Speaker 1: The scum Kings, a broad Sword Studio production created and
written by Mike Daltrey. Chapter fifty seven, The Grind. The
hope that had burned so hot was now a cold,
dead cinder. The march into the Stone Fence Mountains was
not a march at all. It was a.
Speaker 2: Miserable, vertical crawl. The barren hills we had left behind
were a paradise compared to this. Or So had called
it suicide, and with every agonizing step he was proven right.
This was a wall of broken shale and wind scoured rock.
Every foothold was a gambol, every handhold of betrayal. The
loose rock would slide out from under our boots, sending
us sliding back down, bleeding, cursing, wasting energy we did
not have. And the wind, it was not a breeze.
It was a scream, a constant, high pitched, icy razor
that cut through our rags and stole the breath from
our lungs. It found every burn, every cut, every weakness,
and it gnawed on us. The Grand mad Hope of
the Abbey of the Stern Visage, the golden fortress that
had seemed so real in my mind, was a distant,
feverish joke. I was a fool, a lunatic, who had
pitched a ghost story to a crew of dying men,
and they had been desperate enough to believe me. Now,
the physical misery of this climb was the price for
my fantasy. I could feel their unspoken accusations in the silence.
The crew was a tattered, silent procession of my failures.
We were bound by our shared suffering, but that bond
was fraying, rotting from the inside out. Stigan was the worst.
He was a wounded giant, and his mood was as
black and cold as the rock under his feet. The
burns on his hands, the price of his rage and
gray mark, were not healing. The filthy rags we'd wrapped
them in were caked with dirt and puss. In this
ice cold wind, the wounds were festering. He couldn't grip
his axe properly. He climbed with his wrists and forearms,
his movements agonizingly slow. He never complained, He just let
out a low, animal grunt every time he put weight
on a hand. His silence was a thousand times worse
than any of his roars. He was a warrior, being
undone by his own body, and I had led him
here to rot behind me. I heard a clatter and
a wet, choked sob cob. He was our anchor in
every sense of the word. His body softened by years
of cook fires and ale was giving out. He stumbled,
he fell, he wept. Every hundred paces we had to
stop and wait for him, or haul him to his feet.
I can't, I can't dray, He'd whimper, his face slick
with tears and snot you will, I'd snarl back, yanking
him up. You'll climb, or I'll leave you for the crows.
Your choice. But it was an empty threat. We all
knew it. I needed every body. His weakness was my weakness.
It was a constant physical drain on our will to live.
The sun began to dip, a sliver of weak, watery
light that offered no warmth and was now abandoning us.
We found a shallow crevice in the rock, a pathetic
shelter that barely blunted the scream of the wind. We
couldn't make a fire. There was no wood, nothing to
burn but our own despair, and we were too exposed.
We collapsed. A collection of bruises, burns, and broken hopes,
huddled together for a warmth we couldn't generate. The mad
hope of the abbey was dead. It was the ravings
of a fool, and I was that fool. I looked
at my crew in the dying light. Cob was a
shivering fetal ball. Stiggins stared into the darkness, his face
a mask of silent agony. Celaine, her purpose gone, just
looked empty. Then I saw or So. He wasn't huddled,
he wasn't shivering. He was sitting apart, his back against
the rock, his face a calm, cold mask. He had
taken a piece of flint from the ground and was
sharpening his dagger. Shick, shick, shick. The sound was quiet, precise, methodical.
It was the only sound in our miserable camp besides
the wind. He wasn't looking at me, He didn't have
to shick, shick, shick. His silence was a constant, screaming accusation.
It was the loudest, most eloquent I told you so,
I had ever heard in my life.