The Spriggan Mirror A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter One

Gresh was yawning, still not entirely awake, when the bell jingled and the just-unlocked door of his shop opened behind him, letting in a swirl of cold air. He blinked once more, flexed his shoulders, and started to turn.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” his eldest sister’s voice demanded.

Gresh finished his yawn, finished his stretching, finished his turn, and then replied, “Good morning, Dina. I slept well, thank you—and you?”

“You certainly didn’t sleep very much,” Dina retorted. She was standing in the doorway, hands on her hips, glaring at him. She wore her wizard’s robe, which generally meant she was on business. “I was trying to reach you until at least an hour after midnight. Twilfa didn’t know where you were, but wherever you were, you were still awake...”

“And having a lovely time, I might add,” he interrupted. He smiled broadly at her, then glanced at the shop curtains he had been about to open and decided not to move them just yet. Dina’s presence in her robe often implied a commission, and that might well mean traveling. If it required an immediate departure he would just need to close up shop again. He leaned back against his counter.

“I’m sure you were,” Dina said. “Are you planning to see her again, whoever she was, or just add her to the long list of pleasant memories?”

“Well, I don’t think you’ll be acquiring a new sister-in-law in the immediate future—but you didn’t come here to inquire about my love life, Dina. I take it you were trying to use the Spell of Invaded Dreams to contact me last night?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And it always leaves you in a foul temper when a spell doesn’t work, even if it’s not your fault. I apologize for the inconvenience. What was it you wanted to tell me?”

“I need the blood of an unborn child,” Dina replied. “I thought I needed it urgently, since the spell was already started when I discovered I’d run out, but it seems to have dissipated safely after all, since I couldn’t find you to get more.”

“You didn’t check beforehand?” Gresh asked, shocked. “You didn’t make sure you had all the ingredients ready? Gods, Dina...!”

“I checked,” she protested. “Of course I checked! I had one vial left.” She held up two fingers perhaps an inch and a half apart, indicating the size of the vial in question. “Then a spriggan spilled it on the cat.”

“Oh.” Gresh grimaced as he pushed himself upright and began fishing in his belt-purse for something. “My sympathies. Spriggans do get into everything, don’t they?”

“Yes, they do. The little monsters are attracted by magic, you know—especially wizardry. Locks and spells can’t keep them out. I hate the stupid things!”

“I, for one, don’t blame you a bit,” Gresh said, pulling out the key he had sought. “They’re a nuisance, no doubt about it.” He turned to look at the magically-sealed iron door of the vault room that young Twilfa could not open unassisted. “How much did you need? And how were you planning to pay?” Then he paused and looked at Dina. “Blood of an unborn child? Was that for the Greater Spell of Transmutation?”

“Yes. Not that it’s any of your business.” She stepped into the shop, pushing the door partly closed behind her, then crossed her arms over her chest.

“You’re sure it dissipated safely? Isn’t that a high-order spell?”

“Of course it is,” she said, marching forward. “You let me worry about it, Gresh. I’m just here for the blood.”

“Yes, well, I have a reputation to maintain...”

“As a supplier of goods and ingredients, not as a confounded babysitter,” she said. “I’m ten years older than you and a master wizard; I can take care of myself.”

“I don’t want anyone thinking I sold you anything that wasn’t exactly as described,” Gresh protested. “If you turn yourself into a toad, then I don’t want a bunch of wizards whispering to each other that it happened because I sold you a bad batch of baby’s blood.”

“The blood was bad?” a new voice asked, worried, and brother and sister turned to see Twilfa, their youngest sister and Gresh’s assistant, emerging from the rear passageway with the freshly filled coal bucket. She set it on the hearth, then looked at Dina. “I thought you said a spriggan spilled it on the cat.”

“No, the blood was not bad,” Gresh said, with a hint of a growl.

“Is the cat all right?” Twilfa asked, as she transferred coal from the bucket to the grate.

“Is anyone... Are you open?” an unfamiliar voice called from the still partially open front door.

Gresh sighed. “Why don’t you two discuss it all while I see to my customer?” he asked, dropping the key back into his purse and heading for the door. “Come in, come in!” he called.

“I can’t open the vault!” Twilfa called after him. “I can’t open the explosive seal.”

“I’ll be right back,” Gresh told her, as he let in the tall, black-haired woman in a red dress. He did not recognize her, and he was quite sure he would not have forgotten a face like hers.

“The door was open, and I heard voices,” the new arrival said uncertainly. She spoke with an odd accent, one that struck Gresh as somehow old-fashioned.

“I was just preparing to open the shop, my dear,” Gresh said with a bow. “Do come in.” He stepped aside and ushered her into the center of the room.

She obeyed and stood on the lush Sardironese carpet, looking around curiously.

Gresh was aware that Dina and Twilfa were both standing by the iron vault, staring silently at the stranger, but he ignored them. “Now, what can I do for you?” he asked.

The stranger tore her gaze away from the endless shelves of boxes and jars and said, “We want to hire you.”

“Hire me?” Gresh smiled indulgently. “I’m afraid I’m not for hire, my lady. I sell wizards’

supplies; I don’t run errands.”

“I’m not a lady,” the stranger said. “I’m a witch. We were told that if we wanted something hard to find, something magical, something wizardly, then you were the man to see.” Gresh considered her for a moment.

He had assumed she wasn’t a wizard, from her attitude toward him, toward his shop, and toward her own belt-knife; she did not wear her knife quite the way wizards wore their magic daggers, though Gresh could not have explained the difference coherently. Besides, he knew most of the wizards in Ethshar of the Rocks by sight, if not always by name, and he was sure he had never seen her before.

It hadn’t occurred to him that she might be some other sort of magician. From her appearance and slightly stilted pronunciation, he had assumed she was just another wealthy ninny, perhaps a princess from the Small Kingdoms, looking for something exotic to impress someone, or trying to hire adventurers for some foolish scheme.

But witches were rarely ninnies—and for that matter, rarely wealthy. They were also not ordinarily his customers, but perhaps this person had her reasons for coming here. He decided she could indeed be a witch, and telling the exact truth.

“Who is ‘we’?” he asked.

“My husband and I. Really, he’s the one who wants to hire you, but he’s busy with the baby, so I came instead.”

The husband was busy with the baby, so the wife was running his errands? The beautiful young wife who claimed to be a witch and whose slim figure showed no evidence of having recently borne a child? Gresh glanced at his sisters. He wanted to hear this explained, but he had his business to attend to.

“I do not run errands,” he said.

“Fine,” the woman said calmly. “Then let me put it this way. My husband is a wizard, and he wants to buy a specific magical item from you.”

Gresh could hardly deny that that was exactly his line of business. “Could you wait here for a moment, please?” he said.

“Certainly.”

He turned and hurried to the vault door, where he fished out the key again, unlocked the lock, then pried a large black wax seal off with a thumbnail, being careful not to mar the rune etched into the wax. He set the seal aside, to be softened over a candle-flame and re-used later, and placed a glass bowl over it to keep it safe from stray fingers. If anyone else touched that seal, anyone but himself, it would explode violently, and Gresh did not particularly want to risk burning down the shop because Twilfa got careless or a customer got curious.

“There,” he said, opening the vault. “Twilfa, find her blood for her, would you? I’ll help you in a moment. And afterward, I want you to find Tira.”

“Tira?” Twilfa looked at the woman in red, then back at her brother. “What do you want her for?”

Gresh glared at her silently for a moment, then turned back to his waiting customer without explaining. Twilfa ought to be able to figure it out for herself, and he did not care to say anything that the customer might overhear. An ordinary person wouldn’t have heard a whispered explanation at that distance, but a witch would—as Twilfa ought to know. Tira, another of their sisters, was a witch, and Twilfa had certainly had plenty of opportunity to observe just how keen Tira’s senses were. One witch could always tell another and could also evaluate the other witch’s honesty. Tira might be useful in assessing the customer in the red dress.

Twilfa threw one final curious glance at the stranger, then stepped into the vault, Dina close behind.

“Now,” Gresh said, returning to the front of the shop, “what was it your husband wanted to buy?”

“A mirror,” the witch said. “A very specific mirror, about this big.” She held out her hands in a rough circle perhaps five inches in diameter. “He last saw it in the Small Kingdoms, in the mountains near the border between Dwomor and Aigoa.”

“The Small Kingdoms.” That was more or less the far side of the World, and explained her accent.

“Yes. In or near Dwomor.”

“And is this mirror still there?”

“We don’t know.”

Gresh suppressed a sigh. “My dear, the Small Kingdoms are almost a hundred leagues from here, and my time...”

“We have a flying carpet to take you there,” she interrupted. “And we can pay you well.” Gresh blinked. “A flying carpet?” He glanced at the vault; Dina and Twilfa were out of sight behind the iron door.

“Yes.”

Flying carpets required high-order magic; not one wizard in twenty could produce one reliably.

And a wizard who had one, assuming he had made it himself, could generally find most of the ingredients for his spells without assistance, rather than paying Gresh. Certainly finding a mirror should not be so very difficult for such a wizard.

“What’s unique about this mirror?” he asked. “Why do you want me to find it for you?” The self-proclaimed witch replied, “It’s where spriggans come from.” Gresh considered that for a moment. On the face of it, it seemed preposterous—but then, a great deal of what wizards did was preposterous. She looked calm and sincere, and why in the World would anyone come to him with so absurd a story if it wasn’t true?

“Have a seat, my dear,” he said, gesturing to the maroon velvet chairs in one corner. “I’ll need to hear the whole story, but let me finish with this other customer first.” The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Two

Once Dina was safely on her way with a fresh bottle of blood, Gresh locked and re-sealed the vault, closed the front door, and settled on the other velvet chair. He watched as Twilfa slipped out the back, then turned to focus on his customer.

“Now, my dear, if you could explain to me what you know of this mirror, I will consider whether or not I can obtain it for you.”

“Thank you.” The woman nodded an acknowledgment. “My name is Karanissa of the Mountains. About four hundred and seventy years ago, in the course of my military service, I met a powerful wizard named Derithon the Mage, or Derithon of Helde. He was much older than I, but we thought each other to be good company, and before long I found myself living in his castle—a magical castle floating in a void outside the World entirely. Are you familiar with such things?”

“I’ve heard of them,” Gresh said cautiously. He was wondering now whether he was dealing with a witch or with a madwoman. Although nothing she had said was impossible, Gresh had never before met anyone other than wizards who claimed to have lived more than a century, and as he understood it, manufactured places outside the World were extremely scarce—not to mention notoriously dangerous to create.

“Well, Derry had made one, which could be reached through a Transporting Tapestry. We lived there happily for a time, but one day Derry was called away, leaving me in the castle, and he never returned. The tapestry leading out of the castle stopped working, stranding me there. I found out later that Derry had died just on the other side of the tapestry, altering the appearance of the room—you know how Transporting Tapestries work?”

“In theory,” Gresh said. He had heard them described, and of course he knew what ingredients went into the spell to make one, but had never personally used one. Anyone could simply step into the image on the tapestry and instantly find oneself in the actual place depicted, no matter how far away it was—but the image had to be exact, or the tapestry would not work properly, if at all. “I don’t quite see how his death would change anything, though.” Gresh knew there were spells that would stop working if the wizard who had worked them died, but they were much less common than most people supposed, and he was certain that the Transporting Tapestry wasn’t one of them.

Karanissa sighed. “The tapestry came out in a secret room, and Derry died there, and no one found his body. The tapestry didn’t work as long as his bones were lying on what was depicted as empty floor.”

“Oh, I see.” He had not realized the tapestries were that specific, but it made sense.

“The point is,” Karanissa continued, “I was stranded in his castle for more than four and a half centuries. I didn’t know it was that long—he’d put a spell of eternal youth on me, and the castle was magically supplied with food and water. I used my own witchcraft to let me pass the time swiftly, so I lost track of time, and had no idea it had been that long. At last, though, a young wizard named Tobas of Telven happened to find the secret room and the Transporting Tapestry. He found his way into the castle, and eventually he figured out how to get us both out again. While he was looking for a way out, though, he went through Derry’s book of spells, studying the situation and learning more magic. One spell he tried, Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, went wrong, and instead of producing the phantasm, it produced a spriggan.”

Gresh held up a hand. “What do you mean, ‘produced’?”

“Do you know how the spell works?”

“I think I’ve heard of it.” He had heard Dina and others describe it, but he wanted to hear his would-be customer’s version.

“Well, it requires a mirror, and in this case, instead of creating the phantasm it was supposed to create, the spell enchanted the mirror, and the spriggan climbed out of the mirror as if the glass were a door. A minute or two later another spriggan did the same thing, and a moment after that a third, and they kept coming. That’s where all the spriggans come from. By the time we got the tapestry working again there were dozens of them running around loose in the castle, and some of them came through to the World with us. They stole the mirror so we couldn’t break it and hid it somewhere, and it’s been popping out spriggans ever since.”

Gresh stared at her, considering this, keeping his face expressionless.

Spriggans had started appearing a few years ago, without explanation; they had just suddenly been there, getting underfoot, poking into everything, babbling nonsense. It was just one or two at first, but they had gradually been growing more common. Divinations had not, so far as he knew, been able to determine their origin, although everyone was fairly certain they were a product of wizardry. He had never before heard anything about spriggans coming from an enchanted mirror. They were, as Dina had said, drawn to magic in general, and wizardry in particular—but, annoyingly, most magic did not work on them.

That was typical of wizardry; other spells almost never worked properly on something that was already enchanted.

And here was this person, claiming that someone named Derry—no, someone named Tobas—had created them accidentally, by miscasting Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.

Gresh knew a good deal about how the Phantasm worked. It was his business, as a wizards’

supplier, to know as much as possible about all wizardry, so he made a point of coaxing as much information as he could from not just Dina, but every other wizard he sold to. He did not think he had actually picked up any Guild secrets yet, but he certainly knew more about wizardry than the vast majority of people.

The Phantasm was an easy spell, one many wizards had learned before they had finished the third year of apprenticeship. Who was this Tobas who had botched it so spectacularly?

But that wasn’t entirely fair, he told himself. Dina had told him that if a spell went wrong, there was no way to predict what it would do. It might just do nothing, like her ruined spell of the night before, or it might do a variant of the intended spell, or it might do something completely different, and the effect might be utterly out of proportion. The famous Tower of Flame in the Small Kingdoms had supposedly been created when someone sneezed while performing a simple fire-lighting spell, after all. Perhaps this spriggan-generating mirror was the result of just as innocent a mistake.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

“5221,” Karanissa replied. “Some time in Leafcolor, or possibly at the very end of Harvest.”

“Six and a half years ago, going on seven.” That was well before Gresh had ever heard of spriggans, so that fit the facts. “Why are you only looking for the mirror now?”

“We were busy.” She turned up an empty palm. “And we thought the spriggans were harmless.

And we didn’t know the mirror would produce so many. At first we didn’t think it would produce any, once it was out of the castle.”

“Just who is ‘we’? You and your husband, or are others involved?”

“My husband and his other wife and I.”

Other wife? The husband staying with the baby while Karanissa saw to business suddenly made sense. “And your husband is this wizard named Tobas of Telven, then?”

“That’s right.”

“You hadn’t mentioned that he had another wife.”

“It wasn’t relevant.”

“She wasn’t involved in creating the mirror?”

“No. She’s not a magician.”

Gresh nodded and inquired no further about that, although he was curious. Other people’s family arrangements were not his business.

Magical objects sometimes were, though. “And you want me to find this spriggan- generating mirror for you.”

“Yes. You come highly recommended; Telurinon and Kaligir both spoke well of you.” Once again Gresh found himself staring silently at the woman for a moment before he spoke.

Telurinon was one of the most powerful wizards in Ethshar of the Sands and was rumored to be a high official in the Wizards’ Guild. He had reportedly supervised the Guild’s efforts to remove a usurper from the overlord’s throne last year, though of course no one would admit to telling Gresh anything of the sort.

And Kaligir, here in Ethshar of the Rocks, was definitely a high official in the Guild—when his name and the question of his status came up a year or so back Dina had admitted he was a Guildmaster and had hinted that he was perhaps the city’s senior Guildmaster.

“You know them?” he asked.

“We know Telurinon. We helped him dispose of poor Tabaea. We’ve met Kaligir once or twice; he was the one who directed us here, at Telurinon’s suggestion.” The mere fact that this woman knew those two names made it much less likely that she was mad, but her story was more outlandish than ever. She and her husband had helped defeat the self-proclaimed Empress of Ethshar who had briefly taken power in Ethshar of the Sands last year? And it seemed she and her husband got their shopping suggestions from the upper echelons of the Wizards’ Guild.

Add that to a magic castle, eternal youth, the accidental creation of the spriggans that plagued the World, and it was a little much to accept.

“How did you come to be asking their advice?”

Karanissa frowned—the first time Gresh had seen her do so. “They weren’t advising us as much as ordering us,” she said.

“Oh?”

“The Wizards’ Guild holds my husband responsible for the spriggans,” Karanissa explained.

“They summoned us to a meeting, back in Snowfall, and told us as much. A good many wizards have been complaining about the silly things and demanding the Guild do something. They’ve caused a lot of trouble. There’s a man named Ithanalin who got turned to stone or something when he tripped over a spriggan, and was petrified until his apprentice taught herself enough magic to cure him....”

“Kilisha,” Gresh said. “I know Ithanalin and Kilisha.” That was a mild exaggeration; he had met them, even sold them a few things, but no more than that. He remembered the fuss about Ithanalin’s accident; he hadn’t been petrified, exactly, but Gresh supposed the exact details didn’t matter.

“Yes, well, that was one instance,” Karanissa said. “Ithanalin has been very persistent in demanding Kaligir do something about the spriggans. There have been any number of other ruined spells and spilled potions and wasted ingredients....”

Gresh remembered Dina’s precious blood, spilled on her cat. “Yes,” he said.

“No one’s been killed yet, so far as we know, but it seems almost as if it’s just a matter of time, and the Guild wants Tobas to do something about the spriggans before it comes to that. He created them, Telurinon says, so it’s his responsibility to stop them. And that starts with destroying the mirror—if we don’t do that, it’ll just make more.”

“But first you need to find it.”

“Yes. The spriggans hid it, and we need to find it.”

“So you came to me.”

“When nothing else worked, yes.”

Gresh did not like the sound of that—but then, if the Guild had ordered them to do something about the spriggans back in Snowfall of last year, and they had already been working on the problem for five months, then coming to him had clearly not been their first idea. “What else did you try?” he asked.

“Well, since the Guild wanted us to do it, we thought it was only fair to ask them to help us, so we did. We had Mereth of the Golden Door use every divination in her book, and half a dozen other wizards, as well, but none of them could locate the mirror. We consulted three or four theurgists and even a demonologist, to no avail—the gods apparently can’t even perceive spriggans, let alone identify their source, no matter how roundabout you make the questions, and there don’t seem to be any demons who deal with this sort of thing. Witches don’t have the range—I could have told them that, but Tobas talked to a couple of others just to be sure no one had found a way during the four hundred years I was gone. Warlocks had no idea of how to even begin looking, and the scientists and ritual dancers didn’t do much better.” She sighed wearily at the memory. “So when magic failed us, we decided to try other methods. Lady Sarai can’t leave her duties as the overlord’s investigator and didn’t have any clever ideas, but Telurinon said you were the best in the World at finding hard-to-find things without magic—so here I am.”

“Indeed,” Gresh said. He leaned back, keeping his eyes on his guest.

This was, at least potentially, a problem—and an opportunity.

He made an excellent living supplying wizards with the ingredients for their spells; he had been doing it since boyhood. He had started out running errands for his older sisters—mostly Dina, since wizards used so many odd ingredients in their spells, but also occasionally Tira and Chira and Shesta.

Witches used herbs and other tools; sorcerers sometimes wanted particular metals or gems for their talismans and were always looking for leftover bits of old sorcery; and demonologists sometimes needed specific things to pay demons for their services. His business was never entirely for wizards, but wizards certainly made up the bulk of his business.

He had started with his sisters, but then he had begun to fetch things for their friends, and then friends of friends, and then people with no connection he knew of who had heard his name somewhere.

Word had spread; by the time he finished his apprenticeship and opened his own shop, he had developed a reputation for being fast, efficient, honest, and discreet.

He had also developed a reputation for being able to get anything, given time.

This reputation let him charge high prices—higher, in fact, than any other supplier in the city. Even so, he had never lacked for business. There were always people willing to pay more for the best.

The problem was that he had to stay the best. He had to maintain his reputation as the man who could get anything a wizard needed. He could never admit that there was something he couldn’t find, or couldn’t obtain once it was found.

So far, no such admission had been necessary; sooner or later he had gotten everything he went after, or else had been able to give good, sound reasons why he would not seek certain things. As he explained to anyone who asked: he would not kill or maim anyone to obtain an item; he would not violate Wizards’ Guild rules, and he tried to obey the overlords’ laws; and some of the things people had attempted to buy simply didn’t exist.

Or at least, he said they didn’t exist, and no one had ever proved him wrong.

This spriggan mirror, though, apparently did exist. If Karanissa was telling the truth, she knew it existed. Fetching it would not break any Guild rules; in fact, the Guild wanted it found. He wouldn’t be stealing it, or breaking any other laws so far as he could see, and he could see no reason anyone would be killed or maimed if he acquired it. By his own rules, therefore, he should have no objection to going after it. Unless he could find a new and convincing excuse, refusing the task would severely damage his reputation.

Finding it, of course, would enhance his reputation. If he could become known as the man who eliminated the nuisance of the spriggans once and for all, he could crank his prices up even higher. He would be a minor hero throughout the Hegemony.

The problem was that if he agreed to get it and failed to do so, his reputation would be not merely damaged, but ruined—and he had no idea how to find the thing! By Karanissa’s account, most of his usual methods would not work.

Of course, no one outside the family knew what his usual methods were—and he liked it that way. Keeping his trade secrets secret added to his aura of mystery and kept the competition down.

“Will you get it for us?” Karanissa asked, interrupting his train of thought.

He really had no choice. “Of course,” he said. “But it may take some time, and it will be very expensive.”

“The Guild has agreed to cover the cost,” she replied. “We will pay any price.” Gresh blinked at that. Any price?

He had thought he might scare her away; given his reputation for charging high prices, he had thought that when he said “very expensive” she might reconsider and save him the trouble of actually finding the mirror. But the Guild would pay?

When the Wizards’ Guild said “any price,” that meant rather more than when anyone else said it.

The Wizards’ Guild had entire worlds at their disposal.

But of course, the witch might not have meant it literally. She could not be a member of the Guild herself and might have misinterpreted what the Guildmasters had actually said. There might be limitations of which she was unaware.

Still, to have access to the Guild’s own coffers—he would be rich! Really rich, not just as well off as he was now. Or perhaps he might be paid with more than money....

That assumed, of course, that Karanissa was telling the truth. Twilfa had not yet returned with Tira, so he had no way of verifying the story.

It also assumed he could indeed retrieve the missing mirror, but he had confidence in his own abilities—far more confidence than he had in Karanissa’s account of herself.

He considered trying to stall Karanissa, by asking her questions until Tira arrived—after all, he would need more information from her before setting out to find this mirror—but he decided against it.

This was probably not going to be a quick and easy errand. He would undoubtedly talk to her a good many times, with and without Tira.

He would probably need to talk to her husband, as well, but first he wanted to do a little preliminary planning.

“It will take me some time to make preparations,” he said. “I will need to speak with your husband and to do some research.”

“Of course,” Karanissa said. “Whatever is necessary.” She rose.

“Bring your husband and his other wife here this afternoon, and we will settle the details,” Gresh said, rising as well.

She bowed an acknowledgment.

He showed her to the door, then stood in the doorway watching her walk away down the street toward Eastgate Market.

She was a handsome woman, no question about it, and if her story was true, she was a woman with an incredible history. The task she had set him was going to be a challenge—stupendously profitable, he hoped,—but a challenge.

In fact, he had no idea at all, as yet, of how he would do it.

That did not worry him. He would find a way. Various possibilities were already stirring in the back of his mind.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Three

Gresh sat at his kitchen table across from Twilfa and Tira, stroking his short-trimmed beard. “She said they’d tried wizardry, theurgy, demonology, warlockry, science, and ritual dance. She didn’t mention witchcraft, but since she’s a witch herself I think we can take that for granted.”

“Then why did you want me here?” Tira asked.

“To see whether she was telling the truth,” Gresh replied. “Whether she’s really a witch and really as old as she claims.”

“But you let her go!”

“She’ll be back this afternoon.”

“You want me to stay here all day? Gresh, Dar and I have our own customers to attend to.” Gresh sighed. “Are any of them coming today?”

“I’m not going to tell you my entire schedule.”

“I won’t keep you, then, but can you please come by this afternoon? Naturally, I will pay you for your time.”

Tira frowned.

“Tira, I’m sorry I dragged you over here for nothing, but I didn’t know how the conversation was going to go, and this way you’ll know what I want when you come back, and I won’t need to try to signal you surreptitiously. And you can tell me if you’ve ever heard of this Karanissa of the Mountains, or her husband Tobas of Telven, or a mirror that makes spriggans.” Tira considered that for a moment, then relented. “Fine, I’ll be here this afternoon and will tell you whether they’re lying,” she said. “And I never heard of Karanissa or Tobas, but didn’t you say they were from the Small Kingdoms? I don’t know anyone there. The Sisterhood doesn’t operate openly there.”

“Thank you.”

“And you will indeed pay me my full consultation rate this afternoon.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want you thinking you can get a discount just because you’re my brother, or because you’re the famous Gresh the Supplier.”

“Of course not.”

“Good.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’ll be back this afternoon. If I have a chance, I might talk to a few people about this Karanissa.”

“Thank you,” Gresh replied. He and Twilfa watched silently as Tira straightened her shawl and marched out the back door. Except for Dina, his sisters almost always used the back door, at his request. He didn’t want anyone wondering why all these non-wizards were coming to his shop.

And they did come fairly often. His sisters were his most important trade secret. Oh, he had plenty of other sources and contacts, a network of agents scattered across the western half of the World, but his family was at the heart of his unique ability to acquire the things his customers sought. He had based his entire business on sisterly affection and sibling rivalry—what one sister could not find, another could, and would, because to refuse would be to disappoint their only brother and miss a chance to crow.

Gresh was only eight when he first realized he could play off Dina, who was then a freshly accredited journeyman wizard, against Difa, then an apprentice warlock, to his own benefit. He had known all along that Difa had originally intended to be a wizard and had only become a warlock because the possibility was new and exciting and as a warlock she would not be once again following in her older sister’s footsteps. Still, it was not until Dina made journeyman that Gresh had discovered he could exploit this rivalry, challenging each sister to show that she could do more with her magic than the other.

Warlockry was still relatively new and unfamiliar at the time, which had helped—questions of which sort of magic was better at what had not yet all been settled.

Tira was already in her third year of apprenticeship then, and she, too, had joined the competition quickly enough. Chira and Pyata and Shesta joined in their turn. No two of Keshan the Merchant’s daughters chose the same school of magic—that would have been copying—but all were determined to demonstrate that their magic was best.

Then Gresh had reached apprenticeship age himself and faced the prospect of learning his own magic. Dina had not yet been ready for master’s rank, but she could have found him a place with a wizard somewhere.

Or Difa could have found a master warlock. Tira could probably have found a witch. The others were still apprentices themselves, but....

But it didn’t matter, because Gresh had decided he didn’t want to be a magician. It would have meant choosing one sort of magic—and one of his sisters—over all the others. Whichever school of magic he chose, the sister in that school would have deemed it a victory and the others a defeat; factional lines within the family that had always been fluid would become fixed.

He might have chosen a variety of magic that none of them had studied, which would have avoided choosing sides by rejecting all of them, but even at twelve he had been able to foresee a lifetime of being told, “You chose your magic instead of mine, so I can see you won’t want my help!” Although finding a magic none of his older sisters had chosen would have worked as far as not choosing sides at first, it ignored the question of what might happen when his younger sisters began choosing their apprenticeships.

No, there were too many potential complications with any school of magic. Appealing as learning magic might have seemed, he did not want to alienate any of his sisters, or choose one over the others.

He liked being able to call on all of them.

So he had apprenticed to their father, which had made both their parents happy, and he had learned the merchant’s trade, learned bookkeeping and bargaining, buying and bartering—and he had made use of all his twelve sisters in his business, older and younger, from Dina the wizard to Ekava the seamstress, and had eventually taken on Twilfa, the youngest, as his assistant. Because of the family’s competitiveness no two had pursued exactly the same occupation, even after their contacts could no longer find new varieties of magic, and he now had available for consultation representatives of eight different schools of magic, as well as a seamstress, a sailor, and a guardswoman.

That didn’t include the husbands or children his sisters had acquired over the years—nine of the twelve were married, and three of them had offspring old enough to have begun their apprenticeships. His nephews, nieces, and brothers-in-law were not as usefully diverse as his sisters, but they did add to the mix.

“So do you want to talk to Chira?” Twilfa asked, when Tira was out of sight. Chira was the family sorcerer, and Karanissa had not mentioned trying sorcery.

Gresh considered that, then nodded. “I think that’s a good place to start, and she definitely owes me one.” He had located several sorcerous items for Chira over the past few years and had been generous in pricing them. Karanissa’s omission of sorcery from her list was probably just an oversight, and Gresh did not see how any sorcery he was familiar with might help, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

“I’ll fetch her,” Twilfa said, rising.

“And if you see any spriggans on the way, try to catch one,” Gresh said.

Twilfa paused. “You want to have one here for Chira to try her talismans on?”

“I want to ask one a few questions,” Gresh answered. “For all I know, we may not need any magic to find this mirror.”

Twilfa blinked. “You think it might just tell you where the mirror is?” Gresh turned up a palm. “Why not?” he asked. “Spriggans are stupid little creatures, and they seem to want to be cooperative—why wouldn’t it tell me?”

“If it’s that easy, wouldn’t this Karanissa have already tried that? Or her husband?”

“They’re magicians, at least in theory. She’s a witch; he’s a wizard—they’re accustomed to doing things magically. It may have never occurred to them just to ask.” Twilfa started to say something, then stopped and thought for a moment. “You could be right,” she admitted.

Gresh smiled at her. “You’re learning,” he said. “Magicians are just as fallibly human as anyone else.”

Twilfa stuck her tongue out at him and turned away.

Gresh watched her go, then leaned back and began planning.

The mirror was probably still somewhere in the Small Kingdoms—why would the spriggans have taken it anywhere else? He could accept Karanissa’s offer of transport by flying carpet, but how big a carpet was it? How much could it carry? It might be better to travel on the ground.

Although his customers were nominally buying the mirror, what they really wanted was its destruction; should he bring tools for breaking it? An ordinary mirror could be smashed readily enough, but enchanted items had a tendency to be uncooperative in unexpected ways.

Of course, depending on just what he did to locate it, he didn’t necessarily want Tobas and Karanissa to know how he found it; if customers found out how simple some of his methods actually were it could hurt his business.

He needed to talk to a spriggan, no question about it, to find out as much about the mirror as he could. He glanced down the passage toward the shop; naturally, no spriggans were in sight. When he was busy and had no use for the little pests they were everywhere, getting underfoot and making a mess, but now that he wanted one, there were none to be found.

Well, Twilfa might have better luck in apprehending one. Or he could stroll down Wizard Street later and listen for outbursts of profanity or the sound of falling crockery.

Then the doorbell jingled, and he rose hurriedly to attend to his customer.

Ordinary trade filled the remainder of the morning. Twilfa returned shortly before lunch with word that Chira was busy at the moment but would be along later and that all the spriggans seemed to be hiding.

“Of course,” Gresh said.

They had finished a meal of salt ham and cornbread, and Twilfa was clearing the table when Gresh heard a thump. “What was that?” he said.

“What was what?” Twilfa asked, stacking the pewter plates.

A loud crash sounded from the front of the shop.

“That,” Gresh said, as he leapt up and dashed down the passage.

As he had expected, he found a spriggan sitting on the floor below a high shelf, surrounded by broken glass and drying blood. The creature looked up at him as he entered, then sprang to its feet and ran for the door.

Gresh darted in front of it, cutting off its escape. It stopped dead and looked up at him, crestfallen. Its big pointed ears drooped.

“Sorry sorry sorry,” it said, in a high-pitched squeak of a voice.

Gresh smiled. “Of course you are,” he said. “I’m sure you didn’t mean any harm at all, did you?” The spriggan stared up at him uncertainly, its bulging round eyes fixed on his face.

“You were just curious about what was in the bottle, right?” Hesitantly, the spriggan nodded, never taking its eyes from Gresh’s face.

“And you certainly didn’t mean to spill dragon’s blood worth five rounds of gold all over my carpet, did you?”

The ears drooped even further. “Sorry,” the spriggan said.

“Do you know how much five rounds of gold is?”

The spriggan blinked once, its thin, pale eyelids seeming to appear out of nowhere. “No?”

“It’s a very great deal of money. You now owe me a very great deal of money.” The creature looked panic-stricken. “Spriggan doesn’t have money,” it squealed.

“I can see that,” Gresh said. The spriggan was naked and only about eight inches high; there was nowhere it could hide a purse, or even a single coin.

Gresh had never bothered to take a good hard look at a spriggan. The first few he had encountered had been glimpsed from afar, or in the process of fleeing, and by the time he saw one close up and relatively still he had lost any interest in the little pests. Now, though, he stared down at the creature that crouched before his feet, studying it.

It was roughly human in shape—but it also looked a good bit like a frog, an impression aided by its lipless, oversized mouth and bulging pop-eyes. Its shiny, hairless skin was a dull green—Gresh thought he had seen a few that were more of a brown color, but this one was definitely an ugly shade of drab green. It came no more than halfway up his shin; if it stood straight and stretched its bony arms, those long-fingered little hands could probably reach his knee.

This one apparently had no fingernails; some of them did, though. He remembered hearing that some could use their fingernails to pick locks.

Why did some have nails, and some not? Was there any significance to the different colors?

There were plenty of unanswered questions about spriggans. No one knew whether they had one sex or two—or, Gresh supposed, more. No one knew why they all seemed to speak the same sort of broken Ethsharitic, or whether they had names. Not one had ever, so far as Gresh knew, admitted to having any name but “spriggan.” They generally spoke of themselves in the third person, but Gresh wasn’t sure if that was universal.

One thing he discovered, having one this close, was that they did not seem to have any odor at all. He was fairly sure he would have been able to smell a person at this distance, but all he could smell right now was the spilled dragon’s blood.

He was going to need to clean that up, but right now dealing with the spriggan seemed more urgent; the blood and broken glass could wait. He supposed he probably should have kept that in the vault, with the other expensive materials, but wizards used so much dragon’s blood that he had never bothered—he and Twilfa would have spent half the day locking and unlocking the iron door. It seemed as if half the spells used in Ethshar of the Rocks required dragon’s blood.

The stuff had a sharp, metallic odor, and Gresh’s nose could detect nothing else. On a whim, he leaned forward and sniffed at the spriggan.

It backed away a step, startled. “No money,” it said. “You let spriggan go now?” The creature had no scent at all, so far as Gresh could discern. He could smell the blood and the carpet and a dozen other normal shop odors, but nothing at all that might be the spriggan. That was odd, like so many things about the little pests. “You’ll just have to pay me with something other than money,” he said.

“But spriggan not have anything,” the spriggan wailed woefully.

“You can pay me with answers,” Gresh said.

The spriggan calmed down slightly. It blinked up at him, then looked from side to side, as if hoping to see an explanation standing nearby.

Twilfa was standing in the passageway, watching the conversation, but there were no explanations in sight.

“What answers?” it asked warily.

“You owe me five rounds of gold,” Gresh said. “That’s forty bits. Let’s say each answer is worth, oh, two bits—which I’m sure you’ll agree is very generous of me. Then you owe me twenty answers.”

“What kind of answers?”

“Answers to my questions.”

The spriggan considered that carefully, then brightened visibly, its immense ears straightening.

“Yes, yes!” it said. “Answer questions! Then you let spriggan go, yes?”

“Yes,” Gresh said.

“Good, good! Have answers, have fun!” It ventured a tentative smile.

“Don’t get too happy,” Gresh warned. “You still have to give me those twenty answers.”

“Will! Will! Ask questions!”

“Indeed I will. First off, did you come out of a mirror, as I’ve heard?”

“Not know what you heard. That one answer.” It blinked up at him.

Gresh grimaced. Obviously, he would need to be more careful about his phrasing. “Fair enough,” he said. “Did you come out of an enchanted mirror?”

“Yes. That two answers.”

“You’re counting.... Can you even count to twenty?” The spriggan hesitated. “Not sure,” it admitted. “Can try. Can count to twelve for sure. Twenty is more than twelve, might not get all the way. Try, though.” It smiled happily. “That three answers!” Gresh sighed. “I suppose it is. Now, do you know where the mirror you came from is?”

“No. Not know. That four.”

“No, it isn’t!” Gresh protested. “That’s not an answer!”

“Is, too. ‘Not know’ is answer. Just isn’t good answer. You not say good answers!” Gresh put a hand to his forehead. “I’m being outwitted by a spriggan,” he said. “I don’t believe this.” Then he lowered his hand and said, “Where was the mirror when you last saw it?” The spriggan turned up empty hands. “Not know,” it said. “Five.”

“You have to give me honest answers, you know.”

“Did. Have. Will.”

“How can you not know where it was?”

“Not good with places. Not good with names. Not remember well. Six.”

“Well, how did you get here from wherever the mirror was?”

“Walked, mostly. Ran some. Got thrown once by pretty woman who found spriggan in her skirt—maybe eight, nine feet? Rolled down slope once. Is seven? Yes, seven.”

“Seven down.” Gresh sighed again, and rubbed his forehead. “Which direction did you walk?”

“Not know names of directions. Walked away from sun. Not like light in eyes. Eight.”

“But the sun moves!”

“Sun moves, yes. Spriggan know that. Spriggan is not that stupid.”

“But then you’d walk west in the morning, and east in the afternoon, and you’d wind up in the same place—was the mirror here in the city?”

“No, mirror not here! Silly. Walked in mornings, had fun in afternoons—talked to people, played games. Nine.”

“So you went west.”

“Away from sun in morning.”

“That’s west.”

The spriggan turned up an empty palm. “You say is west; spriggan not argue.”

“So you came from the east—which makes sense, since we’re on the west coast. You didn’t turn aside, go north or south?”

“Went other direction when water got in the way. Ten.”

“Water? You mean the ocean?”

“Mean big, big water, great big huge water. Is ocean? Ocean’s eleven.”

“So when you got to the coast you turned aside and walked up the coast to the city.”

“Turned aside twice. First time long ago, then not so long at all. Twelve.” Gresh struggled to remember his geography. The second time would be when the spriggan reached the west coast, of course, but the first time....

That would have been the Gulf of the East, the water between the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars and the Small Kingdoms.

“The first time you turned aside—you walked around the very big water and crossed a long bridge across more water, and then headed west again?”

“Yes, yes! Long bridge with guards.”

“Across the Great River.”

“What comes after twelve? Thirty?”

“Thirteen,” Gresh said automatically, as he tried to choose his next question.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Four

“Thirteen,” the spriggan said.

Gresh frowned. He was using up his twenty questions faster than he liked.

He had made progress, though; knowing that the spriggan had turned aside at the Gulf of the East and crossed the toll bridge on the Great River meant that it had, indeed, come from the Small Kingdoms.

But how far had it come? Where in the Small Kingdoms had it started? Gresh couldn’t very well search all of the two hundred or more little principalities for one little hand-mirror.

“How long did it take you to walk from the mirror to the first big water? How many mornings?” The spriggan turned up empty palms. “Don’t know,” it said. “Didn’t count. Is fourteen?”

“Yes,” Gresh admitted, annoyed with himself for wasting a question. He knew the spriggan couldn’t count, and the stupid little thing probably hadn’t maintained anything like a steady pace in its journeying.

A thought struck him. Had it started in the Small Kingdoms? What if it had started east of the Small Kingdoms, in the Great Eastern Desert?

“Have you ever seen a desert?” he asked. “A big sandy place, where no one lives and there are no trees or farms?”

“No,” the spriggan said. “Would be no fun, huh?” It hesitated. “Fiveteen?”

“Fifteen.”

So the mirror was definitely in the Small Kingdoms. He had five questions left to narrow it down.

“Do you know which kingdom the mirror is in?”

“No. Not good with names. Or kingdoms. Sixteen, yes?”

That was no surprise. “Is the mirror in the mountains, or on the plain, or in the forests?”

“Um....” The spriggan was clearly struggling to think. “Yes,” it said. “Seventeen. That almost twenty?”

“Getting close,” Gresh said. “But you didn’t answer the question—which is it, in the mountains or on the plain or in the forest?”

“Mirror is in mountain,” the spriggan said. “Eighteen.”

“No, that’s just seventeen! You didn’t answer the question the first time.”

“Wasn’t same question! Did answer!”

“It was the same question! You just didn’t hear it right the first time.”

“Was two questions!”

Gresh glared at the spriggan, and the spriggan glared back. Then something registered.

“Wait a minute,” Gresh said. “Did you say the mirror is in a mountain? You mean inside a mountain?”

“Yes,” the spriggan said, folding its spindly arms across its narrow chest. “Said that, meant that.

Nineteen.”

“It’s in a cave?” Gresh said, before realizing that he might have just thrown away his last question.

“Yes. Tenteen.”

Gresh caught himself, closed his lips tight, closed his eyes, and did not correct the spriggan.

Instead he tried to think what else he could ask.

He opened his eyes and glanced at Twilfa, who had obviously been listening and had, just like him, barely caught herself before calling out a correction. He could see her biting her lip as she turned away and hurried down the passageway to the kitchen, out of sight.

Gresh had no idea how many more questions he could get away with; it could be just one, or it could be a dozen before the spriggan caught on. He couldn’t afford to waste any.

“What time of day does the sun first shine in the mouth of the cave?” he asked.

The spriggan considered that for a moment, then said, “Middle of morning, maybe? Not sure.

Um.... eleventeen?”

Then the cave mouth faced more east than west and was probably on the eastern slope of a mountain.

“From the mouth of the cave, what buildings could you see? Castles, towers, farmhouses, villages, anything?”

“Only building was broken one. Castle or tower or something. Don’t know names of buildings.” The spriggan looked puzzled. “Is eleventeen? Said that before?”

“No, you didn’t say it before,” Gresh lied as he considered that. “Eleventeen is right.” A ruin. Nothing else. That made sense; if there were inhabitants in the area they might have noticed the steady stream of spriggans coming down from the cave. Word would have gotten around.

Or up from the cave, he reminded himself. Caves could occur at the bottoms of mountains as well as the tops.

This one, wherever it was, was in sight of a ruined fortification in otherwise uninhabited terrain, far enough from civilization that no one had recognized it as the source of spriggans.

Unfortunately, to the best of Gresh’s knowledge, that described a good-sized portion of the mountainous central Small Kingdoms, from Zedmor in the northwest to Lumeth of the Towers in the southeast.

Lumeth of the Towers...could the cave be in sight of those towers, the gigantic ancient ruins rumored to be older than humanity itself?

But there were three of those, not just one, according to the travelers Gresh had spoken with.

“When you came out of the cave and went west over the mountains, what did you find?” The spriggan blinked at him. It hesitated.

“Rocks,” it said at last. “Trees. Lots of trees. Twelve...twelveteen? Not sound right.”

“Twelveteen,” Gresh said. “You saw forests.” That narrowed down the search; Gresh knew that the southern end of the mountain range extended into open grasslands, and the forests that had once covered the northern end had been cleared for farming. He had had reason to learn such details, since some of the ingredients he sold included forest products—leaves from the topmost branch of a sixty-foot oak, for example, or dew from the underside of a fiddler fern.

Forests—so it wasn’t in Lumeth or Calimor, or anywhere north of Vlagmor. What could he ask that would narrow it down further?

“Did you see a lake as you traveled westward through the forest, or cross a river?”

“No. No lake. No rivers in forest, just little streams. Didn’t cross big river until the long bridge with the guards. And that...thirteenteen? No, that twenty! Twenty, twenty, twenty! Right, twenty?”

“Twenty,” Gresh admitted.

So the mirror was in a cave on the eastern side of a mountain somewhere between Vlagmor and Calimor, and not in the central area where the spriggan’s westward march would have encountered Ekeroa’s lake, or the river that drained the lake and much of the western mountains into the Gulf of the East.

Karanissa had mentioned Dwomor and Aigoa. Gresh was not sure exactly where those were, but he thought they lay somewhere not too far from Ekeroa. If the mirror were still in Dwomor, and Dwomor was where Gresh had thought it was, and the spriggan headed west, it should have seen the lake—but it hadn’t.

That was interesting, but not necessarily significant. Even if the cave was directly east of the lake, if the creature hadn’t headed due west over the mountains it might have missed the water. Depending what time of year it had emerged from the cave, the sun might have risen well to the south of due east, so that it might have headed northwest....

“Go now?” the spriggan asked, interrupting his chain of thought. “Please?”

“Fine,” Gresh said. He did not think he was going to get any more useful information out of the creature. He had used up his questions. He glared at the spilled blood and broken glass, thinking he hadn’t gotten much for the price. “You can go—but don’t come back, ever!” He shook a warning finger at the little creature. “I don’t want ever to see you again!”

“Yes, yes. Not come back. Promise.”

“Good enough.” He stepped aside and even opened the door. The spriggan dashed past him into the street, squeaking wordlessly.

Gresh stood in the door for a moment, watching it flee. He saw his sister Chira approaching, her sorcerer’s pack slung on her shoulder. She waved cheerily, and he waved in return. Cleaning up the blood would have to wait—it had probably already spread as far as it was going to and would have soaked into the planking anyway. It might well need magic to remove it. Talking to his sorcerous sister was more important; he tried not to waste anyone’s time but his own.

A moment later, after apologizing for the mess, he was ushering her to the chairs in the corner and calling to Twilfa to fetch tea.

“So, little brother, what can I do for you?” Chira asked happily, as she tucked her skirt under her and settled onto the velvet. She gave the broken jar a quick glance, then looked at him expectantly as she slid her bag from her shoulder and lowered it to the floor.

Gresh smiled at being called “little brother.” He was over six feet tall, at least six inches taller than Chira, and given his solidly-muscled build and her slim figure, he probably weighed twice what she did.

All the same, the four-and-a-half-year difference in their ages ensured that he would always be “little brother” to her.

“I need to find a particular enchanted mirror,” he said. “It’s in a cave somewhere in the Small Kingdoms, in the central mountains—not the area right around Ekeroa, but somewhere between Vlagmor and Calimor, probably on the eastern slopes. A couple of magicians have tried to find it with various methods and failed, but so far as I know they didn’t try sorcery.”

“What kind of mirror?”

Gresh held out his hands as Karanissa had. “A hand mirror, roughly this size,” he said.

Chira looked down at her pack for a moment, considering. “Nothing comes immediately to mind,” she said. “It’s in a cave, you said?”

Gresh nodded.

“So I can’t follow the sunlight to it. And mirrors don’t have any special smell to track. What sort of enchantment is on it?”

Gresh hesitated. “A faulty version of Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm,” he said.

“Wizardry, then?”

“Yes, of course.”

“No ‘of course’ about it,” Chira said, reaching for the shoulder strap of her bag. “There are plenty of other kinds of enchantment.”

“Well, yes, but...you know I work mostly with wizards. And what other kind of magic would make it so hard to find?”

“Demonology. And some kinds of sorcery—we do work with mirrors sometimes.”

“True, true. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “You’re right, you mostly work with wizards, I know that. And I owe you. We both know that. So tell me about Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm—is that one that produces smoke?”

“No, that’s one...well, it doesn’t matter what it ordinarily does....”

“It might,” she interrupted.

“...but this mirror produces spriggans.”

Chira stopped moving, one hand holding the strap at her knee, the other tucked at her side. She stared at him.

“Spriggans?” she said. She glanced at the pool of dragon’s blood. “Like the one I saw running out of here?”

“Yes. Like that one—and yes, that one broke a jar of very expensive blood. Spriggans are a huge nuisance, and this mirror generates them. In fact, it may be the only source.”

“Someone knows where the spriggans came from?”

“So they tell me.”

“And they’ve hired you to find it?”

“We’re negotiating.”

“Why?”

“Why are we negotiating? Because we haven’t agreed....”

“Why do they want you to find it?”

“To destroy it, I think.”

“They don’t know where it is?”

“No. Spriggans carried it off and hid it in a cave, apparently.”

“Your customer told you that?”

“That spriggans carried it off, yes. I found out about the cave myself.”

“How did.... No, never mind. I’m sure it’s a trade secret. Except...if one of our sisters could tell you it was in a cave, why couldn’t she tell you where?”

Gresh smiled. Chira did indeed know his methods. “It wasn’t anyone in the family,” he said. “It was an independent informant. He’d seen the cave, but didn’t know the route, or exactly where it was.” Chira shook her head in amazement. “How do you find these people?” Gresh turned up empty palms.

“Well, so someone’s hiring you to find this mirror and destroy it. You’re sure about that?”

“I’m sure about hiring me.”

“But destroying it? Not changing it to make something else, something worse?” That possibility had not even occurred to Gresh. He wondered if Karanissa’s good looks had biased him, and had perhaps kept him from considering potential dangers. “I don’t know for certain,” he admitted. “But rest assured, now that you’ve pointed out the risk, I’ll make absolutely sure of their intentions before I let anyone else touch the thing. Assuming, of course, that I find it.” Chira snorted. “You’ll find it,” she said. “You always find what you go after, one way or another.

You always have. Remember when Mother hid the candy when we were little? It didn’t matter where she put it; you’d always have a piece by bedtime.”

Just then Twilfa emerged, carrying a tray bearing a pot and two cups of tea.

“Just two?” Chira asked, as she accepted hers.

“Mine’s in the kitchen,” Twilfa said.

“You’re welcome to listen,” Gresh said. “It’s all in the family.”

“No, that’s all right,” Twilfa replied. She set the teapot on a nearby shelf, then turned, tray in hand, and retreated toward the kitchen.

Gresh frowned at her departing figure.

“I make her nervous,” Chira said quietly, cradling her teacup.

“You’re her sister,” Gresh protested.

“I’m twice her age,” Chira pointed out. “I was halfway through my apprenticeship by the time she could crawl.”

“Well, I was about thirteen, and an apprentice myself,” Gresh said. “It’s not as if we were playmates, either.”

“But she works for you. She sees you every day. And you don’t carry around a bag of mysterious ancient talismans.”

“No, I sit in a shop full of magic! Blood and body parts on every shelf and a vault with explosive seals only I can open!” Then he waved it away. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“We’ve always been a competitive family,” Chira said. “You were special, being the only boy, so maybe you didn’t....”

“I noticed,” Gresh interrupted. “I definitely noticed. But that doesn’t mean I like it when Twilfa treats you like a stranger.”

“Not a stranger,” Chira said.

“Not a sister, either!”

Chira raised her empty hands. “Never mind that. I’m not here to see Twilfa, or to talk about her.”

“Fine. At any rate, I want to find the mirror. Can you help? And rest assured, I won’t just hand it over to my employer with no questions asked.”

“I can’t see how I can find the mirror directly,” she replied. “It doesn’t give off light or sound or odor, so far as you know?”

“No.”

“And it was an ordinary mirror before it was enchanted, not made of anything unusual?”

“Just a mirror—polished metal, or glass and silver, I suppose.”

“Then I can’t think of anything that would find the mirror itself.” She hauled her pack up onto her lap as she spoke and began unbuckling the straps. “But I do have something that might be useful.”

“Oh?”

She rummaged in the bag as she said, “I have something you can use to find and follow spriggans. Maybe when you get close you can use it to backtrack to the mirror.” Gresh nodded thoughtfully. “That might help,” he agreed.

She pulled a talisman from the pack, a dully gleaming metal disk that looked rather like a hand-mirror itself, and held it out. “It isn’t specific to spriggans,” she said. “But it can tell you when anything is moving within a hundred feet of you and follow the motion, even if you can’t see anything yourself. You can tell it to watch one movement and ignore another, or tell it to watch for a particular size or speed.”

Gresh accepted the disk warily and looked at its round surface; his reflected gaze looked back at him, far more faintly than from an actual mirror, but still clear enough.

“How does it work?” he said.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Five

Operating the sorcerous talisman was not as simple as Gresh would have liked. He was sitting in his front room, once again going over the various gestures and commands it obeyed, making sure he wouldn’t forget them, when the front bell jingled. He looked up from the device as Twilfa hurried from the kitchen to answer the door.

He had been practicing with it since Chira left, which had been long enough for Twilfa to clean up the broken jar, wipe up the spilled blood as best she could, and arrange a carpet and a few boxes to hide the bloodstains, which Gresh had promised to have magically removed at the first opportunity. She had scarcely finished that when Tira had arrived at the back door, and Twilfa had barely settled her in the kitchen with a sausage roll and a mug of small beer when the bell rang. Twilfa still reached the front door before Gresh could even slip the talisman into the pouch on his belt. Twilfa was in full bustle this afternoon, rushing around and getting things done with remarkable efficiency. By the time he was upright and had straightened his tunic, she was showing the customers in.

The young man Twilfa ushered into the shop appeared to be in his mid-twenties, but since this was presumably Tobas of Telven, a wizard powerful enough to own a flying carpet, appearances might not mean much in this case. He had dull brown hair and rather pale skin and stood just slightly taller than average. He wore a black tunic trimmed with red and gold, and good leather breeches.

Behind him were two women—the tall, black-haired witch, and a shorter, plumper woman with hair equally black, but curly rather than straight. She had milky-pale skin, whereas Karanissa’s was brown, and the other woman held a bundle in her arms—a bundle with tiny fingers and a face.

The baby was wrapped in fine white linen embroidered in blue and green; its mother wore green velvet and yellow silk. The family could obviously afford to dress well, though Gresh did not think much of their taste—no two of them went together well, not even the mother and child.

“Come in, come in,” he called, tucking the talisman out of sight as Twilfa ushered the foursome through the door. He rose to greet them—and not incidentally, to impress them with his own height and physique. That little bit of psychological advantage might be useful.

Karanissa stepped forward to make introductions. The man was indeed her husband Tobas, the other woman her co-wife Alorria of Dwomor, and the infant was their daughter Alris, who was still at an age where she did little more than stare, wave her hands aimlessly, and occasionally drool.

“She’s named for her grandmother,” Alorria said, as Gresh smiled down at the baby and held out a finger for her to grab. “The queen of Dwomor.”

Gresh managed to hide his surprise at that. When he had first heard the baby’s name, he had immediately wondered whether it deliberately combined elements of both wives’ names, which would have been a remarkable bit of diplomacy. In his admittedly limited experience with polygamists, co-wives tended to treat each other like sisters, which is to say, with a great deal of barely concealed rivalry and an intense interest in maintaining their own place within the family. For a mother to give a baby a name that reflected both women hardly fit that model, so it wasn’t surprising that Alris was not, in fact, named in part for Karanissa, nor that Alorria made sure he knew that—but it was surprising that Alorria’s mother was a queen.

Alorria herself had not been introduced as a princess—but then, she was married to a wizard, and the Wizards’ Guild would not allow someone to be both wizard and royal. Alorria had presumably had to give up her title and her place in the succession when she married Tobas.

Gresh wondered what that place had been. If she had been next in line for the throne then her attachment to Tobas must have been quite intense, but if she had half a dozen older brothers then she hadn’t really given up much of anything. The Small Kingdoms were awash in surplus princesses, due to the tradition that princesses must marry princes or heroes, but princes could marry anyone they chose—emphasis on any one, as multiple marriages complicated the bloodlines and inheritances too much and were therefore not normally permitted for royalty. Which was another reason Alorria’s shared marriage seemed odd.

How in the World had this Tobas wound up married to a witch and a princess? It wasn’t as if it was common for a man to have more than one wife; most women wouldn’t stand for it. Gresh had only very rarely managed to keep company with more than one woman at a time, let alone marry them. Not that he had married anyone, or particularly wanted to.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked, gesturing toward the velvet chairs.

“There aren’t enough chairs,” Alorria said.

“I’ll be happy to stand,” Gresh said. “Let the ladies be seated.”

“I’m not a lady,” Karanissa murmured.

“I am,” Alorria said, settling onto one of the chairs and cooing at Alris.

Karanissa started to say something else, then bit it off and took the other chair.

“Your mother was queen of Dwomor?” Gresh asked Alorria as he leaned comfortably against the wall by the hearth.

“She still is,” Alorria said. “And my father is King Derneth the Second.” The pride in her voice was unmistakable.

That eliminated any possibility that Alorria had been exiled from her homeland and had made the best of her situation by marrying a wizard. Tobas could not be a prince himself—the Guild would never have allowed that.

But in that case, if Alorria had obeyed the rules at all, Tobas must have been a hero.

That was interesting.

Gresh remembered that Karanissa had said that the three of them had helped the Guild deal with Empress Tabaea. The details of exactly what had become of Tabaea had not been made public.

Apparently the Wizards’ Guild had employed some extremely dangerous magic, and rumor had it that all that had remained of the self-proclaimed empress was her left foot. The overlord’s palace in Ethshar of the Sands had reportedly been gutted in the process, as well. Had it been Tobas who did that?

Gresh glanced at the wizard, who gave every appearance of being a rather ordinary young man.

It was hard to imagine him flinging around that sort of high-powered spell.

Even if it had, though, that couldn’t have been what qualified him as a hero in Dwomor. The timing was wrong, as little Alris had certainly been conceived well before Tabaea’s downfall.

Karanissa had said that Tobas rescued her from an other-worldly castle and had accidentally created the first spriggans, but neither of those really seemed the sort of thing that Small Kingdoms royalty would consider adequate heroism. If he had rescued Alorria, or one of her parents—well, perhaps he had.

Gresh pushed the matter aside; maybe he would find out later. Neither of the women seemed particularly reticent.

“Well, Tobas,” Gresh said. “I understand you want me to find a mirror for you.”

“That’s right.” The wizard held up his hands. “About this big. Silvered glass. The sort wizards like to use, but glass, not alloy.”

Gresh knew, of course, exactly what he meant—a great many spells required mirrors, so he provided them for his customers. Wizards sometimes preferred to use mirrors that weren’t as breakable as glass, but they were willing to pay for something better than polished copper, and silversmiths had long since settled on a standard form for a silver-alloy “wizard’s mirror.” The exact mix of metals was a trade secret and varied somewhat from one workshop to the next, but the basic design was fairly consistent.

Other wizards, or the same wizards on other occasions, used glass mirrors, breakable or not; sometimes the image quality was more important than fragility, and glass did not need as much polishing.

Gresh stocked both varieties, of course.

“Like this,” he said, picking one from a nearby shelf.

Tobas took the mirror and looked at it critically. “Slightly larger,” he said. “And with a simple edge, not this beveled fancywork.”

Gresh nodded. “And you last saw it somewhere in the mountains near Dwomor,” he said.

“I last saw it—well, I last saw it in my own hand as I fell through a Transporting Tapestry, but a spriggan snatched it away a few seconds later and ran off with it. I haven’t seen it since.”

“Yes, of course. Now, I have an idea where it is—the general area, not the exact spot—and I believe I can obtain it for you, but there are certain things we must settle before I agree to get it.”

“Anything you want.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Tobas hesitated, looking as if he intended to argue, then sighed, his shoulders slumping. “You’re right, I don’t. I mean anything I can give you without utterly ruining myself. Let us hear your terms, then, so we can discuss them.”

“Well, first off, your wife said that the Wizards’ Guild was financing this and would pay any price.

Did she mean that literally?”

“Not any price,” Tobas said, with a sour glance at Karanissa. “We won’t give you Alris, for example, or make you master of the World. But the Guild can be very generous if it means eliminating spriggans.”

“Forgive me for being blunt, but I’m a businessman, not a diplomat—how much is that?” Tobas sighed again. “Name your price, and I’ll tell you whether we can meet it.”

“All expenses, of course—I don’t know just how long it will take me to obtain the mirror, nor what resources I’ll need—plus ten percent interest. To start.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll want a deposit of one hundred rounds of gold toward those expenses.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

That brought them to the moment of truth, the moment Gresh had been anticipating and dreading ever since Karanissa’s earlier visit. It was a moment that he had dreamed of ever since he first began working as a wizards’ supplier; he was in a position to demand anything he wanted of the Wizards’

Guild.

He could ask for money, for gold by the ton, but that seemed so pedestrian—and besides, if he did, he might well unbalance the local economy, since it was scarcity that gave gold its value. He could ask for, not the World, but a kingdom—Dwomor, perhaps—but then he would have the responsibility of ruling it, of overseeing the welfare of its inhabitants, and he would have to be careful about using magic, or antagonizing neighboring kingdoms into starting a war. He could ask for his own little world, like the castle that Karanissa had been trapped in—but there were risks there; he might become trapped in it, as she had been, or there might be...complications. Wizardry could be a tricky, unreliable thing. He had heard stories about people opening portals into realities that were already inhabited by creatures that did not appreciate the intrusion, or realities that were so distorted, so strange, that they seemed like an endless series of traps, or even some that were not inhabitable by human beings at all—they lacked air or other necessities, or occupied time or space so alien that hearts could not beat and blood could not flow.

He could have made up a whole list of spells he wanted cast for him—love spells, blessings, transformations, animations, Transporting Tapestries, flying carpets, the bloodstone spell, and so on—but that lacked elegance.

But there was something simple that wizards could do for him, something priceless, something that could not go wrong once the spell was cast properly in the first place—though it could be lost through carelessness or by choice. He had dreamed about this since childhood and long ago settled on what he would demand.

“And as my payment I want eternal youth and perfect health,” he said. “I won’t insist on a specific spell, but it must be permanent youth. I do not want to ever be older than I am now.”

“Um,” Tobas said. He glanced at Karanissa.

“That’s my price,” Gresh said. He nodded at Karanissa. “If she’s told me the truth, exactly such a spell was cast on her centuries ago, so please don’t tell me it isn’t possible.”

“I can’t do that,” Tobas said.

“I haven’t been able to provide it for myself or Alorria yet, let alone anyone else.”

Alorria made an unhappy noise in agreement.

“Someone provided it for her,” Gresh said with another nod toward Karanissa.

“Derithon the Mage,” Tobas said. “He’s been dead for centuries. It isn’t immortality, you know; Karanissa can still die, just like anyone else. It just won’t be of old age.”

“I know. That’s good enough.”

“And there are other loopholes.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to explain them to me.”

Tobas grimaced.

“You said the Guild would pay any price; well, that’s my price.”

“I’ll need to talk to Kaligir.”

“You do that, then.”

“I’ll see him as soon as I can, and we’ll get an answer for you. I think he’ll agree, but I can’t promise.”

“Well, that’s good enough for now. So that’s the first point.”

“There are others?”

“One more that I know of; others may arise in our discussions.” Tobas sighed yet again. “What is it?”

“I need to know why you want the mirror. I will not be a party to seriously destructive spells.”

“We want to smash it, of course!” Alorria said before either of the others could reply. “I’m sick of these spriggans!”

Gresh nodded. That was what he wanted to hear. He looked at Tobas.

“She’s right,” he said. “We want to smash it—if that will stop it from producing spriggans. Or destroy it by some other means, or neutralize it somehow. We won’t know for certain until I get a good look at it.”

“No? Why wouldn’t you just smash it?”

Tobas grimaced. “Because we don’t know what that would do. If every fragment then starts spewing out spriggans, or some new sort of creature, that would be even worse, of course.”

“Could that happen?” Gresh asked, startled. He had not thought of that possibility.

“We don’t know,” Tobas said. “Nobody does. The spell that created the mirror only happened once, by accident, when I made a mistake in Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, and I don’t know what the mistake was, so we can’t analyze it and guess at the spriggan spell’s exact nature when we don’t have the mirror in hand. Scrying spells can’t see it, even the most powerful ones, since it happened outside the World. And they can’t find the mirror, or study it. We don’t know exactly why, but presumably it’s just the nature of the spell.”

The project was beginning to sound less appealing again. Being the person who let the spriggan mirror be smashed and unleash some new horror on the World would be very bad for his reputation, even worse than not finding the mirror in the first place. “So you don’t know anything about the spell, except that it makes spriggans?”

“And it was intended to be the Phantasm. That’s right. We know that the mirror pops out a spriggan every so often—the intervals vary, but it seems to generate at least a dozen a day, usually far more. The spriggans are not all identical and seem to be changing slightly over time. The first few spriggans never had any claws, for example, but some of them do now. And we know that if you close the mirror in a box the spriggans will appear anyway until they burst the box from inside....”

“Will they?”

“Oh, yes. I tried that, before I lost it. Those spriggans were very unhappy by the time they finally broke free. I think that may be why they were so determined to get the mirror away from me, so I couldn’t do it again with a stronger box. Spriggans do seem to care about each other, in their own confused fashion, and they seem to want the mirror to keep on making more of them.”

“Stupid little creatures,” Alorria muttered, as Alris patted a tiny hand against her mother’s shoulder.

“They can’t help it,” Karanissa whispered.

“So if the mirror is smashed—wait, do we know it can be smashed? Some magical artifacts are unbreakable.”

“We don’t know,” Tobas admitted. “It was dropped onto a hard floor once or twice after it was enchanted and didn’t break, but that was never from a significant height, and its failure to break didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary to me at the time.”

“I think a spriggan caught it every time it was dropped,” Karanissa added.

“That may be so,” Tobas admitted.

“We don’t know what will happen if it is smashed?”

“No.”

“So breaking it might mean we have dozens of smaller enchanted mirrors spewing out spriggans, or something worse?”

“It might.”

“And if it’s broken, what happens to all the spriggans it’s already produced?”

“We don’t know.”

“I think we might want to find out before we do anything irrevocable.” Tobas hesitated. “We might,” he agreed. “But I have no idea how that would be possible.”

“If we brought it to be studied, perhaps?”

“Perhaps, and we may do that—but Gresh, there may be a way to ensure that its destruction won’t do anything terrible even if we can’t do any elaborate analysis.”

“Might there? And what would that be?”

Tobas looked at his wives, then back to Gresh. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not here, not now.

But if you find the mirror, I’m fairly sure we can dispose of it safely.”

“Are you?” Gresh frowned. He hated secretive customers. He had plenty of secrets of his own, of course, but he always resented it when other people had them, as well, even though he knew it was unreasonable of him. “I’m not sure. This thing sounds as unpredictable as the Tower of Flame. I’m afraid I can’t just trust you on this.”

Tobas frowned back. “What?”

“I am not going to just hand the mirror over to you and trust you to dispose of it. It’s too potentially dangerous. If that’s the job, then I’m turning it down.” Here was his way out of committing himself to a job he might not be able to do, a way to avoid any risk to his reputation—though it might also cost him the greatest fee he could ever collect.

The others all stared at him. Alorria’s mouth fell open. “You’d give up a chance at eternal life?” Alorria asked.

“Gresh, I admit the mirror might be dangerous, but you know the Wizards’ Guild already has spells far more dangerous,” Tobas said. “We used one to kill Tabaea, right in Ederd’s palace, and had to use another one to cancel that one out. We have spells that could destroy the entire World, and you’re worried about giving us a mirror that spits out spriggans?”

“A mirror of unknown capabilities that happens to spit out spriggans.”

“Wizards deal with unknown dangers all the time!”

“But I don’t always care to help them do it!”

“Sir,” Karanissa said quietly. “If I might point something out?” Gresh turned to her, then glanced toward the passage to the kitchen. He hoped that Twilfa had Tira back there listening, as she was supposed to. “And what would that be?” he asked.

“While it’s true we don’t know what else the mirror may do in the wrong hands, we know what it does do in its current situation,” she said. “It produces spriggans, and it seems to do so endlessly. Do you want the whole World flooded with them?”

Gresh blinked at her. “Oh, they’re a nuisance, but I’m sure....”

“No,” Karanissa said, cutting him off. “You don’t understand. They’re a serious danger.”

“Oh, now, really....”

“They have existed for six or seven years now, correct?”

“Well, I didn’t see any until much more recently, but it’s been a few years....”

“There are over half a million of them in the World now,” Karanissa said, interrupting again. “The wizards could determine that much. More are appearing every day, usually dozens or even hundreds more. They’ve spread everywhere. They get into everything.”

“Yes, but....”

“Have you ever seen one die? ”

Gresh blinked again. “What?”

“Have you ever seen a dead spriggan? Have you ever seen one die? Have you ever seen one injured?”

Gresh stopped to think.

“They break things constantly; they trip people; they play with sharp things and hot things and dangerous things; they’re stupid and clumsy, and they’re attracted to magic, which we all know is very dangerous stuff. But have you ever seen one die? Seen one bleed? Seen one missing fingers or toes?”

“They feel pain....” Gresh said slowly. He had observed that a few times.

“Yes, they do—if you slap one, it’ll wail. And they get hungry, and cold, and all the rest—but they don’t die. They can’t be killed by natural means. And that mirror is spitting out more and more of them. If we don’t stop it, spriggans will eventually fill up the entire World, packed side by side from Tintallion to Vond—but we won’t be around to see it, because we’ll all have starved to death long before that, when they’ve eaten all the food.”

Gresh stared at her for a moment. Then he said, “Oh.”

There was no need to ask whether anyone had tried to kill spriggans; the creatures were so annoying that of course people had tried to kill them. He had never really thought about it before, but it was obvious. The witch was absolutely right; he had never seen one injured, never seen a dead one lying in the gutter with the drowned rats after a heavy rain, nor anywhere else. No wizard displayed a stuffed spriggan in his workroom with the snakeskins and dragon skulls and pickled tree squids.

As for disposing of them magically—well, magic didn’t work properly on spriggans. Everyone knew that; it was part of the problem. There were undoubtedly ways to kill them, or at least remove them from the World, but whether those ways could be used safely and effectively was less certain.

A world totally flooded with spriggans was still decades or centuries away. Gresh knew he wouldn’t live to see it without magic, but the idea of a constantly increasing supply of spriggans, more and more and more of them every year....

The risk to his reputation suddenly seemed less important.

“I’ll want to know more about how you plan to dispose of the mirror,” he said. “If not here and now, then when the time is right. I won’t turn it over until I’m satisfied with your plans.”

“Agreed,” Tobas said.

“You’ll provide transportation.”

“Of course.”

“You’ll show me where all your adventures with the mirror happened, if I ask.”

“Gladly.”

Gresh nodded. “Then get Kaligir to agree to a payment of a hundred and ten percent of all my expenses and eternal youth, a contract with no trickery or ways of weaseling out of it, and we have a deal.”

Tobas and both his wives smiled at him.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Six

“My little brother is going to save the World,” Tira said, as Gresh and two of his sisters seated themselves at the kitchen table.

“I might,” Gresh said.

“And get eternal youth in exchange!” Twilfa said.

“That’s the plan, yes.”

“Jealous?” Tira asked.

Twilfa turned to glare at her. “Aren’t you?”

“Oh, maybe a little—but death is a natural part of life, and if everyone lived forever the World would fill up with people instead of spriggans.”

Twilfa did not reply to that, but Gresh did not need even a witch’s limited ability to hear other people’s thoughts to know she thought Tira was mouthing foolish platitudes. “I’ll probably trip and break my neck a sixnight after they perform the spell,” he grumbled. Then he turned to Tira. “I take it you heard everything.”

“Yes.”

“And they’re telling the truth?”

“Well, the witch is; I’m not absolutely sure about the wizard. You know reading wizards is tricky.

And the other woman, the mother, is so caught up in her own concerns I couldn’t tell you a thing about what she actually believes.”

“She didn’t say much, in any case,” Gresh said. “But the witch was telling the truth? Spriggans don’t die?”

“She certainly believes it. Whether it’s a fact I can’t be sure.”

“And Tobas?”

“He seemed to be telling the truth. He felt surprisingly forthright for a wizard. Usually they’re so bound up with worrying about keeping all the Guild’s secrets that they can hardly be honest about anything even when they try. This one, though—I think it may be because he’s still young, and he’s been lucky, and that’s made him over-confident, but so far as I could tell he wasn’t trying to mislead you at all.

The only time he held anything back, he told you.”

“Maybe it’s because he really, really wants that mirror,” Twilfa suggested.

“That could be it, actually. He might have been so focused on getting the mirror that he wasn’t worrying about anything else.”

Gresh frowned. “Do you think Kaligir will agree to my terms?” he asked Tira.

“How should I know?”

“Did they think he would?”

“Yes—but I don’t think they know him very well.”

“Hmm.”

“So how will you find the mirror?” Twilfa asked. “That spriggan you talked to didn’t know where it is.”

“That’s not the only spriggan in the World.”

“That’s sort of the point,” Tira remarked.

“You know, there must be some way to kill them,” Twilfa said. “Maybe not a natural one, but magic can do almost anything. Couldn’t a demon eat one, or a warlock’s magic squash one?”

“Maybe,” Gresh said. “And there may well be wizardry that can destroy them—but the cure might be worse than the disease. Maybe that spell that killed Empress Tabaea could kill spriggans, but from what I’ve heard the spell could have destroyed the World if it hadn’t been stopped. Even if we knew how to kill them, if they don’t die naturally and that confounded mirror keeps spitting out more.... I want to find the mirror and put an end to it, so we don’t wind up in the middle of an everlasting war against the little pests.”

Twilfa shuddered.

“So when you find the mirror, what are you going to do with it?” Tira asked.

“I don’t know,” Gresh admitted.

“Will you give it to Tobas?” Twilfa asked.

“I told you, I don’t know. I barely know the man.”

“Does Dina? Being a wizard and all.”

“I don’t know—and I want to talk to Dina, in any case. I need to know more about the magic involved. Maybe she can give me some idea what Tobas has in mind. Twilfa, could you....”

“I’ll go,” Tira said.

Gresh looked at her in surprise. “I thought you and Dar had business this afternoon.”

“It can wait.”

“Well, that’s...that’s very generous of you. I can certainly use Twilfa here at the shop. I’m going to assume that Kaligir will agree to my terms. I’ll start my preparations for a trip to the Small Kingdoms.”

“Is there anyone else I should find for you?”

Gresh took a moment to think. He saw no obvious use for a warlock or a demonologist, so there was no reason to call on Difa or Shesta. He had already spoken to Chira. Pyata was the family theurgist; Karanissa had mentioned the odd fact that the gods couldn’t perceive spriggans at all, just as they sometimes couldn’t see warlocks or demons. Pyata had once said the same, so she wouldn’t be any help in dealing with the little nuisances, but she might be able to advise him about travel plans—the gods were usually reliable at predicting the weather, for example, and this time of year he wasn’t sure what temperatures to expect in the mountains.

That was hardly urgent, though, and besides, Tira’s husband Dar was a theurgist, as well, and could handle such simple matters.

He didn’t need any new clothes, nor any sort of expertise with fabrics or sewing, so there was no reason to talk to Ekava. Neva was at sea somewhere, not due back for a sixnight. The city guard had no business in the Small Kingdoms, so Deka would be no help. He would probably be bringing some healing herbs and perhaps a few interesting intoxicants along, but he would need to check his own stocks before troubling Setta, the herbalist. Her husband Neran the ship chandler might have some useful supplies if Gresh needed to climb around in the mountains, but that could wait until his plans were a little more advanced.

That left Akka, the ritual dancer, four years younger than Gresh.

“Don’t go out of your way, but if you see Akka or her husband, you could tell her I could use a dance of good fortune.”

“If I see Akka, maybe. If I talk to Tresen he’ll want to know what you’re planning and whether he can help.”

“Good point. Don’t tell Tresen anything, then, but if you see Akka....”

“Right. Anything else?”

“You might ask Dar about the weather in Dwomor for the next few sixnights when you get home.”

“I’d be happy to. It’s off to Wizard Street, then. Take care, little brother.” She rose from the table, and with a wave over her shoulder she headed for the back door.

Gresh and Twilfa watched her go. Once the door was closed, Twilfa leaned over and asked,

“Why is she being so helpful? She wasn’t this morning.”

“Didn’t you hear her? I’m going to save the World. I think she likes the idea. You know what witches are like, always looking for ways to do good and insisting they don’t care about money. Here’s a chance for her to help her greedy brother do something really useful, instead of just fetching oddities for wizards.” He grimaced. “Not to mention that even witches are getting fed up with the spriggans.”

“Oh. Oh, I suppose so.” Twilfa glanced at the door just as the front bell jingled. She hopped up to answer it.

Gresh did not rise. Twilfa could handle ordinary business, and she would call him if he was needed. Right now he wanted to think about what he should bring to Dwomor.

He had already decided that Dwomor would be the first stop; that seemed to be where everything had started. He intended to travel by flying carpet, if the one Tobas had was large enough; that would be much faster than anything else available. If it wasn’t large enough, well—he would deal with that if it became necessary. That meant he could not bring very many bags, and it also meant he couldn’t travel alone. Tobas would, of necessity, be coming with him, since Gresh did not know how to operate a flying carpet and could hardly expect Tobas to trust him with it in any case. That was not a problem; Tobas would probably be useful, and it shouldn’t be very hard to distract him on any occasion Gresh did not want company.

He would not bring anything wizardly, then—that would be Tobas’s responsibility. He would want to discuss that with him and make sure the wizard had all the ingredients he needed for any spells he knew that might be helpful.

He would have Chira’s talisman to help him spot movement. Now, were there any other sorcerous devices he might bring? He had a handful in the shop, but half of them were not functioning.

After some thought he decided that the other half didn’t have any obvious applications for this expedition.

He would need to bring money and his usual assortment of tools, and since he was undoubtedly going to be dealing with spriggans, he thought some snares would be useful. He would also bring a bag of candy—he had heard that spriggans liked honey-drops.

He had a set of snares and nets intended for catching rabbits or hawks, but they should serve well enough for spriggans.

Were there any particular trade goods that might be useful in mountainous country? Nothing came immediately to mind.

He mulled over possibilities for several minutes, until Twilfa called him to help a customer whose needs were somewhat esoteric, and who did not trust a teenaged assistant to meet them.

Trade was brisk for the next hour or so, and he became so involved in conducting his normal business that Dina’s arrival caught him by surprise. “What can I get for you?” he asked, before he remembered that he had sent for her.

“A less troublesome brother,” she replied.

He smiled crookedly and gestured for her to follow him to the chairs by the fire. “Well, I’m afraid the supply is limited, and we’ll just have to see if we can modify the one you have, rather than replace him. I’m sorry, Dina; thank you for coming. I hope the transmutation spell went well?”

“I haven’t done it,” she said. “It takes eight hours, so I have to do it at night, when I won’t be interrupted. I don’t have an apprentice to stand guard, not since Inria made journeyman.”

“Oh, of course. I hope it will go well, then.” He gestured for her to sit.

She remained standing. “What did you want me for, Gresh?”

Gresh glanced around. Twilfa was making change for the last of the other customers over at the far side of the shop. The vault was standing open, and the fire was burning low, but otherwise everything was in order. No one appeared to be listening in—though of course someone might be using a scrying spell on them. The shop was warded against such spells, but no ward was perfect.

“Have a seat, please, Dina; I have some questions I need to ask you.”

“What sort of questions?”

“To begin with, tell me everything you know about Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.”

“Lugwiler’s...? You know the basics, don’t you? It’s a third-order invocation requiring a mirror, black sand, spider’s ichor, a rat’s eyeball, three crow feathers, the long outside bone from a bat’s left wing, and the wizard’s own saliva.” She made a surreptitious gesture indicating that there was another ingredient she was not listing, which did not surprise Gresh. He knew that most spells used the wizard’s dagger somehow, and that for some reason this was not ordinarily mentioned. She settled into the chair, still speaking. “It’s generally used as a minor curse and has no obvious other use, though it’s always possible someone might think of one. It’s handy in that it doesn’t require anything from the intended victim, not even a true name, though in normal usage it won’t take effect until a line of sight is established between the victim and the enchanted mirror. It can be triggered by a command from the wizard when he sees that connection, or set as a booby-trap for the next person who happens into the mirror’s effective area. Why are you asking me this?”

“Because I’ve been asked to retrieve a mirror that was used in a failed attempt at it,” he said, taking the other chair. “Are there known ways it can fail?”

“Well, yes, of course—it can dissipate harmlessly, or attach the curse to the wizard instead of the intended victim, or detonate the mirror, which wouldn’t leave anything to retrieve.”

“Detonate?”

“Explode. Shards of glass or metal everywhere. One of Dabran’s apprentices did that once and almost took out her own eye, not to mention smashing assorted jars and a good lamp and scaring Dabran’s cat half to death.”

Gresh nodded. “It’s supposed to produce a phantasm, right? A monstrous little creature that only the victim can see?”

“Well, an image, anyway. No one’s entirely sure just what the phantasm itself truly is—whether it’s a living creature or a malign spirit or a minor demon or an illusion or what, or whether it’s really where the victim sees it, assuming he’s seeing something real to begin with. One theory is that what the spell actually does is affect the victim’s vision so that he’s catching glimpses of another reality, one inhabited by these hideous little things. Another is that the creatures, whatever they are, are all around us all the time, and what the spell does is to let the victim see things that are normally invisible to us. Mostly, though, we assume it’s just an illusion, that the spell plays tricks on the victim’s mind.”

“What do the phantasms look like?”

“How should I know?”

“You’ve never seen one?”

“No one’s ever had a reason to put a curse on me, thank you very much, dear brother.”

“But you learned the spell as an apprentice, didn’t you?”

She glared at him. “As it happens, no, I didn’t. Have I ever bought rat’s eyeballs from you? I’ve read about it, and I got the formula in a trade with Sensella of the Isle, but I’ve never tried it—Dabran’s apprentice, whatever her name was, made me wary. And even if I had, if I did it properly I wouldn’t see the phantasm.”

That was mildly inconvenient. Gresh had hoped to get every detail of the spell, perhaps see it performed, in order to give him more background, and it appeared Dina couldn’t readily provide that.

She did have the formula, but trying a new spell always carried some risk. He was sure she wouldn’t do it unless he paid for it.

Of course, he could count that as a research expense and charge Tobas and the Guild for it. He might resort to that.

“So it can dissipate, or explode, or hit the wrong target,” he said. “Has it ever produced something other than the expected phantasm, that you know of?”

“Well, now, who knows what the expected phantasm is? For all we know, every victim might be seeing something different. Most of the victims don’t compare notes, and the descriptions usually boil down to, ‘Oh, ick!’ They mostly involve hair and claws and eyes, but don’t get into a lot of specifics—for one thing, the victim usually only sees the phantasm from the corner of her eye, and it’s gone when she looks for it.”

“Someone could try it twice and see whether they get the same image.”

“They could. Maybe someone has. I haven’t, and no one’s ever mentioned it to me. This isn’t a spell that gets a great deal of attention, Gresh.”

“Well, perhaps it should. It appears that on one occasion it did produce something else, instead of a phantasm.”

“And they want you to recover that particular mirror to see if they can do it again?”

“Something like that.”

“It probably won’t work—that spell has half a dozen deliberate variables in it, depending on exactly how you want the curse to operate, as well as all the usual ways to mess it up. The mirror probably isn’t what mattered.”

Gresh hesitated, debating whether to explain in more detail what he was after, but then decided against it, at least for the moment. Instead he asked, “How do you get rid of Lugwiler’s Phantasm?”

“It depends how you set it up in the first place. If you had any sense, you made it conditional—it would work until the victim did something, such as apologize, and then it would end by itself. Or it would only work so long as the victim stayed in a particular area, or carried a specific object—then you wouldn’t need a countercharm.”

“But suppose it wasn’t conditional.”

Dina sighed. “Let me think. Casting Javan’s Restorative on the victim should work.”

“Would the victim need to cooperate for that?”

“To the extent of being present and not interfering in the preparation, yes—though it might be possible to use his true name instead.” She frowned. “I wouldn’t want to try it that way, though; it’s a seventh- or eighth-order spell, and I don’t like improvising at that level. It can be put in a potion or talisman, though, and if the victim drinks the potion or invokes the talisman....”

“I don’t think that will work in this case, Dina. Are there any other countercharms?”

“I don’t know. A Spell of Reversal might do it. They say that works on almost anything.”

“Spell of Reversal? I don’t think I know that one.”

“That’s because the only difficult ingredient in the usual version is hair from a stillborn child; everything else is simple, basic stuff like candles and water and shiny stones that nobody would bother to pay your prices for. Besides, it must be tenth-order or worse; I can’t do it, and not many wizards can.”

“So how does it work?”

“It reverses a process or undoes a spell, so if you’re quick enough and a good enough wizard you can undo some of your worst mistakes. There are rumors it’s even been able to raise the dead if the timing’s just right. You can make a broken jar unbreak itself, a knife unrust, blood flow back into a wound, or a river run uphill. But it doesn’t reverse it permanently—after half an hour or so it wears off and the natural flow is restored. If you’ve reversed it back to before the process started you can try to prevent it happening again—put the jar somewhere safe, keep the knife dry, bandage the wound—but the natural order returns, and that river’s going to run downhill again, the wound is going to bleed, and you can’t stop it.”

“So how would that work on Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm?”

“I’m not sure it would—but if it did, and you used it quickly enough, you might be able to undo the spell, reverse the process to before the mirror was enchanted, and make it as if it was never cast. Or at least make the victim not have looked at the mirror, or whatever.” Gresh nodded thoughtfully; that sounded like a stupendously useful spell. The ability to reverse anything? That could have a thousand applications.

Tenth-order, though—and it probably took hours to prepare....

“Can it be put in a potion or talisman?”

“Not a potion; you cast it on a process, not a person, so a potion wouldn’t work. Maybe it would work in a talisman or a powder; I don’t know.”

Gresh was about to ask who might know more when the doorbell jingled. He glanced over toward Twilfa, who was opening the door, and her expression prevented him from continuing the conversation. He rose.

“Tell your master that Kaligir of the New Quarter is here to see him,” said the new arrival, as he stepped across the threshold.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Seven

Gresh arranged his features into his most welcoming smile as he crossed the front room to greet the thin man in elaborate robes. The wizard was almost as tall as he was, even without counting the shiny black cap he wore.

“Master Kaligir!” he said. “What a pleasure!”

The wizard looked at him, then cocked his head to one side and said, “I was going to question that, but on further consideration it probably is a pleasure for you—my presence means we haven’t rejected your terms out of hand.” He glanced around, and nodded at Twilfa. “Your assistant?”

“Yes—my sister, Twilfa of Ethshar.” That was the name he used for her when talking to patrons.

At home or in other contexts, she had always been Twilfa the Helpful.

“And is that Dina the Wizard? One of your customers?”

“Another of my sisters, Master.”

Dina rose and bowed. “I can go if you would prefer, Guildmaster.”

“Stay. Sit. We may need a neutral party.”

Dina sat. Gresh kept smiling, but did not like the sound of Kaligir’s words.

“Shall I go?” Twilfa asked, gesturing toward the passage to the kitchen and looking back and forth between the two men.

Gresh looked questioningly at Kaligir.

“It’s your house,” the wizard said. “I’m sure you have a way for her to listen in, and of course you might just tell her everything afterward, so please yourself.”

“He brought others with him, Gresh,” Twilfa said. “Several others.”

“They’re waiting in the street,” Kaligir confirmed. “I didn’t see any need to crowd everyone in, and if I can’t intimidate you without them, then you’re clearly mad.”

“Twilfa,” Gresh said. “Would you see if any of our guest’s escort would care for a mug of beer while they wait?”

Twilfa dropped a quick curtsey, and said, “Or I can make tea.”

“Beer will do for now.”

She nodded, then hurried to the kitchen to find a tray and fill a pitcher.

Kaligir watched her depart, then turned back to Gresh. “I am not sure,” he said, “that you understand the situation.”

“I think I do,” Gresh replied. “You want me to retrieve the mirror that Tobas of Telven lost six and a half years ago. The mirror has a botched form of Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm on it—one that was botched in a completely new way, unlike any previous casting of the spell. It’s the source of all the spriggans in the World, and you want to put an end to the production of spriggans before they become a real danger. They’re already a serious nuisance, and the Guild has realized that they don’t die of natural causes and that their number is increasing steadily. Do I have that much correct?”

“You do.”

“You have come to me because all previous attempts to locate the mirror have failed, and I have a reputation for being able to find anything.”

“Not exactly. Tobas and his wives came to you because of this; the Guild did not, and I did not.

We merely ordered Tobas to deal with the problem and agreed to fund his efforts.”

“And he dealt with it by coming to me, for the reasons I stated.”

“Yes.”

“And because of this, because I appear to be your last hope to find the mirror without sending hundreds of treasure-hunters searching through the Small Kingdoms for it and possibly making matters even worse, you told Tobas that you would pay any fee I might ask, but when I asked for eternal youth, you balked.”

“No.”

Gresh blinked. “No?”

“No. We did not balk. However, the price you set has changed the situation. We agreed to provide Tobas with funding, not unlimited magic, and your price is not mere money. Tobas cannot pay it. While he has a suitable spell in his book of spells, he is not yet capable of casting it and won’t be for years. It’s far too complex for him.”

“Very well, then, Tobas balked, not you.”

“No, Tobas did not. He came to me, in my role as the Guild’s representative in Ethshar of the Rocks, and explained the situation and asked if the Guild could pay the fee you had set, since we had said we would finance him.”

“And the Guild declined to do so?”

“No. The Guild has agreed. Your fee will be a successful casting of Enral’s Eternal Youth, to be paid as soon as we are convinced that the mirror will never again produce spriggans. You may need to provide the ingredients for the spell, however—some of them are difficult.”

“Of course,” Gresh said, unable to repress a smile. “I’m sure I can do that.”

“If not, your reputation is undeserved,” Kaligir said dryly.

“But if you agree to my terms—why are you here? Why not just send Tobas back with a contract?”

“Because you are not going to be acting for Tobas. We have decided, given your terms, that if you accept this commission you will indeed be acting for the Wizards’ Guild itself. That alters matters.

We’ve agreed to your fee, but that doesn’t mean everything is settled.”

“It doesn’t? I’m in the business of selling things to wizards that they need in their spells. Tobas wanted this particular item, and I agreed to sell it to him, on certain conditions, and set my price. He may have turned his end of the agreement over to the Guild, but I don’t see how that changes anything. What else needs to be settled?”

“Several things. The Wizards’ Guild does not tolerate any sort of deception or insubordination in our hirelings.”

The last trace of Gresh’s smile vanished. “I’m not deceiving anyone, and I’m not subordinate to anyone, either.”

“You are now. You’re dealing with the Guild itself now, not an individual wizard—the Guild that sets rules kings and overlords obey if they wish to live, rules that every magician of every school of magic in the World must heed. We take a direct interest in anyone with a magically extended lifespan, just as we do rulers or magicians, since such people have the time to have a disproportionate influence on the World. By setting the price you have you have drawn our interest, and the Guild’s authority, once invoked, cannot be resisted.”

Gresh did not like the sound of that at all. “I’m just selling you a mirror; we’ve agreed on a price.

What else does the Guild care about?”

“Times, for one thing. Penalties for non-performance, for another.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Perhaps you would like to sit down, so that we can discuss this?”

“I’ll stand, thank you,” Kaligir said. “What I believe you may have missed is the urgency of this task. The Wizards’ Guild is notoriously slow to act on many issues, but when we do act, we want immediate results.”

“Of course.”

“It has occurred to us that you might well agree to fetch the mirror and then find excuses to put it off—that one reason you demanded a youth spell is that you expect to spend a significant part of a human lifetime in planning and preparation. The possibility was also mentioned that once you have the mirror in your possession—if you ever do—you might decide to alter your price and demand more than a youth spell. I am here to make absolutely certain you understand that nothing of this sort will be acceptable.”

Gresh stared silently at the wizard. He had honestly not known he could still be so deeply offended by...well, anyone.

“Sir,” he said at last. “I am an honest tradesman, with a reputation to uphold. I will have your mirror for you as quickly as I can and at the agreed-upon price—eternal youth and payment in gold equal to a hundred and ten percent of my expenses, with one hundred rounds of gold as a down-payment. Not an iron bit more or less than that and with delivery as prompt as I can make it.”

“How prompt is that?”

“I can’t possibly know. I know it’s in a cave on the eastern slope of a mountain somewhere between Calimor and Vlagmor, within sight of a ruin, but that leaves a great deal of territory to search. I might find it the first day, or not for months.”

Kaligir blinked, and then it was his turn to stare silently. The silence was interrupted by Twilfa passing through the room with a tray of mugs and a pitcher of beer. The wizard watched her slip out the front door, then turned back to Gresh.

“You know that, do you?” His tone was much more conciliatory now. He had gotten rather strident in the course of the conversation, and that stridency had abruptly vanished.

“Yes, I do,” Gresh replied. “And that information cost me goods valued at five rounds of gold, which will be included in my bill for expenses, though of course the down payment will more than cover it. Did you think I wouldn’t have begun my investigation?” Kaligir hesitated, then admitted, “To be honest, yes, I did. I suspected, in fact, that you had set your price on the assumption we wouldn’t meet it and that you had no intention of finding the mirror.”

“I believe you owe me an apology, then.”

“Yes, I believe I do, and you have it. I have apparently misjudged you; I apologize.”

“Thank you.” Gresh’s own voice, which had also crept up in volume, lowered a little.

“Nonetheless, I still need to explain the terms further.”

Gresh frowned. “Why?”

“Because I am speaking for the Wizards’ Guild as a whole. We agreed on terms in council, and I have no authority to modify them. Resentment of the spriggans has reached a remarkable level of ferocity, and it was impressed on me that despite our own years of dawdling, we want results quickly.

We have therefore settled upon...well, I now wish we hadn’t, that we had trusted in your good faith, but alas, we did not. Your reputation for greed exceeded your reputation for honesty.” This was sounding worse and worse; Gresh had begun to wish he had simply told Karanissa the shop was closed the other morning, and refused to get involved with any of this. “And?” he said.

“And the Wizards’ Guild has declared your shop and your services to be forbidden to all wizards until such time as you find the mirror. You will sell not so much as a drop of virgin’s blood until the mirror has been dealt with.”

“By all the gods who hear! That’s outrageous!”

Kaligir turned up a palm. “Think of it as incentive.”

+

“It’s insulting.”

“Yes, I suppose it is. I’m sorry. On the other hand, there is a reason I brought half a dozen other master wizards with me today.”

“Oh?”

“To speed you on your way and make certain of your success, we are volunteering, on behalf of the Guild, to equip your expedition with magic you may think would be useful—potions, powders, perhaps the loan of an enchanted jewel or dagger. Within reasonable limits, of course.” That sounded like a bit of good news, finally, but Gresh was wary. “I had assumed that Tobas would accompany me and provide me with spells as needed,” he said.

“And he will, if you want—but Tobas’s apprenticeship had certain...irregularities, and his training is spotty. While he has access to a great many spells, many of them unique and remarkably powerful, he can’t always perform them reliably, and he hasn’t learned certain commonplace spells. Furthermore, as you know, some spells take hours or days, and we thought it might be useful to have them in more immediately accessible form.”

Gresh remembered his interrupted conversation with Dina. “It would indeed,” he said.

“Well, we are here to supply that—each wizard here, myself included, knows how to prepare powders and potions. Choose what spells you want—given your line of work I’m sure you know much of what we have available—and we’ll prepare them for you.” That was good news—though the bit about Tobas being improperly trained wasn’t, and there were still some things that needed explanation. “Ah...why so many wizards? Why not just one good one?”

“Because each spell takes time, and we will be preparing them simultaneously, one per wizard.

Depending just what you request, having one wizard do them all might take sixnights, or even months.

Besides, we are unpaid volunteers, doing this on the Guild’s behalf for the general good, and no one of us is that generous with his time and energy. We’re all eager to get back to our own concerns.” That made sense. Gresh nodded. “You said powders and potions, or loans? What about making talismans for me?”

Kaligir frowned. “Don’t ask too much, Gresh,” he said. “Tolnor’s Forging is not undertaken lightly and takes a sixnight or more for every spell—the slightest slip, and a day’s work has to be repeated until it’s perfect. You can’t stop partway through. There have been wizards who spent years trying to get a single enchantment right, having to snatch naps when they could, being fed quick bites by their apprentices or families because they couldn’t leave the work area. No one is volunteering for that; most of us aren’t even capable of it.”

“Oh.” Gresh had never actually known just what was involved in creating enchanted objects that carried reusable spells, but given the rarity of such artifacts it made sense that the spell would be difficult and expensive. He just hadn’t realized how difficult and expensive.

“And as soon as you have the magical preparations, we trust you and Tobas will depart for the Small Kingdoms.”

“Indeed.” He glanced at Dina. “And might one wizard answer questions for me, instead? A wizard who is very familiar with Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm?”

“An excellent suggestion. Then you agree to our terms?”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“No. The Guild has decided you don’t. You will find the enchanted mirror and deliver it promptly to Tobas or another representative of the Wizards’ Guild, and the Guild will pay you the agreed-upon price. Now, have you given any thought to the spells you want to have available?”

“A little.” He glanced at Dina again. “The Spell of Reversal would be useful, and Javan’s Restorative....”

An hour later all the volunteers but one had been sent home to their workshops to begin work on spells Gresh had requested—using ingredients he had provided, of course; their altruism was not unlimited. One, a plump middle-aged woman named Heshka, had stayed to advise Gresh on the workings of Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, flying carpets, Transporting Tapestries, and other relevant wizardry, as well as what little was known about spriggans themselves.

Gresh worded his questions carefully, never asking certain things outright, and concluded that his initial guess had been right—the wizards had tried divinations of every sort, but had never thought to seriously interrogate the spriggans themselves about where they came from, or backtrack them to the mirror. That was typical of wizards, especially city-bred ones—such ordinary, non-magical methods simply never occurred to most of them. A few had at least asked the spriggans about where they came from and had almost always gotten, “Don’t know. Don’t remember,” as the answer.

Gresh began to wonder whether that was actually true. Everyone always assumed that spriggans were too stupid to lie effectively, but Gresh had started to wonder whether they might not be quite as idiotic as they appeared.

As for the spell that created them, Gresh learned more of the mechanics, but Dina’s description had covered most of what he wanted, and Heshka confirmed Dina’s account. The Haunting Phantasm manifested a hideous little creature that only the chosen victim could see, but no one really knew whether the spell created an illusion, created a real creature, or summoned a pre-existing creature from somewhere.

“Illusions don’t trip people or knock bottles off shelves, so spriggans aren’t illusions,” Gresh said.

“They don’t look anything like the phantasm, either,” Heshka pointed out. “No fangs or fur. We have no idea just how wrong the spell went; it may not have resembled the Phantasm at all by the time Tobas finished it. For one thing, he performed it in a castle outside the World. How do we know that didn’t completely alter its nature? No one else has ever tried that. He may not even have made any mistakes other than choosing the wrong place to perform it!”

“Ordinarily, when the spell is complete, and the phantasm is haunting the chosen victim, how is the mirror involved? Does breaking it break the spell?”

Heshka looked startled. “No, of course not. Once the spell is done, it’s just an ordinary mirror; it has nothing to do with the phantasm. I told you, the spriggan mirror is different.”

“So I see,” Gresh said, stroking his beard. “And do you think that might be because the spell was never actually finished? Might it stop making spriggans if the curse were directed at its original intended target?”

“I don’t think so,” Heshka said. “It was directed at its original intended target—didn’t Tobas tell you? The target even held the mirror at one point. If that didn’t complete it, what would?”

“The trigger word?”

“I don’t think he was doing that version—though you might ask him.”

“I take it you’ve spoken with Tobas about this. Who was the original intended target?”

“Well, that might be why it went wrong, too. We’re fairly sure it was an Invisible Servitor.

Something artificial, anyway, that Derithon had left running loose in his castle. You really aren’t supposed to cast the curse on anything but humans, but Tobas didn’t know that. He should have known he was in a magically created void because he had already found corridors that behaved unnaturally. Using the spell to curse a magical creature, something that’s effectively a spell incarnate, while you’re in an enchanted castle in a magically created void where space isn’t the same shape was foolish. It’s amazing the spell didn’t do something even worse than a plague of spriggans. I think we can all be grateful that the Haunting Phantasm is a simple, low-order spell.”

“I see,” Gresh said thoughtfully.

The Wizards’ Guild generally tended to be very conservative, and cases like this were a major reason why. Wizardry was absurdly powerful, dangerous stuff that tapped into the raw chaos that underlay ordinary reality. Even simple spells could go spectacularly wrong. That was why wizards screened their apprentices carefully and imposed draconian rules on each other. Mistakes that would be harmless in any sane enterprise could be fatal to everyone in the area when wizardry was involved. It was theoretically possible for a single wizard to destroy the entire World, and while a portion of the Guild might actually survive that, no one cared to put it to the test. The Guild and individual wizards therefore did everything they could to prevent the careless use of wizardry.

This was often a self-solving problem, actually—sloppy or untalented apprentices didn’t survive to become journeymen. The death rate wasn’t as discouraging as it was for demonologists, but it wasn’t zero, either. Even non-fatal mistakes might leave an apprentice with four legs and fur, or trapped in an unbreakable bottle, or otherwise incapacitated.

Tobas appeared to be that rare and fortunate thing, a wizard who had done something very stupid when he was young and survived it unscathed. Gresh would want to watch him very closely.

Tobas should have learned from his mistakes, but that didn’t mean he had, and someone who did something stupendously stupid once might well do something stupid again.

At last he could think of no more questions to ask. He thanked Heshka and Dina and sent them both home, noticing as he did that the sun was down and the lamps were lit. Weary, he stretched, and headed to the kitchen, where he discovered that Twilfa had found Akka, the family’s ritual dancer, as he had asked, and had brought her back to the shop. The sisters were chatting over empty plates while a third plate, holding a supper of cold salt ham and honeyed pears, waited for him.

He sat down to eat, but before he could pick up his fork Akka turned and asked, “What sort of dance do you need?”

“A blessing on travelers, I think,” he said, as he cut a bite of ham. “I’m going to the Small Kingdoms on an errand.” He popped the ham in his mouth. “And if you can do anything to make spriggans more cooperative, that would help.”

“And I suppose you’re too busy to actually watch the dance, let alone participate.”

“You suppose correctly.”

“It would be much more effective if you joined in.”

“I don’t work magic, Akka,” Gresh said. “You know that. I’ll use other people’s magic happily; I do it all the time. But I don’t make my own magic, ever.”

“You could at least stand in the center of the pattern.”

Gresh considered that for a moment. The wizards had said it would take two days to get the powders and potions ready. He estimated he would need half a day for his own preparations. That left a day and a half. He had thought he might to use the time for further research and to handle the normal course of business, but now he remembered that the Guild had ordered his customers not to buy from him until he brought back the mirror, so there wouldn’t be any normal business. He wasn’t really sure just what research remained to be done. He might try to catch and talk to a few more spriggans, and he might have more questions for Tobas and his wives, but beyond that, what would he do with his time?

“When will your troupe be ready?” he asked.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Eight

Gresh eyed the carpet critically. “Will that thing really hold us?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Tobas assured him. “It’s quite safe.”

“No, it isn’t,” Alorria said.

“Ali....”

“It isn’t! It’s amazing none of us have ever fallen off, and we’ve gotten hit by birds and gotten bugs in our eyes....”

“Shut up, Ali,” Karanissa said. “We haven’t fallen off, and we aren’t going to, because part of the spell on the carpet is to adjust its shape to hold us upright and to adjust its path through the air to keep us on it.”

“It’s hard to fall off a flying carpet,” Tobas said.

“But it can be done,” Alorria insisted. “And we do run into birds and bugs, and there’s no protection from wind or rain....”

“I’m sure Gresh can handle riding it,” Karanissa replied.

“I’m sure I can,” Gresh agreed, but he had some doubts. The carpet was only about six feet wide and nine or ten feet long, and it was a long way to the Small Kingdoms, well over a hundred leagues. He and Tobas would presumably want to sleep on the way. Put the two of them on that carpet, along with their baggage and supplies, and...well, it would be cozy.

He had asked Tobas to bring it over so he could see how much room he would have for supplies, and he was not happy with what he saw. The carpet was nicely patterned in blues and reds and hovered steadily a foot off the hard-packed earth of East Road, but it really was small and didn’t look very sturdy. Gresh tended to think Alorria was right about its safety.

“The four of us flew here from Ethshar of the Sands on it,” Tobas said. “It wasn’t bad.”

“It was crowded,” Alorria said. “I was frightened the whole time that I was going to drop the baby.”

“But you didn’t,” Tobas said. “Really, it wasn’t bad.”

From Ethshar of the Sands to Ethshar of the Rocks was about fifty leagues. “How long did that take?” Gresh asked.

“Oh, half a day.”

Gresh threw Tobas a sideways glance. “Half a day?”

“About that.”

“That’s fast!”

“That’s the point,” Tobas said.

“Well, yes,” Gresh acknowledged.

“It’s going to be crowded,” Alorria said. “It was bad enough with four of us.” Gresh looked at her, startled. “What?”

“I said it would be crowded,” Alorria said.

“But you aren’t coming!”

“Oh, yes, I am! You think I’m going to miss a chance to show our daughter to her grandparents?

They haven’t seen her yet, you know. And I am not about to let Tobas strand me and the baby here with a bunch of strangers. I don’t know anyone in this city! We’ve been staying at an inn near Eastgate, and I am not going to stay in a place like that without my husband to protect me. Not to mention that caring for a baby is a lot of work, and I expect Tobas to do his share of it, and he can’t if he’s in Dwomor and Alris is here, can he? I am definitely coming, Gresh the Supplier, and don’t you think you can prevent it!”

“We may be able to leave her and the baby with her parents in Dwomor while we’re out in the wilderness,” Tobas said apologetically. “Or if the trip is too strenuous, perhaps in our home in Ethshar of the Sands.”

“Or our other home,” Alorria said.

“As far as anyone in this World can tell, that is in Ethshar of the Sands,” Karanissa said.

Gresh was not at all sure what homes they were talking about, but the details didn’t really matter.

“So we’re going to crowd all four of us and our baggage onto....”

“Five,” Karanissa said.

Gresh turned to glower at her.

“I’m afraid my wives don’t like it if I travel with only one of them,” Tobas said.

Karanissa glared silently at him, while Alorria said, “No, I don’t like it if you try to go off alone with her, and I don’t mind saying so! I know you married her first, and you’re both magicians, but you’re my husband, all the same, and I’m not going to let you run around with another woman, even if she is your wife! Especially not now that I have the baby.”

Gresh closed his eyes wearily.

“It’s going to be crowded,” he said.

“We can hang the luggage from the sides,” Tobas said. “It won’t be that bad.”

“I’ll need to re-pack my things,” Gresh said.

“Honestly, it can lift several tons,” Tobas said. “You’d be amazed. We moved half our household from Dwomor to Ethshar on it, in a single load. Secure everything with a few ropes, and we’ll be fine.”

“All the same, I prefer to rearrange,” Gresh said. He did not say so, but what he now intended to do was to stuff everything into the magical bottomless bag Dina had made for him years ago, as much to keep Tobas’s wives from poking into his belongings as because he was concerned about the carpet’s capacity. It would make unpacking much more of a job, since everything had to be removed from the bag one item at a time in the exact reverse of the order it went in, but he would feel more secure.

He really hoped Akka’s dance did some good. Her group had gathered the other night and danced until they were dripping with sweat, and Gresh hoped the effort hadn’t been wasted. It had certainly felt invigorating, as if the dancers were pouring energy into him, so presumably it had done something.

“Can you be ready to leave in an hour and a half?” he asked.

“We’re ready to leave now,” Alorria said.

“No, we aren’t,” Karanissa retorted. “Our belongings are still at the inn, and we haven’t paid the bill or told Kaligir we’re leaving.”

“But everything’s packed up, Kara,” Alorria said.”

“We can be ready in an hour,” Tobas said. “We’ll be in Ethshar of the Sands by nightfall.”

“But we’re going to Dwomor,” Gresh said.

“Not today,” Tobas said. “We’ll spend the night at my home in Grandgate, and tomorrow we’ll head for Dwomor. It’s a long day’s flight from Ethshar of the Sands to Dwomor. We’ll want to start bright and early. It’s not much fun flying in the dark.”

That, Gresh was forced to admit to himself, made sense, probably far more sense than trying to sleep on a grossly overcrowded carpet. “An hour, then,” he said.

“We’ll be here.” With that, Tobas and his wives climbed aboard the carpet and settled down cross-legged on the worn wool: Tobas at the front, Karanissa at the rear, and Alorria in the center with Alris clutched in her arms. From the smooth efficiency with which they took their places, Gresh judged they had done this several times before.

The wizard made a sound and a gesture, and the carpet rose smoothly upward, to rooftop level, before turning and heading east down the street.

Gresh watched it go, then sighed and went back into the shop, wondering whether he could stuff his other luggage directly into the bottomless bag, or whether he would need to unpack it and shove everything in piece by piece.

When it came time to try, most of his bags fit just as they were, but the single largest had to be unpacked and fed in piecemeal. Gresh was glad that he had asked Dina to make sure his bottomless bag had a good wide mouth and wished it had been just a little bit larger—that big bag, containing a bedroll and pillow and his formal robes, among other things, had almost fit.

He would need to take all that stuff back out, item by item, before he could retrieve the bag of tools and snares, or the precious box of powders and potions, or the bag of magical ingredients, or the sack of non-perishable food, or the case of wine, or all his other clothing and toiletries. He thought he might want to take the time to arrange things in a better order at some point on the journey, but for now he would make do. The important thing was that he had packed all the supplies he wanted to bring into the one magical bag, the apparent size of a very large watermelon, and the apparent weight of the heaviest single item in it. He was not entirely sure what that item was, though; he just knew how the spell operated and that when he hefted the bag it seemed to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds.

That was quite manageable. He could easily sling the bag over one shoulder and carry it for as far as necessary.

When Tobas’s carpet once again swooped down from the rooftops to hover in front of the shop, Gresh was ready, the bottomless bag at his heel, and five of his sisters—Twilfa, Dina, Chira, Tira, and Akka—standing beside him to say their farewells.

The carpet looked rather different now; instead of a simple flat cloth surface it had taken on the appearance of a miniature caravan, laden with baggage. On either side hung an assortment of bags, valises, traveling cases, and other luggage, suspended from a network of ropes and cords that crisscrossed the carpet itself. These bags didn’t seem to interfere with the carpet’s ability to fly, and the ropes barely indented the carpet’s surface at all—in fact, some appeared to be stretched above the fabric, between edges that curled slightly upward. The passengers were once again seated cross-legged in a row down the center, with the two women crowded together to create a cramped fourth space, carefully kept open, between Tobas and Alorria. Gresh noticed that Alorria now wore a slender gold coronet, and Karanissa had her hair tightly bound into a long, thick braid.

The carpet fluttered in from the east and wheeled just above head-height, setting the dangling luggage swinging, then settled down toward Tobas’s door, stopping the instant the lowest-hanging bundle brushed the dirt of the street. This meant the carpet stayed a good three feet up, perhaps four, rather than the single foot it had managed on the previous visit.

“Hai! Gresh!” Tobas called from his position at the front of the rug, waving. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” Gresh said, picking up his bag with one hand and giving Twilfa a quick final hug with the other. He stepped forward.

“Just the one bag?” Tobas asked.

“It’s bottomless,” Gresh explained, carefully not expressing his surprise that Tobas had apparently not used anything of the sort himself.

“Hallin’s spell?” Tobas turned up a palm. “I have the instructions for that one, but I could never make it work. Half a day or more!”

“But you have a flying carpet,” Dina said, startled. “Varrin’s Lesser Propulsion takes a day and a half and is at least an order or two higher than Hallin’s Bottomless Bag!”

“Oh, I didn’t make this,” Tobas said. “I bought it. We used to need to do a lot of traveling around Dwomor, so I had some friends find me one I could just barely afford. It must be about a century old—it’s about thirty years into its eighty-year cycle.”

“What?” Gresh said, suddenly worried about the carpet’s reliability. He much preferred dealing with wizards who used their own magic, rather than borrowed or bought devices. They knew how to fix it if something went wrong.

“Varrin’s Lesser Propulsion needs to be renewed every so often,” Dina explained. “When it’s first cast it only lasts for one cycle of the greater moon, from one full moon to the next. But every time the spell is renewed it lasts twice as long, so after a few cycles it’s good for years at a time. What he calls the eighty-year cycle is... let me see... the tenth renewal. It’s really a little less than seventy-nine years.”

“Is that good?” Gresh asked.

“Well, if he’s right, you won’t need to worry about renewing the spell—old flying carpets are worth more than new, because of that; by the tenth renewal they last longer than most owners will live.

The thing is, each renewal is more difficult—you need to use certain elements of the original spell, and they tend to get lost after a few cycles.”

“One reason I could afford this carpet,” Tobas said, “is that the original maker’s heirs have mislaid one of the seven white stones, so the spell can’t be renewed forty or fifty years from now.”

“But you’re sure it’s good for years yet?” Gresh asked.

“Mereth of the Golden Door says it is. Do you know a better diviner?” Gresh looked at Dina.

“She’s not local, but I’ve heard of Mereth,” Dina admitted.

“She lives in Ethshar of the Sands,” Tobas said. “Near the palace.”

“She’s supposed to be good,” Dina acknowledged. She turned back to Tobas. “You can’t do Hallin’s Bottomless Bag?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘ can’t,’” Tobas replied. “Let’s just say I haven’t done Hallin’s spell.”

“The Bottomless Bag,” Dina corrected him. “Hallin invented more than one spell, you know.” Tobas blinked at her. “He did?”

“Yes, he did! The other important one is Hallin’s Transporting Fissure. Seventh- or eighth-order.

You never heard of it?”

“Um... no,” Tobas admitted. “I haven’t. But I probably couldn’t use it in any case—I can’t work seventh-order spells with any sort of reliability at all. And I’ve always just heard the Bottomless Bag referred to as Hallin’s spell—after all, it works on things besides bags.”

“I’m sure this is all very interesting for you wizards,” Alorria interrupted. “But some of us would like to get home before dark. If Gresh has all his things in that one little bag, so much the better. He can climb on the carpet, and we can go.”

“Yes, of course.” Gresh handed his bag to Tobas. “Hold this for a moment, would you?” Tobas accepted it warily. “It won’t explode, away from its true owner, or anything?”

“No, of course not!” Dina said. “I made that bag properly!” Tobas turned, startled. “You made it?”

Gresh was trying to judge the best way to mount the carpet, whether to climb up the dangling luggage or simply vault onto the carpet. He decided on the vault; he grabbed two of the ropes and jumped.

“Yes, I made it! Did you think Gresh did it? He’s no wizard....” The carpet felt rather like an oversized feather bed, Gresh discovered as he landed. He rolled forward awkwardly as his eldest sister shouted angrily at Tobas. “Dina,” he said, as he tried to untangle himself from the cords and hoist himself into a sitting position. “Could you please not argue with my other customers?” He put out a hand to right himself and found he was leaning on Alorria’s knee. He quickly snatched his hand away and murmured, “My apologies, lady.”

“Be careful, Gresh!” Twilfa called.