Council of Loshev

Loshev is governed by a council that appoints itself. A seat is held for life, ending only in death or retirement, and it is the sitting councilors who vote in a new one. The one exception is the office of the Counselor, the voice of the people, which the town at large elects and likewise holds for life. Who has ever held it was never written down.

The chamber is in the Town Hall, in the Gate Market where the town’s money moves: a stone semicircle built to seat twenty-one, with a low podium in the break at its center and public benches facing it. The body has run between nine and thirteen members for as long as Loshev has had one, about eleven of them lately, and the number must always stay odd. An empty seat is therefore not an available one: taking a place requires a sitting member to step down, or a second appointment made alongside the first, and a sponsor either way.

Most were seated when the town was built and never replaced, which explains the room. Councillors doze while testimony is given. Food comes in before the lunching bell, cut fine for a shaking hand. A hobgoblin woman sits up there, an old human, a Peren well past a century; the air smells of mothballs and baby powder; a morning’s docket can be one quarrel over a neighbor’s chickens.

Votes are anonymous to the public. By Loshev’s own account of itself the body is lawful and moderately corrupt, elders and merchants who bend a rule where it pays them, and it practices capital punishment, which several of its members, Yullen Gemsmith among them, find barbaric. Jhessail Vintree, who came up on the Lower Pier and speaks for it, is plainer: the councilors who fawn hardest promise a vote one way and cast it another, as they did when her own bill to put more guards on the docks went down. Beyond Rook, Gemsmith, Vintree, Ithrielle Nyvaal, Nathan Fox, the Crestbornes and the councilwomen Jazelle and Ethel, the body has never been enumerated.

Campaign Updates

Aldo’s accusation against the jailer Dan was heard in full on the party’s first morning in town and acted on not at all; the same sitting opened the coffers and deputised three strangers to hunt the bandits east of Loshev (S1E01). Moving it on Dan took Fox, who named a seat as his price. Alex Westwood signed the resignation that made room and died overnight, and Fox’s first act as a councilor carried the conviction (S1E05). What three towns owed for the breaking of the Ten Lashes was settled the season after, Rook presiding and Fox reading the papers, and Westwood’s own house went to the Valiant Few (S2E14).

Since then it has approved the Draazstone trade near-unanimously and a capped offer for Forven’s prisoners (S3E34), and, after weeks of Koa nagging it, the repair of the town’s ancient bridge (S4E40). Then the Muharib came through Loshev. The council asked the Valiant Few to hunt them and was refused, because Beltran and the curses came first and because killing or jailing a few Muharib would only bring the rest of the clan back on the town. The council voted to accept the refusal and to let a mercenary contract instead. Fox forced through a recompense for the maimed guards over Kurvroc, Kurvroc’s man and Rook, and a relief program for the town’s other injured followed (S5E58, S5E59). Fox had by then paid for the guard’s new equipment, recruits and outside trainers with the council’s blessing, leaving Tariq al-Mahir constable of a force that no longer needed him. A plan to bribe, discredit and replace the whole body, a third of it already executed, is in the party’s hands; its author walks free.

Then a seat fell in. Torgun Kurvroc died while the party was north at the keeps, and the council wrote both of the letters that told them so: a somber invitation to a funeral that had already happened, and, because Loshev is too small a city to keep solicitors, a summons to the reading of his will, which the council administered itself. What killed him the letters did not say. The seat is empty, and by the body’s own arithmetic an empty seat is not an available one.

The bridge the council was nagged into repairing has turned into a revenue scheme. Nobody alive knows how to make the old blocks it was built from, so the only way to get more is to pay men to strip them out of ruins, and to pay for that the town is sinking foundations in the river itself for a gate and a toll on everyone who passes. The stone it means to buy is in Haudh-Gwenn, which has a ruined district full of it and no money at all.