The only city Quaddis sports is called Xicarph—if indeed it can even truly be called a city. Xicarph, situated at Quaddis’ northern artic pole, is a sprawling vision of grandiose palaces, marble plazas, fecund gardens, and echoing amphitheatres— all bathed in a balmy heat contained beneath a sealed dome of brass and armour crystal that keeps the killing cold of the polar ice flats from disturbing the city’s inhabitants. Xicarph is the planet’s legal capitol but has few trappings of government, and even less of industry or production. Instead, it is a setting for all manner of revels and diversions, a sealed and guarded playground and meeting place for the obscenely wealthy and those whose dealings and power stretch across the worlds of the Calixis Sector. Xicarph is a marvel to the eye and a marked contrast to many other Imperial cities, a sprawling riot of white stone, marble, gold and adamantine. A place of open plazas, sumptuous palaces, wide promenades, stately gardens, and clean air, Xicarph’s beauty belies its true nature as a product of intrigue, vanity, and the callous abuse of power. Beneath its heavenly exterior, it is as corrosive and deadly as the worst world the Calixis Sector has to offer. As well as being home to a few thousand functionaries and attendants who can be truly called the city’s natives, its population swells and falls dramatically with the movements to and from residences of the city’s patrons and their entourages and with the movements of travellers, revellers, entertainers and traders. This transient population is fed by the fact that Xicarph also has the world’s lone open starport, and is thus a stopping point for itinerant entertainment troupes and jaded travellers from across the sector seeking Quaddis’ pleasures, if they have the wealth to afford the exorbitant landing fees. Xicarph is both a wondrous construction in itself and a relic of the Calixis Sector’s founding days, and like the rest of Quaddis,it is home to many forgotten things and dark echoes of the past. Running for kilometres beneath the city’s surface, sunk like roots into the rock below, is a maze of passageways, storage chambers, service ducts, geo-thermal reactors and, above all, secrets best left buried. Part of this shadowy labyrinth of steel and darkness carries the legendary name of the “Red Cages,” a network of slaughterhouses, cage complexes, and containment pens in which savage creatures are kept to fuel the blood sport arenas (and worse) in the city above.