Chapter 47: The Water Gate
The darkest hour before dawn found several cloaked figures waiting in the shadow of the tower beside Lannisport’s eastern water gate. The sea wind came in cold from the harbor, carrying salt, pitch, old fish, and the nervous smell of men who had chosen treason and were now discovering that treason did not sit comfortably in the stomach. Ships rocked softly against their moorings, ropes creaking against the pilings while the city slept behind its walls.
“The time is almost here,” Cory whispered, wiping sweat from his round face with a sleeve already damp from fear.
“Shut up,” Hobart Leek said.
The thin minor lord stood beside him with one hand wrapped around the hilt of his sword. His knuckles were pale. House Leek held small lands near the harbor and lived from sea trade, which meant Damon Lannister’s stubbornness and the Battanian army outside the walls had become personal matters. A doomed port could bury a family as easily as a battlefield could bury a knight. Hobart had decided it was better to gamble before Damon dragged them all down with him. Very brave, if one ignored how much fear had helped.
The captain of the water gate was his distant kin and had already been persuaded. Several merchants and lesser nobles had joined the same game, sending men through the dark to bargain with Smith’s agents outside the city. They had received a promise: their families would be spared, their property protected, and their cooperation rewarded after the city fell. Promises were cheap. In wartime, cheap things became expensive only after men had already trusted them.
Outside Lannisport, the Battanian camp waited in a silence too tense to be natural. Siege towers stood like dark giants against the fading night. Battering rams, ballistae, ladders, and carts were already in position. Men checked bowstrings, tested shield straps, placed arrows where their hands could find them, and said little. A quiet army before an assault was more frightening than a loud one. Loud men spent fear through their mouths. Quiet men kept it for their hands.
Smith stood on a temporary command platform, watching the eastern sky pale by degrees. He held a burning torch in his right hand. The flame shook in the morning wind, bright and restless.
The third quarter before dawn came.
Smith drew a slow breath and threw the torch onto the piles of grease-soaked wood prepared in front of the camp. Fire caught at once. Three beacon flames rose sharply into the grey light, high enough for every watcher on the wall to see if he had been told where to look.
Inside the water gate tower, Cory let out a small, ugly sound.
“The signal. It is the signal.”
Hobart clenched his jaw and nodded to the pale captain beside the winch. The man hesitated only for a heartbeat. Then he gave the order. Soldiers pushed the heavy wheel together, and the iron chains groaned as the water gate began to rise. The sound was loud enough to make Hobart’s stomach tighten. Rusty iron grinding in the dark was not a subtle instrument for betrayal, but subtlety had already done its part.
The gate lifted slowly, revealing the black mouth of the waterway. At the same time, a smaller side door used by skiffs and harbor boats was opened from within.
“Signal them,” Hobart said.
A fire arrow rose from the tower and cut through the dawn.
Smith saw it and did not waste a breath.
“Attack.”
The camp erupted.
War drums rolled across the plain. Horns answered them. Catapults hurled stones against the walls, and the first impacts made the battlements shake. Ballistae spat bolts at towers and parapets while archers loosed volleys to drive defenders down. The earth, so still moments before, became movement, shouting, wheels, steel, and the ugly confidence of men who had rehearsed this before sunrise.
At the harbor, the Battanian water party moved. They were not sailors in any noble sense. Some were soldiers used to rivers, some captives who knew boats, and some men who had learned enough not to drown, which apparently counted as naval training when civilization became desperate. They had hidden among reeds and small craft through the night. Now they rowed hard for the open water gate.
At their front came several fire-ships packed with dry wood, pitch, and oil. They entered the waterway with the current and smashed into the inner obstacles. Flames burst upward, spreading quickly across piers, mooring ropes, warehouses, and anything else Lannisport had foolishly built too close to wood and greed.
“Enemy attack!”
“The water gate is open!”
“Traitors! Traitors opened the gate!”
Damon Lannister had barely slept when the alarm reached him. He rushed to the battlements with half-fastened armor and a face twisted by fury. From the wall, he saw the harbor burning, boats entering through the water gate, and Battanian soldiers already fighting on the docks. His anger did not change the sight. That was the rude thing about reality. It rarely bowed for a lord’s mood.
“Hobart! Cory!” Damon roared. “Kill those traitors. Close the water gate!”
He took men toward the tower, but it was too late. The fire-ships had done their work. More Battanians poured through the side door and dockside passages, cutting into the port guards who arrived in fragments. On the land side, siege towers rolled toward the walls, ladders rose, and battering rams struck the East Gate beneath a roof of shields.
“Hold!” Damon shouted, cutting down a Battanian who had climbed over the wall. “For Lannister. For the Westerlands.”
His loyalists fought hard. That much Arthur would have respected if he had been there to see it. Men defending a doomed city could still be brave, which only made the whole business more wasteful. Once the water gate was lost and the harbor burned, the defense began to split apart. Laborers pressed into service were the first to break. They threw down weapons, ran through alleys, and disrupted formations that might have held a little longer without them.
Several lesser nobles saw the shape of the day and led their men away from the walls. Some surrendered. Some tried to save their own estates. Some simply ran. They would later call it judgment, caution, or concern for their people. Men were endlessly inventive when dressing cowardice in better clothes.
“My lord,” a bloodied officer said, grabbing Damon’s arm. “We cannot hold. We must retreat through the West Gate. Casterly Rock is still open.”
Damon looked at the harbor, where black smoke rose like a funeral cloth. He looked at the breached walls, the broken lines, the fires spreading through warehouses, the men fleeing through streets that had carried Lannister wealth for centuries. Lannisport was finished.
“Retreat,” he said through clenched teeth.
His guards dragged him toward the West Gate before pride could make him change his mind. A small force cut through the chaos and escaped toward Casterly Rock while the city behind them collapsed. Once the commander fled, the defense ended in pieces.
By sunrise, Battanian banners flew over the highest tower and the governor’s mansion of Lannisport. The port city that had fed Lannister pride for generations burned under a golden-red dawn. Corpses lay across the streets, blood ran into drains, and the harbor water took on a faint red tint. Gold had built Lannisport. Fear had opened it. Fire had taken the rest.
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