Chapter 29: The Serpent Strikes Back
The discovery of the marzipan dragon, a grotesque parody of his imperial sigil pierced with silver pins, had been more than an insult; it was a catalyst. The cold, intellectual curiosity King Baelon I Targaryen had initially felt towards the Faceless Man assassin had ignited into a frigid, burning rage. This was not the reactive anger of a common man, but the focused, absolute wrath of a being who considered himself beyond mortal retribution. The Voldemort soul that formed the core of his ancient consciousness, a master of terror and domination, now fully awakened to this personal affront. Meereen, and its unseen tormentor, would learn what it meant to provoke a true dragon.
The Great Pyramid, once a symbol of Ghiscari languor and Baelon's recent, orderly conquest, was transformed overnight into the nerve center of a furious, city-wide manhunt. Lord Larys Strong, already tasked with tripling his efforts, found himself the instrument of a king whose intensity was both terrifying and invigorating. Baelon's previous calm had been replaced by a visible, almost palpable aura of menace. His orders were precise, his expectations absolute, and his patience for failure nonexistent.
"I want this 'child of dust and whispers' found, Lord Larys," Baelon had stated, his voice like the slither of a glacier, as he stood before the Master of Whisperers in the pre-dawn gloom, the crushed remnants of the marzipan dragon still a sticky smear on his obsidian desk. "Not just identified. Found. I want them brought before me. And I want to understand the full extent of Braavos's impudence."
Larys, his face a mask of grim efficiency, launched a crackdown that made previous security measures seem lax. Curfews became absolute, with violators facing immediate and brutal punishment, often administered by the increasingly zealous Freedmen Cohorts who saw any challenge to Baelon's order as a threat to their own newfound status. House-to-house searches were conducted in sectors deemed 'high interest' – those housing artisans, foreigners, or individuals with known, however tenuous, links to Braavosi trade. The screams of the interrogated and the fear of the innocent became the new soundtrack of Meereen by night. The city, which had just begun to breathe a fractured sigh of relief under a new, albeit harsh, order, was now plunged back into a palpable terror.
Baelon himself was no longer content to merely observe or delegate the hunt. He was the serpent, and this was his domain; the rat would be flushed out. He spent hours in his study, not with maps of conquest, but with charts detailing the known abilities of the Faceless Men, gleaned from ancient Valyrian texts and Larys's most secret archives. He sought patterns, weaknesses, anything that could be exploited.
Umbraxys, his shadow familiar, was a constant, coiling presence around him, its senses extended throughout the Pyramid and far into the city. The shadow dragon, an entity of immense primal power, shared its master's cold fury. Its unseen tendrils probed deeper, colder, more invasively than before, seeking not just physical intruders, but also the subtle tell-tale signs of alien consciousness or magic that did not belong. The very stones of Meereen seemed to hum with their combined, oppressive vigilance.
The Dragon's Net
Baelon's counter-offensive was multi-layered, a blend of brutal force, intricate espionage, and his own formidable arcane power.
He initiated a series of large-scale scrying rituals, sequestering himself for hours with his most trusted Royal Academy mages. Using a great silver basin filled with water drawn from the deepest, purest wells beneath Meereen, and infused with his own blood and potent Valyrian incantations, he sought to pierce the veil of anonymity surrounding the assassin. The images that flickered across the water's surface were often chaotic, reflections of the city's fear, fleeting glimpses of shadowed alleys and hidden rooms. But occasionally, a shard of clarity would emerge – a specific architectural detail, a pattern of movement, the echo of a foreign tongue. Each fragment was meticulously recorded, analyzed, and fed into Larys's growing database of potential leads.
Understanding that the Faceless Men thrived on misdirection, Baelon began to weave his own deceptions. He allowed rumors to circulate – of his impending departure for Astapor, of a critical weakness discovered in the Pyramid's foundations, of a secret meeting with a supposed Braavosi informant. Several times, he even employed magically crafted illusions of himself, moving through less secure parts of the city or holding meetings in decoy locations, each scenario a carefully constructed trap, monitored by hidden guards and magical sensors. The assassin, however, proved too disciplined or too cunning to take such obvious bait. No direct attacks were made on these phantoms.
The city itself was transformed into a vast surveillance network. Baelon decreed that every citizen was now an extension of his eyes and ears. Massive rewards – gold, property, even positions of minor authority – were offered for any information leading to the capture of foreign agents or those spreading dissent. Conversely, the punishment for withholding such information, or for sheltering suspects, was widely publicized: swift and agonizing death, not just for the individual, but often for their entire household. Fear became Baelon's most effective informant.
Artisans' guilds were meticulously scrutinized. Larys's men, armed with detailed descriptions of the marzipan dragon and the carved wooden box, interrogated every confectioner, woodworker, and jeweler in Meereen. The unique, pale wood of the box proved particularly vexing; no local craftsman recognized it. Samples were sent via swift raven-carried ships back to Volantis and even King's Landing for identification by Royal Academy scholars there. The silver used for the pins was analyzed and found to be of a purity rarely seen outside the coffers of the Iron Bank of Braavos or the most ancient Valyrian hoards. Each clue was a breadcrumb, tantalizingly small, yet pointing insistently northwards.
During one particularly brutal interrogation of a suspected Braavosi merchant known for dealing in rare goods, a man whose defiance had been systematically broken down by Larys's more persuasive agents, a name was finally extracted. Not the name of the assassin, but of a reclusive, half-mad mystic who lived in the labyrinthine under-city of Meereen, a warren of forgotten tunnels and Ghiscari ruins. This mystic, it was whispered, could procure items that were otherwise unobtainable, items that "passed through shadows."
Baelon, upon hearing this, dispatched Centurion Kael and his most hardened Freedmen, not to arrest the mystic, but to bring him, unharmed if possible, to the Pyramid. He suspected a dead end, another layer of the assassin's misdirection, but no stone would be left unturned.
The Shadow's Dance Continues
The Faceless Man, or Woman, did not remain idle in the face of Baelon's tightening net. Their response was not one of fear, but of chilling adaptation. The overt taunts ceased. The atmosphere within the Pyramid shifted from one of acute, punctuated terror to a gnawing, sustained paranoia.
For a week, nothing happened. No strange objects appeared. No guards reported unsettling nightmares. The taster who had collapsed remained alive but mindless, a living testament to something potent but untraceable. This sudden silence was, in its own way, more unnerving than the direct provocations. Had the assassin fled? Or were they merely biding their time, allowing Baelon's forces to exhaust themselves chasing phantoms?
Larys Strong believed the latter. "They are professionals, Your Grace," he advised Baelon, his voice low and troubled. "They understand patience. This silence… it is a weapon in itself. It breeds complacency in some, and reckless overreach in others."
Baelon knew Larys was right. He felt the strain on his own forces. The constant state of high alert was unsustainable. Guards grew weary. Scholars made mistakes in their scrying. Informants, eager for rewards, began to fabricate leads, wasting precious time and resources.
Then, the assassin shifted tactics, moving from psychological warfare against Baelon himself to something designed to disrupt his fledgling administration and sow chaos within the city.
Lord Gyles Grafton, a Westerosi nobleman appointed as Baelon's chief administrator for Meereen's food distribution – a vital role in maintaining public order – was found dead in his locked chambers. There were no marks on his body, no signs of struggle. The initial assessment by the Royal Academy physicians was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the heart. But Larys, examining the scene with his usual meticulousness, found a single, almost invisible anomaly: a faint, sweet scent clinging to the lord's bedclothes, a scent that was not native to Essos and which, upon deeper magical analysis, revealed trace elements of a highly sophisticated neurotoxin that induced cardiac arrest while leaving almost no other trace. The toxin was known only in the most esoteric Braavosi pharmacopeia.
The message was clear: the Faceless Man could strike down even Baelon's high-ranking officials, seemingly at will, bypassing guards and wards. Fear rippled through the Westerosi and Volantene administrators now staffing Baelon's imperial machine in Meereen. Who would be next?
Baelon was furious. This was not just an attack on an individual; it was an attack on his order, a demonstration that his protection was not absolute. He publicly declared Lord Grafton a martyr to the cause of Meereen's liberation, murdered by cowardly agents of the old slaver regime desperate to restore their tyranny. He used the incident to further justify his crackdown, but privately, he recognized the assassin's skill and their willingness to escalate beyond symbolic gestures.
"This creature is more than just a blade in the dark, Speaker," Umbraxys communicated, its cold intellect analyzing the new development. "It understands the sinews of power, how to incite fear not just in the target, but in those who serve him. It seeks to isolate you."
Voldemort's essence within Baelon seethed. "Isolation is a familiar state, Umbraxys. It has never hindered me. But this… this requires a more direct counter. The city is too large, the shadows too numerous for a purely defensive posture. We must force its hand, make it come to us, but on our terms, in a place of our choosing, where its anonymity is stripped away."
Imperial Ambitions Amidst the Hunt
Even as the shadow war raged, Baelon did not neglect his larger imperial duties. He understood that to appear consumed by this single threat would be a sign of weakness. His gaze remained fixed on the horizon of his ambitions.
He received envoys from the Lhazareen, the Lamb Men of the southern plains, who, having heard of the fall of their Ghiscari oppressors, cautiously sought treaties and trade. Baelon received them with regal condescension, offering them 'protection' under the Valyrian Protectorate in exchange for tribute in wool, hides, and sturdy recruits for his labor corps. It was another piece of the Essosi puzzle falling into place.
From Westeros, Lord Paramount Orryn Baratheon of the Stormlands sent word of a minor rebellion amongst a few disgruntled marcher lords, nostalgic for old privileges. Baelon dispatched a curt reply, authorizing Orryn to crush the dissent with overwhelming force and make examples of the ringleaders. The Iron Throne's peace, even across the Narrow Sea, would be maintained by an iron fist. Helaena, Larys reported, had taken to wandering the gardens of the Red Keep, whispering to the flowers about "a serpent eating its own tail if it focuses only on the sting of a gnat." Baelon dismissed it, yet the imagery lingered, an unwelcome barb.
The Meereen branch of the Royal Academy, under the directorship of a stern, brilliant Volantene scholar named Archmaester Vaellyn (a man whose loyalty Baelon had secured through a combination of lavish funding and subtle magical compulsion), began its work in earnest. Their primary directive, aside from the mundane cataloging of Ghiscari spoils, was to research the specific magical and geographical vulnerabilities of Braavos. Baelon wanted to know everything: the true nature of the fogs that shielded the city, the secrets of their legendary fleet's construction, the foundational weaknesses of the Titan itself, and any forgotten Valyrian lore that spoke of subjugating the defiant city of canals. He was already planning a war on multiple fronts – one against the assassin in his midst, and a slower, more insidious one against the power that had dispatched them.
Umbraxys, in their shared consciousness, proved invaluable in this. The shadow dragon's ancient memory held fragments of lore from epochs before Valyria's rise, echoes of powers that had shaped the world. It guided Vaellyn's researchers towards obscure texts and forgotten pathways of knowledge, hinting at elemental vulnerabilities the Braavosi might possess.
A Glimmer in the Dark
Centurion Kael and his Freedmen returned from the under-city with their quarry: the mystic known as Old Anathos. He was a withered husk of a man, his eyes clouded with what seemed like cataracts but held an unnerving, milky luminescence. He was brought, not in chains, but with a strange deference from Kael, who reported that Anathos had simply agreed to come, stating, "The Dragon King calls. The threads of fate tighten."
Baelon received him not in his grand audience chamber, but in a small, private room, attended only by Larys Strong and Umbraxys's unseen but palpable presence.
"They say you procure things that pass through shadows, old one," Baelon began, his voice neutral.
Anathos's head tilted, his milky eyes seeming to look through Baelon rather than at him. "Shadows have many paths, Great King. Some carry whispers, some carry treasures, some carry… emptiness." His voice was a dry rustle, like autumn leaves.
"The box," Larys interjected, holding up a precise drawing of the marzipan dragon's container. "And the silver pins. Did they pass through your hands?"
Anathos was silent for a long moment, his gaze unfocused. Then, a faint, almost pitying smile touched his lips. "A child of many faces sought a vessel for a bitter gift. A vessel of pale wood, from a land where winter's breath is long. The pins… ah, the silver. Pure as a frozen tear, sharp as a serpent's tooth. Such things can be found, if one knows which shadows to ask."
"Who was this child?" Baelon's voice was like steel.
"Faceless," Anathos whispered. "As the god they serve. A whisper in the wind, a ripple in the water. Sometimes boy, sometimes girl. Sometimes old, sometimes young. They are the void that walks. I saw only the coin they offered – ancient, from a city long drowned beneath the waves, yet still bearing the mark of the Unseen."
This was more than Larys had managed to glean in weeks. A child, or one who could appear as such. Pale wood from a cold land – perhaps the northern Wolfswood in Westeros, or even further afield, beyond the Shivering Sea. Silver pure as a frozen tear. And a coin from a drowned city.
"Can you find them again?" Baelon pressed, leaning forward, his eyes boring into the mystic.
Anathos shook his head slowly. "They find you, Great King. Or they do not. They are a current. To seek them is to seek the wind." He then looked directly at Baelon, and for the first time, his milky eyes seemed to focus with an almost painful intensity. "But know this, Serpent Who Dwells in Shadow: they seek not just your life, but your unmaking. They are the price for a power that defies the natural turn of the Great Wheel. They are the echo of all the screams your new order is built upon."
Before Baelon or Larys could question him further, a tremor ran through Old Anathos. A faint, dark mist seemed to seep from his pores, and he collapsed, not violently, but gently, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Dead. The faint scent of the unknown neurotoxin that had killed Lord Grafton was briefly, almost imperceptibly, present in the air before dissipating.
Larys cursed under his breath, rushing to the body. Baelon remained seated, his expression unreadable, though his fists were clenched so tightly his knuckles were white. The assassin had silenced their only potential link, right under his nose, within the heart of his fortress, using the same subtle poison. But Anathos had given him something: confirmation of the assassin's polymorphic nature, clues to the origin of their materials, and a chilling insight into their motive – not just a contract, but a quasi-religious opposition to his very being.
"The price of eternity," Baelon murmured, recalling Helaena's words. He rose, his eyes burning with a cold, implacable fire. "It seems the Faceless God and its little ghost are more ambitious than I credited." He looked at Larys. "The mystic spoke of pale wood from a land where winter's breath is long. Focus your inquiries on any recent shipments, any travelers, any connection, no matter how remote, to the northernmost regions. And the coin from a drowned city… an intriguing detail. Search the records of Valyrian outposts, pre-Doom. See what drowned cities paid tribute or traded in such currency."
He then turned, not towards the door, but towards the empty air where Umbraxys invisibly coiled. "They have struck again, Umbraxys. Closer this time. More directly. They believe they are untouchable, that their god shields them." A terrifying smile touched his lips. "We shall teach them a new prayer. A prayer to a power far older, far darker, than any many-faced deity of fleeting mortals. The Serpent is no longer just coiled. It is time to truly strike back." His mind was already racing, formulating a new, far more aggressive, and infinitely more dangerous plan to draw out and destroy this faceless, formless enemy. The shadow war was about to enter a new, bloodier phase.