Chapter 39: The Prophet of Profit
Chapter 39: The Prophet of Profit
298 AC, Month of the Sun's Zenith
The news from King's Landing trickled into the orderly, sun-drenched domain of the Blackwater March like a slow, black poison. Ravens arrived daily, carrying official reports for the Lord Paramount, while coded messages from Alaric's agents provided the ugly, unvarnished truth. The new Hand, Lord Eddard Stark, a man of granite honour, was drowning in a sea of silks and lies. The Hand's Tourney, a magnificent display of martial prowess, had been a financial catastrophe, plunging the Crown even deeper into the waiting arms of its Lannister creditors.
Alaric observed it all from the cool, detached vantage of his solar in Serpent's Head Keep, but his true vantage point was far more intimate. In the silent, warded darkness of his sanctum, he was the most well-informed man in the world. He was a ghost in the Red Keep, a silent observer at the Small Council table.
Night after night, he would descend to his laboratory. The great obsidian scrying bowl, activated by a drop of his own magically-infused blood and focused by the humming power of Nightfall laid beside it, would clear. The murky depths would resolve into perfect, stable images. He watched with the dispassionate interest of a scholar as the predictable chemical reaction he knew as history began to bubble and smoke.
He watched Eddard Stark follow the trail left by Jon Arryn. He saw the Hand of the King in the filthy forge of Tobho Mott, saw him lay eyes on the dark-haired, blue-eyed bastard boy, Gendry. Alaric felt a flicker of something akin to pity. Ned was an honourable man searching for a simple truth in a city where truth was a commodity to be bought, sold, and twisted into a weapon. He was playing cyvasse with men who had thrown away the rulebook and were busy poisoning the pieces.
He watched the tense, fraught meetings of the Small Council. He saw the way Petyr Baelish, Littlefinger, would offer Ned advice that was simultaneously helpful and subtly ruinous, guiding the noble wolf deeper into the snare. He observed the silent, spider-like Varys, whose web of whispers covered the city, and made a mental note to begin a counter-intelligence project specifically aimed at mapping the Master of Whisperer's network. He recognized Varys and Littlefinger as the only other true players in the city, though their ambitions were earthbound compared to his own.
The point of no return came, as he knew it would, in a filthy alleyway slick with rain. He was scrying the city's underbelly, tracking the flow of gold from a Lannister agent to a captain of the City Watch, when his focus was drawn by a sudden eruption of violence. He shifted his perspective, the image swirling and reforming. He found himself looking down on Lord Stark and his men, surrounded by a score of Lannister guardsmen led by the Kingslayer himself, Ser Jaime Lannister.
Alaric watched the confrontation with the cold interest of a master watching a novice's flawed duel. He saw Ned's northern honour compel him to face the challenge head-on. He saw the brief, brutal melee, the deaths of good men, and the final, ignominious moment when one of Ned's own panicked horses fell, crushing the Hand's leg beneath it. A pathetic, predictable end to the confrontation.
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While the realm reeled from the news of the Hand's injury, Alaric's public response was one of impeccable loyalty and grave concern. A raven flew from Serpent's Head to King's Landing, bearing a message for Lord Stark.
My Lord Hand, it read. I am deeply troubled by the news of the cowardly attack upon your person. This breakdown of the King's Peace in the very heart of the capital is an affront to the rule of law. My domain is secure, but my sword is sworn to the Iron Throne and its servants. I would be honoured to dispatch a cohort of my Onyx Legion to King's Landing to assist the City Watch in restoring order and to serve as a personal guard for you until such time as these assassins are brought to justice. The security of the Hand of the King is paramount.
It was a perfect political move. He knew the offer would be refused. The last thing the proud lords at court would accept was a provincial lord sending his private army to police the capital. But by making the offer, Alaric positioned himself as a staunch ally of the Hand, a man of order in a time of chaos. He had placed his loyalty on the public record for all to see, a valuable chit he could cash in later.
Behind this façade of dutiful concern, his real work began. The attack on Ned Stark was the signal he had been waiting for. The first domino had fallen. Now, he would arrange his own pieces to profit from the collapse. He summoned Nervo to the Chamber of Accounts.
"The war between the wolf and the lion has begun, though they do not yet know it," Alaric stated, forgoing any preamble. "We will now execute the 'Harvest Scythe' contingency."
Nervo's eyes, those of a man who now saw commerce as a form of warfare, lit up with understanding. He pulled a specific, heavily-bound ledger from the shelves.
"I want you to begin the quiet liquidation of all our assets and contracts tied to the Westerlands," Alaric commanded. "Sell our iron futures. Terminate our shipping agreements with Lannisport. I want not a single Blackwood dragon invested in the fortunes of House Lannister by the time the moon turns."
"It will cause a minor panic in the Lannisport markets, my lord," Nervo noted. "Our withdrawal will be seen as a lack of confidence."
"Excellent," Alaric said. "Let them panic. A nervous market is a volatile market, and we are insulated from it. Take the capital from the liquidation and pour every single coin into one commodity: grain. Not just futures, Nervo. I want physical possession. Buy the entire autumn harvest of the Riverlands before it is even reaped. Use our warehouses in the Blackwater March, and secretly lease more near Fairmarket and the Trident. When the Lannister armies march, they will burn the Riverlands from the God's Eye to the Red Fork. A famine will follow. And we will be the sole proprietors of the region's food supply."
It was a move of breathtaking cruelty and genius. He was betting on the utter devastation of his own homeland, positioning himself to profit from the starvation of his countrymen. He would sell his grain back to the armies of both sides, at whatever price he chose to name.
His family, the dynasty he was building, was always a part of his calculations. That evening, he dined with Lynesse and their children. Tyber, now a precocious eight-year-old, was detailing the flaws in the strategy of a historical battle he had been studying. Cassia, his quiet six-year-old, was sitting on the floor, stroking the head of a large Irish wolfhound that had its head in her lap. The beast, usually fierce and territorial, was as placid as a kitten in her presence.
Lynesse, hearing the disturbing news from the capital, was visibly anxious. "Alaric, this fighting in the streets… knights being killed… is it safe? Will the war touch us here?"
Alaric looked at the scene before him: his beautiful, high-status wife; his brilliant, magically-infused heir; his strange, powerful daughter. They were the assets he had created, the living embodiment of his legacy. The chaos of the outside world was merely a storm from which he had to shield them.
"My love," he said, his voice a reassuring calm that belied the cold calculations in his mind. "Think of Serpent's Head as the eye of the hurricane. The winds will rage across the Seven Kingdoms, tearing down old houses and destroying ancient lines. But here, we will be untouched. This fortress was built for this very purpose. The world may burn, but our family will be safe. I have foreseen it."
His use of the word "foreseen" was deliberate. He was cultivating his own legend within his family, the myth of the lord who could see the future. It was another tool of control.
He left his family to their peaceful dinner and descended to his sanctum. The world of men was proceeding along its predictable, self-destructive path. It was time to attend to the world of magic.
His scrying confirmed his predictions. He watched as King Robert, his leg bandaged from a minor wound sustained in the street brawl, raged at Ned, forcing him to make peace with the Lannisters. He watched Ned, his leg broken and his honour compromised, reluctantly agree. But the peace was a lie, and Alaric knew it.
He turned his arcane senses to a new task. His knowledge from the books was comprehensive, but it was about the major players. He needed to understand the variables, the agents of chaos like Baelish and Varys. He performed a complex ritual, using a drop of his own blood on the Valyrian dagger and focusing its amplified energy through the obsidian bowl. He did not seek to see a place, but a concept: he sought to see the webs.
The vision was dizzying. He saw the city of King's Landing not as streets and buildings, but as a vast, shimmering web of connections. He saw the golden strands of Lannister wealth, the grey strands of Stark honour, the fiery strands of Baratheon power. But beneath them all, he saw two other networks. A web of shimmering, silver lies that all emanated from a single, mockingbird-shaped node in the heart of the Red Keep. And a web of grey, silken threads that stretched from the dungeons to the docks, a web filled with the whispers of children, all leading back to a patient, eunuch-shaped spider at its centre.
He was seeing the intelligence networks of Littlefinger and Varys. He could not hear their secrets, not yet, but he could see the shape and scope of their influence. He had identified his true rivals in the game.
The final act of the tragedy played out exactly as the book had been written. In his scrying bowl, Alaric watched Robert Baratheon, full of wine and false confidence, go on his fateful hunt in the kingswood. He watched the monstrous boar, a beast of almost unnatural fury, find the King. He watched Robert return to the Red Keep, his belly torn open, dying in a slow, agonizing agony.
He was a ghost in the King's bedchamber. He saw Queen Cersei's crocodile tears. He saw Grand Maester Pycelle's feigned sorrow. He saw Lord Renly flee the city. And he saw Ned Stark stand before his dying friend, as Robert named him Lord Regent and Protector of the Realm.
The last conversation between the stag and the wolf was a poignant, foolish tragedy, and Alaric watched it with the detached interest of a biologist observing the final moments of a magnificent but doomed creature.
When Robert finally died, Alaric felt a surge of cold, thrilling power. The king was dead. The primary pillar holding the fragile peace of the realm together had crumbled. The system was now entering a state of catastrophic failure. The War of the Five Kings was about to begin.
He stood up from his scrying bowl, the images fading from his mind. Everything he had worked for, everything he had planned for, was coming to fruition. The world was about to descend into chaos, and he was the only man who had brought a ledger.
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Alaric walked to a great map of Westeros that was etched onto the stone wall of his sanctum. He looked at the sigils of the great houses, at the pieces on the board.
"Let the games begin," he whispered to the silent, humming darkness of the vault.