Magic, Legends, and Real History Meet in The City of Brass

It is in this heady mix we meet Nahri, a motherless child honed by the hard Cairo streets into something like a blade: thin, sharp, and cynical. Nahri doesn’t believe in magic, and scoffs openly about its existence to the apothecary who has taken her on as something like an apprentice. She doesn’t believe in magic, even while she gulls sneering, superior Ottoman officials out of their coin and jewels using a sixth sense for medicine that defies easy explanation. She knows the man she sends out of the city so she can rob his house is not dying, and her prescribed ablutions will certainly keep him healthy enough to ascribe her “cure” to magic, and not a short con. This the only real difference between her and any other grifter: the knowledge her schemes won’t be upended by the mark’s sudden heart attack.
A touch with medicine isn’t Nahri’s only gift. She also has an uncanny ear for language: no sooner does she hear a tongue than she can understand and speak it. She also thinks to herself in a native language she has never heard another person utter; she’s been orphaned so long, she doesn’t even know what it is called. When she tries it on her Jewish apothecary friend, thinking it sounds Semitic, he recoils, telling her has enough trouble as a religious minority in their Cairo slum; kindly to stop messing with him. It is this facility with her native language that gets Nahri in trouble.
Nahri is a street urchin, always on the hustle, pulling any kind of con she can to pay off the bribes and make rent on her ugly flat. To those ends, she use others’ belief in magic to make some fast cash, staging a zar—a sort of exorcism specific to the rural transplants to cosmopolitan Cairo—on a young girl. The zar is very much a community event, with musicians Nahri must tip out and a basket passed around to all the rubberneckers. She first sings the songs of entreaty to the “djinn” the local folklore insists is inhabiting a mute young girl (though Nahri thinks her afflicted with a more mundane condition) in the tongue of the girl’s parents. Then, switching it up for show, she entreats the djinn in her own inner language. It is here that everything goes wrong.
On her way home (and after an ill-advised shortcut through a graveyard), Nahri is beset upon by ghouls, parries words with an ifrit, and must contend with the djinn she most accidentally called forth. Dara, the warrior djinn in question—he doesn’t call himself a djinn, but this is the easiest term for him now—spirits her away from the murderous ifrit via a most charming flying carpet, and upends her life. He’s the first and only person she has ever heard speak her private language, and he soon reveals Nahri is a lost scion of the Nahid family, a mix of djinn and human whose existence repulses him.
Nahri has a hard time letting go of the careful poverty she has lived in all her life—she’s more angry with Dara for forcing her to leave a few coins behind than she is grateful for her rescue—and it takes her more than a while to acquiesce to the new, magical reality she inhabits. (Nahri doesn’t believe in magic.) This is the kind of grounding that I adore in stories of magic: where people raised in poverty don’t shed their well-honed instinct for survival just because someone informs them of a possible storied legacy. The djinn Dara takes her to the fabled City of Brass, where she may be protected from the ifrit and learn of her potential and power. But of course, there is danger in the brass city as well. It is a smoky mirror of her bustling Cairo, built in evocative prose from ancient legends and Chakrabotry’s own singular imagination.
Early on in her acquaintance with Dara, Nahri turns her medical sense on him, looking for the blood and viscera that moves within every person she’s heretofore encountered. He doesn’t register to her sixth sense; he is something like smoke and flame. This disquiets her: what is he if not flesh? The djinn, the city of brass, and her whole journey is something like a mirage, built out of heat and desire, but no less real for it. A fire is real, though you can’t hold it in your hands. So are words, especially the native ones that whisk us to our destinies.
The City of Brass is available now.