Speaker 1: The Scum Kings, created and written by Mike Daltrey. The
air in the room was thick with the aftershock of
my rage. Rat lay wheezing on the floor where I
dropped him, his eyes wide with the terror that I
had put there. The others were silent, their gazes averted.
I had reasserted my dominance, and the only way I
knew how, by finding the weakest neck in the room
and squeezing. It was a hollow, ugly feeling, but for
a moment the world made sense again. My fury was spent,
leaving behind a cold, familiar emptiness. My eyes scanned the room,
taking stock of my broken kings, and my gaze fell
on Stiggand he was in the darkest corner, sitting on
a straw pallet, his massive frame slumped in on itself.
I had expected to see him simmering, his hands clenching
and unclenching, his jaw tight with the need for revenge.
The man I had pulled out of that fighting pit
and Tarhaven would have been smashing his fists against the
stone wall, roaring for another chance to die fighting. But
this was a different man, a ghost. He was quiet, utterly,
unnervingly quiet, his axe lay on the floor beside him, forgotten.
He was just staring down at his own hands, at
the bruised and split knuckles that had won him a
hundred fights. He looked at them, not with a warrior's pride,
but with a deep and profound confusion, as if there
were foreign objects that had failed him in some fundamental way.
He couldn't comprehend. I understood then that his pride was
more wounded than my own. My pride was about power,
about being the leader. His was about strength, about the
code of combat. He had been beaten once before at
the caravan raid, but that was a crossbow bolt from
the dark. It was the luck of the fight. This
was different. We hadn't lost a fight. There hadn't been
a fight. Corvin's men hadn't fought with passion or rage
or the thrill of battle. They had moved with the cold,
detached efficiency of men putting down livestock. There was no
honor in it, no contest of will. They hadn't defeated
a warrior. They had simply dismantled a threat. They had
treated stiggand the strongest of us all like an object
to be contained. They had stripped him of his personhood,
and in doing so they had broken something inside him
that no simple beating ever could. The silence stretched heavy
and suffocating. It was Cob who finally broke it. Timidly, cautiously,
he shuffled over to the big Northmen, holding out a
dirty cup filled with water. It was a small, kind
gesture in a room that had just seen too much cruelty.
Stiggan didn't move for a long time. Then slowly he
looked up. His eyes, usually blazing with life and laughter,
were clouded over with a troubling, unfamiliar sadness. He took
the cup, his movements slow and heavy. He stared into
the cup for a moment, then spoke, his voice, a low,
gravelly mutter, stripped of all its booming energy. They didn't
even fight like men, he said, his words, landing in
the quiet room like stones. It was like butchery.