Chapter 216: The Division of Labor Between Boss and Secretary
"Is that all?" Ian asked.
"No, one more thing." Celia shook her head. "Rol captured old Grazdan's grandson at his family manor outside the city — the one from the line of that old lord who used to wear the pearl-tasseled tokar. He's asking how you want it handled."
Ian, who had been half-drifting, came alert immediately.
"Who else knows about this?" he asked.
"Rol, Bronn, the two Unsullied who made the capture, me, and now you."
"Release him." Ian said it instantly, then stopped himself. "No — wait. Here's what we do instead. Have Sama go in at night. A rescue. Break into the manor, pull the boy out quietly, and get him to Meereen. Once he's there, he can tell whatever story he wants about Fehmar's methods — and he'll have plenty of true material to work with."
"I thought you didn't want to antagonize Meereen yet."
"As long as we're not touching their core interests, do you honestly think they'd move against a man with eight thousand Unsullied?" Ian's expression was dismissive. "They won't. But Fehmar and his allies will spend the next several months knowing that a hostile witness to everything that happened here is alive, well, and talking in Meereen. That kind of uncertainty makes them easier to manage. It keeps them dependent on us for protection from consequences they can't fully see."
Celia thought it through. "So Meereen stays neutral, but Fehmar feels the ground shift under him — which tightens his need for your backing. And if Sama earns Grazdan's grandson's trust while playing the rescuer, you have a source inside Meereen."
"Exactly." Ian settled back. "Every operation needs friction to function. An enemy with no teeth, no reach, and no real threat to us — but enough presence to keep our allies anxious and grateful — is worth more than a clean board. If we can manufacture that enemy ourselves at no real cost, there's no reason not to." He paused. "There's an old saying about it — you can't have light without shadow. One side defines the other. Eliminate every external enemy and the tensions don't disappear; they just turn inward. Better to keep something manageable outside the walls than to let it fester inside them."
Celia repeated the thought quietly to herself, then smiled. "I have nothing else to bring you."
"Good." Ian made a small gesture toward the door. "I'm sure your desk hasn't gotten any shorter while we've been talking."
"Farewell." Celia gave a slight bow and left.
The announcement of the Five Orders and the temporary fast-track promotions hit the Worm River basin like a spark in dry grass.
What followed was, by any objective measure, an almost absurd frenzy — slaves informing on other slaves, slaves accusing free citizens, accusations piling on top of accusations in a cascading wave that briefly threatened to make the existing chaos look orderly by comparison.
It lasted two weeks.
Then, with the arrival of the first cohort of newly elevated higher-order slaves, the Worm River basin settled into something that could be described as order — though the word didn't quite capture it. It was heavier than order. More like pressure. Every person on the river worked like a mechanism, spoke carefully, and kept their eyes moving. A man didn't casually confide in his neighbor when his neighbor might be calculating what the information was worth.
Anyone who had seen a dungeon and a functioning city might have found the result somewhere in between.
Ian didn't witness any of this firsthand. He never left Astapor.
During this period, Ian finished the first full draft of the officer's handbook and had slave scribes copy out two dozen versions.
He then selected twenty men from his Black Falcon Guard and the Ghiscari noble families to serve as his reserve officer corps for the new army. His original intent had been an even split between the two groups.
The reality didn't cooperate. When he looked at his direct guard, he could only find four men with functional High Valyrian — a significant problem when his entire force operated primarily in that language. He couldn't appoint officers who couldn't communicate with the men they'd be leading.
That forced him to pull the remainder from the Ghiscari pool. Most were nobles, but the group included one commoner and one slave who had recently earned Third Order status. Ian promoted the latter to Second Order on the spot and made a point of doing it publicly. It cost him nothing and sent a message to every slave watching.
Ian ran the selection process himself. The majority of the officers he chose came from families of Unsullied instructors — men who had already grown up around military discipline and had absorbed at least the basics of how soldiers were organized and led.
Bringing young Astapori nobles in as officers also served a secondary purpose: it was compensation. The Worm River campaign had cost the Astapori noble families something, and offering their second sons — the ones without inheritance rights, the ones with no particular future in Astapor — a position in a conquering army bound for Westeros was a reasonable exchange. The families were glad to see those sons find prospects elsewhere. The sons were glad to have prospects at all.
Once the officers were selected, Ian began spending part of each day teaching them directly. He laid out a two-month curriculum before the actual army training would begin.
The sessions drew an informal audience. Unsullied instructors from the neighboring Ghiscari legion began drifting in to listen — first a few, then more. Ian took the hint. He leaned into it: adopted the traditional Ghiscari tokar for the sessions, referred to himself with some irony as a spiritual son of Old Ghis, and generally made it clear that he considered their military heritage worth taking seriously. The Astapori nobles found this delightful. It cost Ian nothing and bought him a room full of goodwill.
While Ian taught, Celia worked.
Her first task was gunpowder. She sourced sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal in sufficient quantities and began systematic mixing trials, adjusting ratios methodically across dozens of attempts.
None of them detonated.
She tried every proportion variation she could think of. The mixture would burn — sometimes vigorously — but it would not explode. After exhausting her options, she filed a summary report to Ian that concluded, with visible frustration, that this world might operate under fundamentally different physical rules than the one they'd come from. Some property of the material or the environment was simply not cooperating.
With gunpowder off the table for now, the crossbow production facility became more urgent. Celia hired skilled craftsmen at significant expense, purchased additional slave labor through Meereen's markets, and broke ground on the first factory. It wasn't producing yet, but the foundations were laid and the trajectory was clear.
The plate armor facility moved faster. Blast furnace steelmaking and water-powered forge hammers weren't novel concepts — they didn't require invention, just competent execution. The craftsmen and engineers Celia had recruited worked from her specifications and completed equipment blueprints quickly. The first production run was underway.
The output wasn't perfect. Water-powered hammers couldn't produce perfectly uniform iron plates, which meant the finished armor showed variation in thickness and consistency. For the purpose of equipping large numbers of infantry, Ian had been explicit: he cared about volume, not perfection. Imperfect armor on a thousand men was worth more than flawless armor on a hundred. The factory's shortcomings were acceptable.
With Astapor's immediate operations handed off to subordinates, Celia moved east to the Worm River.
She set up at the riverside manor where Rol's forces were based and began the work of tallying what the operation had actually captured — acreage, resources, population, infrastructure — while simultaneously organizing the slaves into productive labor assignments.
The agricultural picture she found was not what she'd hoped for.
Bread was the staple of Slaver's Bay, and wheat was the primary grain. But along the Worm River, more than half the farmland had been given over to cash crops: olives, grapes, figs, dates, pomegranates, walnuts, melons, peppers, and similar produce grown for the comfort and profit of the Good Masters rather than for feeding anyone. The region imported its staple food while its fertile land grew luxury goods for men who would never go hungry regardless.
That structure was going to change. Celia's initial plan called for clearing the majority of those crops and converting most of the acreage to grain production. Wheat was the working assumption for now.
Before leaving Astapor, she had sent agents to the ports of nearby cities with instructions to contact merchants from across the known world and inquire about high-yield crop varieties. If she could locate potatoes, corn, or rice — crops with the kind of output-per-acre that could actually feed an army and a labor population through a sustained crisis — she would reassess the land and revise the plan accordingly.
The need was pressing. This world had no reliable seasonal rhythm — only long summers and long winters, with nothing predictable in between. The Long Night was coming. No one knew exactly when, but the window to prepare was finite and the tail end of the current summer was burning away.
Slaver's Bay had mild weather and productive soil. What it needed was someone willing to use both seriously.
Celia intended to be that person.
(End of Chapter)
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