Chapter Text
With Gilberto gathering sellswords and Aegor organising the fort, Marq and his squires took to the city proper. Though they were not the only crew of Braavosi-aligned marines and agents on the island, that they travelled as a three kept the locals off their backs.
Viserys had donned a heavy mail-lined doublet and brigandine, and vambraces and greaves with a leather cloak, and his short sword and one-handed halberd. He desired the weight of his shield, but Marq chided, "It's tight quarters, and you have a dagger and knife besides."
Viserys wanted to argue that those were for other purposes, but he took the hit and donned his gorget just to be safe. Tytus dressed lighter in leather and ring mail with a shoulder cape, while Ser Marq bore his heavy mail, leather, and whale-skin cloak, with only half as many weapons as usual. They surely looked grizzled, and Viserys all the more mysterious as he tied his hair under an scarf and donned a hood over top – only Lyseni marines had white hair, and Lady Danelle had advised Viserys that he should not be the one to cause a diplomatic incident.
They worked their way through an outer district of winding streets around rocky estates, and into the maze itself. Viserys had expected a simple structure of stone bricks, not a six-story megalith of fused grey and white stone whose pathways snaked for hundreds of miles over most of the island.
"While the princes and magisters do have control of most of the island from without, within the freebooters and sellsails have taken control." Marq led them around a street priest in a hair shirt with a long, matted beard. He had two axe-bearing Norvoshi warriors for guards, distinct for the knotting patterns depicting scenes of their god of redemption and rebirth. "With the backing of the Bearded Priests, it seems."
Tytus's hand had drifted to his sword, though he dropped it when he saw how it made the locals follow him with their eyes. "Stands to reason government lies in the heart of the maze."
Marq snorted. "Government? Gods I forget how fucking green you both are." Marq waved for them to follow, down a narrow street barely large enough for two men abreast, the ceiling low enough to touch. Stalls lined the maze walls to either side, with narrow residences above them constructed from driftwood and whale bone. "When I said sellsails and freebooters, I meant it."
The scar-faced knight made a sharp left down a steep flight of stairs into a den of the literal variety, the walls, roof, and floor all tightly-packed dirt and smooth stone. Viserys felt he was in a far more ancient part of the world than anywhere in Essos or Westeros he had ever been, the very air stale and dank with a thousand-year rot.
"Speak only when I say, and keep your eyes open." Marq gave his squires a firm glare before sitting on a squat stool across a small table from a small, bald man with a falcon's nose. He carried the distinct rapier and earrings of a bravo, but the dark teal and brown preferred by Braavosi admirals. Not just any admiral. "I thought you were known here?"
"Before he was First Sword, Syrio Forel had a grimmer face, and far more hair." One adroit hand rubbed his empty scalp. "Your squires as well, they should do to cherish their hair. You, Lyseni?"
Marq grunted for Viserys to speak. "Not technically. Syrio Forel?"
Syrio smiled, sly as a cat. "You are... a lion, Westerman?" Syrio looked to Tytus, resting his chin in his hand. Marq rolled his eyes at the flippancy and stood to fetch drinks. "Very far from gold mines."
"Only through my father, First Sword." Tytus stood a little straighter. "But once I am a knight, I hope to return."
"The conquering hero?"
"The prodigal son," Viserys said, insisting that Tytus be honest. "He has been left to his own devices long enough. We'll be knights within two years." Viserys spied a few other Lyseni with silver and gold hair, so he removed his hood and scarf. "But for now, what would you have of us?"
Syrio frowned at the squires cutting through his witty repartee. Tytus added, "We are sellswords, Master Forel. Not sell-diplomats."
"I am no master, sellsword. Merely Syrio Forel." He slapped the table just as Marq sat. Beer for him and watered mead for Viserys and Tytus. "There is a... captain. Near a vice-admiral by Braavosi standards. Ibbenese, with some pull in Lorath's whaling industry. He has proven... unnameable to Braavosi schools of thought. That, and his joyous participation in the Shivering Sea flesh trade. They've started raiding the Vale and the North, and we neither want nor need Westeros, at peace or war, turning their eye east."
Marq nodded, downing his drink and hissing. "We can kill a slaver and his thugs. Sounds like standard shit." Marq snorted and spat in his hand. "You got the payment? In gold, as specified."
"I don't think he's done, Ser," said Viserys.
Syrio winked at Viserys. "The killing of Captain Togg Joth would be nice, but simply a secondary request. No, they took someone. Someone the Vale, much of Westeros, believes to be dead."
"We're not thieves, Forel," Marq growled. "Who is the target?"
Syrio smirked, spitting in his own palm and shaking Marq's much bulkier hand. "The Lady Arryn, Lysa Tully. Red of hair, like copper, with blue eyes and dimples. Slender and delicate, and, when she was taken, with child."
"Why would she be caught dead outside of the Eyrie?" Tytus asked. Viserys almost closed his ears out of reflex, but for a mission he supposed he needed to know. He rarely sought information about the Seven Kingdoms, partially out of adolescent emotion, but mostly because he did not like being reminded his family was still fighting after almost seven years. "What, visiting a lover?"
"Nothing like that. A part-Braavosi house among the Fingers. The entire household dead, but Lady Lysa, missing. I had the pleasure when the Masked Falcon and she treated with the Sealord a few years ago." Syrio grew more somber. "But the rumours are not good. While Lady Lysa herself has not been brutalized, she may still have seen or been subject to other torments."
Viserys asked, "Why should that matter? Alive is alive."
"Lord Arryn... has made it clear that his heir is of more importance."
"She may have lost the babe, boy," said Marq. "We understand. If she is alive?"
Syrio gave a disengaged shrug. "The Andals are men of utility and pride. They abandon their daughters and wives if they are mistreated beyond their own control, and go to war against sons for the sins of the father."
"The confirmation is what they want," Marq explained. "And our word is as good as gold."
Syrio passed a sack from his cloak to Marq. "Five-hundred gold falcons, for your silence and fidelity, and another thousand if the heir is intact and safely returned to Braavos."
Viserys felt sick. Tytus had a grim look on his face, so he assumed the Westerman felt the same. Marq had his typical grimace. "And if we do kill Captain Jagged Tooth?"
"Togg Joth," Syrio corrected. "The reward for his head is twenty-thousand Braavosi silver. Your current fee includes watching his fort on the northern tip of the island, but with his death, some doors may open." Syrio made his goodbyes and stood. "Syrio Forel shall come to your fort again within the month. Until then, farewell."
Marq waited a few minutes before urging the squires finish their drinks and depart, his squires close behind. They exited the maze and walked north along the perilous eastern shore, mines and tall, leaning manses of black stone clinging to the island's shore of shattered seastone. Following the street had them walking on top of the maze some two-hundred feet above the sea soon after, the stone slick from rain and smooth from time, which all made for perilous walking. Viserys felt sick seeing a few people tip, slip, and fall to their death. He had seen bodies fall off the walls of Qohor and some tall towers in Vaes Dothrak, but those deaths were all punishments or self-inflicted. Death by accident seemed so... unfinished.
Viserys felt his heart in his throat at the height, dizzying as he looked out on the Shivering Sea. It was a rolling plain of steel and snow, crashing waves making for perilous travel. A few big-bellied whalers and fishing vessels eked out a living, but with all the dead sailors, sharks were the main taking.
Tytus indicated a wharf at the bottom of the cliffs as they descended another wooden walkway, creaking underfoot. A crane hauled at a bloody heap in the water, reeled up to reveal the black and white skin of a massive sea creature. It was too large to be a dolphin or even a shark, and its long black fin looked like something out of a story. "Sea wolves, the Dothraki call them," Marq said.
"Orca," Viserys and Tytus both corrected.
Marq snorted dismissively. "Come. We're almost there."
Togg Joth's fort was a fortified shipyard, a combination of stone, ice, and hulks of ruined ships making a forty-foot outer wall with five watchtowers twice again as tall. Within there were warehouses and a fortified dockmaster's house, typical of all ports, while the yards between were dotted with overseers and chain gangs building ships.
"Norvoshi wood," muttered Marq.
"They've already withdrawn support, but they've their own warriors." Tytus said, indicating a few Norvoshi sellswords with axes and straight short-swords, and fur-lined hats and well-made ringmail and plate armour.
"And knights. 'Armoured men of the Hills,' Melara called them." Viserys indicated his own captured Norvoshi ringmail and leather brigandine. "Their swords resemble those of the Andals."
"It's said the Norvoshi and the Andals both began as former conquests of the Sarnori." Gilberto came up behind them with a group of twenty marines and forty various sellswords, freebooters, and street toughs from Lorassyon. "How shall we do this?"
Marq indicated the open gates. "There's no time like the present. Get in, barricade the gates. Viserys, take that eastern watchtower. Tytus, the west." Marq stepped up, cracking his neck and his knuckles, drawing his sword, and cutting down the first Ibbenese guard who stood up to him. "Move!"
"Your father's half mad!" Tytus cried as GIlberto set a line with ten sellswords and sent the marines in to secure the fort.
Viserys took the ladder up past a guard, shoving the next who tried to stop him off the wall. He drew his halberd on the next man, driving the spike through the mail and whale hide on his chest. The fort's guards were mostly Ibbenese, stout with wiry hair caked with scented oils and a salty sea grime. The next Viserys deflected with his halberd, then drew his knife, sidestepping a sword and cutting the man at the knee. He fell, and Viserys hacked his halberd into his shoulder.
He fell down screaming and would die slow, but Viserys did not have time to finish him off. The top of the tower was home to a heavy ballistae and three archers. The first Viserys cut at the ankles before he came up the ladder, the next he gutted with his short sword. The third and forth both shot at him.
The ballistae bolt went under his legs, tearing out the back of the watchtower. The archer's arrow landed in his chest, the tip scratching his skin but held back by his brigandine's rings.
"Yield!" Viserys tore the bow from the archer's hand and punched him hard across the face. The man at the ballistae scrambled to draw a short sword, and Viserys chopped down on his wrist. He twisted his halberd at the last moment, and instead of amputating his hand he simply broke the marksman's wrist. "Yield."
He yielded. "Joth's in the fort but he'll be running for his ship. I swear on my mother." He was Lorathi with a strange accent, between Norvoshi and something old and foreign.
Viserys looked down on the courtyard. Tytus had taken the other watchtower, while Ser Marq and the sellswords besieged the dockmaster's house and the marines secured the shipyard. Gilberto was below, holding the gate and barricading them inside. The marines grappled with Ibbenese sellsails in the yard, but the walls were mostly clear to the water.
Skating down the ladder, Viserys picked up a longsword and an iron-studded wooden shield from a dead Norvoshi knight as he ran to the small dock. It was flanked by more ship hulks and icebergs, some making for perilous anchors that threatened to pull the smaller ships out to sea.
Running with his shield up and wishing he had his helmet, Viserys ran by more Ibbenese and Norvoshi sellswords, paying them no mind but taking dispatching many a lightly-armoured freebooter and sellsail. They could not defend against his new sword's good steel, forged to Golden Company's standards during their residence and Norvos. Like all Norvoshi weapons, it was slightly shorter and wider than a standard longsword, with a two-handed handle and a large pommel, making the weapon perfect for sweeping cuts and arcing blocks.
He clobbered one slaving pirate aside with his shield, throwing him into the icy water, then slashed across the arm of another. Viserys kicked him off the dock towards the water, only for him to stagger across the sea's frozen surface.
Viserys's jaw fell open in surprise, even as the pirate charged, slipped, then started crawling his way back on to the dock. Viserys parried a quick cut and thrust back, pushing his sword through the slaver's flank and out his armpit. When he fell back, he crashed through the ice, sinking into the black abyss below Lorassyon.
The dock was occupied by three large vessels: two round-bellied whaling ships and a Lorathi galleon getting underway. Not wanting to give away his position, but also not wanting to risk being alone on a ship in the Shivering Sea. On his way to the galleon, Viserys smashed a few oil lanterns, starting a fire in the hopes that he could follow the smoke back to shore if he did get lost.
The gangway retracted out of reach but the anchor was still trundling upward, which made Viserys throw the longsword and shield down the deck as a distraction. Vaulting to the anchor chain, he scrambled up, killed one of the men drawing it up, and sent the ship, halfway under sail, into a tailspin.
Above, Viserys disappeared into the rigging, stronger than as a boy on the *Caterina Viola* but larger and gangly as well. Soon he was high overhead, a few clouds hiding him from arrows and crossbow bolts as he tried tangling and tearing the rigging and masts. Viserys took perverse pride in the chaos, letting his hair get torn from the hood by the wind. With the fire below and a bloody blade in hand, he felt like Barristan the Bold and Duncan the Tall. Those knights, at least, still sat high in his boyish heart.
Men scrambled up the rigging to do away with him even as Marq and the marines moved towards the ship against a crowd of Ibbenese whalers. Better arms and the threat of death kept them away from the sellswords, but they had the support of sellsails and a growing crowd of armed slavers hoping to protect their stock. Tytus and Gilberto had riled the chain gangs, freeing them into a tool-armed mob wreaking havoc among their enslavers. Viserys thought it all a beautiful sight.
A slender Lorathi bravo climbed up the rigging, drawing a rapier. Viserys met him with his short sword, parrying easily but giving ground as they duelled atop mainmast's highest boom. It swayed in the wind and he wheeled to catch his balance. The Lorathi thrust but over-extended, and even as he cut Viserys along the arm, he went teetering off the boom. He left a red smear on an iceberg before sliding into the water.
Another frozen wind crashed on them from the depths of the Shivering Sea. Viserys grit his teeth and wished for some good wool to cover his ears, still not used to the damp and the cold ache a year of winter on the sea left in his bones.
Only one of the fort's defenders still pursued Viserys, the fighting long since moved back to the docks. The deck was relatively quiet and Viserys, spying the proper line, gave it a chop, swung and kicked the sellsail to the water before descending to the ship.
He picked up the Norvoshi sword and a square Lorathi buckler, dashing below deck and barricading himself inside. "Near the bow..." Viserys got his bearings and started moving to the stern, sticking to the shadows as he went. The squeaking rats and groaning wood set his teeth on edge, while the rare fleeing slave or bed-warmer spooked him as they passed. "Fighting in the sun in an open field. Much better than... this!"
An Ibbenese woman charged him with a cast-iron skillet in one hand and a meat cleaver in the other. Viserys took the first on the flat of sword and the second on his shield, stepping into her guard, stout and strong as she might have been, and driving his head into her face. "Enough! I am here to rescue Lady Lysa."
The Ibben frowned. "Lee-sa?" Viserys nodded. She grunted and nodded back towards the captain's cabin, holding her bloody nose while staggering to her feet to flee.
Viserys did not wait to see if she was going to fetch a warrior. The door to the captain's cabin was locked, Viserys giving it a swift kick but was rebuffed. "Seven hells." Viserys wedged the sword in the door latch, forced it down and out, and popped the lock.
He smirked as he entered, raising the shield just in time to catch a crossbow bolt. It embedded through the beaten leather and bronze halfway up the shaft. The man who shot at him cursed and raised a blood-caked axe to Lysa Tully's neck.
Togg Joth was a pimple-faced and pox-scarred Lorathi, with straw-yellow hair and a severe underbite of rotting yellow teeth. Beneath him he held her, screaming and wailing, coppery auburn hair and fear in her blue eyes. "Back up! Or I do her in!"
Viserys held his sword between them. "Let her go, captain. We have no quarrel with you. What happened to the babe?"
"Heh. We used that dead mess for chum." Viserys paled as the woman's screams fell to a blood-chilling wail. "Oi! Shut it! Or we'll give you something to really-"
"Let her go! Marines and sellswords are all over the docks!" Viserys eyed Togg Joth's axe, held close under Lysa's neck as his other hand held her up by the hair. "Your baby?"
"He, they- he... They killed her!" Lysa screeched and drove her hands, long nails and gnarled fingers, into Togg Joth's crotch between his armour, grabbing and pulling with a sound like snapping chicken skin. Viserys cringed as the slaver wailed, staggering backwards as bloody chunks fell out from between his legs.
Lysa fell backwards into him, both screaming, but Viserys dashed forward to pull her free. "My lady? My lady!"
She battered his chest then stopped, looking up at him almost bashfully. "You look like... the silver prince." She fainted in his arms. Viserys cursed as he pulled her up. He was nearing manhood, but nowhere near strong enough to carry a woman grown by himself.
Lady Lysa was, however, a rickety bag of bones, a weight Viserys could manage once he got his shoulder under her. He thought better of immediate escape, however, putting her down on a cot in the corner and barricading the doors. He used Togg Joth's axe to cut off his head, shoving it in one sack as he filled a second with the various loot of a slave ship's captain's cabin. All the chattel and flesh-trade documents, he thought to burn at first, but Ma Cate and Ser Marq would know who to pass them to to possibly hinder other slavers.
Lysa stirred. "What's that-? Ahh!" She screeched at the sight of Togg Joth's head.
Viserys clamped his hand over her mouth. "My lady! You must be quiet. There are enemies about and I am only one squire."
She moaned into his hand for a few seconds more before running out of breath, Viserys meanwhile looking up and out towards the decks beyond as the fighting intensified. She nodded a bit and Viserys let off his hand. "Where are we?"
"Lorassyon. The Free Cities. Essos."
"I know where Lorath is!" She smacked his arm and it actually hurt, likely due to his bruises. Viserys always had bruises. "I would be sick again if I could." She paled at the sight of the dead body. "Get me out of here."
"The fighting, Lady Lysa."
She stood and, timidly but with surprising speed, opened a porthole to look outside at the chaos of looting, brawling, and slaver-torture. "They won't hear. Men hear nothing over their fighting." She went to a chest by the cot, digging through it towards a layered dress of blue and teal. Tully and Arryn colours. On her fair skin, were she not so thin and weak, she would be regal.
"Lady Arryn, have you something... protective?" Viserys looked at the spare armour hung on the wall, too large for Lysa and himself.
"What of the horses? A wheelhouse?"
"My lady, we're on a rocky island with barely any goats. We'll need to run. Have you eaten? I've this..." Viserys dug into his hip pouch for some smoked meat and dried fruit he kept in supply. "Once we're at the fort, we'll see to something hot."
She gave him a disgusted scowl and returned to trying on dresses, choosing something of chiffon and linen when she had layers of wool she was discarding. "Avert your eyes, squire!"
Viserys staggered backwards at her unpleasant volume, though all the better to watch the door and keep them secure. "It is a wet winter outside, Lady Arryn. Dress appropriately."
"Do not deign to order me around. You are but a squire."
"You are in my charge. I will do whatever necessary so you are alive and intact." She poked him in the shoulder to turn around, having donned a thick robe dress of slate-grey wool. It was embroidered with images of dancing trouts and falcons, with the rare prancing maiden. Viserys indicated some wool breeches. "Those as well."
Lysa groaned childishly but donned them anyway, offering Viserys a quick if impolite view of her pale legs and buttocks. Viserys quickly averted his gaze while tossing her a pair of boots from a mound of loot he thought might fit. "May we go now? Mother's mercy, I knew he would send for me but taking so long?"
Viserys's ears thought the fighting had died down, listening at the door and hearing just a few groans of pain, not the constant clash of steel. "You're right to have faith in your husband, ladyship." Viserys slowly eased the door open. "Grab my belt."
"What do you-"
"Grab it!" He snarled. She took it firmly but with a whimper. "Don't let go. Unless I'm dragging you on the ground, you stay silent."
She nodded and he took off, in a stalking jog back the way he had come through the depths of the Lorathi slave ship.