Chapter 229: Be Especially Wary of Me
Ian had barely finished setting up the optional quest — Ensure you won't be attacked by the Faceless Men who came to assassinate Adam — and handed it to Yara before the system notification came back immediately: complete.
That confirmed what he'd suspected. The Faceless Men operated under genuine constraints. In most circumstances, they didn't take lives outside their contracted target. The kill was the transaction, and the transaction had defined limits.
Which made Jaqen H'ghar's behavior at Harrenhal look stranger in retrospect, not less. Agreeing to help Arya Stark escape — killing Lannister soldiers who had nothing to do with any contract — that was a significant departure from the institution's apparent rules.
It lent some weight to a theory Ian had come across in his previous life, among readers who'd thought carefully about where the story was heading: that Arya Stark was something more than a character finding her own path. That she was a piece being moved in a much larger game — the conflict between R'hllor and whatever force drove the Long Night.
In the show, Arya had used her Faceless Man training to disguise herself and drive a blade into the Night King, ending the Long Night in a single moment. Ian's personal assessment of that resolution was that it was dramatically convenient in a way the books would never be. The probability of the written story going that direction was effectively zero.
But Arya's role in whatever the gods were arranging for the Long Night — that part he believed. She was going to matter.
Ian caught himself and stopped.
I'm in Slaver's Bay. He pressed a hand briefly to his forehead. The Long Night is years away. Whatever the gods have planned for Arya Stark is not my problem. Whatever happens in Westeros right now is not my problem.
He shook it off and kept walking.
By the time he reached the third floor from the top of the pyramid, Ian had already dismissed everyone except the entrance guards. He turned to the Unsullied captain — a veteran with two commander's spikes on his helm.
"From this moment, no one enters or leaves this section for three months. All guard details maintain groups of no fewer than four men at all times. No individual leaves the line of sight of at least three others. No exceptions."
"Yes, sir."
"One more thing." Ian kept his voice level. "Our enemy can impersonate anyone. That includes me." He pointed at himself. "If anyone arrives at this post in the next three months and gives an order to lift the restriction or grant entry — anyone at all, regardless of who they appear to be — you kill them on the spot. Understood?"
The captain hesitated. "Anyone? Including you, my lord?"
"Including every one of your superior officers. Including my personal guard commanders. Including Lord Fehmar. Including me — especially me. Anyone who shows up and tries to get through that door is a Faceless Man in disguise. Assume it without exception."
"Yes, sir."
"Good." Ian waved him aside. "Let me through. I need to pass on the same instructions to the guards inside."
The captain waved his men aside to clear the path.
Ian stopped walking and stared at him.
"What did I just say?"
The captain opened his mouth.
"Anyone," Ian said, with considerably more force. "I just told you to kill anyone who approaches this post and gives such an order — and then I gave such an order." He held the captain's gaze. "So why am I still standing here?"
"My lord, you've been in our sight the entire time. You can't be an imposter."
"I didn't ask you to make that judgment. I don't want you making that judgment. I want you to follow the order, which means no one passes. Not under any circumstances. Are we clear?"
"Alert!" The captain's voice snapped out, and all twelve Unsullied on the stairway leveled their spears at Ian in a single motion.
"That's what I'm talking about." Ian nodded with satisfaction, then turned and walked briskly away before they had time to reconsider.
Per his earlier instructions, the guards were not permitted to leave their post to pursue a fleeing individual — that was exactly the kind of gap a Faceless Man would exploit. They held their ground. Ian kept walking until he was well clear of their range, then let out a slow breath.
He was barely down the steps when Duncan intercepted him.
Duncan was one of Ian's A-rank NPC knights — acquired early, and honestly not thought about much lately. As Ian's operation had expanded, the A-rank men had faded into the background behind the S-rank NPCs and the growing officer corps. But after the New Ghis envoy's visit, Ian had remembered them and put them to use: Duncan, his companion Mundo, and Ser Keith had been reassigned to Daenerys's personal guard.
The reasoning was straightforward. Ian had been publicly embracing Ghiscari culture — the tokar, the language, the deliberate positioning of himself as a man who understood and respected Old Ghis — and it was working well for local relations. Too well, perhaps. The city-states of Slaver's Bay had started asking a question Ian didn't want them asking: does this Westerosi knight actually intend to leave, or is he planning to stay and take everything?
The answer, eventually, was the latter — but not yet, and not in the way they were imagining. The immediate priority was keeping Meereen, Yunkai, and New Ghis calm long enough to deal with them on Ian's timetable rather than theirs.
Putting traditionally Westerosi knights in Daenerys's guard was the first move in that reassurance — a visible signal that the Queen still oriented toward home. The next step would be a series of carefully managed meetings with delegations from all three cities, engineered to leave them confident that Astapor's new rulers were a temporary disruption rather than a permanent threat.
"Why aren't you with the Queen?" Ian asked. "What are you doing out here?"
"Her Grace sent me to find you, my lord." Duncan straightened. "She says she has an urgent question. It seemed serious."
"Do you know what it's about?"
"The slave ranking system, my lord. She learned about the Five Orders — and about the Worm River operation. The number of new slaves taken." Duncan paused. "She's angry."
Ian's eyes narrowed. "Daenerys hasn't left Astapor. Who told her?"
"I don't know, my lord."
"Then find out. That's your job — not standing here telling me you don't know." Ian dismissed him with a wave and continued toward Daenerys's chambers.
The unease he'd felt all morning hadn't gone away. If anything it had sharpened.
The search for the Shadowbinder had come up empty. The Faceless Man defense had required him to build something almost absurdly specific just to close one vulnerability. And now someone inside his own operation had fed information to Daenerys — information Ian hadn't chosen to share with her yet, through a channel he couldn't identify.
Three separate intelligence failures in the same week. And he was working in a city the size of Astapor, a territory he actually controlled. What happened when he took Meereen — a city three times larger, with a hostile population, a functioning nobility, and enemies he hadn't fully mapped yet?
He needed something better than falcons and cats. He needed an actual network — the kind of systematic, layered intelligence operation that Varys had spent decades building with his little birds, or that Illyrio had maintained through Pentos with his informants spread through every household that mattered.
Building that from scratch, in the middle of everything else, was going to be a significant undertaking.
Ian filed it alongside the factory expansion and the food supply problem: things he couldn't solve today but couldn't afford to ignore indefinitely.
He arrived at Daenerys's door.
Mundo — the second A-rank knight, posted outside — straightened immediately on seeing him. "My lord. Please come in."
Ian stopped. "Shouldn't you go inside and announce me first?"
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