The King of Winters

Chapter 39

Rhaegar

The king was dressed warm particularly that day. He was garbed in heavy quilted breeches and a woolen doublet, and over it all he had thrown the heavy black samite cloak.

He was glad that he had dressed warmly. The chill in the long dank vault went bone deep. They were somewhere under the hill of Rhaenys, behind the Guildhall of the Alchemists. The damp stone walls were splotchy with nitre, and the only light came from the sealed iron-and-glass oil lamp that Hallyne the Pyromancer carried so gingerly.

Gingerly indeed . . . and these would be the ginger jars. Rhaegar lifted one for inspection. It was round and ruddy, a fat glass jar glowing green inside. It fit comfortably in his grip with no hint of slippery. The vessel was thin, so fragile that he had been warned not to squeeze too tightly, lest he crush it in his fist. The glass felt roughened, pebbled. Hallyne told him that was intentional. "A smooth pot is more apt to slip from a man's grasp."

The wildfire oozed slowly inside the jar when Rhaegar tilted the vessel in his hand. The color was a bright green, so bright that it glowed inside the jar. "It is thick," he said.

"That is from the cold, Your Grace," said Hallyne, a pallid man with soft damp hands and an obsequious manner. He was dressed in striped black-and-scarlet robes trimmed with sable, but the fur looked more than a little patchy and moth-eaten. "As it warms, the substance will flow more easily, like lamp oil."

The substance was the pyromancers' own term for wildfire. They called each other wisdom as well, which Rhaegar found almost as annoying as their custom of hinting at the vast secret stores of knowledge that they wanted him to think they possessed. His father had been so fond of the wildfire and the pyromancers alike. He went so far as to keep a favorite one to burn people and had even made him as his hand. He was so obsessed with wildfire to even meet his end with it. Once the alchemist's guild had been a powerful one, but in recent centuries the maesters of the Citadel had supplanted the alchemists almost everywhere. Now only a few of the older order remained, and they no longer even pretended to transmute metals . . .

. . . but they could make wildfire. "Water will not quench it, I am told."

"That is so. Once it takes fire, the substance will burn fiercely until it is no more. More, it will seep into cloth, wood, leather, even steel, so they take fire as well."

"Why doesn't it seep into the glass then?"

"Oh, but it does," said Hallyne. "There is a vault below this one where we store the older pots. Those from your father's day. It was his fancy to have the jars made in the shapes of fruits. Very perilous fruits indeed, Your Grace, and, hmmm, riper now than ever, if you take my meaning. We have sealed them with wax and pumped the lower vault full of water, but even so . . . by rights they ought to have been destroyed, but we have very little masters who can make wildfire of such quality, the few acolytes who now remain are unequal to the task. And much of the stock we made for King Aerys was lost. Only last year, two hundred jars were discovered in a storeroom beneath the Great Sept of Baelor. No one could recall how they came there, but I'm sure I do not need to tell you that the High Septon was beside himself with terror. I myself saw that they were safely moved. I had a cart filled with sand, and sent our most able acolytes. We worked only by night, we—"

"—did a splendid job, I have no doubt." Rhaegar placed the jar he'd been holding back among its fellows. They covered the table, standing in orderly rows of four and marching away into the subterranean dimness. And there were other tables beyond, many other tables. He knew how those jars came to be there. His father had ordered his ever faithful servants to blow up the city rather than to surrender it to him. Only by the efforts of Ser Jaime the whole thing was spared and Rhaegar had tasked Ser Jaime to find and eliminate all the pyromancers Rossart had placed throughout the city. They had removed most of the wildfire caches his father's Hand had hid in various parts of the city. It seems as if I still have to search more for the wildfire hidden in his city.