On the walls of Qarth, men beat gongs to herald¹ her coming, while others blew curious horns that encircled their bodies like great bronze snakes. A column of camelry emerged from the city as her honor guards. The riders wore scaled copper² armor and snouted helms with copper tusks³ and long black silk plumes⁴, and sat high on saddles inlaid with rubies⁵ and garnets. Their camels were dressed in blankets of a hundred different hues⁶.  “Qarth is the greatest city that ever was or ever will be,” Pyat Pree had told her, back amongst the bones of Vaes Tolorro. “It is the center of the world, the gate between north and south, the bridge between east and west, ancient beyond memory of man and so magnificent that Saathos the Wise put out his eyes after gazing upon Qarth for the first time, because he knew that all he saw thereafter should look squalid and ugly by comparison.”  Dany took the warlock’s words well salted, but the magnificence of the great city was not to be denied. Three thick walls encircled Qarth, elaborately carved. The outer was red sandstone, thirty feet high and decorated with animals: snakes slithering, kites flying, fish swimming, intermingled with wolves of the red waste and striped zorses and monstrous⁷ elephants. The middle wall, forty feet high, was grey granite⁸ alive with scenes of war: the clash of sword and shield and spear, arrows in flight, heroes at battle and babes being butchered, pyres of the dead. The innermost wall was fifty feet of black marble, with carvings⁹ that made Dany blush until she told herself that she was being a fool. She was no maid; if she could look on the grey wall’s scenes of

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