Oldtown was beautiful, its beauty coming from its age, from centuries upon centuries of men and women living, building, tearing down, and building again, until the city had grown into something that no single mind had ever planned, or could have planned.
Harald found himself sitting in one of the taverns near the harbor, waiting for the sun to set so he could begin his infiltration of the Citadel. He sat in a seat near the window, at a small table against the wall where he could see both the room and the street outside, and where, if he angled himself right, the Citadel was visible above the rooftops, its pale towers catching the noon light.
The tavern wench returned once more, and Harald ordered another round of ale, girl, and whatever was being cooked. The price of food had grown, according to the complaints Harald overheard. The city was preparing for a siege, after all, or the possibility of one.
"...heard he's already past Goldengrove. What's left of Rowan's men scattered like geese in a storm..."
"...doesn't matter. Lord Hightower's called the banners. We've got the largest walls..."
"...walls didn't stop the last siege of Oldtown, and that was just some petty lord..."
"...that was six hundred years ago, you old fool..."
All of it meant Loren was now marching on Highgarden. With the amount of help Harald had given him, especially with potions, Loren's sixty thousand men could fight and win against the Reach's finest. Still, the Reach could beat Loren if they used a vast number of men, which this land could easily call up. Everything would depend upon timing, and with how Loren planned to use the stamina potions, the advantage was on Loren's side.
In the corner, a musician had set up, a thin young man with a battered lute and a voice better than his instrument deserved. He had been playing merchant songs and sailing tunes, but now he struck up something different, a faster rhythm with a cheerful vulgarity to it. Several heads in the room turned, and someone whistled in recognition.
The singer grinned and launched into it.
Oh Loren the Golden, the Lion King fine,
Puts on his mother's dress when he dines,
With rouge on his cheeks and a flower in his hair,
And not a stitch more, for he's got none to spare.
Laughter erupted from all around the tavern. The craftsmen banged their cups on the table. The city watchmen who were there eating also hollered in support, while some of the wenches danced.
He sells by the hour in Lannisport town,
Two coppers to look and three coppers to...
The rest of the verse was drowned in roaring laughter before the singer even finished it. Someone threw a coin, which the singer caught without missing a beat or a word. The song grew considerably cruder from there, working through several verses that managed to impugn Loren's manhood, all to a genuinely catchy tune.
Harald tried to tune it out.
He was not entirely successful.
The man singing had a talent for memorable rhymes.
He drank his ale and waited.
=========
Hours passed, and Harald found himself wandering the city. It had been a long time since he had had some time to himself. He found himself standing some distance from the Citadel as the afternoon stretched toward evening, watching the towers catch the last of the direct sunlight, counting down the minutes as the sky began to darken at its edges.
He was so concentrated on the Citadel that he almost did not feel the small tugs at his cloak.
He looked down and saw a boy, ten years old at most. Tied to the boy's back with a length of rough cloth was a girl, younger, perhaps five, her small arms wrapped around her brother's neck. Harald noticed the girl's leg immediately. The left one was twisted, a break that had healed badly.
The boy held out his hand without speaking, his eyes pleading.
Harald reached into his purse and placed several silver coins in the boy's palm.
The boy stared at the coins, then at Harald, his eyes gone very wide.
"What happened to your sister's leg?" Harald asked.
"Cart," the boy said simply. "She didn't move fast enough. Cartman didn't stop."
Harald studied the girl on the boy's back. She was watching him with large, solemn eyes.
"Want to see a magic trick?" Harald asked the boy.
The boy looked at him for a moment, then nodded slowly.
Harald's hands began to glow gold.
The boy stepped back immediately, his body tensing to run, his arms coming up instinctively to protect his sister. The girl on his back made a small, frightened sound and pressed her face against the back of her brother's neck.
"Trust me," Harald said quietly.
He reached out and touched the girl's twisted leg gently. The restoration spell moved through her like warm water, Harald feeling the wrongness of the bone through his fingertips, feeling the slow knitting, the gentle correction. It took longer than a fresh injury would have. Old damage was always harder, and Harald knew some very powerful restoration spells. He had even gone to the College at first to learn restoration. The rest had been bonuses.
The girl went very still.
"It doesn't hurt," she said in a small voice. She sounded almost confused by this fact.
The boy turned to look at his sister's face over his shoulder, then back at Harald. He opened his mouth. Closed it.
Harald winked at them both.
"Be careful out there. And be careful with the money too."
He turned and walked toward the Citadel.
The sky darkened further as he walked. By the time he reached the Citadel's outer approach, the last color had gone from the western horizon, and the city's torches and lanterns were lit. He found a shadow between two buildings, stood quietly for a moment, and cast the muffle spell. His footsteps became silent. Then came the invisibility spell, the air shimmering briefly around him before settling into nothing.
He walked through the Citadel's front entrance. Two sphinxes flanked it, carved from pale stone. Harald paused briefly to look at them and decided there was old magic worked into the stone, faint and unfocused, more like a memory of magic than the thing itself.
He walked farther in, and the Citadel was exactly what he had expected and also nothing like what he had imagined.
The scale of it struck him first. It was a collection of towers, yes, but what connected those towers was a labyrinth of halls, galleries, and chambers that seemed to have been built, rebuilt, and expanded across countless centuries. One corridor would be plain, bare stone. It would open into a gallery with arched ceilings and carved columns. That would lead to a low-ceilinged passage that clearly predated everything around it, the stonework rougher and darker, the air tasting different.
And everywhere, books. Scrolls. Parchment. Reports. Records. Histories.
The shelves went from floor to ceiling in every chamber he passed through. In the largest of them, the shelves were interrupted by ladders on rolling tracks, and the ladders themselves had smaller ladders beside them for the highest shelves. Thousands of years of accumulated knowledge lay here, records sent from every corner of the Seven Kingdoms, astronomical observations, medical texts, trade reports, genealogies, weather records, and everything else that maesters had thought worth preserving.
Acolytes moved between the shelves. A few older maesters sat at reading tables, their faces bent close to open volumes in the lamplight.
Harald cast the clairvoyance spell.
The familiar blue light appeared in his vision, tracing a path through the air ahead of him. It led him deeper into the Citadel, not through the main corridors, but angling toward a side passage, then down a staircase he would not have noticed without it.
He followed it down.
The lamps became fewer and more widely spaced. The air grew cooler and stale. He passed through a sealed door using a simple unlocking spell, the mechanism clicking open quietly, and continued downward.
Banners hung against one wall, their colors faded almost to nothing, though the sigils were still barely visible. He looked at them for a moment, and most he did not even recognize. He wondered if these were houses the order had had a hand in destroying. Some of them looked very old, old enough to be from the time of the Andal migrations.
He continued walking, looking at the displays. Swords. A tower shield so old the leather binding had cracked and separated, showing the wood beneath. A helm with a broken visor that had been repaired badly with a different metal.
Archaeological findings, he realized. The order had been collecting for millennia.
A large horn rested on a stand of its own, carved from something dark and covered in runes of the earth. Harald could feel that it held a great deal of magic, perhaps more than any other item there.
He continued on as the clairvoyance path led him to a final door.
The chamber beyond was circular, with a vaulted ceiling. In the center sat a heavy table, and on the table, among several other objects, sat many artifacts. Harald felt the Daedric energy before he even fully registered what he was looking at.
One of the artifacts was a disc of dark metal, etched with Daedric symbols that seemed to shift slightly. He approached it and, after a brief examination, activated it with a touch of his own magic.
The surface of the disc clouded, then cleared, showing him a view from above, a ship on open water. He saw himself standing at the prow. It was not him, of course, but Aeron Hoare. The necklace Harald had given him was visible.
Good. The decoy had worked perfectly.
He turned his attention to the rest of the chamber. The other artifacts were varied in nature and threat. He quickly began to nullify them using the spell he had learned from the Vigilants of Stendarr, the one designed to disrupt and deactivate Daedric objects without destroying them entirely.
As he destroyed them all, his eyes caught on some parchments. They stood out, newer than the rest, and looked as if they were being used to take notes.
Harald took them and read. He saw drawings of pieces of what looked like a mechanical dragon. The writing proved one thing: this was the weapon Mora had threatened him with, and it looked Dwemer in design.
A Dwemer construct made in the image of a dragon, and it looked like it was being transported to Highgarden.
Fuck.
This was not good.
He turned back to one of the larger drawings, the full-body view. The chest cavity illustration showed the space inside it, and inside that, at the center, was a gem.
A damned soul gem, one that rivaled the Mantella Tiber Septim had used to revive the Numidium.
This was bad.
"Fucking idiots," Harald snarled, his fury increasing by the second at the order of fools.
He heard footsteps.
Harald moved quickly and quietly to the far side of the chamber and cast invisibility again.
Four maesters entered.
He recognized all four of them from the descriptions Flowers had given him. Quenton. Moryn. Yarrick. Tyrek. Eddard and Theomore were missing.
They were arguing before the door was fully shut.
"...taken Bronzegate," Moryn said, his voice filled with fury. "The damned whore has actually taken Bronzegate. The Wensingtons, of all people. I would never have thought the fucking Wensingtons capable of..."
"What matters is that she is now marching south with five thousand Legion men at her back," Quenton said.
"All five are converging on Storm's End," Yarrick added. "Ormund, Baldric, Lyonel, Swann, and now Argella. My assessment is that they will exhaust each other first, the three pretenders, and then Argella and the Legion will pick apart whoever survives."
"Your assessment," Tyrek said flatly, "assumes the three will fight each other rather than unite against her."
"They have no reason to unite."
"Tyrek has a point," Moryn said grudgingly.
"Even so," Yarrick said, "the numbers favor Argella. And with the Anathema's magic..."
"The Anathema is in the Stepstones," Quenton interrupted. "He is not with her."
"He taught her his damned magic," Moryn said. "The Anathema awakened something in her bed. You read the reports. She called lightning down."
A silence followed.
How naive, Harald thought.
No. Not naive. Too comfortable.
This group of men had influenced the Seven Kingdoms from the shadows for thousands of years. They had whispered in the ears of kings, guided the hands of lords, and smothered magic wherever they found it. Thousands of years of winning had made them certain they would continue to win.
That certainty had made them slow.
It had made them arrogant.
It had made them underestimate anything they could not fit into their established understanding of how the world worked.
Yarrick set down his parchment on the table.
"Theomore will want to know about Bronzegate immediately," Yarrick said.
"We should have hired the Faceless Men earlier," Moryn snapped, his fingers drumming anxiously against the table. "All of this could have been avoided if the Anathema had simply died when he was supposed to."
"The Faceless Men have not reported success," Tyrek said coldly. "We paid for a dead king. I am sure we will get one soon."
It was time.
Harald dropped the invisibility spell and walked out of the shadows.
Moryn saw him first.
For a brief instant, the old man's mind seemed unable to understand what his eyes were seeing. His mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
A second later, he found it. He screamed and fell backward over his chair, crashing to the floor. Tyrek froze completely in his seat, his face draining of all color, his mouth open. Yarrick began to shake, his hands trembling so badly the parchment he was holding rattled audibly.
Quenton reacted last and worst.
He screamed like a terrified child and bolted for the side passage.
Harald raised his hand and fired a lightning spell.
The spell struck Quenton in the back before he had taken five steps. His body seized violently, limbs locking, jaw snapping shut hard enough that Harald heard teeth crack. He spasmed in place for a moment, then stopped.
He was dead.
The smell of burned flesh filled the chamber.
Moryn's scream became louder.
Tyrek made a faint choking sound.
Yarrick stared at Quenton's body, then slowly turned back to Harald.
"How?" he whispered.
Moryn tried to crawl away, still screaming, one hand clawing at the floor, the other raised as if that could somehow ward Harald off.
Harald walked over to him unhurriedly in three steps.
He bent down, grabbed Moryn by the front of his robes, and punched him once in the face. The crack of breaking bone was wet and sharp. Moryn's screaming became gurgling and wet, his hands going to his ruined face.
Harald looked at the three of them.
"What?" Harald asked quietly. "Didn't see this coming?"
"Please," Tyrek said, his voice barely holding together, hands coming up. "Please," he repeated. "Your Grace, please. We can explain. We can be useful to you."
Harald shook his head.
"Where are Theomore and Eddard?"
Tyrek's mouth opened and closed, but no words came.
Yarrick stared at the floor.
Moryn whimpered beneath him.
Harald waited, and no answer came.
He sighed as he placed his boot on Moryn's broken head.
Tyrek's eyes widened in horror.
"No," he whispered.
Harald pressed down.
Moryn made one final, wet, terrified sound.
Then his skull gave way beneath Harald's boot.
Tyrek screamed.
Yarrick recoiled so hard that his chair toppled backward, sending him sprawling across the floor.
Harald looked at them again.
"Where are Theomore and Eddard?"
Yarrick broke.
"The rookery!" he screamed. "Theomore is in the rookery! Eddard is in Highgarden! Highgarden! Please, please, I told you!"
"Thank you," Harald said.
Tyrek began sobbing.
Yarrick clasped his hands together, crawling closer on his knees.
"Mercy," Yarrick begged. "Please. I gave you what you wanted. I told you. Please, Your Grace. Mercy."
But Harald had no mercy left for them. They had done terrible things, killing women and children, all in the name of snuffing out magic. Harald's hands frosted over as the ice spell built between his palms, cold spreading outward from him in a visible wave. The temperature in the sealed chamber dropped sharply, breath becoming visible, the lamp flames guttering and shrinking.
"No," Yarrick whispered. "No, please."
He released it.
The frost hit everything at once. The room went white. Ice crept up the walls and across the floor in seconds, coating the table, the cabinets, the artifacts, and the parchments. The two maesters' screaming cut off mid-breath as the cold took them completely. Yarrick and Tyrek stood frozen where they had knelt and cowered, their bodies locked in final poses of fear.
Harald turned away.
Behind him, the frozen bodies cracked.
Then shattered. The sound followed him as he walked out of the secret chamber and into the dark passage beyond.
There was still one more.
========
Harald walked out and headed for the rookery.
Up and up he went.
The air changed as he climbed. The damp cold of the lower levels gave way to the dry smell of feathers, straw, old parchment, and bird droppings. The distant cries of ravens grew louder. Hundreds of them. Perhaps more. The Citadel's rookery was enormous, a vast tower chamber filled with cages, perches, and open arches where ravens came and went. It was one of the most important places in Westeros, though few lords truly understood that.
There were not many people inside, and because he was invisible, Harald was able to walk through undetected. It did not take him long to find Theomore.
Near the center of the room stood Archmaester Theomore, an old man with a heavy chain of many metals around his neck, holding out his arm for a raven to step onto. The bird obliged. Theomore murmured something to it, reaching for a small scroll to attach to its leg.
Then he looked up.
The scroll fell from his fingers.
For a long moment, Theomore simply stared, his mouth open, the raven still sitting calmly on his outstretched arm, completely unbothered.
Harald walked toward him.
"It was a mistake," Harald said, "making deals with Mora."
Theomore did not move.
Harald stopped a few paces away from him.
"I would have left you alone a little longer," Harald continued. "But you submitted yourself to a Daedric Prince, and now you have brought something into this world that you cannot control and do not understand. Something that could destroy this entire world."
Theomore's shock began to crack.
Hatred filled the gaps.
"Anathema," he hissed.
Harald said nothing.
"Abomination," Theomore spat, finding strength in his fury. "You think killing us makes you victorious? You think this ends with us? Fool. We are eternal. The order will survive us. You cannot kill the idea."
"Eternal? No. Nothing you built was eternal. You mistook age for immortality."
"The Citadel will survive," Harald said. "The knowledge here, most of it, will survive. I have no quarrel with scholars."
He looked at the old man steadily.
"But your order is already dead. It died the moment you decided I was a problem that needed solving."
Theomore's lips curled.
"Do your worst."
Harald smiled. He took a breath and spoke two words of the Bend Will shout.
"GOL QETH."
Every raven in the rookery turned at once. Hundreds of them, every bird on every perch and in every cage, heads swiveling in perfect unison toward Harald.
Harald took one last look at Theomore, who stood there trembling now.
Then he turned and walked toward the door.
Behind him, he heard Theomore's sharp intake of breath as the silence broke. The sound that followed started as a rush of wings, hundreds of wings, like a wave breaking. The birds struck him from every direction, claws tearing at robes, beaks pecking, wings beating against his face and hands. He stumbled backward, swinging wildly, trying to shield himself. A raven tore at his cheek. Another latched onto his ear. Several more clawed at his hands as he raised them to protect his eyes.
"Help me!" Theomore shrieked. "Help me!"
Harald kept walking.
The screaming continued behind him.
The screaming went on for a while.
Then it stopped.
Harald walked out into the cool night air of Oldtown and did not look back at the Citadel.
.
.
Next chapter "It Awakens"
You can read up to chapter 87 here.
p.a.t.r.eon.com/Illusiveone (check the chapter summary i have it there as well)