The Grand Bazaar is a teeming marketplace crowning the city — a çarşı (the covered market) famed for its bustle and for the diversity of its shops. It boasts vendors of the better sort, Nazif's Scents chief amongst them, a perfumery that draws a mingled custom. Its architecture runs to a maze of covered walkways, warehouse fronts, and upper-storey lodgings, all of which heighten its lively air; awnings of many colours stretch overhead in a kaleidoscope that lures locals and strangers alike. Merchants deal in wares of every kind — spices, textiles, perfumes — so that the bazaar stands as a chief hub of trade and of society in the city. The clime is commonly warm, and lets it flourish as a favourite gathering-place the year round, its inhabitants a various company of humans and non-humans, a very tapestry of cultures.
Nazif's Scents keeps a hidden door that opens upon the Undercity: well-lit ancient stairs descend from it into a stone hall, and thence to the Undercity, peopled by tieflings, half-orcs, and other altered folk. Yet in the aftermath of the Festival of Candles, Nazif's perfumery stall was shut upon his death at the hands of the Ghost of March. The stall stood under a state of emergency when Sharif the Strong Fur, a talking black cat in a red fez, claimed to be taking up Nazif's duties. He offered passage to the Undercity for a fee or a password, and enforced a strict rule against magic within the stall, pleading its volatility and the need for secrecy. Sharif asked besides for aid on behalf of gravely ill cats, and let fall a connexion to the Ghost of March, averring that Nazif had been relieved of his duties by Ghost of March.