“Her Ice grinds the worldfilth away,

Driving us like snow before the gust,

Pushing us south under the raven-eyed gaze

Of He whose breath is the gust,

Into the MudMaze—

In their jabbering laments we trust.”

-Frigia and Farseer’s Wedding Song

The Mud Maze sprawled beneath him, beneath the steep ridge of worldbone that banked off to the Cumberlands, which it seemed, had once spanned the MudWorm.

The evening star—his twilight guide, friend before a hundred midnight kills—had risen.

When the NightGuide had fallen back into the inky pits of Hel, then would come his time, the time before the moon rose, illuminating the nighted world with her pale face in her morbid way.

A man of one of the oafish pursuits might call to the Farseer or to Thunderer at such a time, when the soul of a man sought its guide. But a trekker kept the way of the cunning bests and did not speak in the ways of men on the hunt—least of all when he hunted men.

They yet milled about the campfires below, at the mouths of their maze. They were not of this land, their forefathers driven from it ages ago. But where the Nords avoided the MudCombs and MudMazes, except for the weird ones of the forge and the mad mudspeakers, these lesser men of the southlands lived in like places, and were comforted by the filth and confinement. Thus they clung to this rat’s den in an alien land, trusting to the two fools he skinned in the twilight as he watched from above, from the post they were to keep fireless to fend off one of his kind, in the place where they had so freshly died even as the night lied.

The smart one was bald, his skin just the right size to wear as a disguise, a hide that would fit. He wanted dearly, though, to don mud hair, to wear the iron-oil wool of a Mudder, and so he wore that one’s whole scalp as a helmet and mask, feeling his life juice dripping with the smell of iron down his neck, nape and throat. The skin was of the right tone for the nighthunt, the hair distinctively braided and matchlessly black.

He had listened to them for an hour as they spoke back and forth, and had memorized the watchword. Now, as he gazed down upon the reeking MudMaze, he muttered the watchword, in the tone of the bald one, whose brown skin had not been dark enough, and was painted with ash grease as he muttered.

“Hombre Noche,” he whispered without mocking, over and over again, into the listening earth that had drunk their blood. He whispered in the precise cracking tone of the bald one, whose skin he wore and painted, heard for the hour of dusk—his namesake hour—as it spoke to the one who had died first and most silently at the fireless camp’s edge.

“Hombre Noche,” he whispered as he painted the brown skin black.

“Hombre Noche,” he whispered as he rolled his head under the bobbing iron-oil wool of the Mudder, the matchless runner who ran now in Hel, from the fury of her fiends, for having failed her earthward minions.

“Hombre Noche,” he whispered, as he stretched the flattish black face skin over his face and sewed it’s chin flap to his chin, the Mudder ear flaps to his ears, with wound-binding sinew, whispering with each loop, without moving his chin, “Hombre Noche.”