Chapter 136: What the Lake Remembers
ULF
Smoke had been rising through the Street of Sisters for nine days before anyone thought it worth reporting. The bakers blamed the tanners. The tanners blamed the bakers. It took Torren, the lean Northman Stark used for tracking, three hours of walking the same four streets before he found where it came from: a drain grate behind a shuttered fishmonger's, breathing warm air up into a cold morning.
Ulf knelt and laid his palm flat on the iron. Warm as a sleeping body. Under the reek of old fish and burnt fat sat a smell he knew from the floor of the Dragonpit, sour and heavy, a big animal that had been living in its own leavings for weeks.
"Well?" Stark said.
"Something's been down there eating. Weeks, not days."
"Dragon."
"Nothing else stinks like that."
Torren crouched at the grate's edge and counted on his fingers. "Four ways in that I've found, my lord. This. The undercroft stair beneath the Sept of the Sisters. A fallen sluice on the Blackwater side. And whatever the water's opened for itself since."
Stark didn't look at the grate. He looked at his captain. "Seal them. All four, before a man of ours goes down. He walked through my cordon at River Row like it was a hedge. He'll not do it twice."
"Seal them," Ulf said, "and we're in a closed room with a wild dragon."
"Aye." Stark said it the way he said everything, flat, unhurried, a verdict rather than an argument. "That's the price. Pay it or let him go a third time." He tightened the strap on his vambrace. "And Ulf. Pin him. Don't kill him. A corpse answers nothing, and my tribunal wants his answers written down and signed by his own hand."
"If the dragon has an opinion about that?"
"Then we'll hear it."
Torren was still crouched at the grate, staring into the warm dark. "Do they dream, do you think," he said. "Down there that long."
Nobody answered him.
The undercroft stair went seventy-one steps into the ground and didn't stop where it should have. Ankle water at fifty. Knee water at the bottom, black and slow-moving, the same black water that had nearly taken Jaehaerys out of the world eleven days ago. Ulf put his boot into it and felt his jaw set.
The hall opened out ahead of them, wider than the Great Sept's nave. Maegor's men had cut it to hold water for beasts that never came, six brick pillars holding a barrel vault, the whole of it shored up centuries later with timber that was now green-black and soft as bread. Torchlight went out across the flood and found nothing to stop it for forty yards. High on the north wall, above the reach of any tide, a broad stone ledge had been swept clean of rubble and layered with charred bones.
Daemon stood on a broken pier at the hall's center with his boots dry and his hands empty.
"You brought the wolf," he said. The vault carried his voice and gave it back doubled.
"He brought me."
"Daemon of House Targaryen." Stark's words rolled down the water. "Lay down your steel and come up the stair. You'll be tried. Not hanged in a street like a cutpurse."
"That's meant to be a kindness."
"It's meant to be a fact."
Daemon laughed, and the laugh was worse than the ravings had been. He turned his head toward the far end of the hall, and something came up out of the water there without any sound at all.
She was smaller than Vermithor, barely half his size, and she moved like a thing built out of whips. Scales the color of storm clouds, gray and black shot through with silver, water sheeting off wings that had never carried a saddle. No rider had ever laid a claim on her. She'd been courted in the dark by a dead prince who'd spent months learning what she'd tolerate.
"Meet Vhalor," Daemon said. "Won the hard way. No sorcery, just patience. Meat every third night, never a hand on her, never a word she hadn't already heard. The one thing you've never learned."
He counted instead of answering: eleven men behind him on the stair. Waist water. Six pillars, four of them cracked. One dragon between his people and the only ledge in the room, which was the only place Daemon had looked twice since they came down.
Soru put him across the flood in a shove of white spray. Rankyaku followed, an air blade that took the top off the pier and made Daemon drop flat behind it, and that was the moment Ulf learned Daemon had never meant to hold the center at all. The Rogue Prince came up already running for the north wall with a Valyrian steel dagger in his fist. He'd never fought fair. Honor was a weapon other men carried, and the one who put it down first usually walked away.
Vhalor did not strike at Daemon. She struck at the noise.
Her tail came around the pillars at head height, faster than anything that size had a right to move, and Ser Denys Waters was standing in the middle of it with his shield up and his mouth already open. Ulf got there first. He set Tekkai. He reached for weight and took hold of every stone of it he had, fifty thousand kilos, the ceiling of everything he'd trained for six years, and then the ceiling gave under his hand and he kept going down past it into somewhere he had never been.
The water around his legs did not splash. It fled, driven out in a flat ring that slapped the far pillars. The brick floor broke in a circle under his boots. The tail hit him and stopped, and forty feet of dragon whipped back on itself with the shock running up her spine, and Vhalor screamed a sound that put two men on the stair onto their knees with their hands over their ears.
He didn't remember letting go.
He was kneeling when he came back to himself, water at his chest, the taste of copper filling his mouth. Blood ran out of his nose in a steady thread and made small dark coins on the surface. His hands shook. He tried to close the left one and it wouldn't answer, and the torchlight had gone to smeared streaks with black flecks eating holes through the middle of them.
He hadn't decided to do that. That was the part worth being afraid of. He'd reached for exactly that surge a hundred times on the training yard in the Red Keep's lower ward and got nothing but sweat and a headache. It had come when the tail was two feet from his face and not one heartbeat before.
Ser Denys hauled him upright. Ser Ryam Mallery took his other arm, and Ulf saw both their faces before he could get his own back under control, saw them looking at the blood on his chin and his fingers jumping, and knew neither of them would ever forget it.
Then the vault groaned.
It was not a loud sound. It was the sound a ship's hull makes before it opens. Two pillars had gone to gravel under the tail strike, the shoring above them had folded, and brick began coming down in slabs the size of doors. Ulf hardened and took one across the shoulders and felt it break apart on him. Under his boots the floor was letting the bay in, water coming up through the new cracks in ropes, rising past his belt while he stood in it.
"Back to the stair," Stark was shouting. "Archers hold at the arch. Nobody kills him."
Daemon was already gone from the pier. He went up the north wall by a fallen sluice pipe with his cloak streaming behind him like smoke, and Vhalor was thrashing between him and the Queensguard, driving her wings against water and brick, wanting nothing in the world but the strangers out of her roost.
Ulf tried Soru. His legs went out from under him and he came down on one knee in the rising black, and the Rankyaku he threw after Daemon went wide by ten feet and opened a wound in the wall instead.
Daemon reached the ledge. He set his palm on the dagger's edge, closed his fist, and let the blood run down onto the charred bones. Then he began to speak, low and steady, the old words in a tongue that had been made for exactly this, and Vhalor's great gray head came around toward the sound of them.
Ulf got a boot under himself, dragged the back of his wrist across his mouth, and stood up.