Chapter 57: The Sowing Begins
HUGH HAMMER
The Dragonpit stank of fear.
Not the sulphur. Hugh had smelled that from the outer gate and found nothing in it he hadn't breathed every working day since he was nine. Fear had its own smell and it came off the men around him in the sand: old sweat gone sharp, and under that the sour thing a body does when it has spent the whole night deciding.
Thirty men and a handful of women, all claiming dragon blood, most lying. Hugh had them sorted before the keepers got the inner gate open. They flinched when a chain moved. They counted the exits twice, then counted them again. Not one had faced anything worse than a tavern fight with the odds already settled.
Sheep. Waiting on the knife.
His own blood was real. His mother told him the year the flux took her, propped up in a bed she'd stopped leaving. A night with a Targaryen lordling who paid in silver and was gone before the candle guttered. Silver coin for silver seed, she said, and laughed until it turned into the cough, and nine months later Hugh came screaming into the world with hair the colour of hammered tin and no name to hang it on.
So he'd grown up in the forges. Learned to shape metal. Learned to stand in a heat that made grown men step back and call it a full day's work.
Dragons are just bigger furnaces. Same principle.
The queen's man came through the arch with two keepers at his heels, in the same plain grey cloak he'd worn along the third tier at midnight. The gallery turned to look at him and pretended it hadn't.
The one who killed Daemon's assassins. The one she knelt for.
"Ulf, isn't it?" Hugh put himself in the man's road and said it loud enough for the benches. "Heard stories about you."
The bastard stopped. Looked up at him without hurrying about it.
"Hugh Hammer. The blacksmith."
"You know me?"
"I know everyone here who matters. You're the only other one who does."
Arrogant. He hadn't been arrogant last night, on the stair, with the lantern. Maybe it was earned.
"Think you'll claim a dragon today?"
"I think I'll try. Same as you."
"Not the same." Hugh grinned and let it sit. "I'm going for Vermithor. The Bronze Fury. Second biggest beast alive."
Say that name in any tavern between the Iron Gate and the river and men crossed themselves or laughed at you. The queen's man only nodded.
"Bold choice."
"Bold wins. Careful gets you burned and dead."
"Sometimes careful keeps you alive long enough to win later."
"How many hours since you slept?" the bastard asked.
Hugh didn't answer that one.
Marston's keepers came down the line with their hooks, and one of them put a horn to his mouth, and the trials began.
ULF
The first death came quickly.
A sailor off a Driftmark cog, forty years old, grandfather a Velaryon bastard and proud enough of it to have said so four times since dawn. He walked out to Morghul with his shoulders back and his palms open like a man greeting a horse.
"I'm blood of the sea kings," he told her. "I've come to—"
Her jaws closed across his middle before the sentence was finished. The sound was wet and very short. Blood went out across the sand in a long arc and speckled the front rank at the rail, and the screaming that started in the gallery was louder and lasted longer than his own.
Morghul settled back on her haunches and licked her scales clean.
One.
The second took longer and was worse for it. A merchant's son from the Hook, nineteen or twenty, who'd bought his descent from a hedge septon and had the parchment folded in his shirt. Shrykos didn't eat him. She burned him where he stood and then watched him. I counted while he screamed, because counting was the only thing left to do with my hands. Thirty seconds. It is a long time when you are made to spend it.
Two.
The third made it further than either. A stable hand out of Rosby, pale-haired, violet-eyed, and if any of them were true-blooded it was her. She went slowly. She stopped when the dragon lifted its head and waited until it settled, and then went on, and she was doing everything right.
It let her put her hand on its snout.
Then it convulsed. The whole length of it came off the stone at once and the girl went across the chamber and into the wall, and the crack of it came back off the vault twice.
Three.
She was dead before she landed, which was more mercy than the pit had shown that morning.
After that the galleries thinned. Men who had boasted for eight days about their grandmothers remembered business at the docks. Half the roll was gone by noon. I stood at the edge of that floor with a queen's writ in my sleeve and no power in it to shut one gate.
Wick I kept on the second tier, on the far side of Marston, with a keeper's tally board in his hands and a job to do that would hold him there. He knew what I was doing. He held the board anyway, and he wrote the names down, and he didn't look at me once.
Hugh Hammer stayed. He hadn't moved from where he'd stood at first light. When they came with the sledge for the stable hand he watched them load her without any change in his face, and then he found me across sixty yards of bloody sand and held my eyes until I gave him the nod he was waiting for.
He wasn't afraid. Neither was I.
Not the same reasons. It came out the same.
HUGH HAMMER
Vermithor waited in the deepest chamber, where the sound of the crowd came through the stone as a hum and nothing more.
Ninety feet of scale. Old King Jaehaerys's mount, unridden since the Conciliator died fifteen years back, and four men dead of him since, three of them keepers who'd carried him his meat.
Hugh walked in without slowing.
Fear is death. Confidence is life. Nothing complicated in it.
The eye opened. Bronze on black, wider than a cart wheel, and old.
"I'm Hugh Hammer," he said, and threw it at the vault to fill the chamber, a forge-floor shout with twelve years of practice behind it. "I'm here to ride you."
The rumble came up through his boots before he heard it.
"I know you've been alone. I know the others fear you." He took another step. "But I'm not afraid. I've spent my life in fire. I've made steel out of dirt and I've done it with my hands. I know heat better than any man alive."
The jaws opened.
Here it comes.
Fire came out of him in one white roar and Hugh screamed into it, and there was no fear anywhere in the sound. He'd made that noise at an anvil a thousand times, over a bar that wouldn't bend. His skin blistered and split. Something in his ear went. The pain was past anything the forge had ever taught him and there was nothing on the other side of it to bargain with.
He walked forward. One boot, then the other, then the first again.
When the flame stopped he was three feet from the snout. His face was running blood and the sleeves had burned off him entirely and the smell coming off his own arms was a smell he knew from work.
He grinned through split lips.
"That all you got?"
Vermithor looked at him for the length of four breaths.
Then lowered his head.
Hugh got his ruined hands into the spine ridge and climbed, half dead and entirely certain, and the roar that went up from the galleries when the Bronze Fury came out into the daylight was the first sound in his life that had ever been for him.
ULF
I watched him take his lap over King's Landing from the broken dome, and the whole city came out into the streets to shout at the sky.
Brave. Insane. It worked.
Weeks in a maester's care, if he lived through the fever. Scars to the grave. And a dragon second only to Vhagar under him, which made him an ally worth any price or an enemy I couldn't afford, and probably both before the year turned.
Criston Cole came up the gallery steps and stood at my shoulder with his cloak over his arm.
"Nineteen left on the roll," he said. "The council will want them run tomorrow."
"The council wasn't down there."
"The council needs riders. It has one more tonight than it had this morning and it has counted." He watched the shape of Vermithor bank out over the Blackwater. "That smith walked into fire and came out of it. Every man on that roll saw it. You will not talk one of them off the bench now."
"No," I said. "I won't."
"So what will you do?"
"Chalk," I said. "A line thirty feet out from every chain, keepers with buckets on both sides of it, and nobody past it without my hand up."
He turned his head. "You're not like Hammer. He uses force. You use—"
"Patience."
"Will patience be enough?"
I didn't answer him, because Marston's lads were coming up the stair below us with the third body on a hurdle and I had promised myself I would look at every one of them.
I went down to meet it.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists. you just need a ticket through.
→ $6 — 10 chapters into the future, plus 5 more every week.
→ $9 — 15 chapters past the public timeline.
→ $15 — 20 chapters ahead. every chapter the second i finish writing it.
patreon.com/Whatif0
see you in the next loop.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
P.S. — in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com. just saying. that timeline also has more chapters.