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The Hightower of Oldtown was furnished with a system of sturdy wooden cages into which two (even three, if they did not mind breathing in the fug of each other’s sweat) people could fit. The cages were then lifted and lowered by a system of ropes and pulleys modeled on the one described in Harmune’s Watchers on the Wall. Every fifty yards or so, the riders would switch cages for the next leg of their vertical journey, covering the entire span of that great edifice, from Lord Hightower’s chambers just beneath the great beacon, down to the tower’s oldest section: the warren of chambers and corridors hewn from black stone by unknown means in ages long past.
Malora Hightower wished, not for the first time, that there was a way to bypass the journey in stages up and down the Hightower, but magic was both specific and materialist: it rooted itself in objects, places, correspondences. No corners could be cut along the way. Only once she had descended to the Hightower’s bowels, where the greasy stone walls – which appeared more worn down by eons of rushing water than hewn by any human tool – absorbed the lamplight, only then could she cross distances in one quick step. No one living knew the Hightower’s foundations’ origins any better than they knew who had built the Citadel, though Malora had her suspicions. The black stone from which both buildings sprouted like massive stone trees was a clue. There were places in the Hightower’s oldest layer where one step, accompanied by the right gesture and muttered words, took Malora from her ancestral seat to the lowest cellar under the Citadel’s library.
She snuck up a servants’ narrow back stair, passed like a shadow among the stacks, pilfered the scrolls and leather-bound volumes she needed, and went back the same way without any maester or acolyte or novice spying her and becoming upset at a woman’s presence in their sanctuary. Knights of the mind, they called themselves, which Malora supposed made the Citadel their White Sword Tower, their bastion of virtue and strength. But skill – of the mind or the sword arm – was only as useful and virtuous as the man wielding it, and if the Kingsguard had spawned its share of Jaime Lannisters and Criston Coles over the past three centuries, the Citadel was little better.
Malora did not trouble herself with wondering if she was a virtuous knight of the mind. Knighthood was a game for men. She was after secrets which men disdained, in service to a necessity they failed to notice till it was too late.
Her arms full of books, the pockets of her simple woolen shift bulging with scrolls, she hurried back to the damp black cellar, there to trace a design she had found in a Valyrian text on the blank wall and speak the necessary words, and then she passed with her loot back into the disused storage room under the Hightower. Enter in one place and exit in another, linked by material hewn from the same source, the same hands which had done the hewing, some similarity more guessed at than clearly perceived.
Magic could be subtle, but its use was simple, once one knew the trick of it. Like called to like, the bridge between woven of symbols and hints, mist and shadow.
It being the hour of the wolf when Malora returned from her raid on the Citadel, no one saw her climb up to her chamber at the top of the Hightower, next to Father’s chamber and their shared solar, save the attendants who operated the pulleys that conveyed her heavenward, and they would not speak of this. Loyalty to House Hightower ran deep in Oldtown, and the sight of the Mad Maid wandering about with books and scrolls at all hours, muttering to herself, was hardly a novelty.
Lighting an array of fat wax candles, she laid out her treasure across the trestle table she used as a desk, fingering the books’ covers like she was teasing a lover. Malora had flowered and withered long since and never found half as much to interest her in any man, nor even the idea of a man, as she did in the prospect of another book to read.
In truth, she did not believe she needed to consult these works again, but Father had taught her to be meticulous. She thumbed through worn pages of velum and parchment to passages she’d memorized already, ran her ink-stained fingertip down the margins of faded scrolls to lines written in what seemed more like spider silk than quill and ink. From single lines of old lays in praise of the Drowned God in Kirth’s Songs the Drowned Men Sing and snatches of tales of blood offerings passed down the generations of illiterate ironborn in Yorrick’s Wed to the Sea, Malora leapt to Galendro’s The Fires of the Freehold, then to fragments of Valyrian scrolls which filled in the gaps in that incomplete work, and finally came to roost in the second, secret book of Barth’s Unnatural History, which she’d found bound up in a nondescript volume with a treatise on herbs that grew in the North. Found it and hidden it from the librarians when she’d been just a slip of a girl.
Like spoke to like, fragments of texts recent and ancient, all speaking of or hinting at a greater story. A greater truth: The greasy black stone on which the Hightowers had built their keep and on which kings of the Iron Islands had sat. Words to rouse the sea’s wrath and soothe it back to glassy calm. Rituals, incantations, sacrifices. The Deep Ones, the most elusive of the elder races, less known or understood even than the children of the forest. What was the Drowned God of the ironborn if not a dim ancestral memory of those elusive and terrible denizens of the deepest ocean?
Archmaester Marwyn, who unlike most of his brethren did not disdain to speak with the Mad Maid, had told her more than once that all Valyrian magic was rooted in blood and fire. Malora liked Marwyn well enough, but she had her own spies at the Citadel, who’d told her about the black candle burning in the archmaester’s chamber in the Ravenry. Like to like, dragonflame called to the eerie glow of the dragonglass candle.
Blood was the key, but there was more than one kind of magic.
Balance mattered, and correspondence, and mirror images. What went high up into the air must also reach deep down into the earth. Or under the sea. Father understood this and had corresponded about such matters with other men whose castles breached the clouds: Jon Arryn, Gerion Lannister... One was dead and the other, if he yet lived, gone so far away no scrying Malora might perform would find him. So it was all down to them. To her. The Mad Maid of House Hightower. Father was too cautious, always wanting to read one more book, check one more chronicle, ponder one more maester’s guesswork and speculation. Malora had seen and read and thought enough to be certain – or at least certain enough – of what needed doing.
Malora assembled what she needed: a chip of the black stone from the bowels of the Hightower; a drop of blood, her own, which the stone absorbed as though it had thirsted for just such nourishment; words she meant to speak with enough conviction to lend them power. Words which she firmly believed were at least as important as the symbolic ingredients and the purity of her intent. Long ago, in the age of the First Men, the Hightowers had mastered shipbuilding and sailing on the open seas in order to safeguard their lands and people from ironborn reavers. They’d done more than just that, Malora hazarded to guess. She had spent years chasing down clues that she had the right of it. With the ironborn threat resurgent and the tales of dragons coming out of the east, Malora prayed softly to whichever gods might hear her, gods of forest and stone, or the Seven in their septs, or whoever dwelled in the depths, that the blood of House Hightower still spoke to those Old Ones that the ironborn thought they alone had a claim on.
She opened her window high above the city and the mouth of the Honeywine and flung the bloodied stone into the rushing water below. So high up, the tendrils of fog did not obscure her view of the stars, and the sweet scents of Oldtown’s gardens did not reach her. She could not even hear the whisper of the brackish water lapping the shore. Into the clear night air, sharp and cold as a needle, she flung her bloodied offering and her voice, the one rushing to be swallowed by the first salt waves to strike the shore, the other riding the wind out to the open sea. She intoned words of greeting, supplication, promise of greater and better sacrifice in exchange for aid in Oldtown’s time of need.
A bridge woven of symbols could cross great distances faster than any raven. Blood had the ocean in it, salty and quickening with life. The same kind of stone could let one lift their foot in one place and lower it in another. The Whispering Sound opened into the Sunset Sea, which the maesters speculated was endless and bottomless. Yet the First Men had found the Seastone Chair and the Hightower’s foundations, with their warren of rooms and passages, already in place, like a landing ground from which one could climb out of the water or depart from dry land as one wished.
The icy wind lifted Malora’s hair and snuck down the back of her loose shift, but she did not light a fire or close the window. She stayed rooted in place, bathed in the sharp night air. Her eyes saw only the deep sky with its pinprick of stars, but her straining ears finally caught what might have been just a louder gust of wind, a gale rushing preternaturally fast across the sea. Or it might have been – Malora was certain that it was – the sound of something roaring awake. Something rousing itself and rising from the depths the maesters thought bottomless, hungry for sacrifice, for battle. For blood.
Malora clapped her hands and laughed. Father would be so proud of her, call her his clever girl! He’d also need some persuading of the wisdom of Malora’s course of action and how she’d reasoned her way to it, for he could be overly concerned with details. Malora had evidence on her side, for there existed ample precedent for blood sacrifice, if one knew where to look and how to read the oldest surviving sources: the old gods of the North, Valyrian blood magic, even Garth Greenhand before the singers had turned him all jolly and vegetal…
Like called to like, but there was more than one kind of magic, and water beat fire every time. A burning croft was rescued by a blizzard. A city put to the torch by raiders prayed for rain. And a big enough wave from the depths of the sea might drown both the overproud ironborn and any bolt of dragonflame from on high.