Location from A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
The teeming capital of the Seven Kingdoms — half a million souls crammed between the Red Keep's towers and the stinking alleys of Flea Bottom, where power is bought with gold, blood, and whispered secrets.
King's Landing assaults the senses before it reveals its secrets. The smell hits first — fish guts from the harbor, open sewers running downhill, roasting meat from street vendors, incense from the sept, and beneath it all the sour human density of too many people packed too tightly. The sound follows: hawkers, beggars, the clatter of the Gold Cloaks' boots on cobblestone, the distant roar from the fighting pits, and always the bells — the sept bells that ring for coronations, weddings, and deaths, which in this city are often the same event. Beneath the noise and stench, the real city operates in whispers. The Small Council chamber where wars are planned over wine. The tunnels beneath the Red Keep where Varys's little birds scurry with secrets. The brothels where Littlefinger's informants trade pillow talk for coin. Every transaction in King's Landing has a visible price and a hidden one, and the hidden one is always higher. The city was built by conquerors and has been ruled by schemers ever since — it rewards cunning, punishes naivety, and grinds the poor between the ambitions of the powerful without a second thought.
The city sprawls across three hills — Aegon's, Visenya's, and Rhaenys's — where the Red Keep, the Great Sept of Baelor, and the Dragonpit respectively crown each summit. Mud-brick and timber buildings crowd every slope between, their rooftops a chaotic patchwork of tile and thatch descending to the harbor where hundreds of ships rock at anchor. The city walls trace a rough crescent along the Blackwater Rush. On clear days the towers gleam almost gold; on most days, a haze of cookfire smoke and human industry hangs over everything like a dirty veil.
Also known as: the capital, King's Landing, KL