Council of Haudh-Gwenn

Haudh-Gwenn is governed by eight, seated for life. The town’s own name for the arrangement is an oligarchic council with a nominal High Councilman, and both halves of that are meant: the council rules, and the man at the head of it is its face rather than its master. It oversees law, policy and diplomacy, moves slowly, and moves with hidden agendas. Two informants who had never met gave the party the same three words for it: united by greed.

Where it meets is known. What it does once it sits is not. The chambers stand in Council Heights on the high ground with the estates of the elite around them, well kept Mól architecture behind guards, and the Grayeras family estate is also named as a place the council meets. No description of the body in session, its procedure or its chamber was ever written down, so what is known of its politics comes from soirées, drawing rooms and taverns.

The Seats

Seats are predominantly hereditary or secured through political maneuvering. One seat alone is elected by the general populace; the rest are appointed by the councilors already sitting, often through backdoor deals, and pass down inside families by bribery. It takes six votes to seat a new councilor, less one for each vacant place, and a simple majority of five carries any other motion. The High Councilman casts a double vote.

The effect of all that is a body which renews itself and answers to almost nobody. Nathan Fox, who trades in other towns’ gossip as a matter of business, put it in one line: life appointments, mostly elected by the council itself, handed down through families with money changing hands. The one lever anyone outside has on it belongs to the Silver Web, the guild that holds the ruins in the middle of the city. The tannery fire that was blamed on ruin squatters was the guild’s warning to the council, and the fact that the central Mól ruins have never been cleared is the standing proof of who is owed what.

The party’s own standing with the council went from disliked to ignored, and stayed there.

The Arithmetic

Traxian Grayeras sits as High Councilman, rumored to have bought his way into the Grayeras name in the first place. Alyphe holds a seat of her own and votes where he votes, near enough every time. Two seats therefore deliver three votes before anybody else in the room has spoken, and the rest can be purchased by whoever has the coin and the favor, which the Grayeras have.

Not every account makes them unassailable. A broker of the Silver Web told the party the parents held only two seats of some seven, that the family could be outvoted, and that the road to removing Beltran ran through the council rather than through force, and the party built its politics on that for a long while. Katalia’s account, given later, was the opposite: the double vote, the wife who always follows it, and enough bought sycophants to make it near half the chamber. Two informants, two arithmetics, and nothing has reconciled them.

Beltran is not among the eight. He held the Emir’s office, which is to say the city’s military command, and the captaincy of the guard beneath it, and both are the council’s to give. He worked the chamber through a rotating stable of grudge-bearing men whom he spent and replaced, deliberately kept at each other’s throats. Whent was the last of them, and whether Whent sat on the council at all is disputed: a barkeep and one of Beltran’s own lieutenants both called him a councilman, and another account has him a low-life recently handed a guard’s uniform. He is not one of the eight.

The Eight

• Traxian Grayeras: High Councilman, and the face the council shows. Tired, and publicly commanding.
• Alyphe Grayeras: his wife, Peren, the half of the family vote that never needed persuading.
• Johanka Materai: rose years ago as a bookkeeper who amassed blackmail, and inherited both seat and estate when her parents died in an accident. She runs the bank, keeps a black book on every colleague she has, and resents owing Beltran her place enough to spend the city’s own money buying his support away from him.
• Sarro Rashid: Peren, and the bank’s fair-dealing master before her. He built Haudh-Gwenn’s close trade with Peredhel, and it was the bank he lost, not the seat: the council handed it to Beltran for being their voice of reason, and he keeps his chair still. A wagon went out of town at night with his household aboard, and he was not in it. He was missing from Materai’s gala, which was noticed.
• Asiya Azrak: a tall hobgoblin of Clan Azri who commanded in eastern Peredhel on the marches of the Barren Lands. Militant and cutthroat, said to have eaten the chieftains she killed and to keep their skulls, and to have murdered a rival councilor with her own marked letter opener. She pushed Haudh-Gwenn to raise a military for years before it did.
• Khadija Dalzen: Asiya’s daughter, young, married out and took a name that is not a hobgoblin one. Kindhearted and out of her depth, sympathetic to the people, champion of education, and the reason the Chantry is still funded.
• Elren Amin: human and old, a retired adventurer who delegates and moves on, and who knows his way around a blade. He stayed inside a burning town hall with that blade drawn so that somebody would answer for it.
• Dalvaar Rashaa: an aged Hobbin in his late fifties, and a reliable Grayeras man. He would smell their farts and call the air sweet.

Which of them is youngest is not settled. Materai was called the youngest of the council when the party first heard of her, in her late twenties then; by the time the roster was complete it held Khadija Dalzen, who is likely younger still.

Campaign Updates

Under this council Haudh-Gwenn raised a standing army of around a hundred, the largest in Idir and the only one besides Draazstone’s, which puts the town in breach of the pact between the towns. It took the river town of Ostrad twice by force for its food. When the bank ran, it froze withdrawals behind a council writ and put far more guards on the doors. Through a season of disappearances, unpaid guards and a walking tax it stayed silent except to issue denials, and then the city rioted.

Beltran was killed in the street outside the Color Stay, and the Emir’s office and the captaincy of the guard went into the ground with him. No successor to either was ever named, and the council never recorded any answer to his death. Traxian keeps the High Councilman’s seat and its double vote; Alyphe outlived her son. The collapse of the house is under way and has not yet taken a shape anyone can see. Materai survived the night her estate burned. The estate did not.

The long game against the body has lost most of its evidence. Beltran’s blackmail ledgers, which named councilors and were the whole paper foundation of Lady Talia’s political campaign, were destroyed by his own clerk Davi Solt to keep himself from being named in them, and they are ash. What survives is Materai’s own book of every councilor’s dealings, loyalties and price, lifted out of her locked study. It has not been burned. It has not been read, and not one name has yet been spoken out of it.

There is also a bill coming. Voler Bria burned his own inn to draw the street into it, means to have the blame land on the council, and intends Haudh-Gwenn to pay for a lavish rebuild he considers himself owed.