Drogon had been in the air for an hour.
He had gone up, tested the thermals over the waste with the patience of something discovering a new sense, and climbed until he was a black point against the pale sky that Daenerys could only locate by the faint secondary awareness she now knew to look for — the tilted feeling, the secondary horizon, the knowledge of altitude in a body that was not her own.
She had been watching from the ground and watching from the air simultaneously, still learning how to hold both at once without letting either slip.
The waste from four hundred feet was extraordinary. The red surface that looked flat from the ground revealed itself as textured — ridges and dried channels and the faint shadows of old watercourses, the landscape of a place that had once had water and had been systematically drained of it over centuries. She could see the grass-lines that marked the underground channels, clearer from above than from the ground. She made a mental note to revise the next day's route.
Then Drogon banked, correcting course, and the secondary vision swung southwest.
She almost missed it.
A flash of white — not the red-brown of rock, not the bleached tan of dried grass, but a true, sharp white that caught the high sun and threw it back. There and then gone as Drogon completed his turn.
Go back, she thought.
Drogon banked again. She wasn't sure if he was responding to her or simply following his own inclination, but the result was the same: the southwest horizon again, and the white shape larger now that she was looking for it.
A city.
The regularity of it was unmistakable — not rock formation, not natural outcrop. Straight lines. Walls. The geometry of something built.
She blinked herself back to her own eyes and stood in the red waste with her hand pressed against her sternum, still feeling the slight vertigo of the transition.
"Jorah."
He was sceptical in the way of a man who has not seen what she has seen. She could not blame him for this.
"No one lives in the red waste," he said. "As far as I know, no one ever has. The Free City traders don't cross it. The Dothraki avoid it except to ride through on their way to the Lhazar, and they don't stop." He turned the information over. "A ruined city, then. Something old."
"Thirty miles southwest," Daenerys said. "Drogon could see it clearly. It's large — not a village, not a waystation. Something that was built to last."
"A dead city," Jorah said slowly. "In a waste that didn't used to be a waste." He looked at the dried riverbed beside them. "This was a river valley once."
"Not so long ago that all traces are gone," she agreed. "Something changed. The water stopped."
He looked southwest. The horizon was flat red under the white sky.
"It would be shelter," he said. "Stone walls keep the heat out better than tent canvas."
"It would be water," she said. "Old cities were built on water. The cisterns might still hold something."
He nodded. "I'll send Aggo."
Aggo came back before noon with two riders, all three of them carrying the particular expression of people who have seen something they have not fully decided how to categorise.
"It's real," Aggo said. "White stone. Everything white — the walls, the streets, the houses. Like someone poured chalk over everything." He paused. "No people. The gates are fallen. The roofs are mostly in. The streets—" he considered— "have been empty for a long time. Generations, maybe. There's no smell of recent fire, no refuse, no sign anyone has been near it."
"The stone is intact?"
"Mostly. Some buildings have fallen entirely. Others look like they could still stand another hundred years." He looked at her. "It's a big place. Bigger than I expected from your description."
"We move toward it at dusk," Daenerys said.
Jhiqui made a sound.
"When gods leave a place," the girl said carefully, "other things come to fill the space. Darker things. A city where no one has lived for generations—" she stopped.
"What things?" Daenerys asked.
"Everyone knows," Jhiqui said.
"I don't know," Daenerys said. "Tell me specifically."
Jhiqui looked at her feet. "I don't know specifically."
"Then we'll find out when we get there." Daenerys looked at the assembled riders. "Stone walls. Shade. Possible water in the cisterns. This is what we've been looking for. We are going."
She looked at Jhiqui and Irri.
"Both of you, walk near me when we arrive. If anything tries to eat you, my dragons will eat it first."
She was fairly confident this was true. Drogon had been showing increasing interest in anything that moved at ground level and was smaller than a horse.
They moved at dusk.
The route southwest added distance but the scouts had found two water caches along the approach, and by the time the white walls appeared on the horizon — pale against the darkening sky, visible from miles away by the way they caught the last of the light — the khalasar had covered sixty miles and the horses were moving with the particular focused purposefulness of animals that can smell something ahead that they have not smelled in days.
Water. The cisterns were dry but the wells were not — some of them, at the city's lowest points, still held a thin film of groundwater that seeped up from whatever lay beneath the white stone.
Not enough for everyone. But the filter was already running.
Daenerys stood in the main gate — or where the main gate had been, before time and wind had worked on the hinges and left the doors lying flat in the dust — and looked at the city.
It was very white. The stone was a pale limestone that had been cut and dressed and fitted with a precision she recognised as the work of people who knew what they were doing. The streets were wide enough for carts. The buildings were low, designed for heat — thick walls, small windows, deep interior courtyards that would hold cool air long after the exterior baked.
There were no signs. No inscriptions visible from where she stood. No statues, no imagery. Whoever had lived here had either taken their culture with them or it had been removed by whoever came after.
"It's beautiful," Doreah said, from behind her left shoulder.
It was, Daenerys realised. In its own austere way, under the first stars and the red glow of the comet, the white city was genuinely beautiful — the geometry of it, the care of its construction, the fact that it had outlasted whatever had killed the civilisation that built it.
She thought about Vhaeson's book. She thought about the maps it contained. She thought about the sections that described various cities of Essos and what they had been before they were what they currently were.
She had not yet read the section on the red waste.
She made a note to do so.
"Set the camp inside the walls," she said. "Central courtyard if there's one large enough. Quaro — post guards on the gate and the approaches. Jorah, I need an hour with the cisterns before you sleep."
She walked into the white city with Drogon on her shoulder and the comet overhead and the sound of two hundred people following her in.