The City of Brass characters

Appears from the start

A young woman scraping a living in Ottoman Cairo as a thief, a fake exorcist and a healer for hire. She has no memory of her parents, speaks an unusual number of languages including one she has never been able to place, and hides a talent she cannot explain: she senses sickness in others by touch, and her own injuries close almost as fast as she takes them. Sharp-tongued, mercenary and relentlessly practical, she treats every relationship as a transaction, until a ceremony she is performing purely for money summons something she cannot talk her way out of.

Also known as Darayavahoush e-Afshin, the Afshin

First appears in chapter 2

A daeva warrior who appears out of the desert air when Nahri sings in a language she does not know she speaks. Tall and green-eyed, marked with a faded tattoo of ladder-like rungs and wearing a battered emerald ring, he commands fire and wind and can fly. He served the Nahids, the family of magical healers who ruled the djinn city of Daevabad before it was taken from them, and fourteen centuries of that history sit heavily on him. Arrogant, blunt and quick to violence, he is bound by duty to protect Nahri, whom he believes to be the last of his masters' line. Long stretches of his own past are missing from his memory.

Appears from the start

An elderly apothecary in Cairo who lets Nahri work beside him, buys the odd item she has stolen, and worries constantly about the risks she takes. He is one of the few people in her life she is genuinely fond of.

Appears from the start

A young girl in Cairo whose family pays Nahri to perform a zar, a ceremony meant to appease the spirit they believe is troubling her. Nahri expects to sing, take the money and leave. The ceremony does not go as she intends.

Also known as Alizayd al Qahtani, Ali

First appears in chapter 4

The younger son of the king of Daevabad, raised from childhood at the Citadel to become Qaid, commander of the army, and to serve his elder brother when that brother takes the throne. Devout, disciplined and awkward anywhere outside a training yard, he is troubled by the way the city treats its shafit, the people of mixed human and djinn blood, and has begun quietly diverting money to an organization that helps them, a betrayal of his father he tells himself is only charity.

Also known as Sheikh Anas Bhatt

First appears in chapter 6

The leader of the Tanzeem, a shafit welfare organization in Daevabad that runs an orphanage, a school and a clinic, and that Ali has been secretly funding. A preacher of mixed human and djinn blood, he argues that the city's laws leave the shafit no lawful way to protect themselves.

Also known as Ghassan al Qahtani

First appears in chapter 6

King of Daevabad and head of the Qahtani family, which took the city from the Nahids fourteen centuries ago. He rules its six djinn tribes from the palace of the brass city and holds Suleiman's seal, the relic whose bearer commands magic within Daevabad's walls. Politically shrewd and entirely unsentimental, he keeps peace between tribes that despise one another by making public examples of anyone who disturbs it.

First appears in chapter 8

Ghassan's elder son and the emir, heir to Daevabad. Charming, worldly and fond of wine, poetry and company, he moves easily among the city's nobles in a way his younger brother never has. He is inseparable from Jamshid e-Pramukh, son of the Daeva grand wazir, and he treats the responsibilities waiting for him with a lightness his family reads as carelessness.

First appears in chapter 10

Ghassan's daughter and Ali's older sister, a princess raised at court rather than at the Citadel. Poised and very well informed, she reads the palace's politics better than either of her brothers and is often the only easy point of contact between them.

First appears in chapter 11

A peri, one of the beings of the air, who finds Nahri and Dara close to death on their journey east and tends to them. The peri are forbidden to involve themselves in the affairs of daevas and humans, and the help he gives is offered at real risk to himself.

First appears in chapter 12

An officer of Daevabad's Royal Guard who is connected to the Tanzeem and who presses Ali to carry his sympathy for the shafit further than quiet donations. Devout and uncompromising, he has little patience for a prince's scruples.

First appears in chapter 18

A Daeva woman who served the last Nahid healers before they died and who now assists Nahri in the palace infirmary, teaching her a craft she was never trained in. Devoted to Daeva tradition and to the restoration of her tribe's standing, she is impatient with Nahri's ignorance and with her friendliness toward the Qahtanis.

Also known as Kaveh e-Pramukh

First appears in chapter 18

Grand wazir of Daevabad and the highest-ranking Daeva in the king's government, brought to the capital from the tribe's provincial seat. Fiercely protective of Daeva interests and openly hostile to any concession to the shafit, he is in near-constant conflict with Ali.

Also known as Banu Manizheh

First appears in chapter 18

The Banu Nahida of the previous generation, remembered as the most gifted healer her family produced and as a woman the king could never quite control. She and her brother Rustam were reported killed by ifrit some twenty years before Nahri arrives, and their deaths left Daevabad with no Nahid healer at all. Everything Nahri hears about her comes secondhand, from people with reasons of their own for how they tell it.

Also known as Jamshid e-Pramukh

First appears in chapter 20

Kaveh's son, a Daeva archer who serves as Muntadhir's captain and closest companion. Even-tempered and steady, he is one of the very few people at court whom both the Daeva tribe and the Qahtanis are willing to trust.