He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 31 (Patreon)

Dont know how accurate the high valyrian translator is but Jaes Dāervo means God Of Freedom. If you played Blood of the Dawnwalker you will recognize who I based and named a certain character on.

XXXI

Jaes Dāervo

The last thing Garth remembered was the sea.

The drunk, lurching deck of a Pentoshi trader under a sky with no stars, the smell of tar and brine and the cheap wine Daemon had bought by the cask in Myr, and Caraxes circling above them like a scarlet vulture, his wings catching the moonlight in ways that made the sailors pray to gods they'd forgotten they had.

Then nothing.

Then the guards.

Then the word slave, spoken in a language he did not yet understand, by a man whose face he could not see clearly because the light was wrong and his head was splitting and his hands were chained and the world was made of stone and heat and the smell of unwashed bodies packed too close together in a space too small to hold them.

That was two years ago.

He had stopped counting the days after the first month, when the counting had become a kind of torture more exquisite than anything the pits could offer - each day a stone added to a pile that grew and grew and would never be lifted, each dawn a reminder that another had passed and he was still here, still in this oven of a city with its pyramids and its harpy and its fighting pits and its masters who looked at him the way a man looks at a horse he has bought and not yet decided whether to breed or break.

He had learned the name of the city the way a man learns the name of his disease. Meereen. The queen of Slaver's Bay, the jewel of the Ghiscari coast, the city whose pyramids rose like broken teeth against the yellow sky and whose fighting pits drank blood the way the earth drank rain.

He had been a gift.

That was what the Great Master of House Reznak had told him-or rather, what the slave boy who served as Reznak's translator had told him.

There had been other men-Garth remembered that much. Men from King's Landing, from the City Watch, men who had followed Prince Daemon. There had been five of them. Or seven. Or four. The number shifted in his memory the way a face shifts in a dream, never quite resolving into clarity.

He did not know if they were alive. He did not know if Prince Daemon was alive. He did not know anything except the pits, and the sand, and the sound of voices screaming for blood.

He had been fighting for two years.

The first fight had been the worst-not because of the opponent, who was a thin Dothraki boy with a curved sword, but because of what it had made him. Garth had killed the boy. He had cut him down in the sand with a short sword that was too heavy in his grip and too blunt at the point, and the boy had died looking at him, and Garth had stood in the sand with the boy's blood on his hands and the crowd roaring and the sun beating down, and he had understood that the world he had known-the world of the City Watch and the Red Keep and the gold cloaks -that world was gone. It was not coming back. And the only thing left was the sand.

He had won the second fight. And the third. And the fourth. By the tenth, the crowd had a name for him: the Sunset Wolf. The name meant nothing to him. The fights meant nothing to him. The only thing that meant anything was the fact that he was still alive.

The Great Master of House Reznak had given him the sword after his first victory. It was a longsword, the blade etched with Ghiscari script that Garth could not read, the hilt wrapped in leather that had been dyed the deep burgundy of House Reznak. It was a good sword. A better sword than he had any right to own, and he had learned to sleep with it, to eat with it, to carry it everywhere the chains allowed, because in the fighting pits a man's sword was the only thing that stood between him and the Gates of Fate, where the names of the dead were graven in stone and the living came to eat the stew made from the animals killed in the arena and remember.

Today he was in Daznak's Pit.

He had fought in the other pits. He had fought in the Pit of Ghazdan, where the tiers were low and the sand was mixed with gravel that tore the skin when you fell. He had fought in the Pit of Ilyn, where the animals were starved for a week before the bout to make them savage. But he had never fought in Daznak's.

Daznak's was the biggest.

He had seen it from the outside, of course-everyone in Meereen had. The Great Pit of Daznak dominated the city the way the pyramids dominated the sky. The circular brick arena rose from the city like a wound in the earth, its descending tiers of benches each in a different color -black and purple at the top for the slaves and the poor, blue and green and white for the merchants and the tradesmen, yellow and orange and red at the bottom for the Great Masters and their families, close enough to the sand to smell the blood.

At the entrance, the Gates of Fate stood-twin pillars of black stone carved with the names of every gladiator who had died in the arena, the script so dense in places that the letters overlapped and merged into a single, unreadable texture of death. Garth had looked at the names as he'd walked through. Thousands. Tens of thousands.

He had walked through the gates, and the sand had been under his boots, and the roar had been in his ears, and he had thought: This is where I die.

He was good he had earned that much, two years of killing had made him as good as the sand could make a man, and House Reznak had invested too much in him to throw him away on a meaningless bout. But eventually. One day. The sand always won. The sand was patient. The sand was always there.

The announcer's voice cut through the roar-bastard High Valyrian, the words twisted by the Ghiscari accent into something that was almost a different language. Garth caught fragments. Sunset Wolf. House Reznak. Champion. The rest was lost in the noise.

He stood in the sand and waited.

The gates on the opposite side of the arena opened.

Bakir came out.

He was enormous. He was half-naked, his torso bare and oiled, the muscles standing out in cords and slabs that looked carved from dark wood. His arms were longer than they should have been, ending in hands that gripped two arakhs-curved, single-edged blades of Dothraki make, well suited to close, vicious work, the steel bright and freshly whetted.

He was smiling.

Bakir the Man Eater. They called him that because he ate the flesh of the fighters he killed.

Bakir saw Garth across the sand. His smile widened. He laughed-a deep, rolling sound that carried over the crowd the way thunder carries over water.

Garth did not laugh. He did not smile. He stood in the sand in his leather armor with his longsword in his hand and his heart hammering against his ribs, and he watched Bakir the way a rabbit watches a wolf.

They both turned toward the dais.

The Great Masters sat in the red tier-Reznak and Hazkar and the others, their faces painted, their tokars draped just so, their eyes flat and appraising. They watched the way men watch dogs fight. Whether Garth lived or died, whether Bakir lived or died, was a matter of consequence only insofar as it affected the bets and the standing of the houses.

Bakir raised both arakhs high, the blades catching the sun, and shouted something in bastard Valyrian-a prayer to the gods of Ghis, who counted the blood spilled in the pits among the sacrifices most pleasing to them. The crowd roared its approval.

Garth did nothing. He stood with his sword at his side and his jaw set and his eyes on Bakir, and the crowd's roar swallowed the silence and the sand waited.

The announcer spoke. The words were short-Garth caught the command beneath the accent, the single word that every fighter in every pit in Meereen knew regardless of tongue.

Begin.

Bakir came.

He was fast-faster than a man that size had any right to be. The sand exploded under his feet as he launched forward, both arakhs whirling in tight, figure-eight patterns that covered his approach in a shimmering wall of steel. The crowd surged to its feet. The sound doubled.

Garth moved laterally, angling to Bakir's left, the longsword coming up in a guard that was pure Westerosi-high and tight, the blade angled to deflect rather than block, the old drill worked into him back when he'd been nothing but a green recruit in the Watch, because blocking two arakhs with a longsword was a good way to get your guard split and your arms opened from wrist to elbow.

The first arakh came in low-a scything cut aimed at his thigh, the blade moving so fast it hummed. Garth pivoted, the edge hissing past the leather of his greave, and brought the longsword down in a short, chopping stroke that caught the second arakh mid-swing. Steel rang on steel. The impact shuddered up his arm and into his shoulder. Bakir was strong- impossibly strong, the kind of strong that came from years of pit fighting and the specific, focused conditioning of a body that did nothing but kill-and the parry that should have deflected the second blade only redirected it, the arakh skidding off the longsword and slicing across Garth's forearm. The leather took most of it. A line of fire opened on his skin, and blood welled and ran.

Bakir laughed again-shorter this time, sharper.

Garth shifted his grip and pressed forward.

The next exchange was a storm. Bakir's arakhs came from everywhere-high, low, the left blade feinting while the right committed, the right feinting while the left swept in a wide, decapitating arc that would have taken Garth's head if he had not ducked under it and felt the wind of its passage on his scalp. He countered from the crouch-a rising slash that caught Bakir across the ribs. The blade bit. Blood sprayed. Somewhere above them the crowd's roar cracked into something higher, hungrier, twenty thousand voices tasting first blood at the same instant.

Bakir grunted. Not in pain but in surprise. He had not expected the Sunset Wolf to close distance. He had not expected the counter.

Garth pressed the advantage. The longsword was longer than the arakhs, and at range it gave him reach that Bakir's curved blades could not match. He thrust-once, twice, three times-each thrust aimed at the gaps in Bakir's guard: the throat, the armpit, the space below the ribs where the oiled muscles thinned and the organs lay close to the surface. The first thrust was parried. The second skimmed off Bakir's forearm, opening a shallow cut. The third buried itself in the meat of Bakir's shoulder.

The crowd screamed.

Bakir bellowed in fury. He caught the longsword's blade between his arakhs-the steel trapped in a vise of curved Dothraki steel-and wrenched. The sword was torn from Garth's grip. It cartwheeled through the air and landed in the sand six feet away, the blade burying itself to half its length.

Bakir charged.

The shoulder was bleeding freely-the cut was deep, the muscle severed, and the arm on that side should have been useless. It was not. Bakir swung the arakh in his wounded arm with the same force as the other, the pain either ignored or embraced, channeled into the fury that drove him forward like a battering ram.

Garth backpedaled. He had no sword. He had no shield. He had a knife in his belt-a short blade, more tool than weapon-but the distance between his hand and the knife and the distance between Bakir's arakh and his skull were measured in the same unit, and the arakh was closer.

He dove forward, under the sweeping arc of the arakh, his shoulder hitting the sand and his body rolling, the blade passing over him so close he felt the displacement of air on his face. He came up on his feet, spun, and ran for the sword. His hand closed around the hilt. He wrenched it free.

Bakir was on him before he could turn.

The arakh came down in a brutal overhead chop that would have split his skull if he had not thrown the longsword up in a desperate, two-handed guard that caught the blade an inch above his forehead. The impact drove him to his knees. The sand compressed under his boots. His arms shook-the tendons standing out like cables, the muscles burning, the strength draining out of him with every heartbeat as Bakir leaned into the strike with all his weight and all his fury and the arakh bit into the longsword's edge.

Garth twisted. He let the arakh slide off the weakened blade and rolled sideways, coming up slashing. The longsword caught Bakir across the thigh-a deep, hampering cut that opened the muscle to the bone. Bakir staggered. The leg buckled. The crowd roared-a vast, animal sound.

Garth cut him again. A backhand stroke across the belly-not deep enough to spill the guts, but deep enough to open the skin and the fat beneath, and the blood ran in sheets down Bakir's midsection. The Man Eater looked down at his own blood with an expression of mild surprise, as if the sight of it was unusual, as if the blood of other men was so familiar to him that his own had become a stranger.

He should have gone down. Any other man would have. The thigh was cut to the bone, the shoulder opened to the muscle, the belly laid bare. He was standing in a puddle of his own blood, and the sand around him was dark and wet.

He did not go down. He smiled.

It was the same smile he had worn when he walked out of the gate-the smile of a man who found killing amusing-but now there was something else in it. Something colder.

He dropped the arakhs.

Both of them. Let them fall in the sand. And he came for Garth with his hands.

The tackle was immense. Bakir hit him like a horse-two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and bone and fury, the wounded leg buckling but not collapsing, the arms closing around Garth's torso in a grip that was not wrestling but crushing. The air left Garth's lungs in a single, explosive gasp. The longsword was trapped between their bodies, useless. His feet left the sand. Bakir lifted him-actually lifted him, one arm around his chest, the other hand finding his throat-and slammed him into the ground.

The sand was soft. The ground beneath it was not. The impact drove every thought from Garth's mind except the immediate, animal awareness that he was on his back and Bakir was on top of him and the hand that had found his throat was squeezing.

The world narrowed.

The crowd was still screaming, but the sound had become distant-a roar heard through water, muffled and directionless. The sky above was yellow and hot and very far away. Bakir's face filled his vision.

The hand tightened.

Garth's mouth opened. No sound came out. The air was gone. The blood was pounding in his ears, in his temples, in the places behind his eyes where the world was beginning to darken at the edges. His hands found Bakir's wrist. The arm did not move. It was like pulling on a tree root.

The sword. His mind was screaming it at him. It's right there. Six inches to your left. Your fingers could reach it. You just need to-

He stretched. His left hand released Bakir's wrist and clawed at the sand, fingers raking through the bloodied grit. He could feel it-the hilt, the leather wrapping, the pommel digging into the sand. His fingertips grazed the guard.

Bakir shifted his weight. The hand on Garth's throat bore down. The darkness at the edges of his vision crept inward.

I'm going to die in the sand.

The thought was clear and calm and final-acceptance. The rabbit had stopped running. The wolf had won. The sand would have another name for the Gates of Fate.

A single, concussive, earth-shattering boom hit the arena like a giant's hammer striking an anvil the size of a city. The sand jumped. The benches cracked. Twenty thousand people screamed at once, and beneath the scream Garth felt the whole vast bowl of the arena shiver on its foundations.

Bakir's head snapped up. His eyes left Garth's face. His grip loosened.

It was enough.

Garth's fingers closed around the hilt. He pulled. The blade came free of the sand. He drove it upward.

The longsword entered Bakir's belly just below the navel and went in to the hilt.

Bakir went still.

His eyes came back to Garth's face. The expression on them was-Garth would remember it for the rest of his life, however long or short that turned out to be-surprise.

The broad face looked down at the hilt protruding from his own stomach. Then back up at Garth. And then-slowly, impossibly, the muscles of his face working against whatever was happening inside him-Bakir smiled.

It was a real smile. The first real one Garth had seen on the man's face. A smile that looked, in the last moment of his life, almost like respect.

He fell forward.

The weight of him collapsed onto Garth and drove the air from his lungs for the second time. The hilt of the sword was between them, the blade still buried. Blood poured from the wound, hot and copious, soaking Garth's armor, pooling in the sand beneath them.

Garth lay beneath the dead man and breathed. Or tried to. The weight on his chest was enormous. His ribs creaked. His arms shook as he pushed at the body, shoving at the slick, blood-smeared shoulders, trying to roll the dead weight off him.

He managed it-barely. Bakir's body rolled sideways and hit the sand with a wet, heavy thud, the arakhs lying where they'd fallen, the curved blades catching the sun. Garth pulled the longsword from the corpse and staggered to his feet.

The arena was in chaos.

The crowd was not watching him. The announcer's voice had stopped. The drums had stopped. Everything had stopped except the screaming.

And beneath the screaming, beneath the panic, a voice.

It came from everywhere at once-above, below, from the walls of the arena and the tiers of the benches and the sand beneath his feet. It was speaking High Valyrian, and the words were clear and precise and carried with a force that vibrated in Garth's chest and his teeth and the bones of his skull.

He could not understand all of it. His Valyrian was the broken, piecemeal thing of a man who had learned fragments in the fighting pits-commands, insults, the names of the gods. But the voice was not speaking to him. It was speaking to the city.

He looked toward the dais. The red tier-the seats of the Great Masters-was empty. Reznak was gone. Hazkar was gone. All of them-gone, vanished between one heartbeat and the next- leaving behind their guards and their servants, who stood in confused, frightened clusters, their painted faces slack, their robes disheveled, looking at each other with bewildered expressions.

Garth dropped the sword.

His body did not want to run. Every part of him screamed to lie down in the sand and let the fight be over, whatever came next, however it came. He ran anyway.

He ran toward the lowest tier, the wall of dressed stone rising above him higher than it had any right to be from this side of it, and hit it at a sprint that was really more of a stagger. His hands found the top edge on the second try, fingers slipping on stone slick with something he did not let himself think about too closely. He pulled himself up-arms burning, ribs screaming where Bakir's weight had ground into them, blood that was not his own making everything he touched slick and warm-and hauled himself over the edge into the red tier, the seats of the Great Masters, and fell more than climbed onto the tiled floor.

The tier was empty, and it was a wreck. Overturned wine cups bled dark stains across pale stone. A fan of dyed ostrich plumes lay trampled where someone had dropped it running. A single slipper sat alone in the middle of the floor, its mate nowhere to be found. Whatever had happened in the sky had emptied this tier faster than fire ever could have.

He did not stop to look at it. He ran through the wreckage, past silk cushions and abandoned sunshades, toward the archway at the back where the servants' corridor was.

The corridor smelled of perfume and fear, the two so mixed together by now that Garth could not have separated them if he'd tried. His boots slipped on stone worn smooth by a thousand years of soft-soled slaves. Torches guttered in their brackets, throwing his shadow long and broken across painted walls. Somewhere ahead of him a woman was sobbing, and somewhere behind him a man was praying, and neither sound was louder than the voice.

The voice followed him-louder here, if anything, or perhaps only clearer, the stone corridor gathering it and throwing it back at him from every direction at once. The High Valyrian poured through the passage in waves, each word a physical thing, a pressure that pushed against his eardrums and his chest and made the torch flames bend as though a wind were passing through solid stone.

He burst through the outer gate and into the street, half braced to run into a wall of bodies, a riot, a massacre. He got three strides before his legs simply stopped obeying him and stopped.

The street was full of people. Slaves, guards, freemen, merchants, women, children-hundreds of them, thousands, the entire population of this quarter of Meereen poured into the streets, standing in the light of the afternoon sun with their faces turned upward and their mouths open and their eyes fixed on something above and behind him.

They were not moving. Entranced was the word that came to Garth's mind, though it was not quite right.

He looked at the slaves nearest him.

Their necks were bare. The collars were gone. The bronze collars that every slave in Meereen wore-the mark of ownership, the brand of property, the thing that said you belong to someone else-were gone.

He turned around.

He looked where everyone else was looking.

The figure was far away - high above the city, higher than anything human had any right to be. It was small at that distance - a dark shape against the yellow sky, standing on nothing, suspended in the air as casually as a man stands on the ground.

Around it, strange things flew.

They were shapes - dark, low-slung, armored, blackened and pitted hulls that put Garth in mind of nothing so much as beetles the size of ships. They did not linger near the figure for long. They peeled off in twos and threes, dropping low over the rooftops and the terraces of the pyramids. One passed almost directly overhead, low enough that Garth felt the wind of its passage on his face. Another hung motionless over the harbor, hovering in a way nothing that flew had any right to. Others fanned further out still-toward the Great Pyramid, toward the Temple of the Graces, toward the harbor walls and the slave markets and the long, low warehouses where men were bought and sold-until it seemed there was no rooftop left in Meereen without one of the dark shapes passing over it.

The light from them reflected off the pyramids and the arena walls and the upturned faces of the people below, painting all of it in shades of sapphire and silver. Garth did not know whether to call it a rescue or a conquest. Watching those shapes cover every quarter of the city at once, he thought it was very likely both.

The figure was speaking and the words were shaking the world.

He could not make out details at this distance. The figure was too far, the light too bright, the sky too vast. But he could hear the words-or the last of them, the ones that came as the figure finished whatever it had been saying and the city held its breath.

"...warning."

The word was the only one Garth caught and understood. It was spoken in a voice that carried the weight of absolute authority.

Then two beams of fire loosed from the figure.

They struck a pyramid behind Garth-some distance off, across the city, one of the lesser pyramids but still enormous, still ancient, still a monument to the power of the Ghiscari Empire that had built it. The beams hit the upper half of the structure. The stone simply ceased to be-the top third of the pyramid gone, consumed in a flash of white-orange heat so intense the sky itself seemed to flinch. The lower portion remained, its cut surface glowing cherry-red, molten stone running down the sides in bright rivers that hardened even as they cooled.

For a moment, no one in the street made a sound at all.

Then the silence broke into a hundred different things at once. A child began to wail and was snatched into her mother's skirts and hushed. An old man dropped to his knees on the cobblestones with both hands raised, whether in prayer or surrender Garth could not have said. Somewhere close by a woman laughed-a high, cracked, disbelieving sound that was more shock than joy. When the boom of the strike finally rolled across the city, arriving a long heartbeat after the light itself, half the street flinched as one and several people threw themselves flat against the nearest wall, as though a pyramid half a city away could still come down on top of them.

Garth turned and stared at the figure in the sky.

"Kallen," he whispered.

Around him, the guards were dropping their swords.

One by one, the swords hitting the cobblestones with a clatter that was lost in the silence- clank, clank, clank-each one a small surrender, each one a man who had looked up at the sky and seen something that made the sword in his hand feel very, very small. The spears followed. Then the shields.

And then the slaves cheered.

It started with one voice. A single voice, from somewhere in the crowd-a man, a woman, he could not tell-raised in a shout, a raw, uncontained eruption of something that had been buried for so long it had forgotten its own name. It was joy. It was rage. It was grief and relief and the sheer, animal howl of a living thing that had been caged and had just watched the cage dissolve.

"Jaes dāervo!" The voice came from somewhere to his left-clear, High Valyrian, two words spoken with a force that cut through the noise like a blade.

"Jaes dāervo!" Another voice, from somewhere else.

"Jaes dāervo!" A third. A fourth. A dozen. A hundred.

The words spread through the crowd the way fire spreads through dry grass-leaping from voice to voice, from street to street, until the entire street was shouting it:

"JAES DĀERVO!"

Garth stood in the street with Bakir's blood drying on his armor and the sound of a city breaking its chains ringing in his ears.

"Jaes dāervo," he said, and his voice was lost in the roar of the city.