They call themselves The Tithes, a flock of robed and masked scavengers clothed in stitched-together tapestries of feather and cloth. They bear the smell of cinder-oil and flamer wash, their breath sour with litanies unspoken since the founding of the Redemptionist fires. They worship the Sheen birds — carrion fowl with iridescent oil-slick feathers that haunt the spires and scrapyards of the hive’s deepest recesses. Where others see vermin, The Tithes see angels. They believe each Sheen bird carries the soul of a fallen martyr, a whispering messenger sent by the Emperor to guide the worthy.

Their leader, Grift, was once a priest in good standing within the Cawdor orthodoxy. A firebrand and chainsword-saint who strode into the darkness with gospel and flame, tasked to purge a suspected xeno-heretic enclave near the fringes of Brigstowe’s broken shell. What he found instead was Rush.

A woman — which in itself was blasphemy enough. But more than that, she was listened to. Surrounded by a clutch of Sheen birds, she moved through scrapheaps as if the refuse obeyed her. Her flock brought her trinkets — glinting bits of relic-metal and tech fragments long since corroded — and she whispered back in tongues not taught by any sanctioned catechism.

Grift’s faith broke that day. Or perhaps it molted.

He and Rush slaughtered his fellow missionaries in a rain of flame and steel. The fire echoed through the sump-cracked hollows like the scream of a newborn. Together they birthed The Tithes — a gang that preaches not just the burning of heresy, but the veneration of what others discard. They reject the rigid male-only hierarchy of Cawdor, embracing the doctrine that the Emperor’s will is not only fire and blood, but found in whispering rust and feather-flecked shadow.

They call themselves a murder, in the old Low Gothic term for a group of crows. Every member wears a bird’s skull — bleached or tar-stained — upon their brow or mask, some claiming the spirit of their guiding martyr rests within it. Their language is half litany, half birdcall, and wholly unnerving.

Rush, the First Tithe and zealot deacon, remains a figure of awe and fear even among her kin. Her eviscerator is named Nestbreaker, its teeth clotted with the bones of blasphemers and the bold. She leads charges like a comet, trailing Sheen birds in her wake like black smoke.

Perch, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, once survived a duel with a Van Saar ambusher by shooting out the man’s optic array with a single reclaimed bullet. Her autogun is stitched with feather charms and her left eye glows faintly — a “gift” from a relic shard uncovered beneath the dome.

Haist, youngest among them, fights like he’s trying to earn the Sheen birds’ notice. His maul, a railway piston engraved with devotional glyphs, speaks louder than he does.

And then there are the bone pickers — Tad, Foot, Lean, Tooth, and Claw — five half-starved scavengers with hollow eyes and nimble hands. They move like whispers through the wreckage, leaving only blood and stripped brass behind. Clad in stitched shrouds of netting and greasecloth, they are relic-thieves, flesh-cleaners, and quiet executioners. Some say Tad can speak to the birds, though never when asked. Claw keeps a necklace of fingers he claims were “offered.” Tooth hisses prayers between gnaws of bone. Lean hasn’t spoken since a blast from a squat grav-rifle sheared off half his jaw. And Foot, limping and cracked from sump-fever, never stops moving — his steps always tracing slow spirals around the rest.

Their loyalty to Grift is absolute. They were the first to kneel before him in the ashes of his broken faith — and the first to set fire to what remained.

The Tithes have staked their claim in the eastern rim of Brigstowe, carving shrines from wreckage and nesting high in the shell-wrecks of derelict manufactora. There they wage a holy war against the pretender cults: Tzeentchian sorcerers who twist fate like molten plastek, Genestealer filth who birth monsters in the flesh, brutish Goliaths who tear down what they cannot understand, and Van Saar tech-priests who dare to mock the sanctity of rust with silicon precision. Even a squat expeditionary team was found drowned in promethium, a Sheen bird perched on each blackened skull.

But it is the Cawdor Redemptionists who hunt them most zealously. To them, The Tithes are an infection — heresy feathered and laughing in the dark. More than once, entire purging bands have descended into Brigstowe to root them out. None have returned.

Yet in the deeper places of the hive, feather-trails are found on sanctified altars, and birdcall echoes in empty cathedra.

The murder grows.