Chapter 226

The Vale. Gulltown. 301 AC.

Axel Arryn.

Fear is a fascinating tool, one that lets those who know how to wield it rise above everyone else, but it carries its own dangers too. Grow careless, and you might lose everything before you even notice it slipping away. A great deal had happened over the past month, and yet, in another sense, nothing of real substance had changed. My most powerful vassals had come to see the reanimated corpse with their own eyes, and under the weight of fear and my own authority, they had given me carte blanche for whatever I chose to do next. Before, I had been an absolute monarch on my own lands, free to do as I pleased so long as it did no great harm to my vassals. Now, though… they would endure any injustice, right up until the moment I started slaughtering them wholesale. Ha. The ability to twist any situation to one’s own advantage is one of the most essential qualities a good politician can have.

But politics is not all a man lives for. My own professional curiosity, along with plain necessity, had pushed me to throw myself into studying the corpse that had been brought to me. For days now I had been keeping company with the dead man, my left eye doing its work, unraveling every secret and every method of fighting what it represented.

“So, what have you actually worked out?” The three of us were alone in the room: myself, Robar, and the corpse. “And don’t bother repeating Snow’s words back to me, you clearly know a great deal more than he does.” My “magic” was one of my most closely guarded secrets, though a few of my closest men knew of it.

“It’s very crude, clearly built for churning out soldiers quickly and in bulk, but it burns through a great deal of power and puts a heavy strain on the body. The Walkers’ magic runs on obsidian. If dragonglass gets inside one of these creatures, the opposing charges cancel each other out and the magic is destroyed from within the body. That, incidentally, is one reason the Walkers can’t raise the same soldier twice.” Robar was an intelligent man, but his expression had gone blank; I needed to put it more simply. “Think of the dead as flame, and obsidian as wildfire. Throw a pyromancer’s piss on a bonfire, and the flame goes out.” Very crude, very simplified, but it was the closest comparison I could manage for someone with no grounding in the subject.

Despite sharing a general approach, my necromancy differed from the White Walkers’ magic; it was more “spiritual,” more refined. Where they crudely turned corpses into puppets driven by commands set in advance, I altered the spiritual essence of the recently dead instead. My wights lost everything that had once made them human, leaving only an all consuming hatred behind. And so my undead could draw on every scrap of knowledge they had possessed in life and acted with a considerable degree of independence. Rational, strategically minded spirits had been an absolute nightmare for Cardolan.

“…If the magic is really that ‘powerful,’ then there ought to be far fewer of the dead than Snow claims. You explained something about output, strength, the volume of energy involved, didn’t you?” At least he had retained something from my explanations.

How many kilograms can you carry on your own back? Say, fifty or sixty, since the people of this world are stronger than ours? Load on more than that, and your body gives out and breaks. Wights put a strain of about half a kilo on each Other. Exceed that, and something breaks, only I don’t know what their actual limit is, so theoretically, Snow could be right.

“But I don’t believe it. Raising hundreds of thousands of dead by this method would require an enormous amount of power, more than even I possessed as a Ringwraith. It’s doubtful Sauron himself could manage it, and he is a god, a Maia who in some respects rose to the strength of the Valar.”

“So there’s nothing to worry about, then,” Robar said, letting out a breath. Fighting a mythical horror while knowing nothing about it was one thing; fighting an enemy whose every secret, weaknesses included, you already understood was quite another. “Are you using the lords’ hysteria for your own greater ends? Even my own father fell for it.”

“Naturally. However much authority and strength I hold, there is a line beyond which they would drag me out to string up on the gallows. Barring something truly extraordinary, my power remains strong, but never absolute. The White Walkers have handed me an excellent pretext to make use of ‘extraordinary measures.'”

Until quite recently, I had never even considered turning my authority into something absolute. For my purposes, my current position was entirely sufficient, and I could still realize my ambitions well within it. What might have served as a catalyst for transforming that power would have been some “great calamity” befalling all of Westeros, perhaps even the world. This civil war did not qualify. Yes, certain regions would suffer terribly, many houses would die out, and tens if not hundreds of thousands would perish from the war’s consequences, but none of that would truly touch the Vale. What did it matter to me if some Tyrells or other died out and their lands were laid waste? Not in the slightest.

“Just don’t drag the Vale down into the abyss along with your ambitions,” Robar warned me, though the warning itself carried a hint of agreement with my plan. It’s a pleasant thing, being supported.

“I’ll be careful.”