Speaker 1: The scum Kings, created and written by Mike Daltrey, The
Price of Arrogance. The silence in the crooked Keg was
the silence of the grave. It was a thick, suffocating thing,
broken only by the sound of Corvin's boots on the
grimy floorboards as he took a slow, deliberate walk from the.
Speaker 2: Door to our table. He wasn't a wolf circling his prey.
He was a butcher walking down a line of hanging meat,
deciding where to make the first cut. My men were
statues of coiled tension. Stiggins's knuckles were white on his
axe handle. Brynn was a phantom of stillness, her eyes
darting between the enforcers at the doors. Even Gigs's manic
energy was gone, replaced by a focused, predatory calm. We
were outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and utterly trapped. For the first time
since I'd this crew, my will was not the most
powerful force in the room. Corvin stopped before our table,
his shadow falling over us. He didn't look at me.
He looked at the small leather pouch of silver that
sat beside Celaine's hand. Silas has calculated your tax, he said,
his voice, calm, almost pleasant. He named a figure. It
was nearly everything we had, all the silver from the pilgrim,
save for a few coins. It was not a tax,
it was a stripping.
Speaker 1: It was a.
Speaker 2: Declaration that everything we had, everything we had bled for,
now belonged to another man. I saw the flicker in
Orso's eyes, the slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head.
He was telling me to take the deal to live.
His cold logic was clear. We were beaten. The smart
play was to accept the loss and survive, to fight
another day. But the priest's laughter was still echoing in
my ears. The shame of ourthetic victories, the weight of
our failures. It all boiled up inside me. I had
not clawed my way out of the dirt just to
be a dog for a man named Silas. My pride
was a sickness, and it would not let me kneel.
I met Corvin's gaze, a slow, cold fury building in
my chest. I gave him my answer, a single guttural snarl,
go to hell. Corvin didn't flinch, he didn't raise his voice.
He just gave a simple, almost imperceptible nod to his men.
The world exploded. A heavy wooden chair splintered against Stiggins's back.
That sound like a cracking bone. He roared, but it
was the roar of a bear caught in a steel trap.
Two men were on him, then a third, their cudgels
rising and falling in a brutal, methodical rhythm. A cudgel
whistled past my ear. I parried the blow with my forearm,
but another man was already behind me. A boot kicked
my legs out from under me, and I hit the
floor hard. Gicks lunged forward, a knife appearing in his hand,
as if by magic. He was a blur of motion,
but he never reached his target. A mailed fist caught
him square on the temple. He went down like a
sack of stones, his painted smile finally wiped from his face.
It was over before it had truly begun. It wasn't
a fight, It was a dismantling. They moved with a brutal,
practiced efficiency that spoke of a hundred such beatdowns. We
were a pack of wild dogs, and we had just
met the quiet, disciplined violence of men. I felt a
sharp pain in my shoulder as my arm was twisted
behind my back. My face was pressed into the sticky,
ale soaked floorboards. The tip of a cold blade rested
against the side of my throat. I looked up and
saw stiggand pinned under the weight of three men, still struggling,
roaring in pure impotent fury, gicks a limp form on
the floor. The rest of my crew had been similarly
and silently subdued. We were utterly and completely defeated. We
hadn't just lost a fight. We had been proven to
be nothing