GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 382 - Assembling the Army

A black tide surged from the gates of Astapor.

A hundred thousand feet hit the ground in unison, and the earth trembled.

Atop the pyramid, Tyrion Lannister stood with his mouth hanging open, staring down at the steel flood marching toward the horizon.

His throat had gone dry.

He had seen his father Tywin's Westerlands army. He had seen Stannis's supposedly unstoppable forces.

Compared to what was below him, those were children playing at war.

Thirty thousand Westerlands soldiers could shake all of Westeros to its core. But Astapor sat on Slaver's Bay, and the population here was almost impossible to fathom. The Dothraki had poured slaves into these cities for generations , that was the one advantage a place like Essos held over anything the West could offer.

"Can they... can they really win?"

Tyrion muttered it under his breath.

He meant the slave masters of Yunkai and Meereen.

Daenerys stood beside Lynn, watching the army that belonged to her. Her violet eyes held a brightness that had never been there before.

She didn't answer Tyrion's question.

The answer was already obvious.

Lynn didn't look at the army.

He closed his eyes.

His mental energy crossed the distance in an instant, vast and precise, and the whole of Slaver's Bay opened before him like a map drawn in living detail.

...

Yunkai.

At the top of the Golden Pyramid, the Wise Masters had dissolved into chaos at the news from Astapor.

"Seventy thousand! He sends seventy thousand men and thinks he can attack both our cities at once?!"

A Wise Master , fat enough to sweat through his robes , shrieked the words, his face flushed with the specific fury of a man who felt he was being looked down on.

"Is he mad?! Who does he think he is? A god?"

"This is an insult to us! An insult to great Yunkai!"

Another Wise Master, Grazdan mo Graz, one of the most powerful slave merchants in the city, slammed his fist on the table.

"We will make him bleed for this."

"I've already reached the Great Masters of Meereen. They've agreed to march."

"Our combined forces will assemble on the plain east of Yaros Island. Open terrain — perfect for our numbers."

"Numbers?" A voice cracked slightly. "Do we even have enough?"

"The Unsullied are fully armored."

Grazdan's face twisted into something ugly.

"Then go get more."

"Every man working in the fields, every man digging in the mines — anyone who can hold a weapon, conscript them all."

"Tell them that if they win, they'll earn their freedom."

A younger Wise Master frowned. "But... we've never actually—"

"Now we have." Grazdan cut him off without looking up. "Extraordinary times."

"Tell the overseers to move fast. I don't care how , whips, branding irons, whatever it takes."

"In three days, I want fifty thousand slave soldiers assembled at the Skahazadhan crossing."

"Let them bleed the Unsullied dry before the real fight even starts."

...

The Skahazadhan River.

This was the river that had fed the Ghiscari plains for a thousand years. Now it had become a word that meant tears and blood.

Along the banks, overseers drove slaves with whips, dragging them out of fields and villages by force.

A gray-haired old man clutched his son , fifteen, maybe sixteen , and wept with the kind of grief that tears the throat.

"Please, my lord. Please. He's just a child."

"He can barely hold a hoe. How is he supposed to fight?!"

The overseer kicked him in the face. The old man hit the ground and didn't move.

"Get out of the way, you old wretch."

"It's an honor for dogs like you to serve the Wise Masters."

The overseer grinned and grabbed the boy , still shaking, still staring at his father on the ground , and shoved a sharpened wooden stick into his hands.

"There. That's your weapon."

"And don't even think about running."

He pointed at the boy.

"One step back. One order ignored. I twitch my finger, and your head comes off."

The boy's face went white.

He looked at his father, pinned under the overseer's boot, and he didn't know if the man was alive or dead. He looked at the others around him , conscripted like him, their faces hollowed out with the same despair.

Tears slid down his cheeks without a sound.

He was shoved onto a barge already packed past bearing. It pushed off from the bank and carried them downstream, toward the place they called the front lines.

The same scene played out at every crossing along the Skahazadhan.

Thousands upon thousands of slaves. Some marching by land. Some loaded onto boats and shipped forward, boatload after boatload.

No armor. No real weapons.

Their only purpose was to spend their lives buying a little time for the forces waiting behind them.

...

Astapor.

Top of the pyramid.

Lynn opened his eyes.

He had seen it. All of it. The madness and cruelty of the slave masters, and the innocent men being herded toward slaughter.

Daenerys looked at him, something worried moving across her face.

"What is it? Did something happen?"

Lynn didn't answer.

He turned and looked at Tyrion.

"You said they conscripted over a hundred thousand?"

Tyrion nodded. "That's what the intelligence says, yes."

"No." Lynn shook his head. "It's not a hundred thousand."

"The number's still climbing."

"My estimate is over two hundred thousand by now."

"What?!"

Tyrion and Jorah Mormont said it at the same time.

Two hundred thousand?

Impossible. Even if they conscripted every man in Slaver's Bay, they couldn't put together two hundred thousand soldiers in this short a time.

"My lord." Jorah's voice had gone tight. "Are you certain?"

If it was really that many, this battle had just become something else entirely.

Lynn didn't explain.

He looked at Tyrion and asked a question that seemed to have nothing to do with any of it.

"What do you think is the single most important quality a ruler needs?"

Tyrion blinked. He hadn't expected that.

He thought for a moment. "Wisdom? Justice?" He paused. "Mercy?"

"No."

Lynn smiled.

"Ruthlessness."

He didn't wait for their reactions. He walked to the edge of the pyramid, faced the open sky, and let out one long, sharp whistle.

A single breath of silence.

Then a dragon's roar split the world open from above the clouds.

An enormous black shadow tore through the overcast sky and dropped toward them, vast and annihilating, as though the heavens themselves were falling.

➤ Next: Routine Ultimatum — Steel and Blood