Eye Spy

by Mercedes Lackey

  Abi had to remind herself that she wasn’t here to talk about magic swords, much less buy one, even though a dagger that could be used as a torch sounded awfully useful. “Well, I was wondering if you might be willing to help me. Would you be able to tell if the false Valdemarans used magic to bring down the city wall?”

  The woman stroked her chin. “Maybe, if there’s anything left to find. They might have wiped out their work . . . though I should be able to pick up some traces. Did you want me to go have a look at it? There’ll be a fee whether or not I find anything.”

  “If you could do that, it would help us a lot,” Abi admitted.

  The woman nodded. “I dunno why that dolt of a mayor didn’t ask one of us to come have a look in the first place,” she said, lifting up a section of the counter that swung up on hinges and coming out into the shop. Now that she was out from behind the counter, Abi saw she was wearing breeches not unlike Abi’s, only with leather patches on the thighs and the front of the lower legs, and stout working boots. “No, wait, I do know. Skinflint didn’t want to pay us.” She barked a laugh, and led the way out of the shop, pausing only to lock it behind her.

  There was a lot of activity at the wall site. There was a kiln going full blast, Master Padrick had marked out the rectangle where the footings would go in string tied around pegs pounded into the ground, and there were two men digging it out to the depth of about a hand. The ground was saturated, but there wasn’t a puddle forming in the excavated area, so the cement footings should set regardless of the condition of the ground.

  The Mage ignored them all, stalking up to the place where the wall had been, closing her eyes and scowling with concentration.

  She stood there a lot longer than Abi would have expected. But finally, she nodded, turned, and stalked back to Abi.

  “Three spells, no doubt of that. What three spells, I couldn’t tell you; not my specialty. But since everybody knows you Valdemarans don’t use magic, if they were your people, I’ll eat a set of horseshoes without salt.” She said it loud enough that everyone around the breach in the wall could hear her. Then she held out her hand. “One silver.”

  Abi put two into the waiting palm.

  She grinned. “Pleasure doing business with you,” she said, giving Abi a little two-fingered salute, and stalked off again, the workers quickly getting out of her way.

  Master Vance gazed after her in astonishment. “What was the force of nature that just came onto my worksite?” he asked incredulously.

  “Mage-smith Evelie,” Abi replied. “She makes magical weapons. She was also able to confirm that there were three spells used on the wall, as we guessed. I’m betting one was to pull water into the wall, one was to freeze the wall, and one was to heat it.”

  Master Padrick joined them, nodding. “It just occurred to me that you wouldn’t need to freeze and thaw the wall several times to make the mortar crumble. Once would do it if you could get it cold and hot enough, suddenly.”

  “Well, I’m glad she trumpeted the fact that it couldn’t have been our people to everyone in earshot,” Vance said. “She’s local, and probably trusted. This should spread.”

  Abi nodded. That was why she’d paid the woman the second silver piece.

  When Stev turned up, he was relieved to hear that Abi had been successful in her quest. “Because I certainly wasn’t,” he said ruefully. “The old man was deaf as a post, and I’m not entirely certain he had all his wits. He kept trying to shove me out the door, yelling ‘I don’t make love potions, young man! You’ll have to win her yourself!’ at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t get it through his head that I was there on other business.”

  “We’ve got our confirmation that one of the four fake Valdemarans was a Mage,” she replied. “Can you think of anything else we can do? The fact that the quarry has fled and wasn’t native to this city limits our options.”

  “Let’s go to the third Mage, just in case he can tell us more,” Stev decided, after a moment of thought. “Unfortunately, he’s all the way on the northern side of town. It’s a long walk.”

  Abi leveled a look at him. “I’m not a Herald. I don’t have a Companion. I walked the entire Fair about thirty times every day it was open,” she said scornfully. “You’re the softie used to riding everywhere.”

  “Ouch.” He stepped back a pace. “Point to you. Let’s go.”

  The northern side of town had not been one of the places where Abi had needed to go until now. And the closer they got to the area marked on Stev’s rough map, the more oddly at home she felt.

  Because this was the mirror image of the part of Haven where her father had his pawn shop. She was absolutely sure that if the other three Masters had known where Stev was taking her, they’d have had hysterics.

  Jicks, on the other hand, was likely to say, “Why didn’t you take me along? I miss all the fun.”

  Stev’s white uniform would have drawn a lot of attention, so it was just as well that he wasn’t wearing it. As it was, he was getting second and third looks, given that his clothing hadn’t been worn to rags, then patched up to wear again. For that matter, so was she, and she had the distinct feeling that this would not have been a good place to wear a skirt.

  She adjusted her tunic so both knives showed, at the same time that Steve put a hand on his sword hilt.

  The bystanders quickly became uninterested. And those who might have been following them somehow found a reason to peel off in other directions.

  “Not the part of town for an evening stroll,” Abi observed, trying not to inhale through her nose, because this part of town was a lot more odorous than its counterpart in Haven.

  “Or any other time, actually. But at least in daylight we can get them to back off with a show of strength.”

  The stench here wasn’t a sewage smell because, not so oddly, that component wasn’t any stronger than it was in the rest of the city. No, it was another sort of smell, compounded of unwashed bodies, sickness, rot, mildew, with the stench of a tannery somewhere nearby, urine baked into the street, and a harsh, acrid stench she couldn’t identify. As she’d told that Bardic Trainee back at the Collegium, urine and dung were valuable, and she’d bet her last copper that while the latrines in this part of town were probably filthy, they were also emptied religiously. And the rare bit of dung from donkeys or cart horses probably had three or four urchins competing to sweep it up before it hit the ground.

  Conditions improved a bit as they got nearer to the city wall, but it was still quite clear that this was the poorest part of the city—just that the nearer you got to the walls and the guards on top of them, the more “poor but honest” it became. It was also the lowest part of the city, which probably meant that in a heavy rainstorm, every nasty thing in the streets and gutters washed down here. And if there was enough rain that part of the city flooded, it would be here. And the muddy streets here would be the last to dry.

  Their goal was another shop, this one with the sign of a black bird over it. They found it in the last street before the wall.

  Stev opened the door without knocking.

  There was no bell to jangle at their entrance, but there was a skinny lad standing behind a counter filled with little bags made of a scrap of cloth tied with a bit of thread, carefully sorted by fabric color. “We’re looking for Korlak,” Stev said, loudly.

  The boy stared at them, or rather, their weapons, and stood frozen as a frightened rabbit.

  “I said, we’re looking for Korlak,” Stev repeated.

  “He’s not here,” said a voice that was probably supposed to be a child’s piping soprano, but was clearly an adult’s strained falsetto. “He’s gone to visit his sister. He probably won’t be back, ever.”

  “We can pay,” said Stev.

  “Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place?” said the Mage Korlak, opening the door the whole way and gently push
ing the boy to one side.

  Korlak looked a little like a shabbier, more desperate version of Steen.

  He could have been younger, but Abi placed him between twenty and thirty, though what was left of his hair was a grimy white. His robe had either once been black and faded to patchy gray, or pale and accumulated so much grime that wouldn’t wash out that it had achieved the same effect. It had definitely been turned several times and mended carefully.

  A tentative sniff told her that he and the boy at least were accustomed to bathing, though there was a medicinal, bitter smell about him that had nothing to do with a lack of cleanliness.

  And there was a crow on his shoulder. It was definitely a live bird. It looked at her and cawed derisively.

  “Don’t be rude, they have money,” Korlak scolded. He turned back to them and looked them up and down. “Ten coppers for your initial consultation,” he said.

  Stev started to fumble out coppers. Abi slapped three silver on the counter. Korlak’s eyes bulged.

  “Ah, ah,” she cautioned, as he reached for them. “First you tell us if you can do what we want. And what we want is for you to look at the place where the fake Valdemarans brought down the city wall and tell us more about the magic that did it than just the fact that three spells were used. If you can do that, you can have those. If you lie to me, we’ll know, and you’ll get nothing.”

  He pulled back his hand, and he and the crow eyed her with about the same expression, or lack of it. “The wall was wrecked by magic?”

  “Not initially,” Stev corrected. “The initial crack was caused by soil instability under it. The fake Valdemarans used magic to break the entire wall down.”

  “You should probably go ask Albemarle,” Korlak sighed. “As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not the best Mage in the city.”

  “Albemarle kept yelling at me about love potions,” Stev said flatly. “And the smith is who told Abi that there were three spells in the first place. We need more information and we need it now.”

  “If you’re willing to wait, Albemarle usually comes out of those fits in two or three days and has about a day of being lucid—”

  “No,” Stev and Abi said together, interrupting him. They looked at each other. “We’re under some time pressure,” Abi said. “The Artificers want to get out of this city as soon as we’ve got a footing set for the wall repair. Let’s just say they aren’t happy about conditions here.”

  “I see you’re getting the benefit of our mayor’s notion of hospitality,” Korlak said dryly. “All right. We’ll do what we can. But no guarantees. Magic is sometimes unpredictable, and mine in particular is unreliable.” He glanced at the counter, and the little bags lined up in neat rows. “I can offer you each a potion by way of compensation if I don’t come up with anything.”

  “Do they work?” asked Stev.

  “The bellyache tea does,” the boy behind the counter spoke at last.

  “Two bellyache teas, then,” Stev said, and Abi took her hand away from the three coins. Korlak snatched them up, put them somewhere inside his baggy robes, and came out from behind the counter. The boy gave Stev two faded green bags, and Korlak followed them out into the street, crow and all.

  “If you don’t mind, can we take the long way around, by way of the wall?” Korlak asked nervously, once the door shut behind him, casting a glance at the less-than-welcoming streets they would have to cross.

  Stev sighed. Abi cast him a mocking glance. “I’d prefer that myself,” she said. “I don’t mind walking more.”

  They didn’t actually have to go the whole way around. It wasn’t even a quarter of the way when the state of the houses and shops told both Abi and Stev that they were in “respectable” neighborhoods, and it was safe to cut across the city from there. When they reached the breach in the wall, it was late afternoon, and the site for the footings had been dug out, and framed in with scrap timber. It looked to Abi as though the damp ground wasn’t going to cause a problem with the concrete curing as long as Master Vance got the right mix.

  “Ah, there you are,” said Vance, when he spotted them. “The last batch of clay is in the kiln. It should be burned off by morning. We’ll be able to mix and pour the cement then, and if all goes well and it sets and cures properly, we can be out of this place the next day, and they can rebuild the wall as quickly as they please.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Stev asked.

  “It will!” Vance snapped. Clearly his temper had been tried by day after day of monotonous, poverty-level food. Not that Abi blamed him. Especially not after the generous way in which they’d been treated back at Ellistown. The food wasn’t going to kill them, but it wasn’t what they were all used to. In fact . . . unless she was very much mistaken, he’d lost weight.

  “We might not get a good cure because we are not using components that have come from people who do nothing but make cement,” Master Padrick said, soothingly. “It won’t take long to find the proper mix if that happens. And we made plenty of all the ingredients for several batches. And as a bonus, the couple of more intelligent fellows we have here are learning how to make cement. So we’ve brought something new to the city.”

  “Not that they’ll be grateful,” Master Vance growled.

  Abi did not fail to notice that Korlak was carefully keeping Stev and her between himself and Master Vance. “Can we just get on with this, please?” the Mage whispered, timidly.

  “We have another Mage to look over the wall, Master,” she said.

  “Fine, fine, whatever.” Vance waved a dismissive hand at all three of them. “Go investigate your mystery. I’ll see you back at the Town Hall. Jicks said she’s going to have a word with the people at the inn that’s supplying us. Maybe that will bring an improvement in the food.”

  He and the other two Masters stalked off in the direction of their host building. Korlak drifted over to the wall, looking down for a moment at the excavation with bemusement.

  “What, exactly, are you going to do here?” he asked.

  “The ground’s wet here, and it’s unstable. That’s why the wall cracked in the first place. We’re making a stable platform for the stones of the wall out of something called”—she used the Valdemaran word—“cement. It will fill this form and harden as tough as a stone.”

  He eyed the extent of the form, which extended into dry ground on either side. “Would a single stone slab have worked as well?”

  “Do you people have stone slabs that size lying around here?” she countered. “Do you have the means to transport blocks of that size and place them without cracking them?”

  “Well, yes, I mean, we have the means and the men to cut and transport something of that nature, but the mayor won’t pay the stonemasons for a job that complicated,” Korlak admitted. “Even with all the men he threw at you, this isn’t costing him a fraction of the price of a job that size. This lot is all unskilled labor, and they cost coppers, not silver.”

  “I’m glad the Masters aren’t here to hear that,” Stev put in. “The way their tempers are right now, if they knew all of this could have been done by getting a big enough slab of stone in, there’d have been an explosion.” Abi nodded.

  “Why don’t you have a look at the wall,” Abi suggested to the Mage.

  Korlak picked his way around stones and got to the wall itself. He put both hands on the section still standing, closed his eyes, and his head sagged. The crow on his shoulder froze, not moving a feather.

  They stood like that for some time, long enough for the lengthening shadows to make considerable progress and for all the men except the ones manning the kiln overnight to go off home. Abi and Stev sat down on two of the stones. The sounds of the city reached them faintly; the murmur of voices (now and then one raised, shouting something incoherent), the noise of hoofbeats and rolling cart wheels, the steps of the guard on their section of the wall, approa
ching, then receding.

  “Sweet Mother of Kernos!” Korlak shrieked.

  Stev actually fell off his stone. Abi leaped to her feet, daggers out.

  Korlak had somehow leaped a good cartlength backward away from the wall. He stood there, frozen, eyes wide, pupils dilated with shock. The crow on his shoulder flapped its wings and made alarm calls.

  Abi ran to him, sheathing her daggers, as Stev picked himself up. She seized Korlak’s elbow to steady him, with one eye on the crow in case it took the notion to attack. “Magician! What happened? What did you see?” she asked urgently.

  Korlak began shaking, as if he were standing in the middle of a blizzard.

  Then his eyes rolled up into his head, and he dropped to the ground.

  Or started to. Stev caught him before he got too far.

  The crow startled up into the air as he started to fall and landed on Abi’s shoulder, making pathetic, whimpering sounds. “Let’s get him to the nearest tavern and get something into him,” Abi suggested.

  “Good idea. I can carry him, he probably weighs less than you do,” Stev replied. “Lead the way.”

  Unconscious people carried out of the Green Dog Pub were not an unusual sight, but an unconscious person carried in was something else again. They managed to attract a small group of well-meaning drinkers, some of whom were drunk enough that they weren’t all that far from resembling Korlak and none of whom had any useful suggestions.

  Except one.

  The cook came bustling out of the kitchen, made Stev put the Mage on the floor, pulled his legs up and draped them over a bench, then patted his cheeks until he moaned and opened his eyes. “Get him up slow,” she said, brusquely. “I’ll be back.”

  She bustled out and bustled back in again with a wooden cup. “Drink,” she ordered the Mage, raising him into a sitting position and shoving the cup under his nose. Obediently, he drank.

  “Brandy?” asked Stev.