Minister Gerault Vash

Gerault Vash was Warden of the City, the council minister who commanded the city watch, and for the eleven years he held the post he was the most honest man at the Supreme Ruler’s table and very nearly the least loved.

He was big, bald and close-bearded, slow-moving, with the Warden’s heavy chain across his shoulders, and he had a habit of laying one broad hand flat on whatever was nearest before he spoke, as if to make sure it would hold. He had walked the night streets as a watch captain for twenty years before anyone gave him a chair in council, had been shot at and once set on fire, and believed one thing above all: that the law ought to look the same from every street in the city.

That belief made him the ruler’s most uncomfortable servant in the year the ruler’s daughter lived openly among the Velvet Veil. It was Vash who stood up in council and called her a disgrace to the house, and was rebuked for it in front of everyone. When a Veil company staged a satire of him, he sent the watch to close it in anger and without a magistrate, and in the street that night a tile came down from a roof on a watchman of nineteen, who died of it two days later. Vash said plainly that the men had been his, and so was the boy.

He asked for thirty-four Veil houses to be closed and accepted seven. The first, where his captains believed the player was hidden, was full when the watch came and held nobody he wanted; the other six were empty, warned to the hour — from the ruler’s own desk, it was traced, in a hand he did not need named. It was Vash who brought the council’s paper that ended in Zarina’s renunciation, and he did not enjoy it, and he carried the ruler’s sealed order to the Low Gate himself that night, and told nobody where it came from.

After the empty houses he said that he would like to know, one day, what he was to tell the boy’s mother.