Chapter 17 – The Whisper Market
The Whisper Market wasn't a place so much as an arrangement of shadows. Beneath the taverns of Flea Bottom, where rats feasted and secrets fermented, men and women traded in the one currency that never lost its value — information.
Aden entered alone, dressed plainly, his face half-hidden beneath a hood. The air reeked of wet stone and wine.
At a small table sat a woman with ink-stained fingers, eyes bright and untrusting.
"You're late," she said.
"I'm cautious."
"Same thing," she murmured, sliding a scrap of parchment toward him. "Three bits of truth for the price of one lie. That's how we trade here."
Aden unfolded it. Each line a whisper of the city's veins:
Baelish's collectors paid in gold, not coin.
Maester Rendal's apprentice meets with Varys's birds.
The Iron Bank holds the Crown's debt through proxies.
He memorized the words, then burned the parchment.
"You've been busy for a clerk," the woman said softly. "Men like you don't last long."
"I don't intend to last," Aden replied. "I intend to matter."
That answer drew the first flicker of respect from her eyes.
By dawn, he'd purchased the names of two informants within the Treasury and learned that one of them — a scribe named Daren — had vanished three nights ago after copying Baelish's private ledgers.
Rendal, too, was unraveling. Reports arrived of him interrogating his own clerks, convinced of a plot against him. Aden had sent him another anonymous letter, just one line: "The enemy you fear is already in your walls."
The city had become a web — and every tremor ran back to him.
Yet for all his control, Aden couldn't shake the unease building beneath it all.
Someone else was weaving, too.
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