Chapter 11

The man in the dark robe stood in the shadow of the Titan, watching the ships come home with the sunset.

The hulls came first into his sight, as splashes of purple paint on the horizon, for their sails blended with the cloudy sky. They travelled in their hundreds, a fleet unrivalled by any other in the world. Many-masted they were, long and sleek and broad-sailed, and tall as well. Yet their height seemed as nothing when they passed under the pillars of black granite that were the legs of the Titan, melding with the mountains of two different isles. The top of a mainmast rose less than a quarter as high as the point where the Titan's legs met

The Titan blew an earth-shaking roar, the customary blast to herald their coming. Looking up, a surge of pride filled Anno as the ground trembled beneath his feet. This great artifice was Braavosi work, all of it, made not by the blood magics of the dragonlords but by the hands and minds of men. By then the ships were close enough that he could see the sailors' faces, pale in the cool wet air and framed by dark strands, and he knew they felt it too. They stood proud and straight-backed, as if they were returning as a conquering army and not as the miserable dregs of defeat.

If only that were so.

Oh, they had not been defeated on the waves, to be sure. The Braavosi fleet had performed splendidly. The Lorathi fleet and all the sellsails that the Pact of Four could hire had descended upon Braavos, and the brave sailors of the Queen of Cities had fought off them all, then executed an exemplary blockade against Lorath and the coasts controlled by Pentos in the latter half of the war.

It had not been enough. None of it had been enough.

All of Braavos's naval might had not been able to stop the Pact of Four's armies. The attempted landing on Lorath had failed miserably, driven back into the sea. The blockade had been too late; by the time Ferrego Antaryon as Sealord had learnt that four Free Cities had gone to war upon him, Lorath's gold had already hired and paid an immense host of sellswords, instructing them to gather at Norvos. The Pact of Four must have been planning their Great Northern War for a long time. Probably as soon as Antaryon's war with Norvos ended, Anno thought, damnable folly that it was.

The throng of people gathering at the docks raised a haggard cheer for their returning heroes. Anxious children and women shouted names, seeking fathers, brothers, husbands and sons amidst those sailors who had lived to come home.

Anno stood among them, in the midst of a crowd and yet utterly alone.

He watched the ships moor at the Ragman's Harbour in the west of the city. Doubtless they would soon be seeking their wives and children, parted from them for nigh a year. Before that, though, there were formalities to be got out of the way.

"Your Excellency." The high captains of the expeditionary fleet bowed.

Anno Nusaris, newly elected Sealord of Braavos, surrounded by dark-robed attendants and ringed in steel by unsmiling armed men, raised his voice. "My high captains," the Sealord said. "You have served the city well."

"As you have led us well, Your Excellency," the high captains said in unison.

Anno wondered darkly whether men's memories would agree. The treaty with Norvos after the previous war had been utterly undone; worse, the Unequal Treaties with Pentos, born of five wars and a century of effort, had been stripped away. Pentos had regained its full independence, devoid of Braavosi vassalage. Among the free Pentoshi government's earliest acts had been the restoration of slavery. Worst of all, a Norvoshi army dwelt in Karavos, one of Braavos's five tributary cities, and it looked like they were not about to leave.

All of this was the fault of Ferrego Antaryon's faction and their senseless over-ambition. But Anno feared he would be remembered as the Sealord who had presided over one of the worst defeats Braavos had ever suffered.

Nonetheless he spoke the traditional words. "Do you therefore, comprehending your return, relinquish your commands and all the authority conferred upon you back into the hands of the Braavosi people whence it came?"

"I relinquish my command and all the authority conferred upon me back into the hands of the Braavosi people whence it came," each high captain said.

"Then be welcomed to hearth and home as a free citizen of Braavos," Anno said, and it was done.

With the wartime formations officially disbanded, the common men of the expeditionary fleet were permitted to disembark. They came down in good order, without haste to find their loved ones. These were disciplined men, and they knew they would not be separated from their families for long. In peacetime the Braavosi fleet was still on duty, remaining in the lagoon or on the high seas to keep merchantmen safe, but city leave was common, unlike in wartime.

The ceremony was done—an old custom, designed to prevent the grand commanders of land and sea from using their men to seize political power within the city, after an unstable era of more than a hundred years in which they had done precisely that—and now there was no further need of Anno here. He lingered nonetheless, among the people he was charged to lead.

Men met women and children and other men, and embraced one another with hugs and kisses and tears. When they had moved off, and the number of sailors was receding, women and children and the elderly turned away too and headed for their homes, backs slumped and weeping. These were sights and sounds to scour the soul, but Anno forced himself to watch despite it. They were his fellow citizens, and this was the cost of war. As his grandfather Sealord Ranio Nusaris had told him, the course of the cold demands of statecraft should never cause a Sealord to forget what fighting meant, behind it all.

Hours later, when most of the throng had departed, leaving only a scattering of families searching the docks with fading hopes, Anno's keen eyes caught sight of a young man nearby in the black of night. He must have been less than a hundred feet from Anno for hours. Aproaching, Anno heard sickly, snuffling snores coming from him.

The man was asleep on the docks in the cold wind, missing an arm.

Anno saw the tatty remnants of a uniform over those slender youthful features and his heart seized up with disgust. He must have been a soldier who had given everything for Braavos, only to lose his job and be cast out onto the ground like the foul-smelling contents of a chamberpot.

Quietly, bidding his guardsmen to stand aside, he walked up to the sleeper, knelt and lightly tucked a purse of iron coins beneath the sleeper's only arm. "I am going to make things better," he whispered, knowing that nobody could hear him. "What I do, I do for the sake of men like you. You will have a home soon. I promise."

A gesture, and they moved on.

Anno was in a melancholy mood as they headed to the Sealord's Palace, tall spires gleaming in the silver moonlight, on prettily cobbled streets that looked a world away from this. Everywhere he went, guardsmen and servants bowed and called him "Your Excellency". A set of several immense rooms, the Sealord's personal bathing, dressing and bed chambers, were particularly well guarded. Dozens of men guarded every door, and not even Anno's guardsmen passed, only Anno.

He put a key into the lock, turned it, and was greeted by the gleam of gold.

A kingly hoard was heaped all over Anno's floor. Gold, silver and gemstones were the greater part of it, but by no means all. There were also plenty of furs, barrels of fine wine, spices, sculptures, portraits and more—a breathtakingly massive gathering of the wealth of Braavos. It could have given food, shelter and comfort to thousands of Braavosi. That was how Anno would have spent it. Instead it was destined for the magisters of Pentos, Norvos, Qohor and Lorath when their fleets arrived to take it, as tribute in recompense for the Great Northern War.

Anno stepped into the chamber, locked the door and turned away from the hoard of tribute. He had little desire to look upon the sign of his beloved home's subjection tonight.

Anno Nusaris awoke early in the morning on a soft white featherbed quite like the one that he had enjoyed in his old family manse. That, at least, was familiar to before, when so much of his life was not. Some servants were allowed into the meticulously guarded privacy of his night chambers to dress him, and in a robe of charcoal grey, he emerged to the rest of the gigantic Sealord's Palace.

The next day, Anno was issuing judgements in a public square when a tall, pale-skinned hairless man with a hideously scarred face was escorted by dozens of glaring armed guards into his presence.

"I offer you sincere greetings, Your Excellency," said the pale man, wearing lots of gold on his person in contrast to the subdued dark colours that were preferred in Braavos, "for myself, Captain Gemilio Nikar, of the Company of the Cat, and on behalf of my commander, known hereabouts as Lord Handtaker."

A sellsword envoy. Anno stiffened.

"I greet you, Captain Nikar," he said, "on the behalf of the people of Braavos."

"And a most generous people they are," Nikar oozed. "These seem to be rather open surroundings, Your Excellency," Captain Nikar suggested, glancing dismissively at the surrounding Braavosi citizens, ordinary men and women here to watch their Sealord's judgements as was their right. "For delicate matters, would it not be better to your service were we to meet more privately?"

"I am a leader of my people," Anno Nusaris said coolly, "and I act on their behalf. I do not need to hide from them. I am not about to hire you; there is no need for secrecy. This is the way things are done in Braavos, you see."

Cheers resounded off the walls and rang to the skies. "Nusaris, Nusaris, Nusaris!"

If at all deterred, the pale scarred man did not let that stop him. "As Your Excellency desires," he said with a bow. "Lord Handtaker has long enjoyed a relationship of trust and mutual respect with the office of the Sealord, keyholders and magisters of Braavos, and it would grieve him deeply were that not to continue."

"I do not wish to cause unnecessary grief," Anno said.

"I am glad of it, Your Excellency," said Captain Nikar. "You see, my commander wished to raise a somewhat delicate matter. We fought bravely for the cause of Braavos throughout the recent war, never tiring, never deserting even to the very end, just as we promised we would; and it therefore occurs to him to raise the issue of the payment—"

The crowd erupted in jeers. Mocking yells and snarls of hate drowned out what Nikar was trying to say, raining down on the sellsword who was trying to take more of the wealth of which Braavos had so little remaining.

"The payment that the Sealord of Braavos promised to us," Nikar shouted over them.

Anno Nusaris made a cutting gesture. Over the course of several minutes, the noise died down.

"I see," Anno said politely. "You do understand, I hope, that we are in quite some difficulty. We must pay a very great tribute to all four of the Free Cities that stood against us in the war, and many of our citizens are in great need."

"That is grievous to hear, Your Excellency," Nikar said with unconvincing grief. "Please accept my sincerest condolences for the fate that has befallen Braavos."

"They are accepted," said Anno.

"Yet I must nonetheless raise the matter of payment."

"Ah yes. Payment for your services in the Great Northern War."

"Yes, Your Excellency."

"That is a very large payment, isn't it?"

Captain Nikar looked wary. "The… ah… previous Sealord was a generous man, Your Excellency."

"Generous," Anno Nusaris repeated. "That is one way of putting it. He is not remembered as a generous man in Braavos, you may be interested to hear. Yet he was exceptionally generous to you. Has it occurred to you to wonder why?"

"The minds of Sealords are not known to me, Your Excellency," Nikar said.

"Oh, I think they are," Anno said mildly. "You did something for him, so he did something for you. Are you a foolish man, captain?"

Nikar looked taken aback. "I'd like to think not, Your Excellency."

"I still remember that grand reception nearly a year past, when you and your commander sat as guests in the Sealord's Palace," said Anno. "Your Lord Handtaker and his captains acted as the tough fighting men, carefully serving one man's interests. You spoke words of absurd, foolish confidence about Braavos's prospects in a grand war. I remember all your extravagant promises of victory. 'Let them come. We will destroy them, each and every one.' That's what one of you said to me, wasn't it? Those words, coming from sellswords as successful as you, persuaded many of our magisters that if they were to take as much land from Norvos as possible then the retaliation wouldn't be too dangerous. You persuaded them that the chance was worth taking."

Nikar's pale scarred face was turning ever more pale.

"I don't think you are a foolish man, unlike my unlamented predecessor," Anno continued. "Nor do I think that of your commander. So what do I think, then? That leaves me little choice. That means I think you deliberately tried to persuade the leaders of Braavos into taking foolish steps that would cause a war that would kill thousands of my people and leave my city destitute, so that you could earn some gold. And then Antaryon and his corrupt friends granted you a grossly inflated wage, many times what sellswords would ordinarily be paid in a contract."

The Company of the Cat's envoy struggled to be heard over the jeers. "We fought for your city! That wage was for the danger we undertook, by picking your side!"

Anno's voice was harsh with disbelief. "'For the danger'. Antaryon said so, but we all know why he really did it. You helped to sway the magisters of this city to do as he wished, so he thought kindly of you; so when war broke out to his surprise, he heaped Braavosi taxpayers' hard-earned wealth on you."

"Please, Your Excellency, it was promised! We need the coin!"

"You need the coin? You need the coin?" Anno remembered the wounded soldier sleeping on the docks, a better and more deserving man than this by far, and his temper blazed red-hot. "I'll tell you who needs the coin. The poor people and the wounded and the widowed and the orphaned of Braavos are in desperate need of gold we can't give them, because of what the Pact cities are taking from us. Because of the war you sellswords wrought, with your lies, for your greed. The blame lies with you, almost as much as Antaryon's men. So long as I am Sealord, what remains of Braavosi wealth will be spent for the Braavosi, not to pay off the merchants of death whose sweet lies ruined this city in the first place."

The cheers were deafening now, the ocean of applause so tremendous it drowned out all other sound.

"Tell Handtaker this," Anno thundered. "We don't want his kind here in our city!"

The celebration of his people uplifted him like nothing he had ever known. For all he knew, he could have been walking on the clouds. Anno exulted in it, delighting in the warm glow of their approval. He would always keep them in his thought, he swore to himself, and be a better Sealord than any other who had come before. Distantly, as if in a dream, he saw the sellsword emissary ride away empty-handed, doubtless to inform his foul master. He scarcely noticed. He was too caught in the moment…

A high-pitched cry tore through the morning air.

Anno Nusaris looked up, his reverie shattered by the scream. He looked around for a while. But all that he saw was a lonely eagle circling in the sky.

Hammered unrelentingly by raindrops, angry desperate voices filled the stuffy air of the tent like swarming flies.

"Useless! They won't help us! You're a fool if you think the proud high-and-mighty likes of Hyndel and Domaryen will stick out their necks for the likes of us!"

"Not for us; for themselves," argued Bloodbeard. "Nusaris seized power from them; surely they'll want it back."

"Not enough to unleash violence in the city," Tyleo Anastis retorted.

"Nusaris unleashed violence in the city! All his rioters, shouting for peace… he threw down Antaryon, for gods' sake, he fought the lawful Sealord! Why shouldn't they do the same to him?"

"Because he didn't fight the lawful Sealord. The rioting commoners did, but Nusaris didn't. Antaryon was deposed lawfully. The Braavosi have a way to throw away a Sealord who has led the city to disaster; 'impeachment' it's called. That's what they did to Antaryon, then the magisters and keyholders voted for Nusaris to replace him. That is how things can be done in Braavos."

"What a load of bullshit! 'Impeachment', so Nusaris's faction, Prestayn's men, get to overthrow Antaryon and Antaryon's faction don't get to do the same back… how absurd. It's just words, a paper shield, meaningless. There's no such thing in Norvos or Tyrosh. Why don't they just kill Nusaris and have done with it?"

Captain Anastis lost his patience. "Well we are not speaking of Tyrosh!"

"Shout at me all you like," snapped Philenio Zometemis, whom men called Bloodbeard. "Call me a fool if it please you. How do you propose we get the gold that was promised to us?"

"That's just it," Anastis said, more quietly, wiping the sweat from his monstrous scar-covered face with one hand. "I don't think we can."

"Why did they vote for Nusaris at all?" lamented the Pentoshi captain Ranio Lorumis, one of Handtaker's old friends, holding his head in his hands. "The voters don't like Nusaris; they're all rich, and the rich are Antaryon's men for the most part."

"The sentiment of the city is on Nusaris's side," one-eyed Ommo Pomistis explained. Young, this one, but with the dark hair and slight figure common among Braavosi. "He knows it. Antaryon's men know it too. The Peace Men on the streets are bolder every day, and Antaryon's faction won't dare push the commoners too far."

"Mayhaps we can appeal to the Iron Bank to make good the lack," suggested Captain Feran, a Myrman, Handtaker's chief of scouts. "The keyholders there are sensible men, not swept up with Nusaris's dangerous commoner-loving nonsense. Surely they understand Braavos will have to pay free companies in times to come. If our payment is withheld, other free companies will be wary of the Titan."

"If it were a small lack, perhaps they would," Handtaker said wearily. "What the Braavosi owe us is not small. In advance they paid us half of what would have been the Company's full wage for an ordinary contract, but my Braavosi associates prevailed upon Antaryon to promise us a much higher wage. The Iron Bank would not make good a sum as great as that. Not unless they thought the Sealord would eventually pay them back for it. Ferrego Antaryon might have, but Nusaris was one of Banero Prestayn's men, before… before all of this. Prestayn wouldn't have, if he'd succeeded in becoming Sealord, and the keyholders of the Iron Bank are not utter fools. They know Nusaris won't."

"Then what can we do?" moaned Feran. "We lost too many men in the Great Northern War, staying to the very end so that we wouldn't forfeit our payment by that generous contract you got for us, and soon it'll be time to pay the men's wages. We need that gold! What is left to us, if neither the Iron Bank nor the new Sealord will give it? Commander, are you sure we can't find a way to throw Nusaris down? Perhaps with the aid of your… associates?"

"We can't." Handtaker said it shortly, baldly. "Horo Lynalyon was my closest associate there, and he's been charged for war profiteering. Levoryn has been sacked from his rank in the Guard; Prestayn's nephew commands in his place. The others have been cowed by Nusaris's purge. They scarcely dare step out to the canals to show their faces."

Disdain dripped from Handtaker's voice, as it often did, but there was something else as well, something unfamiliar. Shocked, Stannis took a moment to identify it as despair.

In seven years, he had never, ever heard the commander sound so defeated.

A deep, incredulous voice rose over them. "Do you mean to forget what those liars have stolen from us? Do you mean to forgive?"

It was the first time Stannis spoke since he had told them what his eagle-eyes had seen.

"I think we must," Tyleo Anastis said, resting his head in his hands. "We have no other choice, unless you can think of a way to see Nusaris deposed that has eluded all the rest of us." He looked up challengingly.

"We have a choice," Stannis said. "We'd be fools to rely on the wheedling of magisters. They're cowards to a man. Merchants have their place in the world, but no man of the sword should ever have to go on bended knee or to rely upon a petty copper-counter. They are no true men. They know nothing of lance and bow and sword, only how to fiddle with silks and spices and simper in their fine manses."

His words oozed contempt so thick that one could almost taste it.

"They don't have the stomach to fight Nusaris." Stannis swept a hand around the tent. "But we do."

"Fight him?" Captain Pomistis asked, jaw dropping. "Have you lost your wits?"

"No. It sounds like I alone have kept them. Every place needs a man and every man has his place. We are not Braavosi electors. What do we know of their arcane procedures? We won't defeat Nusaris on his terrain; we will defeat him on ours. We are warriors, and war is what we know well. So I say—Let us seize the bastard daughter of Valyria by the throat, and we'll take what is ours by rights at the point of a sword."

No-one spoke. For a few seconds, the sheer audacity stunned them all to silence.

Old Anastis was first to recover himself. "You are entirely mad. How would you break through the Braavosi defences?"

"With ease," said Stannis. "The Braavosi defences are pitiful; it alone of the Free Cities has no walls to hold us off. Thanks be to the Great Northern War there's still a great multitude of sellswords near here, one of the greatest gatherings of our kind of the past fifty years: those that fought beside us, those that fought under the Pact of Four, the difference does not matter. Men in our profession are ofttimes willing to risk our lives for gold and glory. We should be easily able to ally with enough of those free companies to form a host that can break the Braavosi remnants in the field. Braavos's army has been mauled in this war, and even at the best of times, all the Free Cities' hosts of sworn soldiers are smaller than the hosts of sellswords they hire to fight for pay and loot. And where in the world has more to loot than the Queen of Cities?"

"Braavos has no walls. Braavos needs no walls," Ommo Pomistis said. Stannis thought of him as a young man, though he was older than Stannis himself. "Have you even seen it, Sunsetlander?"

"Yes," Stannis said, grinding his teeth.

"Braavos has its wooden walls," Pomistis said slowly, in such a tone as if he were speaking to a dull child. "Braavos has its fleet. And Braavos is in a lagoon; they don't call it Braavos of the Hundred Isles for nothing. Yes of course an alliance of free companies could defeat what is left of their army. But other free companies will not join with us if they can make no profit from it, as long as Braavos itself remains untouchable. All that we could do is lay a siege—a worthless siege, for Braavos could easily resupply by sea, so we would fail."

"We would not fail."

"Then tell me," the young Braavosi captain said, slow, mocking, "how, exactly, do you expect to get us past the greatest fleet in the world?"

Stannis looked past Ommo Pomistis and locked eyes with Handtaker. "It is possible," he said, straight to the commander. "You may not trust me as a captain any more, but you were at Nyrelos, you know enough not to doubt me as a sorcerer."

A soft, soft voice, silk in a whisper. "I know."

"So trust me then, commander, when I tell you that it can be done."

Handtaker's dark eyes held that gaze for a long while. None dared to speak. Then, sharply, once, he nodded.

Yes! Stannis clenched his fists with elation. He had the chance he had desired, to win back the esteem he had lost.

"I will hold you to that," Handtaker murmured.

"Your trust will not be misplaced, commander," Stannis declared. He expected that his life depended on it.

Handtaker did not further reply, but others were less restrained. "Commander, surely you don't mean to follow this mad plan!" cried Tyleo Anastis. "No-one can get past the Braavosi fleet, despite the Sunsetlander's bluster. Only the Volantene fleet would stand a chance, and they're a thousand miles from here. It cannot be done, has never been done! Even the Valyrians trod lightly around the Queen of Cities!"

"I'm not sure of that," said Bloodbeard, to Stannis's shock. He had not thought that Philenio Zometemis had any fondness for him. Something of it must have shown on his face, for Captain Zometemis snorted and said, "Don't think too much of it, Sunsetlander. But I was there at Nyrelos, Tyleo, when you were leading a detachment. I saw what the Sunsetlander did there. If he says he can get us past the Braavosi fleet… well, I won't assume he can't."

Anastis looked straight at Handtaker. "Commander. Listen to me, please. This is insane. Do not throw this free company into a hopeless war upon a madman's say-so."

The silent struggle in the air grew backbreaking. Philenio Zometemis against Tyleo Anastis, Handtaker's foremost captain against one of his oldest friends.

At last the commander spoke. "We may die," Handtaker acknowledged. "But we may live. If we do, we will become rich beyond imagination." His voice hardened. "And I did not acquire my reputation by ever, ever, ever forgiving any man who has betrayed me."

With that, Stannis knew, I have him.

"So this is how I propose we get the gold that was promised to us," Stannis said, his heart soaring. "We gather other free companies with a promise to share the loot. We sweep aside the remnants of the Sealord's army. I smash the greatest navy in the world to broken beams and bloated bodies. And then—" a sudden smile, thin lips twisting like a knife— "we sack the Queen of Cities."