Chapter 4: A Child's Cunning (73 AC, Age 5)
By the age of five, Maric had cultivated his secret life into a finely balanced, dual existence. To his family and the grimy inhabitants of their small corner of Flea Bottom, he was a quiet, unusually self-possessed child. A strange boy, perhaps, with his dark, watchful eyes and a tendency to sit still for hours, but a child nonetheless. In the silent, fortified spaces of his own mind, however, he was The Architect, and he was laying the foundations of his new empire with the meticulous patience of a master mason.
His private project—the harvesting of essence—had continued, but with a newfound paranoia. The close call with Kael had been a lesson learned in blood and adrenaline. His hunts became rarer, more strategic, and focused on targets of opportunity that presented virtually zero risk. A dog struck by a merchant's cart, left to die in an alley. A nest of shrews uncovered during a rainstorm. Each kill was a small, calculated investment, adding another drop of vitality to his reserves, subtly reinforcing his body against the ravages of their life. The stolen life force kept him healthy, his mind sharp, but it was a stopgap, a personal advantage that did nothing to shore up the crumbling walls of his primary asset: his family.
The turning point came in the lean, hungry weeks that followed the thaw of winter. The small stockpiles they'd accrued were gone. Borin's work at the docks was sporadic, his deepening cough making him less desirable than stronger, healthier men. They were subsisting on thin, watery cabbage soup and the scraps Kael could filch, a diet that left a constant, hollow ache in their bellies. His sister, Elara, was a pale, listless waif, and even Lara's resilience was being eroded into a brittle, desperate anxiety.
Maric observed this with the cold detachment of a general assessing his supply lines. His own vitality was a tactical advantage, but it was useless if his base of operations collapsed. A starving family was a vulnerable family. They would draw the wrong kind of attention—the predatory pity of slavers from across the Narrow Sea, or the contemptuous notice of men like Galt, who might decide a family too weak to pay was a family that could be broken for sport. He needed to stabilize his foundation. It was time to shift from personal enrichment to organizational development. It was time to make his family profitable.
The challenge was immense. How could a five-year-old, whose vocabulary was still limited to simple words and short, declarative sentences, steer the economic fortunes of his household? He couldn't lecture them on resource management or diversification of income. He had to manipulate them, to plant ideas so subtly that they believed the thoughts were their own. He had to become a ventriloquist, making his will speak through their mouths.
His first opportunity came, as most things did in their life, from the river. Borin would often come home with a few small fish given to him as a pittance in lieu of coin. They would eat the meager flesh, and Lara would toss the heads, bones, and guts into the alley for the rats. It was waste. In Marco Bellini's world, waste was a cardinal sin.
He had a sliver of memory from his past life—a tour through the Tuscan countryside. He remembered the pungent smell of a pig farm, and the farmer explaining that nothing was wasted. He also had the intelligence he'd gathered in this life: the location of a small, stinking piggery on the edge of the city, near the Dung Gate. The men who worked there often came into Flea Bottom to drink, and they smelled of mud and swine and cheap ale. He had the two data points. He now needed to connect them.
He chose his moment carefully. Lara was descaling a pair of small silver-fin, her hands moving with a practiced, weary rhythm. Maric sat near her, ostensibly playing with a smooth grey stone.
"Ma," he said, his voice small and childishly inquisitive. "Fish have eyes."
Lara grunted, not looking up. "Aye, that they do."
"We don't eat the eyes," he continued. "Or the head." He poked the small pile of offal with his toe. "Throw away."
"It's waste, little one. Nothin' for us there."
He paused, letting the silence stretch. This was the critical step. He had to make the leap for her, but it had to sound like a child's random, nonsensical observation. He looked up, his face a mask of innocence. "The pig man smells like fish."
Lara stopped her work. She looked at him, her brow furrowed. "What pig man?"
"Man by the gate," Maric said, gesturing vaguely. "Smells bad. Like old fish."
She stared at him, her mind slowly working through the strange, childish logic. The pig man… smells like fish… they throw away fish guts. It was a flimsy, tenuous connection, one an adult mind would likely dismiss. But Lara was desperate. Desperation made the mind fertile ground for even the wildest of seeds.
"The pigs," she whispered, more to herself than to him. "Maybe they feed the pigs… anything."
Maric said nothing more. He had planted the seed. Now he had to trust her desperation to make it grow. He went back to his stone, a perfect picture of a child who had already forgotten his own strange words.
The next day, Lara told Borin she was going to the market. Instead, she took the bucket of fish guts from the night before, covered it with a rag, and made the long walk to the Dung Gate. She returned hours later, her face flushed with a look of stunned triumph Maric hadn't seen in years. In her hands, she clutched a small, lumpy sack. Turnips. Six of them. And a string of onions.
"You were right, Maric," she said, her voice filled with awe as she knelt before him. "My clever, clever boy. The pig farmer, he laughed. But he took them. He said it saves him a trip to the docks." She hugged him fiercely, her tears of relief dampening his hair.
Borin stared at the sack of vegetables as if it were a bag of gold. That night, they had a thick, savory stew, the first truly filling meal they'd had in months. Borin didn't speak, but he gave Maric a long, searching look, a flicker of something that wasn't resignation in his eyes.
The first scheme was a success. He had turned waste into sustenance. He had improved his family's morale. Most importantly, he had established a precedent: Maric's strange, childish observations sometimes led to good fortune. He was no longer just a mouth to feed; he was becoming their lucky charm.
His next target was Kael. His brother was the family's primary earner, in a chaotic, inefficient way. His scavenging and petty theft brought in a trickle of food and the occasional copper, but it was random, high-risk, and low-reward. Maric saw not a street urchin, but an untrained field agent, an asset operating at a fraction of his potential. He needed to refine him, to give his efforts direction and purpose.
He couldn't command Kael. His brother's pride and street-honed suspicion would never allow it. He had to manipulate him by feeding that very pride. He had to make Kael believe the strategies were his own.
Maric began to accompany Kael on his forays, always under the guise of a worshipful younger brother tagging along. "Kael, you run so fast," he would say. "You know all the secret places."
During these trips, Maric's mind was a whirlwind of analysis, his eyes scanning everything, assessing value. He saw discarded rope, frayed but usable. He saw broken crates that could be used for firewood. He saw a cooper throwing away barrel staves that were only slightly warped. These things were currency, if you knew who to trade with.
One day, he saw a group of City Watchmen hassling a merchant, their steel-tipped spears gleaming. Kael instinctively pulled him into a side alley. Maric looked at the spears, then at Kael's prized possession: a small, rust-pitted knife he had found.
Later that day, back in the hovel, Maric said, "Kael, your knife is sharp."
Kael puffed out his chest. "Sharpest in the Gut."
"The Watchmen have sharper knives," Maric noted, as if making a simple comparison. "And spears. Lots of metal." He paused. "The blacksmith likes metal."
He let the observation hang in the air. The next day, he saw Kael wasn't just looking for food. He was stuffing scraps of metal—bent nails, a broken buckle, a piece of a barrel hoop—into his pockets. Two days later, Kael returned from the smithy on the Street of Steel, not with a new knife, but with a small file and a handful of newly-made, sharp-headed nails. The file could sharpen his knife better than any stone. The nails, Lara discovered, were perfect for patching the leaky roof and could be traded to other hovel-dwellers for a bit of bread or a sliver of cheese.
Maric had transformed his brother's random scavenging into a targeted resource-gathering operation. He repeated the pattern, subtly directing Kael's attention to different materials and their potential markets. Old rags for the paper-maker. Discarded leather for the cobbler. He turned Kael into a one-boy supply chain, feeding him intelligence couched as the innocent observations of a child. Kael, flush with his newfound success and reputation as a canny provider, never suspected he was a puppet. He was Maric's first 'made man', and he didn't even know the organization existed.
While orchestrating this domestic revival, Maric pursued his shadow project with relentless focus. His increased freedom to wander with Kael gave him unprecedented access to the inner workings of Flea Bottom's underworld. He was no longer just observing; he was actively mapping the enemy.
The Razor-Hawks were the dominant power, their territory covering the most profitable sections near the River Gate and the fish market. Their enforcers were identifiable by the crude tattoo of a hawk's head on their hands or necks. Galt was one of their senior men, a 'sergeant' who ran a crew of five thugs. He answered to a man they called 'One-Eye' Joric, a vicious brute who was, in turn, the right hand of the gang's leader, a man known only as the Ragman.
Maric learned this by becoming invisible. He would sit in the corner of a crowded market, seemingly engrossed in drawing patterns in the dirt, while his ears soaked up the hushed gossip of merchants complaining about their protection payments. He would trail Kael to the docks and watch from behind barrels as Razor-Hawks shook down sailors for a cut of their wages. He learned their faces, their names, their routines.
He also identified their rivals. There were the Dreg Rats, a smaller, more desperate gang of thieves and pickpockets who controlled the sewer exits and the trash middens. There were the Iron Crows, a handful of disgraced sellswords who ran a small-time smuggling ring out of a collapsed septry. The ecosystem was more complex than he'd first thought. It was a web of interlocking territories, simmering feuds, and fragile alliances. It was a perfect microcosm of the Great Game of Westeros, played out with broken bottles and rusty knives instead of armies and dragons.
His focus, however, remained laser-sharp. Galt.
He learned where Galt drank: a filthy tavern called The Leaky Barrel. He learned the man had a weakness for a particular type of cheap, sweet Dornish red wine. He learned he was sloppy when he was drunk, boasting loudly about his exploits. He learned Galt had a room above the tavern where he would take whores, and that he was often the last of his crew to leave for the night. Each piece of information was a stone, and Maric was slowly, patiently building a foundation for the man's demise.
One afternoon, his intelligence gathering led him to another close call. He had followed one of Galt's thugs, a lanky pockmarked man named Stiv, to a quiet alley where a deal was being made—a small pouch of what Maric guessed was milk of the poppy being exchanged for a handful of silver stags. Hidden behind a pile of rotting crates, Maric watched intently, logging the faces and the transaction details.
He was so focused that he didn't hear the footsteps behind him until it was too late.
A heavy hand clamped down on his shoulder, yanking him out from his hiding place. He found himself dangling from the grip of another Razor-Hawk, a hulking brute with a squashed nose and dead, piggish eyes.
"Well, well. What have we here?" the man grunted, his breath a foul wave of garlic and sour ale. "A little rat, listenin' where he shouldn't."
Stiv, the first thug, spun around, his face a mask of fury and alarm. "What the hell? Where'd he come from?"
Fear, cold and absolute, tried to seize Maric. This was not a test. This was a fatal error. He had gotten too close, been too bold. But the mind of Marco Bellini did not panic. It assessed. It calculated. He had only one weapon available: his performance.
He let his body go limp, a rag doll in the man's grip. His face, which had been a mask of concentration, instantly dissolved into terror. His eyes went wide, his lower lip trembled, and a high-pitched, terrified wail erupted from his lungs. It was the most convincing scream of his young life, fueled by a very real surge of adrenaline.
"Please!" he shrieked, the word garbled by sobs. "Lost my ma! Wanna go home!"
The brute holding him seemed taken aback by the sheer volume of the scream. He gave Maric a rough shake. "Shut yer trap, you little gutter-snipe!"
Stiv looked around nervously. "Get rid of him, Harl! Someone'll hear!"
"How?" Harl grunted. "Toss him in the river?"
This was it. The moment his life could end, thrown away in a filthy alley. Maric redoubled his efforts. He started crying hysterically, tears—real tears, born of pure, survivalist instinct—streaming down his face. He thrashed and kicked with the uncoordinated, ineffective movements of a truly terrified five-year-old.
"He's just a kid, Harl," Stiv hissed. "A stupid kid. Let him go. He ain't seen nothin'."
Harl stared at the sobbing, writhing child in his grasp. What he saw was not a threat. He saw a nuisance. He saw a wailing brat that was drawing attention to their illicit activities. With a final curse, he shoved Maric away.
"Get out of here, you little shit!" he snarled. "And if I ever see you again, I'll cut out your tongue and feed it to the dogs!"
Maric didn't need to be told twice. He scrambled to his feet, stumbled, and ran, never once looking back, his sobs echoing down the alley. He didn't stop running until he was back in the relative safety of his own street, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He collapsed behind his hovel, gasping for air, the performance fading to reveal the cold, stark terror beneath. He had survived. He had logged two new names—Stiv and Harl—and a vital piece of intelligence: the Razor-Hawks were paranoid, but they were also dismissive of children. His cover, while dangerous, was effective.
That evening, the family ate well. Kael had traded a bundle of scavenged iron scraps for a piece of salt pork, and Lara had made a thick, savory stew with the last of the turnips. The mood in the hovel was lighter than it had been in years. Borin even managed a weak smile. Lara pulled Maric onto her lap, stroking his hair.
"Because of you, my little lucky charm," she murmured. "We're going to be all right."
Maric leaned against her, accepting the warmth, his breathing finally steady. He looked around at his family, his organization. The assets were secure. The base was stable. His intelligence network, in the form of his unwitting brother, was becoming more effective by the day. And his knowledge of the enemy was growing deeper.
He had earned their trust. He was helping them survive. But it was all a means to an end. As he listened to the sounds of his family eating, his thoughts were in a dark alley across the slums, with a man named Galt. The plan was not yet complete, but the pieces were moving into place. The Architect was nearing the final stages of his design. Soon, it would be time for demolition.