Chapter 19: Over the Sea and Far Away pt. 2
Qohor, a city of about a half a million, was surrounded by strong, stone walls. The furthest east of the northern Free Cities, and along one of the main routes into that area, it was often visited by Dothraki khalasars. Though it paid them tribute rather than fight, the city maintained their walls and a strong core of Unsullied to deter attacks and reduce the cost of tribute.
The Unsullied were hard to describe. Basically, the same principle of being an unflinching warrior that you’d see from the Spartans, but rather than being trained for initiative the Unsullied slave-soldiers were trained to be ridiculously, suicidally obedient. They were skilled yet disturbing to contemplate.
Apart from being the gateway between western and eastern Essos, Qohor had one more claim to fame. It was known as a city of sorcerers. The greatest of Qohorik smiths could rework Valyrian steel, even if they couldn’t make more of that fabled metal. Divination, blood magic and necromancy were rumored practices.
I was nervous of pursuing their magics without caution though. They worshipped a dark god there, the Black Goat, and gave it daily sacrifices of blood and animals with condemned criminals for holy feast days. And that was in good years. In times of true crisis, the Qohorik nobles might sacrifice their own children. Truly, their “god” was more of a demon. They guarded the secrets of their magic jealously, and I had no desire for a city of half a million to chase me as a sacrifice. But Valyrian steel… that was a secret I wanted.
Jon and I entered the city cautiously, my senses straining to catch any active magic, my eyes channeling an overlay of mage-sight. I was disappointed. None of the street wizards, or their more expensive kin available for consultation seemed to have true power. But then I found it; a forge that glowed with true magic. It was weak, yes, and old, but there were signs of more recent power as well. The smell of the sacrifices they used to power their spells was distinct, the blood seeped into the earth.
I found a master smith, and asked him about whether he could reforge Valyrian steel.
He looked me up and down, the quality of my armor making him raise an eyebrow. “I can, but I doubt you have any,” he replied.
I laughed, shaking my head. “I wish, I wish. But no, I was hoping to see it done. It is the greatest magic of the modern age, and I wanted to be able to bring the tale of watching a true master smith at work back to my home in Westeros.”
His face became grim, his body posture aggressive. “You speak our language without accent, outsider, so you should know. The secrets of the smiths are for Qohor alone.”
Damn. I was going to have to try it. “Of course, of course,” I said, deescalating the situation. “I would never dream of anything different. But surely it would do no harm to just watch, just the once, and pay a hundred dragons for the privelege?” I argued, loosing the Blue spell that I hoped would act as a Jedi Mind Trick and help convince him.
It seemed to work as he blinked, then nodded with slightly glazed eyes. “Yes, yes, it would do no harm to just watch. I will show you.”
I had seen Ice before, of course, Ned’s Valyrian greatsword, but the enchantment on it was like the edge of a fractal snowflake. I just couldn’t get enough resolution on it to properly understand it, and it was obvious that the application of the enchantment was as much part of the casting as the final shape. I was hoping this would let me bridge the gap.
The smith gathered his apprentices and journeymen, then began the task of re-forging the single small Valyrian dagger he kept for practice. They were looking at Jon and I askance. Poor Jon, of course, was following little of this. His Valyrian was not conversational yet, and the local dialect had drifted far from what the classical Valyrian he had been taught by Luwin as a boy.
Hours of heating, sacrifices, chanting, and working the blade followed. I was engrossed, as were the smiths. Too much so to notice one of the younger apprentices slipping out near the end. I did notice when he returned, however, with a handful of officers, a priest, twenty Unsullied and forty common soldiers besides. Or rather, Hue and Mu noticed while flying over-watch for just such an occasion, and they warned me.
Jon and I fled, our horses turning off the street just as the band sent to arrest us turned onto it. Ghost and Togo were outside the city; I knew that the odds of my getting into trouble there were high, and there were only a handful of people in the world who had canine companions like ours. The Starks had enough enemies and assassins as it was.
Aethon and Shadowfax pushed their way through the crowds and we had disappeared out the far gate before the alarm spread and sent the city into lockdown.
But it had worked; I had the secret of Valyrian steel. Oh, I’d need to work with a smith to make the true version; the folded and refolded layers of a damascene blade were a necessary part of the enchanting process. But that was the third level of the Valyrian enchanted blade.
The first level, the basic enchantment to never dull or break, to be a fraction as heavy, and to cut slightly better because the edge was harder was easily in my grasp. The only issue was that the lack of weight to the sword could make the blows have less momentum.
The second level was for the edge to be extremely sharp. That required being cast on the blade at forging as it had a naturally self-sharpening effect on the blade, or for me to figure out how to magically sharpen a blade’s edge at the same time that I cast the enchantment.
The third level was by far the best. It included a sort of conceptual ideal of cutting, as well as what I thought might be a kind of guided strike effect to help the swordsman. It had a higher level of the base enchantments too, and made it so that each strike carried the impact of what the sword should have weighed.
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Unfortunately, it would still need a conventional master blade smith to manage. The conceptual effects in particular were partially a distillation of the concept of a fighting blade, and depended on the smith’s ability to resonate with that ideal, their ability to push that purpose into the weapon. It was really interesting from a magical point of view, and gave me insights into how I’d be able to get enchantments to “stick” for lack of a better term to inanimate objects.
Suffice to say, learning how to smith was put on the list of things to do when I had time. As a proper mage, I’d likely find it much easier to impose the concepts, and wouldn’t need to be a true master to manage the third level of the enchantment. Though if I did become that good, I’d likely be able to make something amazing.
A vorpal sword. That sounded like a lot of fun, and really damned unfair for anyone we went up against.
Until then, Jon and I would have to content ourselves with our +1 blades, the metal shimmering slightly when caught in the light.
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After leaving Qohor we decided to cut through the forest rather than take the road south that passed through Ar Noy. Unfortunately the river Qhoyne was too close to Qohor and any potential pursuit for my liking, so I had to forgo its Blue.
The forest was old, ancient even, and the mana was dense and potent because of it. I picked up another eight Green mana on the way, taking my time since I knew that after we entered the Dothraki Sea and its thousands of miles of plains and grasslands that I wouldn’t have another easy source of Green Mana for a while.
It was a heady thing, so much wild, natural magic. Playing around with it I learned some more on how to manipulate plants, a bit of Green and colorless for growing food or shelter from roots and bushes, or how I could use some more power and cover an animal in entangling roots, trapping it. I doubted I’d use the spells much, but they were fun to play around with, even if the magic made Jon a bit nervous at first.
Then we left the forest and entered the plains. It was some fifteen or sixteen hundred miles from where we left the forest to Vaes Dothrak, the only Dothraki city, which sat in the middle of their grasslands. I knew that Drogo and Daenerys had been headed there a few months ago, and hoped to find them, or at least news of where they were headed last, at Vaes Dothrak. We would ride half the day, then stop to rest and for me to bond the plains. They gave White mana, and over the journey from the forest of Qohor I bonded ten times.
The journey was uneventful. Hue and Mu would scout in turns, keeping an eye out for the Dothraki barbarians. And they were truly barbarians; horse-riders and raiders one and all, they believed that farming, cutting the earth to till it was a sin. They thought that the gods could not see unless the actions took place under an open sky, and so they eschewed cities. They depended on their horses for transportation and sustenance, eating and drinking the milk, blood and flesh from their steeds.
A man who did not ride was not a man; literally. Only the crippled, very young, very old, very pregnant, eunuchs or more valuable slaves rode carts, while being forced to walk was an act of shame, fit only for slaves. All others rode, which made the Dothraki amazing light cavalry. But for all their similarities, in any comparison with the Mongols, the Mongols came out on top.
The Mongols of Earth conquered and forged empires; bloody as their acts may have been, they adapted and assimilated the civilizations they ruled. The Dothraki merely destroyed. They were a scourge as far as I was concerned, hordes of man sized destructive cunning beasts rather than possessing any of the finer traits of humanity.
I contented myself with the fact that someday, eventually, the civilized forces would grow and gain in population, technology, strength. And then those fucking horse-lords would face the fangs of civilization: rifles and cannon. And they would become a footnote of history.
Until that day the Dothraki would continue as a human plague.
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A couple days ride away from Vaes Dothrak we stopped. I had grown greatly in power during the journey: eleven Green, eleven White, four Blue, two Black, and seven Red extra compared to when I had started out from Westeros. I’d had a lot of nights to spend time thinking and tinkering with how to improve the spells, the upgrades and cultivated power I had gathered.
The Green based Supernatural Physique, Oakflesh, and Regeneration had all improved. Blue had been streamlined a bit, but hadn’t had more than minor incremental gains. In Red, the improved reactions, increased power when hitting, and the straight up conceptual bonus to speed that I called Haste had all improved significantly.
With White, I had managed to get the stored healing energy to be denser and more efficient, while the skin-tight conceptual defense was actually getting useful, more like an inch of heavy padding in its effect against physical attacks with a similar performance against magical ones. I also figured out how to not just improve the Projectile Shield, making it stronger and adding another layer, but also how to link them together with other, nearby Projectile Shields so that they could share power.
The disadvantage to that was that if one person’s shields went down, everyone’s went down. But the advantage was that to bring one shield down the attackers had to bring everyone’s down. For example, it was impossible to target the horse and ignore the rider, or vice versa.
The linkage wasn’t perfectly designed yet; optimally, I’d have the shields being partially linked so if a heavier attack like a ballista bolt hit one person’s shield, that shield would just pop, stopping the projectile but not over-drawing on the shield network. Then their second shield layer would activate and cycle into the networked shield defense. But the Dothraki didn’t use ballista, so I figured it was a moot point at that moment.
I even figured out how to us Black mana to get more nutrition from food. It was a bit strange, but when I shifted my point of view I realized that digestion is really killing the food and taking its qualities for myself. Black’s death and greed fit well enough into that image. It was minor, but I did notice my health slightly improving. That was by far and away the most interesting Black-oriented effect I had managed to date; if properly developed, it might even let me steal more abstract powers and traits by eating them, sort of like the protagonist of Re:Monster.
I took the time to clean up the upgrades, engineer them into more generally applicable enchantments, and give them to Jon, Togo, Ghost, Aethon, Shadowfax, Hue and Mu.
Then with a bit of time to spare I reverse engineered the Valyrian steel spell enough that I could improve our armor. The links of the chain shone and shimmered when exposed, would never suffer from rust, and would be far harder to penetrate. It was only equivalent to the first level of the Valyrian steel, but it was already a great improvement.
Honestly, given the stone-like oakflesh and all of the other upgrades I doubted we had much to worry about, but better safe than sorry. Plus it was far subtler for an arrow or sword to fail to penetrate our armor than for it to merely cause a pin-prick in our skin.
And I’ll admit; my inner fantasy nerd was much happier to have bright, shiny mail compared to the slightly rusty, discolored mail I had had previously. Plus enchanted gear is always better, right?
Fully prepared, we set off for Vaes Dothrak.