The city of Myr was bleeding.
In the hours since Magister Calasso's fall, his rivals had given their enforcers free rein. The inner city had turned into a slaughterhouse as the victorious guilds dispatched their private soldiers and hired sellswords to liquidate every known supporter of the old Magister, settling debts and grudges simultaneously. The night sky above the rooftops glowed orange, lit by scattered fires.
Gendry held his warhammer in both hands and studied the pursuing mob crowding the street behind them. It was a chaotic menagerie of Myrish city guards, private sellswords, and opportunist cutthroats.
Dark-skinned, wiry Myrmen. Tyroshi with purple or blue-dyed beards. Pale Lyseni with gold hair. Meereenese with heavy builds and pit-fighter scars. He was looking at mercenaries from across the known world, and they outnumbered the Wolf Pack's survivors by at least five to one.
The reunion was brief and brutal. Pretty Boy's strike team met Greybeard's survivors at a collapsed archway, the two groups forming a tight, bristling hedgehog of swords, shields, and longbows.
"Cover me!" Fletcher Dick bellowed.
The Wolf Pack raised their shields, forming a corridor. Dick moved with unhurried precision, setting his feet shoulder-width apart, drawing to full extension, and releasing. Arrow after arrow hissed down the street, punching through the cheap leather armor of the pursuing cavalry and collapsing horses in screaming piles that blocked the road. The Myrish pursuit slowed, then stalled.
The survivor who had led the remnants of Greybeard's group through the streets was a barrel-chested man in his forties wearing a pair of heavy steel spiked gauntlets—now black with dried blood. He pressed the back of his gauntlet against his bleeding cheek, tears running freely down his battered face.
"Iron Fist," Pretty Boy said, gripping the man's arm tightly. "Where is Greybeard?"
The old captain's expression gave the answer before the words came.
"The Joios Magister betrayed us," Iron Fist said, voice cracked with grief. "Magister Calasso reached out for help. He was invited to a dinner." Iron Fist closed his eyes briefly. "The whole family. Poisoned at the table. The Captain tried to warn him. He and four brothers were killed defending the manse when the Unsullied broke down the door. The rest of us fought out."
Pretty Boy's scarred face went absolutely still.
"Magister Joios," he said quietly. "He was a fellow member of the fire-weed guild. Calasso's own ally."
"The Seafarer's Guild bought him years ago," Iron Fist explained bitterly. "Joios was never independent. The initial candidate the Seafarers nominated publicly was a decoy—they wanted Joios all along. He was the knife they hid inside Calasso's own house."
"Gods," Pretty Boy said, exhaling slowly.
Myr's political machine was merciless. Its Magisters had perfected the art of the long con, turning trusted friends into patient assassins. It was a different kind of murder than the sword—slower, colder, and absolutely final.
Iron Fist reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out a ring. It was a heavy, ugly thing—black iron and bronze, set with a small but fierce wolf's head. Ancient First Men runes ran along the inner band. It was unmistakably the command sigil of the Wolf Pack Company.
"The Captain left instructions. If he didn't make it out, you were to take command." Iron Fist placed the ring in Pretty Boy's gauntleted palm.
Pretty Boy stared at it for a long moment. Then he closed his fist around it and put it on his right hand without a word. He turned to the street.
"We go. Now."
"The East Gate," Iron Fist urged. "Their defenses are weakest on—"
"No time for the gate," Pretty Boy cut him off, his voice iron-hard. "We have a different way out. Secret tunnel. We feint toward the East Gate and fold back—fast."
"Agreed."
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The war drums changed rhythm. The Myrish mob parted. From the far end of the street came the sound of disciplined, synchronized footsteps—a sound completely unlike the chaotic scramble of a sellsword mob. It was the sound of men who had been drilling since they were five years old.
Thirty Unsullied marched into view.
They wore quilted tunics and spiked bronze caps, their round shields locked together in an overlapping wall of bronze and leather. Each carried three short ashwood spears and a shortsword at the hip. Their faces were expressionless—not the blank face of a man who felt no fear, but the blank face of a man who had been chemically and surgically separated from the very concept of fear years ago.
The Myrish sellswords in the surrounding mob erupted into cheering. The Unsullied were the Free Cities' ultimate deterrent—the soldiers who had once repelled eighteen consecutive Dothraki charges at the Battle of Qohor. Their arrival transformed a mob into an army.
"Damn Myrish merchants. They really know how to spend gold," Pretty Boy muttered.
"The Unsullied don't ride horses," Longspear noted, scanning the phalanx with a professional eye. "If we break their formation and scatter them across the alleys, they lose half their effectiveness."
"Oblique charge. Hammer their flank before they lock the phalanx fully," Pretty Boy commanded. "Pretty Boy, Iron Fist, Gendry, Longspear. Hit them at an angle. Don't let them close the wall. Thirty seconds, then we break and run."
Gendry pulled his bull-horned helm down and locked his grip on his warhammer. He could feel the Storm's Fury simmering in his marrow.
The four of them charged at a diagonal, slamming into the Unsullied formation at the corner rather than the center. The collision was deafening.
The Unsullied were fast—genuinely, terrifyingly fast. The nearest soldier thrust his short spear in a compact, brutally efficient motion aimed at the gap below Gendry's gorget.
Clang.
Gendry took the hit directly on his warhammer's iron haft and felt the force shudder up his forearms. The Unsullied soldier showed no reaction to missing his mark. He was already withdrawing for a second thrust.
"They are exactly what they say," Longspear grunted beside Gendry, his own spear darting and probing. The Unsullied's interlocking defense was terrifyingly tight—it was nearly impossible to find a gap in their shield wall.
"Don't get pinned! They drink the Wine of Courage—you cannot hurt them the way you hurt a man!" Pretty Boy roared over the din. "They feel nothing!"
Gendry understood immediately. Normal pain reactions—a man flinching from a cut, hesitating from shock—were entirely absent. A wounded Unsullied fought exactly as effectively as an uninjured one until the moment he died. They were not soldiers. They were weapons shaped like men.
Gendry raised his warhammer and swung in a tight, devastating arc, hitting the bronze shield directly in front of him with full force. The shield arm buckled under the catastrophic impact, driving the Unsullied soldier sideways. As the man was staggered, Gendry stepped forward and drove the warhammer's spike into the soldier's chest through the quilted tunic. The Unsullied let out a single sharp exhale, crumpled, and was dead.
Leather armor. Gendry recognized the critical weakness with cold clarity. In the warm Essosi climate, the Unsullied wore no metal plate—their protection was quilted cloth and a bronze cap. Against a Meereenese arakh or a short sword, this was adequate protection. Against a spiked warhammer wielded by a man of Gendry's size and bloodline-fueled strength, it was essentially meaningless.
He seized the dead man's fallen round shield.
"Kill!"
Gendry became a force of pure concentrated violence. His left arm held the shield, absorbing the spear thrusts of two Unsullied simultaneously, while his right arm drove the warhammer into chests, helms, and shield arms. The phalanx was breaking down around him as Longspear and Iron Fist worked the flanks. Three more Unsullied fell in rapid succession—not because Gendry was technically superior to them, but because his armored mass overwhelmed their capacity to harm him. Each spear thrust that hit his scale mail simply didn't have enough weight behind it to punch through the overlapping iron rings.
He roared like a stag.
"Now!" Pretty Boy grabbed his arm, dragging him sideways into the mouth of a dark alley. The remaining Unsullied immediately fell back into formation, hesitating in the face of the sudden route change rather than charging blindly into a dark alley with a screaming juggernaut.
They had their thirty seconds.
"Move! Move!" the new Captain of the Wolf Pack bellowed, sprinting through the dark alleys of the outer city with the remnants of his company behind him, the secret tunnel, the coast, and Salladhor Saan's waiting ship the only things that stood between them and a Myrish dungeon.
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