Speaker 1: The Scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written
by Mike Daltrey. Episode fifty one, The Last Coin. Cobb's
voice was the sound of a dying animal. There's no point.
The word hung in the cold, thin air of the
barren hills. The march stopped.
Speaker 2: The fragile thread of my will, the only thing that
had been pulling them forward snapped. They turned on me.
Not with blades, not yet, but with their eyes. Or
So was the first to speak. He was not angry,
he was just done. He's right, dre Where are we going?
His voice was flat, a cold statement of fact. You've
marched us into a graveyard. There's no food, there's no water.
Gray Mark is behind us, and the sea is probably
already putting a bounty on our heads. Your plan has failed.
He's right, stick and rumbled, his voice a low growl
of pure, exhausted misery. He gestured at his bandage to
burned hands. I can barely hold my axe. What are
we doing here but walking to our own graves? I
had no answer. I was a king of nothing, my
authority a hollow, ringing echo. I had led them from
one disaster to another, and now I had finally led
them to the end of the line. They were broken,
and I was the one who had broken them. The
pack was dissolving. In that moment, I knew I had
lost them weight. The voice was Slaine's. It was quiet,
but it cut through the despair like a shard of glass.
We all turned to look at her. She stood apart
her face mask of grime, but her eyes held a cold,
calculating light that had been missing for days. She was
not broken, She was just calculating. He's right, she said,
nodding it. Or so the plan has failed. We have
nothing almost She slowly deliberately reached into a hidden pocket
sewn into the lining of her tunic. My heart, which
I had thought was a dead stone in my chest,
gave a single, hard thump. With a surgeon's care, she
pulled out a small, folded scrap of cloth. I kept one,
she said. She unwrapped it. There in the palm of
her hand lay the last silver coin. In the chaos
of the gutters. I had forgotten her claim to the
last piece of silver, the one she now held in
her hand. It was a beacon in the gray twilight.
It was a single, perfect, impossible coin. Cobbs weeping stopped.
Stigan took a half step forward, his eyes wide. She
held it up for us all to see, our last hope.
This is not a treasure, she continued, her voice all business,
the Quartermaster back in control. It is a tool. It
is our way out. She laid out the plan. It
was logical, it was practical, and it was the most pathetic,
soul crushing thing.
Speaker 3: I had ever heard.
Speaker 2: We are not warriors. We are not kings, she said,
her eyes meeting mine, a cold, final judgment. We are scavengers,
and we have forgotten how to scavenge. Her plan was simple.
She would go alone. She was the only one who
could pass for a villager. She would walk to the
nearest settlement, one a full day's march away from us
and when we were avoiding due to it being so
close to gray Mark, and find a place to break
the coin, A danger difficult task in itself. She would
use the coppers to buy hardtack salt, a few new waterskins,
and maybe a cheap sharp blade or two. We go
back to what we know, she concluded, her gaze sweeping
over us. We find a quiet, forgotten road. We stop
hunting kings and start hunting merchants again. We become bandits.
We survive a return back to the beginning, back to
the tangle, to fighting over a single pig, to being
routed by a caravan. It was a full circle. I
watched the faces of my crew. I saw the look
in their eyes as they stared at that coin. It
was not hope. It was resignation. Cob stiggand even or
So they were beaten. They were ready to accept this.
They were ready to go back to being bottom feeders
because it was a life they understood. It was in
its own miserable away or return home. I looked at
the silver salary gleaming in Selaine's hand. I looked at
my broken crew, ready to follow this new sensible path
back into the mud. And I realized, with a cold,
terrible certainty that this plan wasn't a path to survival.
It was just a warmer, slower, more pathetic way to die.
It was a grave they were digging for themselves, and
they were going to climb right into it.
Speaker 1: The Scum Kings a Broadsword studio for Duction, created and
written by Mike Daltrey. Episode fifty two, The.
Speaker 2: Challenge Selaine's plan hung in the cold, still air. It
was a sensible plan, a logical plan. It was a
plan for survivors, for scavengers. It also was the sound
of a nail being hammered into our own coffin. I
saw the flicker of pathetic relief on Cobb's face. I
saw Stiggins's shoulders slump, not in defeat, but in a
weary acceptance. Even Orso gave a slight appreciative nod. This
was math, he understood, one coin, seven mouths, A return
to a life of meager, predictable survival. They were all
ready to follow her, to go back to being nothing,
back to the mud. No, My voice was a low rasp.
It was the only sound in the twilight. Selaine's head
snapped up, her eyes narrowing. What did you say? I said, No,
I repeated louder, this time, my own anger, a sudden,
surprising spark in the cold. We're not going back. We're
not going back to hiding in ditches and fighting over scraps.
We're not going back to being routed by caravan guards
and mugging beggars on the road. Dre Seline said, her
voice laced with a cold, sharp pity. Look at us,
that is exactly what we are. We just forgot it
for a while. She's right. A new voice cut in.
Or So he stepped forward, taking his place beside Selaine.
He wasn't challenging me, not yet. He was simply stating
a fact. Her plan is the only logical one. It's
the only plan that offers a chance of survival. Survival,
I spat the word is just a slower way to die.
I turned on them, my gaze sweeping over their tired,
beaten faces. We had a city, we had a throne.
We failed because we were small, because we were stupid.
You want to go back to that, go back to
being the prey. I don't. I had crushed their last
practical hope, and in doing so, I had finally broken
the pack. Or So stared at me for a long,
cold moment. The scarred side of his face was impassive,
but his eyes were hard as flint. The moment of
debate was over. This was the mutiny. This is over, Dre,
he said, his voice flat and final. He wasn't shouting,
He was just closing a ledger. Your leadership has failed.
Your gut, your fire. It led us to a burning
city and an empty purse. Now we're starving because you
won't listen to reason. He turned away from me, addressing
the others. We are splitting up. It's the logical choice.
Selaine's plan is sound. She can buy food, We can
hunt again properly. Anyone who wants to live can come
with me. It wasn't a fist fight. It was a
battle for their souls, and I had just been disarmed.
Orso was offering them a path, a miserable, pathetic path,
but it was a path, a path to probable survival.
I was left with nothing, no plan, no food, no coin,
no future. I watched as Selaine, her face set, moved
to stand with Orso. Bryn, after a moment's hesitation, her
loyalty to the hunt and to a practical meal outweighing
any loyalty to me, gave Orso a slight nod and
joined him. Cob weeping, scrambled to his feet and huddled
behind them. Only stiggand And remained. Stiggin looked torn, his
gaze shifting between me and Orso, his simple code of
loyalty at war with his own misery. Dix just watched,
his painted smile, unreadable, fascinated by this new, delicious chaos.
Or So looked at me, his face a cold mask.
He had four, I had two, maybe he had one.
I stood there, My authority shattered. My will, which had
held them together through sheer, ferocious determination, was now just
the empty roaring of a dying animal. I was a
king with no kingdom, no subjects, and no plan.
Speaker 3: I had lost.
Speaker 1: The scum Kings. A Broadsword Studio production created and written
by Mike Daltrey, episode fifty three, The Icon.
Speaker 2: They were twenty paces away, but it felt like a mile.
I stood at the edge of our miserable, fireless camp,
a king in exile, and watched them, my crew, my pack,
or at least they had been. Now they were Orso's.
He was the new center of gravity. He was kneeling,
scratching a crude map in the dirt with a stick.
Celaine was beside him, her head bowed in concentration, pointing
at a mark he'd made. Brinn sat nearby, her back
to me, her attention fixed on Orso's plan, and Cob,
the sniveling, weeping coward, was huddled behind them, as if
for warmth. They were the pragmatists, the survivors. They had
made the logical choice. Even stiggand my great loyal Northmen
sat near them. He had his back to me, a silent,
brooding mountain of betrayal, staring at his burned hands. He
hadn't joined them, not officially, but he hadn't stayed with
me either. Dix was the only one who seemed unbothered,
sitting apart from us, both idly sharpening a jagged piece
of flint, humming a tuneless airy dirge. He was a
spectator at my execution. I turned my back on them.
I couldn't look at them anymore. A king, a scum king,
what a fucking joke, A king of ashes and dust,
a king of nothing. I began to pace a caged animal,
my boots crunching on the loose gravel. The rage in
my gut was a cold, sick thing. It had no target,
or so. I wanted to hate him, to smash his smug,
scarred face in, But I couldn't, because he was right.
His cold, miserable logic had won his plan to become
a common Bandit again was pathetic, but it was a plan.
It was more than I had, My fire, my gut,
my will. It had all led us here, to this
barren graveyard of rock, I had failed. The walk was
a torrent of my own failures. I thought of the
priest's bloody, laughing mouth, mocking my six copper prize. I
thought of Corven's calm, pitying smile as he dismantled my
pride without throwing a punch. I thought of stigand hurling
the lantern and turning our one true victory into a
blazing pillar of smoke and ruin, which was my fault
as much as his cale was dead rat. It was
a scream in the smoke. And now this the pack
was broken my authority. The only thing I'd ever truly
built was a lie. It was a thing I'd held
together with my fists and the iron in my voice.
But what good is a strong voice when your stomach
is empty? What good is a fist when the enemy
is a cold, hard fact? Orso's words echoed in my head,
a hammer blow on an anvil. Where are we going, Dre?
I had no answer, I had nothing. I stopped pacing.
The wind was a cold knife, and for the first
time I truly felt it. I wasn't a king, I
wasn't even a leader. I was just a man, cold
and hungry and alone in the middle of nowhere, a failure.
My hands trembling slightly from cold, from rage, I didn't
know which, went to my pouches. It was a desperate, final,
pathetic act, a fool's inventory. I was searching for anything,
A single copper I might have missed, a forgotten crust
of heart attack from the pilgrim's pack, a loose thread,
anything to prove I wasn't completely and utterly empty. My
fingers fumbled in my belt pouch, nothing but worn leather
and lint. I jammed my hand into the deep pocket
of my tunic, the one I used for my most
private possessions. Nothing weight, not nothing. My fingers, numb and clumsy,
brushed against something hard and smooth, tucked into the seam
at the very bottom. It was small, oblong, and cold
as the stones around us. I'd forgotten it was even there,
forgotten in the fire and the blood and the running.
I'd buried it under the weight of my own failures.
My heart, which I had thought was a dead stone
in my chest, gave a single, hard, unfamiliar thump. Slowly
I pulled my hand from the pouch. I uncurled my fingers.
There in the grimy palm of my hand, resting in
the lines of my own failure, was the Pilgrim's ivory icon, Worthless.
Selaine had called it a token of a dying faith.
I stared at it. The light of the pale, dying
sun was just enough to see the carving, the severe,
judgmental face of the stern visage. It stared back at me,
its expression as cold and unforgiving as Orso's. It was
the last thing I owned in the world.
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, salary, high denomination currency from the sea, enough
to buy passage into a 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 stone, 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 flop house in 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.
Speaker 3: It was a.
Speaker 2: 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,
terrifying purpose.
Speaker 3: This wasn't a.
Speaker 2: Gambol, 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 my answer. The scum Kings a broad Swords
Udo production created and written by Mike Daltrey, Chapter fifty five,
The Pitch.
Speaker 3: I walked back to them.
Speaker 2: They were huddled around, orso, their backs to me, a
tight knot of conspiracy. They were planning their escape, planning
how to divide the last of our meager supplies, Planning
how to leave me behind. My footsteps on the gravel
were the only sound, and they stopped talking. One by one.
They turned, and I saw the look in their eyes.
It was not fear, It was not respect. It was pity,
the look you give a dog that's been hit by
a cart just before you take a stone to its head.
Or so stood up, placing himself between me and the
rest of them. The new leader of the pack, Dre, said,
his voice flat, trying to be gentle, which was worse
than any insult. It's done. Don't make this any harder,
one last council, I said. My voice was quiet, but
it was not the voice they had heard before. It
was not the bark of a failed leader or the
snarl of a cornered animal. It was calm, It was certain.
It unnerved them. What is there to talk about, Selaine asked,
her voice brittle. We have a plan. It's the only plan.
You have a plan, I said, to die slowly. I
have a plan to live. I didn't wait for them
to argue. I didn't threaten them. I just began to talk.
The madmen in the flophouse, I said, my gaze sweeping
over them. The acolyte, the one with the fever and
the shakes sticking, grunted. What about him? He was a lunatic,
we all thought, so, I agreed, nodding. I told him
to shut his mouth or so called his story illogical.
We threw him out into the alley to die. We
were wrong. I let that hang in the air. Think
about it, I said, my voice gathering a low, feverish intensity.
The one eyed priest, a crumbling shrine in the middle
of nowhere, and he chains his offering box to the
stone floor, a fortress level defense for six copper coins.
We called him a fool. I stepped closer to them.
The pilgrim, a simple holy man walking a dead road,
and he's carrying a purse of high sea silver, enough
to buy his way into any guild in gray Mark.
We called that our good luck.
Speaker 3: I saw the.
Speaker 2: Confusion on their faces. They saw the pieces, but they
didn't see the thread. The madman said, my voice, dropping
the priest, the pilgrim. They all have one thing in common,
one thing we saw, and one thing we were too
stupid and too blind to understand. I opened my hand.
There in my palm lay the ivory icon. This, I said.
The priest served the stern visage. The pilgrim died with
this in his pocket. And the madman, he was clutching
one just like it. As he raved. I saw Orso's
eyes narrow. He was putting it together, but his mind
was fighting it. Dre Orso said, his voice a low
warning growl. You're building a house on a cloud. It's
a coincidence, a common religious token. You're chasing a fever
dream because you can't accept that we've failed. It's madness,
Selene agreed. Stepping forward, she held up her hand. Pinched
between her fingers was the single gleaming silver salari. This
is real, This is food, This is a path back.
What you have is a carving. She was right. Her
plan was sane, it was logical. It was survival. And
I laughed. It was a dry, rasping sound that clawed
its way out of my chest. It was the laugh
of a man who has seen the end of the
world and found it amusing. They all stared at me,
their faces a mask of confusion and fear. They thought
I had finally broken. You're right, I said, my laugh
dying into a grin that felt strange and new on
my face. It is madness. It's a one and a
million chants. It's a lunatic story. It's a ghost. I
pointed at the silver coin in Selaine's hand, And what
is your plan? You'll buy what a few days of hardtack.
We'll go back to being bottom feeders, hiding in another
ditch until the next corvin, or the next caravan guard
or the next one eyed priest finds us and beats
us for our scraps. That isn't survival, Selaine, That's just
a slower, more pathetic way to die. I let this
silence stretch, forcing them to feel the truth of that
miserable future. Then I closed my fist around the icon.
We have two choices, I said, my voice, now, a
ringing iron command. We can die here, splitting scraps in
the mud as the forgotten, beaten dogs of Gray mark
or I held up my fist the icon hidden within it.
We can march to the stone fence mountains. We can
find this abbey of the Stern Visage, and we can
see if the madman was telling the truth. I looked
at each of them, at Orso, the man of logic,
at stigand the man of strength, at Selaine, the woman
of coin. I am not offering you a long life,
I said, I am not offering you safety. I am
offering you a glorious death, or a prize that will
make us legends. The wind howled around us, the only
sound in a world that had suddenly gone still. The
crew was stunned, their faces pale in the twilight. They
looked from orso and his one sensible silver coin to
me and my burning, beautiful, insane hope,