Cull reclined under a swamp of Mud gut-filth, wondering if this was the hour, if the time had come. He could not let them pass, would not suffer this humiliation without taking his soul toll. There had not been a Mud or a Mudder crapping, vomiting or pissing on the heap of seeping bubbling reek above him—through which he breathed with the artful straw as hellish, and no doubt brown, urine stung his eyes—for, for, how long had it been?

A plank, a plank had just been set down to cover—no, he would not be entombed!

With a heaving effort of his great filth-soaked frame Cull pushed upward on elbows capped in iron, coming to his iron shod knees as steaming filth sloughed from his brown bear hide shoulders banded in iron like snow from an ice bear’s back. Spitting out the sodden straw, he gurgled a low hissing snarl of rage as a squatting Mudder—tall and black as a shadow in the moonlight—gasped through his pointed teeth and the great steel hook of the Nords arced up out of the pit of filth and sank with a pleasing pop into his supple scales of thickset muscle.

But muscle never stood before steel, and that perfect abdominal wall rent with an ear-soothing tear, like a wench ripping cloth for bandages. The Mudder looked into his reddened filth-stung eyes with panicked orbs of moon white surrounding motes of black and sought to flee, unarmed as he was, twisting and turning and running on all fours away from the mighty up swung axe that “kchunked” into the ancient clay matted floor as the big Mudder scampered off with a nimbleness that Cull found disappointing in such a big man.

The Mudder bastard might have escaped the axe, but he was sure-hooked axe food. Even as the Mudder reached the doorway to the long corridor washed in moonlight through a gap in the roof, Cull gave a mighty tug of his iron shod hook-mounted arm, even as he pulled himself out of the filth pit by the haft of the floor-sunk axe.

“Gggrrr!” he snarled low and deep, as the voice of the Mudder, halted now in his progress by the tug on his intestines that trailed out behind him for a good double pace, stolen from within, according to the pitiless tug on his gut-chords.

“Gggrrr!” Cull snarled as the shit flowed from his armored hide in sheets and the Mudder clutched at his torn belly to reel in his guts, and kicked at the hook caught in the long bunched knot of intestines halfway between he and Cull.

Cull yanked the twice triple-weight, and sinisterly bearded, axe from the floor, a weapon heavier than most Nords could wield in two good hands, a weapon so heavy as to need no back spike. He tugged ardently on the gut-tangle caught in his lucky Mud-hooking appendage even as he raised the terrible cleaving thing on high and lurched forward, still getting his stiff legs under him.

The Mudder responded with the cowardice of the woman, as well as the cunning of the kayot, letting go his belly and permitting his guts to reel out behind him as he fled to give warning to his fellows.

Cull, grudgingly respectful of the bug-eyed death flight of the gutted manhound, let fly the terrible axe of the Nords in one languid hurl, the massive weapon making a half revolution and hammering in the back of the wooly head with the top of the iron haft-tang with an unremarkable “sclitch.”

He walked dripping and clacking, his bear clawed battle socks, banded in iron and steel, betraying his presence in the mudmaze.

Right camped the chiefs and their Mudders.

Left bedded down the Muds in their many hel-shrouds.

Cull was a slayer.

The chiefs and manhounds would come to salvage their warbands, and he would welcome them.

To his left branched the hall down one lonely corridor, where a campfire wavered in the dank inner distance of this festering sore on the pockmarked face of the ravaged world. He would work out his kinks here.

Striding furiously, simmering in his mind over his defilement, he strode into a four by five pace chamber occupied by five Muds rising from their places, where they had been tossing gems in some game of chance. They were startled, seizing up shields and drawing machetes, donning helmets, jabbering in their accursed way.

A shrill cry split the dank air of the chamber and flowed around him like a wench’s ravished scream.

In response Cull’s lungs roared his bear roar and sent an arm holding a machete whirling across the butcher’s stall that had once been a camp, the back swing of his axe shattering a plank shield and hurling the squealing owner limp against the wall. His great hook ripped up into the groin of a third mouthful of axe food and lifted the wretch screaming in glorious soul-soothing agony as he cleaved into its jabbering head with The Axe Who Knew, The Axe True, The Axe Who Ate rightfully of its rancid food—feasting greedily as its wielder sang the Blood Song of the Nords…