Razdal mo Eraz

A haughty envoy of the slave-city of Yunkai, the Yellow City, sent to buy off the dragon queen with gold and threats.

The fuller tale

Razdal mo Eraz is a lord of Yunkai, the Yellow City — Astapor’s softer, richer neighbor, whose masters train bed-slaves rather than soldiers and have always preferred buying enemies to fighting them. He enters the tale as Yunkai’s envoy when Daenerys’s freed army arrives at the city’s gates: borne to her camp in a litter, all silken condescension, he offers the invader chests of gold and as many ships as she likes to take her plague of liberation elsewhere. The counteroffer — her gifts, in exchange for every slave in Yunkai walking free — strikes him as the joke of a savage child, and he leaves with threats about the city’s powerful friends, having accomplished nothing except the audience’s education in how Yunkai negotiates.

The show brings him back years later for the masters’ war against Meereen, a returning face among the coalition that funds the Sons of the Harpy and sails against the queen’s city — and at the story’s parleys he remains exactly what he was at the first one: the smooth voice of an order that cannot conceive of losing to its former property, offering terms to people it plans to re-enslave. Razdal’s function across both appearances is to embody Yunkai itself — wealth without strength, cruelty without candor — and the tale enjoys letting his certainties curdle each time the dragon queen declines, again, to be bought.

The page and the screen

Razdal is essentially the show’s composite Yunkishman. His book counterpart at the first parley is Grazdan mo Eraz, who performs the same errand — gold and ships for a departure — with the same result, and the books then dissolve the role into Yunkai’s swarming, ridiculous aristocracy of the later volumes, the perfumed lords Tyrion’s chapters mock by their deformities and vanities. The show gathered all of that into one recurring face and gave him the later Meereen negotiations, including a final parley scene of its own invention in the sixth season that no book stages. Readers of the novels will also note that the real Yunkai’s masters end A Dance with Dragons besieging Meereen with the pale mare loose in their camps — a reckoning the page has not yet finished delivering.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.