Gresh finally managed to right himself, and smiled. He called back, “Why? If I get myself killed you inherit the business!”

“I’d rather not just yet, thank you,” Twilfa retorted.

“Be careful, Gresh,” Dina said, with a significant glance at Tobas.

“I will, Dina.”

“Good luck, brother,” Akka said. “We’ll dance for you every sixnight.”

“Thank you.”

“Take care,” Tira said.

“Good fortune and a swift return!” Chira called. She waved, and as she did Tobas did something with the fingers of his right hand, and the carpet began to rise, rotating very slowly.

Then all five women on the ground were waving, and Gresh was clinging to a rope with one hand and waving back with the other, ignoring Tobas’s attempt to hand him his bag. He turned his head to keep watching his sisters and saw that Alorria was holding up one of Alris’s chubby little hands and waving that, as well.

Then the rotation was complete, the carpet pointing east. It began to rise again, and to move forward, gaining speed as it went. In a moment Gresh could no longer see any of his sisters. He turned around to face forward and finally accepted the bag Tobas had been trying to hand him. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Tobas replied. He glanced back past Gresh’s shoulder. “And people say I’m mad, to have two wives! I heard the one on the end call you brother, and the young one’s your assistant, but that still leaves three.”

“They aren’t my wives,” Gresh protested, as he watched the buildings flash by on either side. The carpet was still rising, so they were now even with third-floor windows or the rooftops and gutters of the lower structures.

“They’re still three women.”

Gresh hesitated, then admitted, “They’re all my sisters.” He looked forward, past Tobas, and saw the towers of Eastgate approaching with frightening speed.

“What, all four of them?”

“All five of them. My assistant Twilfa is the baby of the family.” They were passing over the broad hexagon of New Eastgate Market; the merchants and shoppers were looking up in surprise as the carpet’s shadow swept over them. The wind of their passage whipped at Gresh’s hair, and just as Alorria had warned, an insect of some sort bounced off his cheek.

“The wizard, too?” Tobas asked.

“Dina’s the oldest.” They were past the market and soaring along far enough above East Road that it no longer mattered whether they actually stayed above the street—they would clear most of the rooftops in any case. Gresh had to shout to be heard over the rush of wind. He realized they were passing over the intersection with Wizard Street, and he pointed to the north. “Her shop’s over there.” When he turned his gaze forward again, Gresh saw that the towers ahead were... well, they were straight ahead, and the carpet was rushing directly at them.

Then they zoomed over Old Eastgate Market, and between the two towers of the gates, clearing the city wall by four or five feet, and they were outside Ethshar of the Rocks and flying east at a phenomenal speed, on their way to Ethshar of the Sands.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Nine

“My home village of Telven is somewhere over that way, on the coast,” Tobas shouted over his shoulder, waving his right arm vaguely.

Gresh glanced to the south, then frowned. “Isn’t that still the Pirate Towns?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Tobas said. “The Free Lands of the Coasts, they call themselves. I grew up there.

My father was a pirate, Dabran the Pirate, captain of Retribution. A demonologist out of Ethshar of the Spices sent the whole ship to the bottom, with all hands, when I was fifteen.” Gresh nodded but did not reply. He was unsure whether Tobas was serious or not, and besides, conversation was difficult over the constant roar of the wind as the carpet sped through the air.

They were about four hours out of Ethshar of the Rocks, and Gresh had discovered that while riding the carpet didn’t seem particularly dangerous, Alorria had been right that it wasn’t exactly fun.

There were frequently bugs splattering against their chests and faces, at least at lower altitudes; the luggage piled around Tobas was speckled with their remains. Birds hadn’t been a problem, but the unrelenting wind of their passage was tiring and annoying and made it impossible to talk comfortably.

Gresh also now understood why Alorria wore a coronet and why Karanissa had gone to the trouble to braid her waist-length locks. His own hair was long enough to whip about uncomfortably, flicking across his eyes at inopportune moments. He was sure he looked positively dreadful, with his hair awry and dead gnats smeared everywhere.

The worst part of flying was that it was boring. A day earlier Gresh would not have believed that soaring through the air at fantastic speeds on a magic carpet could become tedious so quickly, but it had.

They had passed over a hundred miles of farms and fields and forests. After the first hour or so they all looked very much the same.

If he had been able to talk freely with his companions it might not have been bad, but the wind prevented that—the wind, and his uncertainty as to how much he could believe of what Tobas and Alorria told him. Alorria had said that Tobas slew a dragon to win her hand and that he had served for a time as the court wizard to her father, Derneth II, king of Dwomor. However, Tobas had already been married to Karanissa at the time and had been spending most of his time in another world, so it had been complicated. Tobas claimed to have inherited Derithon the Mage’s book of spells, rather than compiling his own, which was undoubtedly a violation of custom and probably of Wizards’ Guild rules but which explained why his training was so uneven. Tobas had served only a partial apprenticeship under a senile and dying master, but the old book allowed him to teach himself much more.

Now Tobas claimed to be a pirate captain’s son. How would a pirate’s son have wound up apprenticed to a wizard at all? Gresh was beginning to think he wouldn’t have believed any of this if Kaligir hadn’t shown up with those other wizards to provide him with magic. Pirates and princesses, dragons and castles and centuries-old witches and all, sounded like far too much adventure to have jammed into Tobas’s one short lifetime. Good honest magic Gresh understood, and spells gone wrong, so the flying carpet and the spriggan mirror were easy to accept, but the rest of it....

But four-hundred-year-old Karanissa was there behind him on the carpet, and Tira had said she spoke the truth. Alorria, princess of Dwomor, was there, as well, and no one back in the city had expressed any reservations about her claimed heritage. Kaligir had believed enough of Tobas’s story to agree to pay Gresh’s fee, and to provide him with all those lovely vials and jars, safely tucked away in Gresh’s bag.

Gresh hoped he had chosen those prepared spells wisely. He had equipped himself with powders that were good for a dozen castings each of Lirrim’s Rectification, Javan’s Restorative, Javan’s Geas, the Spell of Reversal, and as the result of a fit of originality, the Spell of the Revealed Power, as well as seven doses apiece of potions that would provide Varrin’s Protective Bubble or the Spell of Retarded Time. The five magical powders had all turned out different colors, which several wizards had assured him was normal. They were all carefully tucked away in clearly labeled glass jars in a well-padded wooden box, along with labeled vials of the two crystal-clear potions.

Those spells were all the help Kaligir’s little committee would provide, so Gresh hoped that his heavy emphasis on counter-spells would prove appropriate. He had decided against any levitations; the flying carpet should serve well enough. He had also considered and dismissed a variety of communication spells, illusions, invisibilities, and other simple magic on the assumption that even Tobas ought to be able to provide those. Having those other spells as potions might have been faster, but he hadn’t had that many wizards available to produce them and had preferred to use his limited resources for the most difficult or important spells. His options had not been unlimited; he had had to choose preparations that six wizards could produce in less than three days. It had taken some argument even to get a second potion, since that had required one wizard to perform the spell for Tracel’s Adaptable Potion twice in quick succession.

With his sisters’ help, he had equipped himself with a few of his usual devices, as well as Kaligir’s contributions; the Spell of the Spinning Coin would keep Twilfa informed of his general state of health, the amulet strapped to his left wrist held a rune that would protect him from most hostile magic, he had a bloodstone tucked away that could be used for the Spell of Sustenance if food ran short, and Dina and Chira had provided half a dozen other talismans of various sorts. He felt reasonably well prepared.

The one thing he regretted was that he hadn’t managed to include any decent divinations in his supplies—but since the Guild had already tried every known divination in previous attempts to locate the mirror, he had reluctantly chosen to skip those, even though they might have been useful in less direct applications.

Right now he thought a divination to tell him whether Tobas was embellishing his personal history might have been welcome, but he didn’t have one available.

“Is that where we gave that man a boat?” Alorria called, pointing.

“Yes,” Tobas called back.

Gresh decided not to even ask about that. He did peer off to the south, though, and glimpsed the ocean in the distance, glinting in the afternoon sun.

They must be past the peninsula that held the Pirate Towns. Tobas’s alleged home must have been near the eastern boundary. That meant it was only another fifteen leagues or so to Ethshar of the Sands, perhaps even less.

Gresh had been to both the other Ethshars before, in the course of his business, but by ship, rather than flying carpet. Carpet was definitely faster, but all in all, he thought he preferred to take a few days to go by ship.

And the journey to Ethshar of the Spices, and then across the Gulf of the East to the Small Kingdoms, was almost twice as far.

While they were in Ethshar of the Sands, Gresh decided, he would unpack enough to get out a book to read. He had brought a few histories, written by various court scholars in the Small Kingdoms, in hopes that by balancing out the various patriotic lies he could glean some useful information about the region’s past. He had on occasion traveled the Great Highway across the northern end of the Small Kingdoms to Shan on the Desert, and he had taken ship up the river to Ekeroa, but he had never before actually set foot in Dwomor or any of its immediate neighbors. The existing maps and reports invariably reflected their makers’ biases as much as any physical reality.

He had originally thought he would be reading his books in bed by candlelight, but now he thought otherwise. It had not occurred to him when he was packing that riding a carpet would be a good time to read, but now he could not think of a better use of his travel time.

At least the sun was behind them now; for the start of the flight it had been in their eyes.

Behind him Alris started crying again—all in all she was a well-behaved baby, but four hours of wind would be wearing on anyone, and of course every baby cried sometimes. Gresh glanced over his shoulder.

“Give her to me!” Alorria said, turning. Karanissa had been holding the baby, giving Alorria’s arms a rest, but quickly handed her back to her mother. Gresh suspected that she was perfectly happy to unload the squalling little nuisance.

Alorria bounced the child for a moment, cuddling her, then said unnecessarily, “She’s hungry!” Gresh had figured that much out from Alris’s gestures and expression, and he knew very little about infants—he had handled his youngest sisters and a few of his nieces and nephews on occasion, but never taken a great interest in them. He politely turned his gaze forward again as Alorria unbuttoned her tunic to take care of the situation.

“What do you plan to do when we reach Dwomor?” Tobas asked him, shouting over the wind.

“Find the mirror,” Gresh said.

“Yes, of course, but how?”

“That’s my business.”

“Well, yes, but....”

“Tobas,” Gresh interrupted, “I’ll find it. Leave the details to me.” Had they been safely on the ground he might have been less abrupt, but the truth was Gresh didn’t know exactly how he was going to find the mirror. He would improvise, as he usually did. Telling a customer that would be bad business, though.

He glanced over to the right; the ocean was plainly visible now, and the coastline was sandy beaches. It couldn’t be terribly much farther to Ethshar of the Sands. He peered forward, into the distance, hoping to glimpse the Great Lighthouse or the towers of Grandgate, but as yet he could see no sign of them.

He shifted in his seat, adjusting his legs to keep them from getting stiff; the carpet soared smoothly onward, undisturbed by his movement. A small boat or spring-mounted wagon would have rocked, but whatever magic kept the carpet in the air was not bothered by such things.

He wondered why carpets were the traditional way to use Varrin’s Lesser Propulsion. It would make more sense to use boats or wagons, which already had seats and sides, and would be harder to fall off. Why not build things specifically designed to fly through the air, with solid sides, and perhaps a transparent panel of some sort at the front to block the wind and keep the bugs off the luggage?

Admittedly, you wouldn’t be able to roll those up and store them in a closet, but was that really so important? Even just enchanting a sofa instead of a carpet would be more comfortable, and that could be used on the ground readily enough; it wouldn’t need any special storage.

But no, wizards always used carpets. It was traditional. It was what people expected, so it was what wizards did. Wizards were very fond of tradition.

Of course, one reason for that, he had to admit, was that the traditional ways of doing things were known to be relatively safe. Carpets worked; they didn’t explode or run away or eat people or argue with their owners. There was a lot to be said for that. It might just be that when Varrin invented the spell, hundreds of years ago, he had first cast it on a carpet, and everyone had used it on carpets ever since simply because that was known to work.

Not that terribly many people used it at all; it wasn’t a simple spell. Gresh doubted there were more than a hundred functioning flying carpets in the World, and some of them, like the one he was on, were decades old.

Still, you’d think some eager young wizard would experiment a little. Maybe he would ask Dina about it when he got home, suggest that there might be good money in making flying craft a little more sensible than carpets. He had a momentary vision of swarms of sky-boats zipping around above the city, or flying caravans replacing merchants’ ships....

The Wizards’ Guild might not like that. The merchants and shipwrights and ship chandlers might have reservations about it, too. And homeowners might be a bit wary about large heavy objects overhead, for that matter. He vaguely recalled hearing something about how Varrin’s Greater Propulsion, which in bygone days had lifted entire castles and ships and kept them aloft indefinitely, was considered too dangerous to be used by anyone without special Guild approval exactly because sometimes the things did fall, with very unfortunate effects on whatever happened to be underneath.

So any plans for marketing sky-craft would require caution—but still, it shouldn’t be impossible to sell a few.

Behind him he heard Alorria cooing, and then a surprisingly loud belch from Alris. He resisted the temptation to look back, and instead stared ahead over Tobas’s shoulder, looking for Ethshar of the Sands.

There, at last, he could see the conical turret atop the Great Lighthouse, and then the crenellations around the lamp itself, peeping above the horizon, still tiny in the distance. A little to the left was an almost imperceptible flicker of red that was the banner atop Grandgate. Gresh smiled.

The remainder of the journey went much more quickly. Having their eventual goal in sight helped immensely, even when Tobas insisted on taking a small detour to the north instead of flying over the central portion of the city. He refused to explain why beyond saying, “It’s not safe to fly over the palace anymore.”

Gresh didn’t think a direct path would have brought them within half a mile of the palace dome in any case, but it didn’t really matter. He watched with pleasure as they skimmed along twenty feet above the top of the city wall, looping aside to miss the guard tower at Northgate, then swinging out over the Wall Street Field and the rooftops of Northangle, before finally descending onto a street he did not recognize, a few blocks from Grandgate’s north tower.

The carpet came to a stop a yard in the air, just as it had in front of Gresh’s own shop in Ethshar of the Rocks, and Tobas half-jumped, half-tumbled off the front, then turned and stood, looking uncertainly at Gresh.

Gresh realized quickly that the young wizard was in the habit of helping his wives down from the carpet, but was unsure whether Gresh would welcome assistance. Gresh solved his problem by rising to his feet and offering Alorria a hand, then ushering her to her husband’s waiting arms. He held the baby long enough for Alorria to reach the ground, then passed her back to her mother.

Karanissa followed, and before Tobas could release his hold on her, Gresh leapt to the street unaided—where he stumbled and almost fell. His long ride had stiffened him more than he had realized.

He caught himself, though, and looked around with interest.

The houses and shops in this city were much as he remembered them from his three previous visits—unlike the taller and often narrow homes of Ethshar of the Rocks, nearly all the buildings here stood just two stories in height, or at most three, often with a steeply sloping tile roof coming down almost to the ground-floor ceilings. The limited height, despite the shortage of land within the city walls, was due to the inability of the sandy soil to support tall buildings without serious engineering; the steep roofs were to shed the heavy spring rains, as there was little snow this far south.

Wood and plaster were common here, and stone was scarce—neither wood nor stone was easy to obtain locally, given the terrain, but wood was cheaper to ship in.

To the east the immense towers of Grandgate loomed high above the rooftops, shining in the afternoon sun. The street itself was packed sand, lighter in color than the dark and stony streets of his home city, and lined with houses built wall-to-wall; perhaps one in three had a shop window and signboard to indicate that it held a business as well as a home. Gresh spotted a baker, a vintner, a tinker—the typical things one would see in any residential neighborhood.

They had stopped in front of perhaps the smallest house on the entire street, a tiny, half-timbered structure with no sign or shop-window.

“I rather expected you to live on Wizard Street,” Gresh remarked. “It’s nearby, isn’t it?”

“A block and a half west,” Tobas said. “But I couldn’t really afford it. There weren’t any vacant properties, so I would have had to buy out an existing business, and those aren’t cheap. Besides, I don’t really want to run a shop—I was never trained for it.”

“He’s a court wizard, not a shopkeeper!” Alorria said, as she collected various baby supplies from the carpet.

“Except we don’t live in Dwomor anymore,” Karanissa said. “The Guild ruined the Transporting Tapestry that came out near there. Which makes it difficult to be their court wizard.”

“Well, if you didn’t insist on keeping close to the castle....” Alorria began.

“It’s my home!”

“And Dwomor is mine!”

“And neither of them...oh, never mind,” Tobas said. “Be quiet, both of you, and let’s get the carpet and luggage inside.” He drew his belt-knife and cut one of the cords holding the baggage and handed Karanissa a valise.

“You need to open the door,” Alorria said, as she waited with the baby on her hip.

Gresh got his own bag and one other, then followed and waited as Tobas peeled a black wax seal off the door-latch—a seal very much like the one he used on his own vault back in Ethshar of the Rocks. That answered any questions Gresh might have had about how Tobas kept his home secure in his absence; the rune on the wax would explode and cripple or kill anyone else who tried to open the door.

Presumably there were similar seals, or other magical protections, on the other doors and windows.

The door swung open, and Tobas held it back while both his wives entered the house; Gresh was close on their heels, and a moment later Tobas followed, with two more bags. He, Gresh, and Karanissa proceeded to fetch the rest of the luggage in, while Alorria tended to the baby’s needs and got her dressed in a fresh gown, until finally Tobas was able to roll up the carpet and bring that, too, inside, closing the door behind him.

The party and their belongings were now clustered into a small, sparsely furnished parlor; a dusty hearth filled one end of the room, while a few chairs and a small table were scattered about elsewhere.

The plank floor was bare; Gresh suspected that the flying carpet currently tucked under Tobas’s arm usually lay on it. Two doors led to back rooms, and a steep staircase led to the upper story—Gresh could see the slanting ceilings that reduced that second floor to a fraction of the size of the already-tiny ground floor.

The place was considerably smaller than his own home and business; it did not look like the house of a wealthy wizard, to say the least. Even Akka and her useless husband had a more luxurious home, though it was in worse repair, and Gresh suspected they had gone far into debt to pay for it.

“Welcome to my home,” Tobas said. “You can sleep here tonight, if you like, or take a room at an inn on Grand Street, whichever you prefer. I think Karanissa can provide us with some supper, or there are the inns for that, too, as you please.”

Gresh looked around at the utter lack of a couch or any likely place a guest room might be hidden away and concluded that staying here would probably mean sharing a bedroom with three adults and a baby. The adults weren’t a real problem unless one of them snored, but the baby....

“You’ll have the place to yourself, if you stay here,” Karanissa said, as if reading his thoughts. As a witch, she very well might be reading them. “We’ll be sleeping elsewhere.”

“Where?” he asked, startled.

“I’ll show you,” the witch said. “Come on.”

Gresh followed as Karanissa led him up the stairs, which emerged, as he had expected, into a single good-sized attic room. Sunlight spilled in through windows on either end, and for most of its length the two long sides slanted in. Three beds and several bureaus and nightstands were arranged between the stairs and the rear wall. The front area, above the parlor, was almost empty, with just a pair of velvet-upholstered chairs at one side.

The portion above the parlor hearth was somewhat different from the rest; here the side wall was vertical, closing in the chimney, rather than sloping, and a pair of heavy gray drapes hung on it. As Gresh reached the top of the stair, Karanissa strode to these drapes and pulled a cord, drawing them back to reveal a tapestry.

“There,” she said, pointing. “That’s where we’ll be.”

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Ten

Gresh stared at the tapestry in astonishment. He had never seen anything quite like it; the realism, the attention to detail, was amazing. Neither stitch nor brush-stroke was visible at first glance—if not for the slight billowing as it moved in the breeze created by the opening drapes, and the neatly sewn silk binding at the hem, he might almost have taken it for a painting, or even a window.

The image on the tapestry was also unlike anything he had seen before. It was a single scene, a picture of a castle—but it was a castle out of a nightmare, a weird structure of black and gray stone standing on a rocky crag, framed against a red-and-purple sky, approachable only by a narrow rope bridge across an abyss. Faces and figures of demons were carved into the structure at every opportunity; the battlements were lined with gargoyles, and monstrous stone visages peered around corners, from niches, and from the top of every window. A dozen towers and turrets jutted up at odd angles, some topped with rings of black iron spikes, others with conical roofs carved to resemble folded bat-wings.

Even the one visible door was surrounded by a portico carved to resemble a great fanged mouth.

“Don’t touch it,” Karanissa warned.

“I won’t,” Gresh assured her, as he realized what he was looking at. “That’s a Transporting Tapestry, isn’t it? One that goes out of the World completely?”

“Yes. And it leads to our real home, more or less.”

“The castle? You live in that?”

“Most of the time—at least, since Tabaea’s death. Before that we spent most of our time in Dwomor Keep, where Tobas was the court wizard for Alorria’s father.” Gresh remembered the story Karanissa had told him when she first came to his shop—that she had spent four hundred years trapped in a wizard’s castle, and Tobas had rescued her. That was presumably the castle he had saved her from. And she had later said that the Guild had ruined the tapestry that had been the only exit from the castle.

“How do you get out of it?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re planning to sleep there tonight....”

“We have another Transporting Tapestry in the castle,” Karanissa explained. “When the Guild ruined our old one while they were trying to stop Tabaea, they replaced it with another that comes out near here. That’s why we bought this house and relocated to Ethshar of the Sands—it’s where we can get out of the castle.” She sighed. “At first I thought I’d like that—I never really felt very welcome in Dwomor Keep, after all, since it’s Alorria’s home.”

Gresh started to ask a question about the relationship between the two women, then caught himself. He did not want to pry into their personal lives uninvited. “It hasn’t worked out?” he asked instead.

“We don’t really belong here,” she said. “Tobas is from a little village in the Pirate Towns, Alorria is a princess from the Small Kingdoms, I’m from the distant past—none of us really fits in a city like this. When I was here as a girl it wasn’t a city at all; it was General Torran’s staging area for the western campaign—they were still dredging the ship channel and drawing up plans for the city wall, and Grandgate was one tower called Grand Castle because there wasn’t a wall yet to put a gate in. There wasn’t any palace or city, just tents and wooden sheds.”

Gresh glanced out the window at the street and tried to imagine that; he failed.

“Now there are more people in the Grandgate district alone than in all of Dwomor, so Alorria is as lost here as I am,” Karanissa continued. “The Guild brought Tobas here because he’d been doing research in countercharms, trying to fix some of the things that had gone wrong back in the mountains, so someone thought he was some sort of expert and called him in to help against Tabaea’s magic Black Dagger, and he didn’t argue—he thought it would be fun, and that he might know something useful. He does have the formulas for plenty of spells, including some that had been lost for centuries, but all the same, he’s not really that good a wizard—more than good enough for Dwomor, or anywhere in the Small Kingdoms or outlying lands, but here in the three Ethshars he’s only up to journeyman level, really.

He doesn’t know anyone except Telurinon and a few other wizards....” She let her voice trail off, and sighed.

“He seems to have the Guild’s respect,” Gresh said.

“Yes, he does, and he earned it,” she agreed. “He was the one who finally stopped Telurinon’s stupid miscalculation from destroying the whole city. They showed their respect by ordering him to find and stop the spriggan mirror—typical of them. If you do one impossible thing your reward is to be asked to do another.”

“But he made the mirror in the first place?”

“Which is why we didn’t argue when they told him to stop it. He does feel responsible. So he’s been running around the city talking to magicians and conferring with Lady Sarai and so on, until finally someone suggested we talk to you, and here we are. But when this is all done, we’re going to have to hold a family conference and decide just where and how we want to live.” She looked at the tapestry.

“We may have to give that castle up—or at least, spend much less time there.” Gresh glanced at the image and shuddered; he could not think of giving up that horror as a real loss.

Then Karanissa shook herself. “That’s all for later, though. Tonight we’ll be sleeping in the castle, so that Tobas can collect some things he needs from the workshop there, and you can have this place to yourself. We’ll be back out first thing in the morning and off to Dwomor.” Gresh started to nod, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the workshop where the mirror was first enchanted?”

Karanissa looked at him. “Yes. Why?”

“There might be evidence....”

“No.” Karanissa held up a hand. “We checked, very carefully.”

“You’re absolutely certain the mirror isn’t still in there somewhere?”

“Oh, yes. We saw it go through the tapestry to the mountains. Besides, we haven’t seen any new spriggans in the castle in years—there are still about half a dozen that never left, but we only see those same ones, never any others.”

“Hmm.” He was not absolutely convinced. He had seen people lose things in plain sight often enough to have no faith at all in the human ability to see what was actually in front of them, and after his twenty questions a few days before he had far more respect for how deceptive spriggans could be. But Karanissa was a witch and probably knew what she was talking about.

Even a spriggan would know a castle was not a cave—or could there be a cave somewhere in that stone mass the castle sat upon?

“Are there any ruins in that...that place?” he asked.

“What place?” Karanissa glanced from him to the tapestry. “The void? No, there are the two stones—the little one at this end of the bridge, and the big one holding the castle. That’s all. There’s nothing a ruin could stand on, nowhere it could be.”

Then at any rate, the mirror had not been in there when that particular spriggan emerged from it, and it wasn’t likely it had gotten there since.

“Thank you.” Gresh gave the tapestry a final look, then turned away and headed back down the stairs to rejoin the others. Karanissa came close behind.

Alorria looked up from playing with Alris’s fingers. “Showing off the castle, Kara?”

“Just explaining where we’re going tonight, Ali.”

Alorria made a face. “The baby and I may just wait out here,” she said. “I hate crossing that bridge.”

Tobas exchanged glances with Karanissa, and Gresh thought that the two of them were not entirely displeased by Alorria’s words. “I thought you didn’t want to be alone,” Tobas said.

“I won’t be—I’ll have Gresh to protect me.”

That prompted an awkward silence that was finally broken by Alorria saying, “I assume we can trust him well enough. He doesn’t want to antagonize the Guild, after all. He won’t let anything happen to us.”

“Of course I won’t,” Gresh said.

“And I can manage the baby by myself for one night, Tobas.”

“Of course you can,” Tobas agreed.

“It’s not as if we’re in any danger of being eaten by a dragon or attacked by Vondish assassins here in the city.”

“You aren’t in any danger from them back in Dwomor, either,” Karanissa said.

“Well, you never know,” Alorria said.

It was plain from Karanissa’s expression that she thought you did know, but she didn’t say anything further on the subject.

“You can always change your mind, Ali,” Tobas said. “We’ll leave the door unlocked.”

“I’ll be fine here with Gresh.”

“All right, then. Let us see about finding some supper, shall we? Kara? I’d rather not deal with a crowded inn, if we have any food here.”

“We have wine and cheese in the kitchen and half a salted ham, but there’s no bread.”

“I saw a baker just across the street,” Gresh offered. “I could buy a loaf.”

“And bill the Guild for it, I suppose,” Tobas said.

“Of course!”

“I’ll see what I can do, then,” Karanissa said, heading for one of the two doors at the back.

Half an hour later the four adults sat down around the little table in the kitchen, where Karanissa had set out a simple but satisfactory meal. Gresh had purchased a few sweet cakes, as well as a loaf of good bread; Karanissa had boiled generous slices of ham; and Tobas had found the butter, cheese, and wine. During supper’s preparation the conversation had been casual and fragmented, but now Gresh turned to Tobas and said, “Tell me how you came to enchant the mirror in the first place, in as much detail as you can. You never know what information might turn out to be useful, and I’d like to have the story now, just to be sure that I don’t need to look around inside that haunted castle of yours before we go on to Dwomor.”

Tobas tore off a chunk of bread and buttered it thoughtfully, then began his story. “I grew up in the village of Telven, near the eastern end of what you’d call the Pirate Towns, and I didn’t bother with an apprenticeship when I was twelve because I was my father’s only acknowledged child, and I expected to inherit his ship, Retribution. When a demonologist sank it and left me orphaned at the age of fifteen, I had to change my plans, but of course by then I was too old for any respectable apprenticeship.”

He took a bite of bread, then continued. “Fortunately for me, there was an old wizard named Roggit who lived in the marshes just outside of Telven. I used to think he was too senile to see that I was obviously too old, but now I’m fairly sure he took pity on me. Either way, he took me on despite my age.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t much of a wizard, and he was even less of a teacher, and his health was terrible.

I lived with him for a year and a half, or maybe it was closer to two years, and while he did get through all the essential initiations in that time, by the time he died peacefully in his sleep he had only taught me one useful spell—Thrindle’s Combustion.”

“Unfortunate,” Gresh said. “But presumably you inherited his business, as his apprentice at the time of his death—did his family contest that because of your age?”

“He didn’t have any family, any more than I did,” Tobas said. “But as for his business, such as it was, he had put an explosive seal on his book of spells, and I didn’t know any better than to open it. The whole house burned to the ground, book and all, and I was left with nothing.” He took another bite. “So I set out to seek my fortune—not that I had much choice, after losing two separate inheritances.” He went on to describe making his way to Ethshar of the Spices, where he had discovered no one had any use for a wizard who hadn’t finished his apprenticeship and knew just one spell. In desperation he had signed up to slay a dragon in the Small Kingdoms, more or less accidentally, as much to stay out of the hands of slavers as because he thought it was a good idea. He told Gresh about his first visit to Dwomor, sparing no details, to Alorria’s dismay. She tried to defend her homeland, but Tobas refused to retract his negative comments. He explained about the terms on which the dragon-hunters had been hired and how they had been divided up into teams.

By the time he finished his account of wandering in the hills northeast of Dwomor Keep, finding Derithon’s fallen flying castle, salvaging the Transporting Tapestry, and stumbling through it to join Karanissa in her captivity, supper had been eaten, a bottle of wine had been drunk, the daylight had faded away, and the candles had been lit.

Tobas explained how he had begun working his way through Derithon’s massive collection of spells, trying as many of the easy ones as he could to gain enough practice that he might have a chance of surviving attempts to use higher-order wizardry to get Karanissa and himself out of the castle and back to the World. He described every detail he could remember of his failed attempt at Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.

Gresh listened closely and had him review several portions before permitting him to continue the story.

The spriggans had stolen the mirror just as he carried it through the revitalized Transporting Tapestry, back out in the World, and he had not seen it since. He had married Karanissa, and then more or less accidentally slain the dragon after all. In order to collect the promised reward he had been required to marry Alorria, as well—which, he was quick to note, was no hardship. He had never planned on having two wives, but he certainly didn’t mind.

He glanced from one woman to the other at that point, but no one else commented.

There were parts of the story that did not seem to make sense, Gresh thought—the account of removing the Transporting Tapestry from the fallen flying castle, for example. How and why had Tobas removed it without going through it?

And for that matter, why had the castle fallen in the first place? Presumably Varrin’s Greater Propulsion had failed, but why? A wizard of Derithon’s obvious accomplishments wouldn’t have been careless with something so important as the enchantment holding up his home. Was there some inherent flaw in the spell?

And there was the way Tobas had simply let the spriggans run off with the mirror without pursuing them, and how it had been years before spriggans started turning up in any numbers.

There was something Tobas wasn’t telling him. Gresh suspected that it was related to the wizard’s plans for disposing of the mirror.

“We should go,” Karanissa said, as Gresh asked a few more leading questions, hoping for some further hint. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, and you need to pack up things from your workshop.”

“A long day, but not a strenuous one,” Gresh pointed out. “You’ll just be sitting on a carpet all day.”

“That’s tiring enough for me,” Karanissa said.

“But you haven’t said a word yet about how you helped Lady Sarai defeat Empress Tabaea,” Gresh protested.

“That has nothing to do with the mirror or the spriggans,” Tobas said. “And it is getting late.” He rose.

Gresh glanced at Alorria, hoping that she would insist her husband brag about his part in defeating the mad magician-thief who had somehow temporarily overthrown the overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, but she was dozing off, and the baby in her arms was sound asleep. He sighed.

He would be traveling with these people for days, perhaps months. There would be time to worm the truth out of them.

“I suppose it is,” he conceded.

Karanissa rose and leaned over to touch Alorria’s shoulder. “Ali,” she said. “Time for bed.”

“Uh?” Alorria started; Alris stirred but did not wake. Then Alorria nodded. “Oh, yes. Bed. Yes.” She rose, as well.

“I’ll clean up,” Gresh said, but as he looked around he realized that while he and Tobas had been talking, Karanissa had already cleared away most of the dishes and other evidence of their supper.

“We’ll see you in the morning,” Karanissa said.

“Come on upstairs, Ali,” Tobas said. “We’ll get you and the baby tucked in.” The family headed for the stairs.

Gresh watched them go, while brushing the last crumbs from the table and taking the empty wineglasses to the scullery tub.

Something in the mountains of the Small Kingdoms had downed a flying castle, centuries ago.

Something in that same area had apparently interfered with two Transporting Tapestries. Tobas had apparently thought the spriggans would not be a problem there, even though he had considered them a hazard in his otherworldly castle. Something associated with Tobas had defeated an incredibly powerful rogue magician, allegedly gutting the interior of the overlord’s palace in the process and leaving nothing of Tabaea but her left foot, when the Guild’s ordinary efforts had failed. And if Karanissa was to be believed, the Guild’s failed attempts had endangered the entire city. And a Transporting Tapestry had been permanently ruined somewhere in the process.

On top of all that, Tobas was reputed to be an expert on countercharms—though Karanissa denied that he deserved that reputation.

Gresh frowned.

He could think of one explanation for everything, though it might not be the right one. It fit with a few other rumors that he had heard about Tabaea’s demise, as well. All of this could be explained if Tobas had stumbled upon an all-powerful countercharm of some sort, presumably one created long ago, perhaps as a weapon in the Great War. Such a charm might have brought down the flying castle, rendered the tapestries and the mirror temporarily inert, eventually destroyed one tapestry permanently, and erased both Tabaea’s magic and whatever magic the Guild had used unsuccessfully against her.

That would also account for the secrecy; the Wizards’ Guild would not want it widely known that so powerful a defense against their magic existed. It would account for why they were sending Tobas to deal with the mirror, rather than a more experienced wizard. He probably had the charm, if it existed, in his possession and was not willing, or perhaps not able, to loan it to anyone else.

Gresh had not noticed any jewels or amulets or other obvious magical devices on Tobas anywhere; he carried a knife and pouch on his belt, like most people, but wore no rings or brooches or pendants, so far as Gresh could see.

The charm might not be anything so obvious, of course; it could be a rune burned into Tobas’s flesh, or a pebble in his pocket, or...well, almost anything. If it existed at all.

Presumably, Tobas intended to use it on the mirror and make sure the effect was permanent this time. That would be a very satisfactory conclusion to the whole business.

A general-purpose countercharm like that would be very useful and very valuable—but Gresh told himself not to get greedy or do anything stupid; it wasn’t his, it almost certainly wasn’t for sale, and he was getting paid quite enough for the mirror as it was. Trying to obtain or duplicate this theoretical charm would almost certainly annoy the Wizards’ Guild, and that could ruin his business and get him killed.

No, he would leave it alone. He would find the mirror, collect his reward, and go on to live a very, very long and prosperous life without it.

It really was late now, and he was tired. Perhaps in the morning he would think of another explanation for the holes in Tobas’s story and realize that such a countercharm probably didn’t exist at all. He picked up one candle, blew out the other two, and headed for the stair.

He did make one small detour, though, peering through the other door off the little front parlor.

As he had expected, it led to a wizard’s workshop, but a very small and poorly stocked one; the crude workbench was dusty and bare, the four shelves above it half-empty. If the parlor, kitchen, and attic had not already made it obvious, this workshop demonstrated that the little house really wasn’t much of a home to Tobas and his family—at least, not yet.

He closed the door carefully and climbed the steps.

Alorria and Alris were sound asleep on the nearest bed; Tobas and Karanissa were nowhere to be seen, but the tapestry shimmered eerily in the candlelight. Cautiously, Gresh set down the candle and closed the drapes over it. He did not want to wake up in the middle of the night and see that ghastly image, or worse, stumble into it while looking for a chamber pot or something.

He then made his way to the farthest bed, so as to have as much space as possible between Alorria and himself. There he pulled off his boots, peeled off his socks, blew out the candle, and then fell back onto the down-filled mattress.

His last waking thought was the realization that he could tell by the faint scent lingering on the pillow that this was Karanissa’s bed.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Eleven

Gresh awoke in the darkness to the sudden unpleasant and loud discovery that Alris was not yet sleeping through the night. He pushed himself up on one elbow and squinted into the gloom, determined that Alorria was moving, and then, as the baby quieted, he lay back down and tried to get back to sleep.

He dozed off quickly enough that time, but the second time the baby’s crying woke him, the first faint light of dawn was seeping in the windows, and he had to debate briefly with himself whether to rise or not. He decided not, but getting back to sleep was more difficult, and it scarcely seemed as if he had managed it when he heard Tobas calling his name.

“Mrph,” he said. Then he rolled over and realized that the windows were bright with full daylight.

He raised his head and called, “I’ll be right there!”

Five minutes later he ambled downstairs to find the parlor empty—the carpet and baggage had all been carried out to the street and reassembled, with two new bags added. Tobas was securing the last few knots as Gresh peered out the door. Both women were standing nearby, looking over the arrangements.

“You missed breakfast,” Tobas told him, looking up from his labors. “But we saved you bread and cheese to eat on the way.”

“Try not to get crumbs everywhere,” Alorria added, as Karanissa smiled apologetically.

“We thought it would be best to let you sleep,” the witch explained. “We didn’t know how late you had stayed up.”

“Not very late,” Gresh said, with a meaningful glance at the baby Alorria was holding to her shoulder. “But I didn’t sleep very well, so I appreciate it.” Alris let out a belch, and white goo dribbled onto a rag Alorria had draped on her shoulder. The baby goggled at Gresh. Gresh smiled back.

Babies were cute, he thought, but he was very glad he didn’t usually live with one. They were noisy and smelly and needed constant attention, mostly in the form of cleaning up things he preferred not to deal with.

“Forty leagues this morning,” Tobas said, straightening up. “Stop in Ethshar of the Spices for luncheon, and then across the Gulf of the East this afternoon, and another forty leagues or so takes us to Dwomor Keep. We’ll stay there tonight, and then head out to look for the mirror as soon as you’re ready—perhaps even tomorrow?”

“I hope so,” Gresh said.

“You have your bag?”

Gresh did indeed, and displayed it.

“Good! Then climb aboard, Ali, and Kara, and we’ll get airborne.” Gresh noticed there was no mention of possibly leaving anyone behind, either in Ethshar of the Sands or the castle in the tapestry. He supposed it had been discussed before he awoke and didn’t bother to inquire into the matter. Instead he watched as the women boarded the carpet, then climbed on in his turn, squeezing into his allotted space.

The route out of Ethshar of the Sands took them between Grandgate’s main towers, leading Gresh to suspect that Tobas simply liked flying between pairs of towers. They passed well over the half-dozen smaller towers between the big ones, however, and over all three layers of walls and gates, missing several opportunities to show off the rug’s maneuverability.

Once outside the city the main road headed east by northeast, while their own route was almost due east, so they gradually diverged, the coastal highway angling off to the left while they flew over beaches and sand dunes, with the shining Southern Sea on their right. They had been flying less than half an hour, and Gresh had only just brushed off the last breakfast crumbs, when the beaches, too, curved away to the north, and they found themselves flying over open ocean.

Gresh found that slightly worrisome at first; if the spell failed and the carpet fell, they might all drown. He quickly realized, though, that he was being ridiculous. They were high enough up that the fall would almost certainly kill them in any case. Besides, he had known the route included a leg across the Gulf of the East; the Southern Sea wasn’t any worse.

By the time they were an hour and a half from Grandgate they were out of sight of land; the faint line on the northern horizon had finally vanished in the distance. It didn’t reappear for some time, and when it did, Gresh had noticed something else that distracted him.

“Why is the water a different color ahead?” he asked, pointing. The ocean behind them was a dark gray-blue; ahead it lightened to a slightly greenish shade.

“Shoals,” Tobas said. “There’s shallow water from here to the western edge of the peninsula, and it looks different because you can sort of see the bottom.”

“It’s good fishing grounds,” Karanissa called from behind.

Indeed, Gresh could see boats ahead, a dozen or more spaced out across the water. Earlier he had thought he might have glimpsed sails off to the south, but they were not flying over the shipping lanes, so none had been close enough to identify with any certainty; here, though, the boats were working close in, and there could be no mistaking them. He shifted over closer to the edge of the carpet for a better look.

“Don’t fall off!” Alorria called.

“I won’t,” Gresh assured her, but he stopped creeping sideways and sat where he was, leaning over a leather case as he watched the fishing boats. They were casting and hauling in nets; the nets fell into the water dark and empty, but came up full of gleaming silver fish, twinkling in the sun.

“This whole stretch of coast is lined with fishing villages,” Tobas remarked. “And each one has a magician or two who knows a preserving spell of some sort—usually wizards with Enral’s Preservation, but sometimes witches or even theurgists. Half those fish will wind up in the markets in Ethshar of the Spices, three or four days old, but looking and smelling fresh-caught.”

“Enral....” Gresh knew that name.

“Yes, the same one who discovered the eternal youth spell you’ve been promised,” Tobas said.

“Preventing decay was his specialty, it seems.”

That seemed to tarnish the glamour of it, somehow, to learn that his eternal youth spell was related to the magic that kept fish fresh on their way to market—but he was being silly, Gresh told himself. What did it matter how the spell had been developed, so long as it worked?

They flew over the pale waters of the shoals for almost an hour before finally reaching the coast, where they did, indeed, pass directly over a busy fishing village, where long wooden piers stretched out across the mud and sand to reach water deep enough for the boats. Inland was initially a tangle of salt marshes, sand dunes, and scrubland. There was no ground here worth farming, no path firm and stable enough to be called a road.

That changed gradually; the ground rose, smoothed out, and dried out. Scattered farmhouses appeared, and the paths winding between them grew broader. The farms remained small, though—these were not the big grain farms of the plain, but herb farms, growing the plants that herbalists and wizards and witches used in their magic, as well as the spices that gave Ethshar of the Spices its name and distinctive odor.

People were working in the fields and walking on the roads; most glanced up when they saw the carpet whizzing overhead. Tobas waved to them occasionally; the others, further back on the rug, were not really in a position to do so.

The herb farms and spice plantations began to give way to orchards and vegetable farms, and then Gresh glimpsed sunlight on water, red tile roofs, and brightly colored sails in the distance.

“Do you have any friends or favorite places in Ethshar of the Spices?” Tobas asked over his shoulder. “Somewhere we might stop for lunch?”

“I know a few people here, but only as people I do business with,” Gresh shouted back. “I wouldn’t call them friends, exactly. I wouldn’t stop in without letting them know I was coming.”

“That’s more than we know,” Alorria said, looking up from the baby at her breast. “We always just stop at an inn.”

“The Dragon’s Tail, near Westgate, is pleasant enough,” Gresh remarked.

“That’s where I

generally go.”

“We usually stay at the Clumsy Juggler,” Alorria said.

“I like the name,” Tobas added.

“I hear it’s a good sound inn, but perhaps a little overpriced,” Gresh replied. Then he remembered that he always got discount rates at the Dragon’s Tail because of his occupation—the proprietor had made a specialty of hosting wizards’ suppliers because that drew in wizards, who could be ruthlessly overcharged. Dragging Tobas and his wives there might not be a kindness; the Guild might be paying his expenses, but he had no idea what the family finances were like otherwise. “But on the other hand, we might try somewhere new.” There were half a dozen inns lining the eastern side of Westgate Market, so they would hardly need to explore any unfamiliar part of the city. Besides the Dragon’s Tail and the Clumsy Juggler there were the Blue Lantern, the Gatehouse Inn, the Market House, and the Pink Rose, or a score of others in the few blocks around the corner on High Street.

They could avoid the city entirely. “What about the Inn at the Bridge?” Gresh asked, pointing north.

“That’s an hour out of our way!” Tobas said.

“Oh.” Gresh had no experience judging speeds and distances from the carpet and had to take the wizard’s word for it.

It seemed reasonable, actually. Valder’s inn was a day’s travel from Ethshar of the Spices on foot. And they were descending now, swooping down toward the city wall.

The towers of Westgate seemed puny, insignificant things after the overblown fortifications of Grandgate back at Ethshar of the Sands. Tobas did not even bother guiding the rug between them, but swooped around the north side of the gate before descending into the market square.

Westgate Market was crowded, unsurprisingly—it was the middle of a lovely day in the month of Greengrowth, and after the tedium of winter and the spring rains most people were eager to be out in the sun. There was no room to land the carpet initially, and Tobas brought it to a halt about ten feet up, the dangling luggage hanging a foot or so above the tallest heads.

Naturally, several people stared, pointed, and laughed. The people directly below it moved aside, to get a better view, and Tobas let it sink slowly downward.

“Well, there they are,” he said, waving a hand at the inns. “Pick one.” Gresh looked back at the women, but Alorria was busy with the baby, and Karanissa turned up a palm.

They probably all cheated wizards, Gresh told himself. “The Dragon’s Tail, then,” he said, pointing to the one second from the corner of High Street, with its crude sign of a green zigzag on a background so stylized that Gresh would never have known it was meant to represent sand and sea if the inn’s owner hadn’t told him.

The carpet glided toward the inn’s door, descending as it went; the watching townsfolk scattered before it. Tobas curved the route around a stall stacked with jars of honey and maneuvered in close beneath the sign.

There he dismounted and beckoned for Gresh to do the same, as Alorria gathered up the assorted bags and cloths she needed to tend the baby. Karanissa waited patiently at the rear.

“What about your luggage?” Gresh asked, bringing his own one bag. “Will you be casting spells to protect it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tobas said, as Gresh dropped to the earth.

“Listen, I know only a madman would try to rob a wizard, but this city has its share of madmen—I’ve met a few.”

“We’ll take care of it.” He accepted Alris, then stepped aside while Alorria slid off the carpet.

She turned back for her collection of baby gear.

Gresh noticed that Karanissa hadn’t moved. “Are you leaving her on guard?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Tobas said.

“I’m ready,” Alorria said, as she stepped back with her arms full.

“Good.” With that, Tobas gestured, and the carpet began to rise. It stopped at a height of perhaps a dozen feet, well out of reach.

Gresh watched, puzzled. Yes, leaving it in mid-air would keep it safe from ordinary thieves, but what was Karanissa doing on it?

Then as he watched, she stood up and casually walked off the carpet—but instead of falling she spread her arms and drifted gracefully to earth.

Witchcraft, of course; Gresh had forgotten that some witches could levitate, since most could not, and even those who could were so limited in what they could do that they rarely bothered. Getting off the ground was apparently very, very difficult—but slowing a fall was relatively easy.

“It won’t rise without anyone on it,” Tobas explained, as he caught Karanissa and lowered her the last foot or two. “It hovers just fine, but it won’t go anywhere unless someone’s on it.” Gresh nodded.

“Come on, let’s eat,” Alorria said, heading into the inn. The others followed.

There were no empty tables, but half the inn’s staff recognized Gresh, and so a space was cleared for his party by asking a couple and two unaccompanied diners to move, rearranging the available seating. Alorria’s obvious annoyance at how the servers deferred to Gresh was mollified when one barmaid went into ecstasies of cooing over Alris, and they ate a fine meal with minimal displays of ill temper. Gresh pointed out the skin of an actual dragon’s tail pinned to one wall, but none of the others were particularly impressed.

An hour later they emerged to find four boys throwing rocks and other small objects, trying to land them on the hovering carpet. When Tobas cleared his throat, the four took one look at him, then turned and ran.

No one pursued them, though Alorria looked as if she wanted to. Instead Tobas picked Karanissa up by the waist and tossed her upward, as lightly as if she were a mere toy rather than a grown woman—witchcraft again, obviously.

She caught the edge of the carpet and pulled herself up. A moment later a shower of pebbles, sticks, half-eaten candies, and bits of string tumbled down. Gresh grinned at the sight; Alorria frowned furiously. Apparently those boys had been at it for some time and had been fairly successful at their game.

“Is anything damaged or missing?” Tobas called up, gesturing as he did so.

“No.”

And with that, the carpet began descending. When it was low enough, Tobas lifted Alorria and Alris into place, and then the men clambered aboard. When everyone was settled in their accustomed places Tobas waved a hand, and they soared up and out of the market.

Their route now took them east across the city, from the crowded streets of Westgate to the elegant shops of the New Merchants’ Quarter, then over the rooftops of the mansions of New City.

Gresh watched the overlord’s palace slip past on the left and tried to make sense of the tangled streets of the Old City, but they were no more comprehensible from up here than they were on the ground.

Then they sailed over Allston and Hempfield and Eastgate and out over the city wall into the sandy expanse of the eastern peninsula. No one farmed here, but a few homes were scattered about, and along the beaches to the left Gresh could see children digging for clams.

The coastline curved away to the north, and the wasteland below grew more deserted, until an hour after they had left the city the coastline reappeared ahead of them. They had reached the Gulf of the East and headed out over open water.

Before long the land was lost behind them, and only water was in sight in all directions. Save for an occasional glimpse of a merchant ship’s sails in the distance, the monotony of the crossing was unbroken until the coast of the Small Kingdoms appeared, rushing toward them.

This land was no flat oversized sandbar like the peninsula, but was rolling green hills behind a line of crumbling brown cliffs. Tobas adjusted the carpet’s altitude, taking it higher to be sure of clearing all obstructions; it had descended a little while crossing the Gulf.

As they soared over the white line of surf breaking against the steep slopes below, Tobas pointed out the forbidding stone fortress that clung to a rocky stretch of shoreline just to the south. “Imryllirion,” he said.

Farms and meadows flashed past, and mere moments later they passed almost directly over another castle, a few miles inland. Tobas announced, “Chatna.” He continued to tell Gresh, unasked, the name of each kingdom they passed over—Hsinorium, Strivura, a corner of Nebhala, Torthon, Danua, Ekeroa, and Vectamon, though they did not pass within sight of towns or castles in Hsinorium or Nebhala or Ekeroa, and Castle Torthon was merely a speck on the horizon. The trees hid most of Vectamon Castle, as well.

They crossed the river in Ekeroa, and the land began to rise, farms giving way to woodland. The sun was low in the sky behind them, mountains were looming ahead of them, and the carpet was rising, when Tobas said, “Lumeth of the Forest claims that land to the right.” He gestured at what looked to Gresh like just another stretch of unbroken forest on rolling hills. “But Vectamon and Dwomor don’t recognize the claim.”

“It’s Dwomoritic land,” Alorria said.

“The Vectamons don’t think so, any more than the Lumethans do,” Tobas retorted.

Alorria replied in a language Gresh had never heard.

“She’s fluent in Vectamonic,” Tobas said. “But she mostly uses it to insult them.” Gresh decided that was a hint that he should not ask for a translation.

Then they were descending to treetop level and heading directly for a sprawling castle that appeared to be in a state of mild disrepair, and Gresh forgot the conversation and focused his attention on Dwomor Keep.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Twelve

Dwomor Keep had obviously not been built quickly or recently. It occupied the center of a small plateau, surrounded by a double handful of thatched cottages that presumably constituted the capital city, but the castle itself was quite large—easily as large as the Fortress back in Ethshar of the Rocks, at least if measured by any surface dimension. The interior volume of the solidly compact Fortress might well exceed the space enclosed within the keep’s sprawling tangle of wings, towers, and turrets, though.

Every wing or tower of Dwomor Keep seemed to have been constructed in a different architectural style. Some walls were smooth, unadorned stone, while others were rough, or decorated with elaborate carvings. Windows ranged from narrow arrow-slits to grand mullioned or tracery affairs with hundreds of leaded panes, and were made variously of clear glass, stained glass, and wooden shutters over unglazed openings.

There were two unifying features, however—every exterior wall was constructed of the same gray-brown stone, and every roof, whether tile, thatch, or slate, seemed to need repair.

As they approached close enough to see into the courtyards, Gresh discovered the inner structures to be even more varied than the outside, as these walls did not need to be good defensible stone. Some were brick, or wood, or half-timbered plaster, or even wattle-and-daub, while others were that same gray-brown stone.

The courtyards themselves all appeared to be mud, though, untroubled by any pavement or boardwalk.

The carpet swept down toward this castle, and Tobas and both his wives began to shout and wave. People appeared in windows and on battlements, waving in response. The carpet flew a long loop around the castle so its passengers could greet everyone, but finally came soaring in toward a railed wooden platform that looked newer than any of the other structures. It stood atop an old slate roof, next to a tower where a new door appeared to have been cut into an old wall, and had no recognizable purpose for any ordinary castle.

It was, however, just the right size for landing this particular flying carpet.

The rug settled gently onto the platform, stopping when the luggage first lightly touched the wooden surface. Tobas then climbed off the front of the carpet, then stepped around the side to help his wives and child off. Gresh was left to his own devices and clambered awkwardly off, pulling his bag up and heaving it over one shoulder.

A moment later Tobas had the door open, and the entire party stepped into the tower, into a good-sized sitting room. Faded tapestries hung on several walls, and a few rather worn settees were arranged below them. Assorted tables, chairs, and cushions were scattered about, and three rugs covered portions of the plank floor, leaving a good-sized bare area in the center—one that Gresh recognized as a convenient place for the flying carpet. A spiral stair rose in one corner, and in the far wall two carved wooden doors stood solidly shut.

Gresh had barely had time to look around at the chamber within when a knock sounded on one of the carved doors. “Come in!” Tobas called.

The door swung inward, and a thin old man in an elaborately embroidered tunic leaned in. “Lord Tobas?” he asked.

“Yes. All of us, and a guest.”

“His Majesty the king wishes to invite you all to dine with him tonight.”

“Convey my best wishes to His Majesty, and we would be delighted.”

“Is there anything we can do for you in the meanwhile?”

“If you could give us a hand with the luggage, it would be welcome.”

“Of course. I’ll send footmen.” Then the door closed again.

“It’s good to be home!” Alorria said, smiling broadly and looking around happily, gently bouncing the baby in her arms.

“It is good to be back,” Karanissa agreed. “Home or not.”

“They seem to have kept it clean,” Tobas said. “I hope no one’s disturbed my workshop.”

“I thought you took everything dangerous with you,” Alorria said.

“I did. I still hope no one disturbed it—I want to be able to find things.”

“I didn’t think you left anything worth finding,” Karanissa said.

“This is your home?” Gresh asked.

All three of the other adults tried to answer simultaneously, Alorria saying “Yes,” Karanissa saying “No,” and Tobas saying, “When we’re in Dwomor.” The two women exchanged looks, and Karanissa added, “It used to be, before we bought the house in Ethshar of the Sands.”

“It still is,” Alorria said, with happy assurance. “We just don’t live here all the time.”

“It will be again,” Tobas said. “If we find the spriggan mirror and deal with it successfully.” That sounded interesting. “Oh?” Gresh said.

Tobas grimaced. “I’m not as smart as you, Gresh—when the Wizards’ Guild ordered me to stop the spriggans, I demanded payment, and they agreed, but I didn’t think of asking for eternal youth. I asked for another Transporting Tapestry, one that comes out here in Dwomor Keep, so we could come back here permanently. I like being my father-in-law’s court wizard and don’t really want to live in a big city. They agreed to make one for us—though of course it will take a year or so, and no one’s even started on it yet. There aren’t very many wizards who can make one, and most of them aren’t willing to put in the time.”

“But when it’s made, you’ll live here again.”

“Yes.” Tobas sighed. “Eternal youth for Alorria and myself would have been clever, but I just didn’t think of it. I’ll just have to hope I can work my way up to doing it myself eventually.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage it,” Karanissa said.

“Plenty of wizards don’t,” Tobas said.

For a moment silence fell, as no one knew quite what to say, but then Alris awoke and began crying, and Alorria, cooing and rocking, carried her up the spiral staircase.

“We have the entire tower,” Tobas said. “The bedrooms are the next floor up, and my workshop above that.”

Gresh nodded. “Do you get many spriggans here?”

Tobas blinked foolishly at him for a moment. “What?”

“Are there many spriggans in Dwomor? Does your magic attract them to this tower?” Tobas glanced upward. “It ought to, oughtn’t it?”

“Does it?”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Tobas admitted.

“I’ve seen a few here and there in Dwomor,” Karanissa said. “But they’re no worse here than in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars—perhaps not as bad.”

“But the mirror isn’t terribly far from here.”

“Well, we don’t know that....” Tobas began.

“I do,” Gresh interrupted. He was not ready to believe the spriggan he had interrogated had fooled him as completely as that.

“All right, then,” Tobas said, clearly nettled. “I don’t know why there aren’t more of them here; there just aren’t.”

Before Gresh could reply there was a knock at the door. Karanissa reached over to open it, revealing half a dozen young men in green-and-white uniforms.

There were several minutes of bustle and confusion as the footmen brought the luggage in from the landing platform and stowed it where Tobas and his wives directed them. Gresh tried to stay out of the way.

“I’m going to dress for dinner,” Alorria announced from the stairs, where she was blocking a footman’s way. He was balanced precariously, holding an immense leather trunk he had been carrying upstairs.

“Good,” Tobas said. “So will I.”

A moment later, when the luggage had all been dealt with, the six footmen brought in the carpet itself and spread it on the floor, exactly where Gresh had thought it should go. Then one of them bowed to Tobas and asked, “Will there be anything else?”

“No, thank you,” Tobas said. “Very good work, all of you.” The footman bowed again, and the entire half-dozen quickly exited the suite.

“Pardon me a moment, Gresh,” Tobas said. Karanissa was already climbing the spiral stair, and Tobas followed her, leaving Gresh alone in the sitting room.

He glanced around, then shrugged and sank onto one of the settees. He had no intention of trying to unpack anything here; his most appropriate change of clothing for dining with a king was well down the bottomless bag. His Majesty Derneth II would just have to put up with a guest in traveling clothes.

He looked around the room again, but saw nothing of particular interest. No spriggans were in sight.

That was curious, really. If the mirror was generating spriggans somewhere within a few leagues, and the spriggans just wandered randomly, then their population density here should be several times what it was anywhere in the Hegemony, and it plainly wasn’t.

That meant that their wanderings weren’t random. It wasn’t simply an attraction to wizardry that motivated them, because if it were, then Tobas’s workshop would have been overrun with them when he was working as Dwomor’s court wizard.

Gresh wondered just what was really going on. Were spriggans more organized and more intelligent than they appeared? Was there some pattern to their behavior over the past few years? He felt a slight chill at the thought. What if they were not just an infestation, but an actual deliberate invasion?

Was it really just a botched casting of Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm that had brought them into the World?

Then Karanissa came back down the stairs in a white silk gown that made Gresh forget about spriggans and mirrors and spells, not to mention the inconvenient fact that she was married to someone else. He rose quickly and bowed to her.

“You know, after so long in your company on the carpet, I can hear your thoughts,” she said, pausing at the foot of the stair. “Especially when they’re as clear as they are just now.” For an instant Gresh hesitated. He did not want to offend a wizard’s wife.

On the other hand, Karanissa could have easily ignored his reaction. She had chosen not to, and that gave Gresh some latitude.

“Then you know there’s nothing I can do to control them,” he replied with a smile.

“I know you aren’t even trying. Really, do you feel no shame at all at lusting so blatantly for another man’s wife?”

“None,” Gresh replied. “For three reasons.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. First, you call it blatant, but you’re a witch—would an ordinary woman know what I am thinking? Look at my face, rather than the thoughts behind it, and I think you’ll see my expression is well within the bounds of mere polite admiration.”

“Ah. You’re right—and you do have a dozen years of practice, don’t you? And the advice of your sisters, as well.”

“Indeed. Second, lust is a natural and healthy response to a sight such as the one before me now.

While it is the custom to disguise it in polite company, I know that it is the disguise that is unnatural, not the desire.”

“Most men are not as certain of that as you are.”

He nodded an acknowledgment. “You would know that better than I.”

“And your third reason?”

This was the one that had convinced him to be honest. “With all due respect, lady, you would not have put that dress on if you did not want to provoke lust. The angled neckline, the fit at the hips—that dress is designed to inflame men’s hearts, and as a witch you surely know it and chose it for that purpose.”

“Ah, one of your sisters is a seamstress, isn’t she? I hadn’t known that.”

“Ekava, the next-to-youngest,” Gresh agreed. “Still a journeyman, but she knows her profession well enough.”

Karanissa glanced upward and stepped away from the stairs as Tobas appeared, hurrying down the spiral. He wore a loose black robe and a pointed velvet cap, looking every inch a wizard save for the fact that he held a sleeping baby in his arms. “Alorria will be down in a moment,” he said, shifting Alris from one elbow to the other and straightening the lush crimson blanket that now wrapped her.

Until now Gresh had always seen Alris bundled in white or gray or yellow, if one didn’t count the usual stains and discolorations. It appeared that tonight even she was dressed up for their dinner with the king. Gresh looked down at his own brown wool tunic and black leather breeches and decided they would do well enough—he was a traveler, after all, and could not be blamed if he looked the part. If they stayed in Dwomor for any length of time, and royal suppers were the norm, he might eventually take the time to dress up, but not tonight.

The three of them stood silently for an awkward moment,; then Tobas said, “I’ll see what’s keeping Alorria.” He handed Alris to Karanissa, then hurried back up the stairs.

Karanissa watched him go, then looked down at the baby and smiled. She glanced at Gresh.

“She’ll be down soon enough, once she realizes I’m holding her child,” Karanissa said. “You look fine just as you are; don’t worry about it.”

“You look...well, ‘fine’ isn’t strong enough,” Gresh replied.

“Thank you.”

Gresh started to form a question, but Karanissa answered before he started to speak.

“Ali is a princess here,” she said. “Alris is the king’s grandchild. I prefer not to fade completely into the background. I hope this dress will work to compete with the two of them.”

“I can’t imagine you fading into the background anywhere,” Gresh replied.

She smiled at him, much as she had at the baby a moment before. “Many men consider me too tall and thin and dark; they prefer their women a little fairer and more rounded, like Ali.” Gresh’s immediate thought would never, ever have been spoken aloud, but Karanissa was a witch; it didn’t need to be audible.

“Tobas has no fixed preference,” she said softly. “He tries very hard not to favor one of us over the other. Anything beyond that is none of your business; I say this much only so that I will not be troubled by your curious thoughts any further.”

“I’m sorry,” Gresh said. “If I could have prevented that thought, I would have.”

“Of course. And if I could have avoided hearing it—well, actually, I could have and should have; I was careless.” She sighed. “I was trying to hurry the conversation, so.... Ah! There they are!” Gresh looked up to see Tobas leading a smiling Alorria down the stairs. Tobas was still in his robe and cap; Alorria wore a green-and-white dress elaborately embroidered in green, black, and gold.

Where Karanissa’s white silk was unadorned and simple, clearly designed to draw attention to its wearer rather than itself, Alorria’s gown seemed intended as an exercise in ostentation, with fancywork at collar and cuffs, intricate lace ruffles across the bodice and around the hem, velvet puffs at the shoulders, and gold-edged slashes in either upper sleeve. Her hair had been brushed out and arranged so that the sides were swept back into two wings, then secured with the familiar golden coronet.

To Gresh, she looked old-fashioned and faintly ridiculous—no one would wear such a dress in present-day Ethshar—but he knew that this was the semi-formal attire of a princess in the Small Kingdoms. Whatever her garb, she was an attractive young woman, and judging by her expression very pleased with her appearance, so he tried to look appropriately admiring.

He wondered whether Karanissa was still listening to his thoughts and detecting his faint scorn for Alorria. He risked a glance at her and thought he saw a faint nod.

“Shall we go?” Alorria said, flouncing cheerfully off the bottom stair and snatching the baby from Karanissa’s arms.

Gresh made no comment as he was led through a veritable maze of corridors and stairwells; he was trying to take in as much of his surroundings as possible. He was also keeping an eye out for lurking spriggans. There ought to be some around here. Why didn’t he see any?

He accompanied the wizard’s family into a good-sized dining hall where a few dozen people were milling about; places were set at the long table, but no one had been seated yet.

His party was greeted with shouts of greeting and much shaking of hands and slapping of backs, but Gresh could not follow any of the happy conversation—it was all in an unfamiliar language he took to be Dwomoritic. Alorria was smiling and laughing, clearly in her element. Gresh thought he understood now what Tobas saw in her beyond a pretty face.

He heard his own name spoken a few times, and then suddenly he was shaking hands with a young man with silky white hair, red eyes, and unnaturally pale skin.

“A pleasure to meet you, Gresh,” he said, in perfect Ethsharitic. “I am Peren the White—Lord Peren the Dragonslayer, they call me here, but that’s just Small Kingdoms pomposity.”

“Dragon slayer?” Gresh said, as he eyed the man’s strange hair.

“I didn’t slay it, of course,” Peren said. “Tobas did. He blew its head off with a single spell. But I was there, trying to help, and before that I was the one who got him out of his castle when he was trapped there, so he’s always shared the credit with me, and I got a share of the reward.” He pulled forward a young woman who was unmistakably related to Alorria, and who wore a green dress that was also clearly akin to Alorria’s. “This is my wife, Her Highness Princess Tinira of Dwomor—she and her dowry were my share.”

“I am honored to meet you,” the princess said with a curtsey. Her Ethsharitic was heavily accented, but intelligible.

“The honor is mine,” Gresh said with a bow, thinking as he did how odd it was that princesses, nominally people of high rank, were treated as mere property, to be handed out as rewards for heroism.

He knew the reasoning behind it—princesses were too good to marry mere ordinary men, but at the same time the Small Kingdoms produced a surplus that had to be dealt with somehow—but it still seemed slightly perverse.

“I know you have met my sister Alorria,” Tinira said. “Have you met any of my other siblings?” Gresh turned up an empty palm. “I have only just arrived....”

“I will fetch them! Wait here!” She turned and bustled away, leaving Gresh and Peren together.

“A lovely young woman,” Gresh remarked.

“I’m a lucky man,” Peren agreed, watching his wife.

“You are an unusual man,” Gresh said. “If you will pardon my impertinence, might you be interested in selling some of your hair?”

“What?” His gaze whipped back to Gresh.

“Your hair. I believe it might be quite valuable in my business.” Peren frowned. “Aren’t you...well, some sort of adventurer? How would my hair be of any value?”

“No, no,” Gresh said. “I’m not an adventurer; I’m a wizards’ supplier. I sell the wizards of Ethshar of the Rocks their dragon’s blood and virgin’s tears—and if I’m not mistaken, pure white hair such as yours is useful in certain obscure spells. I’ve never found a reliable source. Fortunately, demand has been so slight that I haven’t needed a source, but it’s best to be prepared.”

“You’re...a supplier? A merchant?”

“Yes, exactly. A merchant, like my father before me, save that he trades in more ordinary goods—exotic woods, perfumes, that sort of thing.” As he said that, it occurred to Gresh to wonder whether his father had ever done any business here; he mostly traded with Tintallion and the other northern lands, but there had been a few expeditions to the Small Kingdoms....

“And you have a market for albino hair?” Peren asked.

“I believe so, yes. Not a huge quantity of it, but I could certainly use a few locks.” Peren stared at him for a moment, then said, “I have two questions, and I’m not sure which to ask first.”

“If one of them is ‘How much will you pay?,’ I’ll need to....”

“No,” Peren interrupted. “That’s later. The first one is, if you’re just a merchant, why has Tobas brought you halfway across the World?”

“Oh—has he told you why he’s here?”

Peren grimaced. “He has half a dozen reasons to be here, beginning with showing his daughter off to her grandparents, but I assume you mean that he’s running some mysterious errand for the Wizards’

Guild. He said you were helping him with it, but not the nature of it.”

“Then I shan’t say too much either, but I will say that I have a reputation back home as a man who can always find what his customers want, if the price is right. I have agreed to obtain a certain object for Tobas and the Guild, and I believe it to be somewhere in the mountains to the northeast of this castle.

It’s not adventuring; it’s just a hunting expedition. Just business.”

“Not a dragon?”

“No.”

“Fair enough.”

“And your other question?”

“Simple enough. I’ve dealt with wizards’ suppliers before—I was the one who sold off the blood and scales and teeth and all the rest of it when we killed the dragon seven years ago. I’ve sold them a few other things since then—as I’m sure you know, there are certain spells that call for ingredients that are best obtained by someone with an intimate relationship with a royal family.”

“Yes, I know. Your question?”

“Why is it that in all these seven years, none of those suppliers ever asked about my hair?” Gresh smiled and turned up a palm.

“Amateurs,” he said. “You were dealing with amateurs. I, Lord Peren, am a professional.” The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Thirteen

By the time dinner was served Gresh had made the acquaintance of a significant portion of the royal family of Dwomor—King Derneth II, Queen Alris, the king’s brother Prince Debrel, the king’s unmarried sisters Princess Sadra and Princess Shasha, and half a dozen of the king’s nine children, the others having been married off to the royal families of other kingdoms. Three grandchildren were also present, counting little Alris—known here, understandably, as Alris the Younger. One prince had a wife, recently brought from Yorbethon, and still clearly not entirely adjusted to her new surroundings.

Two of the absent daughters also reportedly had children, but those children, like their mothers, were elsewhere.

If nothing else, it was clear that there was no danger that the current dynasty would run out of heirs any time soon.

Unfortunately, only about half the royal family and a handful of retainers spoke any Ethsharitic, and not all of them were anything close to fluent, leaving Gresh unable to communicate with most of the company. He still tried to make the best impression he could, especially when he was presented to the king and queen.

He had to explain repeatedly that he was not a wizard nor an adventurer, merely a businessman.

All in all, he did not consider the evening a great social success; his unfamiliarity with the language put a damper on any attempt to strike up an intimate acquaintance with one of the local women, since he was not stupid enough to attempt to seduce a princess or anyone with a husband in evidence, and his other conversations all seemed to follow the same route while going nowhere.

The food was excellent, though—plentiful servings of well-seasoned roast beef, cabbage soup, stewed apples, and cherry compote. The wine was astonishingly good; when he remarked on it he was informed that Dwomor prided itself on its vineyards, and the only reason they weren’t better known was that they didn’t produce enough of a surplus for significant exports.

He did manage to conduct some business, after a fashion; he added Peren to his permanent list of suppliers and talked to several people about spriggan sightings in the area. He was surprised how few people had ever seen the little pests; a few even professed not to believe in the creatures at all.

That seemed very odd, given that the mirror was in the area. Rather than being attracted by Tobas’s magic, the spriggans seemed to be deliberately avoiding Dwomor Keep. There was clearly something going on here that he didn’t understand, and he wondered whether it was related to whatever secrets Tobas was keeping. If there really was a powerful countercharm of some sort in Tobas’s possession, such as Gresh had previously theorized, perhaps the spriggans feared it.

He had no hard evidence, though, and no one he spoke to seemed to know anything about it, so at last he dropped the subject.

When the meal was over the Lord Chamberlain, who turned out to be the thin old man who had first knocked on the sitting room door, took him aside. “We have arranged accommodations for you, sir; if you would follow me, I will show you to your rooms.”

At that Gresh realized just how tired he was. He had started the day in Ethshar of the Sands, spent more than half the day on the flying carpet, visited Ethshar of the Spices, arrived in Dwomor, and survived a royal supper, all of it after a rather poor night’s sleep. He was happy to follow the chamberlain to a pleasant apartment on the second floor.

All his luggage was still in the bottomless bag in Tobas’s sitting room, though. He mentioned as much to the chamberlain.

“I will see to it, sir.”

Gresh settled into a chair, planning to just rest his feet for a moment; he was awakened by a knock at the door, where he found a footman holding his bag. He accepted it with a polite remark that the man obviously didn’t understand, but the two of them exchanged bows, and then the footman went about his business, leaving Gresh alone.

Gresh considered his situation for perhaps two or three minutes. Then he made his way into the bedchamber, dropped the bag, pulled off his boots, blew out the candle, and fell into bed.

No crying infants disturbed him; no woman’s lingering scent troubled his dreams. He slept well and awoke refreshed and was not surprised to see, upon looking out a window at the angle of the sun, that he had slept long. The morning was well advanced, the sun high in the east.

He was hungry, but not ravenous, and decided that he would prefer not to eat breakfast in the same clothes he had worn to bed. He began emptying his bag. He was unsure how long he would be staying in Dwomor Keep, but he thought he might as well unpack thoroughly.

He had pulled out perhaps half the contents when a knock sounded at the apartment door. He answered it and found Tobas.

“Good morning,” the wizard said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all; I was just unpacking a little,” Gresh said.

“I see. I was wondering what your plans are for today. Will you be heading out to look for the mirror?”

“Actually, I would very much like to get a look at where the mirror first entered the World, and I was hoping you could fly me there this afternoon. I assume it won’t take very long to reach the area?” Tobas hesitated. “The carpet can’t take you all the way,” he said. “I can get you to the general area and point out a few things—it’s perhaps an hour’s flight—but it isn’t a safe place to fly.” Gresh stared at him. “Why not?” he asked, baffled. He remembered now that Tobas had said the center of Ethshar of the Sands wasn’t a safe place to fly, either. That part of the city was where the usurper Tabaea died. And this place in the wilderness was where Derithon’s flying castle had crashed.

The all-purpose countercharm, if that’s what it was, was presumably involved.

“I can’t tell you that.”

Gresh glared for a moment, then said, “Fine. Get me as close as you can. Shall we meet at midday?”

“I’ll come find you,” Tobas said.

“Fine.”

Tobas bowed, and turned away. Gresh watched him go, then closed the door of the apartment.

Whatever the secret was Tobas was hiding—well, first off, he wasn’t hiding it very well.

Second—it appeared that whatever had been done in the mountains and in the overlord’s palace had after-effects. That was interesting—and did it have anything to do with the spriggans’ mirror?

He would probably find out that afternoon. He returned to unpacking his bag.

A few hours later he had sorted out his belongings, changed his clothes, stuffed a few carefully selected items in a small shoulder-pack, stuffed several others back in the bottomless bag, and had gotten lost wandering the castle corridors looking for a bite to eat. The servants he encountered did not include anyone who could make sense of his Ethsharitic or his gestures, but he eventually found himself directed to the Lord Chamberlain, who sent him back to his apartments with assurances that a tray would be sent up forthwith.

The tray did arrive—bread, cheese, wine, figs, and dried apricots—and he was licking the last of the sticky residue of the figs from his fingers when Tobas knocked on the door again.

After admitting the wizard, Gresh finished his glass of wine and re-corked the bottle, then grabbed his little pack. He took a moment to reassure himself that the bottomless bag was tucked out of sight; then he followed Tobas upstairs.

Ten minutes later the carpet rose from the platform outside Tobas’s apartments with the two men on it—and no women or children, nor any luggage but Gresh’s pack.

It seemed much roomier that way.

About forty minutes later they came swooping down over a forested valley, and Tobas said,

“There it is.” He pointed at an impressive cliff ahead.

Gresh followed the pointing finger and saw the ruins at the foot of the cliff, barely visible among the trees. He blinked, and said, “Fly level, please.”

“We are flying level,” Tobas replied. “It’s the castle that’s crooked.” Then the carpet veered off, swooping up to the right.

Gresh turned his head to keep the castle in sight.

It was still some distance away, so he could not make out all the details, but he could see the tops of five towers and one gable end protruding above the treetops. As Tobas had said, the castle was crooked; the trees made that obvious, now that he was paying attention. The entire structure was tilted at a ridiculous angle; it was a wonder that any of the towers still stood.

The roofs were red tile, though streaked dark with dirt and moss; the walls were smooth stone, either off-white or a very pale yellow. Gresh was not sure which. It appeared to be a very simple structure, with no ornamentation or elaboration.

The carpet came around in a full circle, and Gresh realized they were descending into a clearing in the forest. “Are we landing?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can’t we get closer than this?”

“Not safely, no.”

“Wait a minute, then,” Gresh said. He unslung the pack from his shoulder and loosened the drawstring, then began rummaging in it.

The carpet slowed and descended further, making another loop. The trees now hid the castle completely.

Gresh pulled Chira’s talisman from the pack and gestured over it, setting it to detect anything between a foot and half a foot in height, and taller than it was long. That, he thought, should limit it to spriggans. Squirrels and other such creatures should be longer than they were tall, at least when moving.

He spoke the command that activated the device.

Nothing happened; the surface did not glow, and no markings appeared.

He reset it for all small creatures, as a test, and promptly located what appeared to be several mice, squirrels, chipmunks, and other animals. He switched the settings back, and it went dead again.

“What is that?” Tobas asked, staring.

Gresh looked up, startled. He had been so involved in working the talisman that he had not consciously noticed that the carpet was now on the ground, and Tobas was standing on it and looking down at him.

“Sorcery,” he said.

“You’re a sorcerer?”

“I know a sorcerer.”

Tobas did not seem entirely satisfied by that response, but before he could say anything more, Gresh said, “Can we get any closer to the castle?”

“On foot, certainly—we can walk right up to it. But it’s not safe to fly the carpet any closer.” Gresh considered that for a moment, staring into the forest toward the castle, then shook his head. “Get us airborne again and move us around to the...” He glanced up at the sun, then at the disk in his hand. “...the east,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because the mirror isn’t in this area.”

Tobas started to ask another question, then stopped. He sat down and waved a hand, and the carpet rose. “You know, it’s only an hour’s walk to the castle from here,” he said. “We could visit it, if you want.”

“Why would I want to?” Gresh said. “Do you think the mirror might be in there?”

“No,” Tobas said. “In fact, I’m sure it isn’t.”

“Because the same thing that makes it unsafe to fly there would make the mirror...well, it would do something to the mirror?”

“Yes,” Tobas admitted reluctantly. “It wouldn’t work there. That was why I let the spriggans take it in the first place—I never thought they’d get it out of the... out of... away from the castle.”

“You have some kind of powerful countercharm there?”

“What? No, I... Not exactly.”

“But there’s something there that interferes with certain spells. And you used the same thing against Tabaea in the overlord’s palace in Ethshar of the Sands.”

“Not just.... Well, after a fashion.”

“Do you know which spells it stops? How certain are you it affects the mirror?”

“It prevents all wizardry,” Tobas said. “All of it. It doesn’t cancel out anything, or counter it, or reverse it—it’s just that no magical effects happen there.”

“So it didn’t break the enchantment on the mirror, when it was in the castle?”

“No. It just... suspended it, I suppose. And the Transporting Tapestry, and everything else. The carpet can’t fly there—it’s just a carpet. For that matter, I suppose Karanissa ages any time she’s in there—but the instant the mirror was somewhere normal, spriggans must have started popping out again.

And the tapestry still works, the carpet flies, and Karanissa doesn’t age, as long as they’re somewhere normal. If I use the Spell of the Spinning Coin and then I go in there, the coin still spins—but I can’t spin one when I’m there, even if I immediately leave for someplace else. You do understand that this is a Guild secret and to reveal it may carry a death sentence?”

“You’re revealing it to me.”

“We’re on Guild business, and you’d already figured part of it out, and I can’t see any way to not tell you if you’re going to look for the mirror around here. I don’t think Kaligir would appreciate it if you wasted all his powders and potions by trying to use them in there.” Gresh grimaced. “That’s a good point. Or even just wasting time searching the area, if you’re really sure the mirror can’t be in there.”

“I’m sure, believe me. No wizardry has worked there in four hundred years. There’s an entire town up on the cliff that had to be abandoned as a result.”

“Four hundred years?”

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

“So that castle—that was Derithon’s? And Varrin’s Greater Propulsion shut down when it came too close to whatever it is, and the tapestry stopped working, and that was how Karanissa was trapped in there?”

Tobas sighed. “Yes.”

“Does witchcraft still work there? Or sorcery?”

“Witchcraft definitely does; I can’t be entirely certain about sorcery, as I haven’t tested it, but I believe it does.”

“Karanissa might be useful to have along, then.”

“If we were going to the castle, maybe, but you just said we didn’t need to.”

“True. A good point.” Gresh stroked his beard thoughtfully, then glanced down at the talisman he still held. “Take us around... what do you call it? Is there a whole area here where wizardry doesn’t work?”

Reluctantly, Tobas admitted, “Yes.”

“What shape is it? Is it a line, or...?”

“Spherical. We mapped it out years ago; it’s a sphere close to two miles in diameter, centered on top of the cliff. That must be where he stood....” He stopped.

“What? Who?”

“Never mind. It’s a sphere, centered on top of the cliff.” Gresh nodded thoughtfully. “Two miles. And in Ethshar of the Sands...?”

“None of your business. Much smaller.”

“Of course. And your plan for disposing of the mirror, the one you wouldn’t tell me—is to take it into that sphere and smash it?”

“Yes,” Tobas admitted. “And now that you’ve learned my secret, where did you want to go?”

“Oh, yes. Around to the east, along the edge of the...the sphere.” He looked down at the talisman. “Low and slow, please.”

He did not expect to find the mirror in the woods, of course; unless the spriggan had completely fooled him it was in a cave, not a forest, and in a mountain, not a valley. He did, however, want to find a spriggan or two. He hoped to backtrack some to the mirror, and he was also trying to figure out why so few ever reached Dwomor Keep. It might turn out to be important.

Or it might not matter at all. Now that he knew a little more about it, he had to admit that Tobas’s plan of taking the mirror into the no-wizardry area and smashing it sounded feasible. It was simple and direct, and he couldn’t see anything obvious that might go wrong.

They still had to find the mirror, though. He knew it was in a cave, in sight of a ruin, probably facing east, and at one time it had been in that ruined castle over there, so it seemed very likely that it was somewhere in the mountains just to the west—why would the spriggans have taken it any farther than they had to?

But you never knew, with spriggans. It might be twenty leagues away in Vlagmor; that might explain why so few spriggans troubled Dwomor.

For the moment, though, he intended to start with the area around the castle. He peered intently at the sorcerous talisman in his hand as the carpet sailed gracefully along, skimming the treetops.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Fourteen

They had made roughly a quarter-circle around the fallen castle when Gresh finally spotted a spriggan.

“Down!” he barked.

Tobas gestured, and the carpet dove to the ground. Gresh vaulted off, talisman in hand. He left Tobas standing on the carpet, blinking foolishly, as he dashed into the bushes. Mindless of the thorns and branches tearing at his sleeves, he reached forward to where the talisman indicated a small moving object.

“Help help help help help!” a squeaky voice shrieked. “A crazy man is grabbing for me!”

“Come out where I can see you!” Gresh shouted.

“No! You’re grabbing!”

Gresh stopped and straightened up as best he could in the middle of the thicket. “No grabbing,” he said. “Just talk.”

“No grabbing?”

“If you stay in the bushes I’ll grab you, all right,” Gresh growled, as he looked at the disk in his hand. The spriggan was about four feet in front of him, in the thickest and thorniest part of the bushes. If he dove for it he would have just one chance. If he missed, he wouldn’t be able to disentangle himself before the spriggan had put a hundred feet between them. “If you come out and talk, no grabbing.”

“Promise?”

The spriggan wasn’t moving. “I promise.”

“You first.”

“All right, then. I’m going to step back out of the bushes, and then you’ll come out, and we’ll talk. No grabbing—as long as you talk. If you try to run away, you’ll make me very angry, and you wouldn’t like that.”

“You first.”

Carefully, with much snapping and scratching, Gresh backed out of the bushes until he stood in an open patch beside the carpet. He waited, hands on his hips.

A moment later a small green face peered out at him. “No grabbing?” it squeaked.

“No grabbing,” Gresh agreed.

“Talk?”

“Talk.”

“What talk?”

“I want you to tell me a few things.”

“Fun things?”

“Maybe.”

“What things?”

“Where did you come from?”

The spriggan blinked up at him. “Mirror,” it said.

That was exactly what Gresh wanted to hear. “Where is that mirror?” he asked.

The spriggan hesitated, looking around the clearing; then it stuck an arm out and pointed to the northwest. “That way.”

“How far?”

Spriggans might not be human, but there was no misunderstanding the expression on the creature’s face as it said, “Don’t know.” It obviously thought Gresh was an idiot for asking.

“How long ago did you come out of the mirror? Today? Yesterday? A sixnight ago? Longer?”

“Not today.”

“Yesterday?”

“No. How much more talk?”

“We’re almost done; I just want to find the mirror.”

“Why?”

“I promised I would.”

“Stupid promise.”

“Maybe,” Gresh admitted. “But I made it anyway.”

“You no fun.”

“I know. No fun at all. Where’s the mirror?”

“That way.” It pointed again. “Maybe four days ago.”

“In a cave?”

The spriggan frowned. “How you know that?”

“It’s still in the cave?” Gresh persisted.

“Done talking.” And with that, the spriggan ducked back into the bush and vanished.

Gresh reached for his talisman, then stopped. There was no point in harassing one particular spriggan. There would be more of them out there. Instead he brushed off the worst of the twigs and bits of leaf, then turned and marched back to his waiting companion.

“I heard that,” Tobas said.

“Yes, I would assume so,” Gresh said, as he settled cross-legged onto the carpet. “I didn’t think you were deaf.”

“You were interrogating that spriggan.”

“Well, yes. And you’re stating the obvious.”

“Is that how you plan to find the mirror? Is that how you know more or less where it is?”

“I questioned a spriggan back in Ethshar of the Rocks, yes.”

“But anyone could do that!”

Gresh looked at him. “But did anyone do it?” he asked. “I’m the one who actually thought of it and tried it, so it doesn’t really matter whether anyone else could have.”

“But that’s.... You’re charging the Guild Enral’s Eternal Youth for that?”

“You and Karanissa told me the Guild would pay almost any price for the mirror. You never said anything about using esoteric methods to find it. Simple methods often work just as well.”

“But...just asking?”

“Do you have a better idea? You tried scrying spells and oracular deities and all the other possibilities offered by modern magic, and they didn’t work, as I recall. My method has at least gotten us close.”

“By asking spriggans.”

“Yes. After all, they’re the ones who know where the mirror is.”

“But you just... just asking....”

“Yes. You’d be surprised how often asking questions gets answers. Very few people—or creatures—are as obsessed with secrecy as you wizards are.” Tobas stared at him for a moment, then said, “I was right. You are smarter than I am. It’s good common sense, and I didn’t think of it—though now I feel as if I should have. With wits like that, why didn’t you become a magician, or go to work for the overlord?”

“Because I didn’t want to; I didn’t like all the rules they have to worry about. I chose to be a merchant, like my father before me—and I’m glad I did. I’m good at it. Now, can we continue the search and still be back at Dwomor Keep before dark?”

Tobas glanced at the position of the sun, then nodded. “We have about an hour, I’d say.”

“Then let’s get this carpet moving.”

Tobas made a gesture, and the carpet rose gently. “Where to?” he asked.

Gresh pointed northwest, the same direction the spriggan had. “That way.” He grimaced. “I just wish I knew how far a spriggan wanders in four days.”

“Well, it’s about a three-day hike from here to Dwomor Keep for a human, if you aren’t particularly rushing.” The carpet started drifting forward, as well as up.

“Somehow I doubt a spriggan would get anywhere near that far.”

“So do I.”

Gresh looked around as the carpet reached treetop level, then protested, “I said that way!”

“We can’t,” Tobas replied. “That would take us through an edge of the dead place. The sphere.” Gresh bit back a retort; he supposed the wizard had a point. The detour would make it that much harder to follow the spriggan’s direction, though.

But then, how sure was he that the spriggan had been right? It undoubtedly knew which way it had been walking when it reached that thicket, but it had probably wandered back and forth during those four days; the direction was at best an approximation. With a sigh, he picked up Chira’s talisman and began searching for more spriggans.

A pair skittered by briefly, at the edges of the device’s range—but then the carpet swooped around into a loop, spiraling upward to top a cliff and get over a rocky peak that intruded on their course, and Gresh lost contact with them.

They soared over the mountaintop and began descending the much gentler western slope.

Suddenly the talisman sparkled and buzzed with the presence of spriggans ahead—but only briefly and unevenly.

“Slow down!” Gresh called.

Tobas gestured, and the rug slowed. “What is it?”

Gresh did not answer; instead he studied the talisman, trying to make sense of its responses. It took him a moment to remember that it did not detect spriggans as such; it detected motion. The creatures ahead had been moving, then stopped, but every so often one would shift position, and the talisman would flicker.

They were hiding, obviously.

Or perhaps the local squirrels sometimes sat up on their hind legs and looked around; that would probably show up in just the same manner. He sighed. “Keep going,” he said. “But not too fast.” Tobas obeyed.

Gresh kept a close watch on the talisman, but looked up every so often to scan the surrounding countryside for caves. The spriggan he had questioned had said the mirror was inside a mountain, so the cave was in a mountainside, not down in the valley below. There were plenty of mountainsides in sight, but none had any obvious openings in them.

He had hoped that the cave would be the obvious place, in the cliff right next to the fallen castle, but if Tobas was right that was impossible—that was inside the dead-to-wizardry zone.

At least, unless the cave stretched back far enough into the mountain to reach beyond the sphere....

“Are you sure the dead area is a sphere?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tobas said.

Gresh was slightly startled that the wizard did not hesitate or qualify his response in any way, but gave a quick flat affirmative that left no room for argument. “What if there were a tunnel going back into the cliff?” he asked. “How far would it have to go to get out of the area?” Tobas looked off to the left, toward the cliff and the castle’s towers showing above the trees, and considered the question carefully.

“About three-fourths of a mile, I’d say. A little less if it sloped steeply downward.”

“Oh.” A cave that long was not out of the question, but it seemed unlikely that the spriggans would have carried the mirror so deep into the earth.

On the other hand, the spriggan had not originally said it emerged in a cave. It had said it was inside a mountain. Three-quarters of a mile would definitely be well inside.

He needed to capture another spriggan for questioning; that was all there was to it.

Then he looked at the talisman and saw the golden trace of a moving spriggan ahead. “That way,” he said, pointing.

Tobas obeyed.

A second spriggan’s trail appeared, and a third, all three moving west to east.

That was interesting, that they were all going in the same direction. They might be heading away from the cave, looking for somewhere they could have more fun. Instead of directing Tobas toward the three of them, therefore, Gresh decided to backtrack them. “West,” he said.

The carpet sailed on, just above the treetops, down one slope and up the next, as Gresh studied the talisman. He spotted more spriggans in the forest below—and all of them seemed to be moving east.

Then their numbers began to increase; the talisman sparkled with their trails, and now some were veering north or south.

But none were going west, even now.

Gresh looked up. The carpet was rising steeply. They were rounding the northern end of the cliff now, moving out of sight of the fallen castle, and the spriggans were still scattering out from somewhere to the west.

But hadn’t the spriggan said the castle was in sight of the cave mouth?

No. It had said that a ruin was, but it had never really said what ruin. Gresh had just assumed it was the crooked castle.

“Are there any other ruins around here?” he asked.

Tobas glanced back at him. “There’s an entire abandoned town up on that mountainside,” he said, pointing up at the top of the cliff.

“It’s in the dead area?”

“Oh, yes. That was where we first found out that wizardry didn’t work.”

“Ah.”

They swept up over the top of the slope, and Gresh could see the ruined town. That, he decided, might well be the ruins the spriggan had meant—yes, it had said it saw a castle or a tower, but it had admitted it knew nothing of architecture. “That way,” he said, pointing. “As close as you can get without going in the sphere.”

They flew on for several more minutes while Gresh tried to locate more spriggans and determine which direction they were moving, but they had become scarce again. Finally Tobas said, “We need to head back soon.”

Gresh hesitated, looking up at the sun. It was almost brushing the mountaintops ahead.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“If you like.”

“I do,” Gresh said. “I’m sure the mirror is around here somewhere. We just need to find it.”

“That is the general idea,” Tobas agreed. He gestured, and the carpet swooped upward and headed toward Dwomor Keep.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Fifteen

For their second day of searching Gresh insisted on an earlier start and told Tobas to start just to the west of the ruined town. He also stuck a long-handled net through his belt before departure and added a few snares to the items already in his little shoulder-pack.

They spent an hour or so exploring from the air, and Gresh was able to locate what appeared to be a point of origin from which spriggans were radiating to the north and east—but not to the south, because that would have led them through the no-wizardry area, and very few to the west, directly over the mountains. That neatly explained why so few found their way to Dwomor, which lay to the southwest.

Gresh had Tobas circle over the area, looking for a cave.

The area was a mountainside facing east, and much of it did indeed have a view of the ruined town on the western slope of the next mountain over. The fallen castle lay beyond that, at the foot of the cliff east of the town. A trail led off to the southwest, and Tobas assured him that that led, by a somewhat circuitous route, back to Dwomor, but it passed through the no-wizardry bubble, so the spriggans presumably avoided it.

The forest did not completely cover this particular mountain; several areas were bare brown rock. There were grassy and mossy patches, as well, and brush-covered areas where the slope was too steep or the soil too thin for trees. Gresh scanned these carefully, looking for a cave-mouth, but he saw none.

Chira’s talisman was sparkling and sizzling with spriggans as they circled, and here they were moving in every direction, so that no exact center could be found, no spot from which they all radiated.

There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of spriggans in the bushes and trees below. Gresh saw a few running across open country, as well.

It was obvious that some of them did not immediately leave the area once they had emerged from the mirror. Gresh wondered what they found to eat; some of the bushes had apparently been nibbled on, but that would hardly feed the numbers the talisman was reporting. The wizards had assured him that spriggans didn’t need to eat, that they were incapable of starving to death, but they certainly liked to eat and felt hungry when they didn’t. There couldn’t possibly be enough food for the spriggans below unless they were eating tree bark and dry grass, or just dirt.

In fact, the number of spriggans below was rather intimidating. Somehow Gresh had assumed that as soon as they came out of the mirror they all promptly marched off looking for people to annoy, but apparently that was not exactly the case. Karanissa had said there were half a million of the little pests in the World, and Gresh had pictured them being fairly evenly spread over the entirety of it, from Vond to Tintallion, but now he was beginning to wonder whether a significant portion hadn’t stayed right here.

Chira’s talisman was glittering as if a wizard had cast some sort of glamour on it.

For the first time it occurred to Gresh that he might not be able to simply walk into the cave and pick up the mirror. If there really were hundreds of spriggans down there, and they wanted to defend it, he might face a real challenge.

Even after a dozen circles he could not see a cave anywhere. He had to conclude that it was under the trees somewhere. He didn’t want to go over the whole mountainside on foot, but it didn’t seem he was going to spot it from the air.

“Land,” he told Tobas.

“Anywhere in particular?” the wizard asked.

“No. Wherever is convenient.”

Tobas nodded and sent the carpet downward, landing it on a relatively level patch of meadow well up the mountain. Spriggans fled squealing as its shadow swept over them, and the carpet came to rest, crushing a few square yards of delicate yellow wildflowers.

Gresh stood up and looked around. Downslope to the east the meadow ended in a rocky outcropping and a sudden drop-off, and below that was a patch of forest—mostly birch and aspen, from what Gresh could see. To the north was a stretch of broken ground and tangled brush. Westward the meadow rose gradually for perhaps fifty yards, then suddenly gave way to steep bare stone jutting upward toward the peak. To the south the meadow dropped away at the shoulder of the mountain, providing a spectacular view of forested hills rolling away into the distance.

Gresh pulled the net from his belt, holding it halfway along the handle, and looked about. He had seen dozens of spriggans as the carpet descended, but they had all apparently taken cover. “Hai! ” he called. “Anyone here?”

“They were all over the place a moment ago,” Tobas said.

“They still are,” Gresh said. He had spotted several of the silly creatures, crouching down to blend in with the tall grass, weeds, and flowers. It appeared there was a reason they were green.

“Anyone want to talk to me a little?” he called.

“We have fun?” someone ventured warily.

“We might,” Gresh said.

“You put down net?”

“If one of you comes out to talk to me, I’ll put down the net.” Several squeaky voices whispered to one another; then one spriggan stood up. “Spriggan talk,” it said.

“Good!” Gresh tossed the net onto the carpet, then knelt down in the grass. “Come and talk.” The spriggan approached cautiously. “You want what?”

“I want to know where the mirror is that you came out of,” Gresh said. “I know it’s in a cave somewhere on this mountain, but I don’t know exactly where. Can you show me?” The spriggan considered that for a moment, then said, “That not sound like fun.”

“Could you show me anyway?”

“Promise no net?”

“If you show me, I won’t net you. I promise.”

The creature hesitated, clearly thinking hard.

“No tell!” another spriggan called.

“Not think it good idea....”

“I’ll give you candy,” Gresh said, before the spriggan could complete a firm refusal. He reached back and unslung the pack from his shoulder. He had thought he might need to bribe the little pests at some point, and his pack held a pound of honey-drops.

A pound might not be enough for the occasion, though—he glanced around and realized there were hundreds of spriggans surrounding the carpet. They were not bothering to hide very carefully anymore. He had never seen anything remotely close to this many at once before.

“Candy?” the spriggan said brightly.

Several other little green heads popped up here and

there.

“First show me where the mirror is.”

“Um. Not sure....”

“Well, whoever shows me gets the candy.” He opened his pack, found the bag of candy, and pulled a golden honey-drop the size of his thumb out of the paper sack. He held it up for the spriggans to see. It occurred to him that a candy that a human could pop in his mouth and suck down to nothing in a couple of minutes would be the size of a whole meal to one of the little creatures.

“Oooooh! ”

“Show! Show!”

“I show you!”

Half a dozen eager spriggans jumped out of the tall grass, reaching for the candy he held high above their heads.

“Show me, and I’ll give you the candy,” he called.

“This way! This way!” shouted a dozen spriggans, even as a dozen others tried to shush them.

Gresh had trouble keeping track of any individual in the tall grass, but he could plainly see the general movement toward the west, toward the exposed stone of the upper slope. He followed, holding the candy high in one hand, the open pack again slung on his shoulder and held in place with the other hand.

“Gresh?” Tobas called.

“Stay with the carpet,” Gresh told him. “In fact, you might want to get airborne, in case we need to make a quick escape.”

“Yes, of course,” Tobas called. The grass rustled as the carpet rose a foot or so. Gresh did not look back, but kept his attention focused on the spriggans as he followed them toward the rocks.

As he walked he studied the stony slope ahead, but he still did not see a cave mouth; it must, he thought, be hidden somehow. Could someone have cast an illusion spell, perhaps? Spriggans seemed to have some magical abilities, such as their talent at opening locks, but surely they couldn’t have done such a thing. Had some wizard done them a favor, for some reason? If not, then the spriggans had been either very lucky or very clever to have found such a well-concealed refuge. There were a few cracks and crevices in the rocks, but no cave....

Then one of the spriggans hopped up on a rock and thrust its hand into one of the cracks. “Here!

Here!” it called. “Cave here!”

Several others quickly joined it, squeaking and pointing. Gresh’s heart sank as he broke into a trot.

He began cursing himself for a fool as he approached the rocks. He had been thinking of the cave as one a grown man could fit in, but that was stupid. Why in the World would spriggans want one that big? They would undoubtedly feel much safer with their precious mirror tucked into a cave a human couldn’t fit in—an opening an eight-inch spriggan could slip through would be just a useless crack to a six-foot man!

He strode up to the rocks and peered into the crack the spriggans were pointing to; sure enough, he could see no back to it. Instead of ending, it seemed to open out into darkness inside the stony wall.

The crack ran about four feet across the slope, between two stone slabs, and when he thrust in his arm he could not feel anything but cool air.

But the opening was no more than six inches high at its widest point.

He turned and looked at the opposite slope and discovered that the trees hid most of the ruined town from here, but one moderately large stone structure happened to be plainly visible. It was not a castle or tower, but to a spriggan it might well look like one—it was round on one end, and roofless.

That was obviously what his informant had seen. Everything fit. He turned back to the horizontal slit in the rocks.

“The mirror is in there?” he asked.

The shrill chorus of “Yes, yes, yes!” was deafening.

“Candy now!” a spriggan said. The chorus began chanting, “Candy, candy, candy!”

“You promised!” shrilled one voice.

“Can you bring the mirror out, so I can see it?” Gresh asked.

The hundred voices were suddenly stilled. For a moment the only sounds were rustling leaves and the wind in the grass.

Then one shocked voice said, “Not allowed!”

“Mirror stays in cave,” another added.

“Spriggans could die,” said a third.

“Promised candy if we showed cave,” someone said. “Didn’t say fetch mirror.”

“How do I know it’s really in there?” Gresh countered.

The spriggans looked at one another; then a large brownish one said, “Wait.” With surprising agility, it hopped up to the crack in the rocks and trotted into the opening—it barely had to duck at all Gresh ducked his head, though, to peer into the cave after the spriggan. He shaded his eyes and tried to follow the creature’s movement.

It was sliding down a slope; Gresh could see its brown back as it slipped into the gloom of the interior. The crack did open out, and the spriggan vanished into the darkness.

“Bring light!” the spriggan called.

Gresh blinked, then looked around. He pulled up a clump of dead weeds and twisted them into a makeshift torch, then called to Tobas, “Do you have a tinderbox?”

“Something better,” Tobas called back, as he fumbled at his belt-pouch. “Hold that thing up.” Gresh obeyed, and a moment later Tobas did something with his dagger and a bit of orange powder, and one end of the bundle of weeds burst into vigorous flame—so vigorous, in fact, that Gresh had to move hastily to avoid being burned. He flung the flaming stalks into the cave.

Then he stooped and peered in after them and saw the brownish spriggan dragging the burning twist of weeds. The flame illuminated the cave’s interior quite well.

Gresh was astonished by what he saw; once past the impossibly narrow entrance the cave was really quite good-sized. It extended at least fifteen or twenty feet back into the mountain, and much of it was high enough that a man could stand upright. It seemed to extend across the full width of the rock face, at least fifty feet from end to end—it was hard to be sure, with only the central portion lit. This whole section of slope, it appeared, was hollow. It looked as if a chunk of the mountainside had folded down upon itself, long ago—as if a cliff or ledge had collapsed and wedged itself across the top of what had been a small gully, covering it completely but not filling it in.

There were dozens of spriggans in there, shielding their eyes against the sudden glare, as the brownish one stood in the center of the cave holding his improvised torch near a small shining disk. As Gresh watched, a pair of scrawny green arms rose up out of the disk’s surface, as if it were the surface of a tiny pool, and then a spriggan pulled itself up with those arms, hopping out of what could only be the infamous mirror.

“There!” the brownish one called. “See? See?”

“I see,” Gresh acknowledged. “Come on up and get your candy, then.”

“Me, too!” shrieked one of the others, and a wild chorus of squeals erupted.

The brownish spriggan left the torch in the cave as it scampered back up to the opening, and out into the sunlight; Gresh waited until it emerged, then handed it the large honey-drop.

The spriggan promptly stuffed the candy in its mouth and smiled stickily at Gresh.

A hundred others shrieked, and two hundred hands stretched out hungrily. Gresh quickly began distributing the candy, making sure no one got more than one piece.

The bag emptied very quickly, and he handed it to a spriggan while saying apologetically, “All gone.”

“Nooooo! ” wailed a score of high-pitched voices, as the one with the bag turned the sack inside out and began desperately licking the last bits of sweet from it. Gresh held out his empty hands and retreated away from the cave mouth.

“Tobas,” he said in a conversational tone. “I think we should go now.” He glanced back over his shoulder.

The carpet had risen to perhaps three feet above the ground, and Tobas was watching uneasily as spriggans jumped up and down around it, trying to leap up onto it.

“Tobas?”

The carpet drifted higher, but no closer.

“Tobas!”

The wizard finally looked up and noticed Gresh moving away from the cave. He wiggled his fingers, and the carpet came swooping across the meadow. Gresh turned and ran for it, leaping onto it as Tobas brought it past.

A moment later the two men were seated safely on the carpet, Tobas at the front and Gresh near the back, sailing some twenty feet above the ground. The meadow below them seemed to be covered in spriggans shrieking for candy or shouting about mirrors and promises.

“It’s in there,” Gresh said grimly.

“What is?” Tobas asked.

“The mirror, of course. It’s in the cave there.”

“What cave? I saw you poking at the rocks, but I didn’t see a cave.” Gresh let his breath out in an exasperated sigh. “There’s a cave,” he said. “But the entrance is much too narrow for humans. The spriggans can climb in and out easily, but we can’t.”

“Oh. And the mirror’s inside? You’re sure?”

“I saw it,” Gresh said. “I saw a spriggan climb out of it.”

“So it’s really there? It’s not a fake?”

“Unless someone is casting some rather sophisticated illusions, it’s really in there.”

“We have to get in there, then.”

“Yes, of course,” Gresh agreed. “I had figured that much out myself. We need to get in there, or get the mirror out somehow. The question is, how? The spriggans don’t want to bring it out; they seem to have some sort of agreement among themselves that it must stay in there.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? One of them said that if it was brought out they could die, but I don’t have any idea why.”

“So we can’t just bribe them to fetch it? I saw how much they liked that candy of yours.”

“I don’t think so—not unless we bring enough candy for the entire half-million of the little pests, and I’m not sure even that would do it.”

“Then how can we get it out?”

Gresh grimaced. “You’re the wizard,” he said. “I was hoping you might have an idea.”

“You’re supposed to be the expert on fetching things.”

“And I can find a way, don’t you ever doubt it—but I hoped you might have a nice easy one.” Tobas considered that for a moment, looking down at the rocks and the seething mass of spriggans. “Ordinarily I might suggest using Riyal’s Transformation to shrink down to mouse size, but somehow I don’t think I want to go down there while I’m smaller than a spriggan,” he said.

“We might keep that as a last resort,” Gresh said.

“The Cloak of Ethereality would let me walk through the stone,” Tobas said. “But it only works on the wizard casting the spell, so I’d need to go in alone, and I couldn’t carry anything while ethereal, so I’d need to stay in the cave until it wore off and then hand the mirror out to someone.”

“That might work.”

“Then I’d need to use it again to get out. It takes eight hours to wear off—there’s no known way to reduce the time.”

“It still might work.”

“I’m not thrilled by the idea,” Tobas said. “Are there spriggans in the cave? Because they might not be very happy to see me in there, ethereal or not. And whoever I pass the mirror to... well, I wouldn’t be able to help much if anything happened before the eight hours were up.”

“Is there some way you could levitate the mirror out?”

Tobas considered that for a moment, then turned up an empty hand. “Varen’s Levitation would work if I could touch the mirror, and if wizardry will work on it—if it’s magic-resistant, like spriggans....”

“You need to touch it?” Gresh interrupted.

“Yes.”

“That won’t work, then, unless you get into the cave; it’s much too far back to reach from outside.”

“Oh.”

That exchange reminded Gresh of something, though. “Could your wife levitate it out?”

“Who, Alorria? She’s not a wizard....”

“No, your other wife. Karanissa. She’s a witch, and she can levitate. I saw her do it in Ethshar of the Spices.”

“Oh! Oh, of course. I don’t know—she probably could. But I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Well, you have some time to think of a better one on the flight back to the castle.” Tobas considered that, looked down at the meadow, then asked, “What if the spriggans move the mirror again, now that they know we’re looking for it? What if they hide it somewhere even worse?”

“If we’re quick we can be back here by mid-afternoon. I don’t think they’re organized enough to move it that fast. Besides, where would they find a better hiding place than that cave?”

“You’re probably right,” Tobas agreed. He looked up at the sun, only just past its zenith, then down at the meadow, where there were no signs of organized activity of any kind, but merely dozens of silly little creatures running about aimlessly. “You’re right. If we’re quick.”

“And...?”

“And we should go.” He gestured, and the carpet surged forward, picking up speed. As the wind whipped Gresh’s hair back, the carpet curved its path to the southwest, toward Dwomor Keep, leaving the spriggans, the meadow, the cave, and the mirror behind.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Sixteen

“You are not going anywhere with her without us,” Alorria said, sitting herself down on the carpet, Alris the Younger in her arms. She was wearing a white tunic and green skirt that did not go well with the rich reds and blues of the carpet, and the baby was wrapped in white bunting and a green blanket.

“Ali, you’re being silly,” Tobas said, hands on his hips. “This is magician business, and we’ll have Gresh with us....”

“You two are not going anywhere without us!” Alorria insisted.

“There are three of us, and we need Karanissa because she’s a witch, not because she’s my wife! We’ll be back by nightfall....”

“Find another witch, then.”

“There isn’t time!”

“Then take Alris and me along!”

“It isn’t safe for a baby!”

“It’s safe enough for the three of you.”

“We’re not babies!”

“I’m not, either, and I can look after Alris while you two do your magic!”

“Ali, get off the carpet.”

“No. Before you try to force me, remember who my father is and where we are.”

“I am not likely to ever forget,” Tobas said.

“Tobas, let her come,” Gresh said. “What are the spriggans going to do? They wouldn’t hurt a baby. We’re wasting time arguing.”

“Kara?” Tobas turned to his other wife, who was standing ready in a simple red dress, holding a bag she had hastily filled with things she thought might be useful in dealing with the spriggans and their enchanted mirror.

“I don’t care, so long as she stays out of the way when I’m working,” the witch replied.

“Fine, then,” Tobas said. “We’ll all go, and Ali and Alris can play with the spriggans while we steal their most precious possession and destroy it.”

“That might actually be a useful distraction,” Gresh said mildly.

“Oh, get on the carpet.”

Moments later all four of the adults were seated, each holding one bag nearby—Gresh had his powders and potions and tools in his small shoulder-pack, Tobas had his grimoire and the ingredients for various spells in a leather valise, Karanissa had assorted herbs and crystals to aid her witchcraft, and Alorria had a large collection of diapers, rags, and other baby supplies, and of course Alris was in her arms. At Tobas’s command the carpet rose smoothly into the air and sailed northeastward from Dwomor Keep.

“We need to do something about these bugs,” Alorria said, as she sheltered her daughter from a swarm of gnats.

“Ali, it’s a flying carpet,” Tobas said, exasperated. “We’ll be above them soon enough.” Gresh resisted the temptation to say something. He agreed with Alorria, actually, that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to add some sort of protective cover, but he did not want to take sides in a marital squabble—at least, no more than he already had in advising Tobas to let Alorria accompany them.

Besides, he did not want to antagonize the wizard who was supposed to be helping him, nor his nominal employer, nor the representative of the Wizards’ Guild, and Tobas happened to be all three of those things.

Finally, he didn’t want to suggest anything because he saw a marketing opportunity and did not want to throw it away. It should be easy to make money selling enclosed flying machines that would be safer and more comfortable than carpets, and he wanted to keep that money in his family. He would build the craft, or maybe hire Akka’s husband Tresen to do it, and then have Dina cast Varrin’s Lesser Propulsion on them. He didn’t want to involve Tobas, as either partner or competitor.

That would all have to wait, though. First they had to get the mirror out of the cave, then smash it.

They might need to take it to the no-wizardry area around the ruined village and fallen castle to break it, but that shouldn’t be difficult—it was just across a narrow valley.

So he kept silent and watched the countryside flashing by below them as they swept through the mountains, covering a three-day hike in less than an hour.

Despite the delays caused by gathering Karanissa and her supplies and by Alorria’s insistence on coming, it was not much past mid-afternoon when the carpet settled back onto the grass in the mountain meadow beside the peculiar little cave where the spriggans had hidden the mirror.

Tobas had set it down in the exact spot it had rested in before; the grass was still pressed down from the previous visit. Gresh frowned slightly, as he saw no reason not to have landed right next to the cave, but decided it wasn’t worth arguing about, not with the entire family along. He was afraid that Alorria and Karanissa might take offense at criticism of their husband, or find an excuse to start bickering.

Dozens of spriggans were visible from where Gresh sat, scattered around the meadow and the surrounding terrain, but most were making at least a pretense of hiding, and none made any threatening moves or showed any signs of approaching the carpet.

“It’s over there,” Gresh told Karanissa, pointing, as he got to his feet and slung his pack on his shoulder. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“We’ll wait here,” Tobas said, staying seated cross-legged where he was. “To watch the carpet.” Gresh glanced at Alorria, who smiled up at him without moving. “You two go ahead,” she said.

Gresh had thought that Alorria would stay with Tobas—after all, the wizard was the prize for whom the two women were competing. He was reassured to see that he was right and had not misjudged the situation. “As you please,” he said, nodding his head in a faint intimation of a bow. He beckoned to Karanissa. “If you would, please?”

“Of course.” She was already on her feet and followed gracefully as Gresh crossed the meadow.

The two did not hurry; they still had hours before sunset. Gresh was conserving his energy and making contingency plans, while Karanissa was enjoying the gentle breeze and the scattering of wildflowers.

The crack in the rock wall was half-hidden by shadows, and Gresh was not sure he would have found it again immediately if not for the trampled weeds in front of the opening. As it was, he had no trouble in locating it, but he quickly realized that the torch inside had long since burned out, leaving the interior dark and the mirror invisible; all that was left was a faint whiff of smoke.

“It’s in there,” he said. “I can make a light and throw it in....”

“That won’t be necessary,” Karanissa said.

“What you do?” a spriggan squeaked up at them, as Karanissa raised a hand to the opening in the stones. Gresh turned, intending to shoo the creature away, but then saw that it was not alone—a few dozen spriggans had gathered around and were looking up at the two humans worriedly.

“Nothing terrible,” Gresh said. “We just wanted a look at the mirror in the cave.”

“Leave mirror alone!” shrieked a spriggan, one that was an unusually bright shade of green and had noticeable fingernails.

“We won’t....”

“You don’t take mirror!” squeaked another.

“Listen, we don’t....”

“Not touch mirror!”

Gresh looked to Karanissa for aid, but the witch was staring intently into the crevice. Gresh realized something inside was glowing and turned to see what was happening.

A faint pale glow was coming from the mirror itself; as Gresh watched, it started to rise into the air.

But then several spriggans leapt onto it, dragging it back down, and as Gresh watched dozens more piled on, until the glass disk was completely hidden beneath a pile of squirming little green-brown creatures.

The glow vanished, plunging cave, mirror, and spriggans into utter blackness, and Karanissa gasped, then slumped, catching herself against the rocks.

“Are you all right?” Gresh asked her, worried. He glanced at her, then turned his attention to the spriggans.

They had formed a half-ring around the witch and himself, about three feet away and about four spriggans deep, and more were peering down from atop the rocks above the cave opening. So far they weren’t moving, but just standing, watching the two humans intently.

It occurred to Gresh that where one spriggan was harmless, a few hundred of them would not be; in fact, they might be unstoppable. If they just kept flinging themselves at a person, they could probably smother him to death, or crush him under their weight—and if Karanissa was right about their indestructibility, they wouldn’t be hurt in the process.

This errand, fetching the mirror, might be far more dangerous than he had thought.

“Karanissa?” Gresh asked.

“I’m all right,” she whispered. “Just tired. All those spriggans—I kept trying, I thought I might be able to snatch it out from under them, and they must have weighed a hundred pounds at the very least....”

“I understand,” Gresh said.

He knew that unlike most magicks, witchcraft drew all its energy from the user’s own body.

What Karanissa had done had tired her just as much as if she had reached that far into the cave with her hand and tried to lift the mirror with all those spriggans on it, not to mention the energy used in creating that faint light. That must have taken a good bit of strength, and she was a slender woman. Naturally, she would need to catch her breath after such an exertion.

He looked out over the ring of spriggans, across the meadow, at the carpet fifty yards away.

Tobas and Alorria were seated on the little rug, facing each other and bent over, heads almost colliding, as they played with the baby. Gresh could see a pudgy hand waving in the air. Several spriggans were watching the baby, as well, but all from a respectful distance of several feet. They had not formed the sort of encirclement that he and Karanissa faced.

And why would they? The baby and her parents weren’t doing anything, weren’t trying to steal their precious mirror.

Even a baby not yet half a year old was far larger than a spriggan—but there was only one baby, and there were hundreds of spriggans.

Gresh debated calling out to Tobas, asking for help, but so far the spriggans crowding around were not doing anything aggressive or making any demands, and he did not want the wizard to over-react and start throwing spells around carelessly. He also did not want to do anything that might prompt the spriggans to attack.

Besides, he and Karanissa still hadn’t retrieved the mirror, and if they didn’t get it out of the cave soon, the spriggans would almost certainly carry it off and hide it somewhere else, now that they knew that Gresh and his comrades were trying to take it.

This was all very annoying, and Gresh was irritated with himself for not having prepared for this situation. When he had thought about how they would retrieve the mirror he had somehow not expected to find this great horde of spriggans guarding the confounded thing, and in retrospect he wondered why he hadn’t considered the possibility. He supposed it was because he hadn’t thought of the little nuisances as intelligent enough to do anything so organized, but he now saw that this had been foolish of him. They could talk, they could use tools, and even a family of birds can organize well enough to guard a nest.

Spriggans were stupid, but they weren’t that stupid.

Right now a hundred or so were watching him intently.

“Did you want something?” he asked the encircling spriggans.

“You go away!”

“Leave mirror alone!”

“Not touch!”

“Why?” Gresh asked. “It seems like an interesting thing. Why shouldn’t I look at it?”

“Might break!”

“Spriggans need it!”

“Could die! ”

“Well, if it’s that important,” Gresh asked, “why do you have it out here in a dirty old cave, where some animal might get in and break it, instead of safely locked away in a castle somewhere?” Too many tried to reply simultaneously for Gresh to make any sense of the response to his question. He held up both hands in a calming gesture.

“Now, now,” he said. “There’s no need to shout.” He pointed to one especially excited-looking spriggan. “Can you explain it to me?”

“Not trust castles,” the spriggan said. “Full of people. Some people not like spriggans, might break mirror on purpose!”

“Well, what about a deserted castle?” He did not actually point at the mountain to the east, but there could be no question of what he meant.

“Not safe! Mirror not work there!”

“Well, how safe is it here? What if a wolf got into that cave?”

“Mirror works here, and spriggans guard cave, keep animals out.”

“You guard it? Is that why you’re all here?”

“Yes, yes! Not like it here, but guard mirror, keep safe!”

“You don’t like it here?”

“No! But spriggans stay and guard.”

“Some spriggans didn’t stay, though—I’ve seen them all the way on the far side of the World, in Ethshar of the Rocks.”

“Spriggans take turns. Enough stay here to fill cave, and others go, then come back.” Enough to fill the cave? Gresh glanced into the darkness of the opening and tried to guess how many that actually was. A great many, certainly. There was another obvious question. “They come back?” he asked.

The spriggan looked uncertain and glanced at its companions.

“Someday, maybe,” one squeaked.

“That the idea,” added another.

“So they’re out having fun, while you’re stuck here guarding the mirror. That doesn’t seem very fair.”

“Life not fair,” a spriggan agreed.

“Must guard mirror,” said another.

That didn’t seem to be getting anywhere; Gresh glanced at Karanissa, who seemed to be largely but not completely recovered. He decided he needed to keep the conversation going a little longer. “Why is the mirror so very important?” he asked. “Aren’t there already enough spriggans in the World?”

“Oh, yes,” one spriggan said brightly.

“Maybe.”

“Not know.”

“Not matter.”

“You go now,” said a larger-than-average one.

Karanissa leaned over and whispered into his ear, “Some of them don’t much like that question—I could feel their dismay when you asked it.”

That was the closest Karanissa had yet come to him, and Gresh tried not to be distracted by the scent of her, or her hair brushing his shoulder. He concentrated on her words.

They didn’t want to tell him why the mirror was important—but it apparently was not for making more spriggans; that was interesting and unexpected. Why did they care about it, then? He had taken it for granted that they wanted to reproduce, like any living creature, and that the mirror was important to them for that reason, but perhaps that was not the case at all. Magical creatures did not always follow the usual rules.

But what else did the spriggan mirror do?