Gizem Faruki is a woman of four-and-forty, human and of Turkish stock, who carries herself with the composure of a Sufi whirling dervish and is rarely seen out of her particular habit of white, gold, and blue. A convert from Sunni Islam to the Sufi way, she has given her life over to two devotions at once — her prayer and her craft — and keeps a beloved baklava shop tucked into an alley, where she is as much a fixture of the neighbourhood as its cobbles. She lodges in the apartment above the ovens and oversees the trade there with the help of her assistant and the assistant's younger brother, cultivating the good will of neighbours and patrons alike. She works her own shifts at the counter, and it is a truth known to every proprietor of a small shop that the woman who serves the sweets hears the whole street's gossip; Gizem listens, and by such quiet attention keeps herself abreast of all that stirs about her.
Of late she received an invitation of some weight — to travel in the company of Osman Hamdi Bey and confer upon the Empire's ecumenical policy, a mark of her growing consequence. At a dinner at Thymbra Farm she moved amongst notable guests, General Patrice de MacMahon amongst them, and showed her nurturing temper by pressing sweets upon the children and staying Miray from a glass of wine. She marked, too, how ably Evelyn Calvert carried herself in talk of war and trade; and Osman Hamdi Bey praised her own labours at an archaeological dig before the company.
The following morning, before the dawn, she took to the terrace to practise her turning upon a balance nail-board. Her grace at it drew the eye of Sophia Schliemann, and Gizem seized the moment to set out the first steps of the turn and to explain its devotional meaning to the younger girls, who watched in a kind of wonder.
For all her sweetness of manner she is a courteous diplomat and a martial artist besides, unruffled where others would flinch. She addressed a Serpent in Turkish and asked hospitality of it as one might of a host; and when a great Serpent came forth from a dark hole she went to meet it and open a peaceful parley. By her negotiation she won the creature's forbearance on the condition that the party clear certain "interlopers" from the adjoining chamber — a bargain struck to spare her fellows and to settle the quarrel without needless blood. Following the Serpent's word, she helped draw out two men found frozen within a luminous ward, and afterward the company followed the Serpent to an outdoor exit, where one of the men was discovered senseless but breathing.
Her care for others reaches well past the shopfront, and she gathers what she can amongst the common folk. She sought out Nadja, who orders the kitchen of a mosque soup-kitchen, to ask after a man last seen at the soup-line — a thread of an ongoing inquiry — her questions turning upon a fevered monster-hunter and betraying how far her heart is bound up with the party's ends and with the people of her quarter.
In matters of faith she keeps to Sufi belief and to an open, ecumenical temper, and is drawn especially to the question of whether beings arisen by magic may yet be counted among the faithful. She is practical where such talk grows tangled, and meets others plainly upon knotty points of theology. Through her friend Nadja she is brought to souls seeking spiritual counsel, and her grasp of local lore and custom serves her well in finding her way.
It was to Nadja that she put the question of whether Islamic practice might suit a being that is not human, wishing to meet Kore, a dweller of the Undercity who had questions of faith of its own. She called at Nazif's Scents to arrange passage down to Kore, and once within the Undercity she marvelled at the variety of its people, falling into talk with Kore upon Sufism and upon the place of non-humans within the practice of faith. Through it all she held to her own convictions whilst turning over the spiritual puzzles set before her, minded always to build understanding where others would build walls.
By a turn few would have foretold, she took up a man's guise — styled, in the party's own phrase, as "a Turkish Marlene Dietrich" — that she might pass with an air of sophistication into the gambling world. So attired she fell in with Jean-Zera Mongé and Chique Manu at high play in a hidden tea-house club, and her gift for deception and easy address carried her through the table's currents. Returning to the club, she closed the night upon a winning hand, repaid the stake she had been advanced, and came away three hundred gold to the good — a nice proof of both her nerve at cards and her ready adaptation to such company.
She has become, in these adventures, a mainstay of a band that numbers Sidra al-Najjar, Jean-Zera Mongé, and Miray, and has borne her part in their fights — against footpads, and against a dwarf chieftain called Usta Kerim. In a heaving alley she essayed the charm called Charm Person upon a Frank, who shook it off and demanded coin; as matters grew hot an orc rushed her with an axe and missed, whereupon she answered with a flurry of blows that told upon the brute, though it flung her aside and left its mark upon her. The turning-point was hers: with a rain of kicks she felled Usta Kerim without killing him, and so helped bring the assailants to heel. Afterward she fell to talk of the quarter's stratagems and the tangled society of the Undercity.
She is reckoned, too, among a company entangled with the Ghost of March and the killing of Nazif the perfumist. Amid the disorder of the Festival of Candles, Gizem confirmed Nazif's death, with Chique Manu at hand, and reported that the Ghost's retinue went clad in the uniforms of the Sekban — that corps which had once destroyed the Janissaries and was itself disbanded after.
In the small hours that followed she joined a debrief with her companions to weigh what the Ghost's doings meant for a city already restless, and the party resolved to look into Nazif's perfumery stall and learn how power in the Undercity would settle now he was gone. Slipping in unseen, they met Sharif the Strong Fur, a talking black cat who had assumed Nazif's office and laid a rule of no magic upon his ground. Gizem had her share in the exploration of the vaults beneath Saint Benoit Church, where the company faced the walking dead and things of spectre; and against a set of animated cadavers she took her Wild Shape and bit and dragged one of them down, helping her fellows undo the undead.
She is a bard as well, and no gentle one in a fight — her magic runs to fear and confusion. She wields the workings called Unsettling Words and Vicious Mockery, and looses Dissonant Whispers to set an Undead Priest and a gunman to flight. Such spells open the ground for her allies to seize the advantage, and she has more than once sent guards fleeing to swell the chaos of a battle.
During a shift at the bakery she fell into talk with a married pair, Yusuf and Osman, who let slip rumour of an underground affair at the Hippodrome and counselled her to lay her wager upon the Green. Osman bade her to the coming race, warned her the horses were no true horses, and named a meeting-place at the Theodosius Obelisk hard by the Hagia Sophia. She sought word of the Janissaries and of ghosts at the hamam (the bath-house), but found its patrons unwilling to be drawn on such matters. Later she contrived a pretext to seek out Matilda Manukian, delivering baked goods to shop after shop until the trail led to Matilda herself, who gave her the way through the Undercity and to the Ghost of March's compound; and she bespoke a custom cloak of a disguise-shop to serve the party's designs.
That stealth-lending cloak in hand, she took her part in a scheme to steal into the Hippodrome, arranging with Sidra al-Najjar to slip in unticketed. Losing herself in the press of the throng, she used the crowd for cover; and quietly opening a service door she came eye to eye with an elven saboteur, who fled deeper into the house. She marked the enchantment lying heavy over the whole Hippodrome — the stone of it plain enough, yet the arena entire wrapped in a mantle of magic.
Afterward she called upon Cyrus, a bead-seller, for counsel about the Undercity, browsing his ritual and magical wares; and she consulted Sif, a tiefling bookseller, who told her of a recent sale to Chique Manu, a bookmaker. She visited the Styx bathhouse, took her bearings from an attendant, and learned the ways of the place — a house well suited to the gathering of rumour and the striking of bargains. There she heard of a bounty upon an undead thing that chose its prey with care, and resolved to draw her party into the hunt.
As part of that same course she stood in a trio with Sidra al-Najjar and Jean-Zera Mongé, charged to name an assassin known as the Kavalan Of Egypt. In the catacombs she met the undead and showed her mettle at close quarters — grappling a skeleton, wrenching an arm from it, and pulling it to pieces hand to hand. She flung herself to disarm a Janissary named Alexander in a tense standoff, took the sting of an arrow-trap, and set upon a Giant Skeleton, striving to break it by twisting its ribs and joints; and though it hurled her against a wall she fought on beside her companions, and gathered trophies from the thing when it was down.
She is visited by dreams of some import that shape her course. In one, her disquiet is eased when a lost square of paper is returned to her, and she is led to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, where she knows a much younger Aziz Sefa Bey for the man escorting her.
After a fraught business at Topkapi Palace the party withdrew to Gizem's own home to lie low, to eat, and to rest. Whilst searching a Coastal Manor Garden she came to grips with shadowy, half-bodied Janissary soldiers, striking again and again and undoing one; she found that these shades turned aside honest steel, and that a shadow's strength-draining touch could overmaster her — as indeed it did, dropping her limp, until Miray's healing magic brought her back and restored a measure of her vigour.
She carries a crossbow and goes veiled in a headscarf, and has since taken to a pair of magical spectacles that alter what her eyes report. She once spied a great submerged mirror and an unfamiliar soldier of the Far East within it, waved and named herself to him, and tossed baklava toward the glass for good measure. A rotten stretch of boardwalk gave way beneath her, but she kept her feet, found the water shallow enough to stand in, and hauled Sidra back up onto the sound side of the broken planks. She loosed a bolt into a Merrow and wounded it; she donned the spectacles and made her peace with their strange sight; and to shun a Medusa's gaze she bound her eyes with her headscarf, shot the creature with her crossbow, and gained cover — though the serpents of its hair found her and dealt a heavy poison. Closing in, she landed a stunning blow upon the Medusa, and then fled with the party down the stair her stroke had revealed.