Now they are sold only in groups of a century or thousand. The Good Masters, the slavers of Astapor, used to sell Unsullied in groups of ten for household guards, but that proved unsound since they mingle with others, and forget who they are. To win their spiked cap they must take a silver mark go to the slave markets and buy a newborn slave child and kill it before its mother and pay the slave's owner for his loss. During training boys are culled whenever they fail a task, be it running all day in full pack, scaling a mountain at night or walking across a bed of coals. Should he fail to do so, he is killed and fed to the surviving dogs. At the end of the first year, the boy is made to strangle the puppy. On the day a boy is cut, he is given a puppy to take care of. This means that they cannot be as strong as whole men, but this is more than made up for by discipline. The eunuchs are fully castrated, with their penis and testicles cut, and their manhoods are burned at the altar of the Lady of Spears. Only a third of the slaves to enter training survive to become Unsullied. Slaves that fail any aspect of their training are killed. It is brutal, designed not only to teach them how to fight, but to strip away all individuality, empathy, and self-worth. Their training starts at age five and is from dawn to dusk. Every day they choose new names at random by drawing tokens from a bucket, each consisting of a color and a type of vermin, such as ' Grey Worm'.

Unsullied begin as young male slaves chosen for their size, speed, and strength. A line of disciplined Unsullied spearman routing a cavalry charge, by Tomasz Jedruszek © Fantasy Flight Games

A storm of swords 2