Chapter 56: The Pit Prepared
ULF
Aemond's last two words had come down the hill with me and they were still there at the third hour past midnight, standing in the cold under the Dragonpit's outer arch.
Marston came down the gallery stair with a lantern in his fist. Head dragonkeeper thirty years, hands ruined to the wrist from a lifetime of feeding things that spit fire.
"All thirty-eight breathing," he said. "You can go up to your bed."
"How many awake?"
"All thirty-eight."
The chain across the arch had been strung at sundown, with two Gold Cloaks at it counting out the watch. Behind them the galleries ran back under the vault in three tiers of stone bench, and the men were on them. Straw. Two braziers for thirty-eight bodies. The pit breathes sulphur up through its own floor even in winter, and to that you could add wet wool, the corner drain, and eight days of men who hadn't been let out to wash.
"I want to walk the line," I said.
"You want to empty it."
"I want it cut down to the ones with a chance."
Marston set the lantern on the chain post. "The Hand's clerk counted heads at sundown. Thirty-eight. If it's thirty-five at first light, it isn't you he sends for."
"I'll put my name against every man I take out."
"And he'll count the heads anyway." He didn't say it unkindly. "I'll tell you what I told him, since you're the only one who comes down here to hear it. This should not be done. Not by these men, not tomorrow, not by anyone. You put strangers in a chamber with a beast that has known one keeper's smell for fifteen years and you don't get a rider. You get a dragon that's eaten in its own room and remembers the taste of it after. Then it's my lads who go in with the meat."
"I know."
"Then say so where the Hand can hear you."
"I did. Twice." I ducked under the chain. "Bring the lantern."
Most of them were lying, and it took me the length of the first tier to see how badly. Valyrian blood shows or it doesn't, and out of thirty-eight there were perhaps five heads in that gallery that would have made anyone look twice. The rest had grey eyes and brown hair and a story about a grandmother.
I sat down on the bench across from a cooper out of Fishmonger's Square who had a nose broken flat and four children asleep in a room off Pigrun Alley.
"Go home," I said. "The chain isn't locked. The clerk won't chase you."
"And then what."
"Then you're a cooper."
"Bread's gone up eleven times since summer," he said. "Eleven. I did my sums on a barrel head with a nail. If I work every day between now and spring I'm short by a third, and the short third is the children." He looked at me with no heat in him at all. "You're telling me tomorrow might kill me. I know tomorrow might kill me. Winter's certain."
I had eight silver stags left in the world after the bread riot. There was nothing in my purse that answered him.
I went the whole tier that way and got no one off it.
HUGH HAMMER
The queen's man came along the third tier with the keeper's lantern behind him, and Hugh watched him from the dark at the top of the stair and didn't stand.
No sword on him. Soft boots, no spurs, a plain grey cloak worth more than it looked. He sat with them. He talked low. Twice Hugh saw a man shake his head, and both times the queen's man got up off the bench without arguing. A lord argues. A lord likes the sound of it.
The lantern came level. Hugh let it find his face and kept his hands loose on his knees where they could be seen.
"They say the queen's shield walks down here at night," Hugh said. "Talking men out of their turn."
"Some of them ought to be talked out."
"Some of them." Hugh got up then, slowly, so the grey cloak had to come up with him. He stood a head and a half over the man and gave him time to feel it. "Not me. I'm for Vermithor."
The lantern didn't move. The face under it didn't do what faces did in a tavern when Hugh said that name.
"He's killed four men since the old king died," the queen's man said. "Three of them keepers who fed him."
"Then he's hungry for better."
"You've seen him?"
"I've smelled him from the third gallery. It's a forge smell." Hugh spread his hands, and the burns went up both forearms in a bad silver braid, twelve years of them, his trade written where anyone could read it. "I've been in fire since I was nine. Every man I ever worked beside is dead of it or crippled of it and I'm neither. That isn't luck. Luck runs out and mine hasn't."
"Luck's the only thing that does run out."
"You'd know." Hugh smiled with his teeth. He had wanted to say it since the man came under the arch. "Word is you got yours in a cave on a cliff. Word is she knelt for you."
Nothing came back at all. The lantern went off down the tier, and Hugh sat down again with the taste of a thing said to a man who hadn't bothered to catch it.
ULF
I found him on the second tier, third bench, sitting apart with his knees up.
Nineteen now. Lysene-fair, the hair gone the colour of dirty tin, and the burn scar still running from his jaw down under the collar where a chandler's lad had thrown a pot at him at eleven for stealing nothing at all.
"Wick."
"My lord."
"Don't." I sat on the bench below him. "Who put you on this roll?"
"I did. I walked up to the clerk at the Iron Gate and gave him my name and my mother's."
"Then walk to him now and take it back. I'll stand there while you do it."
"No."
"Wick."
"I've carried for you since I was eight." He said it flat, no build to it. "Eleven years. I've stood in the rain outside the Street of Steel counting who went in a door. I ran the Gin Alley run when Nel got too small for it, and I ran it after she wasn't there to give it to." He turned his head and looked at me properly for the first time. "You went up the hill on that. On me, and Hobb, and her. You struck Hobb off the list with your own hand and he's still under the Mud Gate with his arms up. So don't sit there and tell me the door's shut. You walked through it."
"It isn't a door," I said.
"It was for you."
I sat there and had nothing. I couldn't put one true sentence in front of that boy, because the only one I had was that he would die in the morning, and he knew it, and he had already worked out that it cost him less than the winter did.
"Which one's yours," he said after a while. "They wouldn't tell us."
"Silverwing."
He nodded slowly, and filed that somewhere I couldn't reach, and neither of us said anything else.
I stayed on the bench until the braziers went down to red.
They unbarred the pit gates at first light. The sound came up through three tiers of stone, the drawbar coming out of its seat in two long grinding pulls, and every man in that gallery was on his feet before the second one finished. Marston's keepers went down the line with their hooks and their masks on. Someone prayed in Braavosi. The cooper tied his belt twice.
The chain came off the arch.
The first man went through.