Chapter 8: The Great Game's First Square

Chapter 8: The Great Game's First Square

281 AC, Month of the Ice Dragon

The sea voyage was a crucible of transition. For forty-six days, the Tidal Serpent was Alaric's world, a microcosm of wood, rope, and the unceasing, sighing breath of the ocean. He spent the first week in his small, cramped cabin, not with seasickness, but with a self-imposed, feverish intensity. He was not merely a passenger; he was a general in his war room, preparing for a new campaign.

He had Prometheus collate, index, and cross-reference every scrap of knowledge he had plundered from the Citadel. The histories, the economic treatises, the forbidden texts on magic—he organised it all into a coherent, searchable weapon. He ran simulations, built models, and war-gamed his entry into Pentos. He emerged from his cabin on the eighth day, his eyes clear and sharp, his mind a razor's edge. He had a thousand different plans, each one branching into a dozen contingencies.

His relationship with Captain Zoros evolved from a simple business transaction into one of grudging, professional respect. The change began during a vicious three-day storm that caught them in the Sea of Dorne. The sky turned a bruised purple-black, and the sea rose up in angry, mountainous waves that threatened to splinter the old tramp freighter. The crew fought with a desperate, grim competence, but they were losing ground, the ship being driven dangerously close to the rocky Stepstones.

Alaric, dry and calm in his cabin, was running a far more detailed analysis.

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Alaric took this information, translated it from cold data into practical advice, and went to find the captain. He found Zoros lashed to the ship's wheel, his face a mask of salt-spray and exhaustion, shouting orders against the screaming wind.

"Captain!" Alaric yelled over the gale. "You're fighting a current that runs southwest! If you turn to port and ride with it, it will spit you out into the open sea by morning!"

Zoros glared at him, his eyes red-rimmed. "Get below, boy, before you're washed overboard! I've been sailing these waters since before your father was born!"

"And you've been sailing them with your gut!" Alaric shouted back, his voice cutting through the roar of the wind with an unnatural authority. "I've been sailing them with mathematics! Your current course will have us wrecked on the rocks of Bloodstone within three hours! My course will have you drinking wine in a tavern in Myr in three weeks! It's your ship, Captain, but it's my life, and I am telling you that you are going to get us all killed!"

Something in Alaric's absolute certainty, the sheer, insane confidence in his eyes, gave Zoros pause. He was a man who trusted his experience, but he was also a man who knew when the dice were not rolling his way. With a curse that was snatched away by the wind, he began shouting new orders.

The next twelve hours were a violent, churning hell. The ship groaned and shuddered, tossed about like a child's toy. But as the dawn broke, weak and grey, the storm broke with it. They had cleared the Stepstones, and the sea was calming into a rolling, grey swell. They were battered, but they were safe. And they were two days ahead of schedule.

Zoros said nothing to Alaric for a full day. Then, one evening, as Alaric stood watching the sunset, the captain approached, holding two cups of Myrish fire-wine. He handed one to Alaric.

"That was either the luckiest guess in the history of the sea, or you're something other than a scholar," Zoros said, his voice a low rumble.

"Luck is the residue of design, Captain," Alaric replied, taking a sip of the wine. It was hot and spicy, burning a pleasant trail down his throat.

Zoros grunted, a sound that might have been a laugh. "I don't know what kind of books you read, boy, but they're not like any I've ever seen." He stared out at the horizon. "Pentos is a pit of smiling snakes. You have a plan for a place like that?"

"I have several," Alaric said.

"See that you do," Zoros advised. "In the Free Cities, a man with a heavy purse and a soft head doesn't keep his purse for long. Or his head."

The conversation marked a turning point. Zoros began to talk, to share his own hard-won knowledge. He told Alaric of the shadow-war between the Magisters of Pentos, of the stranglehold the cheese and spice guilds had on the city's economy, of the way the Prince was a powerless, gilded puppet, chosen each year and required to deflower two virgins—the Maid of the Fields and the Maid of the Seas—to ensure prosperity, a ritual that cost him his own life if the crops failed or the trade faltered. It was anecdotal, street-level intelligence, but it was invaluable, adding colour and texture to Prometheus's cold, hard data.

When the coast of Essos finally appeared as a hazy, brown smudge on the horizon, Alaric was ready. As they drew closer, the smudge resolved itself into the mighty, sun-baked brick walls of Pentos. The city was sprawling, far larger than Oldtown, its skyline dominated not by a single elegant tower, but by a forest of massive, square-cut towers of faded red and orange brick, the fortified manses of the city's wealthy Magisters.

The harbour was a spectacle of global trade. The sleek, swan-prowed galleys of the Summer Isles were moored next to the hulking merchant cogs of the North. The purple sails of Tyroshi trading vessels mingled with the salt-stained canvas of fishing boats from the Braavosian lagoon. The air hit him like a physical blow—a wave of smells so complex and overwhelming it made Oldtown seem like a sterile laboratory. There was the sweet, cloying scent of a hundred different perfumes, the sharp tang of exotic spices, the savoury aroma of roasting meats, the coppery smell of blood from the butcher's quay, and under it all, the pervasive, sweetish stench of decay and human filth. This was the smell of unbridled capitalism, of immense wealth built side-by-side with abject poverty.

Alaric's first act upon disembarking was to pay Captain Zoros the promised hundred dragons, plus a bonus of twenty more. "For services rendered," Alaric said simply.

Zoros spat on a dragon for luck before tucking the heavy purse into his belt. "If your 'research' ever requires you to leave Pentos in a hurry, Scholar," the captain said with a wry grin, "send word to the Tidal Serpent. My rates are reasonable for repeat customers."

Alaric had secured a reliable, discreet transport link. The first piece was on the board.

He did not present himself to the Magisters. He did not go to the Iron Bank. His letters of introduction remained safely tucked away. To announce his presence would be to become a known quantity, to be judged and categorized based on the Citadel's reputation. He preferred to be an unknown variable.

For the first week, he became a ghost. Dressed in the simple, unremarkable clothes of a hired scribe, he walked the city from the opulent Sunrise Gate to the festering poverty of the Ragman's Harbor. He observed everything. The way the Unsullied guards, employed by the dozen Magisters who could afford them, moved with a fluid, terrifying discipline that made the City Watch of Oldtown look like drunken louts. The way merchants would bow to a Magister's litter, their smiles wide but their eyes filled with fear. The way slaves, their faces branded with the mark of their owners—a flame for a cook, a hammer for a smith, a teardrop for a bed-slave—moved through the city like wraiths, their eyes fixed on the ground.

He saw all this not with pity or moral outrage, but with the cold, detached eye of a sociologist and an economist. Slavery was an inefficient allocation of labour, creating a permanent, resentful underclass that required expensive security to control. But it also provided a source of incredibly cheap manpower that allowed the Magisters to live in obscene luxury. It was a system of brutal, elegant simplicity.

At night, in the anonymous room of a dockside inn, he would collate the day's findings.

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After a week of reconnaissance, he made his move. He didn't lease a grand manse. That would come later. For now, he needed a secure, anonymous base of operations. He found a small, stone house for rent in the Street of Silversmiths, a respectable but quiet district. It had a walled courtyard, a solid iron-bound door, and only two windows on the ground floor. It was defensible. He paid the landlord a full year's rent in advance, using the name 'Alar', a simple merchant's clerk from Tyrosh.

Next, he needed local staff. He needed eyes and ears that understood the city's labyrinthine social codes. He did not go to a hiring fair. He went to the temple of the Lord of Harmony, a place where out-of-work scribes and factors came to pray for employment. There, he observed a man named Nervo, a Pentoshi in his late forties, his forked beard dyed a faded orange, his clothes neat but frayed. He watched as Nervo was turned away from three potential jobs, his face showing not despair, but a weary, stoic resignation. Nervo was experienced, beaten down by life, and unlikely to be overly ambitious. He was perfect.

Alaric approached him outside the temple. "You seek work?"

Nervo looked him up and down, taking in the plain clothes but the expensive leather boots. "I am a factor, skilled in accounts and logistics. I seek a patron."

"I am a scholar and an investor," Alaric said. "I am new to Pentos. I require a man who knows the city, who can manage my household accounts, and who can act as my agent in the markets. The work will require absolute discretion."

He offered Nervo a wage that was three times the standard rate for a factor. Nervo's eyes widened, a flicker of hope warring with a lifetime of suspicion.

"Why me?" Nervo asked. "You could hire any factor in the city for such a sum."

"Because the others are hungry and ambitious," Alaric replied coolly. "They would see my business and think of how to make it their own. You," he looked Nervo directly in the eye, "are a man who has known failure. You understand the value of a stable position. You will be loyal because you know what it is to have nothing. I am not buying your ambition. I am buying your loyalty."

The brutal honesty of the assessment struck Nervo like a physical blow. He stared at the boy, at the ancient, assessing intelligence in his eyes, and knew he was in the presence of someone utterly alien to his experience. He gave a deep, formal bow. "I am your man, master."

With his base and his agent secured, Alaric prepared to make his first play. It was a small, delicate piece of financial surgery designed to test his methods and generate his first independent profit.

Through Nervo's contacts and Prometheus's analysis, he had identified a curious anomaly in the wine market. A virulent rot had struck the vineyards of a lesser Magister named Presto, ruining half his harvest of a common but popular red. The price of Presto's wine futures had plummeted. Everyone expected him to take a catastrophic loss.

But Alaric, through his nightly study of the forbidden texts from the Citadel, knew something that no one else in Pentos did. He had read of a specific species of blight-eating mold, a harmless fungus that, when introduced to a vineyard under specific conditions of humidity and moonlight, would consume the rot while leaving the grapes themselves unharmed, albeit with a slightly altered, sweeter taste. It was a piece of arcane agricultural knowledge, a footnote in a maester's treatise on esoteric farming techniques.

He instructed Nervo to quietly buy up as many of Magister Presto's worthless wine futures as he could, using a small portion of the Iron Bank funds. Nervo protested, convinced his new master was a fool about to throw his money away.

"The man is ruined, master! The wine will be vinegar!"

"Do as I say, Nervo," Alaric commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument. "The price is low precisely because everyone believes that. Buy."

That night, Alaric slipped out of his house alone. He carried a small, clay pot containing a culture of the specific mold he had painstakingly identified and acquired from a dealer in rare herbs, claiming it was for an alchemical experiment. He made his way to the vineyards outside the city walls, a shadow moving through the darkness. He found Magister Presto's blighted fields and, following the precise instructions from the text, introduced the mold, whispering a few words in High Valyrian that the text claimed would 'awaken' the fungus. He felt a faint thrum of energy, a whisper of the earth magic he had only read about.

He returned before dawn, his hands smelling of damp earth. For the next two weeks, he waited. Nervo grew more anxious by the day as the harvest approached.

Then, the news began to trickle through the markets. Magister Presto, far from being ruined, was harvesting a crop of grapes that were not only saved, but had produced a wine of a unique and exquisite sweetness. His "Miracle Vintage," as it was being called, was fetching three times the normal price.

The value of the futures contracts Alaric held skyrocketed overnight. He instructed Nervo to sell. When the final accounts were tallied, Alaric's initial investment of fifty golden dragons had returned a profit of over four hundred.

Nervo stood in Alaric's study, his face a mask of utter disbelief as he looked at the ledger. He had thought his master was a mad, rich boy. He now knew he was working for a sorcerer.

"How," Nervo whispered, his voice filled with awe and terror. "How could you have known?"

Alaric looked up from a map of the city, his expression unreadable. "I am a scholar, Nervo. I read the right books."

He looked down at the ledger, at the neat column of figures that represented his first victory. It was a small sum in the grand scheme of things, but it was a beginning. He had taken knowledge, applied it with precision, and created wealth from nothing. He had planted his flag. The Great Game of Essos was afoot, and Alaric Blackwood, the Serpent of the Citadel, had just made his opening move.