Al Qadim
Satima's mentor
Satima's mentor is the reknowned digitalogist Hafiz ben Wasil al-Adad, a wise and devout dwarf who is one of the lay brethren of the Temple of Zann the Learned. Hafiz loves numbers, equations, algebra and the intricate dance of sums, and puts them to the service of the temple and any scholars who go there seeking the answers to mathematical problems. In general, he lives a fairly quiet, undisturbed life in a small room, surrounded by books and abacuses and sheafs of paper covered with scrawled equations. He is a loyal citizen of Huzuz and the Caliph, however, and has always been open to helping the jannissaries when needed.
Hafiz is served by a tasked messenger genie, Rasul, whose life Hafiz once saved when Rasul was in a coma and enemies had come to slay him. Rasul serves Hafiz out of love and obligation, although Hafiz quietly protests that he wants nothing to do with genies, whether they are obliged to him or not. As a result, Rasul remains inconspicuous, but always available. He is polite to Satima, but reserved. Hafiz is not actively antagonistic toward genies; he just has his peoples' usual mistrust for creatures of magic; he does speak Jannti and knows a great deal about genie lore, a useful set of skills for a mage in Huzuz.
Hafiz is also skilled at astrology, navigation, numerology, and numeracy. He has a magical warhammer that he picked up during travels past, of which he tends to say little, modestly protesting that at heart he's a scholar, not an adventurer. His willingness to work with jannissaries may have come from his past experiences with them during his travels.
Satima studies with Hafiz in his cell in the temple, and also does research for him and on her own at Al-Bidir Sallah, the largest univeristy in Zakhara, where she has limited access due to Hafiz' fame to the libraries of the College of Magic and the College of the Sciences. She lives, however, in the harim of the Grand Palace, and visits her brother in the Pilgrim's District, where he lives with other lay brethren of the Temple of Kor in a small house not far from the Mosque of Kor.
