Chapter 63: The Sea Gate
ULF
Duskendale at a thousand feet was two towns inside one wall.
Landward it was slate roofs and mud lanes and the Dun Fort squatting on its hill, Darklyn's colours flying with Rhaenyra's black and red run up beside them. Seaward it was masts. I counted forty-one hulls in the harbour before I made myself stop counting, because forty-one was already the number that mattered. Those keels had sat across the mouth of the Bay since spring, taking the grain barges before they ever smelled the Blackwater. Every empty stall in Fishmonger's Square went back to them. I'd carried a dead boy out of that square. My forearm still remembered where his head had rested.
Below and behind, Cole's ten thousand were coming out of the treeline in six columns with the ladders on their shoulders, and from up there it looked like a wood deciding to walk.
Vhagar came up on my left. Silverwing dropped ten feet on her own to keep clean air under her, which nobody had taught her; she'd worked it out in a fortnight and never mentioned it again.
"The harbour first," Aemond called. The wind took half of it. He didn't repeat himself. He never did. "Ships. Then the warehouses, then the rope walks. Let it run inland off the water."
"The wind's onshore." I had to shout it twice. "You light the quays and you've lit the whole town by noon. Nobody will need to open a gate because there won't be a gate."
"Then it runs where I want it to run."
"It runs into twenty thousand people and about four months of grain we're going to want in our own bellies before the year turns."
"Duskendale is a letter, Ulf." He wasn't looking at me. He was watching Cole's columns the way a man watches water come to the boil. "Every wavering lord between here and the Trident reads it. I would rather it were short."
"Then let them read a different one. A town that burns is a town she can weep over. A town that opens its gate is a town she has to explain."
Vermithor came in fast on the other side, too close, the way Hugh always flew. "You promised me the harbour."
"Hold your height," Aemond said.
"You promised—"
"Hold. Your. Height."
I said it before the quiet could set. "Give me the Sea Gate. Send Cole's right along the shingle under the sea wall and I'll have the grid up before they reach the mole."
Aemond turned his head then. One eye, and the sapphire, and nothing on his face at all. Three miles back, grounded because I'd argued for it in a tent five nights ago, Daeron was sitting on Tessarion with nothing to do.
"Cole's right is two miles out of position."
"Then send them now."
He looked down at the town for a long moment. At the Dun Fort. At a harbour full of ships that would have made a fire visible from Dragonstone.
"You have until the ladders touch the wall," he said. "If that gate is shut when Cole loses his first man on a rung, I burn the harbour, and whatever the wind does afterward belongs to you."
That was all I was going to get, and more than I'd expected. I put my hand flat on Silverwing's neck and leaned.
"Jikagon."
She fell out of the sky like she'd been waiting all morning to be asked.
The sea wall came up green and wet and streaked with weed at the base. I set her down hard on the outer mole with her wings still half spread, which scattered the shore battery like thrown grain. Two crossbowmen went into the water. A third dropped his windlass and ran for the postern and didn't reach it.
"Kelītīs," I told her. Hold. Don't burn. She made a low sound in her chest that I'd learned to read as disagreement, and held.
The Sea Gate stood forty yards along the wall walk, and the wall walk was full of men who had spent the whole night watching the landward side.
I went light for the run. Twelve stone became something a strong gust could have carried off, and I hit the first four of them at a speed no body that weight has any business reaching, and didn't stop to see where they landed. A spear came up out of the stairhead. I dropped back to my own weight in the middle of the stride, let the shaft skate off my leathers, and took the stair three at a time into the winch chamber.
They'd prepared it properly. Whoever ran Staunton's gate crew knew his trade.
The grid was down and pinned, twelve feet by fourteen of oak in iron shoeing, seated deep in its channel. Above it, the drum: elm, thick as my chest, the chain wound six turns round it and running out through the roof slot to the counterweight shaft in the wall's thickness. The pawl sat in its ratchet. A bar of iron had been driven through two spokes and wedged hard against the frame. And they'd emptied the cradle — down the shaft, forty feet below, the iron basket rested on stone with its granite blocks tipped out around it, so that even if the drum came free there was nothing left in the world to haul the chain the right way.
Two men were still in the chamber. One had a hand axe and used it. The other had his back against the drum with both arms spread across it as though he could hold four tons of gate shut with his shoulders.
I put the axeman through the wall slot into the harbour. The other I hit in the chest with an open hand and heard something go, and he sat down and stayed down.
Then I climbed the frame, got both feet on the housing above the pawl, and stopped being a man.
Two and a half thousand kilos arrived on an iron ratchet seated in mortared stone. The pawl sheared. Its seat went with it, and the frame timber split along the grain with a crack that came back off the harbour water half a second later. The drum jumped in its bearings. The iron bar sprang out of the spokes and rang off the ceiling.
Now the drum wanted to turn and the gate wanted to stay down, and four tons of oak and iron wins that argument every time it is put.
So I went down the shaft after the empty cradle, stepped into it, and became the stone.
The change takes two seconds and they are always two seconds too long. Then the basket lurched under me, the chain came up off the floor with a sound like a whip drawn through gravel, and I dropped.
Above me the drum rolled over and kept rolling. The grid came up out of its channel an inch, then a foot, then in a rush that shook grit out of the ceiling and down the back of my neck.
Somebody on the wall walk put a crossbow bolt into my back. I felt it stop, the way they stopped now, and didn't turn around.
AEMOND
From Vhagar's back the gate looked like nothing at all. A black line widening in a grey wall. A hundred yards of masonry that had held for two hundred years, opening the way a mouth opens.
Cole's right came round the headland at a run eleven minutes after the order, which was better than Aemond had allowed for, and went in under the arch four abreast without one ladder touched to one wall.
The Dun Fort ran a white banner up its tower before the first hundred were through. Staunton wanted terms. Staunton had wanted terms since the ships were counted. That would keep.
Then Vermithor broke formation.
Aemond saw it start and didn't put Vhagar between them, and he knew, in the moment of not doing it, that he had made a choice he would be able to call something else by evening.
Hugh took the bronze down over the eastern arm of the harbour where the fishing quarter stood. Netlofts, tar sheds, four hundred houses of pitched board packed shoulder to shoulder on stilts above the mud. It went up as tinder goes up. In the time it took Vhagar to make one wide turn there was no eastern arm at all, only a wall of orange with roof beams standing black inside it.
Vermithor climbed back to height and settled into line as though nothing had occurred.
Aemond looked once at the burning quarter and once at the open gate, and thought that his letter had been written after all, and that not one word of it was in his hand.
ULF
The smoke came over the sea wall before the heat did, low and greasy and full of tar, and I stood in an iron basket forty feet down a stone shaft and couldn't move.
If I lightened, the gate came down. If the gate came down, Cole's right was cut in half inside a town that wanted it dead.
So I stayed heavy while the fishing quarter burned, and listened to it through forty feet of wall, and there is no honest way to set down what that sounds like from inside stone.
Nine minutes. I counted them.
When the first of Cole's serjeants reached the winch chamber I shouted them through the iron bar and the spare pin, heard the drum lock, and let myself go back to twelve stone. My knees disagreed with the decision. I came up the ladder with blood running out of my nose and both hands shaking too badly to close on the rungs, so I hooked my elbows through them instead.
The gateway was full of soldiers coming the other way. Somebody was bellowing about the wells.
The Darklyn winchman I'd put down was still sitting where I'd left him, holding his chest, watching me with the flat curiosity of a man who has already decided he dies today.
"You're the White," he said.
"Yes."
"They said you were a drunk."
I didn't answer him. I walked out under the arch onto the quay, into ash coming down on the water like grey snow, and turned to look east at what Hugh had made.
That was when I saw it.
Low off the water, out of the east, out of the morning glare, a pale shape running flat and fast above its own reflection. Small. Small enough that for one breath I read the distance wrong and thought it was a gull.
The chain was still in my fists. I hadn't noticed picking it up.