“Thunderer, hear me

Take my hammer song—

While they spear me

Forge it in storm—

So, when my shade flits free

You might cleanse the world with your song,

A song, they might say, that began with me.

-Singe Forgeson’s Prayer

“What shall we do?”

That womanly grumble of his still vexed him. Thus he had come here to trade life for death dearly among the things that had occupied his life in such a toilsome way.

“What shall we do?” he hissed into the looking glass before which he had often forged battle steel and home iron from the vast twisted ruins of the MudCombs.

In the time Before the Coming of Ice on her cosmic sled of grinding purity, cleansing the land of the human filth of the Elder Age, such places as this had risin in great humming hives, each housing more of the damned in one of its towers than now numbered the souls of the entire world. Raised from the mud of creation, to house the intestinal mud of mankind, these places were now—when they yet stood—nothing but ochre-stained combs barely rising far enough to stroke Tunderer’s beard on the foggiest of days, when his spirit hung low and wet in the morning sky.

He had once used this glass backed by chalk metal to better check the edge of his works—of which the great swords were most highly honored. Once, it was said, the priestesses of wicked Hel, who did rule the world in the Elder Age, used these devices to assess their own beguiling beauty. He wished now, as he assessed the features and fitness of the man in the hellish reflection, that somewhere, in Her sulfurous pits, among the accumulated detritus of ages, that each and every one of those long dead queens of savagery could look up into the ceiling of Hel’s hideous grotto and see the reflection—of this ugly worn out bastard and think it were their face!

That would be vengeance sweet, to the plucking tune of a gut-chord song.

The man was taller than normal, bent of back from years over the scrap forge, missing three fingers on the left hand, stringy of leg, well-belted with two short broad throwing knives, armored in a cured buffalo hide vest laired with mudcomb bone, a stout round mudcomb shield laired sevenfold thick hanging high on his back, his two iron maws hanging from his harness hooks and swinging below his arms.

The forearms were massed cords of muscle, burned and scarred from toil, as were the upper arms thick. He knew though, that beneath that vest, was a sunken chest, a weakening heart that had not been able to turn his pisser into a bone for a full winter. His great sweep of forked gray beard and twist of mustache, could not hide the hollowness of the haggard face from which they sprouted like weeds from the MudCombs in which he had laid his ambush.

He looked hard into the hollow sockets and hollow glass eyes sunken under that bison horn helmet, and grumbled, “If you don’t drag twenty to Hel’s pit you shall be cursed to sink below the Mudworm, and never see the Nightland, to, for eternity, lick her fetid slit! You have earned Reverent Chandler a day with your ruse—pound him out another day; trade Time—breath for death—hammer on fang!”

A whimper of a scent-caught hound came echoing to his ears down the winding corridors of this twisted place, lit only by the forge fire smoldering beneath the false floor above…