Chapter 116: Battle for King's Landing — The Tunnel Beneath
ULF
Silverwing set him down inside the breached wall, and Ulf pushed on toward the tanner's yard, the bay already behind him. The boy was still down there under the green water. He'd still be down there tomorrow. There wasn't a thing left on this side of the morning that could be done about it, so he found the shaft behind the tanner's yard where Stokeworth's man had left a knotted rope, went down it hand over hand, and let the dark close over the top of his head.
The drainage tunnel smelled of centuries. Damp stone and old iron and the faint, sour trace of things that had rotted here when Aegon the Conqueror's grandfather was still a boy. Water ran ankle-deep and cold enough to ache in the bones of his feet. The ceiling hung low enough that the taller men walked bent, and the walls sat close enough on both sides that nobody could swing a longsword without ringing it off stone.
Cole waited at the bend with the infiltration team behind him. Twelve, handpicked from the Green loyalists, their blades wrapped in cloth to kill the glint. He'd taken a cut across the brow somewhere on the wall and hadn't bothered to bind it. Blood had dried in a line down his cheek.
"The harbor's ours," Ulf said. "Both towers are slag. Their ships are burning at anchor."
"And the gray dragon that rose from the Pit?"
"Down in the bay."
Cole waited for the rest. Ulf laid his palm against the tunnel wall instead and held it there, and the stone told him what he needed. Bootfalls. Not one column. Two.
"Sixteen ahead of us," he said. "Nine behind. Somebody sold them the breach point."
"Then we go through the sixteen." Cole was already moving past him, sword clearing the scabbard.
Ulf caught his forearm. "You're behind me."
"I'm Lord Commander of the Kingsguard."
"And this passage is four feet wide. If you go first, you plug it, and I'm fighting through your back."
"My men have to see me go in first." Cole didn't lower his voice, and he didn't pull his arm free either. He simply stood there in the wet with the blood dried on his face, and he was not going to move. "That's half of what I'm for. You can do the rest."
There wasn't time to win it. Ulf let go. "Two steps behind me. Not one."
He went into the dark. Stokeworth's maps had been accurate about the geography and useless about everything else, and the first torch came around the corner forty feet on, throwing a wobble of orange across wet brick. Ulf thought about Rokuogan for exactly as long as it took to refuse it. In four feet of stone with his own men packed shoulder to shoulder behind him, that shockwave wouldn't stop at the enemy. It would come back down the tunnel and kill everyone he'd brought.
So he did it with his hands.
Soru put him inside the torchlight before the man holding it finished turning his head. Ulf took the wrist, snapped it against the wall, and let the torch drop hissing into the water, and the dark came back down like a lid. That was the point. He knew where every one of them stood now. They knew nothing.
Two spears came at where he'd been. He wasn't there. Shigan took the first spearman through the meat of the shoulder, a single finger driven in and out faster than the man could register it, and the arm went dead and the spear went into the water. The second one Ulf put down with a strike behind the knee, and the man folded screaming and stayed folded. He wasn't dead. He'd be alive tonight, in a cell, with a bad leg and a story. That was worth two seconds.
The rest came on anyway. They knew this tunnel was lost, they'd heard their own men shrieking in the dark, and they still came, packed shoulder to shoulder, shoving each other forward because their captain had told them to hold and none of them could see far enough to know why.
One got it right. He set his spear low and drove it up under Ulf's ribs with everything a frightened man has, a killing thrust, perfectly aimed.
"Tekkai."
The point met flesh and stopped as though it had met a wall, and the shaft bowed, and the ash cracked lengthwise with a sound like a branch giving way. The man's face came into the last of the torchlight, and Ulf watched him understand. Then Ulf broke his jaw and stepped over him.
It took less than a minute. When it was done, the water was moving wrong and the tunnel was full of the smell of iron and men's fear, and four of the sixteen were still breathing where they'd fallen. Cole stood two paces back with his sword unbloodied.
"You moved faster than I could see," Cole said. It wasn't a question. It was an acknowledgment, the first time he'd said aloud what Ulf could do rather than simply working around it. "I've heard the stories. I've seen the aftermath. But I've never watched you move like that."
"There's a lot you haven't seen." Ulf was already going, Soru-propelled, water sheeting off his boots. "Stay close. And don't get between me and the next guard."
Stokeworth's tunnel surfaced exactly where the old lord had promised: a rusted grate set in the floor of the Red Keep's wine cellars, forgotten since before the Dance began. Ulf pressed his palm against the iron. Old, and thick, and ready to give.
"Tekkai," he breathed, and his forearm hardened to the density of forged steel. One strike. The grate groaned, buckled, and fell inward with a crash that rolled away between the casks.
The first guard died before he could shout. Ulf's Soru carried him across the cellar in one blurred step, a hand clamped over the man's mouth, the short blade finding the gap beneath the ribs. He was dead before he knew he'd been touched. Ulf lowered him to the stone without a sound.
"Two more at the stairwell," he said. Cole came up beside him, jaw tight, his face gone the color of tallow. "I'll take them. Your men secure the corridor behind us."
The second guard died to Rankyaku, Ulf's leg scything through the air, the compressed blade catching him across the chest before the spear came up. In the cellar gloom there was nothing to see. A flicker of moved air, a wet sound, a body meeting stone. The third nearly got his sword clear before Ulf's hardened forearm took the cut, steel ringing off him like a hammer off an anvil, and the return strike finished it.
Three bodies in the cellar, and no alarm raised. Cole's men spread out through the lower corridors, securing the kitchens and the servants' passages, cutting the keep's ability to feed men up from below. At the end of the second sublevel, behind a door bolted from the inside by someone in a great hurry, they found the war-plans chamber.
"These aren't battle plans." Cole spread the documents across a table stained black with spilled ink. It was a storeroom, converted, its walls papered over with maps and proclamations, every one of them in Rhaenyra's own hand. "These are purges. Lists of houses she intends to destroy after the war is won. Lords who've been loyal to her for years, marked for execution on charges that don't make sense."
"And this one—" Ulf lifted a proclamation and the ink smudged under his thumb, still fresh. It ordered the deaths of three minor lords whose only crime was being distantly related to Green supporters. The hand that had written it had been shaking. The letters ran jagged, crowded, nothing like the careful script she'd used on the terms he'd carried out of Dragonstone. "She's deteriorating. Something's been feeding her fear."
"Or someone." Cole's finger stopped on a line halfway down the page. A counselor, it said, who came to the Queen alone at night after her sworn advisors had retired. "This advisor. He's in half the proclamations but never named. Whatever he's been telling her, it's been working. She's been signing death warrants for her own allies."
"Daemon." The name came up dry in Ulf's throat, tasting of ash and old smoke. "He's supposed to be dead. The God's Eye—"
"Body never recovered." Cole raised the page into the torchlight so they could both read the words that had no name attached to them. "Dead men don't write war plans. Dead men don't whisper in queens' ears. If Daemon Targaryen is alive and feeding Rhaenyra's paranoia, this war isn't over when the city falls. It's just changing shape."
Ulf gathered the documents and pushed them inside his tunic against his chest. Above them, faint through a hundred feet of stone, somebody was ringing the bells. The path to the throne room was open. He looked at Cole, and Cole looked back at him, and neither of them said what they both understood, which was that they had come down here to win a battle and were going up to fight something else entirely.
"Torches out," Ulf said, and started up the stairs.