Speaker 1: The Scum Kings created and written by Mike Daltrey, a
Signal Box Studio production, Episode one Retreat.
Speaker 2: The forest floor is a tangle of thorns and grasping roots,
and it's trying to swallow us whole. Every step is
a fight. Branches whip at my face, leaving stinging cuts
that I barely feel. The only thing I feel is
the hot, coiling rage in my gut. It's a familiar friend. Faster.
My voice is a raw bark lost in the blackness
between the skeletal trees. You want their dogs to run
you down. Move behind me. I hear the grunts and
curses of my men, my so called kings of the gutter.
We're just slugs right now, crawling through the mud with
our tails between our legs. Steigan is the loudest, of course,
he is the big Northman is leaning heavily on Orso.
His massive frame, a dead weight, a crossbow bolt, short
and ugly, is still lodged in the thick muscle of
his shoulder. Cowards, he roars, his voice, thick with pain
and fury. Fucking arches in the dark. Let me face them,
let me split one skull or so just grunts with
the effort of holding him up. His face a mask
of cold concentration. Save your breath, stiggined, you'll need it
to bleed. His voice is as sharp and practical as
the dagger he favors. He's already moved past the rage
and is on to the grim math of survival. I
see it in the way his eyes dart around, not
looking for enemies, for a path, an advantage, any small
thing to salvage from this disaster. We were supposed to
be rich. The plan was simple, a merchant caravan, fat
with goods from the coast, moving slow on a forgotten
road and easy plucking. But the merchants had hired professionals,
hard faced men who didn't flinch. They had crossbows and discipline,
and they met our wild charge with a wall of quiet,
efficient death. We broke against them like a wave on rocks.
Two of my men are now just carrying on that road,
and for what a sob cuts through the night. It's Cob,
of course, the fat cook is stumbling behind us, his
face slick with tears and snot. They're going to kill
us all, Oh gods, we're all gonna die out here.
Shut your mouth, Cob or I'll shut it for you.
All over my shoulder. Fear is a disease. If I
let it fester, it'll kill us faster than any crossbow bolt.
Gix shoves the cook forward, a wide, unsettling grin plastered
on his painted face. In one hand, he's dragging our
only prize from this whole debacle, a single scrawny caravan
guard we managed to snatch. In the chaos, the prisoner
stumbles along a rope around his neck, his eyes wide
with terror. Gix finds the whole thing hilarious. Don't worry, Cook,
Gix cackles, his voice, a dry rasp. If they catch us,
I'll give you to them first, A nice plump distraction.
He yanks the prisoner's rope, making the poor bastard gasp
and trip chaos. Gix lives for it. From the trees ahead,
a shadow detaches itself from the deeper gloom brin. She
moves without a sound, a phantom in the woods. Her
green eyes glitter in the sliver of moonlight. She gives
a short, sharp jerk of her head. Clear for now,
she clips her voice. Like stones grinding together, they stop
following a mile back. They're not coming into the tangle
at night. Not this deep relief washes over the man,
a palpable wave of sagging shoulders and ragged breaths. Not me.
They stopped because they know we're no longer a threat.
We're just wounded animals, bleeding into the darkness. We're not
worth the effort. That stings worse than a clean defeat.
Find us a place. I order her something we can
hold with cover. She just nods and melts back into
the trees. She's the rest of us are just trespassers.
We follow a miserable procession of failures. Steigin's groans, COB's
whimpers gicks as quiet unnerving chuckles as he torments our prisoner.
It's the music of my kingdom. An hour later, Bryn
leads us to a shallow hollow, a sort of natural ditch,
carved out by ancient water and choked with the gnarled
roots of a dead ironwood tree. It's not a fortress,
but it's defensible. The thorns and rock falls on the
approach will slow anyone down and make them noisy. It'll
have to do here, I grunt, shrugging off my pack.
No fire, not a spark, drink what you have double
the watch the men collapse groaning. Steigan slumps against the roots,
his face pale and slick with sweat. Bryn is immediately
at his side, her knife out, not to threaten, but
to work with a brutal efficiency that makes my teeth ache.
She slices the cloth around his wound. Staigan bites back
a roar of agony, his knuckles white where he grips
a root or so, watches his face grim that bolt
needs to come out. Brynne glances up, her expression feral,
I know, hold him. I turn away. I don't need
to see it. I can hear it. The thick, wet
sound of the bolt being worked free Stigan's strangled gasp,
and then a low hiss of pain. I find a
spot on the edge of the hollow, my back against
the cold earth, and watch my broken crew. GX has
tied the prisoner to a tree and is now quietly
sharpening one of his jagged blades, humming a tune that
sounds like a dirge. Cob is curled into a ball,
trying to disappear. Sileang, the keeper of coin, is sitting
apart from the others, her ledger already open on her lap.
Though there's barely enough light to see. She's always counting,
always assessing. I run a hand over my face, the
stubble scratching my palm. I can still see it, the
way our charge broke, the disciplined line of guards, the
glint of moonlight on crossbow heads, My plan, my failure,
My rage had cooled, leaving behind something harder and colder,
a stone of pure black fury in my gut. A
few minutes pass in near silence, broken only by stiggins
pained breathing, and then footsteps in the dirt sea lane
stops in front of me, her form a slim silhouette
against the slightly less black sky. She doesn't need much
light to deliver bad news. She crouches down, her voice
a low, clinical whisper, devoid of panic or accusation. It's
worse that way, It's just the truth. Two men dead.
She begins, not looking at me, but at the numbers.
Only she can see that's Joik and Finn. We used
a quarter of our remaining arrows. Brynn is down to
her last dozen bodkins. The medical kit is nearly empty. Now,
just for stigging, we have two days of water, maybe
three if we don't wash. She finally looks at me,
her gray eyes as cold and hard as iron slags.
Dre she says, and the word hangs in the air
between us. Before the attack, we were poor, we were desperate,
but we were whole. She pauses, letting the weight of
it settle in the dark. Now we are poor, we
are more desperate. We have one useless captive, and we
are bleeding men and resources into the dirt. We have
gained nothing, we have lost ground. I don't say anything,
and Selaine shakes her head and walks away. There is
nothing to say.
Speaker 1: Signal Box The Scum Kings created and written by Mike Daltrey,
a Signal Box Studio production, Episode two.
Speaker 2: The naming. The Dawn brought no warmth, only a gray,
watery light that made the hollow look even more pathetic.
It exposed the grime on our faces, the dark blood
stains on stigins, bandages, the utter exhaustion in every man's eyes.
The mood was poison. You could taste it in the air,
sharp and metallic like old blood. Selaine's words from the
night before had hung in the dark, and now in
the light they'd festered. We were sharing out the last
of the hard tack, mouthfuls of dust and regret. A
man named Khail, a brawler with more muscle than sense,
looked at his pitiful portion and spat on the ground.
This is what Yorick and Finn died for. His voice
was a low growl, but it carried in the tense silence,
a mouthful of stale bread and a grave in the mud.
He looked up, his eyes, finding mine across the damp pit.
Your plan was shit, dre. You let us straight into
a slaughter. The world seemed to shrink to the space
between me and him. I could feel the eyes of
the crew on us, waiting. Orso's hand had stopped polishing
his dagger. Dicks watched with a child's eager curiosity for cruelty.
This was the moment the pivot. A leader who accepts
blame is a leader who gets a knife in the back.
I didn't say a word. I set my rations down
slowly and stood up. I walked the ten paces across
the hollow, each footstep a dull thud on the packed earth.
Cale puffed out his chest, trying to stand his ground.
He was strong, but his anger made him stupid. He
opened his mouth to say something else, but my fist
caught him square on the jaw before the first sound
came out. His head snapped back with a crack of
bone on bone. He staggered, eyes wide with surprise, and
I didn't give him a moment to recover. I drove
the heel of my palm into his nose, a wet crunch,
and blood exploded across his face. He went down in
a heap, sputtering. I stood over him, breathing evenly, and
looked out at the rest of them. My gaze swept
over each man, lingering for just a second. The plan failed,
I said, my voice, low and cold as a winter river.
We lost. Now we move on. The next man with
a complaint can deliver it to Jorik and Finn himself.
I gave the bloody mess that was Kail a light kick.
Any takers silence, nothing but the whisper of the wind
and the dead trees, and the quiet, terrified whimpers from
our captive, who had watched the whole thing from his bonds.
I walked back to my spot and picked up my
hard tack. Authority is a simple thing. You take it,
and you hold it, and sometimes you have to smear
it in a man's face with his own blood to
remind him who it belongs to. The rest of the
day was a sullen affair. Stiggind sulked, the pain in
his shoulder matched only by the insult of being denied
a real fight. Bryn had vanished into the woods, hunting
for anything to fill our bellies or so spent hours
sharpening every blade he owned, his movements precise and methodical.
The rest of us just sat trapped in our own
miserable thoughts. As dusk began to settle again, cob bless
his cowardly heart, decided he was our savior. He scurried
around the camp, gathering odds and ends in his cook pot.
A little something to warm the bones, he announced to
the silent crew, a special brew. We watched in morbid
fascination as he worked. He threw in a handful of
bitter roots. Bryn had scavended, some crushed acorns, and a
suspicious looking clump of moss. The finishing touch was a small,
grimy wine skin he produced from his pack, which he
poured in with a flourish. The smell was staggering. It
was the scent of sour earth and regret, but it
was something. He ladled the foul smelling grog into our
horns and cups. It was warm, thick as mud, and
tasted worse than it smelled. But it had a kick,
a vicious, immediate kick that went straight to the head.
After the first swallow, the world didn't seem quite so
sharp around the edges. We sat around a small, sputtering fire,
and the first we dared to light. The warmth felt
good on my skin, but it did nothing for the
chill inside. We drank in silence for a long time,
the grog working its ugly magic. I stared into the
pathetic flames, watching the meat away a piece of dead wood.
It was us consuming ourselves out here in the dark.
I took another long pull from my horn and spat
a thick glob of the gritty brew into the fire.
It hissed, We're just a bunch of scum. I muttered,
more to the flames than to anyone else. From across
the fire cob his face flushed from the grog, and
his own misplaced optimism perked up. But we're scum with
a dream, A real kingdom. Maybe a loud, barking laugh
irrupted from my right. It was Stiggant. He winced as
the movement pulled at his wounded shoulder, but the grin
on his face was genuine. He raised his drinking horn,
the firelight glinting off the cheap metal rings in his beard. Aye.
His voice boomed, we'll be kings. The sound of steel
sliding against a wet stone stopped. Or so, hadn't looked
up from his work the entire time. He paused, admiring
the edge on his blade, his scarred face half hidden
in shadow. Without raising his eyes, he spoke, his voice,
dry and final, cutting through the other's noise. That's us, then,
the scum kings. The name fell into the silence between us.
It wasn't a cheer, it wasn't a battle cry. It
was a statement of fact. It landed and lay there,
heavy and ugly and perfect. I looked around the fire
at their faces, Cale nursing his broken nose in the shadows, Cob,
the hopeful fool, stiggined, the laughing brute Gicks, smiling at
a joke. Only he understood. Selene watching, calculating Bryn, a
silent predator returned to the fold, and or so the
cold heart of us all A slow grin spread across
my face. It wasn't a happy expression. It was the
grin of a wolf that has finally accepted the blood
on its teeth. The scum Kings, it wasn't a name
you'd carve on a castle wall. It was a name
you'd scrawl in blood on a tavern door, right before
you burned it to the ground. And it was ours.
Signal Box The Scum Kings.
Speaker 1: Created and written by Mike Daltrey, a Signal Box Studio production,
Episode three, The Captive. The third day in this God's
Forsaken Ditch doned the same as the last, cold, gray
and miserable. The name we'd claimed the night before felt
like a mockery in the morning light. The scum Kings,
we were just scum, and our kingdom was this muddy hollow,
populated by a wounded Northman, a weeping cook, and a
handful of sullen killers.
Speaker 2: Gix was bored. I can always tell. He gets a
particular stillness about him, a predatory calm that's far more
unsettling than his usual manic energy. He spent the morning
watching our prisoner, who was still tied to the ironwood root,
shivering and stained with his own filth. Gix's head was
cocked to one side, like a magpie studying a beetle
before pecki its guts out. He finally slithered over to me,
his movements unnervingly fluid. He crouched down, his painted face
a mask of polite inquiry dre he whispered, a conspiratorial
gleam in his eyes, Our guest, he's looking awfully lonely.
I think he has stories to tell. He just needs
a little hum encouragement to share. I looked from Gigs's
hungry face to the pathetic heap of the caravan guard.
The man was a nobody, a farmer with a cheap spear,
hired for a few coppers. The odds of him knowing
anything about his employer's shipping manifests were long, but they
weren't zero. Right now, A one in one hundred chance
was the best hand we had. Find out what he knows,
I said, my voice, flat roots schedules the strength of
other go guards who hired them. I fixed him with
a hard stare, get what you can, don't take all
day about it? A smile stretched Gix's lips, showing the
sharpened points of his teeth. Of course, not, we're all
busy men. He sauntered over to the prisoner, pulling a
small cloth wrapped bundle from his pouch as he walked.
The guard flinched as Gicks approached, pressing himself against the
tree as if he could merge with the bark. Gis's
interrogation was not a thing of shouting and breaking bones.
It was a performance. The rest of the crew paid
it little mind, or so watched for a moment, his
expression purely analytical, before deciding it was a waste of
his time and returning to the careful maintenance of his gear.
Stiggin propped up against the hollow's wall, grunted and closed
his eyes, interested in sleep more than sport. Brynn was
a few yards away, skinning a pair of squirrels with
a practiced indifference that was its own form of cruelty.
Gicks began by untying the man. He was disarmingly gentle.
He even offered the man a sip of water from
his own water skin, which the guard, shaking accepted. There Now,
Gigs cooed, patting the man's shoulder. We're not animals, are we.
He then unrolled his cloth bundle on the ground. It
didn't contain tongs or hot irons. It contained a feather,
a shard of glass worn smooth by a river, a
dead hornet, perfectly preserved, and a single long, rust colored needle.
I just want to play a game, Jick said, his
voice dropping to a confidential whisper. The guard started weeping.
It's a simple game of questions. For every answer I like,
you get a drink of wine for every answer I
don't like. He picked up the dead hornet, holding it
between his thumb and forefinger. I show you one of
my treasures up close. Gicks would ask a legitimate question
who was the paymaster? And then a completely nonsensical one,
do you think a song has a color? The combination
designed to shred what was left of the man's sanity.
I watched my face, impassive. I didn't care about the man,
I didn't care about Gigs's sick games. I just wanted
a piece of information, a name, a date, a road,
anything to turn this disaster into something else. But there
was nothing. The guard was exactly what he looked like,
a hired hand from a village called Oakhaven, paid in advance.
He didn't know where the caravan was ultimately headed, only
that his contract ended at the next way station. He
didn't know who owned the goods. He didn't know anything.
He babbled about his wife, his children, the patch of
land he was hoping to buy. He offered Gix to
everything he had, which was nothing. Finally, after nearly an hour,
Gix's pleasant demeanor soured. The prisoner was broken, sobbing uncontrollably,
his answers just a stream of incoherent please. The toy
was no longer interesting. Gigs stood up, a look of
profound disappointment on his face. He sighed the sound loud
and the quiet camp. Oh, he said, his voice flat
with boredom. That's no fun at all. He looked at
me and gave a slight shake of his head. Nothing.
I gave him a curt nod and did Gis turned
back to the weeping man, who looked up a flicker
of desperate hope in his eyes. Gix's hand moved in
a lazy, almost casual arc. The jagged blade he favored
seemed to leap into his palm, a flash of steel,
a wet, tearing sound. The guard's weeping stopped. He slumped forward,
a red line blossoming across his throat. Dix wiped his
blade clean on the dead man's tunic, his expression that
of a craftsman who's found a flaw in his materials.
He walked away from the body without a second glance.
The scum Kings watched, unmoved. Another body, another failure. We
were exactly where we were an hour ago, just with
more blood on the ground. I looked at the corpse,
then at my crew, then at the gray, uncaring sky.
Another mouth gone, I thought, another body to bury the
grand profits of our new kingdom.
Speaker 1: Signal Box The Scum Kings created and written by Mike Daltrey,
a Signal Box Studio production.
Speaker 2: Episode four, The Hunger. A hunger is a quiet poison.
It works its way into you, slow and patient. After
three days with nothing but Cobb's foul grog and a
few strips of squirrel, the rage in my gut had
cooled and curdled into a height cramping knot. Every rock
started to look like a loaf of bread. Every gust
of wind sounded like a mocking laugh. We were kings
of nothing. But this hollow and our thrones were our
own empty bellies. The camp was a picture of slow
decay stiggand the great mountain of a man was reduced
to a grumbling heap. I'd kill a man for a
heel of stale bread, he groaned for the tenth time
that morning. I'd kill two men for a sausage. The
pain in his shoulder was forgotten, replaced by the deep,
insulting ache of starvation. Cob Ever, the Optimist was trying
to create a feast from filth. He had a fire going,
a pot of water bubbling over it. Into this, he
was shaving thin strips of bark from a dead tree.
It's all in the broth, he announced to no one
in particular, stirring the round water with a stick. The
bark has an earthy flavor, full of fortitude. He threw
in a handful of the same bitter roots that had
failed to improve his grog. The resulting soup looked like
running mud and smelled like wet rot. No one moved
to ask for a bowl. Even Gix had lost his edge.
He sat apart from the others, listlessly, throwing a sharpened
rock at a tree stump, there was nothing to torment,
nothing to break. His creative cruelty needed an audience, a victim,
and all he had was the crushing boredom of starvation.
I sat with Orso on the edge of the camp,
watching the slow motion collapse of our crew. His face,
with its web of burned scars, was as grim and
logical as ever. We have two choices, he said, his
voice low. He drew a line in the dirt with
the tip of his dagger. We can follow this ditch
east in three days, maybe four. We'll stumble out of
the tangle and hit a village. We'll be half dead,
with nothing to trade, but we'll be alive and do what.
I shot back, the words, tasting like ash in my mouth,
beg for scraps hire ourselves out of scarecrows. We're the
scum kings, or so not the scum beggars. The name
felt absurd, saying it now a bitter joke. He drew
another line, heading west, deeper into the blank space on
our mental map, or we push on into nothing. We
have no idea what's in that direction. The math says
we die. We run out of water in two days,
and our own bodies in three. The math was wrong
about the caravan too, I countered the anger flaring up,
hot and weak. It said we'd be rich. The math
wasn't wrong, or so said his voice, dangerously quiet. The
plan was My point is this? A chance of humiliation
is better than a guarantee of death. We swallow our pride,
we survive, we find a new score. Pride doesn't fill
your stomach. Pride is all we have left. I stood up,
too agitated to sit still. I paced the length of
our pathetic camp. If we crawl out of this forest
like beaten dogs, we're finished. Every cheap gang boss and
tinpot baron will know we can be broken. We push on.
There is always another score, There has to be. Or
So looked up at me, his eyes cold and clear.
Hope is not a strategy, dre Before I could answer,
a shadow fell over the camp. Brynn was back. She
had been gone for two days, melding into the woods
at dawn one morning, and promptly forgotten. She moved with
a weary purpose, her feral energy banked low like coals.
She didn't speak. She walked straight to me, past the others,
her gaze locked on mine. She stopped at my feet
and opened the small sack she carried. A single, scrawny
rabbit tumbled out, landing in the dirt with a soft,
pathetic thud. Its fur was modeled, its body thin. A
meal for one, maybe an insult for seven. A collective
sigh of disappointment rose from the men sticking just groaned
and rolled over. It wasn't enough, it was nothing. But
I wasn't looking at the rabbit. I was looking at
Bryn's eyes. They weren't the eyes of a hunter who
had struggled for two days to catch a single, worthless meal.
They were bright, sharp, focused. They held the thrill of
the chase. She had dropped the rabbit at my feet
as a token of formality. Her gaze was fixed on
the horizon, and it was telling me, clear as any words,
that she had found something else. She had found bigger prey.
Speaker 1: Signal box The scum Kings created and written by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: Episode five planning. Brinn led me through the thorny scrub
for half a mile, moving with the silence of a
hunting cat. I followed my stomach a hollow ache, the
pathetic rabbit from the night before. A distant unsatisfying memory.
She brought me to a rocky outcrop overlooking a small
cleared valley. Crouching behind a gray, lichen covered boulder, she
simply pointed. I peered over the edge. My heart, which
had been hammering with the hope of a fat merchant
train or a rich pilgrim's camp, sank into my boots.
Below us, nestled in the shallow dale, was a farm,
not a thriving estate, but a tiny, isolated hovel clinging
to life. There was a small lopsided cottage with a
wisp of smoke curling from its stone chimney, a barn
whose roof sagged in the middle, and a muddy fenced
in pen. In that pen, snuffling contentedly in the muck,
was the single most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
A pig, A fat, glorious, pink flanked pig was pathetic.
It was everything. How many I asked my voice a
hoarse whisper. Brynn held up two fingers. Man and a
woman old saw them gathering wood this morning. I stared
down at the sad little farm, a wave of conflicting
emotions washing over me. Disappointment, hot and sharp. We were killers, conquerors,
and now our grand prize was a single farm animal.
But beneath the disappointment was a raw animal, craving that
drowned out everything else. My mouth watered. That pig was life,
It was victory. We brought the others one by one.
They crawled to the edge of the outcrop and stared
down at our target. I saw the same flicker of
shame and hunger in their eyes. That's it, Sigin grunted,
his voice full of disbelief, locked on the pig, and
when a low rumble started in his chest, Gods, look
at the size of it. We retreated back into the
woods to lay our plans. It was absurd, it was essential.
We couldn't afford another failure, not even this one. The
memory of the caravan guards of Finn and Joric bleeding
out on the road was too fresh. This time there
would be no mistakes, or so, our master tactician knelt
in the dirt. With the tip of his dagger. He
began to sketch a map with the focus and intensity
he would give to laying siege to a city. He
drew the cottage, the barn, the pig pen, even the
thin track of a creek that ran along the valley floor.
It's a simple, too structure assault, he began, his voice,
all business. The six of us huddled around his dirt
map as if it were a king's wars table. The
approach is clear from the north, but exposed. We move
under the cover of dusk. Brynn, he glanced at her,
You will circle west. Your job is observation. Only confirm
the targets are inside the cottage and stay there. She nodded,
her eyes already scanning the valley below. Stiggand or So
continued drawing a line toward the barn. You and I
will take the barn. It's our primary staging point. The
door is old wood. It should be silent if we're careful.
If not, I'll break it. Steagan finished, clenching a fist
the size of a small ham two hits. Or So nodded, Gicks,
you have sentry duty. Gix, who had been watching with
a predatory stillness, smiled thinly. What kind of sentry, the
living kind, or So said, the kind that secures the house.
You and Dre will take the cottage. Your job is containment.
No one comes out, no one makes a sound. The
implication hung in the air. Containment a clean word for
a bloody job. Selaine. Ever, the quartermaster spoke up the asset.
What is the plan for extraction? We butcher on sight? No,
I said, the decision forming as I spoke. The thought
of hot blood and fresh meat was making me reckless.
Too much noise, too much time. We take it alive,
We drag it back here and deal with it. The
absurdity of it all hit me. Then, the scum kings,
seven hardened killers, planning the abduction of a single pig
with the tactical precision of a military campaign. I felt
a hysterical laugh bubble in my chest, but I choked
it down. We needed this, We needed a win, no
matter how small, howetic. Our pride was a luxury. We
had burned on the pire of our last failure. All
that was left was the gnawing in our bellies. All right,
I said, looking at the faces around me, that's the plan.
We move in one hour. Check your gear, no mistakes,
no noise. The crew nodded, their faces grim and serious.
Stiggins stretched his arms, preparing for his grand assault on
the barn door. Or So reviewed his dirt map, checking angles.
This was the bottom. This was our great and terrible
war for a slab of bacon. As we stood there,
finalizing our pathetic masterpiece of a plan, a sound drifted
up from the valley. Who yap, yap, yap, whoof We
all froze. Every head snapped toward the direction of the farm.
A dog, a yapping, alert little farm dog. It wasn't
a roar of a warhound, but it was enough. It
was an alarm, an unplanned variable. We looked at each
other the same thought in every eye, our meticulously planned ambush,
our great hope for a hot meal, might already be
a failure. Signal box