Chapter 13
Part I

"You have fought," the Braavosi envoy said, "successfully. You have swept hosts of the defeated and the diminished from the field. But you must surely understand that you can go no further. The wooden walls of Braavos are impenetrable. Your ravaging of the outlying villages is a nuisance, not a threat to us. Yet you are fortunate men. For, from the kindness of his heart towards the subjects you have butchered, His Excellency the Sealord is prepared to offer you fair terms, if you will hear them."

"I am so glad that we can resolve this like civilised men, Magister Domaryen," said Handtaker, wearing a wide, sharklike smile. The sellsword commanders and captains gathered around him exchanged glances with each other and muttered.

"Indeed," said Qarro Domaryen of Braavos, relaxing. The disapproval of the others was concerning, but Anno and Calido had told him that the other free companies here were smaller and of less repute. They would not dare to act alone. The Company of the Cat was the one that really mattered, and the Company of the Cat was ruled by Handtaker with an iron fist. "It should, of course, be understood that His Excellency would have you leave his lands and cease to rape, kill and plunder on the soil of Braavos."

"Oh, of course," said Handtaker politely. "We would not wish any unnecessary unpleasantness."

"In return, His Excellency offers you these terms—"

"I'm sorry. When did you get the idea that you would be deciding terms?"

Qarro blinked. "Lord Handtaker—"

"These are my terms," Handtaker said. "I demand that Braavos will give us all of the sum of gold that we were promised, and then ten times that, in compensation for the Sealord's treachery. We had to make war upon your city to take what we should have been freely given. Actions have consequences, magister, treason most especially."

"Ten times?" Qarro erupted, horrified.

"Eleven, actually," said Handtaker, "and I am not done."

One could have heard a pin drop. Distantly the cries of seagulls touched Qarro's ears. Speaking in the silence, Handtaker's voice, quieter than before, seemed to fill the world in its soft solemnity.

"I want Anno Nusaris," Handtaker said, menace pouring off his tongue and murder written on his face. "I want his brothers. I want his sisters. I want his father and his mother. I want his children and his wife. I want his uncles, his aunts and his cousins. I want his father's and mother's cousins, his grandfathers' and grandmothers' cousins. I want the descendants of them all. And I want every man, woman and child bearing the Nusaris name in the whole Free City. I demand all of them delivered alive into my custody, so that no Sealord of Braavos will ever again think to deny sellswords our wages after we have fought and bled for him."

The sellsword captains roared their approval, shattering that silence pikes on the ground. "Handtaker! Handtaker! Handtaker!"

Qarro was quivering. When the throng of voices had faded enough, he cried, "His Excellency will never consent to such harsh terms!"

"I do not expect him to. I expect the magisters of Braavos to consent to my terms, if they know what is good for them. If they refuse, I'll murder every single one when this city has fallen."

"You madman, you surely know they never will. They know as well as you do: Braavos cannot be taken by storm."

The smile that answered him was as clear and bright as the golden-lit noon sky. "How sure are you of that?"

That night was a misty one in much of the lagoon of Braavos. The mist was not too thick, for the most part; one could see through it, albeit hazily, like gazing through a dirty glass. For the most part. Some small places where the mist had gathered were too clouded for the orange glare of the watchfires to pierce.

It could not hide an army. It could hide a man.

Stannis Baratheon stood silent at a sail, black against the midnight sky. His arms were folded, for he did not row the rough-hewn wooden raft beneath his feet; a cold wind, shifting with his will, bore him onward. Sometimes he came within a few hundred feet of a great warship, painted purple with Braavosi dye. Yet he was surrounded by a cloud of thick white mist, which itself was concealed by a much larger cloud of thinner mist. They were blind to him. His man's eyes were just as blind, but that was not much hindrance to a greenseer. One of his golden eagle companions flew above him, a magnificent adult female, espying warships and fishing boats to be avoided with his superb sharp eyes.

The crude raft glided through the lagoon with eerie, unnatural serenity. The waters scarcely rippled as it went. It approached Braavos of the Hundred Isles from the east, sailing disdainfully straight past a watchtower, until it came up to a bridge over the Green Canal, on one of the largest, most built up islands near the centre of the city. It was an outlying bridge, far from the greatest even of those over this canal. That suited Stannis well enough. The wind that was himself turned in seconds from a galelike gust that pushed the sail to its limits—despite being unnoticeable to the rest of the lagoon—to perfect stillness. The sail drooped. There was not the slightest flutter.

In that stillness, Stannis stepped off the raft onto Braavosi soil with easy grace. He felt the wet earth beneath his feet and triumph welled up within him; his customary scowl grew slightly less woeful on unfamiliar features. He had had his doubts. He now knew that he should not have done. These fools, ignorant and devoid of true power, were not and never had been strong enough to thwart him.

Quickly he dismantled the sail from the raft. He folded the sail, then heaved them both up to the underside of the great bridge, careless of his boots in the water. He wedged the raft and its bundle of sailcloth beneath the bridge, such that it could only be seen by someone below it looking upward. No longer needing the mist and the wind, he withdrew his will from the power that sustained them, and they fell out of his conscious thought. They still existed, but without the driving force of a warlock's will behind them they became no more than natural.

Irritatingly, he felt a twinge of disturbance as he became no longer so intent on driving the mist and the wind. A small scared voice—or a bundle of concepts, rather, for even to call it a voice was an exaggeration—chanted unceasing in the back of his thoughts, a gibbering nonsense that he could not entirely dismiss.

I am not, it pleaded, over and over again, I am not, I am not, I am not, I am not…

It did not even know what it was not. It did not know that that meant Stannis Baratheon. It only had the vague, desperate conception that there was something it was not meant to be.

Stannis ignored it. He had no time to waste dealing with the last scattered bloody chunks of a hideously wounded mind that he had put out of its misery.

Wearing the face that the facechanger must have stolen some number of years ago, Stannis strode out into the empty night. The darkness was near total. There were no watchtowers here, well past the outer boundary of the Queen of Cities. In those sombre silent streets, a stranger stalked freely; none came to stop him. The arrogance of it! Truly the Braavosi behave like a folk who have never feared to be conquered.

They were fools indeed, if they did not fear what walked in the night.

Stannis stayed away from the barge-lights on the canals, few as they were, and the lamps that hung from the large straight roads. Instead he walked through twisting alleys that meandered on their way. His own stride was anything but meandering; albeit on shorter legs than he remembered, he came with swift certain purpose. His eagles looked down on him from above, but he did not need them now to know these streets like the back of his hand. Amidst the lazy languor of the Queen of Cities, the killer passed like a fleeting shadow cast by the flicker of a candleflame.

Then, in passing, he saw an iron-barred fence with prettily forged dolphin decorations, and grey stone walls with red wood balconies. The sight of it stabbed his face with shards of broken memory. He knew this place, and at first he did not know why he knew it, but then he knew that he had lived here once, half a dozen years and half a lifetime ago.

He stopped.

Hesitant, almost afraid, Stannis turned from his path and went up to the gate.

The house was doubtless home to some other man or family now. His servants were gone, long dismissed. They had served well enough; he they had found other employment by now. This place is not mine any more. It does not matter to me any more.

For some reason, he found himself laying a hand gently on a fencepost.

The low wrought iron fence would not have stopped a thief who was good at climbing, let alone a true threat, and yet somehow it was strangely charming in its powerlessness. It had been a long time since he had slept as he had slept there, feeling safe at night.

He knew not whether that was an aspect of the house or an aspect of the man who he had been.

Stannis wondered what his younger self who had settled here would have thought to see him now. In ways they were similar. That young man had already forsaken the foolish oath that he had taken as a boy, swearing not to use his magic just because of failures that were the crow's, not his. He had understood that he had to take a path alone, defying the Faith's prohibition of witchcraft and yet also defying the three-eyed crow, with its absurd pronouncements and its strict limits on the practice of his power. But he had not gone as far along that path as the older Stannis had.

The Stannis who had first set foot in his house had been a pitiable, self-pitying exile who spent most of most days in the form of eagles gazing mournfully down at lands he knew he would never be able to return to. That weak gaunt figure had been so busy brooding over what he had lost due to the caprice of his useless, ungrateful brother Robert that he had not even fed himself. He had been a shame to House Baratheon; Stannis saw that clearly now. And yet, in some sense, Stannis the half-starved exile had been more a Baratheon of Storm's End than Stannis himself was. The exile had not yet delved into lost scrolls, ruins and ancient temples to enhance his power with their sorcerous secrets. He had not waded in the blood of hundreds of enemy prisoners, sacrificed in cold blood to wash away a horde of foes. He had not razed villages to the ground and overseen rapes and murders. He had not encountered all the unacceptable unbreakable orders and petty cruelties that came with service to Handtaker.

Gods, he had been so young.

The older Stannis knew better. The world was cruel, and only the cruel could survive it. Mayhaps he would have liked not to do what he had had to do, not to become what he had had to become… but he had had no choice in the matter. No choice at all. None! Only men blessed with good fortune, like his even younger self before Robert had banished him, had the luxury of avoiding hard choices. Unfortunate men had to take different paths. Stannis had had to sign up with one or another of the free companies, so that he could be paid, to eat, and for all Handtaker's viciousness he did not believe that other sellsword commanders were much kinder. He had needed the coin.

There was nothing else he could have done, he knew. And even in spite of all this, a part of him wondered whether his younger self would have been ashamed of him.

Angrily Stannis withdrew his hand as if it had been stung and turned his back on the old house that a bitter young fool had once dwelt in. It is nothing to me. There was work yet to be done; he should not have tarried to return here. What was dead was dead. What was past was past. It should be left dead and unremembered.

Stannis walked on past the west end of the Green Canal. He ignored the Palace of Truth to his left, where the Braavosi would gather on the days of their silly choosings. He instead proceeded to the more northerly side of the city, a long brisk walk, and asked for passage on a ship to the Isle of the Gods.

There were hundreds of people coming to pray even at this ungodly hour, especially with an enemy army camping on the shore of the lagoon. Refugees from the surrounding towns and villages had filled the great Free City, and the folk of the city itself often had friends and loved ones outside. Indeed, the Isle of the Gods was one of the least suspicious places for a man awake at this midnight hour to be.

Therefore Stannis had no trouble obtaining passage on a boat to the Isle of the Gods. He came with a dozen other folk, women mostly, and, he suspected, likely widows. Some approached him with meaningless chatter. He did not reply, and they soon learnt to leave the little silent man alone. Stannis would never have drawn so little notice in his birth-self, he knew; the body of long-dead Perio Kavayn that the facechangers had stolen drew far fewer eyes than the broad, towering body of a Baratheon.

He stepped off the boat at the greatest dock, for the Temple of the Moonsingers. It was a great domed thing of white marble and silvery metal, dwarfing the Great Sept of Baelor as a giant to a grumpkin. Most of the passengers left there, so Stannis made himself no exception. Then, when the others entered by the immense statues of moon-maidens, he slipped away.

This small-limbed body was well-suited to sneaking. Doubtless the facechangers had chosen it for that purpose. Beneath notice, like a ghost in the night, Stannis flitted from temple to temple, seeing all but paying homage towards none. He passed a stout red sandstone fortress with a dozen fires burning, which he knew to be the Braavosi temple of R'hllor the Lord of Light. He had no interest in it. Cheap tricksters, pretenders grasping at the outer threads of the mantle of power and imagining it means they are blessed by the one true god. He passed the Sept-Beyond-the-Sea, too, and permitted himself to spit in its direction. Curse you, Seven Who Are Not. You should not have let me do what I did. You should have been real. He passed even the Warren, home to altars and statues for the gods whose congregations were too poor to afford a temple of proper magnificence, and he did not turn in.

He turned in when he saw a very familiar pair of doors, on a much smaller temple. One was wrought of weirwood, one ebony—one white, one black.

The facechanger's memories were open to him, not merely like a book to be read but as if they were what he himself remembered. He walked up to the doors. He sensed the magic that dwelt in them, which he had never done in all his memories of entering and leaving through this door a thousand times before.

A pass-phrase enchantment, he thought. How quaint. It occurred to him to destroy it and walk in on his own terms. Certainly he was capable of that. But there was no need, and this way would make it easier to play along.

Stannis spoke in High Valyrian. "Valar morghulis."

The doors swung open.

Inside the House of Black and White it was very dark, with only faint candles to show the way. Stannis's eyes fitted easily to the low light and his ears and nose helped where his eyes could not. To this host body, those skills were so well known that they had become almost instinct.

A small girl in a black-and-white robe appeared, soon, to offer him refreshment. He brushed her away. She was no true girl, he knew; she was a woman grown, an initiate here. He had seen her many times before.

Shortly later, a man in a matching robe approached from a passage that opened in the wall behind him. Stannis turned to see him come. His memories told him it amused the facechangers to play the game of sneaking up on each other. It did not amuse Stannis. His thoughts were ever reaching out beyond his mortal shell; with their minds blazing like beacons, it was no game to him.

Yet he saw the face beneath the man's cowl, elderly, friendly and with a pleasant smile. He knew that face. His memories told him instantly, and something within him felt the tiniest, most insubstantial flicker of hope.

help me help me help me help me help me

"Brother," he said, bowing respectfully to the eldest facechanger of the House of Black and White, skilful and dangerous. The facechangers had no lord or commander, yet this one was held in great respect.

"You have arrived early, brother," the old facechanger observed.

"I have," said the one who was not no-one, simply.

"Were you successful?"

"I was."

"That is quicker than I expected," said the smiling old man. "You have done well, brother. I must confess I thought a man like Aro Isattis would be more trouble to bring the gift to."

"Nothing more than a man. All men must die." He put a dagger through the old man's neck.

Horror. Misery. Guilt that could have crushed a mountain. no no no no no no no no no

Stannis whispered in the ear of the dying man, "Including you."

He yanked the knife free.

The eldest of the facechangers fell boneless to the floor as Stannis stared down at the woman in the shape of a little girl. She was frozen in shock and horror, feet rooted to the ground. A quick perusal of her thoughts—open to him, easy prey—led him to understand that a servant of their 'many-faced god' had never turned against them before.

When she saw him take two steps towards her, though, she turned to run. She must have known she was outmatched; he, or rather his host, was a full facechanger and she was only an initiate. Instants later she lay dead on the floor… but an instant before that, she started to scream.

Cursing, Stannis ran on, extending his thoughts to perceive the bizarre self-mutilated minds of those who called themselves the Faceless Men. With ease born of long memory, he loped through the House of Black and White, knowing exactly where to find his prey.

It was scarce past midnight. The facechangers were barely getting up, bleary-eyed, in a place that they had believed to be their one sole place of safety. The first he found after the two victims in the entrance hall was almost in his sleep. He ran into the bedchamber of the second, dagger glistening with blood, legs pounding.

"Brother?" the second facechanger said with confusion, recognising Perio Kavayn's stolen face on the man bounding towards him. "What—"

Dagger. Throat.

The little voice was sobbing. not real not real not real not real not real want to wake up want to wake up want to wake up

Be silent!

It did nothing, of course. The few small remaining shards of the possessed facechanger's consciousness were too gone to understand the thought-command even if they could perceive it. Only a few reflexes, word-associations and instincts were left, devoid of complex thought.

His possessed facechanger near-leapt out of the chamber to rush at the next victim. To Stannis all of this felt new, but to his host body it was natural, honed by practising for years and years. The killings were swift and without mercy, bounding from one bedchamber to the next. The journeys were quick. He knew exactly where to go, and the House of Black and White was no large temple.

The fourth victim was the first to be armed and dressed, but still not out of his bedchamber. Stannis rushed in. "Brother, there's an army, you have to help, I've killed some of them, come with me—"

"I'm with you, brother—"

Dagger. Throat.

The small soft weeping voice in his head rose into a soundless scream.

Stannis paid it no attention. Truth be told, this was less distracting than when it was capable enough to form coherent thoughts.

The next few facechangers were out of their rooms. Stannis emerged into a grand room in the centre of the temple, with a big black pool lit by dim candles at its sides, with alcoves for the dying and the dead.

It was no time for stealth. Cold-eyed, dripping blood of which none was his own, he turned to four facechangers in their black-and-white robes. "Stand and fight me if you dare, arrogant fools. You call yourselves servants of Death. Now it is time to die."

"You are not our brother." This from a woman. Hers was an old woman's face, wrinkled, though that meant nothing. "Who are you?"

"I am the storm that is coming for you."

I am not I am not I am not I am not I am not

All four of the facechangers charged at Stannis, rushing to circle around him and closing in, near to him and to each other. He did not fight back. He could not. There were too many. Instead, he threw himself at the mind of the leading facechanger.

If what he had done to the facechanger he now possessed was a slicing knife, this was a warhammer. There was not the slightest trace of subtlety to it; he simply flung his thoughts, self and memories into the mind of the facechanger foremost in the charge against him. She threw back her head and screamed, screamed like he had never heard anyone scream, screamed long and loud and high as glass that was as broken as her self was. Her mind took the brunt of the onslaught and struggled to reconcile the new wave of memories with what she already knew, found a gap where her own past should have been due to the facechangers' wilful wounding of their own sense of self, shoved it in… but there was too much, too much, too much self-that-was-not-herself, clashing with herself, too much coming much too fast…

For a few crucial moments, the leading facechanger had no idea who or what she was, wrestling with the deluge of thoughts he had shoved violently into her head. In that time she tripped, losing her concentration, and tumbled to the floor. In doing so, she hit over one of her fellows, on the side she fell. It left him shaky and trying to recover his balance.

Stannis reached out with his thoughts and lashed again. He had not moved a muscle.

Another facechanger, a tall squinting man, howled his agony to the heavens as he was struck by a mental assault as careful as being trampled by an elephant. The blow tore the integrity of his mind to ribbons, turning it to a morass of contradicting beliefs and thoughts that refused to accept one another as consistent. It had none of the precision of the well-tailored mask that he had forced onto the face of his current facechanger host in order to enable this possession, but it did not need to. All it needed was to make the attacking facechanger briefly lose his concentration, and it was more than enough for that. The squinting man lost all control of hands and feet and he collapsed. The facechangers were very close to each other now, and it was too much for the one who had come close to losing his footing before; the hard impact of his brother's body made him lose his balance and fall to the ground.

Three out of four facechangers had stumbled. Stannis leapt at the last with all the skill that his stolen host-body had, knives in both hands, and after a short fight it was over. He wasted no time in cutting the throats of the remaining facechangers while they were still on the floor.

There were some facechangers who tried to escape, afterwards. Many were initiates, easily cut down. Some were not; he only found two of those. He went after them first.

Stannis tracked down the last of the facechangers in a tunnel that led out of the House of Black and White. It should have been a secret, but there was not a single secret passage in the temple that Stannis did not know. The facechangers trusted each other too much. They had no lord, like sensible folk; they deemed each other equals; and so there was no one of them who was permitted to know secrets that the others did not. So the loss of a single one of their number sufficed to lose them everything.

There was a fight. It was short. The last of the self-proclaimed Faceless Men lay bleeding in a cramped dank tunnel in the dark, his dagger lost and half of his hand with it.

"Why are you doing this?" the facechanger sobbed. "You were one of us! Why, brother, why, what did we ever do to you?"

"Your order tried to thwart my vengeance. You made yourselves my enemies," said Stannis. He paused, considering. "My brother Robert forgave his enemies."

Stannis saw the hope blaze suddenly in the facechanger's eyes. So they do wish not to die. They are not as inhuman as they want to be. "Then forgive us, please—"

"I do not make Robert's mistakes."

The blood went everywhere. He scarcely noticed. It did not make much of a difference now.

Stannis Baratheon strode out of the House of Black and White with dozens of dead bodies behind him. Most were men. Some were women. They were old, young, healthy, diseased, fat, thin, Braavosi, foreign, and any of a dozen other things. None were spared. The corpses littered the floor like autumn leaves.

He stepped over them, as carelessly as if leaves were all that they were, and went onward. By the time anyone visited the House of Black and White in the morning, he would be long gone.

There was duty to be done.