Astapor

The city stands entirely in red brick, walls included, where the Worm River meets the sea, and still it wears a threadbare look, as though it had more room than people to fill it. The stepped pyramids of the wealthy carry hanging gardens on their terraces — the tallest brushes four hundred feet — and at dusk they're lit with silk lanterns that stain them in color. Outside the gates waits the Plaza of Punishment, a wooden platform where rebellious slaves are whipped, tortured, and hanged; it's the first thing a newly chained arrival sees. Further in, the Plaza of Pride works as a market for human flesh around a fountain that reeks of sulfur, and the boys training to become Unsullied are barracked right there. In the fighting pits, named for whoever owns them, wagers are placed on starving bear cubs or on children smeared with honey.

Astapori skin runs amber and their hair is stiff, red and black, inherited from the old Ghiscari people; they speak a dialect of High Valyrian in a thick accent. The Good Masters, the ruling class, wrap themselves in the tokar, a cloth that covers one shoulder and has to be held up with one hand, its fringe announcing the wearer's rank, and they style their hair into wings or horns. Women cover their faces with veils, less for modesty than to keep the red dust of the cobblestones out of their eyes.

Astapor began as a Ghiscari colony, one of the few that outlasted the Freehold of Valyria's destruction of Old Ghis. Valyrian dragons went on to conquer it as well, turning it into a warehouse of human flesh: slave labor shipped out from here to half the known world. Conquest cost the city its language too; Astapori stopped speaking Ghiscari and picked up a High Valyrian bent out of shape by generations of local accent.

One saying survives from that history, repeated in the city like a warning: 'With cobblestones and blood was Astapor built, and with cobblestones and blood, her people.'

Daenerys Targaryen comes to Astapor to buy an army of Unsullied, and leaves with the whole city turned upside down. She closes the deal, but the moment the soldiers answer to her she turns them on the men who sold them to her: she sacks the city, frees the slaves, and has most of the Good Masters killed.

Before she leaves she hands the government to a council of three — a healer, a scholar, a priest — people with no army of their own and no declared ambition to rule.

The council Daenerys leaves behind doesn't last. Cleon, a former butcher, convinces the population that the three regents are plotting to bring back the Good Masters, and stages a coup that ends with all three executed. He crowns himself king.

Under him the city slides back into old habits: the markets fill again with food and slaves for sale, and noble-born boys are rounded up wholesale to be trained as Unsullied — the same fate once reserved for others.

Yunkai lays siege to Astapor with an army of sellswords. Inside the walls the crown changes heads faster than anyone can track: Cleon is murdered, his killer proclaims himself Cleon the Second, and he in turn is killed by another man who starts calling himself the Cutthroat King. The city splits between him and the Whore Queen, Cleon's former concubine.

The new Unsullied, barely trained, march out to break the siege and are crushed. On top of that the bloody flux tears through what's left of the population, who end up throwing the gates open to escape the sickness rather than the enemy. The Yunkish pour in through those same gates.

The Whore Queen dies fighting; the Cutthroat King is torn apart by dogs in one of the fighting pits. The Yunkish, masters of the city now, shut the gates again, this time to keep the plague from spreading. Quentyn Martell, who rides through those red cobbled streets before it's all over, will later say it was the closest thing to hell he'd ever seen.