He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 32 (Patreon)

Spend a lot of time looking at ship terminology-it made my head hurt. It might not be accurate cause I am too stupid for that stuff...

XXXII

The Silent Conquest

The fog was a living thing.

It clung to the rigging and the masts and the furled sails in pale, wet streamers that turned the fleet into ghosts of themselves-each ship visible only as a suggestion, a shadow, a darkening in the mist that resolved into timber and rope and canvas only when you were close enough to touch it. The water beneath the hull was black and still, the kind of still that came with no wind and no current, as if the sea itself was holding its breath and waiting for the fog to lift before it decided what to do next.

Laenor Velaryon stood at the rail of the Pride of Driftmark and watched the mist swallow the world.

He was seventeen. He had the aquiline nose of his father, the same sharp, proud line that marked the Velaryon blood as surely as any sigil, and his hair was silver-white, worn loose to his shoulders in the fashion of the dragonlords his mother's house claimed. His eyes were purple - the deep, vivid purple of Targaryen blood, the color that men wrote songs about and women fell into and never quite climbed out of.

The fog was wrong for the Stepstones. The Stepstones were heat and salt and the blinding glare of bare rock under a sun that showed no mercy. Fog belonged to the narrow sea, to the waters around Dragonstone and Driftmark, to the cold grey mornings of the Gullet where the mist came off the water and turned everything soft and strange. Here, in the waters west of the Disputed Lands, fog was a visitor-and an unwelcome one, because fog meant you could not see, and in the Stepstones, not seeing meant dying.

The fleet was small. Nine ships-six Velaryon, three Baratheon-creeping through the mist in a loose formation that put the heaviest hulls on the flanks and the fastest in the van. They were warships, every one of them: lean-hulled, low-decked, their sails furled and their oars muffled in rag and greased leather, dipping at half stroke to a count the oarmasters murmured from the benches. Forward, a leadsman in the chains swung his line and whispered the soundings back to the helm. The men aboard were quiet.

At the bow, barely visible through the haze, stood the silhouette of Laenor's father. Corlys Velaryon stood where he always stood: at the very front of the ship, one hand on the rail, his silver hair catching what little light the fog allowed, his eyes fixed on the distance.

Laenor left the rail and made his way forward.

The deck was slick with moisture-every surface, every rope, every plank covered in a fine film of condensation that made the wood gleam dully in the grey light. The crew moved around him. A deckhand was coiling a line near the mainmast. A crossbowman sat on a water cask, his weapon across his knees, staring into the fog with the fixed stare.

Laenor reached the bow. His father did not turn.

Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides and Master of Driftmark, was fifty-eight years old. His body was lean and hard, whittled by decades of seafaring into something spare and essential, every ounce of excess stripped away until what remained was sinew and bone and will. His face was sharp-planed, weathered by salt and sun into the texture of old leather, his eyes dark and watchful beneath brows that had gone grey years ago. His hair was silver-white, longer than fashion dictated, pulled back and tied with a strip of plain leather. He wore no ornament - no rings, no gold, no velvets. His doublet was dark wool, plain, cut for movement. His cloak was oiled cloth. His boots were made for decks, not courts.

He looked like what he was: a man who had built a fortune with his hands and his nerve and his refusal to accept that the world's limits applied to him, and who had then built a fleet and a name and a legacy with the same tools and the same refusal. The Sea Snake, they called him- the name given to him in his youth, when he had sailed to the ends of the earth and come back with holds full of spice and silk and stories that the maesters wrote down because no one would have believed them otherwise. He had nine great voyages to his name, each one a legend, each one a fortune. He had married a Targaryen princess who should have been queen. He had sired two children who rode dragons. He had waged war in the Stepstones for five years against an enemy that the Iron Throne would not commit to fighting, because someone had to and Corlys Velaryon did not wait for someone else to do what needed doing.

He was, by any measure, the most dangerous man Laenor had ever known. Not because he was cruel, or violent, or ruthless-though he could be all three when the situation demanded-but because he was patient. He played the long game. He set pieces in motion years before the board was ready, and by the time his opponents realized they were playing, the game was already over.

"What are we doing here, Father?"

Laenor's voice was quiet, pitched to carry no further than the two of them. The fog swallowed it and gave nothing back.

Corlys did not turn. His eyes stayed on the mist ahead.

"We are deep in Triarchy waters," Laenor continued. "You never told me what the plan is."

The silence stretched.

"The Triarchy have fortified a small island," Corlys said at last. "Near here. A waystation for their supply ships. Garrison of perhaps two hundred, with scorpions on the walls and a harbor sheltered from the open sea."

Laenor waited.

"A few days past," Corlys continued, "I received a raven from one of our spies. A man I placed in the garrison two years ago-a Tyroshi scribe who keeps their accounts and counts their grain and sends me what he hears." He paused. "A week ago, Craghas Drahar arrived at the island. With him were what our man claims to be people who look important. Magisters, perhaps. Or envoys. Men of consequence, in any case-men who arrived with guards and chests."

Laenor's attention sharpened. Craghas Drahar. The Crabfeeder. The Myrish prince-admiral who commanded the Triarchy's forces in the Stepstones, who had fought the war to a stalemate and bled both sides for five years, who had turned the Stepstones into a graveyard of ships and men and ambition.

"They have not left since," Corlys said.

"Between the raven and now, they could have left," Laenor said.

"True." Corlys's voice carried no argument. "But it is too good an opportunity to pass up. If these people are important in the Triarchy-if they are magisters-then they can be valuable hostages. Along with Craghas. We can use them to end this madness."

Laenor considered this. It was not a bad plan. Take the Crabfeeder. Take the magisters. Put them in chains and send word to the Triarchy with a single demand: withdraw from the Stepstones, or we send them back in pieces.

It would work. It might work. The Triarchy was a coalition, and coalitions were held together by money and fear, and if you took away the men who provided the money and inspired the fear, the coalition frayed.

"Our man also reports," Corlys added, and something shifted in his voice-a subtle change, the faintest tightening, the tone he used when he was relaying information that did not fit neatly into the shape of his plans, "that they seemed scared of something. They have not shared what with their men, but the men can feel it. The garrison is on edge. Nervous. Jumping at shadows."

Laenor frowned. "Scared of what?"

"He did not say. He did not know." Corlys's eyes moved across the mist. "But scared men make mistakes. And mistakes are what we are here to exploit."

Laenor was quiet for a moment, turning this over. Then:

"What deal did you make with Lord Boremund? You never said."

Corlys's expression did not change. His eyes did not move. But something in the set of his shoulders shifted.

"Lord Boremund has always been a strong supporter of your mother," he said. "You know that."

"I do."

"And with Viserys's weak response to the raids from the Triarchy on the storm coast, he was eager to join forces."

"There is more than that, isn't there?" Laenor asked.

Corlys sighed. It was a sound Laenor had heard perhaps a dozen times in his life, and each time it had preceded something his father did not want to say.

"He also asked for a marriage match," Corlys said. "Between his granddaughter and any sons you might have."

Laenor laughed.

It was not a bitter laugh, or a mocking one. It was the laugh of a young man who found the world's capacity for irony genuinely amusing, even when the irony was at his own expense. He laughed, and the fog swallowed the sound.

"Son," Corlys said.

The word was heavy. It carried the weight of an argument they had had before-many times, in many forms, in the cabins of ships and the halls of Driftmark and the corridors of the Red Keep. The argument about duty. The argument about legacy. The argument about the thing that Laenor was and the thing that Corlys needed him to be.

"I understand that you have other... interests," Corlys said. "But you are my heir. And you must do your duty."

The fog pressed in. The water lapped at the hull. Somewhere ahead, invisible in the mist, the rest of the fleet crept through the grey like wolves through a winter wood.

"I know, Father." Laenor's voice was quiet. The amusement was gone, drained away, replaced by something older and sadder. "But when the time comes... and if I can't do my duty... will I still be your son?"

The question hung in the wet air between them.

Corlys was quiet.

Laenor felt the silence like a blade.

He had asked the question before. He had asked it in different forms, in different places, at different ages, but the question was always the same: If I cannot be what you need me to be, will you still want me? And the answer was always the same: silence. The silence that said I don't know louder than any words.

He looked away. The mist was thinning ahead, or he imagined it was-the grey becoming less opaque, the shapes within it becoming less suggestion and more substance. He focused on that, on the physical fact of the fog and the water and the ship beneath his boots, because focusing on those things was easier than focusing on the silence his father was offering in place of reassurance.

"I assume Lord Boremund does not know about your plan for Laena," Laenor said.

"No," Corlys said. "And even if he did, he does not believe in-as he says-'fanciful tales from a weak King.'"

The words carried the faintest edge of contempt-not for Boremund Baratheon specifically, but for the general category of men who dismissed what they had not seen and refused to prepare for what they did not understand. Viserys had told the small council about the star, the boy, the structure beyond the Wall. The reports had been written down and circulated and discussed and dismissed, and the men who dismissed them were the same men who would one day be confronted by the things they had dismissed and would not know what to do.

Corlys was not one of those men. He had been on the road when Duskendale burned. He had seen the beams. He had listened to Daemon's account.

And then his daughter had come home from the Wall with a story that made Daemon's account look like a children's tale, and his wife had confirmed every word of it, and Corlys had looked at his daughter and he had begun to plan.

The fog shifted and the island appeared.

It rose from the sea like a clenched fist-pale cliffs of weathered stone against the grey sky, scrubby vegetation clinging to the rock in patches of brown and green. A natural harbor was carved into the southern face, a horseshoe cove closed on its northern arm by a mole of tumbled stone, with a single quay of fitted blocks running along the foot of the cliff beside a narrow beach of white sand and broken shell. A switchback path climbed from the quay to a flat shelf of rock that commanded the approach from the sea, and on that shelf sat the fortress.

Laenor studied it through the thinning mist. It was not large-a modest fortification, built for function rather than grandeur, its walls of fitted stone enclosing a courtyard and a keep and the necessary outbuildings of a garrison post. Scorpions were visible on the walls, their heavy bolt-throwers angled seaward, the dark shapes of their bow-arms silhouetted against the sky. Banners hung from the parapets-Myrish, by the color, though the mist was still too thick to make out devices.

Corlys raised his hand.

He did not shout. There was still a chance that no one on those walls had seen them. A signalman at his elbow unhooded a shuttered lantern, flashed it twice toward the ship astern, and closed it again, and the signal ran back down the line, lantern to lantern, ship to ship, and the fleet answered as it had been drilled to answer.

The heavy ships broke away from the van-three Velaryon war galleys and the three Baratheon- and spread across the roadstead in a wide curve, bows to the shore, presenting the narrowest possible target to the scorpions while every deck bristled with crossbows that could answer them. They dropped anchor with springs on the cables so they could swing broadside if the fortress woke. The Baratheon ships took the left flank, where the cliffs gave the walls their clearest angle of fire, the black stag of Storm's End on its gold banner hanging limp from the lead ship's masthead.

The van went in alone: the Pride of Driftmark and two lean Velaryon galleys, fast enough to seize the quay before anyone could stop them.

"Battle stations," Corlys said. His voice was low, and it carried the length of the deck. "Quietly."

Laenor drew his sword.

The steel whispered out of the scabbard-bright, clean, the edge recently honed. It was a knight's sword, castle-forged, the pommel set with a small amethyst that matched his eyes. He had carried it since he was four-and-ten, when his father had presented it to him on the deck of this very ship and told him that a Velaryon's sword was his word made steel, and that both should be kept sharp and used only when necessary.

He held it at his side and waited.

The van crept toward the harbor mouth at a muffled stroke. The fortress grew, its details emerging from the mist the color of the stone, the shape of the battlements, the dark mouths of the scorpion emplacements staring seaward like empty eye sockets. Laenor braced for the first bolt-the whistle of the heavy quarrel, the impact on the deck or the hull, the shout of the first man hit.

Nothing happened.

The scorpions did not loose. No banners were raised. No horns sounded. No drums beat the alarm. The fortress sat on its shelf of rock above the harbor and did nothing, and the ships approached it the way a man approaches a sleeping beast.

Corlys was studying the fortress. His eyes moved over the walls, the gate, the keep, the harbor, cataloguing details, comparing what he saw to what he had expected to see and marking the differences.

The walls. Laenor saw it now, as the mist thinned further and the angle of approach brought the fortress's western flank into view. A section of the western wall was simply absent. As if it had been erased, the edges of the remaining wall clean and sharp, the stones cut through with a precision that no catapult or trebuchet could achieve.

And the fortress was quiet.

"Bring us in," Corlys said. His voice had changed-the command still there, the authority still absolute, but beneath it something new. Curiosity. "Slowly. Grapples and planks ready, but no one sets foot on that quay until I say. Signal the roadstead: hold station, eyes on the walls. If anything on that shelf so much as twitches, they are to answer it."

The Pride of Driftmark slid through the harbor mouth with her oars whispering, the other two galleys close behind, and the last rags of fog fell away around them as the cove opened out. Nothing moved on the quay. No guard, no sentry, no lantern. A gull stood on a bollard and watched them come.

She came alongside with her oars shipped at the last moment, a woven fender dropped against the stone to take her weight. Deckhands leapt across with the bow and stern lines, made them fast to the iron rings, and hauled them taut; a boarding plank slammed down onto the quay. The second galley eased in astern of her. The third, with no quay left, grounded her bow gently on the white sand beside it and ran her planks down over the prow. In less time than it took Laenor to draw three breaths the Velaryon van was moored, and no one had loosed at them.

"Men ashore," Corlys said. "Crossbows stay at every rail. Keep the oarsmen on the benches-if this is a trap, I mean to be able to leave it."

Longboats were already dropping from the anchored ships. They ferried the Baratheon men-at-arms and the rest of the Velaryon landing companies across the roadstead and onto the beach, where they spread in quick, practiced formations, armed and armored, across the sand and the foot of the quay.

There was no resistance.

The beach was empty. The path leading up to the fortress was empty.

Corlys led the advance. Laenor walked at his shoulder, his sword still drawn, his eyes moving between the fortress walls and the scrubby undergrowth on either side of the path. A small group of men followed them-twelve, handpicked, the best fighters in the fleet, armed with swords and shields.

The rest of the company secured the beach and the harbor. Laenor could hear them behind him, spreading out.

They reached the fortress gate.

It was open. The heavy wooden doors stood ajar, the iron hinges intact, the lock unbroken. Laenor stared at the gap between the doors and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. An open gate was worse than a breached wall. A breach meant violence. An open gate meant something else-something that had made the men behind the gate leave without locking it behind them.

They entered the courtyard. It was deserted. The space was large enough to hold two hundred men and their supplies, and it held nothing. The supply sheds were open, their contents partially gone-piles of grain sacks half-emptied, water casks rolled away or abandoned, crates of bolts for the scorpions stacked against the wall and left. A fire pit in the center of the yard held the ashes of a cold fire, days old.

But the fortress was not entirely empty.

Men moved among the buildings-five, perhaps six, dressed in rags, their faces unshaven, their eyes down. They were picking through the abandoned supplies, checking crates, testing the weight of grain sacks, ignoring the armed men who had just entered the courtyard as if they were beneath notice.

"Lord Corlys!"

The voice came from the far side of the courtyard. A man was approaching them-moving quickly, almost at a run, his rags flapping around his thin frame. He was Tyroshi. He was underfed, his cheekbones sharp beneath skin that had not seen enough sun. His eyes were quick and bright and fixed on Corlys.

The spy.

Corlys recognized him. Laenor saw it in the way his father's posture changed.

"What happened here?" Corlys asked.

The man stopped a few feet away. He was breathing hard, and his eyes were wide, and his hands-the thin, ink-stained hands of a scribe-were shaking.

"Two days ago," the man said, and his voice was thick with an awe that he could not control and did not try to hide. "This thing appeared in the sky above the fort."

"A thing?" Laenor asked.

The man looked at him. His eyes were bright, feverish.

"Forgive me, my lord, but I don't know how to explain it." He paused, searching for words, his hands moving in the air as if trying to shape the thing from memory. "It looked... forged. Not an animal. It was made-of something. Metal, perhaps, or something like metal. Dark. And it was large. It hung in the air above the fortress the way a ship hangs at anchor, and it did not move."

Laenor felt something stir in his chest. A memory-half-formed, secondhand, drawn from his sister's descriptions and his mother's reports and the stories that had filtered through the Red Keep like water through stone. A crystal fortress beyond the Wall. Metal servants.

"And then?" Corlys pressed. His voice was steady.

"A voice came out of it." The man's eyes went wide as he said it, as if saying it again made it real in a way that simply remembering it did not. "I swear it! A voice! It came from the thing- from the sky. It spoke in Valyrian."

Laenor's breath caught.

"It ordered the Triarchy forces to lay down their weapons and go home," the man continued, the words tumbling out now, faster, as if the dam had broken and everything he had been holding back for days was flooding through. "It ordered that Craghas Drahar and the magisters who were holed up here be surrendered to it for judgment."

"They had been meeting for days-Craghas and the two magisters from Myr and Tyrosh. I did not hear what they discussed. But they were afraid, my lord. All of them. They spoke in closed rooms and emerged with faces like men who have received news they do not know how to answer."

"And?" Laenor prompted.

"Craghas came out of his quarters." The man's voice dropped, and the awe in it curdled into something closer to fear. "He was angry-shouting, cursing, calling the voice a trick and a sorcery and a hundred other things. He ordered the men to loose a scorpion bolt at it. The men -they did not want to, my lord, I could see it in their faces, but Craghas is... he was... they feared him more than they feared the thing in the sky. So they loaded the scorpion and they loosed."

The man stopped. His hands had stopped shaking. They were still now, clenched at his sides, and his face held the expression of someone reliving a moment that had permanently altered his understanding.

"When the bolt hit it," he said, quietly, "there was a blue shimmering light. Brief. Like lightning trapped in glass. And the bolt vanished."

"Vanished?" Corlys asked. His voice was carefully neutral. "What do you mean?"

"It was there and then it was not." The man spread his hands, the gesture of someone who has no better explanation to offer. "It did not deflect. It did not bounce away. It did not break apart. It was there, and then it was not. As if the thing had swallowed it, or... or unmade it. I do not have the word, my lord."

Laenor glanced at his father. Corlys's face was unreadable.

"Then it loosed something in response," the man said, and the fear was back in his voice now, raw and genuine. "And the wall where the scorpion was-it was destroyed. Instantly. One moment it was there-stone and mortar and the scorpion and the three men who had fired it. The next moment it was gone. Not collapsed. Not broken. Gone. As if it had never been built. The stones were... they were just not there anymore. And the edges-where the wall ended and the nothing began-the edges were smooth, my lord. Smooth like glass. Like someone had cut through the stone with a blade made of light."

The man pointed, and Laenor turned to look.

The western wall. The absent section he had noted from the harbor. Up close, the edges were visible-the remaining wall ending in a clean, smooth line that looked almost polished, the stone fused at the cut into something dark and glassy. Beyond it, the empty space where the wall had been, and beyond that, the sea.

"After the wall, all the men dropped their swords. Every one of them. They just... put them down. Some of them knelt."

"All of them?" Corlys asked.

"All but the Crabfeeder." The man's mouth twisted. "Craghas. He started yelling. Calling his men cowards, weaklings, slaves born of whores. He had his sword out, and he was swinging it -not at anyone, just at the air, at the sky, at the thing overhead."

The man stopped. He pointed to a spot in the courtyard-a patch of ground where the stone was cracked in a radial pattern, the fissures spreading outward from a central point of impact. Something large had landed there. Something heavy enough to split stone.

"From the thing in the sky, two creatures dropped," the man said.

Laenor's heart was pounding.

"Did they look like men?" Laenor asked.

The man looked at him. "No, my lord. They stood taller than any man I have ever seen, but they were not shaped like men, not truly-they were what a man might be if someone had drawn him from memory and never met one. Pale metal, plated like armor and seamless as an egg, with a cold blue glow beneath it, like light trapped under ice. No faces. Where a face should be there was only a smooth plate, blank as a shield, with two thin lines of blue light where the eyes ought to be. And when the voice in the sky spoke, the lines brightened, and when it stopped they dimmed-as if the voice belonged to them as much as to the ship."

He swallowed.

"They did not hold together the way a man does. Their hands and forearms hung a finger's breadth clear of their arms, held by nothing, and their feet the same, and still they moved as one piece. And set into the brow of each, like a jewel, was a symbol." He drew it in the air with a shaking finger-a diamond-shaped shield, with a mark inside.

Laenor's grip on his sword tightened until his knuckles ached.

"One of them went to Craghas," the man continued. "Craghas charged it. He was still raving, still swinging his sword, and the creature-the metal thing-just stood there and let him come. Craghas swung, and the creature-it caught Craghas's wrist. Just caught it, as if a grown man swinging a sword was nothing, as if the strength behind the blow meant nothing. It took the sword out of his hand. It said one word to him, in Valyrian-flat and gentle, like a nurse to a fevered child. 'Enough.' The lines on its face flared as it spoke, and Craghas went still. As if whatever the creature had done to him had turned off the part of him that fought."

"The other one went to Craghas's quarters." The man turned and pointed to a door-a heavy, iron-bound oak door that was lying on the far side of the courtyard, thirty feet from the frame it had once hung in. "It pulled the door off its hinges the way a man pulls a weed from a garden. Just reached out and took hold and pulled, and the iron hinges bent and the wood splintered and the door came away in its hand."

Laenor stared at the door. It was massive-the kind of door built to withstand a battering ram, reinforced with iron bands as thick as a man's thumb. It lay on the ground like a discarded toy, the hinges twisted, the wood split, the iron bent.

"Then it dragged out the two magisters," the man said. "They did not fight. They did not speak. They were-white, my lord. White as milk."

"Both creatures," Corlys said. "With the Crabfeeder and the magisters in tow. What then?"

"They flew." The man's voice was barely a whisper. "They rose from the courtyard-straight up, into the sky, back toward the thing that hung above the fort. Craghas and the magisters were in their grip, and they did not struggle, and the creatures rose as if the air were solid ground and they were simply walking uphill. They reached the thing and it... swallowed them. Took them in. And then it left."

He spread his hands.

"As fast as it had appeared. One moment it was there. The next moment it was gone, and the sky was empty."

"All the men got on their ships and left shortly after," the man added. "Took what supplies they could carry and sailed east. The scavengers came a day later." He pointed to the ragged men picking through the supply sheds, still ignoring the armed soldiers in their midst.

"It's the boy," Laenor said.

The words came out with a certainty that surprised him. A fact, spoken the way one states that the sun rises in the east.

The spy looked confused. "My lord?"

Corlys said nothing for a long moment. He stood in the courtyard of the fortress, his hand on the hilt of his sword, his silver hair catching the thin morning light that was finally breaking through the fog. His face was the mask it always was-composed, unreadable, giving nothing. But his eyes were moving.

"Aye," Corlys said at last. "And it seems he has started to make his move."