat on his back. As the Mudder went down Nord’s second axe flew from his hand and in a single revolution split the slathering face of the right-most cruncher, which fell and writhed with a mewing yelp—and they were upon him!

Slashing, piercing fangs sought his heel tendons through his bison hide boots. Ripping jaws tore out gobs of flesh from his bare thighs as the horrid little rippers flowed up his legs like so many worm-shades from Hel.

A great slathering mouth closed on his face, avoiding the bison horns on his helmet and clamping from ear to ear as the big paws rested on his shoulders, threatening to drive him on failing part-eaten legs to ground.

There was no way to reach the knife under his pinned shield, so he wrenched free the battleaxe and sank the heavy steel head into the spine of the cruncher, which fell in two pieces, taking Nord’s left ear with it down to Hel’s dismal abode.

The sun blinked reddish in the distance, inspiring him even as he planted the back spike of the axe into the head of a runner, which caused his guts to burst open under his hardened leather girdle, pining it to the tree behind him.

He no longer felt the pain of his shattered arm. His legs, which they feasted and tugged upon, where mere numb organ pipes through which the sound of some distant half-heard song echoed.

The Mudder was rising even as Nord was being dragged down.

Nord dropped the back-spiked axe—poor for throwing—and wrenched free the last of the throwing axes as they ate of him from the ankles up and dragged him down inch by inch. He heaved the heavy weapon, only to see it fly off to the right as his body was transfixed by a hurled spear that pinned him with such force to the tree that he was stuck fast, his legs being stripped to the bone, his bison hide boots already in tatters as his ankle bones were gnawed noisily between ravening jaws.

He could not speak, could not breathe.

The end was upon him.

Defiantly, if only in his mind, he screamed at the advancing Mudder, “By the Hair of Your Papas,” and drew his knife, shearing off a ripper head with the draw cut, lopping off the spear haft a foot before his belly, cleaving away a runner snout with a backhand, biting deep into the back of a thigh eating ripper with a chopping forehand, and then, as the ugly Mudder ran both of his knives into Nord’s chest, cut that tangle-headed grinning skull of black from its spurting neck with the fairest backhand he had ever sent a head to Hel with.

And they ate on—snarling, growling, seething, slathering and snapping—heedless of their black master’s fate, hungry only for the flesh of a fading Nord, a man known to his brothers by the name of his people, a man whose shade sang out over the Mud River far above Hel’s hateful worm, to streak into the Nightland beneath the wings of a great one-eyed raven…