Speaker 1: The Scum Kings, created and written by Mike Daltrey. The
coin Corvin had given us was poison. It brought us
another day in our squalid little room, but the price
was a slow burning humiliation that settled deep in our bones.
For a man like Stiggant, it was a torment he
couldn't bear. He was a creature of action, of loud
boasts and honest violence. This quiet, simmering shame was a
cage he wasn't built for. He couldn't sit still. He
paced our small room like a great bear, his presence
making the walls feel even closer. Finally, without a word
to any of us, he turned and strode out the door.
Stay here, I ordered the others and went after him.
I was his leader, and I couldn't afford for my
most volatile weapon to go off in the middle of
Silas's kingdom without my hand on the trigger. I stayed
in his shadow as he moved through the labyrinth of
the gutters. He wasn't looking for a drink. He passed
three taverns without a glance. He wasn't looking for a woman.
He ignored the painted girls in the doorways. He was searching.
I saw it in the way his eyes scanned the crowds,
the way he dismissed the common thugs and alley brawlers.
He was hunting not for a victim, but for an equal.
He was looking for a way to wash the dishonor
of Corven's butchery off him, to find a fight that
felt like a fight, not a culling. He was searching
for a scrap of the man he used to be.
It was the sound that drew him, a low rhythmic
roar from the bowels of a run down alehouse, the
sound of a mob banged for blood. Stigging's steps quickened.
He pushed through the front room of the tavern, ignoring
the patrons, and headed for a heavy reinforced door in
the back, where a single, massive guard stood with his
arms crossed. Stiggins slapped one of his few new coppers
on the guard's palm. The man grunted and stepped aside.
I paid my own coin and followed him down a
flight of rickety wooden stairs. The air that hit us
was hot and thick, tasting of iron, sweat and cheap ale.
The cellar was a cavern packed with a hundred screaming,
shoving men, their faces, ugly and alive in the flickering torchlight.
In the center of the room, on a floor of
packed dark earth, was a circle of bloody straw. It
wasn't a ring, it was an altar. I looked at Stigant.
The dead, hollow look that had been in his eyes
since Corvin's men had pinned him was gone. In its place,
a familiar fire was rekindling. He gripped the wooden railing
that surrounded the pit, his knuckles white. He wasn't just
watching the two brutes who were currently hammering each other
into a bloody pulp. He was remembering who he was.
We had just walked into his church. The bout ended
when one man fell and didn't get back up. He
was dragged out by his feet, leaving droplets of blood
on the straw, which were added to the collection already there.
The winner, his face a mask of swollen flesh, raised
his arms to a roar from the crowd. Stigan didn't hesitate.
He pushed his way through the press of bodies, a
giant parting a sea of lesser men. He stopped before
the pit boss, a bald, heavily scarred man who looked
almost as wide as he was tall. The pit boss
looked him up and down, a purely transactional appraisal. Stigan
just pointed a thick finger at the bloody circle on
the ground. I want to fight, he growled, mut