Chapter 15

“Arise, my lord. You are back,” Varys heard a voice calling him out of the darkness of death, a very familiar one if haunting to him.

“Back? I ... was dead! How do I come back from that?” Varys strained to see before he noticed who it was that he faced.

Kinvara, the Red Priestess who had aided Tyrion and he in the saving of Meereen, at least back when it still could be saved. She had brought him back, he who loathed and despised everything that the Lord of Light and his priests represented? Why in the name of whatever was out there had she resurrected a man who hated everything that she upheld and believed? For that matter, where were they?

“The Dragonpit, as it happens. That’s where you are, Lord Varys. And, yes, I know that you’re no nobleman, but you have become a lord, haven’t you? The very Lord of Light whom you mistrust, along with his servitors, has chosen to have far more faith in you than you have ever had in him. You have been resurrected for a purpose, my lord. You still have a role to play in the Great War yet to come, that is already begun, but has not yet reached its peak,” Kinvara explained to Varys, who was still stunned by what transpired.

“And how often does this happen? Has Qyburn or Jarrad been revived? Who else has been brought back from the dead like this?” Varys demanded to know, still shaken by this news.

“No, Qyburn and Jarrad are still quite dead and shall remain so. They have no role to play in the events unfolding like a scroll, Lord Varys, but you do. They were not given a task and a purpose by the Lord of Light himself, but you were. Only those of whom the Lord of Light has need in the land of the living are brought back from the dead. Just remember what you felt when you died and know there is nothing to fear in death at all. Death is the darkness, the extinction, the cessation of all being. It is your escape from this world, the only hell that truly exists,” Kinvara answered him partly, but not fully yet.

“Who else, though?” Varys repeated the query.

“That you know, personally, or with you have spoken?” Kinvara replied with another question of her own.

“Exactly. Who else do I know ... who has been resurrected by the Lord of Light? Besides me, that is,” Varys pestered Kinvara some more, being terrified by this awakening to the full power of the Red God.

“Jon Snow and Lord Beric Dondarrion. Jon Snow by Melisandre and Lord Dondarrion by Thoros of Myr. It is a very rare event, I assure you, to be resurrected even once, let alone more often than that. It is true, though, that we have this power. I’m afraid that it comes at a cost, mind you. You’re not quite the same as before you died. No one ever is. It changes you in ways that you cannot anticipate at first. Even the awareness of it can change a man. It’s made Jon Snow a bit more ruthless, to be sure, though not extremely so yet. Only the Lord of Light truly knows what to expect from you now,” Kinvara warned Varys, further staggering him with this news.

“Well, I have some more work to do, in any case. I arrived here, fully expecting to die and never return to life. I did not plan to live longer than this point. You can thank your fellow Red Priestess for that. Melisandre. She told me that I have to die here, in Westeros, just like her. Well, I have died. In Westeros. I just never thought that I would come back from the afterlife, except that apparently, there isn’t an afterlife. How strange is that? A god who brings people back, but doesn’t reward or punish them while they’re dead at all. Very different from the Seven, to be sure,” Varys commented as he tried to make sense of his circumstances, including his clothes.

“The Seven are false gods. The Lord of Light is real. False gods need an afterlife to terrify people into submission, because that’s what the priests who created them use to subjugate their victims. In any case, you must be ready to stand with Azor Ahai. Are you?” Kinvara now rushed memories into Varys’s mind, of the words spoken in the flames by that voice directly to the eunuch when he was cut.

Varys fell to the ground, losing his consciousness for a moment before snapping awake. It was true, he understood now. He couldn’t speak it, the name spoken in the flames, but he knew it now and who spoke it to him. It horrified him, but he recovered a moment later, stood up, and shook himself a bit before turning back to Kinvara for more answers, but she was gone, as if she had never been there.

Varys looked around him in the Dragonpit and he walked as swiftly as he could toward his destination, knowing what he had to do. No one else knew, save Kinvara it seemed, toward the very gates of King’s Landing. He, and no one else, had been tasked with this purpose by the Lord of Light on behalf of Azor Ahai. He, Varys, and no one else, could be sure of success. That much he knew in his bones. Varys ignored everyone speaking to him, walking as if in a daze or a trance, and so people assumed that he was, mostly leaving him alone. No one expected a threat in the slightest, as the Spider reached his destination.

Standing before the very landside gates of King’s Landing, having made it in astonishing speed and time, Varys reached quietly for the bolt which locked the gates in that direction. A city under siege was about to turn into a city under assault and it didn’t even realize it yet. Right at the very moment in the day, after the gates had finally been locked against such possible threats in a time of war now, a small party of volunteers had arrived near the gates of King’s Landing. They were few in number, but heavily armed and armored, being sent for this very point in time.

“What’s the watchword?” Varys asked them quietly from just inside the gates as he steeled himself to push them open.

“Dragon and Wolf,” the answer came in a hushed tone, “What’s yours?”

“Wolf and Dragon,” Varys replied in an equally quiet whisper.

Varys pulled the bolt out of its place, thus depriving King’s Landing of this line of defense, a very crucial one. As dusk had hit, as the guards were reduced in numbers, not looking for any force smaller than a proper army at their gates, the small band of warriors awaited their chance, and it came now. Varys had assumed that Ser Jorah or Ser Davos would carry out this task, but they had basically deflected attention from the true threat, namely the Spider, the least striking or intimidating figure in Westeros to those who didn’t know him. To be fair, now that he was out of office, very few recalled him these days, let alone recognized the former Master of Whispers.

Quietly, in heavy woolen cloaks that concealed their weapons and armor, the selected party of warriors designated to attack King’s Landing sought out their targets now. To strangers, they seemed to be simply beggars or peasants from the countryside or septons or something. They were weird, but not enough to worry about, as they didn’t rush in and assault anyone just yet. To complete the subterfuge, Varys re-bolted the gates in such a way that none ever noticed that they were open. This proved that the Lannisters were either so lax with the City Watch or their own guards, or else stretched too thin, to post sentries where needed. Moving swiftly, yet creeping along, Varys made his way to his next location.

Once Varys found the place that he wished to go, he realized that he would need far more jars, as well as a cart, so he quietly pulled one up near the catacombs of the city. Descending back into the catacombs with as much light as he could use, Varys began gathering up as much wildfire as he could take for his needs. Varys now knew that he would be working well into the night, knowing that few expected the secret of where the wildfire was collected had been spilled at all. The mission was not as simple or easy as it sounded, of course. If one of his little birds or a maester from the guild happened upon him, he would be a dead man again and he knew it.

It was a strange, heady mood for Varys, knowing that his hands were now guided by someone in whom he never believed in the past: the Lord of the Light. Even so, if it should work, the consequences would echo throughout Westeros and the world. It was highly dangerous, but it would achieve two things. The first would be to scale back the amount of wildfire available to Cersei, though Varys knew that he could never find all of it or anything close to that amount. He was only one man, after all. The second would be to store the wildfire in such a fashion that it would be ready for when it was time to use it against the true enemy of Westeros: the Army of the Dead.

Sweating profusely by now, in such harsh and humid conditions, after so much grueling work that he could not mention to others, Varys took a moment to rest before stacking it where he awoke: the Dragonpit. He had no coin to pay for a voyage, but once King’s Landing was secure, he could transport the bulk of this cargo with the blessing of the King and Queen where it needed to go. Until then, he covered it as well as he could, tired as he was, while waiting for dawn to break.

While Varys napped, the city became a battlefield. The small force of warriors assigned to the capital had reached their chosen locations, where they struck, slicing throats open and climbing the stairs in the Tower of the Hand, moving into the Red Keep, and descending into the dungeon beneath the castle. Little did they know that several of the prisoners were already free, as had already been discovered the night before by Cersei and Ser Jaime. Most of the inmates were liberated, but most were simply noblemen with the folly to anger House Lannister somehow since Cersei’s rise. The biggest fish had already paddled away.

Ellaria Sand and her daughter Tyene had been freed and were now loose within the Red Keep, already playing games with Cersei’s mind and Jaime’s. Lannister guards had been savagely attacked in key spots, and in some places, City Watchmen had joined the assault. Cersei and Jaime, along with their Small Council, now knew that the enemy was already within their walls, though they didn’t know how many just yet. They were not safe within the Red Keep anymore. Even if Cersei ordered the use of wildfire, the most that it could do would be to kill them all, which would achieve nothing.

“Well now, we’re very close indeed to finding them, though they’re staying a step or two ahead of us. It can’t be that large of a force, can it, if they’ve had to turn some Gold Cloaks to even stand a chance? We just have to find them before they locate us instead,” Jaime assured Cersei, who had still refused to put on any clothes.

“No, I’m heading for the Great Hall. If my enemies are inside my castle, I want to face them here. On the Iron Throne, staring them down. We surely have more men than they and if they attack me here, it will draw them out into the open, where our guards can slaughter them wholesale and end their little raid,” Cersei insisted, rushing into the Great Hall to find a nasty surprise indeed.

There, standing in a circle around the Iron Throne, was a party of hostile Gold Cloaks. Seated on it, with a rather vicious smile on his face, was Ser Bronn of the Blackwater. Heedless of the risks, Cersei rushed toward the party, only to find the Mountain diverted as he threw back an attack from one of the corners. Behind them, six Ironborn fell upon Ser Jaime and he had to fend them off as well. Furious, Cersei tore herself away, with the Mountain, Ser Jaime, and three other knights of the Kingsguard, and held her ground for now. Both parties now stood off against each other. Three knights of the Kingsguard already lay dead or wounded upon the Great Hall floor, along with four Lannister guards.

“Ser Bronn ... Ser Bronn, what is the meaning of this? Have you turned against us? You will never get your castle now, you know,” Ser Jaime demanded of Ser Bronn, who threw back his head in laughter.

“Well, m’lord, I figured that if you were going to keep your promise, you’d have done it by now. Relax, I’m just warming this here chair for someone else, as you once did for King Robert Baratheon, First of His Name. You remember him, right? Man who you betrayed by sleeping with his wife, your own twin sister here? Besides, someone else promised that if anyone ever offered me a bribe to sell him out, he’d beat their price. Unlike you, it seems that he kept his word,” Ser Bronn told them with a very crooked grin now.

“I think that he means me, brother,” Tyrion Lannister stepped out of the shadows from a corner, “it’s high time that we had another talk.”

“Brother, this is treason, but what else is new with you?” Cersei demanded of Tyrion, which the Imp dismissed with a wave.

“I think that you’re under the false impression that I wished to speak with you, dear sister, but no, I meant our brother, Ser Jaime. There’s still time, brother, to throw aside this nonsense and serve your rightful King and Queen, rather than our sister, who will never be anything more than a murderer. It’s too late for Cersei, but not for you. She wanted me dead, just as much as Father did. Well, I took his life, didn’t I, and I won’t hesitate to take hers, but yours is another matter. I would like to see you spared this pointless violence. All of you, lay down your swords and come peaceably, won’t you?” Tyrion suggested.