Agabus the Querent

Agabus the Querent (dates of birth and death unknown) was a wandering soothsayer who encouraged and later convinced the Uhlans of the Longroad  to seek out and retrieve the Nine Splendors. Most of what is known of him is from his interactions with the uhlans.

He has been described as appearing to be a man of no less than sixty years but on several occasions Agabus had claimed to be well over 500 years old and that his exact age varied depending on his physical proximity to certain kinds of subterranean water deposits.

Synergy of divination methods
Agabus traveled with a sizable contingent of people and animals that he used to make his prophecies and was very vocal about his complex system of using  the portents of one oracle to determine what elements to utilize when consulting another. This system also included an elaborate series of omens that indicated what methods of divination should be combined and in what sequence, at any given time.

An excerpt from the journal of an unnamed uhlan gives us some idea of how Agabus went about his craft and possibly some insight into his demeanor as well. Of Agabus he wrote:


 * “He guided us about his camp, it was an odd network of tents and transportation.  He assured us that the placement of everything within the settlement was done so to achieve the most optimal of fortunes.  At one point during our tour we passed a pen containing a horse, a goat and a lamb.  These beasts were constantly monitored by a youth that whenever one of the animals defecated would draw a circle around the droppings with white paint and mark which animal had made it and the time of its occurrence.  Agabus became distracted by a pile of dung that the goat had made at about mid-day.  After he had looked it over and posed some questions to the youth, he hurried us over to a tent that he said was reserved for mazomancy.  He instructed a matron there to change the nursing mother’s next meal to a mixture of raw honey and mashed sweet potatoes served with a tea of hibiscus and orange.  Upon the mention of foodstuffs Agabus took us to his larder, which was filled with many rare and costly things.  I felt that the display of his ability to procure such things was meant to convince us of his abilities of divination.  Since I already believed his claims I did not say so, but I thought that such wealth would not be outside the grasp of a clever fraud.”

Agabus and his followers traveled with the uhlans for a span of about 100 days and during that time it is thought that he foretold numerous fortunes addressing the uhlans as a group as well as specific individuals, but aside from the prophecy to seek out the splendors, the details of these predictions are ambiguous and disputed.

- Frater Osric Komnenos