Escape From Greymark

The Scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written by Mike Daltrey. 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.