At long tables sat hundreds of them, gnawing on glistening roasts that smelled of man flesh and drinking soured mjod from leaden lanxes. Ranks of hairy backs hunched over their meals. Many wore leather harness, a few coats of mail. Their weapons were leant together in neat conical stacks at the ends of each table, and they were huge and brutal, though the man-wolves surely did not require weapons; their teeth and claws would be sufficient to kill a great white bear.

The odour of kennels assailed Russ' nose. The smell was similar to that in the Aett at a gathering of the Great Companies, but far stronger and with an elusive odour of sickness, as of animals confined too long and grown distempered from it.

At the head of the hall was a dais upon which was another table, this one set transversely. In a hall of men, the space behind the high table would be screened off into separate rooms to quarter the jarl and his family, but this was no human hall and there were no rooms. The floor was ice, not earth covered with reeds. There were no domestic tools or utensils. No weavings to block the cold. No skins to rest on. Gnawed bones were piled where, in the Verse, children would sit to listen to the stories of their elders. The walls were scored with claw marks. There was no comfort in this Underverse aett, only meat, ice and fire.

The king of this place was a great black wolf bigger than all the others, so massive he barely fit in his throne, and hulked over the table as if on the verge of hurling it in rage. He ignored the primarch, and conferred with his jarls through mouthfuls of bloody flesh. On the board before him and his warriors was a long wooden platter. Already mostly consumed, the animal that provided this lord's meat was obvious from the delicate finger bones picked clean and piled upon the wood, and the long, flat shape of the body.

In front of the table lay a sleeping wolf of the more usual kind, though even by the standards of Fenris it was enormous. Like all the other wolves in the room, it was ill-defined, as if composed of shadow and not of flesh.

The sole thing of any craftsmanship within the room was a great spear held horizontally to the wall behind the king by a pair of iron brackets.

The Spear of the Emperor. Russ' own accursed weapon.

Russ strode up to the fire. When dealing with wights and fell beings a man should never display fear. The truth of this had been shown to the primarch many times.