1. Adamantia is the capital of the decayed Himli empire and a huge city, numbering almost a million inhabitants. It is chaotically built, and divided in segregated quarters by curious low, squarely-angled walls made of bricks. Their construction was ordered by the nobles who, taking pride in belonging mostly to the Hilmi race, wanted to make themselves stand apart as much as possible. Some of these enclosed areas are ethnically oriented: there is a Clenian quarter, where weaponsmiths build axes the northern way, and people drink clear ale and eat dried meat; a Dargav one, where the best bowyers and horse-traders are. And finally there is the Hilmi, or nobles', quarter, clustered around the Imperial palace. Another peculiar one is the brothels district, with the temple of Ishami in the middle.	The City and its surroundings Inner City The Maze Surroundings	2. Adamantia gives the impression of being made of a patchwork of several small- or medium-sized towns, each with its own identity, each inhabited by thoroughly different people, some overcrowded, some almost completely abandoned, some luxurious and some miserable; the mass of them is formally girt by one great wall of dark bricks, which actually passes through some of them, while a few are built entirely outside it, and in other places it is partially blown down, built in, or equipped with external staircases. At dawn and at sunset a light dusk seeps, in all seasons, out of the sewers, and to one looking at it from the mountains east of it,  Adamantia appears as a misty landscape, pierced only by some old watchtowers, temple domes and, above all, by the golden stone o the old Imperial Palace.  Some quarters of Adamantia are perfectly safe, others quite dangerous, and it is not always easy for a stranger to part the two groups.
3. As the Arvarian Philosphy predicts, Adamantia has two faces, one "wakeful", exterior, diurnal and one which is a "realm of dreams and the dead". This is the infamous Maze, the series of winding subterranean passages which spreads under almost the whole city.