Speaker 1: The scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written
by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: Chapter fifty six, The March, My pitch, my insane, fever
born gamble. Hung in the cold, dead air, My crew,
what was left of them, just stared at me. Their
faces were pale in the twilight, a gallery of shock
and despair. I had taken their last sensible, pathetic hope
and crushed it. And in its place I had offered
them a dream. It was an unbelievable dream, built on
the fraying threads of a desperate story. But it was
a dream. Or So was the first to speak. His
voice was flat, devoid of anger, as if he were
explaining a simple, sad truth to a child.
Speaker 1: Drey.
Speaker 2: He said, you're raving a fever dream from a dying lunatic.
That's your plan. He shook his head, a gesture of
pure weary pity. We have no food, we have no
map to this abbey. We are weeks from any known
civilized road. It is suicide, a fantasy. Seline stepped forward,
holding up her hand, the single silver coin pinched between
her fingers. This is real, Drey, She said, This is
a loaf of bread, This is a day of life.
What you have, it's a carving, it's a story, it's air.
I am walking to the nearest village. We are going
to eat.
Speaker 1: It was done.
Speaker 2: I had lost them. The logical, sensible world was pulling
them back back to the mud, back to a slow, cold,
certain grave. Then a sound cut through the tension, a
sound so unexpected, so alien in this place of despair,
that it made us all flinch. Stigand was laughing. It
started as a low, rumbling chuckle in his massive chest.
Then it grew erupting from him in a great, booming,
joyous roar that echoed off the barren rocks. He threw
his head back and laughed at the gray, uncaring sky.
Or So and Selaine stared at him, horrified, as if
he too had finally gone mad. Stigand wiped a tear
from his eye, his face split in a bloody, bruised
grin a golden abbey, he roared, slamming his bandaged fist
against his thigh, a fortress full of wine, guarded by priests.
He looked at Orso, his eyes blazing with a new
wild light. You want us to go back to being rats,
or So hiding in ditches. I am a warrior. I
was not born to starve to death waiting for a
single coin to buy me a crust of bread. He
turned to me, his gaze full of a fierce, resurrected loyalty.
I would rather die storming a wall of gold than
live another month as a beggar. He spat on the
ground at Orso's feet. Dre's madness is better than your sense.
At least it is a fine place to die. I'm
in to the feast. Dix, who had been watching the
entire exchange with a child's bright eyed curiosity, began to giggle.
Oh yes, he whispered, his painted smile, returning a secret, rich,
holy place. The things we could do, the chaos, it's beautiful.
The crew was split. Brynn was watching me, her head cocked,
her expression unreadable, but I saw her hand move away
from her knife. She was no longer preparing to leave.
Cob as always, was just terrified, looking back and forth
between or So and me, trying to guess which one
of us was going to get him killed faster. It
all came down to Orso. He was the center of
the mutiny. He had the logic, the coin and the
path to survival. But I had Stiggin's heart and Gix's madness,
orso looked at me. He looked at Stigand, who was
now pulsing with a new dangerous energy. He looked at Selaine,
who was clutching her one coin as if it were
a drowning child. He looked at the barren gray land
around us, at the dying light, at the cold stones.
He was a man of logic, and he was recalculating
the math. I could see it in his eyes. He
hated me, He hated this plan. He hated that his
own sensible, logical path to survival was being undone by
a ghost story and a madman's laugh. But he was,
above all else, a pragmatist. He let out a long,
slow sigh, the breath of a man who accepts a terrible,
unchangeable truth. He looked at the ground, then back at me,
his face a mask of cold, grim resignation, a one
in a million chants. He grunted, his voice, thick with
a disgust. He didn't bother to hide is better than
a crawling in ditches. He sheathed his dagger. The debate
was over. Selaine looked at him, her face crumbling in disbelief.
Her one precious coin, her one real thing, was now worthless.
She slowly mechanically wrapped it in its cloth and hid
it away. She was beaten. One by one, they got
to their feet, Stiggin first, energized as if he'd just feasted,
Gis light as a dancer. Bryn, a silent shadow, rejoining
the pack, cob hauled to his feet by stiggand his
sobs quieted by a new, more profound terror. Finally, or
So and Slaine, the seven of us, We were no
longer a broken, aimless mob. We were a single unit again.
We were hungry, we were battered. We were marching toward
a fantasy. But for the first time since gray Mark,
we were marching with a purpose. I turned my back
on the distant, smoky memory of the city and faced
the dark, jagged line of the stone Fence mountains. I
didn't know if an abbey was out there. I didn't care.
It was a direction, it was a war, and we
were on the march.