The Pleasure Garden was just as its name professed; an open garden full of exotic plants and even more exotic, scantily clad people. Pale-skinned, silver-haired Lyseni, teak-skinned, black-haired Summer Islanders, Irish-looking redheads that were probably Westerosi, even men and women with eyes like molten gold that came from the isle of Naath. Plates with fruits and cheeses and smoked meats made the rounds while beverages of all types were provided in seemingly endless supply - there was even a small fountain full of red wine instead of water.
Jorah and I were in full armor except for our helmets and were both armed; him with his bastard sword, me with my partisan and daggers. Our equipment did not seem to put off the dozens of scantily clad employees of the Pleasure Garden from giving both of us speculative looks, probably because we weren't the only people in full gear on the premises. Soldiers, guards, sell-swords and knights waited in every corner, sitting on the game tables, sampling the high-quality snacks and drinks, huddling in small groups to discuss the coming war, or being serviced by the Pleasure Garden's very skilled boys and girls behind strategically placed trees that provided the illusion of privacy.
"This place is..." Jorah looked around with a scowl, not knowing what to finish his complaint with, so I did it for him.
"A considerably better life for slaves than being chained to a galley's oars," I told him snidely as we walked deeper and deeper into the elaborately set up brothel. "Almost everyone here is enjoying themselves. Why, they don't even seem to realize they are slaves." He winced as we passed a girl that was entertaining two sailors at the same time. Her golden hair, pale skin and slight build made her look like Lynesse, though my apprentice was still prettier. My smile widened in satisfaction the moment Jorah's fists clenched as his mind made the same comparison mine had.
We walked on without another word, letting the music and song and less wholesome sounds wash over us as we searched for our host. It didn't take very long. For all that Pereno Dagareon had chosen a table in secluded corner away from most of the festivities, his robes of golden thread, gleaming red rubies and black diamonds drew the eye as well as a glowing neon sign, proclaiming "rich useless idiot" to anyone who had eyes to see. The half-dozen mercenaries around him, standing there in as much armor and weapons as we had, were far more interesting, for all that the young Dagareon heir supposedly was the city's military commander.
A heavyset man in thick chain armor of fine black steel links, with a short poleaxe at his side and a shield strapped to his back was the first to turn to face us. He was of a height with Jorah and of similar build and age and bore a Direwolf sigil as a belt buckle and on his shield. Black eyes like two pieces of flint glared at Jorah before turning to me and giving me a speculative once-over. He took a step or two closer as we approached, deliberately blocking our path.
"You are a disgrace, Mormont," he stated coldly as we came to a stop. "A stain upon the honor of your ancestors, of your home."
"Don't talk as if you and yours are any better, Hornwood," Jorah shot back. "Your... pack left the North to play sell-swords for a hundred and sixty years. Your ledgers are full of blood and worse."
"Perhaps," the Hornwood guy admitted. "But not a single one of us have been slavers in all that time. The ban on slavery has been in the Company charter since the beginning." His cold, expressionless face stretched into a sneer. "Besides, we have been sell-swords as you say. You were not, so what is your excuse? A pretty face?" Jorah bristled and I put a calming hand on his shoulder.
"Now is not the time," I told them both. "If you want to settle your grievances later, I am told this grand establishment has a dueling pit." Because of course it did. At least it catered to willing duelists rather than slaves or animals like the fighting pits in Slaver's Bay did.
"Hear, hear," a willowy brunette in brigantine almost as finely made as mine said, though hers was lighter and with fewer armor plates. "We're here to fight the Tyroshi bastards, not each other." She was armed with a Braavosi dueling sword and had several knives strapped to her belt and if it weren't for the grey in her hair and the old scar running down from her right temple to her jaw she'd look very much like my aunt, if a bit prettier. Lavender eyes and great looks spoke of some Valyrian blood, but her build, hair and attitude was much closer to Northern women than not.
"Thome of uth thould not be here at all," a tall, gaunt man with hair and eyes blacker than coal lisped as he glared with enough intensity to peel paint. There was something oily about his voice that wasn't the lisp itself, a heaviness to his presence like condensed rot and the tang of rust and spilled blood. His shadow seemed to loom behind him against the light, not something that came from him but a separate thing that followed after. It was a similar heaviness to my sacrificial knife, an aura of death and slaughter that spoke of ritual sacrifices except instead of strengthening him it just clung like a miasma and the distant attention of a power still sleeping. He wore a chain of linked coins from many places, little discs of gold, silver, bronze, iron and even bone, of every shape and size, cast and hammered, bearing the likenesses of kings, wizards, gods, demons, and all manner of fanciful beasts. "Real warth are no plathe for whoreth."
"Then why are you here, Vargo?" I shot back almost automatically, recognizing the bastard both from my spying on the arriving sell-swords and memories of my previous life.
"Yer calling me a whore?" he bristled and the other sell-swords gave us their attention, smelling the drama to come. Young heir Dagareon approached more tentatively, wringing his hands in worry.
"You and your Bloody Mummers are paid in gold to rape and pillage," I goaded him, smirking widely. "I even heard you took on a Westerosi Maester recently, to examine women before you raped them as precautionary measure against venereal diseases," I added and some of the serving girls and boys tittered gaily while Vargo fumed. "That does make you a whore... or perhaps a madam. You are the leader of men who are paid to rape and pillage, after all."
"She's got you there, Goat," Hornwood agreed with a harsh laugh and both the willowy brunette and two others that had yet to speak up nodded as well.
"She's just a bitch with some money and a big mouth," a man with thin brown hair and a papery, fake laugh said. "What use is she to the war effort?" No, not a man; a cadaver with red-rimmed eyes and dark veins showing in the pallid skin on his face and hands. He reeked of rot even worse than Vargo and there was something about him that felt... less than human. He wore a tattered, ragged leather cloak fringed with long, blond hair, a cloak that faintly wailed like a dying girl. None but me seemed to hear it, just like nobody else was scrunching their noses against Vargo Hoat's stench.
"More than a company of a hundred undisciplined vagabonds, I reckon," I countered, wanting to burn the guy where he stood on general principle, let alone for his company being involved in my near-assassination. Unfortunately, I'd have to settle for less, at least for now. "That's how many the so-called Brave Companions number now, yes? Though you should probably change your names after the recent... desertions you suffered."
"Friends, friends! There is no reason to fight amongst ourselves!" Dagareon interrupted, almost tripping over his too-heavy robe of office in his haste to rise from his seat. The earnest youthful face of a blond kid gave us a practiced smile... and I suddenly realized I knew the guy. Or rather... I'd seen someone that could have been his younger brother back on Captain Sathmantes' ship.
"On the contrary, honored Gonfaloniere," I bullshitted for all I was worth. "It is for the good of the city that those unworthy among us should be cast out and forgotten. The wise Council of Magisters hired the Golden Company, knowing quality when they saw it. Why hire the Goats now?"
"The Golden Company is meant to secure our defensive lines," the supposedly elected military official of the city told us. "In their wisdom, the Council decided that we needed scouts and outriders to foray into the Disputed Lands, small companies that could see what a vast army could not." OK, that wasn't an entirely stupid plan, but what he did not say was that the Golden Company had demanded exorbitant rates for an offensive campaign, rates the Council was not willing to pay just yet. And with the economy suffering, they only had enough gold to entice second or even third rate companies like the Brave Companions... or brand new unknowns like my own.
"The Brave Companionth offer our hundred zorthe riderth to the cause!" Vargo Hoat immediately boasted in his ridiculous lisp, his prior reputation and general intensity the only reason he was taken seriously. "Our prithe ith one thilver per man per day." Which was a pretty steep price. I doubted his company even had half as many riders as he claimed after their recent failures, the rest being rabble at best.
"The Wolfpack offers three hundred light infantry, fifty mounted scouts and two hundred archers," the Hornwood guy was quick to speak up as well. "One silver a week for the infantry, two silver a week for each archer, one silver per two days for my mounted scouts." He had a pretty respectable company but from how eagerly he made an offer despite his misgivings with both Jorah and Vargo being present and the price he asked for they had to be hurting for cash.
There was a pause and when the rest of us did not immediately make offers of our own, Pereno steepled his fingers under his chin like the tryhard he was and gave us what he thought was a winsome smile. "And you, ladies?" he asked in that flowing, musical Lysene accent as he showed off pearly white teeth. The brunette and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes and turned back at him.
"The Company of the Rose can field six hundred pikes and one hundred and fifty elite scouts," she said proudly, putting a bit of emphasis on the last word. "I'll accept no less than a silver every five days for my pikes and two silver per three days for my elites. We know our worth and so do you." And if they were actual scouts I'd eat my old boots. Oh, they could do scouting, all right, but from all the rumours and my own investigations they could do a lot more behind enemy lines than gather information. The way the woman herself dressed, armed and carried herself was too familiar for me to think otherwise.
"The Dread Company will field a hundred pikes, eighty heavy crossbowmen, twenty heavy infantry, one sorceress, and one cog ship for our transport," I finally decided to go all-in... not that there had ever been another plan. "One silver a week for the pikemen, two silver a week for the heavy crossbowmen, a silver a day for the heavy infantry, and all docking fees, tariffs, taxes, consumables and repairs for the Company and their transport paid for, for the length of the campaign and as many days afterwards."
Everyone at the table but Jorah stared at me. I'd made the offer exactly as Tregar and Lynesse had said I should and for a brand-new, unproven company it was as high a price as Vargo was demanding for his rabble. Unlike the goat though, we actually had the men we advertised without counting any recruits newer than a month. We also had far better equipment and our own transport. But the biggest difference was the obvious one, the one that needed some more hands-on advertising.
"Nobody's going to pay you that much, you stupid bitch," Vargo's corpse-like companion chortled darkly. "Not unless you spread them pretty legs, eh?"
Right on cue; misogynistic idiots were so predictable. So just as planned I reached out with my mind and magic, hammering at his maggot-ridden skull while also trying to stop the blood in his veins and cook his skin a little. There was resistance - more resistance than anyone else had shown before except the big Ironborn pirate that had nearly killed me - but I wasn't tired from dozens of prior spells and he was only ten feet away. My magic burned a hole through the invisible foul miasma that clung to him like his awful cloak in a few seconds of awkward stand-off... and then the sizzling and writhing and screaming started.
"Nyke ūndegon aōha mijegon hen vokēdre doru-borto," I said in the dead silence that followed his running out of breath and his every muscle locking up from shock, my speech and accent deliberately falling into old High Valyrian. "Isse ñuha tubis, lī qilōni ēdas pōja ābrazȳrys's ñelly syt grēze sia daor dāez naejot ȳdragon. Hae nyke iēdrosa glaesagon, iksis iēdrosa ñuha tubis." Then I pulled my magic back, allowing the still lightly smoking bastard to pass out before turning to our gaping "honored" military leader.
"And with that annoyance out of the way," I said with the air of someone that had just kicked some barely noticeable impediment aside, "what does the Council of Magisters think of my offer?"
The town of Saelys was burning. The fires were still limited near the breach to its northern palisade, with less than two dozen of its wood, straw and brick houses and storage buildings licked by the growing flames but, as every one of the town's semi-permanent residents knew, they would spread. They always spread; five times had the town been reduced to cinders in the last century alone and this one would soon be the sixth. It was one of the reasons the Merchant Princes of Lys had never bothered with construction more permanent - and expensive - than wood and brick.
Not that Lotho much cared about the whys of his situation or the architectural planning of his distant masters; he was far too busy cursing their aversion to a standing military while dodging Tyroshi spears. Fortunately, Saelys' narrow streets and even more cramped alleys made evading the raiders that had just breached the defenses and slain far too many of his men if not exactly easy then at least possible. The problem was that unless he reached one of the few fall-back points they'd managed to organize since they saw the raiders coming and scraped together enough men to both stop the bastards and halt the fire's advance, they'd lose everything.
Huffing and puffing as his boots sank into the muddy ground between the seventh granary and Old Terea's textile workshop, he slowed down to catch his breath and decide where to head to next. The Overseer's manor, the town hall, or the militia training yard behind the ruined temple? It was that moment he took to pause and think that saved him from the raider that came swinging a two-handed axe around the corner, obviously expecting him to have been closer.
Lotho sprang into a lunge, his Braavosi estoc slipping through the raider's guard before the axeman could recover from his overbalanced swing. Its sharp, stiff, narrow point pierced through the man's shoddy, rusty mail with ease but only scraped off his lower ribs without piercing anything important. It didn't really matter. As Lotho had told those idiots he threw off the militia roster for sticking to their axes instead of getting some real weapons, his enemy's next swing came short because axes couldn't match the reach of most other weapons. Lotho thrust again and though his opponent's wild dodge saved him from being skewered, falling on the defensive against Lotho was just another mistake; axes had never been designed to parry either. Oh a skilled warrior could have done so still, but only at a disadvantage - one almost as decisive as the axe's limited attack options. A dozen heartbeats after the fight's start Lotho found his opponent's heart and that was that.
"You should have brought a shield," he told the soon-to-be-corpse and got running again, his knees aching and a stitch growing more and more insistent at his side. Damn the merchant princes and their damn hired killers, he was getting too old for such things. "If I survive this I'm restarting my morning runs, summer or no summer," he vowed, if only to himself. Unfortunately, trouble found him the moment he had to get out of the alleys and into one of the town's few proper streets.
"I found the fat guy!" another damnable Tyroshi yelled not even a minute after he got into the open, a scrawny beanpole of a spearman, waving his rickety pointed stick around. "Did you hear me?!" the blond shouted as he caught up to Lotho and made it look easy. "I found the f-urgh!" His pursuer's shout ended in a gurgle as Lotho reversed directions, dodged a clumsy spear-thrust with a nearly as rusty Water Dancing step that cut diagonally into the younger man's reach then extended into a lunge in the same step, burying the tip of his estoc in the spearman's throat.
"Sorry boy," Lotho told the dying blond that couldn't be older than five and ten, lamenting that the young man had to die uselessly. The damage had already been done as a whole group of raiders hurried up the street, at least a score of them. Spearmen, swordmen, a huge guy in half plate and mace that was sweating like a pig, even a pair of riders with light lances. Even without archers, Lotho knew he was done for.
"Come then, you slaver dogs!" he challenged and raised his blade in a middle guard. If he was lucky, he might even take a couple of the screaming mercenary scum down with him. Sixty yards, two javelins easily sidestepped, fifty yards, a surprisingly long and accurate axe-throw he had to parry, the unruly mob that would be his death fanning out as their near seven-foot-tall leader stepped forth - stupidly, in Lotho's opinion - clearly looking for a duel. Then there was the snap of a bowstring, a sharper crack of metal and the huge sellsword staggered then fell, an arrow buried through his breastplate and chest. Everyone, Lotho included, looked for the archer... and then gaped at what they saw.
A woman almost as tall as the idiot that had just died had stepped into the street as casually as if taking a stroll. Her hair was the silver of Old Valyria rarely seen outside Volantis, her armor expertly tailored brigantine fitted perfectly over a figure of feminine grace, her weapon one of those Westerosi longbows almost as long as she was tall. Then, her arms started moving in a near-blur and raiders started dying. In the first couple of heartbeats two more joined their leader in the mud, an arrow through a spearman's lung and out his back, another through a swordsman's helmet. The raiders responded with a charge but before they could cross even half of the fifty-yard distance, ten more of them were dying or crippled. In a dozen heartbeats the woman had shot just as many times, something Lotho himself had never seen... or even considered possible.
The surviving Tyroshi sell-swords were only a few yards from the woman - who at a second look couldn't be much older than the boy Lotho had just slain - when four men in full heavy plate burst through the doors of the streetside houses in a near-perfect ambush up the charging raiders' flanks. That they were wading in melee of three or four times their numbers did not seem to bother the mace-armed knights any more than wearing black metal plates under the scorching sun of the Disputed Lands. The first to swing sent a man flying a dozen feet, the second crushed another's helmet and head, a shield raised in panic shattered into bloody splinters along with the arm beneath it, the fourth knocked a crumpled sword out of a ruined hand. The charge that was about to reach the archer quickly disintegrated into a chaotic mess.
Said archer set her bow aside and picked up a partisan Lotho could have sworn had not been there a moment before. That she lifted in a two handed grip by the very end and raised in a window guard over one shoulder, a ridiculous stance for a spear of any type. The two spearmen that closed in first did not find it ridiculous at all as the woman swung almost too fast for Lotho to see, the partisan's head scything through their throats in a burst of blood as if they were so much wheat. That, along with the sudden losses and the ambush put an end to the survivors' willingness to engage.
Unfortunately for them, the Valyrian warrior proved that she knew how to use a polearm properly by joining the four men into dismantling said survivors, thrusting through mail with rapid jabs, parrying incoming blows with narrow rotations, shattering limbs and heads with wider swings. In but a few more heartbeats the group of well over twenty raiders were dead to the last man... and Lotho realized he'd just stood there throughout the fight, staring.
"Hail Lotho, of House Naan," the woman greeted him as she walked closer with rapid, graceful steps, the militia leader once again struck by her height, youthful looks and, from what he could see under that coppergate helmet, the kind of beauty the Pleasure Houses of Lys would give a king's ransom for. He very carefully kept his mouth shut about it, though. "In better circumstances I'd say well met, but this mess hardly qualifies."
"...I suppose not, my lady," he agreed with as much politeness as he could bring to bear. "Are you the reinforcements from Lys, then?" He looked around just in case more than those four knights would appear from the nearby alleys or buildings, but no-one did.
"That we are," she said with the confident smirk of the young and foolish. Though, given what Lotho had just seen, maybe it was warranted. "The rest of my men are ambushing other raiding teams in the town square and the Overseer's manor right now." Her eyes took a faraway look, as if gazing at things that Lotho could not see, and the gleaming amethyst of their irises was momentarity shadowed by the milky white of the old and blind. Then Lotho blinked and they looked as bright and perfect as they ever had. "Another two groups the size of this one were just crushed, which only leaves the thirty-seven attackers near the breach." Her smirk turned nasty. "Those, too, are about to get a surprise they won't like."
"That's what we thought too, but the bastards started with volleys of fire arrows, then struck when we tried to put out the flames," the ageing militia trainer cautioned. He had seen far too many young commanders brought low by overconfidence, no matter their skills. "Now Saelys is in danger of burning down even if we manage to fight off the raid."
"Oh, the fires won't be an issue," she said with the air of someone who knew something Lotho did not. Another brief shift of milky white, gone so quickly it could have been a trick of the light. "Come. Your men are rallying for a counterattack and I'd rather avoid an unnecessary clash between yours and mine due to a misunderstanding."
They only took a minute to retrieve the lady's arrows from the dead, any of the raiders still alive finished by a quick thrust of her partisan. Lotho looked on in interest at the very narrow shafts that gleamed in the sun. They looked like...
"Steel arrows?" he couldn't help but ask. "They must have cost a fortune!"
"They are affected much less by the wind, don't ineffectually shatter on impact with plate, and can fit a lot more of them in a quiver of the same size. They're more than worth it," she told him as if the cost of dozens of steel bolts was no big deal. "Besides, the cost isn't as high as you imagine," she added, again with the same air of knowing something he did not.
"Do your men have steel arrows too?" he demanded with some incredulity. What was next, Valyrian steel?
"Steel bolts, actually. They prefer crossbows," she said with a shrug.
Lotho had nothing to say to that, so they progressed in silence, or as much silence as there ever was in a battle. The distant clang of steel on steel and the yells and cries of fighting men mixed with the clicking of well-fitted, expensive plate whose owners made no effort to engage in conversation. It was odd, not fitting with the image of the promised sell-sword reinforcements he'd had in his mind... and it was far from the only thing that didn't.
"When did you get to Saelys?" he asked as they got closer and closer to the breach, the sounds of battle getting louder as the smoke hung more heavily in the air. The roof of an old brewery they just passed was already smoking and it wouldn't be long before the rest went up like a torch.
"We were supposed to arrive the day before yesterday but the weather was not cooperating," she grumbled, putting as much disgust and anger into the word as Lotho would have had. "Our ship came within ten miles of the shore by the time the battle here was starting, so I put my men in boats and told the Captain to stay out of sight while we snuck in on the down low."
"...that can't be right," Lotho said with a frown, suspicion churning in his gut. "How did you know the battle was starting before you even came ashore?" Or maybe it was fear. The fear of standing next to a possibly hostile stranger younger, faster, and capable of more violence than Lotho had been at his peak.
"I know more than others do because I know how to look," the young woman sassed him, proving that she was normal in at least one way. "I'll explain more later, we got a battle to finish and a town to save."
It wasn't much of one, the festivities were all but over by the time they got to the breach. Half a hundred crossbowmen were calmly reclaiming bolts from corpses as half again their number of spearmen in armor of hardened leather and a dozen of the knights in plate were mopping up the last few strugglers. Corpses, blood and gore littered the churned mud next to the breach in the town's meagre defenses, close to thirty homes and warehouses casting the battlefield in a hellish red light and fouling the air with enough black smoke to choke if one took a deep breath.
"Huh, I'd thought they'd last longer," the Valyrian lady whose name Lotho still did not know complained in the way of young people breaking a toy, a tone that sent goosebumps up Lotho's arms.
"You can't expect more from sell-sword scum, my lady," a heavyset knight in plate, sword and board shouted in lieu of greeting. Dark eyes like flint gleamed darkly under his raised visor, on a wide face hard as stone and twice as dour. His blade, the rim of his shield, his armored feet and fists were all bloody and more crimson spatters stained his armor, proving he'd been in the thick of it despite the black plate having not a single dent or scratch.
"Jorah, Jorah, Jorah, you keep forgetting," the lady tutted. "We are sell-sword scum too, now." The man scowled at that when he hadn't at the killing and Lotho decided to, once again, leave well enough alone. "How did it go?"
"The men did... adequately," the knight grudgingly admitted. "I would not bet on them against even hedge knights back home but against this kind of rabble?" He nodded slowly. "A few injuries is the worst the men got. The Cats expected neither the crossbows nor our armor."
"You confirmed it then?" she asked. "It's the Company of the Cat?"
"Only a raiding party. They did not expect opposition."
"Of course the didn't," Lotho scoffed, speaking up for the first time. "We saw neither head nor tail of proper fighting men for years. I had to organize a militia of volunteers, got barely a hundred and now look!" He gestured angrily at the roaring flames. "There is no stopping this, we haven't the men or the water. Saelys will burn once again and for what? A few more golden crowns in the right pockets," he finished with more than a little bitterness.
"Oh ye of little faith," the Valyrian woman said with another annoying young people smirk then turned around.
"Zīragon!"
The Old Valyrian word reverberated around Lotho's skull like the lasting ring of an invisible gong and a weight fell on his shoulders, the air suddenly thick and heavy and hard to breathe. Then there was a shattering glass that was not a glass and weight and thickness vanished. The flames went with them, the burning buildings smothered to smoking embers one by one like so many candles snuffed out by a giant.
The recently renamed Spark Plug sailed up the inventively named river Sal and into Saelys' port only an hour after the battle was over thanks to wireless parrot communication. At a hundred and eighteen feet long and with a cargo capacity of a hair over five hundred tons she was over twice as large as historical cogs back on Earth and calling her a cog would probably annoy historians, but that's what the Westerosi called that ship class so that's what the company called her as well. The people of Bear Island made good use of her greater seaworthiness in the stormy and turbulent Bay of Ice, and her capacity had been put to good use by the Dread Company as well in many ways.
Only twenty of her original Northman crew remained, people that out of loyalty, self-preservation, sense of adventure or stupidity had decided to follow their former Lord into exile. Forty more Lyseni seamen from Houses Ormollen and Saan made up her permanent crew, but the remaining sixty were temporary hires, trainees and new recruits. I'd graciously turned down Tregar's suggestion to get a more reliable slave crew; it had given other factions a chance to sneak spies in our group but I'd already identified four of them and when they'd be executed on the return trip the rest of the crew and the company soldiers would have motivation not to sell information, those other factions would be down a few spies, and I would be up several sacrifices worth of power.
Of the only two real problems, the first was that Saelys' dock sucked. It was made of a trio of wooden piers that had never seen maintenance in the decades since the town's latest rebuilding, gave barely any protection from storms, and as it was meant to only service the cargo ships making the hundred and twenty mile trip between Lys and Saelys, its capability to provide ship maintenance and repairs was barely any better than an all-natural beach. The reason this was a problem for Spark Plug was fouling. The keel of all ships at sea accumulated marine organisms like algae, barnacles, and other debris, which significantly impacted their performance and efficiency. These growths increased drag, reduced speed, and made the ship handle lke a brick. Worse for wooden-hulled ships, it became a host for borers; worms, crustaceans and microorganisms that slowly ate into the wood and eventually destroyed it. Spark Plug had been cleaned after her long trip from Bear Island but more detritus had accumulated in the months since. She had been due for another clean-up but the early break-out of hostilities and the company's first mission had messed with the schedule.
"How is it going, Captain Wyll?" I asked the ageing Bear Islander, shouting to be heard over the cacophony of over a hundred sailors and nearly as many soldiers unloading crates, packages, barrels and boxes by the hundreds.
"We're ahead of schedule, milady," the once-heavyset but now slowly thinning sixty-something man told me in a more normal tone as I walked up a plank to the deck. "Your men seem tireless..." he hesitated for a moment, looking around rather warily. "I wouldn't put any stock to those rumors before but now... some of my boys whisper about a curse. There's mutters the men of the Dread Company can't rest while there's still orders to be carried out..."
"Not bad. They actually got it half-right," I said, noting the difference as both soldiers and sailors worked through the second hour of fast uploading. "Were there any problems with the food?"
"No, none of the usual damage from rats or other vermin. It was probably the short trip," the Captain said distractedly, looking a bit apprehensive before visibly girding himself and asking. "Beg your pardon, milady, but the curse?"
"There is no curse, Captain, just minor healing to remove fatigue," I reasurred him. I mean, the rings caused only harmless mutation at worst, unless abused. "It's even on items that the men can take off whenever they want to." But why would they when the alternative was feeling tired and still having to do the work? "Now any other problems?"
"No, no, everything is going perfectly," he was quick to reassure me. "There was a small delay with a misplaced barrel of dragon peppers but they've already been found; they were just loaded on the wrong hold. Also, the second team of landsmen dropped one of the ballista crates but Master Errik - that's the ship's carpenter milady - confirmed there was no damage except to the crate itself!"
"Crossbows, Captain," I corrected the fidgeting man. For some reason he was even more nervous than before.
"Beg your pardon, milady?"
"They are large crossbows, not ballistae," I explained, paying more attention to the pair of long crates containing more of the devices being slowly lowered to the pier through a series of pulleys. "The former is just a giant steel bow on a fixed base, the latter is a complex torsion engine of rope and sinew that wouldn't last a week in this climate." At a bit over two hundred pounds each with another couple hundred pounds of bolts, the whole system was a crew-served weapon at least as far as transportation on a ship was concerned. That would change once they were fully reassembled, though.
"As you say, milady," the Captain nodded sagely. We spent the next half-hour observing the men unloading everything needed for the campaign ahead and the reassembly of both thirty rickshaw carts as well as the dozen giant crossbows into their own integrated wheeled carts. They were far too few, their ammunition too little, and the transparent arrow shields I'd meant to add to them were absent. Two more months, three at the outside, and each of our thirty squads would have had its fully functional heavy weapon capable of skewering a knight in full plate at several hundred yards, twice a minute. With the early outbreak of the war, we'd not only have to make do with what we had, but also test the crossbows in the field for the first time with inexperienced crews. It was going to be a mess.
By the time the unloading was all but finished, Captain Wyll had one more thing to say. When I heard what it was, I couldn't decide whether to giggle or groan.
"If I may ask, milady, what made you decide to rename the ship so?" He'd stopped fidgeting sometime in the past half hour and was now more curous than worried since everything had ended well, more or less. I guess he had forgotten the war? "'tis such a strange name, Spark Plug. Is it a weaponsmith's tool?"
"Not quite, Captain Wyll. In ancient times it was a device to capture and amplify a certain form of fire." The fifties counted as ancient times, right? "In retrospect, few nowadays would remember its meaning."
"I've heard of far worse ship names, milady," he tried to reassure me, still not understanding what I was talking about... which was the other unsolvable problem. I'd wanted to make a joke, but in medieval Planetos, nobody got modern jokes...
xxxx
"Our problem is that the perimeter is far too large for what we have, and lacks any sort of defensive work," militia leader Lotho said after half a night of trying to hammer out tactics and our overall strategy. "Saelys was ever an overgrown workers' camp rather than a city and it's nearly a mile across. The river covers the east but we're too far from the coast for the south to be secured that way and two miles of palisade is too long to defend. Not with your two hundred men and my hundred and fifty surviving militia. Those crossbows of yours might help, but not nearly enough."
"I... agree with the town guard," Jorah grudgingly admitted. "We simply don't have the numbers." For the first hour or so, his ideas had revolved around raising levies from the nearly ten thousand people that called the overgrown village home until Lotho explained to us both the realities of the situation. Unlike Westeros where every able-bodied man - and quite a few women - had at least passing familiarity with as least one weapon just to defend themselves from bandits, "bandits", animals, monsters, mountain clan raids and food raids during winter years, in Essos in general and the Disputed Lands in particular, most of the working population were slaves. Them having weapons and knowing how to use them was the absolute last thing their masters wanted. Even if we convinced some of the local plantation "workers" to fight, their lifelong conditioning against self-defense would take months to work through and even longer to produce useful results.
"Well, we're going to need some sort of plan," I told the two of them and pointed at the dots on either side of Saelys on the best map we could find in the Overseer's mansion. The man himself had actually died during the raid, which made the job of holding the town together harder but at least his death had let us "requisition" everything he'd hoarded. "The Stormcrows and the Long Lances were just rebuffed by Tolessis' garrisson and are heading towards Laesar up the coast, but that town is where the Company of the Rose ended up. Twelve hundred horsemen trying to take a walled town from six hundred pike and a hundred and fifty elite archers? They'd be chewed up and spit out and probably turn around to bother us." No, I was not salty about other towns having actual defenses, why do you ask?
My finger traveled to the south-west. "The bigger problem is here, though. Vaelys. The Bloody Mummers were sent to defend it, but they're even fewer than we are and the Council refuses to cough up the gold for the Golden Company to send a detachment. Worse, most of the Company of the Cat are loitering between it and Weeping Town." And by 'loitering' I meant 'raping and pillaging'. It was not pretty to watch, even from above. "Bloodbeard still has nearly three thousand men and I doubt he got that men by being a happy and likeable guy. The moment he hears his so-called scouts got what they deserved he'll stop playing and fall on us like a hungry lizard-lion."
"If he's where you say he is, his force is three days' march away," Jorah narrowed his eyes at the mark I'd put for the Cats' main camp some sixty miles from our position. "He'll be expecting at least a messenger from his raiders, word on whether they succeeded or failed. Three days for such to reach him, maybe one more for unexpected delays. When he doesn't get it he'll have to assume the worst... so four days until he starts moving, seven before he is here."
"There is a strip of swampland between Saelys and Velys, plus the river Vel itself. He'll have to go around them. A hundred miles, maybe a hundred and fifty." Because of course the Lyseni wouldn't bother to be more creative in their naming, I thought with a snort as the militia leader marked the road for us. The map had made no mention of it of course. "Can you really see the move of armies from afar, my lady?"
"In a manner of speaking. I don't see it personally, but the information is accurate," was all I said, because explaining the details and limitations of warging to someone that didn't work for me did not sound like a good idea.
"So we will have proper warning at least..." Lotho stated grimly, his fists clenching on either side of his beer gut. "This is something at least, though I still don't see what we could make of it. Three thousand men is three thousand men."
"Your men are used to field work, are they not?" It wasn't really a question but he nodded anyway. "Our supplies include fifteen hundred steel shovels. With over a week to work we could work on a proper trench around town." Putting the local slave population to work was something I was ambivalent about but had prepared for just in case. And if things worked just right... "Your granaries and warehouses are full, does this mean you're done with the harvest?"
"We are, but..." he paused, thought about it, then chuckled. "I was going to say we should start planting for the next season but with the war it's not safe for the field hands."
"That's what I thought." I turned to Jorah. "Have the men dispense the shovels to anyone willing to help. Volunteers only; we don't want to frighten the field hands, that will cause problems we don't need." Plus I wasn't going to force any slaves into more work, and knowing which among said slaves retained at least some initiative and self-preservation was good information.
"A proper moat would take too long," the exiled knight mused, thinking of the town's size compared to most Westerosi villages. "A ditch should be doable though, my lady. Should I put the men into it, too?"
"No, have them training on the crossbows both large and small." Some preparation was always better than none. Speaking of which, I drew Lotho's attention. "I'll be taking over the Overseer's mansion. Ensure I'm not interrupted unless it's a major problem or an enemy arrives unexpectedly."
"What will you be doing, my lady?" Jorah asked with trepidation. It's almost as if he had experience with my usual antics - oh wait, he did.
"Cooking up some surprises for our new friend Bloodbeard and his Company of the Cat." And also giving time to thousands of not-so-timid slaves to familiarize themselves with a steel wedge at the end of a stick that could be used for digging through the hardest of soil... but also bonk people over the head with.
What could possibly go wrong?
During our days-long overseas crossing to the Disputed Lands, both the advantages and limitations of animal spies had become more pronounced. Many tropical and sub-tropical birds could comfortably fly at thirty to forty miles per hour and cover two hundred miles per day, at the cost of eating a third of their weight in food or more. Messenger pigeons back on Earth were a faster and longer-ranged, flying at sixty miles an hour and capable of going over six hundred miles, and ate only a tenth of their mass in food. Citadel ravens, on the other hand, could do a two-thousand-mile trip across Westeros in only a couple of days and their food requirements were abnormally small for that kind of feat, even smaller than real-life ravens at only a twentieth their weight per day. The difference became more obvious once you compared them to a normal raven's endurance, which barely exceeded a hundred miles a day.
This was an issue because I was limited to only a dozen active scouts, sixteen if I dropped everything else and focused entirely on warging, leaving me unaware of my immediate surroundings. Worse, my mental reach for taking over new targets was only a mile or two and I had to know what I was looking for and visualize it. Sending bird scouts from Lys across a hundred miles of sea to the Disputed Lands ate up the majority of their endurance. Even once the birds had crossed over to the area, there had been only so much they could scout... because I had not thought about the endurance problem ahead of time. I had been too used to Featherball and her 'all-other-birds-are-chumps' flight capabilities to deal with the matter and whatever pretense of omniscience I made to Lotho and his militia or our own men, the truth was I'd only found the Company of the Cat because one of my scouts had stumbled into their camp on its way to Weeping Town.
It was the kind of stupid luck that got you dead if you relied on it, so the first thing I did was recall my scouts. The second was to let them rest and eat while I opened one of my magic rings and melted the magic-infused ruby at its core into dozens of tiny bird bands for the flying scouts. Giving magic items to mostly expendable scouts might seem like a bad idea, but it was more an investment. Animals were easier to enhance than humans; the Maesters had done so via careful breeding that promoted beneficial mutations, whether mundane or magical. Having some birds infused with active magic long-term should produce faster results... as long as the magic was toned down enough they didn't mutate into some three-eyed dreamwalking horrors, or something.
While all this was happening, one of the wights was tasked with pulling one of the rickshaws with the other supplies I'd prepared for the trip; a small jar of enchanted blood, chilled and sealed to remain relatively fresh, and a literal wagonload of chipped wood. The Company of the Cat was three days' march away, or several hours' flight; an impractical distance to travel carrying any sort of load for any bird that was not Featherball. A wight was utterly tireless though, far more so than any man even those enhanced by my magic. Pulling the rickshaw at a steady jog, it did what had been three days' worth of marching in and afternoon.
Starting from Saelys, it went all the way around the river Vel and the marshlands from where the river sprang, then back south towards Weeping Town and the nasty kitties' camp. The last few miles it did under cover of night, the near-total darkness thanks to the overcast sky being no impediment to a wight that did not really need eyes to see. By then the birds were rested, fed, enchanted and already flying towards the wight's position on a hill two miles from the enemy camp. By the time they were there, the first batch of wooden chips had soaked well into the enchanted blood and a dozen winged infiltrators were ready to deliver their payload like they'd done many, many times before.
Burning a medieval ship was easy. They were a single object rarely more than a hundred feet long, made of dried, seasoned timber coated in tar, pitch and other extremely flammable substances, and wrapped in thousands of square yards of canvas and rope. They were basically giant torches waiting to be lit and once a fire got going on them it was very hard to stop. Medieval military camps were much less vulnerable than ships to my usual tactics. For one they were far larger targets, especially for an army the size of the Company of the Cat. Over half a thousand tents were spread over a rough ovoid more than a thousand feet across, with hundreds of men standing watch between but not immediately next to almost as many firepits. A ditch and a double-line of wooden stakes surrounded most of the camp and denying easy access except for better-guarded designated entry points. There were no siege weapons in evidence, but every other guard had a crossbow. Whatever other failings he might have, Bloodbeard had instilled some discipline into his men, enough to render the camp relatively safe from a conventional night raid.
The aerial approach under cover of darkness rendered such defensive perimeter entirely useless against my forces. Most people, even trained sentries, simply do not look up in the first place and a bird in the dark was practically invisible at any distance more than thirty feet. Even if it were noticed it was just a bird, wasn't it? What harm could it do? A dozen birds snuck into the camp, delivered their small but deadly payload, then flew back out. It only took them a couple of minutes to frly back to the wight and its rickshaw, load up on new incendiary munitions, and deliver them under stealth. All in all a cycle of four to five minutes for each "bombing run", as I introduced to Martin's death world the concept and tactics of the airplane carrier; a self-propelling resupply and rearming base for a reusable air assault squadron that could effectively attack from a longer range than the defenders could retaliate and had greater speed and mobility than any reaction force they could bring to bear.
It was tempting to bomb Bloodbeard's tent and decapitate the Cats' leadership as an opener. Very tempting indeed... but his death was by no means guaranteed. If my encounter with the Ironborn and my first enemy "hero unit" had proven anything was that I could not discount warriors just because they lacked oblious superhuman power. Skill, strength, speed, even luck could play their role and simple incendiaries were no guarantee of a kill, especially on land where there was much greater area to move in and avoid the flames. If I made a play for Bloodbeard and failed, both the surprise and the biggest strike I could bring to bear would have been wasted.
So the stealth bombers looked for more stationary, less heroic targets. Supply wagons loaded with grains and dried meats. Wooden barrels that held beer, wine, other forms of liquid courage, entertainment and disinfectant. Quartermaster tents full of spare blades, spears and crossbows, armor, ammunition, rope and leather. Blacksmith supplies from tools, to fuel, to fluxes, to intermediate products. Stabling areas full of horse feed and warhorses, zorses, mules, carts and draft animals. An army that size needed hundreds of tents' worth of materiel to be effective, at least some of that to even be called an army at all, and I took my time to sneak dozens of incendiaries into every critical area I could find. Unlike modern bombs, magical incendiaries were small enough to hide just about anywhere and couldn't be easily detected if you did not have magic and with the Nasty Kitties not wary of magical infiltrators just yet, nobody noticed anything during the night.
The early hours of predawn, what modern militaries would call 'nautical twilight', was statistically the time most humans, even trained soldiers, were less aware, were more likely to be deeply asleep, and were slowest to respond to emergencies. It was something even medieval armies were aware of but did not really prepare against for two reasons. First, they still had to guard against attack every other time as well and second, without light medieval armies could not even move so any attacking force would have to either announce itself with thousands of torches or stumble in the dark, doing nothing. Thus when I made the enchanted blood ignite all at once, causing hundreds of fires all across their camp, the Company of the Cat was even slower to respond than I'd been expecting.
Sentries noticed the flames within a minute and an alarm was raised almost immediately, but shock and confusion wasted a few minutes more before the first organized responders tried to stop the flames. Unfortunately for them, four minutes was two minutes too long to let the magical incendiares work on as flammable substances as grains, hay, oils, ropes, tents, even wood. Worse for them, there was neither a large body of water nor any modern water distribution to provide easy water access and the Company's water stores was one of the areas more heavily seeded with incendiaries to boot.
When the terrified screams of horses revealed that the incendiary attacks extended to the animal pens as well, three thousand half-asleep men were thrown into chaos and panic. Some tried to help save the food stores or their rides. Specialists tried to save their tools. Others realized how vulnerable to flame the hundreds of tents really were and tried to strike camp and evacuate. Some unit leaders tried to keep order while others tried to find the source of the obvious attack. In darkness broken by only the hellish light of the spreading conflagration a hundred groups moved in a hundred different directions as discipline disintegrated and the large size of the Company of the Cat turned against it. Then the more unlucky animals and people ran around screaming and on fire and chaos rapidly devolved into terror. The ditch and twin lines of stakes that defended the camp from outside attack became walls that trapped three thousand increasingly more frantic sell-swords along with the smoke and flames.
Fire spread, panic rose, order disintegrated entirely, and men started dying. Whether it was burning to death, choking on smoke or getting trampled by fleeing animals or running crowds, they all added to the disaster. By the time dawn came two hours later, ninety-seven men had died, ten times as many had burns or other injuries, and almost everyone in the enemy Company was exhausted, had trouble from at least some smoke inhalation, and were facing the almost total loss of the Company's supplies and almost fifty percent losses in animals.
A huge man with a great bush of a beard with fiery red whiskers and long braids led the Cats away from the still burning campsite, storming ahead in fury. From both local intelligence and foreknowledge, I knew Bloodbeard to be a savage commander, with a ferocious appetite for slaughter, and no taste for peace. He'd led the Company of the Cat in raid after raid against defenseless towns or smaller sell-sword Companies, looting and burning the former and sending the latter running or crushing them in the field of battle and taking no prisoners. Only the Golden Company and the nine Free Cities had been too big targets for him, and in the past few years only one other Company had dared oppose him and succeed. Now however, his men had been chased away from their camp for the first time. Worse still, they took tremendous losses not in numbers but equipment, losses that limited their mobility and combat effectiveness and put the entire Company in further risk.
Having already looted the villages within a day's march from his camp, he'd have to leave his people further afield in search of food and water. Weeping Town was not on a river and was a mining town rather than a plantation work camp. It had no food and inadequate water for his men. Laesar was too far away. Vaelys and Saelys were his only options, and whatever he did by the time he reached them his men would be thirsty and hungry. Vaelys was closer but its defenses were better than Saelys' dismal palisade. If Bloodbeard knew only a token force of the Bloody Mummers were defending it he'd make a beeline for it... but did he? Or would he pick the practically undefended town he'd already sent a raiding force against, not knowing we were here?
I did not know and my limited war experience was not up to making a decision, so I pulled my mind's shadow as soon as my bombing squadron were safely back to base and returned to my body in the old Overseer's mansion where I'd set up shop. I opened my eyes to find myself on the old Overseer's king-size bed, my body stiff from having been left hours in the same position and my head aching from handling so many different perspectives for just as long. I blinked dizziness and afterimages out of my eyes and tried to shake off the echoes of explosions...
...before realizing there hadn't been any explosions this time, only the roar of hungry flames. Besides, these distant bangs sounded more like... iron on wood? I got off the bed slowly, then walked down the stairs to the ground floor slowly as circulation and magic chased away numbness from my limbs. It wouldn't do to win a big victory against vastly greater numbers only to fall down the stairs and break my neck by being careless. Fourteen hells, if fifteen hours felt like that, I did not even want to imagine what sixty years stuck in a tree felt for Bloodraven and all the other Greenseers that had bound themselves to the Weirwood network before him.
"I'm coming I'm coming!" I shouted to whoever was banging on the mansion's door. Feeling my strength was mostly back, I pushed aside the several-hundred-pound bookcase I'd used to block said door, then used a touch of stone-shaping to open the metal lock I'd fused shut on the idea that the only way to prevent Faceless Men from stabbing me in my sleep was to ensure nobody could enter the house, faceless or otherwise, without having to loudly knock holes into walls.
"What!" I demanded as I finally pulled the heavy door open.
"We have a problem, my lady," Jorah Mormont said in a near-whisper, standing there with a constipated expression on his face and trying to be subtle after having loudly banged on my door for what had to be minutes on end.
"This better be important, Jorah," I told him with a frown, repeating the mantra 'don't kill the messenger' to myself, no matter how much I felt like blowing him up and returning to bed.
"It is. We-" he did not get an opportunity to explain what 'it' was though, as a much younger, prettier man pushed him aside. He was of a height with Jorah but much slimmer, with flawless pale skin, silver-blond hair, and pale lilac eyes. He was a hair too slim but still healthy, his face all harsh lines, high aristocratic cheekbones and an intensity in his gaze that few men had at any age, let alone the eighteen or twenty years old he appeared to be. He was dressed in black wool over red silk, a sachet of spices or perhaps drugs strapped to one hip with a golden chain, an overly ornate sword on the other.
"Oh!" the older teenager said as he took me in, his eyes lingering on my long platinum tresses, now slightly dishevelled from sleep, my purple eyes still with a gleam of magic from my recent efforts, and the swell of my bust under my night dress. "Lady Belaerys, the stories of your beauty do not do your true splendor justice," he said as he gallantly kissed my hand as I stood there poleaxed. As he made that grandiose pronouncement, a much younger girl of maybe nine years peeked from around his elbow, violet eyes almost as bright as my own taking me in with a sense of wonder from behind a curtain of silver-gold hair paler and shinier than the older boy's.
....fuck.