The King's Spy (The Augur's Eye Book 2)

by Guy Antibes

  “They traveled for two days before they caught up to the elves. The pixies were ready to attack, but Saint Varetta held up a hand and told them to wait. She walked alone into the enemy camp and stared at the elves. The same men who attacked her rose to repeat their atrocities, but those same motes appeared, and she directed them at the elves, showering them with love and concern for the well-being of their souls. Varetta entreated them to change their ways and released them from her spell. The elves didn’t attack her but quickly broke camp and left Perisia.

  “Her deeds continued until she disappeared from Fortia twenty years later. Once there were even temples to Saint Varetta in Serincia, but like all the saints, the folk have turned away from the erstwhile benefactors. People spoke of messages from Saint Varetta given in visions.

  “That was two thousand years ago and for another thousand years the saints were venerated and sought out for blessings. That blessed, thousand-year period was called the sanctified centuries. Something happened in the world to turn people away from the saints and many of the wonderful stories of good deeds of all the saints are lost in the gears of time.”

  “I’m going to do some research on the saints when I get back to Herringbone,” Whit said.

  “You are better off starting at the Magister’s Club,” Argien said. “I’ll help you. Varetta’s story intrigues me. I wonder if there was a saint for the angels. I’ve never heard of one.”

  “Oh, there were saints for everyone. I can’t tell you how many there were,” the caretaker said.

  “I can,” Gambol said. He began to recite the saints.

  “Were the sparkling motes real magic or are they an embellishment of the story repeated over and over again for centuries?” Whit asked.

  The caretaker smiled and said with a sly look on her face. “You’ll have to ask Saint Varetta.”

  Whit laughed. “I suppose I will.”

  “If you’ll excuse us, we have to get the midday meal started. We’ve heard the same story hundreds of times,” one of the workers said.

  “At least,” said the other.

  Two of the workers walked to the kitchen area to make lunch after an hour of questioning. The other pair left the building. The remaining workers continued to ask questions and make comments, so everyone was able to exchange enough information to make the session enjoyable.

  “Time for the tour,” the woman said getting up, taking the hand of her husband.

  They walked across the compound and along a flagstone path to the ruin.

  “There are still active spells in the temple,” the caretaker said. “They are benign since there have been so many visitors through the centuries. You might be able to detect them. They are so old that many pixies are unaware they exist.”

  They walked across the large, roofless nave to the cliff end of the temple. As Whit expected, the view was spectacular.

  “Is that Garri?” he asked pointing east and a little south at a smudge barely visible at the edge of the horizon.

  “It is. You can see a quarter of Perisia from this vantage point. It’s the highest point looking directly south.”

  Whit could believe it. “You said there were wards?”

  The caretaker frowned. “I didn’t say they were wards,” she said.

  “It would have to be something like that to last for thousands of years,” Whit said.

  “You know something of wards?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t have an exhaustive knowledge, but I can detect certain wards,” Whit said. He didn’t want to sound like he was boasting, so he didn’t continue with what he could and couldn’t do.

  He passed a wall. “There is a ward here.” He knocked his knuckle against a wall. Whit looked around and pointed his finger where he sensed the ward. It didn’t line up with the stones.

  “It must be behind the wall,” Whit said. He frowned. “It isn’t pixie magic.”

  “Oh,” the caretaker said. “It never occurred to me that the magic protections in the ruin wouldn’t have been created by pixies. Varetta was a pixie, you know. Let me show you a representation of her.”

  They walked to a hallway where an alcove still had a worn carving or casting of the face of a pixie woman. You could still tell she wore a thin veil.

  “There she is,” the caretaker said. “Come and I’ll show you the remaining rooms of the ruin.”

  One side of the temple made up the western walls of a series of rooms. Plaster was mostly gone from the walls, but the stone ceilings still kept out the elements. The rooms were dirty and cobweb-filled with the furniture long since rotted away.

  “It has been a while since we’ve cleaned these rooms,” the caretaker said.

  “Why don’t you let us do some cleaning?” Gambol said.

  “Clean them?” Argien said.

  “You don’t have to do such a thing,” the caretaker said.

  Gambol shook his head and held out his hand to forestall any objections. “The ceilings are too low for Zarl, so Argien can keep him company outside, but the rest of us would consider it an honor.”

  “At least let me feed you dinner for your labor. If you clean these eight rooms, you can sleep in them tonight.”

  Whit was willing. “I promise I won’t damage anything. I’d even be willing to plaster the walls if you have the materials,” he said recalling the plastered walls inside the caretaker’s residence.

  “Do what you can then.”

  ~

  Argien and Zarl helped in the compound while Whit, Razz, Fistian, and Gambol went to work in the temple rooms. They weren’t all the same size, but they were all in the same condition. Peeling plaster, flagstone floors, thin, flat stone that held up the roof.

  Whit went to work, and it didn’t take long for Razz and him to sweep out and clean four of the rooms. Fistian and Gambol had finished with the others. One of Whit’s rooms was larger than the others. Perhaps it was the office of the head of the temple priests or priestesses. Even the caretaker couldn’t tell them what ancient services were like.

  “I’ll sleep in here, tonight,” Whit said to Gambol, “and plaster the walls tomorrow. I learned how to make plaster before I left Whistle Vale, if they have the ingredients here.”

  The workers slaughtered a lamb for dinner, and the meal was unexpectedly delicious, especially accompanied by the homemade wine.

  Whit grabbed his blankets and headed for the room. Even with the hard floor, the room was better than sleeping underneath one of the carriages. He woke up in the middle of the night with an odd feeling and put it down to spending the night in a two-thousand-year-old room. The day dawned, but there were no windows in the room, and one of the workers walked past the rooms to wake them up.

  The caretaker had them do a few early morning chores. Whit spread chicken feed around the compounds chicken coop. There were about fifty chickens clucking it up and pecking away when the caretaker came to check on Whit.

  “You can’t possibly use the eggs that all these chickens produce,” Whit said.

  The caretaker smiled. “I sell a lot of produce in the villages to the east. We make our spending money that way, so we can take care of the temple.”

  “But the religion is dead,” Whit said. “You don’t even know how the saint was worshipped.”

  “Caretaking has been in my family for centuries,” the woman said. “It is a duty I was born to.”

  Whit thought of his mother and the duty that forced her to live in Whistle Vale. “I understand that more than you realize.” He told her about his mother’s assignment.

  “Few people can empathize,” she said. “My workers should have gathered all the materials you need.”

  Whit had to make a few crude tools, but they would be adequate for his task. He entered the temple with Razz helping him with the materials. Whit was able to quickly train Razz and they plastered four of the rooms.

  After dinner, when their supplies were cleaned and the floors of the rooms washed of all the plaster, Whit strolled t
hrough the temple on his own. He passed more places where he could sense magic behind the walls. Whit didn’t know what he could do about that. He walked past the wards again and even found one made with pixie magic, but it wasn’t quite the same kind of magic as what he had sensed in Torius Pott and Yetti.

  The caretaker found him. “Laring Gambol said you might be in the temple wandering around. I came to ask you to stay an extra day and complete your plastering task. It will be easier to keep the rooms clean after you leave.”

  “I suppose we can do it for room and board.”

  “The board is better than the room,” she said.

  “I found more wards,” Whit said.

  “Can you show them to me”?

  Whit walked through the still-standing parts of the temple and pointed to the areas. “Not all of them are pixie magic, like I said yesterday.”

  “You can tell the difference?” the caretaker asked.

  “I know what pixie magic feels like, although I wouldn’t call it a very developed sense. There is other magic, I don’t know what it is, but we walked past them all.”

  “I’ll bring one of my plans tomorrow if you wouldn’t mind going over it all again.”

  Whit shook his head. “Not at all.” He yawned. “Another night. It will be more pleasant in the room this time.”

  After grabbing his bedding, by the time he reached his room, the workers had piled some straw on the floor. It did make a difference, once he adjusted the lumps. He closed his eyes. Even with the new walls, the feeling he experienced the previous night returned. Whit felt like walking the feeling off, so he got up and began to wander.

  Whit felt he had to visit the first patch of magic that he had discovered. He stood in front of the stone wall and pressed his hands, letting the magic seep inside him. Whit didn’t feel any differently, so he returned to his room and went back to sleep.

  He woke up standing in the temple’s nave. There was now an elaborate window mosaic representing a meadow in place of open space. He turned around to be confronted by a beautiful pixie woman, tall for her race, but definitely a pixie. Her hair was a brilliant yellow, but her eyes were deep violet pools of intelligence.

  “You are Whit Varian,” she stated as a fact.

  “I am,” Whit said, settling down to see what would happen during this dream.

  The woman smiled, but Whit didn’t feel a shock of warmth from the intimate gesture, but something more fundamental. There was a connection, but this was a dream state, Whit couldn’t define it in his mind, but he suddenly knew the identity of the pixie.

  “You are Saint Varetta,” Whit said.

  “I am, appearing as I once was,” she said.

  “What do you look like now?” Whit asked, curious by her comment.

  “I would look older and plainer, but I no longer have a body.”

  Whit narrowed his eyes. “You are a ghost?”

  “No,” Varetta said plainly. “I am what you might call a soul or a spirit, but my existence is a bit more than that. I can’t tell you any more about me, for I no longer exist on Fortia.”

  That made sense to Whit. “Why are you appearing to me here?”

  She laughed, lightly and with humor. It made her seem more alive. “Your call. There are few who possess the kind of magic that you do. There is what you would call a ward embedded in the wall. It created the call. I can’t stay long, so tell me what you want.”

  The request surprised Whit. He had expected to receive a message from Varetta, yet she was the one asking for one.

  “I am seeking to reconstruct the Augur’s Eye. There are three and possibly more parts in Perisia. Do you know how many there are?”

  Varetta laughed again. “Even as a saint, I didn’t have the ability to know where everything was in the world.” She looked away from Whit as if she were talking to someone else. She nodded. “I have been told to give you some information regarding the Augur’s Eye,” she said. “The time is not quite ripe for its reemergence into the world, but then you have a long journey ahead of you to collect the artifacts. The Eye was a tool of the most senior of the saints. I was not one of them,” Varetta said.

  “What made some saints senior to others?”

  “We were transformed when we qualified to be elevated by our good deeds. The transformation process imbued us with enhanced powers, but we never were gods. We never could hear our supplicants’ prayers, I admit.”

  “Who transformed you?” Whit asked. He held his breath waiting for her reply. He was never much of a religious person, but this was what she was talking about.

  “There are others in the universe. They aren’t gods either, but they monitor things. Some of their choices for saints weren’t perfect, and that eventually led to division. There wasn’t a war, exactly, but a worldwide Magician’s Circle led by a few renegade saints was able to amass enough power to destroy our bodies. Our spiritual entities survived, and we were swept off the world. The Augur’s Eye was used by a magician to observe and gain enough information to pick us off one by one.”

  “The Magician’s Circle were assassins?”

  Varetta shrugged. “You could call them that, but I wouldn’t. A faithful queen was able to wrest the Augur’s Eye from the circle, but the device could not be destroyed. The magic that created it was too strong, and all she could do was dismantle the Eye and scatter it throughout Fortia.”

  “But I was told I was the end result of a breeding program to resurrect the Eye,” Whit said.

  “That might be true. I only know that you possess many magics. I can see that your motives are pure enough, but there is no guarantee that those of your ancestors were.” Varetta said.

  Whit leaned against a column that no longer existed in the temple’s nave. The information was too much for him. “Should I continue on my current path?”

  Varetta gave Whit a sorrowful gaze. “I cannot tell you, for I do not know.” She looked away from him again for a moment. “I am told that the Augur’s Eye might return some of the grace the saints had, or it might serve to make the world worse. The path is uncertain that you are on. If you do nothing, the Eye may never be reassembled and used, but there are other forces for good and ill in the world. You should understand that the Augur’s Eye is only a window.”

  “Is there a part in the temple?” Whit asked again.

  “There might be, but if there is, it is inaccessible to you right now,” Varetta said. “Be strong and listen to good counsel.”

  The saint vanished, and Whit’s mind went blank. He woke, knowing that he had been sleeping dreamlessly after his vision of the saint. Whit stared at the ceiling of the cell and could recall every second of his meeting with Varetta. It had to be a dream, but it seemed so real. He decided to keep his vision to himself as he rose and found Gambol already in the residence cooking a gnomish breakfast under the watchful eye of two of the workers.

  “Whit, you sleepy head!” Gambol said. “Help me with some of this. Our hosts want to observe my cooking techniques.”

  Whit didn’t do more than chop a few things up and stir the contents of a few bowls.

  “This may not taste exactly the same,” Gambol said to the workers. “Locally-sourced ingredients might not taste the same as what I can get in Herringbone.

  When Gambol had finished, there were platters of sweet cakes with honey syrup and fruit swimming in a sweetened cream sauce. Whit wanted to taste the fried lamb. It smelled the best of all to him.

  “Breakfast is ready. Summon the rest, since these are best served fresh,” Gambol said.

  The workers left, and Whit helped Gambol set out plates and utensils.

  “What will we drink?”

  “Water. They have a spring that bubbles up next to the residence. The water is even sweeter than what we drank at the campsite,” Gambol said. “You either had a good night or a bad night to sleep in so late.”

  “A perplexing night,” Whit said. “I dreamt of Saint Varetta.”

  “Not surprising
since we slept in her temple.”

  Whit shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. I had a vision. I can still remember every little detail.”

  The others began to come into the common room of the residence. Gambol’s breakfast was very good. Whit didn’t think his gnomish friend needed to apologize for his cooking. The others must have agreed because everything Gambol cooked was eaten.

  “You did the cooking, we will do the washing,” the workers said.

  “Tell me more about what you were talking about before breakfast,” Gambol said.

  The pair of them walked to the temple. They would have to load up the carriages soon and head back to Garri before lunch.

  Whit showed him the magic spot and demonstrated how he put his hands on the stone. Immediately, his vision began to cloud. Varetta appeared behind him. Whit turned around, and he was back in the nave before it was a ruin.

  “Go to your room. You will find a loose paving stone in one of the corners. There is a souvenir under the stone to prove our meeting wasn’t a dream.”

  The saint disappeared. Whit blinked and was sitting on the ground. Gambol was rubbing his hand.

  “You had me scared for a moment,” the gnome said.

  “I had another vision.”

  “You fainted but were only out for a moment.”

  Whit took a deep breath and let Gambol help him up. He felt fine enough. “Let’s go to my room.”

  Gambol didn’t look like he believed Whit, but they did find a loose stone in one of the corners. Whit tore a fingernail getting the pavement up, but finding a golden coin was worth it. He lifted it up. There were circles around the outside rim and a woman’s face. He couldn’t read the script.

  “It doesn’t look like ancient ogrish,” Gambol said.

  “Maybe I can give it to King Quiller,” Whit said. “He might have a few ancient coins around. It might show him our good intentions.”

  “You’d give this up?”

  Whit shook his head. “I don’t need it. You were a witness. Saint Varetta told me where the coin lay for so long, and it was there. The vision was real, not a dream.”

  “You’ve made a believer out of me. There was more you didn’t tell me?” Gambol said.