Aryai Ling, the Summer City, lies on the An-Kiu River at the mouth of the Asti-Lio River. This gracious city of gardens and parks is filled with the summer residences of many of the wealthy and noble of Lirith Kai. The An-Kiu, dotted here with many small islands on which may be found private estates, charming restaurants and tea houses, and the quiet retreats of fishermen, is too broad to bridge, but there are many busy ferryboats to connect Aryai Ling with its outlying towns: Aryan Shan to the north across the Asti Lio and Kiru Mina on the east bank of the An-Kiu.

There has been a town or city on this site for longer than men remember. Many times it has been destroyed by flood. In the early days of the Empire, and the days before there was an Empire, it had been often destroyed by war, as well. The oldest part of the city, now in ruins, lies to the southwest of the present city, in a location that has been several times cut off from the river by a shifting of the channel and then revitalized when the channel shifted back; it now lies about two miles from the An-Kiu, wholly outside the present city and its walls. The visible ruins are mostly of public buildings--pillars around a plaza of cracked and missing paving stones, the worn arches of an aqueduct, battered stone walls around roofless rooms, stairways leading nowhere. In the outer parts of the site are the remains of mansions, and there is what was apparently a cemetery to the southwest--monuments leaning and broken, crumbling chapels, time-stained mausoleums like miniature palaces. The whole site is much overgrown with shrubbery and scattered trees, and people generally avoid it, not from superstition but because they have no reason to go there: these ruins have no interest for the people of Aryai Ling of today.

Aryai Ling is the seat of provincial Lord Governor Seldan ten Dahar; the city itself is governed by Subgovernor Magistrate Tirsan ten Korla.