Beneath and below the unholy MudCombs, wretched in their crumbling filth, a soot-painted figure glided, a phantom that seemed to wear two skins, one forming to his muscles, the other clinging to his joints, as if the man was an ape-shaped snake shedding last season’s skin—and perhaps he was.

In the pitch stinking black of the MudMaze night his bare foot felt a bed of upturned rust spikes, torn from the ancient ruins and turned up to catch a skulker such as he. He counted them twelve deep as he stretched his stride over the board, touching each rusty spike to a calloused footpad.

As he reached the doorway beyond, into the den where the remaining hounds were kept—the hounds that might foil his womb-brother, Trek, if allowed to live—he heard the confused whimper of big dog and small, most importantly of the two flap-eared sniffer hounds. With dagger and knife he danced among them in the dark, piercing brain and slicing throat. Within a few heart beats only a gurgling whine could be heard, the subdued yelps having barely roused the stupid Mudder who had bedded down with a brown roundhead boy in the next chamber.

The man’s blood splashed on the den floor before his foot touched down, with Dusk darting off behind him as he died upright, hands to gushing neck and bubbling throat.

The roundhead boy died with a dagger through his skull as he pulled on his loincloth, and Dusk darted down the long crooked corridors that whispered of an elder age gone mad, an age when right-acting men such as himself had been slaves to a bitch goddess who had betrayed her father to the fiends of Hel…

A man fell against a wall, his neck spurting out his lifeblood even before his bladder had drained. He had been a tall, smelly Mudder—a chief of their kind, one of the four remaining.

Dusk crept onward as he took mental inventory of the enemy:

There were three bands trailing them. The hounds had all been attached to this band. The hounds were accounted for, his life well-spent.

The Mudders would increasingly give them problems now that their hounds were slain. They were hounds themselves.

The battle bands trailed behind, two of them, fifty strong each.

This hound band, though, it still had teeth. There were a good two dozen round-headed browns with their bows and arrows, and still three Mudders with their wolfish stride and long steely knives to hunt his brothers. He must account for the Mudders, or at least the broad muscular one that bore the twin axes on his back. That fellow could cause havoc among his brothers, he mused as he glided soundlessly down the corridor before the dimly lit court where the Mudders camped in the gloom of the overhanging MudComb. They or one of their number he must take—

“Hombre Noche,” he hissed as he heard the footfall next to him. Then, as two white black-pointed eyes and a row of grinning dagger-pointed teeth were illuminated by the creeping moonlight, their knives were out, his dagger pinning the large broad thigh and his knife opening the collarbone where the throat had been a moment ago.

He was well positioned for the return knife cut and the upward rip with the dagger. However, his arms failed to move, his body declining to pivot as the big black man stepped behind him splashing his blood on the floor as his long keen knives withdrew from Dusk’s chest and he fell, with his breath gusting out with the blood, not from his mouth, but from the knife-rends in his breast.

His thought was of falling, his senses never experiencing the landing as he tumbled into Hel, mistaken for a failed Mudder, pursued by their queen’s fiends for eternity.

The ravens would know.