A pit fighter of Meereen who came to the Red Keep as sworn shield to Lady Larra Rogare of Lys and who is remembered in the histories of the regency of King Aegon III chiefly for a single afternoon's work upon a drawbridge. Little is known of his life before the Rogares bought him, though it is said he took a hundred victories in the fighting pits of that city. He stood near seven feet tall, black of skin and hair, his face crossed with thin white scars, and his lips and his tongue had been cut away, so that he went veiled in black silk and could neither speak what he had seen nor write it, being unlettered besides. Men who took him for a brute were mistaken in at least one particular, for he was a musician of some delicacy, and played sad sweet songs upon a stringed instrument of goldenheart and ebony. The fool Mushroom records that the playing always made his lady weep, and that she liked it the better for that. He bore a great curved sword of Valyrian steel with a hilt of dragonbone, and a tall black shield of nightwood, boiled hide, and iron.
He came to King's Landing in 134 AC in the train of Prince Viserys Targaryen, who had brought his Lysene wife home from across the narrow sea. In 135 AC, when the Rogares were accused of conspiring against the king in the collapse the singers name the Lysene Spring, Ser Amaury Peake of the Kingsguard went to Maegor's Holdfast with a dozen men-at-arms to take Lady Larra into custody. Prince Viserys planted an axe in the boards of the drawbridge and warned them not to cross it, and when they crossed, Sandoq came out alone. Mushroom, who watched, said it looked less like a swordfight than like a farmer reaping grain, save that these stalks screamed and cursed as they fell. He cut down the guardsmen with his Valyrian steel, killed Ser Amaury with the planted axe, and threw the bodies onto the iron spikes of the dry moat beneath, then withdrew behind the lowered portcullis, and so began the eighteen days remembered as the secret siege. When King Aegon walked into the small council chamber upon his sixteenth nameday to dismiss his regents and his Hand from their service, the Shadow walked at his shoulder, and no man in that room found the tongue to object.