GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 385
THUD!
Seventy thousand feet struck the ground as one. The earth groaned beneath them.
That wall of steel and Flame moved forward, slow and inexorable.
Every step the phalanx advanced, the two-hundred-thousand-strong slave army gave back a step. Then another.
Fear was spreading through their ranks like fire through dry grass.
"Hold! Everyone hold your ground!"
On his ornate platform, Good Master Grazdan of Yunkai was drenched in sweat. He slashed the air with his curved blade and screamed himself hoarse.
"They're outnumbered twenty to one! Charge! Bury them in bodies!"
"Overseers! Where are the overseers?! Get them forward! Anyone who retreats dies where they stand!"
The orders went down the chain.
The overseers, whips in hand, laid into the retreating slave soldiers with frantic brutality, trying to drive them back into the fighting.
Then Lynn slowly raised his hand.
He stood atop the dragon's head and looked down over the chaos below , over the slave masters still clinging to their last illusions.
Pathetic.
He shook his head. Then his fingers closed, gently, one by one.
The world went quiet.
No.
Not quiet.
The wind died.
That salt-damp heat rolling in off the sea , simply gone. Vanished without a trace.
The air turned thick. The pressure of it settled against the chest like stone.
Then ,
A bone-deep cold dropped from the sky without warning.
"What — what's happening?"
On the platform, one of the slave masters instinctively pulled his expensive silk robes tighter around himself.
"It's... cold..."
Everyone felt it.
A cold that seemed to reach inside you and freeze the soul itself.
They looked up in bewilderment.
And then they saw something they would never forget for the rest of their lives.
A single small, white snowflake drifted down from the gray sky.
Then a second. A third.
Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
Snow.
In Slaver's Bay , that sweltering, sun-scorched place that barely knew what a cool breeze felt like , it was snowing.
"A... miracle..."
One of the conscripted slaves held out his hand, stunned, and caught a flake in his palm. The cold touch of it shuddered through his whole body.
This wasn't a dream.
On the dragon's back, Tyrion's jaw had somewhere along the way stopped belonging to him. He rubbed his eyes hard, then pinched himself viciously on the arm.
That hurt.
"I have to be dreaming," he murmured. "Or I've had far too much to drink."
Jorah Mormont stood just as dumbstruck. He had seen wonders in his years , more than most men ever lived to claim. But what he was watching now had shattered the outer edge of everything he understood.
Only Daenerys was different.
She watched Lynn's straight-backed silhouette, and in those violet eyes of hers there was nothing left , nothing but absolute, consuming devotion.
The snow fell harder.
The first gentle flurries thickened fast, then faster, swelling into a roaring blizzard that swallowed the sky whole.
WHOOOM!
The wind screamed. Snow tore through the air in blinding sheets. Visibility dropped to nothing , three steps forward and the world disappeared. Everything turned white.
"I can't see! I can't see anything!"
"Where's my army?! Where are my slaves?!"
Grazdan raged on his platform, but the wind ripped his voice apart the instant it left his mouth. He and the other slave masters had lost all control of their forces. They stood on their island in the storm — blind men screaming into nothing — watching two hundred thousand soldiers disappear into that white hell.
For the slave soldiers, the blizzard was catastrophic.
Most of them wore little more than rags. They had nothing between themselves and the cold. Their hands and feet went rigid almost immediately, their grip on their weapons failing. Worse , they had lost all sense of direction. They couldn't see the enemy. They couldn't see their own officers. All they could hear was the shrieking of the wind, like something wailing in agony from the other side of the world.
The formation collapsed entirely.
The slave soldiers scattered through the snow like headless flies , stumbling, crashing into each other, huddling together just to steal a few degrees of warmth from whoever was nearest.
And through all that white chaos, the wall of steel and Flame kept moving.
The Unsullied held their formation through the blizzard without a single break in their lines. The burning spears of Flame in their hands blazed on through the storm , the only source of light in all that howling darkness.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Steady. Measured. Relentless. Their marching carried through the blizzard like a drumbeat, and it struck against the heart of every lost man who heard it.
Then the phalanx hit them.
It slammed into those broken, shivering, will-less slaves like a blade into wet clay.
SCHUNK!
A spear of Flame drove clean through a man's chest. The fire caught instantly, burning his insides to ash. He didn't even have time to scream before he crumpled to the ground.
The slaughter began.
This was not a battle.
This was a harvest.
The Unsullied moved without expression , spear up, thrust, withdraw. Every motion precise as machinery. Row after row of slave soldiers fell before them. Blood soaked into the snow and turned it red, and then fresh snow covered the red, and then that was red too. Screams rang out through the blizzard, and the wind ate them whole.
On their ornate platform, Grazdan and the other slave masters heard only the howling gale and, drifting through it, half-swallowed by the noise, the faint and skin-crawling sounds of men dying.
They couldn't see anything.
They only knew that their army , all two hundred thousand of them , was being devoured out there in the white, one mouthful at a time.
"Devils... they're devils..."
One of the younger Good Masters finally broke. He let out a scream and bolted for the edge of the platform.
He made it two steps.
Grazdan's curved blade punched through his heart from behind with a SCHUNK.
"No one runs!" Grazdan's face had gone feral. "Stand where you are! Keep watching!"
Time passed. It was impossible to say how much.
The blizzard began to ease. Slowly. Visibility crept back, inch by inch.
Grazdan stared hard into the thinning white, straining to see.
Then a shape resolved through the snow.
A glowing outline. A burning spear.
Then another. And another.
A rank. Two ranks. Three.
The Unsullied emerged from the field of corpses and crimson snow , rank after rank in black armor, spears of Flame burning in their hands , and they walked forward until they stood before the platform.
Grazdan's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
The Unsullied at the front of the formation raised his head. Beneath his helm, only his eyes showed , flat, empty, utterly without feeling.
He lifted his spear of Flame and aimed it directly at Grazdan.
➤ Next: Epilogue — Steel and Blood