Scene 1: The River
The Tyrell encampment at Ashford was not merely a military base; it was a sprawling, luminous city of canvas that turned the night sky an angry orange with the light of ten thousand cookfires.
It could be heard from three miles away—a low, continuous roar of drunken songs, neighing horses, and blacksmith hammers repairing tourney armor.
Siro did not approach the light. He approached the noise.
He moved along the bank of the Cockleswent River, half a mile upstream from the main Tyrell perimeter. He was no longer the stable boy from the market. He was something liminal, dressed in greys and browns that matched the river mud and dry reeds.
He possessed no cloak of invisibility, no sorcerer's shadows to hide him. He was just a small boy who understood how the eye worked. The eye was drawn to movement and contrast. So Siro became still, and he became the color of the dirt.
He moved only when the wind rustled the willow branches. He froze when a cloud cleared the moon. He breathed through his open mouth to silence the sound of air in his nostrils.
He was looking for the veins of the army.
An army of eighty thousand men was a beast that required a massive amount of blood to survive. That blood was water.
He found the main artery by the smell of churned earth.
A wide, muddy track had been beaten from the camp to the riverbank. It was slick with spilled water and the ruts of heavy cart wheels. Siro slipped into the reeds adjacent to the track, sinking to his knees in the cold slime, becoming just another shadow among the cattails.
He watched.
A dozen water wagons were lined up on a wide gravel bar where the river slowed and deepened. A bucket brigade of fifty soldiers—grumbling, sleepy levies—were working rhythmically.
Dip. Swing. Pour.
They filled large wooden casks strapped to the wagons.
Siro focused his attention on the process. He watched a soldier dip a leather bucket directly into the slow-moving current. The water was relatively clear here, upstream of the camp's latrines and horse lines.
The soldier lifted the bucket and dumped it straight into the cask.
Siro waited. He watched the next bucket. And the next.
There were no layers of sand. There were no barrels of crushed charcoal like the ones Robert had ordered Stannis to build. There was no boiling.
They were drinking raw river.
Amateurs, Siro thought, the word echoing his King's disdain. They think because it looks clean, it is clean.
He watched the guards stationed to protect the water point. There were four of them. They were standing near a small fire they had built on the gravel bar, their backs to the dark river, laughing at a joke. Their night vision was completely destroyed by the firelight. They were guarding the flames, not the water.
Siro silently slipped deeper into the water, letting the current carry him slightly further upstream, away from the activity. The water was cold, biting through his thin tunic, but he didn't shiver. Shivering made noise.
He needed to find the intake—the exact flow that fed that gravel bar.
He moved another two hundred yards upstream, around a slight bend in the river. Here, the current caught debris—fallen branches, mats of dead leaves, and river scum—trapped in a natural eddy before flowing down toward the watering point.
Siro waded into the eddy, the water reaching his chest. He stood still, feeling the flow against his legs.
This was it. Anything dropped here would inevitably drift down to where those buckets were dipping.
He looked back towards the orange glow of the camp. They were feasting. They were drinking Arbor gold. And tomorrow, they would drink this water.
Siro permitted himself a very small, very cold smile in the darkness. He had found the throat of the giant. Now, he just needed something to choke it with.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 10: The Spy's First Mission
Scene 2: The Calculation
Siro did not have to go far to find death. In a camp of eighty thousand men, death was a byproduct as common as ash.
He moved away from the river, circling back toward the rear of the Tyrell supply lines. He avoided the picket fires, sticking to the muddy depression that served as the camp's open sewer. The smell was atrocious—a mix of human waste and rotting meat—but to Siro, it was the smell of opportunity.
He found the refuse pit half a mile downwind of the kitchens.
It was a shallow ravine where the army butchers threw the offal—intestines, hooves, and heads of the cattle slaughtered daily for the lords' tables. The mound was buzzing with flies even in the dark.
Siro pulled a heavy canvas sack from his belt—stolen from a grain wagon earlier.
He didn't go for the fresh bones. He dug deeper. He plunged his hands into the slick, warm pile until he found the bottom layer. The grey, putrid meat that had been festering in the summer heat for three days.
He shoveled the rotting entrails into his sack. The stench made his eyes water, but he didn't gag. He filled the sack until it was heavy, wet, and leaking black fluid.
But offal wasn't enough. Offal caused belly aches. He needed something that caused death.
He crept further along the ravine. He found what he was looking for near the latrine trenches.
A body.
It wasn't a soldier. It was a camp follower—an old man, likely a washerman, curled up in the mud. He was dead, his skin pale and clammy, his breeches stained with blood.
The Flux, Siro diagnosed. The Red Death.
It was the soldier's nightmare. Dysentery. It killed faster than arrows and disabled ten men for every one it buried.
The body was small, wasted away by the sickness, but still too heavy for Siro to carry far.
He looked around. He saw a discarded wheelbarrow with a broken handle lying near the latrines.
He rolled the corpse onto the barrow. He piled the sack of rotting offal on top of the dead man's chest. Then, he moved.
The Riverbank
The journey back to the river was a nightmare of physical exertion.
Siro pushed the broken wheelbarrow through the mud, his muscles burning. Every squeak of the rusted axle sounded like a scream in the quiet night. He had to stop twice as a patrol rode by, freezing in the tall grass, the smell of the corpse threatening to give him away.
Finally, he reached the bend in the river—the eddy he had scouted earlier.
He was exhausted. His hands were raw. But the work wasn't done.
If he threw the body in now, it would float. The gases of decay would keep it bobbing on the surface like a cork. The water guards downstream would see it, fish it out, and raise the alarm.
He needed it to vanish.
Siro dragged the corpse to the water's edge. He took the rope he had brought—a coil of braided hemp stolen from the horse lines.
He found three large river stones, each the size of a melon.
He tied the first stone to the dead man's ankles. He tied the second to the corpse's waist.
Then, he took the sack of rotting offal. He cut slits in the canvas so the water could flow through it, flushing the bacteria out. He tied the sack to the corpse's chest with the third stone.
It was a grim package. A biological bomb.
Siro waded into the dark water. The current grabbed at his legs. He dragged the weighted mass with him, the water rising to his waist, then his chest.
He reached the center of the eddy. The water swirled here, slow and deep.
"Drink deep, my Lords," Siro whispered.
He shoved the corpse.
The weight of the stones took it instantly. There was a soft glug, a swirl of bubbles, and then... nothing.
The body sank to the bottom of the riverbed, anchored by the rocks. It was invisible from the surface.
But down in the dark, the current was already working. It washed over the rotting meat. It washed over the flux-ridden clothes of the dead man. It picked up the invisible poison and carried it out of the eddy, merging with the main flow.
Two hundred yards downstream, the bucket brigade was still working.
Dip. Swing. Pour.
They were filling the casks for the morning march. They were bottling the plague.
Siro waded back to the bank, shivering violently now as the adrenaline faded. He washed his hands in the mud to scrub off the worst of the smell, though he knew the scent of death would cling to him for days.
He looked back at the dark water. It looked innocent. It looked clean.
Siro turned and vanished into the reeds. He had done his part. The Tyrell army was no longer facing just 20,000 Stormlanders. They were facing an enemy they couldn't see, couldn't fight, and couldn't armor themselves against.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 10: The Spy's First Mission
Scene 3: The Result
Time: Two Days Later.
Location: The Staging Camp, Deep in the Woodlands North of Ashford.
Robert Baratheon sat on a log by the command fire. He was drinking cold, clear water from a tin cup.
Around him, the camp was a marvel of silent engineering. There were no massive bonfires to alert the enemy. The men huddled under canvas tarps against the drizzle.
Crucially, there was a specific routine at the mess line. Every drop of water drawn from the nearby stream passed through a battery of fifty heavy barrels. These barrels were filled with layers of river sand and crushed charcoal—the black gold Robert had ordered his men to produce weeks ago.
The water dripped out the bottom, slow but clean.
The sentries at the perimeter whistled. A single rider was approaching.
Siro slid off his pony. The boy looked half-dead. He was covered in two days of road dust, his eyes sunken with exhaustion. He stumbled toward the fire, his legs wobbling.
Lord Buckler and Ser Morrigen stepped forward to intercept him, but Robert waved them back.
"Give him water," Robert ordered. "Filtered."
Siro took the cup. He didn't check for floating grit. He drank greedily.
"Report," Robert said softy.
"It is done," Siro rasped, wiping his mouth. "The eddy flows directly into their watering point. I planted the... package... two nights ago."
"What package?" Buckler asked, frowning.
"A corpse," Siro said flatly. "A victim of the Bloody Flux. Weighted down with stones. And a sack of rotting offal."
Buckler recoiled, looking sick. "Seven Hells. You poisoned the river? That is... that is not war, that is an abomination."
"That is mathematics," Robert interrupted, his voice cold.
He stood up, looming over the fire.
"Siro rode for two days," Robert addressed his captains. "The Flux takes two days to brew in the gut. That means while Siro was riding, Mace Tyrell's army was drinking."
Robert paced before the fire.
"Right now," Robert predicted, pointing south into the darkness, "Mace Tyrell is waking up to a nightmare. He has a hundred thousand men packed into a few square miles. They are drinking raw river water because they are too lazy to filter it."
"And the levies?" Morrigen asked.
"The levies are cramping," Robert said grimly. "By noon today, fifteen thousand men will be unable to stand. By sunset, their latrines will overflow. The disease will be in the mud, on their boots, in their food."
Robert turned to Buckler.
"You asked me why I make the men haul these heavy barrels of charcoal, Buckler. You asked me why we waste time dripping water through sand instead of just drinking from the brook."
"I did, my Lord," Buckler admitted. "It seemed... tedious. A waste of time."
"Siro," Robert barked. "Did you see filters in the Tyrell camp?"
"None," Siro said. "They dip buckets straight from the stream. They drink the mud."
"How many cases of the Flux do we have, Buckler?" Robert asked, gesturing to his own army—twenty thousand men living in the damp woods. "We have been in the field for weeks."
Buckler hesitated. "None, my Lord. A few fevers from the rain. No Flux."
"Zero," Robert emphasized. "Tyrell has a hundred thousand men. By my count, a fifth of his army is currently shitting their lives away. He has lost twenty thousand spears without me swinging my hammer once."
The captains went silent. The horror of the biological attack was mitigated by the terrified awe of Robert's foresight. He had turned a few barrels of burnt wood into a shield.
"They are too proud to learn," Robert said, kicking a log into the fire, sending sparks into the night air. "They think war is just swords and glory. They don't understand that the smallest enemy is the deadliest."
He looked at Siro, who had curled up on a bedroll, finally allowing himself to sleep.
"Rest, Siro," Robert murmured.
He turned back to the south, his face hard as granite.
"Let them drink their own filth. We march at dawn."
[End of Chapter 10]