When Daenerys Targaryen came to the red brick city of Astapor upon the shore of Slaver's Bay, she came as a beggar queen with three young dragons and a threadbare host, seeking the means to win back the Seven Kingdoms. Astapor's wealth was built upon the Unsullied, eunuch slave-soldiers gelded and drilled from boyhood in a discipline so absolute that a master might bid them cut down their own hearts and they would obey. The Good Masters, chief among them one Kraznys mo Nakloz, haggled over her before her face, believing that the silver-haired girl could not follow their coarse Ghiscari tongue. In the end she offered them all: her ships, her gold, and the largest of her three dragons, the black beast Drogon, in exchange for every Unsullied in the city, the trained and the half-trained and the boys not yet come to their manhood alike.
The bargain was struck upon the plaza of pride, and Kraznys handed her the harpy's whip that men called the fingers, the token of command over eight thousand eunuchs and more. Then Daenerys spoke to her new soldiers in High Valyrian, that they and all Astapor might learn she had understood every insult heaped upon her, and she gave Drogon a single word: dracarys. The dragon's fire took Kraznys where he stood, and the Unsullied, freed of their masters in the same breath, turned their spears upon the Good Masters who had sold them. The sack that followed was swift and pitiless. The slavers of Astapor were cut down in their manses, the slave pens were thrown open, and the harpy that crowned the city was pulled down into the dust.
Daenerys did not linger to hold what she had taken. She named a healer, a scholar, and a priest to govern the freed city as a council in her absence, then marched north and west with the Unsullied at her back, no longer the least of them but their queen. Behind her Astapor's brief liberty would curdle into misrule and worse, but that was a grief for later years; in the moment of her leaving, the sack of Astapor had turned a friendless exile into a conqueror with a disciplined army of her own, and word of it ran ahead of her across all the cities of the slavers' coast.