had also taught him the art of dancing light on his feet, and Carroll used it now, nearly skipping down the passage. There were no intersections, only a series of turnings. Carroll went around several large curves before he began to hear the roar.
For a moment he thought that he must have gone the wrong way and ended up near the sluice gates that fed into the Caddell, for the roar was loud and angry, like the river when it reached its full flow in springtime. But after another moment he realized that this sound was human, many voices yelling at once. He turned a final corner and blinked.
Every inch of the room seemed bathed in light. Fire was everywhere, torches and candles and chandeliers suspended from the ceiling. But Carroll barely marked them; he was too busy scanning the enormous crowd of backs. There were at least two hundred people here, mostly men, and Brenna had disappeared neatly into the throng.
Feeling more than ever that he had made a mistake, Carroll nevertheless pushed his way into the crowd. It was easier than he had expected; the smells of whiskey and ale permeated the place, and most of the men he shoved past barely had their own balance. In a short time, Carroll had made his way near the front. Some sort of fight was going on; Carroll could just glimpse the flickering, heaving outlines of two figures. Boxing, most likely; Dyer and Fell liked to gamble on their off days, and Carroll had heard them talk about the boxing in the Gut. Though they were both younger than Carroll, neither Dyer nor Fell had grown up in the Keep, and he liked to hear them talk about the wider world.
I should have listened better. I should have asked some questions.
Now Carroll heard a sound he recognized: the snap of a breaking bone. It echoed even over the din of the crowd, and the man behind Carroll roared his approval.
“Bring all the ringers you want from the country, Miller! He’ll crush them all!”
“Put him away!”
A bone broken, Carroll thought. The round should stop now.
But it didn’t. It kept going, and a few seconds later there was another high snap, followed by a scream. Dread fell over Carroll, seeming to squeeze his heart. What sort of fight was this?
You don’t want to know. Walk away.
But he could not. He needed to see. As though someone else guided his steps, he ducked and angled through the crowd. Carroll was agile, and his slim build allowed him to quickly push his way through to the front.
What he saw would be with him until the end of his days.
The ring was not large, only some twenty feet square. The floor was stained with blood, some of it fresh. On one side lay a man, his arm twisted at a grotesque angle, shrieking. His left leg had nearly been severed; it hung by only a few strips of sinew, and blood jetted from the ravaged flesh. While Carroll watched, the injured man collapsed into unconsciousness, and only then did Carroll turn to look at his opponent: a young man, even younger than Carroll perhaps, his eyes deep and dark, trained on his fallen antagonist in the manner of a hunting dog. The boy was tall, much taller than Carroll, and his arms and hands were covered with their own myriad of wounds. But these wounds were well scarred, and a distant part of Carroll’s mind noted that many of them were shiny and stretched, as childhood wounds when the limbs grew and lengthened.
“Finish him, boy! Don’t toy with him!”
It was the same man who had spoken before, his voice hoarse with drink, and suddenly they were all shouting, demanding finality, demanding death. Gradually all of the voices merged and blended into a single chant, and this, too, Carroll would never forget: the sound of the mob, unsatisfied and hungry.
“Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!”
What more do they want? Carroll wondered wildly. That poor bastard will bleed to death inside of a minute. What more must he do?
But the boy seemed to know, for as Carroll watched, he lunged forward and kicked the bleeding, unconscious man in the face, knocking him backward. In a series of movements almost too fast for even Carroll’s quick eyes to follow, the boy had straddled the man, grabbed his neck, and twisted it in a single expert movement. The corpse collapsed to the ground. The crowd howled its approval, and Carroll, who