I’ll upload two more chapters if we 80 power stones.
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Damn these kids are good at this.
I sat cross-legged on a battered wooden stool that wobbled with every shift of my weight, staring down once more at the detailed analysis of underworld secrets scrawled across a torn and filthy scrap of parchment.
The sheepskin was yellowed with age and stained with what looked suspiciously like old mutton grease and spilled small beer.
The handwriting was crude, shaky, and jagged, clearly scratched out by a hand that had spent far more time gripping a pickpocketed coin than a quill.
The writer was barely literate, spelling words with cheerful phonetic abandon, but the crude letters were sharp enough for me to decipher every juicy, scandalous detail hidden within the text.
How a bunch of grubby street rats had even managed to acquire a sheet of parchment, a commodity more precious than silver in these reeking slums, and find someone capable of stringing sentences together was a mystery for the ages.
As for the secrets themselves, they were a magnificent cocktail of petty neighborhood gossip and genuinely dangerous criminal conspiracies.
There were whimsical little nuggets of local filth, such as the tavern keeper down on Eel Street who loudly advertised his famous savory bird stew to the gullible masses while secretly butchering and boiling fat wharf rats caught down by the drainage pipes to pad his profit margins.
There was the burly hammersmith whose shop sat directly across from a cobbler, a man who faithfully strapped on his leather apron every morning only to sneak out under the cloak of night to visit the expensive brothels on the Street of Silk while cheating on his long-suffering wife.
What the smithy did not know, of course, was that his pious wife had a secret lover of her own tucked away in the loft whenever the forge fires went cold.
Then there were the truly foul characters padding out the margins of the report.
A traveling bard from the sun-drenched Reach had been making his lazy way from tavern to tavern day after day, strumming his lute and using every ounce of greasy charm in his arsenal to seduce every naive young maid foolish enough to listen to his romantic ballads.
The rogue had managed to get a thirteen-year-old girl pregnant with a bastard child while swearing up and down on the Seven that he would marry her before skipping town, though his actual plan involved running like a coward toward Dragonstone at the first hint of daylight.
Beside that sordid tale were a few entries so utterly ridiculous and depraved that they made me seriously doubt whether they were clever slanders concocted by rival gangs or actual slices of medieval reality.
One entry claimed the local stable owner was engaging in explicit nocturnal affections with his prized riding mares, while another whispered of a wealthy local cuckold who enjoyed standing in his own doorway and inviting passing strangers to take his wife for the evening.
There was so much chaotic noise and random garbage cluttering the page that it took me several long hours of careful filtering to extract the nuggets of intelligence that actually mattered and held a ring of cold truth.
There was a particularly juicy case of harbor corruption involving a high-ranking customs official who had gladly accepted a heavy pouch of silver stags to look the other way.
The harbour master had knowingly permitted a massive oak barrel supposedly filled with harmless sweet arbor wine to pass uninspected into the heart of King’s Landing, when the heavy cask was actually crammed to the wooden staves with banned Valyrian poisons and unregistered Qohorik steel blades.
Then there was the pious missionary of the Faith of the Seven, a high-ranking holy man dispatched straight from the Reach to preach rigid moral purity and temperance in the royal court every single morning, only to sneak out and visit the seediest brothels three times a week under the cover of darkness.
What was wrong with the people hailing from the Reach that made them such hypersexual hypocrites?
Did none of them actually bother to read the holy texts they waved about, or was mandatory celibacy just a polite suggestion for everyone except the peasants?
The parchment also listed a terrifying catalog of systemic corruption crawling through the ranks of the City Watch.
It made grim sense when you considered that there was no centralized, professional governing body to whip the gold-cloaks into shape, divide them into proper regiments, or enforce a strict chain of command.
The city guards were running rampant with unchecked bribery, shaking down frightened merchants for copper protection money, operating underground dice and blood-fighting rings in abandoned cellars, and taking whatever they wanted from helpless citizens without any fear of royal justice.
I set the long, grease-stained sheet of parchment down on the wobbly wooden table and let out a long, weary sigh, rubbing my thumb and forefinger against my aching forehead.
Slowly lifting my gaze, I stared across the dim, lantern-lit cellar at the ragged assembly of street urchins standing expectantly in the shadows.
“Just how many people do you grease-stained little bastards even have working for you across this entire wretched city?” I asked, my voice carrying a dry, flat note of disbelief.
Pate shifted his weight from one scuffed boot to the other, blinking his wide, suspicious eyes.
He glanced around at the motley crew of ragged children clustered behind him in the gloom.
“Do not rightly know, milord.
We just told every cutpurse, runner, and stable boy we know to keep their eyes wide open and report back whatever juicy bits they could dig up from the gutters.” I looked over the cluster of kids again, counting at least ten distinct bodies crammed into the tiny, foul-smelling room.
Why on earth had Pate brought such a small army of witnesses to our clandestine meeting?
A cynical voice in the back of my modern mind whispered that perhaps he planned to double-cross me, refuse my terms, or signal his older cutthroat friends to jump me in the dark and rob me blind.
Yet I took one look at their scrawny arms, dirt-caked cheeks, and threadbare tunics, and almost laughed aloud at the absurdity of the thought.
It instantly reminded me of those ridiculous internet hypothetical debates from my previous life, where people endlessly argued over how many five-year-old children an average adult male could successfully defeat in unarmed combat before getting completely overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
I had always firmly believed that I could easily take at least twenty of them without breaking a sweat, and looking at this shivering lot, my confidence remained entirely unshaken.
Realizing that I had fallen into a deep, meditative silence for far too long, I cleared my throat and broke the quiet.
“And tell me, are all of you wretched little orphans or genuine street rats born and raised in the filth of Flea Bottom?” Pate swallowed hard, nervously shifting his weight back to his left foot.
“Not truly, milord.
While all of us here are just kids trying to survive, a few have families living in the better districts, and some even sneak out from doing menial kitchen work inside the royal castle itself.” Nodding slowly as I weighed his words, I slid my hand deep into the heavy leather coin pouch hanging at my belt, my fingers instantly finding the smooth, heavy edges of a genuine gold dragon.
I pulled it out into the dim candlelight.
The moment the rich yellow metal caught the faint amber glow, every single pair of hungry eyes in the room locked onto it with the laser-like intensity of starving wolves staring at a fresh kill.
Money in Westeros was a profoundly weird concept, especially when you considered the economic laws laid down by the great maester George himself.
While anyone paying attention already knew that the old man was notoriously terrible with numbers and scale, his financial inconsistencies became painfully hilarious the moment you looked at the currency.
A single gold dragon was a staggering fortune for a common working man, enough to purchase a fully trained warhorse, acquire a magnificent suit of tempered steel chainmail, or comfortably fund a skilled artisan and his entire household for an entire year.
Yet, at the same time, grand lords like Robert Baratheon would casually toss around twenty or forty thousand gold dragons in a single weekly tourney prize purse as if the coins were copper pennies dropped down a well.
The macroeconomics made less sense than a fantasy novel written by a hyperactive squirrel, but value was entirely a matter of collective delusion.
Weighing the heavy disk of gold in my palm for a final moment, I flicked my wrist and tossed it through the air.
Pate lunged forward with the frantic reflexes of a starving alley cat, catching the heavy coin cleanly between his two palms before it could hit the filthy floor.
“That is your pay for this month of intelligence gathering,” I instructed, letting my gaze sweep slowly across every single face in the room so that every last urchin knew I was honoring the bargain.
“Make sure you distribute the shares equally among yourselves.
Continue the network, keep your ears pressed against every tavern wall in the city, and if the quality of your secrets remains this high, I will double your payout next month.” Without waiting for a chorus of grateful murmurs or groveling bows, I pushed myself up off the wobbly wooden stool, turned my back on the assembly, and strode toward the heavy oak door of the dilapidated hovel.
I pulled it open and stepped out into the damp, choking alleyways of the district that would eventually earn the grim, permanent moniker of Flea Bottom.
Was it genuinely a wise tactical decision to hand a small fortune in solid gold over to a pack of ambitious street urchins?
Probably not.
It was the kind of reckless move that usually ended with someone getting a rusty dagger slipped between their ribs in a dark alley when the kids realized how much wealth they were handling.
Only time would tell if things would deteriorate into absolute chaos or blossom into an effective espionage network.
There was also the terrifying risk that if someone caught wind of my little shadow operation, the blame would fall squarely on my tiny royal shoulders, which would initiate a massive domestic crisis.
Once again, only time would provide the definitive answer to whether this dangerous gamble was worth the trouble.
“What on earth are you planning to do with that filthy piece of parchment tucked into your doublet, my prince?” a low, gravelly voice rumbled from the shadows beside the alley wall.
I turned my head to find Ser Humfrey standing at attention, his heavy steel plate armor clanking softly as he shifted his weight.
The veteran knight looked completely ridiculous standing in the middle of a reeking alleyway, radiating an aura of lethal, armored competence that made passing beggars cross to the other side of the dirt road in abject terror.
I reached down, slipping my fingers into my pocket to stroke the rough, grease-stained edges of the secret-filled report.
“I am going to hand it directly to my mother,” I answered smoothly, offering the knight a very wicked little smile.
I certainly hope those dirty little street rats were telling the truth…