Speaker 1: The Scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written
by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: Episode forty six, Escape from Graymark. The horns of the
city Guard were the sound of the world ending through
the roar of the inferno we had created. They came
not a disorganized mob, but disciplined squads of men in
steel and leather. Their shields locked, their spears a hedge
of glittering death. They moved through the fire and smoked
like a single iron scaled beast, and their orders were simple.
They were not making arrests. They were cleansing the gutters.
Any man with a weapon in his hand was to
be put down. We were no longer conquerors. We were
not even gang members. We were just more fuel for
the fire, hunted rats in a burning maze of our
own design. Scatter, I roared, my voice raw from the
smoke to the river go in the chaos. We were
broken apart. I had Orso and Slaine with me, and
we plunged into a side alley, the screams of the
dying echoing behind us. We saw a squad of guardsmen
corner a group of red Hand thugs and execute them
with a cold brutal efficiency that made our own violence
look like a child's tantrum. This was a different kind
of enemy, an enemy we could not beat, We could
only run. It was a nightmare of running through smoke
choked alleys, of dodging collapsing, flame eaten buildings. We found
Bryn first. She was a ghost in the inferno, using
the chaos to her advantage, and she guided us through
a series of twisting paths I never knew existed. A
roar of defiance led us to Stiggant. He was a berserker,
a glorious, suicidal whirlwind of muscle and rage, holding off
four guardsmen at once in the middle of a burning street.
It was a magnificent sight. It was also the end
of him if he stayed stiggand I bellowed over the flames,
to me, that's an order. He turned his face, a
mask of blood and joyous fury, and for a second
I thought he would refuse. Then his loyalty went out.
He broke a guardsman's shield with a final mighty blow
and charged after us. The surviving soldiers wisely letting the
madman go. We found Gicks on a rooftop, perched like
a gargoyle throwing burning brands down onto a squad below.
His laughter a high, unhinged counterpoint to the screams. He
was not trying to escape, He was redecorating hell. It
took a direct command and the promise of more amusing
chaos elsewhere to get him to move. We gathered the
last of us a terrified, weeping cob, and with Brin
leading the way, we found our desperate path out, a
storm drain that emptied into the river, a filthy tube
of salvation that smelled of piss and death. We emerged
on the far side of the river, crawling from the
water like half drowned rats, and we didn't stop running
until we had put a mile of dark wilderness between
us and the city. We stood on a cold, silent hill,
the seven of us that were left. We had come
to the city with silver in our pockets and dreams
of conquest in our heads. We left with nothing but
the clothes on our backs, the blood on our hands,
and the stench of our own failure. We were battered,
empty handed, and now likely wanted as mass murderers and arsonists.
In the distance, the city of Greymark was a wound
on the horizon, the gutters a brilliant, terrible glow against
the night sky. We had lit a spark to start
a war, and in the end the only thing we
had managed to burn to the ground was ourselves.