A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

the trees. “Are you the last?
Baker boy said there was a girl.”
    â€œShe ran off when she heard you coming,” Lommy said. “You

made a lot of noise.” And Arya thought,
Run, Weasel, run as far as you
can, run and hide and never come back.
    â€œTell us where we can find that whoreson Dondarrion, and there’ll be a hot
meal in it for you.”
    â€œWho?” said Lommy blankly.
    â€œI told you, this lot don’t know no more than those cunts in the village.
Waste o’ bloody time.”
    One of the spearmen drifted over to Lommy. “Something wrong with your leg,
boy?”
    â€œIt got hurt.”
    â€œCan you walk?” He sounded concerned.
    â€œNo,” said Lommy. “You got to carry me.”
    â€œThink so?” The man lifted his spear casually and drove the point through the
boy’s soft throat. Lommy never even had time to yield again. He jerked once,
and that was all. When the man pulled his spear loose, blood sprayed out in a
dark fountain. “Carry him, he says,” he muttered, chuckling.

TYRION
    T hey had warned him to dress warmly. Tyrion Lannister took them at their
word. He was garbed in heavy quilted breeches and a woolen doublet, and over it
all he had thrown the shadowskin cloak he had acquired in the Mountains of the
Moon. The cloak was absurdly long, made for a man twice his height. When he was
not ahorse, the only way to wear the thing was to wrap it around him several
times, which made him look like a ball of striped fur.
    Even so, he was glad he had listened. The chill in the long dank vault
went bone deep. Timett had chosen to retreat back up to the cellar after a
brief taste of the cold below. 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.
Tyrion lifted one for inspection. It was round and ruddy, a fat clay
grapefruit. A little big for his hand, but it would fit comfortably in the grip
of a normal man, he knew. The pottery was thin, so fragile that even he had
been warned not to squeeze too tightly, lest he crush it in his fist. The clay
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 toward the lip of the jar when Tyrion tilted it
to peer inside. The color would be a murky green, he knew, but the poor light
made that impossible to confirm. “Thick,” he observed.
    â€œThat is from the cold, my lord,” 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 Tyrion found almost as annoying as
their custom of hinting at the vast secret stores of knowledge that they wanted
him to think they possessed. Once theirs had been a powerful guild, 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.”
    â€œThat 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.”
    Tyrion remembered the red priest Thoros of Myr and his flaming sword. Even a
thin coating of wildfire could burn for an hour. Thoros always needed a new
sword after a melee, but Robert had been fond of the man and ever glad to
provide one. “Why

doesn’t it seep into the clay as well?”
    â€œOh, but it does,” said Hallyne. “There is a vault below this one where we
store the older pots. Those from King Aerys’s day. It was his fancy to have the
jars made in the shapes of fruits. Very perilous fruits indeed, my lord Hand,
and, hmmm,
riper
now than ever, if you take my meaning. We have
sealed them with wax and pumped the lower