Oxwen Amberyskos holds the First Speaker's chair of Bestacia, the office the republic's chartered houses elect to a six-year term and rarely renew. The job is administrative by design. Bestacia's founders built a state that could not easily make war or be ruled by one ambitious gnome, and Amberyskos inherited exactly the government they intended: a treasury, a clerical apparatus, a great many learned committees, and nothing that could stop an enemy at the border.
This is a poor decade to hold the chair. Refugees from the Ubrik silvertongue collapse arrive faster than the coastal towns can absorb them. Watar is squeezing the Telphineas Strait, and Bestacia has no fleet to answer with. And the forests have not improved. Amberyskos's one ghoul policy is the bounty, a standing payment from the treasury for proof of a killed ghoul, which costs less than an army the republic could not raise anyway. The bounty has a cost the ledgers do not show. It is collected on gray, gaunt skin, and there is no honest way to prove a strip of gray skin came off a ghoul rather than off some unlucky person who happened to look like one. Amberyskos knows this. The mage-hunters the bounty attracts are not the sort who answer questions, and the republic keeps paying.