Ar of Gor, the Home of the Blacks
AR... beleaguered and dauntless, was a magnificent sight. Its splendid, defiant shimmering cylinders loomed proudly behind the snowy marble ramparts; its double walls, the first three hundred feet high; the second, separated from the first by twenty yards, four hundred feet high-walls wide enough to drive six tharlarion wagons abreast on their summits. Every fifty yards along the walls rose towers, jutting forth so as to expose any attempt at scaling to the fire of their numerous archer ports. Across the city, from the walls to the cylinders and among the cylinders, I could occasionally see the slight flash of sunlight from the swaying tarn wires, literally hundreds of thousands of slender, almost invisible wires stretched in a protective net across the city. Dropping the tarn through such a maze of wire would be an almost impossible task. The wings of a striking tarn would be cut from its body by such wires." ~Tarnsman of Gor, page 162
"Since the siege of Ar, when Pa-Kur, Master Assassin, had violated the limits of his caste and had presumed, in contradiction to the traditions of Gor, to lead a horde upon the city, intending to make himself Ubar, the Caste of Assassins had lived as hated, hunted men, no longer esteemed mercenaries whose services were sought by cities, and, as often by factions within cities." ~Outlaw of Gor, page 72