Lyonel hauled the five-pound ledger up the stairs.
Casterly Rock did not believe in mercy.
Each step was higher than a normal stair, built for men with long legs and no patience for anything else.
By the time he reached his floor he was breathing like a turtle asked to carry its own shell.
He pushed the door open.
Not bad.
Tywin had not put him with the servants.
One room of his own.
A bed.
A desk.
A shelf of books.
Last night’s charcoal still dead in the corner hearth.
He dropped the ledger on the desk.
The thud jumped the quills.
The blue panel opened on its own.
[Daily draw cooldown remaining: 8 hours 12 minutes.] Outside, the sun had just cleared the water.
It laid a coat of gold across the cliffs until the rock looked minted.
Eight hours.
He pulled out a chair, sat, and opened the first page.
All of it handwritten.
Yellow parchment.
Ink cramped and crooked enough to make his temples throb.
The original owner could read.
That was the kindest thing that could be said for it.
Westerlands account terms sat on the page looking familiar and meaning almost nothing.
Lyonel stared at the first line of figures for half a minute.
He shut the book.
“Fine.
After dark.” Waiting was a miserable taste.
Worse when you knew there was a ticket in your pocket you were not allowed to scratch.
He paced the room three times.
The shelf was a graveyard of family piety.
History of House Lannister.
Geography of the Westerlands.
He pulled Lann the Clever and the Rock, lasted two pages, and put it back.
Stories.
No meat.
He lay down.
Stone ceiling.
Dry moss in the cracks.
The sea in the air, damp and constant.
Memories spilled whether he asked for them or not.
Cersei shoving him into a fountain until he swallowed water.
A feast where they sat him at the last table with the servants.
Sixteen years old, asking to learn a horse, and Tywin cutting it off with one line.
Your legs will not reach the stirrups.
Do not make a spectacle.
Lyonel turned onto his side.
A sentence drifted up from somewhere he had already left.
You forget a thousand things every day.
Forget this one too.
An Arasaka agent had said it with three holes in his chest.
Then this.
He sat up, crossed to the bronze mirror, and looked again.
Big head.
One green eye, one black.
Crooked mouth.
Short legs.
Still the same ruined jar.
He nodded at it anyway.
“Doesn’t matter.” “Something else grows tomorrow.” Not the height.
An entry.
The sun climbed off the water, stood over the Rock, and slid west.
He sat in the chair until his ass went numb.
Nerves were stupid and he had them anyway.
First draw purple.
The system had promised a slight bump in quality for the second.
Bad luck meant White.
He already knew what White looked like.
The example the system had once spat at him was burned in: [White · Lannister Blood: blond hair.
Base Charm +1.] Blond hair.
He was already blond.
Congratulations.
You may continue to breathe.
The window went black.
He fed the hearth himself.
Orange light filled the room.
The ledger lay open, those numbers still written in a language that hated him.
Then the sound arrived.
[Ding.] More punctual than any alarm he had ever owned.
[Daily draw refreshed.
Draw now?] His finger hit yes before the question finished.
No purple flare this time.
A ring of soft blue-green opened on the panel, like a lake taking a stone, and held for three or four seconds before it tightened into an entry.
Lyonel watched the color.
Blue.
One rank under purple.
Not an insult.
[Congratulations.
Blue entry acquired: Photographic Memory] Effect: Reading speed +300% Accuracy of retained text: 100% Passive.
No activation required.
He blinked.
He blinked again.
Three hundred.
Three hundred.
In his last life he had been the fast reader on his team.
Thinking in Java had still taken him two months to chew through.
Three times the speed.
Perfect recall.
He looked at the ledger.
Same book.
Same crooked hand.
He opened the first page, and the world changed.
The ghost-script came apart.
Numbers, items, notes.
They unspooled, lined up, and poured into him the way a machine reads a page.
Westerlands fiefs.
Golden Tooth.
Silverhill.
Banefort.
Fair Isle.
Taxes.
Outlays.
Pay for men.
Pay for roads.
Pay for horseflesh.
Line after line.
His hands got faster.
A page a minute.
Then thirty seconds.
Then ten.
Parchment hissed.
Firelight crawled over that ugly face, and the mismatched eyes ticked left and right like a scanner that had found work it liked.
Three hundred and seventeen pages.
Less than forty minutes.
Lyonel closed the last leaf and let his spine hit the chair.
His skull felt swollen.
The numbers were still marching.
He shut his eyes and pulled one line at random.
Golden Tooth.
Third quarter, 285 AC.
Twelve hundred ounces of gold paid into the treasury.
Note: shaft collapse in the rains.
Yield down.
Next line.
Silverhill.
Second quarter, 286 AC.
Eight hundred forty ounces of silver.
Note: new vein under survey.
Extra outlay, two hundred ounces.
Next.
Every entry sat where he left it, cut into him like files on a drive that did not forget.
He opened his eyes.
The smile started slow.
“Holy shit.” He ran the summary his mind had already built.
Two fingertips on the desk.
Three taps.
Stop.
Wrong.
Golden Tooth had been reporting shaft collapses and falling yield every quarter for three years.
Three years.
A mine that stayed collapsed for three years would have been sealed.
Tywin Lannister was many things.
A fool was not one of them.
So the book was dirty.
And Tywin knew it was dirty.
He had not handed his youngest son a test.
He had handed him trash and a clock, so that in three days he could send the Imp to the Wall with a clean conscience and an audience.
The original owner would never have found it.
Lyonel was not the original owner anymore.
He opened the book to Golden Tooth and started matching lines.
Mining costs falling year after year.
Cartage rising year after year.
That was not how numbers behaved.
Haulage followed yield.
Yield down, shipping should have followed it into the ground.
He pulled the three years before that and ran them against each other.
His head did the arithmetic faster than his old fingers had ever written code.
He pushed the ledger away and sank back.
The crooked smile got wider.
Found it.
The lords at the Golden Tooth had been padding the cartage every year and sliding the extra into a shadow line the book would not explain.
Not a fortune on any single page.
Two or three hundred ounces of gold a year.
Three years of it would buy a small keep.
Smuggling.
The route was in the book if you knew how to look.
Overland from the Golden Tooth to Lannisport.
Out by sea.
Sold to whom?
The ledger did not say.
He already had three names in his head.
He stood and went to the window.
Night made Casterly Rock a scatter of lights.
Moonlight broke on the water and came up in silver scales.
The panel opened again.
[Next draw in 23 hours 58 minutes.] [Current entries: Purple · Blood Resonance of Lannister.
Blue · Photographic Memory.] He looked at the two lines.
One for the family.
One for the page.
One to keep the knives from finding his throat too early.
One to take the room apart and see what it was made of.
If the system had a sense of humor, it was a practical one.
This was a starter kit cut to the exact size of Westeros.
He went back to the desk and opened the book to Golden Tooth again.
His finger rested on the padded cartage.
“Three days?” He laughed under his breath.
“Tomorrow morning.” “I’ll show him what a return looks like.”