Siege of Astapor

The news reached Meereen before anything else did: Cleon, the Butcher King, was dead, killed by his own men after his defeat at Hazzat's Horns. His heir, a boy they called Cleon the Second, did not last either. Astapor fell into the hands of a man calling himself the Cutthroat King and a woman known as the Whore Queen.

Outside the walls, the Yunkai'i and their sellswords had spent months burning crops and killing livestock. Inside, people ate cats, rats and boiled leather while the king and his queen feasted on the flesh of the dead. Someone sacked and burned the pyramid of Nakloz, blaming its owner for every misfortune; others blamed Daenerys Targaryen instead.

Rumors about her contradicted each other: that she was coming with an army and food for everyone, that she had been seen flying over the Yunkish fields on dragonback. In the middle of that desperation, the Green Grace had a vision — that the dead Cleon himself would deliver the city to Yunkai. The Astapori, with little else to hold on to, chose to believe her.

What they did with that vision was dig up the dead king's body, tie it to a starving horse, and put it at the head of an Unsullied sortie against the Yunkish lines. That was how the battle began.

The battle began at dawn, so suddenly that some of the Windblown were still asleep when the Unsullied appeared three hundred yards from their lines. Prince Quentyn Martell watched from a safe distance, alongside Ser Archibald Yronwood and Gerris Drinkwater; it was Gerris who pointed out the dead Butcher King, mounted and armored in a coat of copper scales that shone in the sun.

The Windblown and the Company of the Cat mounted up within minutes and fell on the Astapori flanks, while a legion of New Ghis closed off the other side from the Yunkish camp. The Unsullied were surrounded. From then on it was not a battle, just slaughter.

It was Daggo who unhorsed Cleon's corpse and opened it from shoulder to hip with his Valyrian steel arakh; a stench and a hundred writhing worms spilled out from inside the armor. After that they called him the Corpsekiller. Watching the dead king fall a second time broke what was left of the Unsullied's spirit, and they threw down spears and shields and ran for a city whose gates had already closed behind them.

Quentyn would say afterward that it had felt like a real battle to him. Denzo D'han, who carried a hundred battles on his back, corrected him with a single word: slaughter.

After the Unsullied's defeat, the Green Grace was impaled on a spike in the Plaza of Punishment and left there until she died, for the prophecy that had driven the sortie. In the pyramid of Ullhor, some survivors toasted that same night with wine that turned out to be poisoned.

Soon after, the bloody flux arrived and killed three men in four, guards included. With no one left to hold the gates, the legions of New Ghis, the Yunkai'i and the sellsword riders entered Astapor and the killing began.

The Temple of the Graces was full of the sick who had come to beg the gods to heal them. New Ghis soldiers sealed the doors and set it alight with torches. For hours the flames ate through the city street by street, and people ran back and forth looking for a way out that did not exist, because the city gates had been sealed too.

Quentyn Martell walked through what was left: a river of corpses, the Green Grace's body still on its spike under a cloud of flies, the dying staggering through the smoke. He would later think it was the closest thing to hell he had ever seen. In Meereen, Daenerys Targaryen learned of the city's fall from three Astapori who had managed to escape: a brickmaker, a weaver and a cobbler. She walked out onto her terrace and saw the sky darker than usual, with a smudge of smoke on the distant horizon.