Esmeraz is the Praetor of Azantir, which means the capital's markets answer to him, and the largest of those markets is the one that sells people. Drasnian slaves come up the Divinity Passage and pass through his ledgers before they go anywhere else in Gorath. The docks that never sleep, the customs, the revenue that pays for everything the empire does: Esmeraz administers all of it from a city he has never once left to go to war.
That last fact ought to end any ambition he has. Gorath elects its emperors from its generals, and a praetor who has never stood in a battle line is, by the unwritten rule of the republic, no candidate at all. Esmeraz knows the rule. He has simply stopped believing it. Every campaign Gorath has ever fought was paid for in coin that somebody raised, and for fifteen years that somebody has been him. The argument he makes, quietly, in the right ears, is short. An army marches on what it is paid. He is the man who pays it. A general who wins a province the treasury cannot afford has bought the emperor a debt, not a victory.
They will tell you Gorath was built by the sword. Gorath was built by the men who fed the sword. One of them is standing in front of you. — Esmeraz, in the Azantir markets
This sets him squarely against Veramus, who has met the troubles of his reign by escalating all of them at once and is emptying the treasury to do it. Esmeraz does not argue with the emperor in open council. He waits. When the election comes, and the coin has run dry, and the generals need someone to make the army's wages appear, he intends to be the only man in Azantir who can do it. Whether the republic will break its oldest habit and hand the standard to a man who has never carried one is the question Esmeraz has built his life around answering yes.