and a shadow stepped onto the drawbridge.
Sandoq the Shadow had come from Lys with Lady Larra, a gift from her father the Magister Lysandro. Black of skin and black of hair, he stood almost seven feet tall. His face, which he oft kept hidden behind a black silk veil, was a mass of thin white scars, and his lips and tongue had been removed, leaving him both mute and hideous to look upon. It was said of him that he had been the victor of a hundred fights in the death pits of Meereen, that he had once torn out the throat of a foe with his teeth after his sword had shattered, that he drank the blood of the men he killed, that in the pits he had slain lions, bears, wolves, and wyverns with no weapon but the stones he found upon the sands.
Such tales grow in the telling, to be sure, and we cannot know how much of this, if any, is to be believed. Though Sandoq could not read or write, Mushroom tells us he was fond of music, and would oft sit in the shadows of Lady Larra’s bedchamber playing sweet sad notes on a queer stringed instrument of goldenheart and ebony that stood near as tall as he did. “I could sometimes make the lady laugh, though she did not understand more than a few words of our tongue,” the fool says, “but the Shadow’s playing always made her weep, and strange to say she liked that better.”
It was a different sort of music that Sandoq the Shadow played at the gates of Maegor’s Holdfast, as Ser Amaury’s guardsmen rushed at him with sword and spear. That night his chosen instruments were a tall black shield of nightwood, boiled hide, and iron, and a great curved sword with a dragonbone hilt whose dark blade shone in the torchlight with the distinctive ripples of Valyrian steel. His foes howled and cursed and shouted as they came at him, but the Shadow made no sound save with his steel, sliding through them silent as a cat, his blade whistling left and right and up and down, drawing blood with every cut, slashing through their mail as if they had been clad in parchment. Mushroom, who claims to have seen the battle from the roof above, testifies that “it did not look so much like a swordfight as like a farmer reaping grain. With every stroke more stalks would topple, but these stalks were living men who screamed and cursed as they fell.” Ser Amaury’s men did not lack for courage, and some lived long enough to strike blows of their own, but the Shadow, always moving, caught their blades upon his shield, then used that shield to shove them backward, off the bridge onto the hungry iron spikes below.
Let this be said of Ser Amaury Peake: his dying did not disgrace the Kingsguard. Three of his men were dead upon the drawbridge and two more were twisting on the spikes below by the time Peake slid his own blade from its scabbard. “He was clad in white scale armor under his white cloak,” Mushroom tells us, “but his helm was openface and he had not brought a shield, and sorely did Sandoq make him answer for these lacks.” The Shadow made a dance of it, the fool says; betwixt each fresh wound he dealt Ser Amaury, he would kill one of his remaining minions before turning back to the white knight. Yet Peake fought on with stubborn valor, and near the end, for half a heartbeat, the gods gave him his chance when the last of the guards somehow got his hand around Sandoq’s sword, and ripped it from the Shadow’s grasp before he went tumbling off the bridge. From his knees, Ser Amaury staggered back to his feet and charged his unarmed foe.
Sandoq tore Viserys’s battleaxe from the wood where the prince had buried it and split Ser Amaury’s head and helm in half from crest to gorget. Leaving the corpse to topple onto the spikes, the Shadow paused long enough to shove the dead and dying from the drawbridge before retreating inside Maegor’s Holdfast, whereupon the king commanded the bridge to be raised, the portcullis lowered, and the gates barred. The castle-within-the-castle stood secure.
And so it would remain for eighteen days.
The rest of the Red Keep was in the hands of Ser Marston Waters and his Kingsguard, whilst beyond the castle walls