Speaker 1: The Scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written
by Mike Daltrey. Chapter fifty four, The Ghost of a Chance.
Speaker 2: I stood there, turning the worthless piece of ivory over
in my hands. The world was gray and cold. Twenty
paces away, my crew, or So's crew now, was huddled together,
planning a miserable retreat back to a life of scavenging.
They were beaten. I was beaten. The world had ended,
but the icon felt heavy, solid. It was a real
object in a world that had become a ghost of failure.
I stared at the severe, unblinking face of the stern visage,
and a memory, cold and sharp, pricked at my mind.
The pilgrim, the old man who had carried this, He
was walking a dead road in the middle of nowhere.
He was a simple holy man, but he wasn't poor.
I felt the phantom weight of the pouch Celaine had
taken from his robes. It wasn't coppers. It was silver,
heavy silver salari, high denomination currency from the sea, enough
to buy passage into his city. Why why would a lone,
simple pilgrim be carrying that much hard currency on a
road to nowhere, protected only by a staff and a
dying faith. Another image flashed hot and sharp, the one
eyed priest at his crumbling, pathetic shrine. We had mugged
him for six copper spokes. We had laughed at him,
But I remembered what Brynn had told us. The lock box.
It wasn't just a box. It was chained to the floor,
bolted into the st a fortress level defense for a
handful of coppers. We'd seen it as the act of
a paranoid fool. But what if it wasn't. What if
he wasn't guarding what was in the box, but what
the box represented. He was a fanatic, a man with
a gaze that saw through us, a man with a
strength that belied his age. He served the stern visage
this icon. My breath caught in my chest. The wind
suddenly felt still. The cold in my bones was replaced
by a different kind of chill, a prickling heat that
ran up my spine. One more memory, the one I
had buried, the one I had dismissed as a joke,
a distraction. The flophouse and gray mark, the smell of
gin and sickness, The madman, his feverish eyes, his rattling
dry cough, his tattered acolytes robes, and the thing in
his hand, the thing he was clutching, waving in our
faces as he raved. It was this, this exact same icon.
His words, which had been the meaningless noise of a
dying lunatic, now came back to me with the force
of a thunderclap. A fortress of gold disguised as a
house of prayer, the cellars of wine, deeper than any
hell they hide. It a secret treasure, hidden from the
cardinal conclave itself. I had told him to shut his mouth,
or so, had called him illogical, or so was wrong.
It wasn't a coincidence. It was a pattern. A priest
guarding nothing as if it were a fortune, a pilgrim
carrying a fortune as if he were a beggar, a
madman raving about an impossible treasure, and all three of
them bound by this one worthless token. It wasn't a
plan that formed in my mind. It was a fever.
It was a revelation, a single blinding point of light
in an endless gray darkness. This wasn't a dying faith.
It was a secret faith, a rich faith. And we
had stumbled right into the middle of it. All our failures,
the caravan, the priest, the pig, the city. They weren't
just a string of pathetic defeats. They were a path.
They were a chain of events that had led us here,
starving with nothing to this one final, impossible answer. We
had been trying to steal scraps from the table, while
the whole time a feast had been waiting for us
in the kitchen. Selaine's plan to go back it was
a joke. It was the logic of a rat when
we were meant to be wolves. A laugh, dry and
rasping tore itself from my throat. The despair didn't just lift,
it was incinerated. It was burned away by a new, glorious,
tear verifying purpose. This wasn't a gamble, This wasn't a
one and a million chants. It was the only thing
in the world that was real. I looked up from
the icon. My eyes no longer dead and empty. The
barren gray hills were no longer a graveyard. They were
just a road. My hands were steady, my will was
forged anew, harder and sharper than any blade.
Speaker 1: I had.
Speaker 2: My answer