The spectator matters most in the weeks after the first hard frost, when the cellars of the Vintner's Reach are stocked and sealed for winter. That is when the creatures wake properly. Through summer each one hangs in its vault like a dull purple lantern, a floating sphere the size of a wine barrel head, with a wide central eye and four stalks that curl above it. They look at nothing in particular. Then the cold comes, the casks are rolled down, and every spectator begins to count.
The counting is the routine part, and it is dull to watch. At dusk and again at dawn, each spectator drifts the length of its vault and stares once at every cask, stave and hoop. A stalk eye follows the central one and blinks slowly. It does this for hours. A dropped cork does not interrupt it, and neither does a human carrying a lamp. In deep winter, with the vault walls sweating and frost furring the lower rows, the circuit slows to a single pass a day. By thaw it speeds up again, and the creature grows restless and pale.
Near the village of Vatmeasure, the cellar-wardens, who are called gaugers, hold a trade that exists only because of the spectator. A gauger sets a cask on the stone, steps back, and lets the creature look. If the central eye clouds gray, the wine has turned. If it stays black, the cask is sound. Gaugers are paid a share of the sound barrels. Cian Roache, who has gauged for thirty years in the Jerkin Deeps, a flooded cellar complex east of the river, keeps one rule: never carry a mirror below ground. The spectators dislike their own reflections, and the stalks lash open with a hiss that rattles the hoops. The central eye also casts a cone that stills magic and sours the air, so gaugers never bring charms, rings or lamps blessed by a priest.
The spectator leaves a fine gray grit in the corners of its vault, the dust of whatever it has stared at too long. Gaugers sweep it into sacks and sell it to potters, who mix it into glaze. Tracking one is simple: follow the clean arc worn through the cobweb on the ceiling, which shows exactly where it hovers each night. On my first winter in the Reach, the vault at Vatmeasure held forty casks and the spectator hung near the door. By the second winter it had moved to the back wall, and the grit lay in a ring where it had moved before. A new cask of plum brandy stood alone beside it, and the creature had not once turned its eye away. Roache watched it a long moment and shrugged. "It likes that one. Leave it be."
- Classification
- Floating aberration, lesser eye tyrant
- Habitat
- Wine cellars, flooded vaults, cold cisterns
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 3 ft across, barrel-head sized
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Underground vaults and cellars
- Binomial
- Gazeria vigilans
- Diet
- Cellar mold, spilled wine, small vermin
- Temperament
- Watchful, sulky, territorial