Speaker 1: The scum Kings, created and written by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: The blade at my throat was withdrawn. Corvin gave another
one of his slight, almost imperceptible nods, and the violence
ceased as quickly as it had begun. His men released us,
their movements economical and without malice. It was the detached
efficiency of a butcher who had just stunned an ox.
Corvin didn't speak to us again. He simply gestured at
the pouch of silver sitting on the table. One of
his enforcers, a thick necked brute with dead eyes, stepped forward.
He didn't ask, he simply took it. He walked to
a nearby table, emptied the few pieces of silver onto
the wood. There were few coins, and his counting consisted
of him simply taking them all and leaving behind two
for us. He scooped to pile into a purse of
his own, then picked up one more coin from our share,
leaving a solitary solari behind clean up fee. The brute
grunted a flicker of a cruel smile on his lips.
He picked up and dropped the last coin back onto
the center of the table. It landed with a soft,
pathetic thud. Corvin's men left us in the ruin of
our own arrogance. They were ghosts, slipping back into the
shadows of the gutters, leaving only bruises and.
Speaker 3: Blood in their wake.
Speaker 2: Two of them dragged Kle's body out by the ankles,
his head bumping against the grimy floorboards, the final, undignified
journey of a man who had gambled his pride and
lost his life. The tavern was silent save for the
low moans of the wounded. The other patron studiously avoided
our gaze, turning back to their watered down ale. We
were a blight, a bad omen a lesson in the
brutal economics of this place. Sat there for a long time,
stewing in our own failure. It was Selaine who finally moved,
her face a mask of cold, controlled fury. She walked
to the table where Corvin's man had done his accounting.
A single solitary silver solari lay on the sticky, dark wood.
It gleamed in the dim light, a tiny, perfect sun
in a world of shadow. Trying to salvage some scrap
of leadership from the disaster, I cleared my throat, the
sound was.
Speaker 3: Harsh in the quiet room. All right, I said, my
voice hoarse.
Speaker 2: It's not much, but it's enough that'll buy us a
proper room and food for a week while we figure
out our next move. Selaine didn't even look at me.
Her eyes were fixed on the coin. With a slow,
deliberate movement, she reached out and picked it up. No,
she said. The word was quiet but absolute. What do
you mean no, I growled, my frustration flaring. She finally
turned her gaze to me, and her gray eyes were
like chips of ice. This coin is the reason Kale
is dead in an alley. It is the reason we
are all bruised and beaten. You flashed one of these
and brought the entire gutter down on our heads. She
held the coin between her thumb and forefinger. Spending a
solari in this place is like screaming, I have more
of these to every cutthroat within earshot. This is not
for food, It is not.
Speaker 3: For a room. Then what is it for?
Speaker 2: Stigging rumbled from his corner, his voice thick with pain.
It is a seed, Selaine said, her voice dropping to
a low, intense whisper. It is the only thing of
value we have left. It does not get spent on
daily needs, it gets planted. We will not touch it.
We will not even speak of it again until we
have a plan that guarantees a return on the investment.
Her calm, unshakable certainty was more worrying than any outburst.
She wasn't advising me. She was informing me of a
new law. It was a law I knew was wise,
even as painful as it was. I it will grow.
My words sounded weak, even as I spoke with the
voice of command. Sileen may have laid down the law,
but I was the one who approved and enforced it. Still,
she was the one who laid it down, And as
much as I knew she was right, it felt sour
in my stomach. Without another word, she took out a
clean scrap of cloth and carefully wrapped the Solari in it,
folding the edges with a jeweler's precision. She tucked the small,
precious bundle deep into a hidden pocket within her tunic,
her hand lingering over it for a second. The full
weight of our new reality crashed down upon us. We
were not just beaten and bankrupt. We were now at
odds with our We had a fortune we were forbidden
to spend a light that would attract every predator in
the dark, and a treasurer who had just put our
only hope under a lock and key of her own making.
Speaker 1: The scum Kings created and written by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: The walk back to the squalid room we'd rented was
a silent procession of the damned.
Speaker 3: We were eight.
Speaker 2: Now each man was lost in his own private hell
of ruses and humiliation. We left a trail of blood
drips on the filthy alley stones, a final pathetic tribute
to the king of the gutter. The room was a box,
smelling of old straw, damp earth, and now our own
fresh defeat. It was meant for four men, maybe for
the eight of us. It was a cage. I watched
my crew find their corners slumping onto thin pallets or
against the grimy walls. Cob was weeping softly into his hands.
Brynn stood in the darkest corner, a statue of coiled fury.
Or So was already cleaning the blood from a cut
on his cheek, his movements as detached as if he
were mending a saddle. I couldn't stand still. The four
walls were closing in, each one painted with the image
of Corvin's calm, superior smile. Every bruise on my body
screamed his name. Every sullen, downcast look from my men
was a reflection of my own failure.
Speaker 3: I had led them to this.
Speaker 2: I had swaggered into a trap, and my pride had
paid for it with their blood and our future. The
rage was a wild animal clawing at the inside of
my ribs, desperate for a way out. My leadership, my
entire identity, was built on a foundation of strength and
forward momentum. Now we were beaten, broke, and trapped. The
momentum was gone. The strength had been proven a lie.
What was I if not the strongest. I paced the
small space back and forth a caged wolf. The silent
judgment of my crew was a physical pressure.
Speaker 3: I had to do something. I had to break something.
Speaker 2: My eyes fell on a rickety wooden chair someone had
left in the corner with a roar that was torn
from the very bottom of my gut.
Speaker 3: I seized it.
Speaker 2: I lifted it high and smashed it against the stone wall.
It exploded into a shower of splinters. The sound of
gunshot in the tense, quiet room. Everyone flinched. The violence
was a relief, a release of pressure. But it wasn't enough.
The rage was still there, still directionless, still eating me alive.
It was Rat who made the mistake. The young thief
was huddled on a pallet, nursing a split lip. As
I stood panting, staring at the wreckage of the chair.
He muttered under his breath, just loud enough to be heard,
Kale's dead. All that silver gone for nothing. It wasn't
a challenge, it wasn't an accusation. It was just the
whining of a beaten dog. But it was a target.
My rage, blind and desperate, finally had a place to go.
I spun on him. Before he could even register the
thread in my eyes, I had crossed the room and
hauled him to his feet. I slammed him back against
the wall, the impact knocking the air from his lungs
in a sharp gasp. My hands were around his throat,
my thumbs digging into the soft flesh. His eyes went
wide with terror, his feet dangling inches from the floor.
For the first time since I had laid eyes on Corvin,
the world made sense again. There was a throat in
my hands, there was fear in someone's eyes, and those
eyes were looking at me, and I was the one
causing it. I was in charge again. Say another word,
I hissed, my voice, a low, vicious rasp. The words
were not for Rat, they were for everyone. They were
for myself, 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.
Speaker 3: I expected to see him.
Speaker 2: 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 they 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, 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.
Speaker 3: They had moved with the.
Speaker 2: 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.
Stigan 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.
Speaker 3: It was like butchery.
Speaker 1: The scum kings created and written by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: The day after the beating was worse than the beating itself.
The pain was a dull, constant reminder of our humiliation.
We spent the day in the squalid little room, licking
our wounds, the silence thick with unspoken shame and simmering resentment.
There was the matter of Kal. We couldn't leave him
in the alley. It was a matter of principle. However
thin our principles had become. We didn't have a shovel.
We used our hands and a broken piece of board
to scrape a shallow hole in a trash heap behind
the flophouse. We rolled Kal's body into it and covered
him with garbage and mud. There were no words said.
It wasn't a burial. It was a disposal, one less
mouth to feed, one more ghost at our backs. At
least he wasn't lying in an alley and getting pissed
on by drunken passers by. We were back in the room,
the stench of the grave still on our hands. When
the summons came. It wasn't a hardened enforcer who brought it.
It was a street urchin, a grimy girl no older
than ten who sauntered up to our doors. If she
owned the place? You the new dogs, she asked, looking
as over with an unnerving lack of fear. Silas wants
to see ya now. She spat on the floor and
left a command delivered by a child. We had no
choice but to obey. The walk through the gutters was
a different journey. This time our swagger was gone, replaced
by a grim, humbled silence. We were no longer conqueror
sizing up a new hunting ground. We were chastened dogs
being called to heal, And every eye in the twisting
alley seemed to know it. They watched us pass, not
with the wary fear of before, but with a kind
of knowing pity. They'd seen it a hundred times. New
crew comes in loud, gets broken by silas, and falls
in line or disappears. I watched my own crew, and
I saw the defeat in every step. Stigand walked with
his eyes on the ground. His shoulders slumped. The shame
of his easy defeat had hollowed him out, leaving a quiet,
brooding giant in the place of the roaring Northman. I
knew Brynn was a coiled spring of tension, her hand
never leaving the hilt of her knife, her feral hatred
for this cage of men sharpened to a razor's edge.
Even Gecks was subdued, his usual manic energy replaced by
a quiet, watchful intensity. He was studying this new ecosystem
of power, his smile gone. We were walking through the
heart of our enemy's territory, and for the first time
we understood just how deep it went. Every alley, every doorway,
every pair of eyes belonged to side. We weren't walking
through a city. We were walking through one man's kingdom.
We asked about Silas, and everyone replied with a wordless
finger pointing toward a gambling den in the center of
the gutters Silas. A finger point left or right, a
finger would point. Everyone knew where Silas held court, but
no one wanted to say it. The gambling den was
a squat fortified building with a heavy iron banded door
and two grim faced guards outside. Unlike the crooked keg,
this place had an air of real power. The guard
simply nodded as we approached and opened the door. We
were led through a smoky common room, past tables of
hard faced men playing for stakes far higher than our
entire pathetic fortune, and into a quiet back room. The
room was simple, a heavy wooden table, a few chairs,
a detailed map of the Gutter's hanging on one wall.
A man sat behind the table, looking over a ledger.
He wasn't a mountain of muscle like Stigant or a
scarred killer like Corven. He was of average build, with sharp,
intelligent features and dark hair neatly tied back. He wore
a simple but well kept tunic. He didn't look up
as we entered. The door closed behind us, the sound
of the latch clicking into place, a final, definitive sound.
We were in the heart of the web. After a long,
deliberate moment, the man finally looked up from his book.
His eyes were dark, calm, and held a terrifying analytical intelligence.
Speaker 3: This was not a brute, This was a king.
Speaker 2: So Silas said, his voice, quiet but carrying the weight
of absolute authority. You're the ones who have been making
so much noise in my gutter.
Speaker 1: The scum Kings created and written by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: The silence in the room was a weapon, and Silas
wielded it like a master. He let us stand there,
bruised and bleeding for a long, heavy moment, his dark,
intelligent eyes moving from face to face. He wasn't studying
us as fighters. He was appraising us as assets, like
a man inspecting new livestock. Finally, he spoke, his voice,
quiet but carrying the weight of absolute authority.
Speaker 3: I've heard of you.
Speaker 2: He said, steepling his fingers, A pack of wolves from
the wilderness. Strong, violent, ambitious, He paused, letting the faint
praise settle before delivering the killing blow. You are also loud, clumsy,
and breathtakingly stupid. You mistook my gutter for your forest.
You showed your wealth when you should have shown deference.
You showed your pride when you should have been showing fear.
His gaze locked onto mine. By the laws of this place,
your lives are now mine to take. You spilled blood,
you challenged my authority. The smart play would be to
have Corvin hang your heads from the gate as a
warning to the next pack of fools who wanders into
my territory. Stiggins shifted his weight, a low growl rumbling
in his chest. Silas's eyes flickered to him for a
fraction of a second, and the big Northman fell silent,
cowed not by a threat but by the sheer, cold
certainty in the man's gaze, but continued leaning back in
his chair. A dead wolf is just meat for the crows.
A leashed wolf, however, a leashed wolf can be a
useful tool. You have no allies, no money, and no
name here, but fool I am offering you a chance
to earn a new one. I felt a whisper at
my ear. It was also his voice, low and urgent,
meant for me alone, dre There is no play here,
there is no angle. We take the deal, We live,
we learn, we wait.
Speaker 3: He was right.
Speaker 2: My pride was a hot, useless thing in the face
of this man's cold, inescapable logic. To fight now was
to die, a pointless end to a pathetic story. What's
the job? I asked, the words, tasting like old crumbs
from a tavern floor. A thin smile touched Silas's lips.
Speaker 3: He had won.
Speaker 2: There is a spy ice merchant on the east side
of the gutters, a man named Jorn. He has become forgetful.
He seems to think the protection my organization provides is
a gift, not a service. You will be his memory.
You will go to him and you will collect what
he owes. They shakedown a menial, thuggish task. He wasn't
just giving us a job. He was putting us on
a leash and showing us our place. You will do
the jobs no one else wants, Silas said, his voice
flat and final. You are my bottom rung, my tools,
or you are corpses in an alley with your friend.
I looked at the faces of my men. I saw
their shame, their rage, their resignation. I saw our entire
pathetic journey lead to this moment. Bowing our heads in
a gangster's back room. I gave a single curt nod.
Silas stood the audiences concluded. He walked to the door,
not even bothering to look back at us. Don't fail,
he said, simply. The word's not a threat, but a
statement of fact. We walked out of that room with
our lives, but we left our pride bleeding on the floor.
As we passed through the smoky gambling den, the patrons
looked at us with new eyes. We were no longer
a mystery. We were property. I wore the leash he
had put around my neck. I accepted the humiliation, but
as we stepped back out into the filth of the gutters,
a cold hard promise formed in the pit of my gut.
Speaker 3: A wolf is still a wolf.
Speaker 2: Even on a chain, and I would chew through my
own leg if it meant I could one day get
a taste of that man's throat.
Speaker 3: W