If he could get it to a properly equipped wizard’s laboratory back in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, the Guild’s experts might be able to figure that out, but out here on the mountainside, with a few feet of rock between him and the mirror, the only way to determine it seemed to be to ask the questions the spriggans didn’t want asked and to coax honest answers out of the little pests.

“What does the mirror do that’s so important?” he asked.

“You go now,” the big spriggan said. “No more questions.”

“But I....”

“You go now.” The threat was now unmistakable, despite the creature’s squeaky, high-pitched voice.

Gresh looked around and saw that the ring of spriggans had thickened and solidified as new arrivals filled in gaps and pushed their comrades closer together. Spriggans were now peering out at him from the mouth of the cave, as well. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them in all.

Enough to fill the cave, that one had said—and none of them were smiling. They didn’t look worried or confused anymore; they looked determined.

“If we go now....” he began, then stopped. He had been planning to ask whether they would move the mirror, but he did not want to give them any ideas that hadn’t yet occurred to them. He turned to Karanissa and said, “Can you... ?”

“No,” she interrupted. “Don’t even ask. With all of them in there?”

“We need to get into the cave somehow.”

“No! You stay out of cave! ” shrieked a spriggan.

“What we need is to chase them away,” Karanissa said.

“Any ideas on that?”

She turned up an empty palm. “Nothing comes to mind.”

“No witchcraft you can use?”

“Not with so many.”

“No chase spriggans! You go!”

“Go away! Go away!”

“Maybe a spell? Wizardry, or some sorcery from your pack?” Gresh looked at the couple on the carpet, still happily playing with the baby, oblivious to what was happening to their companions. He tried to think what spells might be useful, and how he might get Tobas’s attention. Why didn’t the wizard look up? Was that baby of his that fascinating? He was supposed to be helping Gresh get the mirror, not counting his daughter’s toes for the hundredth time.

Or there were the powders and potions in his own pack; would any of those help? He reviewed what he had brought.

Lirrim’s Rectification and Javan’s Restorative were counterspells and would be of no use here—though they might be very important once he had the mirror. Javan’s Geas would force someone not to do something; if it worked on spriggans he could command at least a dozen of them not to interfere with him and Karanissa while they retrieved the mirror, but he didn’t have anywhere near enough powder to affect a mob of this size.

And that assumed it worked on spriggans at all, which was by no means a certainty.

The Spell of Reversal had no obvious application, and its exact effects could sometimes be hard to predict.

The Protective Bubble would shield them from any attacks by the spriggans, but they would not be able to reach the mirror through it; magic could pass through it, in theory, but only in severely weakened form, so Karanissa’s witchcraft, which had already proven inadequate for pulling the mirror out of the cave past the spriggans, would not be much use. The Spell of Retarded Time could slow down everything except the person drinking the potion, and he could use that to escape if things turned nasty, or to give himself time to prepare something, but he could not see just how to apply that effectively in the present situation. And Karanissa would need a dose, as well; his supply was not unlimited.

That left the Spell of the Revealed Power.

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever defeated?” he asked Karanissa quietly, hoping the spriggans wouldn’t overhear, despite their big pointed ears.

“What? Why?”

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever defeated?” Gresh repeated. “Or mastered somehow?

Have you ever killed a wolf, perhaps? You did say you’d spent time in these mountains.” She lowered her voice still further. “Yes, but I never encountered a wolf, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have killed it. I’m a witch; I can soothe animals. I can hear you even if you don’t talk aloud at all—just shape the words in your mind.”

Gresh was not entirely sure how to do that, but he could and did reduce his voice to an inaudible murmur. “Soothing a wolf would count as defeating it; have you ever done that? Even a tame one?”

“No.”

“Do you have anything in your bag that’s been used to defeat a large beast, or a monster of some sort?”

“Gresh, what are you talking about?” He barely saw her lips move, but the words seemed very clear—obviously, she could use her witchcraft to speak as well as hear. “I’m a witch, not a hunter. Why would I have fought monsters?”

“I was just looking for some way to use this spell I brought.”

“What spell?”

“The Spell of the Revealed Power,” he whispered. “It’s a transformation. It turns anyone or anything into an exact replica of the most powerful thing it’s ever built, defeated, destroyed, mastered, or otherwise demonstrated power over. A knife that’s killed a wolf becomes the wolf, a hammer that’s smashed a wall—or built one—becomes a wall, and so on. Have you had any children? As I understand it, a mother of five would become five grown people—she would disappear as herself until the spell is reversed, but she would be all five of her children in the prime of their lives. But I’m not sure. She might just become the strongest of the five.”

“I’ve never had any children,” Karanissa said, and Gresh thought she sounded annoyed at the question. “Just what are you planning to do with this spell? Why are you asking?”

“I’m trying to think of some way to use it to chase away the spriggans so we can get that mirror out of the cave.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Well, I don’t have any triumphs or conquests that would be any use, so far as I can recall, but of course Tobas killed a dragon once. Would that help?” Gresh blinked and looked at her. Then he turned and looked at Tobas, who had finally looked up from the baby to see what was taking so long.

“How big a dragon?” he asked silently.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Seventeen

“All right, we’ll go back to our flying carpet,” Gresh announced. “Just make way, and we’ll go.” The spriggans looked at one another and squeaked a few questions back and forth, but then a path gradually opened. Gresh took Karanissa’s hand and led her through the gap and across the meadow, toward the carpet.

Her fingers were warm and delicate; he was careful not to squeeze them.

They were soon clear of the main mass of spriggans. Even so, others were scattered along their route, forming loose lines along either side. Gresh was aware of dozens of bulging little eyes watching him as he released the witch’s hand, unslung his pack, and loosened the drawstring.

Karanissa said nothing. She did not need to ask any questions about his intentions; he was sure she was still sensing his thoughts, even if he was no longer trying to put them into words.

“What happened?” Tobas called, getting to his feet as they neared the carpet. “Did you get the mirror?”

“No,” Gresh said, pulling the box of prepared powders from his pack. “The spriggans don’t want it moved, and in case you haven’t noticed, there are hundreds of them guarding it.”

“Oh. Then what do... what are you doing?”

Gresh had slung his pack back on his shoulder and opened the box and was pulling out a jar of sparkling blue powder. “You killed a dragon once, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with anything? I doubt the spriggans are going to be impressed by my adventures.”

Gresh pulled the cork from the jar. “You did it, right? All by yourself? There isn’t a magic sword or anything involved?”

“Yes, I did it, with a spell, but I still don’t...oh, no. What’s that powder?”

“The Spell of the Revealed Power,” Gresh said, spilling powder into the palm of one hand. “I think you should step away from the carpet.” He managed to push the cork back in place without spilling the powder from his hand.

Tobas did more than step away; he turned and ran, eastward across the meadow toward the drop-off into the trees. Spriggans scattered from his path, squealing in fright.

With a muttered curse, Gresh closed his fist around the precious powder and called, “Come back here!” He dropped the jar back into the box, hastily closed it up, and thrust it back into his pack, all while continuing toward the fleeing wizard.

Tobas stopped and turned. “Gresh, I really don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Do you have a better one? A dragon can chase away the spriggans, and then Karanissa and I can get the mirror out of the cave, and we can get this over with.” A few spriggans yelped and shrieked, as if in confirmation, and Gresh wished he had been a little more circumspect. He had just removed any doubt the spriggans might have had about his intentions.

That made it all the more urgent to get this done quickly. They really didn’t have time for a long argument, or a careful discussion of every option. There might already be spriggans hauling that mirror out of the cave, and if they did get it away, it would probably not be so easy to find next time. The spriggans would know he wanted to take it from them and wouldn’t answer his questions. They already had the idea of hiding it in a hole humans wouldn’t fit in; the next one might be completely inaccessible.

He had to act immediately.

“But just to start, I don’t want to be a dragon,” Tobas said. “Isn’t there something else you can transform? One of your tools? A knife? Or what would it do to you? Haven’t you ever defeated anything powerful?”

“I have no idea what it would do to me,” Gresh admitted, ambling casually across the carpet, past Alorria and toward Tobas. He could understand why someone would be reluctant to be transformed, but he saw no other option. Really, they were fabulously lucky to have someone or something here that could be transformed into something as powerful as a dragon! They needed to take advantage of that good fortune. “That’s exactly why I won’t be trying it on myself. But you defeated a dragon! That’s perfect, Tobas, and I have Javan’s Restorative right here—you know that’s the standard counterspell, don’t you? There’s nothing to worry about. If anything goes wrong, I can change you back in a few seconds!”

“That’s not what worries me—well, yes, it is, but it’s not all that worries me....” Gresh sighed. They didn’t have time for this. “Tobas, the Guild sent us here to get that mirror.

They won’t like it if they find out you refused to help me. Think what they’re paying us! A Transporting Tapestry of your home in Dwomor—isn’t that worth spending a little time under a harmless enchantment?”

“I suppose it is,” Tobas admitted. “But it’s the ‘harmless’ part that worries me. All those spells like the Spell of the Revealed Power where some mysterious magical mechanism we don’t understand decides what the spell will actually do are tricky, untrustworthy things—you can’t be sure just what they’re going to do until you use them.”

“Well, this one should change you into a dragon, shouldn’t it? If we don’t get a dragon, or if there’s something else terribly wrong, I’ll reverse the spell,” Gresh said. “I’ve got the Restorative, and the Spell of Reversal, and Lirrim’s Rectification—I can undo just about anything.”

“I don’t know, Gresh,” Tobas said warily, as the merchant approached. “There’s something we didn’t tell you.”

“‘We’?” Gresh glanced back at the two women on the carpet, Karanissa standing and Alorria seated, both of them watching the two men.

“Yes—they know about it, but I guess Karanissa didn’t think of it. I don’t think that spell will....” He was interrupted in mid-sentence by a faceful of powder, as Gresh got close enough to fling the glittering blue dust.

There was no point in arguing endlessly; this was their best chance, and Gresh intended to take it.

“Esku! ” Gresh shouted the trigger word for the spell as the powder settled on Tobas’s face and shoulders, and a golden glow spread swiftly over the wizard’s entire body. Tobas began to enlarge rapidly, as if he were somehow being inflated, and to elongate. He bent forward at the waist.

Spriggans scattered, screaming like a flock of maddened birds.

“Gresh, you fool! ” Tobas bellowed, in a voice that grew louder as he spoke. “The dragon wasn’t the most powerful thing I’ve defeated! I stopped the Seething Death in Ethshar of the Sands!” The glow brightened, making it impossible to see exactly what was happening to Tobas; Gresh heard fabric tear. The thing that had been the young wizard was on all fours now and still expanding; a tail had thrust out behind it, and wings were unfurling from its back. Gresh had to retreat rapidly to avoid being crushed. Whatever Tobas was becoming was very large, and from the bits Gresh could glimpse through the shimmering glow, bluish-green in color.

Alorria screamed, wordlessly at first, her voice mingling with the shrieks of the spriggans. Finally she cried, “What did you do to my husband?! ”

Then the glow abruptly vanished, and Gresh found himself face-to-face with an angry dragon—a very large angry dragon, a good sixty feet from snout to tail-tip, and with a wingspan almost twice that, standing over the torn and shredded remnants of Tobas’s clothes.

Gresh had seen dragons at fairly close quarters before, but never unchained, uncaged, and this close, and so extremely large. He stepped back.

“Gresh! ” the monster bellowed, spewing a cloud of sparks and black smoke.

“You can talk!” Gresh said, startled, brushing a spark from his sleeve. He had expected Tobas to lose his voice.

“Of course I can.... Oh.” The dragon blinked his immense red eyes, and his voice dropped from a roar like a thunderstorm to a deep rumble. “So I can.”

“Tobas! ” Alorria shrieked, clutching the baby to her breast. Alris promptly began to cry hysterically, adding to the cacophony. Dozens of spriggans were still squealing and screaming.

“I’m fine, Ali,” the dragon said, raising his head to look over Gresh at the women on the carpet.

“Fine? You call that fine?”

“Yes, Ali, I do,” the dragon replied. “I’ve been turned into a dragon, but I’m still me. I can talk, I’m healthy and strong. I’d call that fine, given some of the alternatives.” Then he looked down at Gresh again. “You, though, have no idea how dangerous that was! Casting a spell on an unwilling wizard—what did you think you were doing? You’re very, very lucky that you were right, and I turned into a dragon.”

“Well, what else could you have become?” Gresh asked. “What’s more powerful than a dragon?”

“I told you,” the dragon rumbled. “The Seething Death.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Gresh replied. “I never heard of it. It’s more powerful than a dragon?”

“It’s a pool of raw chaos that expands indefinitely, destroying and absorbing everything it touches. The Guild’s masters think it would destroy the entire World if left unchecked, and counterspells don’t work on it!”

Gresh frowned, remembering what Kaligir had said about Tobas’s uneven training. “You defeated it?”

“Yes. I did.” The dragon glared at him.

Gresh started to ask just how Tobas had defeated it, then thought better of it. “The Spell of the Revealed Power doesn’t seem to think so,” he pointed out.

“I should eat you. I really should,” Tobas growled. He ran an immense forked tongue over his lower lip, and Gresh took another involuntary step back.

“Tobas,” Karanissa called. “You’re starting to think like a dragon.” The dragon looked at his elder wife, then down at Gresh again. He folded his wings. “I think she’s right,” he said. “I’ll need to watch that. But all the same, as I understand it, the Spell of the Revealed Power should have turned me into a bubbling mass of complete destruction instead of a dragon, and if it had, we might all be doomed. You were taking a huge risk, Gresh! You really should have heard me out and not cast the spell.”

“You may be right,” Gresh admitted. He was somewhat embarrassed by his actions. Earlier he had been thinking of Tobas as a dangerous fool for meddling with magic too powerful for him in circumstances where the results might be unpredictable, and here he had gone ahead and done much the same thing himself. It had never occurred to him that Tobas might have mastered anything more powerful than a dragon. He hadn’t really thought there was anything in physical form more powerful than a dragon.

Even so, he really should have considered the possibility. “My apologies,” he said. “Apparently whatever guides the spell either considers the dragon more powerful than the Seething Death, or doesn’t think you defeated it.”

“I suspect,” Karanissa called from behind him, “that the spell doesn’t consider the Seething Death a thing at all, and doesn’t it turn the subject into the most powerful thing he’s mastered?” The man and the dragon both turned to look at her.

“That’s probably it,” the dragon said. “Because I definitely defeated the Seething Death, and it’s definitely powerful enough to destroy the World—but its very nature is that it’s a contagious lack of thingness. Interesting.” He glared down at Gresh. “And very fortunate for us all.” That made sense to Gresh; after all, it sounded as if this Seething Death was a spell, rather than an object or entity, and despite its name, the Spell of the Revealed Power never revealed anything intangible or evanescent, but only solid things.

But even if it had somehow turned Tobas into the Seething Death, that might not have been so very dreadful. “I still think Javan’s Restorative would have worked,” Gresh said.

“I don’t,” Tobas the dragon replied. “But it should turn me back from this shape readily enough.”

“When we’re safely done with the mirror, yes.”

“Oh. Yes. But you should get on with it. I suspect that the longer I stay in this form the more dragonlike I’ll become, and that could be unfortunate if it goes too far. I can feel it already, I think. You look more and more like food every minute.”

“Yes, of course, I’ll hurry, but if you don’t mind, I must ask—what does it feel like, being a dragon?”

Tobas snorted another shower of sparks. “Tell me, Gresh, have you ever asked a woman what it felt like to be female?”

In fact he had, more or less, and the answers had never been any use. He saw what Tobas meant about the impossibility of conveying such an experience. Still, he could not resist pointing out, “She had never not been female; you haven’t always been a dragon.”

“That’s true, but about all I can tell you is that I feel big and strong and impatient. I believe I can fly if I try, and breathe flame, but I can’t begin to explain how I would do it.” Gresh grimaced. “Big—yes, indeed! I’ve never seen a dragon so large! I wasn’t expecting it, even after what Karanissa told me. I’d thought she was exaggerating.” Tobas snorted a little smoke. “Never saw one so large? How many wild dragons have you seen, then?”

“Wild ones? Well, I....” Gresh hesitated, on the verge of giving away one of his trade secrets, then just said, “None, really.”

“Well, no one lets them get this large in captivity, of course.” The dragon looked down at himself, then turned his head to look over his wings and tail. He cocked his head to one side, trying to judge his own dimensions against the trees and flowers. “This does look about the size of the one I killed.”

“It could talk?”

“What? No, it couldn’t. It hadn’t had anyone around to teach it, I suppose, but I’ve always heard that big dragons can learn to talk.”

“Who taught you, then?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Tobas roared. “My father did, of course. I may have the shape of the dragon I slew, but I’m still Tobas of Telven. Now, can we get the mirror?”

“Right, right,” Gresh said, taking a final look up at the dragon before turning his attention back to the cave. “If you can chase away the spriggans, Karanissa and I ought to be able to get the mirror out.” He started walking and called back over his shoulder, “Don’t touch the carpet, you might tear it.”

“Good point,” the dragon said, detouring around the carpet and Alorria and Alris as he followed Gresh. Karanissa, too, marched after Gresh, back toward the cave.

The spriggans had gradually quieted during Gresh’s conversation with the dragon, many of them fleeing the area, but now that the dragon was moving they began to squeal and babble.

“Tobas!” Alorria called, as the dragon circled around the carpet. “Are you really in there?”

“I’m fine, Ali,” Tobas replied. “We’ll turn me back as soon as we have the mirror.” That elicited a fresh chorus of yelps and shrieks from the spriggans still scattered across the meadow. “No take mirror! ”

“Dragon no take mirror!”

“Not break mirror!

“Not eat mirror!”

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Tobas growled, a wisp of smoke emerging with his words as he stalked across the meadow. “It’s my mirror, after all—you spriggans stole it from me, and I’ll take it back if I want to!”

That evoked wails and lamentations.

“Tobas?” Alorria called.

The dragon turned his head.

“Shall I get your clothes and try to repair them?” she asked.

Gresh and the dragon exchanged glances.

“That would be helpful, yes,” Tobas called.

“We can use Lirrim’s Rectification on them if she can’t fix them,” Gresh murmured.

“Just get on with it,” the dragon rumbled in reply.

Gresh hurried on across the meadow. About halfway he glanced back over his shoulder, and up, at the dragon. The size of the beast was astonishing. Equally astonishing was the fact that many of the spriggans still hadn’t fled. Oh, they were hurrying to stay out of the dragon’s path and giving it a respectful berth, but they were not all abandoning the area completely, as Gresh had hoped they would.

The annoying little creatures were braver—or stupider—than he had expected.

Then he reached the rocks and waited for Karanissa to join him.

“Gresh,” she said, as she stepped up beside him. “I don’t really see how Tobas being a dragon is going to help us. Yes, he’s scared away some of the spriggans, but he can’t very well scare them out of the cave, and that’s where the mirror is. If anything, more of them will hide in there to get away from the dragon. They’ll still weigh the mirror down so that I can’t levitate it.” Gresh did not answer her immediately. He had hoped the mere presence of a dragon would send every spriggan in the vicinity fleeing over the horizon, but now that that had failed to happen she had a point.

Gresh was not about to let that stop him, though. He had a dragon helping him, and in the present situation that was almost certainly an improvement over a wizard. “Tobas,” he called, “can you breathe a little fire into that cave there? Not too much—I don’t think we want to melt the mirror at this point, not until we’ve had a look at it.”

“I don’t know if I can melt it,” Tobas said, as he lowered his head until his scaled cheek was just inches from Gresh’s own. He had to crane his eight-foot neck awkwardly to bring his eyes down that far.

“Dragonfire isn’t really as hot as you might think.” He looked at the rocks, then asked, “What cave?”

“Here,” Gresh said, pointing. “It’s too small for a human—that’s why I can’t just climb in and get the mirror. Spriggans pop in and out easily, but we can’t.”

“I can barely....” Tobas began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he cocked one eye toward the opening. “Oh, I see it.” He lifted his head a little. “Stand back.” Gresh and Karanissa quickly stepped back.

The dragon spat a gout of flame into the crack in the rocks. Spriggans screamed wildly from the cave. Gresh shied away from the heat, but tried to see into the opening before the glow faded.

Bits of dried grass and other debris had caught fire. He bent down to the opening and shaded his eyes, peering in.

The mirror still lay unharmed on the cave floor, and dozens of spriggans were still scattered about, many of them staring back at him. A few were sooty, but none appeared to have been harmed by the flames.

Well, after all, they were reportedly invulnerable; why would dragonfire hurt them?

“It didn’t work,” Gresh reported.

“Well, here,” Tobas said. “If the problem is that you can’t get into that little cave, I can fix that!” He stalked forward again, but this time kept his head up and raised a foreclaw, and curled it into a fist the size of a boulder. Then he flexed it and formed the claws into a flat plane.

“Oh, I don’t....” Gresh began, as he backed away.

Tobas thrust forward, driving his claw into the crack in the stone as if it were a wedge.

The entire mountainside seemed to shake with the impact; rocks shattered and tumbled. Then the dragon curled his talons, dug them into the stone, and heaved.

The entire front of the cave tore out; Gresh was knocked off his feet by flying rocks and clumps of earth and blinded by clouds of dust. He fell back coughing on the grass of the meadow.

Spriggans were squealing and screaming, of course, and rocks were clattering against one another, as Gresh sat up and tried to wipe his eyes. His hands were as dusty as his face, so it took a moment before he could see again.

When he could he found himself face-to-face with a satisfied dragon. Tobas smiled down at him, baring ten-inch fangs and that forked tongue longer than a man’s arm.

“There,” he said. “The cave is open. I still can’t fit in, but now you can.” Gresh looked and saw that the transformed wizard was right. He had ripped out several slabs of rock, creating an opening perhaps five feet high and eight feet wide, revealing the interior of the cave. A score or so of spriggans were still perched here and there in the cave, blinking out at the sunlit meadow in surprise.

Gresh got slowly and carefully back to his feet, brushing himself off as best he could, then turned to give the fallen Karanissa a hand up.

“Tobas, are you all right?” Alorria called from the distant carpet.

“I’m fine,” Tobas bellowed back. “Just helping Gresh here.”

“Is the mirror still in there?” Karanissa asked Gresh.

“It must be,” he replied. He stepped forward, staring through the new entrance into the cave. “It ought to be right....”

And that was as far as he got before the cave roof fell in.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Eighteen

“Oh,” the dragon that had once been an ordinary wizard named Tobas of Telven said. “Perhaps I misjudged.”

“Perhaps you did,” Gresh agreed, looking at the rubble and silently thanking whatever gods might be listening that he had not yet stepped into the cave when the roof collapsed. The dust was clearing, and he could see now that most of the cave was still intact; a section of roof perhaps ten feet wide had fallen in, but that left a good twenty feet of cave on either side.

He tried to judge exactly where he had seen the mirror in there. With the whole area so utterly transformed, it was not an easy calculation to make, but he estimated that the mirror should be just under the left edge of the wreckage.

“It’s there,” Karanissa said from beside him, pointing to roughly the same spot he had been estimating.

“No touch mirror! ” shrieked a spriggan from inside the remaining cave.

“Shut up! ” the dragon bellowed in reply, spraying sparks.

“No no no no no!” the spriggan insisted, jumping up and down.

The dragon did not argue further, but instead, moving with amazing speed for so large a beast, reached in with one huge talon and flicked the spriggan far back into the depths of the cave. Then he withdrew the claw and turned to Gresh. “Get the mirror, and let’s get out of here.”

“Right,” Gresh said, hurrying into the cave.

The sun was getting low in the west, behind the mountaintop, so even with a big piece of the wall and ceiling removed, the interior of the cave was shadowy and somewhat dim. Gresh knelt by the edge of the pile of debris, looking for the mirror.

“It’s over there a little farther,” Karanissa said. She had followed him in and was pointing at a small mound of rubble.

“If the ceiling fell on it, it’s probably smashed,” Gresh said. “That would be an end to the matter right there!”

“It isn’t smashed,” Karanissa said. “I can sense it.”

“I knew it couldn’t be that easy,” Gresh grumbled. He pushed aside a few rocks where Karanissa had pointed, and sure enough, there was the mirror, dusty but intact.

“No no no no no! ” shrieked a spriggan, leaping on his hand and startling him so badly he fell backward onto the hard-packed dirt of the cave floor.

“Get away!” Karanissa shouted, diving toward the spriggan. It sprang aside, and she snatched up the mirror.

Half a dozen other spriggans seemed to appear from nowhere, jumping and squeaking and trying to grab the mirror away from the witch. She ignored them as she straightened up. Then she looked down at them, lifted the mirror high above her head, and shouted, “Get back, or I’ll smash it on the rocks here and now!”

The spriggans immediately stopped leaping at her skirts and backed away, whimpering. For a moment no one moved or spoke—then the silence was broken by the squealing of several voices out on the meadow, squealing that continued and grew in volume.

Gresh sat up, brushing himself off, and stared up at the mirror gleaming in the witch’s hand. He paid no attention to the shrieking and babbling outside the cave. He could not see how the spriggans could stop them now, no matter how upset they were. The dragon should be able to shoo them away well enough. “We have it,” he said.

“I have it,” Karanissa said. “Now what do we do with it?”

“We get it out of here,” Gresh told her. He got to his feet and turned toward the opening.

Then he stopped dead, as Tobas said loudly, “Gresh? We may have a problem here.” He sounded worried.

Gresh had not known a dragon could sound worried, but Tobas unquestionably did—and looking out through the hole in the hillside, Gresh could understand why.

Tobas’s right wing blocked much of his view, but by leaning a bit Gresh could see out, and he did not like what he saw. Save for the area immediately around the dragon, the meadow was completely covered in spriggans—and that included the flying carpet. Spriggans were climbing on Alorria’s lap, tugging at her hair, and poking at Alris, who was, quite understandably, crying.

Alorria had been screaming for some time, Gresh realized, but her high-pitched voice had been lost in the noise the spriggans made.

“I can’t chase them away,” Tobas said. “I might hurt Ali or the baby. Or the carpet. There are so many of them!”

“So I see,” Gresh said.

Like Gresh, Karanissa had turned to see what was happening outside the cave, but she had continued to hold the mirror up above her head, well away from any spriggans—except now Gresh saw movement from the corner of his eye and turned to see a spriggan climbing out of the mirror onto Karanissa’s wrist.

“Augh!” she shrieked. “It tickles!”

The spriggan itself looked confused and clambered awkwardly down her arm to her shoulder, then slid down her dress to the ground, where it said, “What happening?” Several other spriggans started to reply, but Gresh shouted, “Get away from her! !” The newborn spriggan squealed and scampered away, but the other spriggans nearby—there were at least a dozen in the cave with the two humans—stood their ground.

Alorria, out there on the spriggan-swarmed carpet, was still screaming, and a glance upward showed Gresh that Tobas was becoming seriously agitated.

Gresh did not want to be around a panicking dragon.

“Calm down, everyone!” he shouted. “Just calm down a moment!”

“And then what? ” Tobas demanded.

“You tell them what I say, so they can all hear,” Gresh said.

“Tell them what?”

“First off, tell them we have their precious mirror, and if they don’t get off Alorria right now, we’ll smash it on the rocks!”

“Yes! You hear that, spriggans?” The dragon’s roar seemed to shake the mountainside, and a few loose stones tumbled from the broken edges of the cave roof. “Get off my wife and daughter, or we’ll smash the mirror! Now! ”

The spriggans hurried to get off Alorria and Alris—but they did not, Gresh noticed, get off the carpet.

“Give back mirror! ” a spriggan shrieked from somewhere in the mob.

“Why is it so important to them?” Karanissa asked.

“I don’t know,” Gresh admitted.

“What should I do with it?”

Gresh considered that for a moment before replying.

They did not know whether they actually could smash the mirror; the only way to find out would be to try. The spriggans seemed to utterly dread that possibility; might it be that the mirror’s destruction would mean they, too, would perish? More than one had said they might die if the mirror was destroyed; did they even know what would happen, any more than the humans did?

He had come here to see that the mirror was destroyed; why not try to do it? Yes, wizardry could have unforeseen effects, but really, how likely was it that smashing it would be any worse than leaving it alone?

It would upset the spriggans—if it didn’t make them vanish—and that was bad, but he and the women had a dragon on their side. Surely, they could fight their way through a horde of toothless eight-inch pests. After all, the spriggans would no longer have anything to fight for, and they had never struck him as vindictive or vengeful creatures. Despite their numbers, they had not yet actually harmed anyone.

He and his companions had come here to dispose of this magic mirror, and now was as good a time as any to see if they could simply do it in the most obvious way.

But still, he hesitated. He had been reckless in using the Spell of the Revealed Power on Tobas, and he did not want to make it a habit. Carelessness with magic would sooner or later get him killed, or at least turned into something unpleasant.

Another spriggan began to emerge from the mirror as Karanissa held it, startling him. Without really meaning to, more thinking aloud than giving instructions, he said, “Break it.” A chorus of horrified squeals arose from every spriggan close enough to have heard his words, and Karanissa did not try to speak over the cacophony. Instead she nodded and looked down.

Spriggans were rushing toward her, to catch the mirror if she threw it against the rocks at her feet. Instead she swung around, arm outstretched, flinging the newly arrived spriggan aside and then slapping the mirror broadside against the stone of the cave wall.

Gresh almost reached out to stop her, but not in time. Glass cracked loudly, and the mirror fell from her hand in four jagged pieces. Countless spriggans screamed—and so did the dragon, with a deafening sound like nothing Gresh had ever heard before. Gresh looked up, startled.

“What did you do?” Tobas roared, spewing flame into the sky.

“What?” Gresh had had his attention focused entirely on Karanissa’s hand, but now he looked around.

There were more spriggans than ever; they certainly hadn’t vanished. In fact, there were many more. They were no longer just a mob, but covered the meadow at least two layers deep. The carpet had completely vanished, and several were spilling onto a screaming Alorria—not deliberately, but because they could find no other footing.

“Oh, blast!” Karanissa said. Gresh turned to see her staring down at the four chunks of mirrored glass that lay at her feet.

Four identical spriggans were squeezing themselves up from the four separate pieces. It took longer than previous emergences, since all four were full-sized but the fragments of mirror were not.

Gresh looked around and realized that all the existing spriggans had also been multiplied by four.

Obviously, the link between the mirror and the spriggans was stronger than he had realized, and the breaking of the mirror had to be undone immediately.

That called for magic.

“Oh, gods and demons!” he muttered, as he snatched the pack from his shoulder and hauled out the box of powders. As he did he was imagining all those poor innocent people throughout the World who had been being harassed by spriggans, and who suddenly found each of the little monsters transformed into a quartet. Something had to be done now.

Well, that was why he had brought all these countercharms. He popped open a jar of sparkling orange powder and strode over to the broken mirror, kicking aside four spriggans that happened to be in the way, then unceremoniously dumped a pinch of the powder over the four shards and barked, “Esku! ” The powder vanished in a golden flash, and the four pieces snapped together as if drawn by magnets, then healed back into a single mirror, which Gresh quickly snatched up before a spriggan could get it. A quick glance out at the meadow showed that the immense mass of spriggans had been reduced by three-fourths, restored to its original still-alarming size. The cave’s population was similarly reduced.

Even the four that had emerged from the broken mirror appeared to have merged into one.

“What spell was that?” Karanissa asked, as Gresh struggled to get the cork safely back into the mouth of the jar without dropping the mirror.

“Javan’s Restorative,” Gresh told her.

“Don’t waste that!” Tobas said, peering in from above. “We need that to turn me back.”

“There’s plenty left,” Gresh assured him. “I’m not going to waste it. Besides, wouldn’t Lirrim’s Rectification or the Spell of Reversal work?”

“I don’t know,” Tobas rumbled. “The Rectification turns things into what they ought to be, not necessarily what they were, and for all I know the spell might decide I should be a dragon. The Spell of Reversal only reverses things so far—if I stay a dragon more than half an hour or so, it won’t do the job.”

“It hasn’t been half an hour yet,” Gresh pointed out. Despite all that had happened since Tobas was transformed, it hadn’t really been very long at all. “I doubt it’s been a quarter of one.” A spriggan— one spriggan—began to climb out of the mirror and found Gresh’s palm in the way.

Gresh quickly turned the disk over and lowered his hand so that the creature could escape.

“So we have the mirror,” he said. “And smashing it isn’t a good idea—if we’d broken it into a hundred pieces we’d probably all have smothered to death.” He glanced up at the dragon. “Well, all but Tobas, anyway.”

“No smash,” a spriggan said timidly. “Please?”

Gresh looked down at the little creature, which blinked up at him from a niche in the cave wall.

“No smash,” he agreed.

For a moment he wondered why the spriggan didn’t want the mirror broken. After all, it only seemed to produce more spriggans. Perhaps the little creature didn’t like crowds, or recognized that the World didn’t have room for all those spriggans?

Though that made the creatures’ unwillingness to give up the mirror that much more mysterious. If they didn’t want more spriggans, why were they so determined to protect the mirror?

“Then what do we do with it?” Karanissa asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“Well, it seems to me that our first goal here is to prevent it from making any more spriggans,” Gresh said. “Isn’t it? The Guild’s worried that the whole World might fill up with spriggans, so if we can stop the mirror from making more, that’s a good start. Dealing with the spriggans we already have is a separate issue, as is destroying it permanently. The first thing we want is to stop it from producing more.”

“How do you propose to do that, if we can’t just smash it?” Karanissa asked.

“We could take it to the dead area....” Tobas began, but the resulting squeals and screams from the spriggans deterred even a dragon from finishing the sentence.

“Give back mirror,” a spriggan called from atop a nearby rock. “You give back, spriggans take it and go away, and give back flying rug and lady and baby. No give mirror, no lady, no baby, no rug.”

“And we’d be back where we started,” Gresh said. “No, I don’t think we’ll do that.”

“I don’t know, Gresh,” Karanissa said. “What about Ali and the baby?”

“They aren’t trying to hurt them,” Gresh said, though not as confidently as he would have liked.

“If we tried to take the mirror to the no-wizardry area they probably would.”

“True enough,” Gresh admitted. “If we can’t take the mirror to the dead zone....” He looked up at Tobas. “You made that no-spell place, didn’t you?”

“The one over there?” Tobas said, waving his head toward the opposite slope. “No. That’s been there for centuries. A wizard named Seth Thorun’s son did it.”

“What about the one in Ethshar of the Sands?”

“I made that, yes.”

“Could you do it again, here?”

Several spriggans squeaked in protest at this suggestion. The dragon ignored them, as he snorted smoke and said, “Not in this shape. Not to mention that it’s forbidden—the Guild outlawed the spell long ago. They gave me a special dispensation for what I did before, but I don’t have any dispensation to do it again. On top of that, I didn’t bring the ingredients, since it is forbidden, and I never expected to have a use for it.”

“Well, what ingredients do you need?”

“Oh, no—I’m not telling you that. It’s forbidden. Using it carries the death penalty. Besides, I can’t do it as a dragon, and if you turned me back now, how long do you think it would be before all these spriggans swarmed over us and took the mirror away from us? Not to mention that they’d interrupt the spell—it takes several minutes.”

“Swarm...?” Gresh looked out and realized that Tobas was right. The dragon had interposed himself between the cave and the horde filling the meadow. A few spriggans were indeed in the cave, but the main body was out there, apparently kept away only by Tobas’s presence.

So Tobas would have to remain a dragon for now, and that meant they had no wizardry available except for the powders and potions in Gresh’s box.

Well, he had chosen those spells for exactly this purpose. None of these were intended to destroy the mirror outright, but he hoped one of them might break the enchantment on it and turn it into a harmless disk of silvered glass.

He would have preferred to try them under more controlled circumstances, but that didn’t appear to be an option. He had to do something to end this stand-off without giving the mirror back to the spriggans, and he had brought all this prepared magic, with the Guild’s blessing. He might as well see whether any of it would do the job.

“Karanissa, could you keep the spriggans away for a moment?” he asked, as he seated himself cross-legged on the cave floor. He set the mirror on his lap, then pulled over the box of spells.

He wanted to be as cautious as possible, starting out with the spells least likely to have unforeseen effects. That made his first choice fairly simple. Javan’s Geas could be used to command anyone not to do something, and it lasted indefinitely—but no one ever used it on inanimate objects, for obvious reasons. The mirror might be something more than a mere inanimate object, though, so Gresh pulled out the appropriate jar and sprinkled a pinch of dark red powder on the mirror.

This was exciting, using magic himself. He had certainly seen plenty of magic, but he had rarely gotten to use it himself. Turning Tobas into a dragon might have been reckless, even frightening, but it had also been fun. It had given him a sensation of power. This experiment with the mirror was far less likely to produce spectacular results, but it was still a bit of a thrill.

He could hear spriggans protesting, but none interrupted him. Apparently Karanissa’s witchcraft was up to the task of keeping them away. “Make no more spriggans—by this spell I charge you,” he proclaimed. “Esku. ”

The powder flashed into non-existence, but the mirror appeared unchanged.

“Make no more spriggans,” Gresh repeated, just in case he had misremembered and the command was supposed to come after the invocation.

“How do we know it worked?” Karanissa asked, looking down at the mirror. She was panting slightly from the effort of keeping the spriggans back.

“We just wait and see whether any more spriggans appear,” Gresh answered, as he closed the jar and slid it back into its place in the box. “After all, they’ve been popping out often enough! No wonder there are half a million of the little pests, if they appear this.... Oh, drat.” A spriggan was heaving itself up out of the mirror.

“It didn’t work,” Karanissa said.

“It didn’t work,” Gresh agreed. He reached for the box.

The glittering white powder of Lirrim’s Rectification flashed silver instead of gold, but had no visible effect at all, and after a five-minute wait the mirror produced another spriggan, demonstrating that the original spell was still working. The spriggan appeared just the same as the others. If the Rectification had had any effect at all, it wasn’t obvious.

“I’d hoped that would turn it into Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm,” Gresh said. “I’m not sure why it didn’t—after all, that’s what the spell was originally intended to be.”

“Maybe wizardry just doesn’t work on the mirror,” Karanissa said, as she slumped against the cave wall, exhausted.

“That’s possible,” Gresh admitted. “But I really hope that’s not the case.”

“Maybe it’s been too long since the original spell,” Tobas said, peering down through the opening where the cave roof used to be.

“That doesn’t seem likely,” Gresh said. “From what I’m told, wizardry usually isn’t time-limited that way—I mean, you can always reverse Fendel’s Superior Petrifaction, even if the victim’s been stone for centuries.” He glanced around. “It might be because there are half a million spriggans out there who think this version of the mirror is exactly what it should be.”

“That could be,” Tobas said.

Gresh tried Javan’s Restorative next, over the dragon’s objections. Tobas pointed out that they had already used the Restorative on the mirror once without removing the enchantment and argued that they really shouldn’t waste another portion of their very limited supply of a very precious spell.

Gresh ignored him and cast the spell, which did absolutely nothing. Spriggans continued to emerge from the mirror at irregular intervals.

The horde of spriggans in the meadow continued to hold Alorria, Alris, and the flying carpet hostage. They bickered and squeaked among themselves, but made no attempt to charge past the dragon. Every so often one would try to sneak past alone, but Tobas spotted most of these and chased them away.

“What does that leave?” Tobas asked, as he brushed a few unusually courageous spriggans back with his tail. “What else have you got in that box?”

“The potions obviously won’t help,” Gresh said. “The mirror can’t drink them. The two powders we haven’t tried are the Spell of the Revealed Power and the Spell of Reversal.”

“The mirror’s been enchanted for years, so I don’t know what the Spell of Reversal could do,” Tobas remarked.

“Make the mirror suck spriggans back in, perhaps?” Karanissa suggested.

Gresh and Tobas exchanged glances, man to dragon.

“I suppose it might,” Gresh said.

“Well, what would the Spell of the Revealed Power do?”

“Who knows?” Gresh replied. “It might show us why the spriggans are so determined to protect this thing, when they say they don’t care whether any more appear out of it.”

“It may be bringing the spriggans from somewhere else,” Tobas suggested. “Instead of creating them, I mean. The Spell of the Revealed Power might transform it into an actual doorway into that realm, whatever and wherever it may be.”

“And if it did....” Gresh blinked. “If it did, maybe we could send all the spriggans back where they came from! Maybe that’s what they actually want it for!”

“And maybe it’s not,” Karanissa said. “Maybe instead it’ll dump another half-million spriggans on us all at once!”

“I’ll have Javan’s Restorative handy,” Gresh said.

“The Spell of Reversal,” Tobas grumbled. “Use that, and save the Restorative!”

“Maybe I will,” Gresh said, as he pulled the jar of blue powder from the box. “Let’s just see what it does....”

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Karanissa said, backing away.

“She may have a point,” Tobas said. “What if it releases an infinite quantity of spriggans, and we’re smothered to death before you can use a counterspell?”

“That would be unfortunate,” Gresh said, as he sprinkled blue powder on the mirror. He had come this far, and did not want to give up. Besides, he had just cast three high-order spells that had done exactly nothing, and was beginning to think wizardry simply didn’t work on the mirror. He wanted to find something that would affect the glass.

“It would be unfortunate,” he repeated. “But I don’t think it’ll happen. Why would it? What power would that reveal? Esku! ”

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Nineteen

There was a golden flash, and the man, woman, and dragon stared down at the little mirror.

It remained a mirror, a round piece of silvered glass about the size of a man’s hand. It did not transform into a gateway, portal, dragon, spriggan, or monster of any sort.

“It would appear,” Karanissa said, staring at it, “that it has never mastered anything more powerful than itself.”

“How annoying,” Gresh said.

A spriggan suddenly popped up out of the mirror, jumped to a nearby rock, teetered on its edge for a moment, then scampered away. It looked just like any number of the other spriggans. The Spell of the Revealed Power had apparently not changed a thing.

“How very annoying,” Gresh said.

“You know,” Tobas said, “you’d make a terrible wizard, Gresh—assuming you survived your apprenticeship. You have a habit of throwing magic around much too carelessly. That spell really might have killed us all. Turning me into a dragon, and all the rest—you really ought to use a little more caution.”

This admonishment, especially coming from Tobas, whose carelessness with magic had created the spriggan mirror in the first place, stung more than Gresh cared to admit—but he could not completely deny that there was some justice in it. “I take some risks, yes,” he said. “I don’t think they’re excessive. I have a box of counterspells right here, after all, and this is what the Guild gave me these spells for. I brought them here to use.”

“But none of them have done anything useful to the mirror,” Karanissa said.

“I know. But there’s one more to try,” Gresh replied.

“The Spell of Reversal? What can that do?” Tobas asked.

“Maybe Karanissa’s right, and it really will suck spriggans back in,” Gresh said.

“Even if it does, it will only work for half an hour,” Tobas pointed out.

“That’s surely better than nothing,” Gresh said. “Perhaps we can find a way to keep on casting it, over and over?” He looked up, and even on a dragon’s face the dubious expression Tobas wore was easy to recognize.

“Well, let’s see what it does,” Gresh said, stubbornly. “We might as well.”

“I admit I don’t see what harm that one can do,” Tobas said. “Unless it breaks the mirror into four pieces again.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Gresh said, with a tug at his beard. “It might, mightn’t it?”

“We could wait until it’s more than half an hour since the mirror was repaired,” Karanissa suggested.

Gresh looked out across the meadow, past Tobas in the draconic form he did not want to keep, at Alorria, who was sitting on the carpet, holding Alris in one arm and tugging at Tobas’s ruined clothes with the other. He looked at the hordes of spriggans milling about, some of them clearly looking for ways to get at the mirror.

“I don’t think we should wait,” he said. “I have the Restorative, or I could even just use the Spell of Reversal again.” He pulled the final unopened jar from his box, wiggled the cork free, then sprinkled a little purple powder over the mirror, and said, “Esku! ” The flash was bluish this time, but after it had faded away the mirror lay on the cave floor just as before and still in one piece. Relieved that it was intact and disappointed that it was not doing anything obvious to reduce the spriggan population, Gresh leaned over and looked into it. He saw only his own reflection looking back at him.

“Nothing,” he said.

Karanissa suddenly reached out and grabbed a spriggan before it had time to react. She held it with one hand around its legs, the other pinning one arm to its body.

The other arm waved wildly about as it squealed, “No no! No hurt! No hurt!”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Karanissa told it. “I’m going to see if I can send you back where you belong.” She tossed the creature onto the mirror.

It landed on the glass with a soggy thump, got up, brushed itself off, and scampered away unhurt, giggling hysterically.

“I’d say it isn’t exactly sucking them back in,” Gresh remarked.

Karanissa leaned over and peered down into the mirror, holding her long hair back out of the way with one hand. “It would seem not,” she agreed.

“So that didn’t work, and we have no other spells to try, so we’re back to trying to figure out some way to get it out of here and across the valley to the no-wizardry zone,” Gresh said.

“Maybe,” Karanissa said, still staring into the mirror. “Or maybe not.” Gresh looked at her. “Maybe not?” He looked down at the mirror. “Why maybe not?”

“Well, look at it,” the witch said. “Maybe the spriggan didn’t get sucked in, but have you seen anything come out of it since you cast that spell?” Gresh blinked. He stared at the mirror. No spriggans were climbing out of it—but it had only been a couple of minutes. He felt a twinge of hope, but quickly suppressed it.

“Not yet,” he said. “But that may not mean anything.”

“It feels different,” Karanissa said. “It’s still magical, still enchanted, it hasn’t gotten any weaker or stronger, but it feels different.”

“Can you tell how?”

Karanissa turned up an empty palm. “No,” she said.

“Tobas? ” a distant voice called.

“Ali?” The dragon had been watching the events in the cave with interest, but now he lifted his scaly head and turned to look at Alorria. Gresh, too, glanced in her direction.

“What’s going on?” Alorria asked, the words barely intelligible over the intervening distance.

“How long are these spriggans going to keep us here? The sun’s going down. Are we going to be stuck here all night?”

The dragon’s head swung back to the cave for a moment. “Excuse me,” Tobas said, “but I’ve been neglecting Ali.” He started to turn away—this time not just by bending his neck, but by turning his entire body.

“Wait a moment,” Gresh called. “If you leave, we’ll be overrun by spriggans, and they’ll take the mirror.”

“If you get too close to the carpet you may panic them into doing something unfortunate,” Karanissa said. “Or you may do something unfortunate, without meaning to.” The dragon hesitated, then said, “I’ll just turn around and talk to Ali from a safe distance.” Karanissa and Gresh exchanged glances. “That should work,” Gresh acknowledged.

“Good.” With that, and with much scraping of scale on rock and rustling of gigantic wings, the dragon turned around, sending spriggans running in various directions squeaking madly, until at last the very tip of his tail slithered across the rocks he had ripped out of the mountainside and curled into the mouth of the cave.

“She’s right that the sun’s setting,” Karanissa said, once the dragon had completed his rotation.

Gresh’s reply was drowned out by the dragon roaring across the meadow to Alorria, reassuring her that everything was fine, and that the other two were just experimenting with the mirror to see if they could remove the enchantment.

Alorria called back, but Gresh and Karanissa could not make out her words. After a moment, by mutual consent, they decided to ignore the conversation between the princess and the dragon and turn their attention back to the mirror. Ordinarily making themselves heard over the dragon’s bellowing might have been difficult, but Karanissa’s witchcraft took care of that.

“There still haven’t been any more spriggans,” Karanissa said. “It really does feel different.

Before it felt as if it were directed away, somehow, and now it seems directed here.”

“Well, the Spell of Reversal....” Gresh began; then he stopped. “Wait,” he said. “It was directed away before?”

“Yes,” Karanissa said. “Definitely.”

“Away where?”

Karanissa hesitated, then turned up a palm. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not anywhere in the World.”

“So it was pulling the spriggans from another world into ours?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you said now it’s aimed here.”

“Yes.”

“But it didn’t suck that spriggan into another world. And we looked into it, and it didn’t suck us in.”

“I know. I never said I understood it. I’m a witch, not a wizard.”

“Oh, I doubt a wizard would do any better,” Gresh assured her. “They rarely really know what they’re doing—it’s all rote formulas and instinct. They don’t actually understand their magic.”

“I know most of them don’t; Tobas certainly doesn’t. Some of them seem to do a little better. I thought Derithon had a better grasp of what he was doing than most, but I was very young then, and that might have been my own naivete.”

“Derithon was your first husband, four centuries ago?”

“Well, we weren’t formally married. I was his mistress. Or technically, a lieutenant assigned special duties under his command.”

Gresh blinked. “Lieutenant?”

“In the military of Old Ethshar. The Great War was in progress, after all. I was serving in reconnaissance, using my witchcraft to locate enemy magicians, when we met.”

“Of course.”

Somehow, despite knowing she was four hundred years old, he had never connected her with the Great War that had ended more than two hundred years ago—but of course she had grown up during the War, and like all magicians of the time would have been conscripted into the military.

The World had been so utterly different then—no wonder Karanissa had said she felt out of place now!

Gresh wondered whether he, too, would feel out of place four hundred years from now, if he completed the job he had come here to do and received the payment he had been promised. That was an odd thought. Was that why so few openly ancient people were around? After all, wizards had been using eternal youth spells for centuries, and even if only a few in each generation ever managed to work them, undying wizards ought to be accumulating, but Gresh hadn’t met more than a handful, at most. Did they withdraw from human society because it was no longer familiar, because it was too different from what they had known when young?

That didn’t really seem reasonable. Karanissa didn’t fit in well because she had spent four hundred years trapped in a castle, but she didn’t seem to want to give up human company, by any means. Most people would have lived through the changes as they happened and could have adapted.

No, there must be some other explanation for the scarcity of ancients.

Scarce or not, he had one here to advise him. “You think they understood wizardry better back then?” he asked.

“Maybe. At least I think Derry did—but he was a couple of centuries old.”

“Oh.” There it was again, the idea of living for hundreds of years and watching the World change around you—but Derithon hadn’t withdrawn from humanity.

Or had he? He had kept his mistress in that weird castle in the tapestry and had flown around the World in another castle, rather than living among ordinary people.

But he had met Karanissa and seduced her. He hadn’t been a hermit.

Or had she seduced him, perhaps? Gresh suddenly wondered whether the Spell of the Revealed Power might turn Karanissa into the likeness of the long-dead Derithon the Mage and whether that might be useful.

He was not about to test out that theory without some careful planning; he had had enough of throwing spells around recklessly. Tobas had been right to criticize him.

“Still no new spriggans,” Karanissa said, interrupting his thoughts.

Gresh glanced down at the mirror, and as he did he caught a glimpse of a pair of pop-eyes watching him from a corner of the cave. The spriggans did not seem upset by whatever the Spell of Reversal had done. There was no ongoing barrage of squeals, nor were there any wild dashes toward the mirror to protect it.

It might be time to ask them a few questions, while waiting to see whether any spriggans emerged before the Spell of Reversal wore off—or after, for that matter. After all, interrogating spriggans had been more obviously useful than wizardry so far.

“Karanissa, would you....” he began.

He did not need to finish the request; she had heard his thoughts. Her hand flashed out and closed on the spriggan’s legs, and a moment later it was hanging upside-down from her fist, squealing.

Several other spriggans were calling protests from elsewhere in the cave.

“Shut up!” Gresh ordered.

The captured spriggan’s complaints died down to terrified whimpering, and the others fell completely silent.

“We aren’t going to hurt you,” Gresh told it. “If you answer all my questions truthfully for the next half-hour, we’ll let you go.”

“Not fun,” the spriggan whined.

“Sometimes life isn’t fun,” Gresh told it.

It nodded desperately.

“Good. Karanissa, why don’t you turn our guest the other way up, so it can talk more easily?” Karanissa righted the creature, but did not loosen her grip.

“Now, my little friend, what do you know about this mirror?” Gresh asked, pointing.

The spriggan looked down and gulped. “That where spriggans come from,” it said. “That what gives spriggans magic, protects spriggans from harm.”

“It does?” Gresh’s gaze fell to the mirror for a moment, then flicked back to their captive. “How does it protect you?”

“Not tell!” another spriggan called from a dozen feet away. Gresh threw a pebble at it, and it fled with a squeal.

The captive saw its companion flee, then said, “Just does.” It tried to shrug, but the gesture was not entirely successful with Karanissa’s hand restricting its movement.

“It didn’t protect you from being captured just now,” Gresh pointed out.

“No, no. Doesn’t protect spriggan from everything. But spriggan can’t be killed, not while mirror is magic.”

“What?” Gresh glanced down at the mirror; was that the source of the spriggans’ invulnerability?

He knew that there was a powerful link between the mirror and the spriggans, or there could have been no fourfold population surge when the mirror was broken, but he had not connected the mirror with the creatures’ reported inability to die from any natural cause.

The spriggan did not try to explain; it just looked unhappy and confused. Karanissa interjected a question. “How do you know it protects you?”

“Didn’t always,” the spriggan said.

“Explain!” Gresh demanded.

The spriggan looked more miserable than ever. “When mirror first make spriggans, mirror was in big stone house in purple sky.” It pointed at Karanissa. “She was there.”

“We know where you mean,” Gresh said, noting silently that the spriggan seemed very sure the mirror made spriggans, rather than bringing them from somewhere else, even though Karanissa had sensed that the mirror was directed somewhere else. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“When mirror was in purple sky place, spriggans had magic, couldn’t be hurt—but wizard tried to lock up mirror, didn’t like spriggans, so spriggans took mirror to other place.” That accorded with what Gresh had been told by Tobas and his wives. “Yes. That was seven years ago.”

“In dark other place, mirror had no magic, so spriggans had no magic. Some spriggans didn’t care, went wandering around, got in trouble, made people angry, and people cut spriggans! With big scary knives! Sharp ones! Spriggans died!”

A chorus of dismayed squeaks came from other spriggans in earshot; the humans ignored them.

“They died?” Gresh looked at Karanissa. “I thought you said they couldn’t be killed by natural means.”

“They can’t,” Karanissa said.

“Spriggans can’t,” the spriggan agreed. “Can’t now, because smart spriggans figured out mirror might be magic again someplace else and took mirror from dark stone house to cave—this cave! And mirror had magic again, and spriggans had magic again, and spriggans not die anymore, ever—well, unless spriggans go where no magic is; spriggans can be killed there. But only stupid spriggans go there; spriggans can feel magic and stay away from bad places.” Comprehension swept over Gresh. Tobas had not bothered retrieving the mirror originally because he had thought it would be harmless in the no-wizardry zone, and it was—but the spriggans had eventually hauled it out of the dead area, not because they wanted more spriggans loose in the World, but because of the magical link between themselves and the mirror that made them unkillable.

That the spriggans had figured out that the link existed proved that spriggans weren’t as stupid as they looked. The connection certainly hadn’t been obvious to him. He supposed that hundreds of them had discussed the situation at length, and they had somehow worked it out collectively, but it was still impressive.

The link might provide some of the other magical abilities the spriggans displayed, as well, such as their uncanny ability to open any lock—but it wasobviously the invulnerability that mattered most to them. “So that’s why you want to keep it safe?” he asked.

The spriggan nodded wildly.

“You were keeping this secret—why?”

“Not want spriggan-killers to know how to kill spriggans! Not want spell broken, or mirror taken to no-magic place again.”

That was reasonable. Furthermore, Gresh thought, in all likelihood, no one had ever asked them about any of this until he had begun his own investigations. The usual reaction to spriggans wasn’t to try to reason with them or determine their origins; it was simply to shoo them away as quickly as possible.

But they could be reasoned with; Gresh saw that now. They wanted the mirror to preserve their indestructibility. “And you don’t care that it keeps making more spriggans?” he asked.

“Not care much,” the spriggan agreed. “Enough spriggans now. Crowded here, with so many.

We send extras off to find wizards—spriggans like magic. And have fun. But keep enough here to guard mirror.”

“You send the extras away, on purpose?” Gresh demanded. “They don’t just wander off?”

“Send them away, yes,” the spriggan said, nodding again. “That way, on easy old road.” It pointed to the north. “Some go off other ways, but most use road.” And that, it seemed, explained why so few wound up in Dwomor—the road the captive indicated led the opposite direction, north and west toward Ethshar, where most of the world’s wizards were.

“Why didn’t one of you just tell us all this, instead of mobbing poor Alorria and making everything difficult?” Gresh asked. “We can work something out!”

“Didn’t know you weren’t spriggan-killer, maybe?”

“But I said we didn’t want to hurt you, didn’t I?” He looked at Karanissa.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Did you?”

“I think maybe we were too busy with other things,” Gresh admitted. “I suppose the way we kept trying to get at the mirror couldn’t have looked very friendly.” Then he turned his attention back to the spriggan. “So right now, is the magic still working? We changed the spell on the mirror—does that matter?”

“Still works,” the spriggan said. “No problem.”

“So if we somehow made this change permanent, you spriggans would be happy?”

“Would depend on other things. Not happy when it rains, or when spriggans all get really hungry.

Hungry now—you have food?”

“No,” Gresh lied. He had a few things to eat in his pack, but he had no intention of giving them to the spriggans. “I meant, you wouldn’t mind the change in the spell?”

“Not mind. Magic still working.”

Gresh nodded.

That really seemed to explain everything. He tried to think of other things to ask the spriggan before releasing it, and nothing came to mind.

Taking the mirror into the no-wizardry area and destroying it would put an end to the spriggans’

indestructibility. If the link was as strong as the quadrupling of the spriggan population when they broke the mirror implied, destroying it might destroy the spriggans, as well, wiping them from existence.

He hadn’t really thought that was likely a few hours ago, but the population explosion had changed his mind, and the news about spriggan invulnerability also being connected to the mirror—well, there was clearly a very strong link. So destroying the mirror might destroy them all.

Or it might not. They hadn’t ceased to exist when the mirror was in the no-wizardry zone before; they had merely lost their magic.

Either way, the spriggans hated the idea of letting the mirror be destroyed or taken into the no-wizardry area and would fight furiously to prevent it. They had no objection to things that merely prevented the mirror from producing more spriggans. If there were some way to make the Spell of Reversal permanent....

But Gresh was fairly certain there wasn’t. Besides, he had agreed to sell the mirror to Tobas and the Guild, he had not contracted to merely stop the production of spriggans.

“Do you think the Guild would be satisfied if we just prevented the mirror from making more of them?” he asked Karanissa.

“I have no idea,” she replied. “I’ve never known what to expect of the Wizards’ Guild. They might be.”

“I had thought that anything that would stop it from producing spriggans would break the spell on it, or completely change it, but that doesn’t seem to be what happened here, with the Spell of Reversal.

Not that I really know what did happen. You said it feels different; can you add anything? Has it changed any further?”

“No.”

Gresh sighed. This was all getting very complicated, whereas his original plan had seemed simple.

“If we could just get it across the valley to the ruins, we could destroy it—smash it to powder, maybe.”

“The spriggans would do everything they could to stop us.”

“I know.” He grimaced. “But we do have a good-sized dragon on our side. Maybe Tobas could clear us a path.”

“What about Alorria and the baby?”

Gresh sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know whether the spriggans would really hurt them or not.”

Karanissa glanced around at the dozens of little eyes watching them from various corners of the cave. “They would try,” she said. “I’m not sure what they could do, but they would try.” He did not doubt her; after all, she was a witch. “What if we took the mirror back to Ethshar?

That wouldn’t block the magic they want. What would they do then?”

“You know they want to keep it under their own control,” Karanissa said. “I don’t think they’d be as desperate as if we were heading to the ruins, but they’d still try to stop us. And how could we do it? They’re all over the flying carpet, and it would take months to get back to Ethshar on foot, and during those months they’d be constantly trying to steal the mirror back. Every time we slept, the spriggans would grab it.”

“What if we got the carpet off the ground with all of us and a few hundred spriggans on it, then dumped all the spriggans off?”

“This would be after you turned Tobas back to a human? How would we get to the carpet through that mob?” She pointed out at the meadow, still swarming with spriggans. “They might also fling so many of themselves on the carpet it couldn’t get off the ground.” Gresh sighed.

“All we need to do,” he said, “is to get the mirror back to Ethshar and give it to the Guild—then it’s their problem. We don’t need to deal with it permanently ourselves.”

“Well, you don’t,” Karanissa agreed. “Tobas and I—well, we made some promises. Our agreement with the Guild is to put an end to the problem of spriggans, not just to deliver the mirror.”

“Just...put an end to the problem?” Gresh considered that. “So if we did make the Spell of Reversal permanent, would that be enough?”

“It might be,” Karanissa said. “I’m not sure. There would still be half a million spriggans running around loose.”

“But there would never be any more than that.”

“That’s why it might be enough.”

Gresh looked down at the mirror. “Stupid thing,” he said. Then he reached for the box of powders—the temptation to play with magic was still strong, and after all, this was what these spells were for.

“I think I’ll try a few things,” he said.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Twenty

“Don’t turn back— esku!” Gresh shouted, as he sprinkled red powder on the mirror.

It flashed gold.

“How will you know whether that worked?” Karanissa asked.

“The half-hour will be up in a few minutes,” Gresh said. “You should be able to sense whether the spell reverts, shouldn’t you?”

“Probably,” the witch admitted.

“If you can’t, we’ll know when spriggans start appearing, or when we’ve gone an hour or two without any.”

“I suppose so.”

The two of them stood staring down at the mirror. In addition to Javan’s Geas, Gresh had also tried Lirrim’s Rectification again, to see whether it did anything, but there was no discernible effect.

The sun was definitely behind the mountaintop now, and the Spell of Reversal was due to expire at any moment. Tobas was still standing guard in front of the cave, roaring reassurances to Alorria. The flying carpet was still partially buried in spriggans and quite thoroughly surrounded by them, but none were touching mother or daughter.

A sudden thump startled Gresh; he turned to see Tobas staring down at one of his front feet, which was planted firmly on the ground. Then the dragon’s face contorted, his neck twisted oddly, and he began making a very odd noise.

“What is that?” Gresh asked, startled. “Is he all right?”

“He’s...he’s laughing,” Karanissa said. “I never heard a dragon laugh before.”

“I didn’t know dragons could laugh!” Gresh exclaimed.

Then Tobas lifted the taloned foot, saying, “That tickles!” A spriggan squirmed up out of the spot where the dragon’s foot had been and scampered away.

Gresh called, “What was that about?”

Tobas turned to look at him. “Oh, nothing much,” the dragon explained. “That spriggan tried to slip by me, so I stepped on it. It didn’t squash, though, and it just kept wriggling around under my foot; it tickled dreadfully.”

“Oh,” Gresh said. The dragon put his claw back on the ground and turned his attention back to Alorria, calling new reassurances to her.

Gresh turned to Karanissa. “I guess they really can’t be seriously harmed,” he said. “If being stamped on by a dragon doesn’t hurt them, what will?”

“Nothing,” Karanissa said. “I told you. That’s the problem.”

“I know, I’ve been thinking about it, and our little hostage explained it, but still, seeing it demonstrated like that....” He turned up an empty palm.

“It is strange,” Karanissa agreed. “It’s strange seeing my husband in the shape of a dragon, too—especially since he’s taken it so calmly, once the actual transformation was complete.”

“He’s a wizard,” Gresh said. “He’s supposed to be accustomed to magic.”

“Getting turned into a dragon is hardly normal even for a wizard.”

“I suppose not.” Gresh glanced at the dragon’s tail, then back at the witch. “But you and he have been involved in some odd adventures before this—trapped in a magic castle, slaying a dragon, defeating the false empress....”

“I know.” She shuddered slightly.

“Even just being married to someone with another wife must be a bit awkward at times.”

“Oh, yes.” She sighed. “I told Tobas before he married Alorria that I wasn’t the jealous type, and I’ve tried not to be. I knew Derry had other women sometimes, and that didn’t bother me, so I thought I could handle it. Ali knew what she was getting into, too—I was married to Tobas first, after all.

She wanted to marry someone, certainly. She had five sisters. Her parents weren’t going to find princes for everyone, and that meant a hero, so she didn’t have a great many choices. Really, she didn’t have any choice; her parents gave her to Tobas as his reward for killing the dragon, bribing him with her dowry. But she did like him and admire him. She can be very sweet. We all thought it would work out.”

“Well, it has worked out, hasn’t it?”

“Mostly—but I must admit, Ali is not who I would have chosen to live with for the rest of my life.

I’ve tried not to be jealous of her, but she hasn’t always done the same for me.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“She feels outmatched. I’m a witch, so I know she does, I’m not just guessing. She sees that I’m a fellow magician for Tobas and four hundred years older than she is, with vastly more experience. She also thinks I’m more beautiful, though Tobas doesn’t, nor most of the other men we meet.”

“I think I’d agree with Alorria on that one.”

“Well, thank you, but most men don’t. They think I’m too skinny, too flat-chested, too dark, too aloof, too tall, too intimidating—whatever. Ali’s just as pretty in the face and anything but flat-chested, not to mention nicely rounded elsewhere. Men may admire me, but they lust after her—not that she believes it. And Tobas—I don’t know how he does it, but most of the time he really doesn’t prefer one of us over the other. It’s amazing. Not that Ali believes that, either, even though we’ve both told her it’s true. Even though she agrees we should be equal partners, she’s always demanding attention, trying to compensate for the advantages she imagines I have.” She sighed. “She’s been especially sensitive ever since she got pregnant with Alris. Sometimes I think I should get pregnant, as well, just to stay even.” Gresh knew that ordinarily female witches could control whether or not they conceived; he wondered whether Karanissa had actively avoided bearing children, or merely let nature take its course.

And really, she wasn’t an ordinary witch; she was four hundred years old. Even with an eternal youth spell, was she still fertile? Did she know?

It wasn’t any of his business; she had already told him far more than he had any business knowing, and far more than he would have asked, though he had not been surprised when his remark elicited so detailed a response. He had been fairly certain that she would be happy to find receptive ears.

Many men professed to find women incomprehensible, but after growing up with his numerous sisters, Gresh thought he had a reasonably good understanding of the female mind. He had provided a sympathetic and non-threatening audience, and Karanissa had taken advantage of his presence to say things she could not tell her husband, her co-wife, or anyone in Dwomor. He understood that perfectly.

He had, in fact, planned it. He liked Karanissa, more than he liked Tobas or Alorria, and had welcomed the opportunity to create a bond.

It was probably a foolish thing to do, though. She was a happily married woman, even if she was not completely satisfied with her co-wife. Once their business with the mirror was done, he would never see her again.

She threw him a sharp glance, and he realized neither of them had spoken for several seconds.

He wondered how much of his thoughts she had heard. “Nothing to say about the wisdom of giving my husband another child?” she said.

Apparently she had not heard everything he had thought; she had probably been too caught up in her own concerns. “It’s not any of my business,” he said. “I would think that your situation is complicated enough, though. And you have plenty of time, with your eternal youth spell; no need to hurry.”

“Tobas doesn’t have an eternal youth spell.”

“I hardly think that’s an issue at this point. He’s a young man.”

“So are you, but you’re concerning yourself with eternal youth.”

“I’m not as young as he is, and I know I won’t always be young unless I do something about it.”

“Tobas didn’t think of that.”

“Or didn’t want to deal with it. I’m sure your marriage is complicated for him, too, and obtaining eternal youth just for himself would surely make it worse, while getting it for both Alorria and himself—well, he may not feel ready to extend the current situation for hundreds of years.” Karanissa stared at him. “Do you believe that’s it? I didn’t intrude, and I believed him when he said he just didn’t think of it.”

“You’re a witch, and you know him far better than I do.”

Karanissa continued to stare at him, and Gresh thought he read speculation in her gaze. Was she, perhaps, thinking that Tobas and Alorria might never find a youth spell, and that someday, fifty or sixty years from now, she would be a widow—and if Gresh was successful in his errand for the Wizards’

Guild, he would still be around and still be young?

Or was he just flattering himself?

Her intense gaze became uncomfortable, and he looked down at the mirror. “The half-hour must be almost done,” he said.

Her gaze dropped, as well. “It is; it’s changing right now. I can feel....” She didn’t finish the sentence; instead she stared silently at the mirror.

So did Gresh. The glass had gone black, and then something began to thrust itself upward out of the mirror—but it was no spriggan. It was neither green nor brown, but glossy black—covered with lush black hair, Gresh realized.

It was larger than the mirror. Some of the fatter spriggans might have had to squeeze a little, but this creature, whatever it was, was somehow forcing itself through an opening much smaller than its own dimensions.

The hair parted on one side as the thing continued to rise up out of the mirror, revealing a brown forehead. Gresh realized that a human head was emerging from the spriggan mirror. The face was turned away from him, toward Karanissa, who was staring at it in shocked horror.

More hair, a pair of ears, a nose—definitely human.

Then came the neck—that was relatively quick, as it did not need to be magically squeezed as much—and then a pair of shoulders, shoulders clad in red fabric....

“Oh, no,” Gresh murmured. “Let me....” He stepped around the mirror and stood beside Karanissa, where he could see the face as the creature continued to force its way up out of the far-too-small mirror.

It was a woman’s face, a dark-skinned oval. Gresh recognized it immediately. After all, he had been looking at it for the past half-hour and more.

It was Karanissa.

Gresh looked up and saw the original Karanissa still standing there, looking down at her duplicate. This wasn’t Karanissa, then; it was a copy.

And the copy had her hands free of the impossibly small glass now and was pushing herself up, just as the spriggans had, except that she was somehow emerging from the mirror despite being much larger than it. Even the slim Karanissa was far more than five inches across.

The mirror was doing something strange to space, obviously.

Then the imitation Karanissa sat back on the stone and pulled her legs from the little glass circle.

She was entirely free, and the mirror once again looked like an ordinary mirror.

This Karanissa, at least initially, appeared indistinguishable from the original. She wore an identical red dress, and her hair was styled just like the original’s.

“Well, so much for using Javan’s Geas on the mirror,” Gresh muttered. “But we must have done something that altered the nature of the spell. Are we going to get a plague of Karanissas now, instead of spriggans?” He found himself thinking that that would certainly be an improvement.

The original Karanissa ignored him as she knelt by the rather dazed-looking copy and asked,

“Who are you?”

The copy looked up, obviously confused, and said, “I’m a person.”

“I didn’t ask what you are,” Karanissa said gently. “I asked who you are.”

“I’m...I’m a person,” the other said. “That’s all I know.”

“Where did you come from?”

The imitation looked down at her feet, then pointed. “The mirror,” she said.

“Are you a witch?” Karanissa asked.

The copy blinked, then frowned. “I’m not sure,” she said.

“Can’t you tell?” Gresh asked the original.

“No, I can’t,” Karanissa admitted. “Which is puzzling, to say the least.” She looked up at Gresh.

“This... this person isn’t all here, exactly.”

“She isn’t...well, you?” Gresh asked. “Could it be that you’re being confused because her identity isn’t entirely distinct from your own?”

Karanissa reached out and put a hand on her imitation’s shoulder; the imitation started slightly, glanced at the hand, then looked up at Gresh. “Do I look like her?” she asked.

“Very much,” Gresh said, startled by the question.

“She’s pretty.”

“So are you.”

The copy lowered her gaze. “Thank you,” she said.

“You know,” Karanissa said, looking up at Gresh, “until I touched her, I wasn’t sure she was really there. I thought she might just be an illusion, especially given how she squeezed through the mirror when she obviously couldn’t have fit.”

Gresh nodded. He was thinking furiously. He did not understand why this duplicate of Karanissa should have emerged from the mirror, but he intended to figure it out. It would almost certainly explain a great deal about how the mirror’s magic worked, and that might well help them end the plague of spriggans forever—if they had not already somehow altered the spell permanently.

He glanced down at the mirror to see whether anything else was climbing out of it; nothing was.

This woman, this copy of Karanissa, was solid, but Karanissa said she did not seem real....

“Lady,” he said, “do you remember anything from before you emerged from the mirror?” The copy looked up at him again. “Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t exist before I climbed out of the mirror, did I?”

“We don’t know,” Gresh said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“Well, as far as I know, I didn’t exist until a couple of minutes ago.” Gresh looked at the original. “You say she doesn’t seem entirely human?”

“She doesn’t seem entirely real,” Karanissa corrected him.

“Do spriggans? Could she be a spriggan in human form?”

“I’m a person,” the duplicate interjected. “I do know that much.”

“She....” Karanissa tilted her head and studied the copy. “She’s not a spriggan, but there is a similarity. I never noticed it before, but you’re right, spriggans aren’t all there, either. If I hadn’t had real humans to compare her to, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with her.”

“There isn’t anything wrong with me!” the duplicate protested.

“Stand up and let me look at you,” Gresh suggested. “Let’s see if you really are an exact duplicate of Karanissa.”

The two women exchanged glances, then rose and turned to face Gresh, standing side-by-side in the fading daylight.

“Oh,” Gresh said. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

The two were identical in appearance in every detail except for one. The dresses were the same fabric, the same cut, belted identically, with the same knot at the same place; the hair was the same length and luster, with every lock and curl matching; the eyes were identical in color and shape; the teeth matched; the nose and mouth were indistinguishable—except for one thing.

The copy was smaller than the original.

She was proportioned exactly like the real Karanissa, but she was about two inches shorter, a shade thinner, and not quite as wide at shoulders, bust, waist, or hips. Her fingers were slightly shorter; her eyes and mouth were slightly smaller. She was the exact image of Karanissa, but somehow shrunken.

Image, he thought. Mirror image.

Gresh looked down at the mirror, then back at the two women.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

He felt simultaneously brilliant and foolish—brilliant because he now was certain of exactly how the mirror’s magic worked, and foolish because it had taken him so long to guess the truth.

It probably explained how Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm worked, too.

It explained why spriggans were indestructible while the mirror’s magic was working, but not when it wasn’t. It explained why none of them had names when they emerged, why they sometimes varied in appearance but were sometimes identical, why they didn’t feel entirely real to witches, and why they had no odor. It explained why they emerged at apparently random intervals, and why the mirror had kept working when broken, but multiplied everything by four.

“Oh, what?” Karanissa asked, visibly annoyed.

“They’re images,” Gresh explained. “Mirror images. They aren’t really here in the World at all; they’re in the mirror.” He leaned forward and sniffed at the smaller woman, and as he had expected, smelled nothing at all—no scent of woman whatsoever.

She looked puzzled at his action, but did not shy away, or make any comment.

“Images? What?” the original Karanissa asked. “What are images?”

“Spriggans. The ones we see and talk to aren’t real spriggans; they’re just mirror images. The real spriggans are in another world somewhere, a world that has a mirror in it that’s magically connected to this one. I wonder whether the reason Tobas’s spell went wrong in the first place is because he was doing it in that purple void, instead of here in the World. Instead of linking to the world of the Haunting Phantasm, he linked this mirror to the world of spriggans, which is related to the void the same way the phantasm world is related to this one.”

“But the Haunting Phantasm doesn’t keep spewing out pests.”

“The worlds are different, of course, so the rules are different, and the magic is different.

Wizardry is like that.” He turned up an empty palm. “Or maybe he just made a mistake; wizardry is like that, too.”

Karanissa shuddered. “Sometimes I hate wizardry.”

The reduced copy—the image, as Gresh now thought of it—looked from one of them to the other, then said, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Spriggan understand,” a squeaky voice said from behind Gresh’s right shoulder.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Twenty-One

Gresh turned to look at the spriggan that had crept up behind him. “Then I’m right?” he asked.

The spriggan turned up an empty hand. “Not know,” it said. “But sounds right.”

“So you’re just an image of a spriggan that looked in a mirror in another world?”

“Think so, yes.”

“That’s why the Restorative and the Rectification didn’t do anything,” Gresh said, as he continued to work out the details in his own mind. “Because the spell didn’t go wrong, it just went differently, so there wasn’t anything to restore or rectify. There’s no intelligence involved, just an enchanted object, so Javan’s Geas can’t do anything—nobody is making our spriggans, they just happen whenever a real spriggan looks at the mirror in the other world.”

“I’m still not sure I understand,” Karanissa said. “How did you figure this out? Why is this copy of me here?”

“She’s what gave it away,” Gresh said. “When I saw she was smaller than you. The reflections in a mirror are smaller than the originals because of perspective—they’re reduced in size, the amount depending on how far from the mirror the original is. She’s smaller than you because she’s a reflection—or really, a reflection of a reflection. It’s that second step that’s why she isn’t reversed.” Karanissa stared at him in annoyance, while the imitation appeared politely interested. “Gresh, what are you talking about?” the original demanded.

He sighed; it was all so obvious to him now he didn’t see why Karanissa hadn’t grasped it.

“When I used the Spell of Reversal,” he said, “the direction of the spell reversed. Instead of creating solid images of creatures from the spriggans’ world in our World, the magic began creating solid images from our World in the spriggans’ world. Every living thing that looked in our mirror during that half-hour or so had a mirror-image copy climb out of the other mirror, the mirror in the spriggans’ world. I looked in the mirror, you looked in it, that spriggan we tried to toss back in—copies of us all must have climbed out in the spriggans’ world. A copy of you was still there in the spriggans’ world when the reversal wore off, and it looked in the mirror, so a copy of the copy climbed out here.” He pointed at the duplicate Karanissa. “That’s her—a mirror image of a mirror image. She doesn’t have a name or any memory because she really didn’t exist until the mirror reflected her into being. She and the spriggans have no odor because smells don’t reflect.” He considered for a moment, then said, “I’m a little surprised that there’s no image of me appearing. I must have been reflected into the other world, too. Maybe my duplicate—or duplicates, since I looked in the mirror more than once while it was reversed....” He stopped, and looked down at the mirror, but nothing was trying to climb out of it; that was a relief. He had been momentarily concerned that half a dozen copies of Karanissa and himself might appear.

According to his theory, in some alien world where spriggans were apparently the dominant form of life, images of Karanissa and himself had climbed out of a mirror. He wondered what was happening to those images, what they were doing, what the real spriggans thought of them. Would they be pests, the way the spriggan images were? They were almost certainly indestructible, like spriggans—after all, you can’t hurt an image; it isn’t really there, it’s in the mirror, and only appears to be anywhere else.

Spriggans were indestructible because a reflection can’t be harmed by striking the reflection itself. A reflection is destroyed when the mirror it’s in is destroyed. That’s why the spriggans thought they would die if the mirror was destroyed. The mirror’s enchantment somehow made the reflections seem solid and able to interact with the real world when the original was no longer looking in the mirror, but they were still just images.

When the spell had been suspended but not broken, when the mirror had been in the sphere where wizardry didn’t work, that had changed, and the reflected spriggans had somehow had their own independent and vulnerable existence. That was one part of the spell that Gresh didn’t entirely understand, but then, wizardry was a chaotic and complex thing. In any case, the magic was working properly now, and the mirror’s creations, whether spriggan or human, were all part of the mirror itself, and therefore couldn’t be harmed as long as the mirror wasn’t harmed.

That would make those reflected people in the other world harder to manage.

The reflections of Karanissa and himself were presumably much larger than spriggans, unless there were some weird factor he hadn’t thought of involved. Even if they weren’t playfully troublesome, like spriggans—and the Karanissa-image standing a few feet away didn’t seem to be—they must be a nuisance just because of their size. It seemed that he and Karanissa had inadvertently unleashed a brief plague of giants on that unsuspecting other world.

That mirror in the other world was presumably indoors somewhere—mirrors generally were, and if it had been out in the open, wouldn’t they have occasionally had creatures other than spriggans climbing out of it, during these past few years? The rooms and corridors would have been built with spriggans in mind. Real spriggans were presumably somewhat larger than their Ethsharitic images, but not that much larger. Those duplicates of Karanissa and himself must have been jammed into spaces far too small for them, much as the spriggans had been when Tobas shut the mirror up in a box.

The spriggans had eventually burst that box. Those reflected Greshes and Karanissas had probably exploded an entire building. The real spriggans were probably pretty upset about that.

The reason only one Karanissa had been reflected back might be that she was still wedged against the mirror somehow; she hadn’t yet climbed out of the wreckage and was blocking the others.

That would also explain why no more spriggans had emerged yet.

Assuming, of course, that his theory was right, and he wasn’t just building up nonsense. Maybe what had really happened was that throwing all those spells at the mirror had finally changed the nature of the enchantment completely, into something unrelated to spriggans.

“Karanissa,” he said. “You said you can sense changes in the spell?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Is it back to its original form now?”

“As far as I can tell, yes.”

That fit with his theory—but he could still be wrong. He didn’t think he was, but he had to keep the possibility in mind.

If he was right, he still had to figure out what to do about it. The Wizards’ Guild wanted the mirror destroyed, but the spriggans didn’t. It appeared that destroying the mirror wasn’t as simple as he might have hoped. Breaking it into pieces made matters worse, and dragonfire hadn’t harmed it, but at least it wasn’t as indestructible as the images it created.

If it were smashed to the point that it ceased to function as a mirror and no longer reflected anything, that would probably do the job—grinding it to dust might to be sufficient, and if they could get it to the wizardry-dead area and grind it to dust there, that would almost certainly do it. Getting it to the dead area was the challenge, with thousands of spriggans determined to prevent it.

Grinding it to dust anywhere other than the dead area did not seem like a good idea; there would inevitably be intermediate stages when the spriggans would be multiplied, and he could not ignore the hideous possibility that every single glittering grain might still serve as a functional mirror as far as the spell was concerned.

If they ground it to dust in the dead area, what was to prevent spriggans or other creatures from someday bringing out those still-enchanted specks, each of which might function as a mirror? That was a nightmarish possibility. Tracking down a particle of dust and dealing with it would be far more difficult than locating an intact hand-mirror.

And they wouldn’t know whether the destruction was adequate and permanent; there would be no way to test it in the dead area, or to reverse it there if it somehow made matters worse.

Melting the thing down so that it was no longer a mirror might put an end to the enchantment.

Gresh tried to think how else one could destroy a mirror, besides smashing and melting.

Nothing came immediately to mind.

There was the question of whether this mirror was really the one they wanted destroyed. If he was right, and it was linked to another mirror in another world, then wouldn’t it be better to destroy that mirror, so that it could no longer cast reflections into this World?

How could he do that? He had no way to transport himself to that other reality, wherever and whatever it might be.

If he could somehow get to that other world, he wouldn’t even need to destroy the other mirror.

If it were merely covered, so that no one could look into it, that would be enough to prevent any more spriggans or imitation Karanissas from appearing.

That wouldn’t do anything to the reflected spriggans that already existed, but somehow, Gresh did not find that such a terrible thought. He looked around the gloomy interior of the cave at the dozens of pop-eyes watching him from the various nooks and crannies.

The spriggans weren’t really so very bad. Yes, they got into things and made trouble, but they didn’t mean any harm. They just wanted to survive—and to have fun. Since they really were just solidified reflections, destroying the mirror might very well destroy them all.

Slaughtering half a million well-intentioned little creatures and wiping them from existence did not appeal to Gresh. As mere reflections the poor little things presumably had no souls—it took a specific sort of enchantment to make a mirror that captured souls, and he did not think Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, no matter how altered, would do it. If they were killed, they would be gone utterly, with no chance at any sort of afterlife—there would be no spriggan ghosts, no spriggans in Heaven or the Nethervoid. Spriggans weren’t human, but they were bright enough to talk and to have figured out that the mirror was essential to their survival.

He didn’t want to kill them all, he realized. Send them somewhere else, perhaps, but not kill them.

He did want to stop the mirror from generating any more. If he could just cover the mirror in the real spriggans’ world, perhaps seal it away in a box....

Sealing away the receiving mirror hadn’t done any good, of course, but sealing away the sending mirror, so that there were no reflections to send, should work.

He could use the Spell of Reversal to send images of himself into the spriggans’ world, but judging by the pseudo-Karanissa they would arrive with no memory of who they were. The copy of Karanissa didn’t even know whether or not she was a witch. Gresh-images wouldn’t remember that the mirror had to be covered up or hidden away.

If there were some way to get a message to the spriggans themselves, surely they would cooperate—the reflected humans must have done a great deal of damage, and they wouldn’t want a repetition. He couldn’t send a reflected spriggan or human with instructions, since the new arrival would have no memory.

Well, he thought, looking at the imitation Karanissa, he couldn’t send spoken instructions that way. Karanissa’s dress had reflected, though....

“Hai,” he called. “Can any of you spriggans read?”

No one answered. He looked at the copy of Karanissa. “Can you read?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I think so.”

Gresh frowned, then reached into the box of magical powders and pulled out a jar. “Read that label,” he said.

The reflection of Karanissa looked at the original, then at the jar. She peered at the label. “It says

‘Lirrim’s Rectification,’” she told Gresh.

“So you can read.”

“Yes, I apparently can,” she agreed.

That meant it was possible for a reflected image to have the ability to read. Gresh hesitated, however, at the thought of setting another immortal giant loose among the real spriggans just to send them a message.

But then he realized he didn’t need to send another; the giants who were already there, however many there were, could undoubtedly read just fine—after all, this copy of Karanissa was a reflection of a reflection, not of the original. If she could read, then so could the copies already there.

But could spriggans?

“What’s going on in there?” asked a deep rumble. Gresh looked up to see the dragon that had been Tobas of Telven looking down at him. “How much longer are we going to be here? The sun is down, and even if you turn me human again, and we take off right now, it’ll probably be dark by the time we reach the keep. Why aren’t we doing.... Who is that?” The final question was spoken in an earth-shaking bellow, as the dragon noticed the presence of a second Karanissa. Spriggans squealed in terror.

“What did you do?” the dragon roared. “Where did it come from?”

“We were experimenting with the mirror,” Gresh said calmly. “I’ve figured out how it works and how to make it stop producing spriggans.”

As if to contradict his statement, a spriggan popped out of the mirror just then—the first one since he had first cast the Spell of Reversal. That fit his theory well enough; some brave spriggan had presumably finally ventured into the neighborhood of the other mirror. The new arrival looked up at the man, the two women, and the dragon, then shrieked and ran away into the darkness of the cave’s depths. Gresh heard other spriggans calling comfortingly to it.

“You have?” the dragon asked suspiciously. “What was that I just saw, then?”

“I said I know how to stop them, not that I’ve done it yet,” Gresh said.

“Of course. You did say that. There’s something else you haven’t done yet—you haven’t explained why there are two of my wife there.”

“That was an accident,” Gresh said. He pointed. “That’s Karanissa.” His finger moved. “And that’s a magical image of her that doesn’t have a name yet.”

“An image?” The dragon cocked his head and glared at the reflection with one baleful red eye.

“Is it solid, or just an illusion?”

“I’m solid enough,” the image replied.

“It talks.”

“Oh, yes,” Gresh said. “In fact, it’s indestructible, just like a spriggan. I told you, we found out how the mirror works, and we did it by accidentally creating... well, her.”

“It’s permanent?”

“Very much so, yes.”

“Kara, what’s going on? What is that thing?”

Before the real Karanissa could reply, the copy shouted, “I’m a person! Stop calling me ‘it’ and talking about me as if I weren’t here!”

This outburst startled Gresh; until now the reflection had been calm and quiet and cooperative.

Like Tobas, he hadn’t been thinking of it as entirely human—he had just been more tactful than the dragon. It seemed there was more to it than he had thought, though.

The dragon stared at the image for a moment; she stared angrily back. Gresh and Karanissa waited.

Finally the dragon said, “I’m sorry, whoever you are. I didn’t realize you were, well, real.”

“That’s better,” the reflection said, crossing her arms over her chest.

The dragon peered at her for a few seconds more, then asked, “But can someone explain to me what’s going on? Do we have the mirror? Can we take it with us and get out of here before it gets dark?

How much longer do I need to be a dragon? Ali is getting upset.” Gresh thought Alorria had been upset for quite some time now, but was not stupid enough to say so.

“I’m not sure what the situation is myself,” Karanissa answered.

“I don’t know what’s going on at all,” the reflection said.

“I do know what’s going on, but I’m not sure how to explain it,” Gresh said. “I know that in, oh, an hour or so I ought to be able to put an end to the production of new spriggans. I don’t know any safe way to destroy the mirror, though, and I’m not sure there is one, or that we should use it if there is.” That was more or less a lie; Gresh was quite sure there were several ways to destroy the mirror.

At least one of them was probably safe. There were spells that could do virtually anything, after all. The problem was that he doubted anyone knew which ones were safe, and he suspected the Guild might try a few that weren’t.

Simply destroying it, given enough magic, couldn’t really be that hard. The trick was to not leave any residue at all, and there were definitely spells that could do that, even if Gresh didn’t know what they were.

He suspected that Tobas didn’t know any of them, either. After all, Tobas might be a wizard, but Gresh was a wizards’ supplier; they were both familiar, at least in theory, with all the common spells. If Gresh couldn’t think of a safe way to destroy the mirror, he doubted Tobas could, either.

There were a few methods that might work—throwing it through a Transporting Tapestry to a place outside the World, letting a warlock destroy it, stuffing it face-down into a bottomless bag, feeding it to a demon. Gresh was not going to suggest any of those. It was all too likely that there were unforeseen flaws in them all.

“If there’s a safe way to destroy it, why shouldn’t we use it?” Tobas demanded.

Gresh’s real reason was simply that he decided he did not want to wipe out half a million semi-intelligent beings, but he did not think Tobas would accept that immediately—especially not when he was in dragon form. The wizard had already acknowledged that his shape was influencing his thoughts and behavior. Gresh doubted a real dragon would hesitate for a second before exterminating the spriggans.

Instead of admitting his unwillingness to play exterminator, Gresh said, “Because it might wipe all the spriggans out of existence, or it might turn them mortal, or it might multiply them infinitely

—remember when we multiplied them by four? Destroying the mirror might do the same thing a hundred times over—or a thousand.”

The dragon stared at him for a moment, then said, “That would be bad.”

“I think so, yes,” Gresh agreed.

“So what are we going to do, then, if we can’t destroy the mirror safely?”

“Well, what I intend to do is ensure that the mirror won’t produce any more spriggans. Next, if possible—and I’m not entirely sure about this part—I’ll give it to you, with the understanding that you will not attempt to destroy it. I think I can convince the spriggans to allow that. What I contracted to do was to deliver the mirror to you, the Guild’s representative, so after that I’ve done my job— more than my job, since preventing it from generating new spriggans wasn’t anything I’d promised. If you like I’ll be happy, as yet another bonus, to try to help you convince the Guild that this is an adequate solution to the spriggan problem. I think that’s more than fair.”

“But the Guild....” The dragon hesitated.

“Oh, and I’m perfectly willing to leave you in either human or dragon form, if you think one might be more useful in negotiating with Kaligir and his friends.” Tobas snorted sparks. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll turn me human. I can’t accept the mirror in this form; I’d probably break it into a dozen pieces and smother you all in spriggans.”

“Good point. Well, you can deliver the mirror to the Guild, if you like—with the appropriate warnings—and let them worry about it.”

“I can, can’t I?” The dragon cocked his head thoughtfully.

“Personally, I’d much rather you just sealed it away in a box somewhere and didn’t let them meddle with it,” Gresh said. “This all assumes that we can actually get it out of this cave, and I’m not entirely certain of that part yet. I do have some ideas.”

“How long is this going to take?”

“Putting an end to new spriggans should take maybe an hour, I’d say. Giving you the mirror and leaving here safely could take five minutes or it could take days, if I can do it at all.”

“It’ll be dark in an hour.”

“I know.”

“Ali won’t like that.”

“I know.”

“I don’t like the idea of flying in the dark.”

“I don’t blame you. And I may not be done until well into the night. I just don’t know. If I do have everything settled fairly quickly, I think I can convince the spriggans to go away and let us leave, and I can turn you human again. If we can’t fly safely, we’ll just take shelter in the cave until morning.

You and Alorria are welcome to join the rest of us here, of course.”

“You think we’ll be here all night?”

“I’m afraid it’s likely, yes.”

“Ali won’t like that. Ali’s parents won’t like that.”

“She insisted on coming along; it wasn’t our idea.”

“I don’t think that’s going to make any difference.”

Gresh turned up a palm. “I know it won’t—so lie. Tell her I messed up a spell and can’t turn you human until the sun rises again, if you like.”

“That might do. There’s no food, though, and she’s a nursing mother.”

“I have a few things in my pack—not much, but a little. We should be able to go back at first light, I think.”

“I suppose.” The dragon looked at the two women. “Will you be all right, Kara?”

“I’m fine,” the witch replied.

“And what about you?”

“I don’t know,” the reflection said. “I’ve never seen night before.” The dragon stared at her for a moment, then turned back to Gresh. “What are we going to do with her?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Gresh said. “I’m not sure we need to do anything with her. She’s a grown woman, and effectively immortal. Even if she doesn’t know anything about the World, she can probably take care of herself. The spriggans have done all right here.”

“But she looks like my wife.”

“What of it?”

The dragon stared at him for a moment, as Gresh tried to decide whether those huge red eyes actually glowed, or merely caught the waning light.

“Nothing, I suppose,” the dragon said at last. “Get started on whatever mysterious thing you’re doing, then, and I’ll try to keep Ali from getting hysterical.” The huge scaly head withdrew from the hole in the cave roof.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Karanissa said.

“I hope so, too,” Gresh said, as he looked around in the fading light, trying to spot some suitable spriggans.

“Excuse me,” the reflection said.

Gresh turned to her, startled. “Yes?”

“That was a dragon, wasn’t it?”

Gresh glanced up at the darkening sky. “That? Yes, that’s a dragon. His name is Tobas.”

“Are many of your friends dragons? Is that common, talking to dragons?” Gresh blinked. That was a very sensible question, but this really did not seem like the right time to address it. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “Right now, though, I have work to do.”

“Oh, of course.” She stepped back, with a glance at Karanissa.

Gresh considered the reflection for a second. Despite what he had said to Tobas, he supposed they would need to do something about her—after all, they were responsible for bringing her into existence.

That could wait, however. Right now, he had the spriggans to deal with.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Twenty-Two

It only took a few minutes to collect several half-burned bits of grass and twig from the floor of the cave and to gather a few reasonably cooperative spriggans—one of them freshly emerged from the mirror.

“Now,” Gresh told the spriggans, “we are going to try a few things. If they work, then I want to make an offer to you and all the spriggans in the World that I think is very fair, and which I very much hope you’ll accept.”

“Can’t speak for all spriggans,” one of the larger spriggans said.

“Well, we’ll see what we can do,” Gresh said. “Now, first off, can any of you read?” The spriggans exchanged glances. “No?” one of them ventured.

“Let’s just see,” Gresh said. He pulled out a jar and showed them the label. “Karanissa, could you provide a little extra light? It’s getting dim in here.” The witch obliged by holding up a glowing hand. Her imitation stared up at this in obvious amazement, then began studying her own hand.

“Now, look at the jar,” Gresh said to the spriggans. “Can any of you tell me what that label says?”

No one replied. Some stared at the jar; some exchanged glances with one another, but none admitted to having any idea what the label said.

Gresh sighed and lowered the jar. “So you can’t read. I was afraid of that. Can any spriggans read?”

“Don’t think so,” the big one said.

“Well, we’ll just have to hope the human reflections cooperate, or that your originals can figure out pictograms,” Gresh said, as he slid the jar back into its place in the box. “Now, I need a volunteer to go first.”

“What first?” a brighter-green-than-usual spriggan asked warily.

“I’ll show you, as soon as one of you volunteers. It won’t hurt.” He certainly hoped it wouldn’t hurt. He didn’t see any reason it should.

“Fun?” asked a nondescript spriggan.

Gresh smiled, hoping he looked sincere. “Yes, I think it’ll be fun.”

“Have fun, then.” It stepped forward.

“Thank you!” Gresh picked up one of his improvised charcoals, caught up the spriggan in his other hand, and quickly began drawing on the spriggan’s bare belly.

A few of the other spriggans gasped in horror at Gresh’s apparent treachery. Some stepped back as the captive shrieked. A couple of them fled, vanishing into the shadows at the far end of the cave.

“Ack! Tickles!” the spriggan in Gresh’s hand squealed, as it began squirming.

“Just...hold still for a moment,” Gresh said, as he struggled to complete the sketch he was drawing.

The spriggan began giggling uncontrollably and thrashing its arms and legs and ears wildly, but Gresh refused to be distracted or release his hold until he had completed the job. Finally, though, he set the little creature down on a rock and released it.

It stood there gasping, hands waving, laughter gradually subsiding into panting. Then it smiled broadly up at him. “Lots of fun!” it squeaked. “Do it again?” Gresh smiled back. “No, let someone else have a turn—and don’t smear the drawing! Don’t touch it! Not yet!” He looked around. “Who’s next?” he asked.

This time no one hesitated. “Next! Next!” shrieked another spriggan, beating its comrades in the rush to Gresh’s knee. Gresh picked it up with one hand while he reached for another bit of charcoal with the other.

As he worked on this second spriggan—who was less ticklish than the first, but still enjoyed the experience—he kept glancing at the first, to make sure the quick charcoal sketch wasn’t being ruined.

Before starting the third, he set Karanissa and her reflection to guarding the finished ones, making certain they didn’t let anything disturb his crude drawings.

Finally, after decorating six spriggans, he felt he had done the best he could. He set the two women to stand guard over them while he pulled out the jar of purple powder. He sprinkled it over the mirror, then told everyone, “Stand back! Don’t look in the mirror!” Both Karanissas stepped back, and the spriggans scampered after them.

“Esku! ” Gresh shouted.

The powder flared up and was gone.

“Now, the first spriggan,” he called. “The first one I drew on—run forward and look in the mirror, just once!”

After a moment of confused hesitation, the creature obeyed.

“Next!” Gresh called.

One by one, he sent all six to look into the mirror; then, satisfied, he carefully laid his pack over the mirror so that no one else could look in it before the Spell of Reversal wore off.

“Tickle again?” a spriggan asked, sidling up to him.

Gresh looked down at the creature. It was smiling up at him, trying to look endearing—and it was succeeding.

Besides, the thing had helped him with his scheme and deserved some reward. “All right,” he said. He picked it up and began tickling.

After all, he had nothing more urgent to do. There was no need to draw any more pictures. He had sent his message.

Or at least, he hoped he had; success all depended on the assumption that his guess about the mirror’s nature was right. If he was wrong about how it worked, he had just wasted a spell and a good bit of time and effort.

If his theory was correct, though, he had just created six spriggan images in the real spriggans’

world, each of the first five with a picture drawn on its belly, and the sixth with a message in Ethsharitic runes.

The pictures were each numbered in the upper left corner—not with numerals, but with tally marks from | to |||||. The drawings, stick figures done in scratchy charcoal, were intended to convey instructions to the inhabitants of that other world.

The first drawing showed two huge scary people threatening a crowd of spriggans; one of the two giants was still in the process of emerging from an oval intended to represent a mirror.

The second showed two spriggans carrying the mirror between them.

The third showed them placing the mirror in an open box.

The fourth showed them closing the box.

The fifth drawing was the most complicated, showing two scenes—at the top two scary giants coming out of a mirror were heavily crossed out with a big black X that had sent the canvas-spriggan into hysterical screams of laughter, while below that four happy, smiling spriggans stood around the safely closed box. He had had trouble with that one; fitting all of it on a single spriggan had been difficult, and he had used his finest bit of charcoal-tipped twig for the job.

Those five were intended to convey his message to illiterate spriggans, but he hoped they wouldn’t be needed. The sixth spriggan’s belly had a message written on it: “SHUT THE MIRROR IN

A SOLID BOX, AND NOTHING ELSE WILL COME OUT OF IT.”

That hadn’t been easy to fit, either. He had debated whether to write the runes forward or backward and had settled on forward—yes, they would probably be reversed on arrival, but so would the images of Karanissa and himself.

Now, if the message got through, and someone in the other world heeded it, then that should solve the spriggan population problem—if the other mirror was safely sealed away where no true spriggans could look in it, then no spriggan images would emerge in the World.

Assuming, of course, that he had correctly deduced the spell’s workings.

The only way to test it was to wait and see. If anything else came out of the mirror, then he would need to try something else.

Even if it all worked perfectly, that only solved half the problem. The other half was that he had promised he would deliver the mirror to Tobas, and right now there were several thousand spriggans who did not want him removing the mirror from this cave. He was fairly certain that there was no magic he could use to force them—if a sixty-foot dragon wasn’t enough to chase them away, then he had no idea what would do the job.

But he might not need to use force.

When he had spent several minutes tickling spriggans, reducing half a dozen of them to helpless laughter, he set the last one on the ground and said, “All you spriggans! Every one who can hear me!

Come here—I need to talk to you.”

Two or three dozen more emerged from the shadows.

“Karanissa,” he said. “Would you go tell your husband to let some spriggans through, to talk to me? Perhaps a hundred or so?”

Karanissa frowned at him, then turned up a hand. “As you say,” she replied. She clambered out through the hole in the cave wall, out onto the meadow beside the dragon’s tail.

He glanced down at his pack, covering the mirror. That seemed secure enough for the moment, but he put a foot on a corner of the pack, just in case. Then he waited.

A moment later a good-sized group of spriggans came swarming into the cave, and Gresh found himself surrounded by several dozen pop-eyed little creatures, all staring at him in the gathering gloom.

None of them seemed inclined to charge him, or to try to grab the mirror—he had half-expected such a maneuver, and had been ready for it.

When the crowd had quieted he looked around. “Oh, good,” he said. “You look as if you’re ready to listen.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Listen.”

“Spriggans listen.”

Gresh nodded. “Here’s the situation, then. Under my pack there is the enchanted mirror you all came from, and that protects you from harm. If it’s broken into pieces, each of you is multiplied into however many pieces there are, and there may be other connections, as well. Most of you know about that—maybe all of you. You don’t want it to be harmed, or to be taken into the places where wizardry doesn’t work, and you hid it away in this cave to prevent anything like that from happening. You’re all still here, instead of out in the World having fun, because you’re guarding the mirror. Am I right?”

“Right!”

“Yes yes yes!”

“That right.”

“We got in here anyway, Karanissa and me, and meddled with the mirror, and our dragon kept you from stopping us—but you kept us from taking the mirror away by getting between us and our flying carpet, where the dragon couldn’t chase you away safely for fear he might harm either the carpet, or the woman and baby sitting on it. So we have something of a stand-off.”

“Right!”

“Yes!”

“You’re hoping we’ll give up and go away eventually—but that isn’t going to work. First off, I’m as stubborn as you are. Second, if we do give up, that isn’t the end of it—the Wizards’ Guild sent us to get the mirror, and if we don’t bring it back they’ll send someone else, and then someone else, until they do get the mirror away from you. They have lots of magic, and they’ll use it. They want the mirror destroyed, and sooner or later they’ll find a way to get it.”

“No!”

“Bad wizards!”

“No no no no!”

“Yes, that’s how it is.” Even in the gathering gloom, Gresh could see the concern and dismay on all those inhuman little faces and the puzzled interest on the reflected Karanissa’s visage. He also saw the real Karanissa climbing back into the cave; he sensed that she was listening carefully, both with her ears and her witchcraft. “But I’ve been studying the mirror, trying spells on it, and I think I’ve figured out how it works. I’ve decided that I don’t want it destroyed, either. If I leave it here with you, though, sooner or later the Wizards’ Guild is going to find it and destroy it. So what I want to do is give it to the wizards, but make sure that instead of destroying it, they lock it away somewhere safe. If I can do that, it won’t be destroyed, and you don’t need to stay on this mountain to guard it anymore—you can go out in the World and have fun, like the other spriggans! What about that idea?” Several spriggans began cheering and applauding, but others were calling protests and questions, obviously not convinced. Gresh held up his hands for silence, and with a little help from Karanissa’s witchcraft, silence descended once again over the unruly mob.

“How you do that?” a large spriggan called.

“Not trust you!” said another.

“Of course, of course,” Gresh said consolingly. “Why should you trust me? I’m just another big nasty human. But here’s what I’ll do, to prove I’m serious. I have here a box of magic powders that the wizards gave me to help me fetch the mirror. The red powder casts a spell called Javan’s Geas—do you know what a geas is?”

“No.” Several spriggans shook their heads or otherwise expressed ignorance.

“It’s a compulsion. What Javan’s Geas does is keep someone from doing something. It can’t make someone do something they don’t want to—it’s not that kind of geas. But it can prevent them from doing something they do want to. You understand?”

That elicited a mixed chorus of “yes” and “no” responses.

“What are you doing? ” Karanissa’s voice said inside his head. He glanced at her and saw her frowning. She had not spoken aloud.

“Bear with me,” he told her silently.

“If I put a spell on someone with Javan’s Geas,” he told the spriggans, “and order him not to break the mirror, then he can’t break the mirror—the spell won’t let him. You see?”

“Yes yes!”

“No!”

“Spriggan see!”

“Spriggan not understand.”

Gresh sighed.

“What I’m going to do,” he said, “is turn the dragon back into a human wizard and give him the mirror. You understand that part?”

“Not let you!” one large spriggan squealed.

“What I want to do,” Gresh corrected himself, “is turn the dragon back into a human wizard and give him the mirror. Is that clear?”

The responses were a mix of affirmatives and mild puzzlement. Gresh pressed on.

“Then, when he has the mirror, I’m going to cast Javan’s Geas on him three times. The first time I will command him not to ever give the mirror to anyone else, at any price. The second time I will command him not to ever try to damage or destroy the mirror. And the third time I will command him not to ever take the mirror into any of the places where wizards’ magic doesn’t work. After that, he’ll want to keep the mirror safe. He’ll take it back to his castle and lock it up safely, where no one can ever harm it—and you won’t need to stay and guard it anymore; the wizard will guard it for you. You see?” The spriggans considered that for a moment, while Karanissa silently asked him, “Have you gone completely mad? ”

“Notice,” he told her mentally, “that I never said anything about not allowing other wizards to take the mirror from him, should they decide it to be necessary. ”

“If you agree to this,” Gresh called to the spriggans, “then just say so. I’ll work the magic, and we can all go have fun—no more guarding caves!”

“You not hurt mirror?” a spriggan asked hesitantly.

“I swear to you, by my true name and all the gods, that I do not intend to damage the mirror.”

“Wizard not hurt mirror?”

“I swear to you, by my true name and all the gods, that if you let us take the mirror away, I will enchant the wizard Tobas of Telven with Javan’s Geas so that he cannot damage the mirror.” For a moment, then, the cave was utterly silent, as Gresh looked out over the crowd of spriggans and they stared back.

Then one voice somewhere in the back said, “Fun!”

With that a chorus of squeaking and squealing erupted. Gresh could not make out most of what was being said, but after a moment he got the definite impression that he had convinced a majority of his listeners and that they were attempting to persuade the rest.

“What if Tobas doesn’t agree to go along with this? ” Karanissa asked silently.

“I wasn’t planning to give him a choice,” Gresh replied.

With that he reached down and pulled two jars out of the battered wooden box, one of bright orange powder and the other of dark red. Then he asked Karanissa, “Is the magic still reversed?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll have to wait a few more minutes.” He sat down on a convenient rock, the two jars cradled in his lap.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Twenty-Three

While they waited, Gresh thought over the situation.

It seemed to him that they were reaching a satisfactory conclusion to matters. With any luck his message had been received and understood in the world from which spriggans were reflected, and the mirror would be shut away in a box somewhere, ending the supply of spriggans. That removed it as any serious threat to the World. The half-million spriggans already in existence might be a nuisance, but they could be accepted; he did not want to aid in exterminating them. Ending the existence of half a million beings bright enough to talk, answer questions, and do all the other things that spriggans did struck him as a horrible idea, an unnecessary and unfair slaughter—after all, a good many of the spriggans had never bothered anyone, but had stayed here in the mountains guarding the mirror. That was almost noble, in a way.

As long as the mirror produced no more, Gresh considered the problem to be adequately solved.

His actual agreement with the Wizards’ Guild had been to deliver the mirror to Tobas, and he had every intention of doing that, so there was no problem there—except for the usual one of getting the Guild to live up to its end of the agreement. Tobas would undoubtedly tell them how he had not used any amazing magic or superhuman skills, but had merely backtracked the spriggans with common sense and a little sorcery, and there would also be the issue of not actually ensuring the mirror’s destruction, so the Guild might well try to wiggle out of paying him the promised youth spell. He would need to have arguments ready, pointing out that he was more than living up to his end of the bargain, and that the Guild would be well-served to see that he continued in his business as their best supplier of exotic ingredients.

Aside from preparing his arguments, there were still a few other loose ends, as well. He would need to see that the mirror was secure, tucked away somewhere no one untrustworthy would meddle with it, and where the spriggans couldn’t easily change their minds and steal it. If possible, he wanted to convince the Guild not to destroy it; that would be simpler if he could offer them a way to deal with troublesome existing spriggans. While he wanted the mirror shut away somewhere, it needed to be stored in such a way that if any more spriggans did emerge, the Guild would be alerted, and the matter could be dealt with.

Whoever was in charge of the mirror would want to be very sure that if it did produce more spriggans, those newly emerged spriggans could not carry the mirror off somewhere and hide it, starting the whole thing over again.

Besides the various aspects of the mirror and the spriggans and the Wizards’ Guild, there was one other loose end. He glanced at her.

The reflection of Karanissa’s reflection was sitting on a rock in the dimming twilight, watching the spriggans curiously.

She considered herself a person, but Gresh was not at all sure she was right. Presumably she was just as indestructible as the mirror’s other creations, just as bound to the mirror’s condition. She did not seem hostile or difficult—in fact, she seemed more passive than the original Karanissa—but simply letting her wander off into the mountains did not seem safe or humane.

Karanissa had said she wasn’t whole—perhaps something could be done about that. Gresh looked down at his open pack and the box of magical powders in the top.

Javan’s Restorative would not do any good; she had never been complete. Lirrim’s Rectification, though, might turn her into the fully human creature she was meant to be. She would still look just like Karanissa, but that was not really much of a problem. Gresh had met identical twins who seemed to lead individual lives.

Lirrim’s Rectification turned things into what they were meant to be, more or less. It was not always clear just what that was, since whatever power guided the spell did not always seem to use human logic, but in this case Gresh could see very few possibilities. It might do nothing, as it had on the mirror itself, but he thought it was more likely that it would turn a solidified image into whatever it was an image of. If so, it would turn the copy of Karanissa into a human being, and it would turn an ordinary spriggan into a real spriggan.

If it worked that way, then the Guild could use Lirrim’s Rectification on troublesome spriggans.

They would become real spriggans, which were presumably mortal and could be harmed, imprisoned, or killed. Such a transformation would surely be an adequate threat and appropriate penalty for misbehaving reflections.

It would also mean there would be no need to destroy the mirror, though doing so would probably be far, far easier than casting Lirrim’s Rectification half a million times.

Of course, no one knew just what real spriggans were like. They were presumably somewhat larger than their images, but there might be other differences, as well. Gresh was not about to try the Rectification on any spriggans. Let some wizard make the experiment.

Gresh was not going to rush into using the spell on the image of Karanissa, either. For the present he just wanted to get the mirror safely stashed away somewhere such as Dwomor Keep. Once that was done....

“There,” Karanissa said. “It’s returned to normal.”

“Ah, good,” Gresh said. He lifted the pack off the mirror and quickly wrapped the glass in soft cloth, then tucked it away in the pack, below the box of powders.

Dozens of spriggans watched him do this; none moved to intervene. Apparently his partisans had convinced the rest.

He hoped his message had gotten through and been acted on—if not, he was going to have spriggans appearing in his backpack, which would be inconvenient, and he would need to find some other way to render the mirror harmless.

“You’ll let us go back to Dwomor now?” he asked the spriggans.

“Make promise! Make promise!”

“Yes, of course—but then we can go and take the mirror with us?”

“Take spriggans with you,” a large one said as solemnly as an eight-inch pop-eyed creature with a squeaky voice could.

Gresh stopped. “What?”

“Take spriggans!” several voices chorused.

Gresh considered for a moment.

They couldn’t mean they wanted to jam all half a million onto the carpet, or even just the thousand or two guarding the cave; even spriggans weren’t that stupid.

“You want to have a few spriggans there to make sure we take good care of the mirror?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“How many?” he asked.

“Five?”

“Four?”

“Six?”

“Lots!”

“I’ll take four,” Gresh announced. “That should be enough.” There was some squeaking and muttering in response to that, but the objections did not seem very serious, so Gresh ignored them and started for the mouth of the cave.

The sun was well down now, the sky darkening. Clambering over the rocks was not particularly enjoyable in the fading light. Gresh had to watch his footing. Once he emerged onto the meadow, though, he looked up and found a pair of huge red eyes staring at him.

“Has anyone ever mentioned to you,” Tobas said conversationally, “that dragons have exceptionally good hearing?”

Gresh blinked. “I can’t say I knew that,” he replied warily.

“I hadn’t known it myself until I became a dragon,” Tobas said. “But I’ve found it’s quite true.

Remarkably so. I heard every word you said to the spriggans.”

“Ah,” Gresh said, noticing just how large the dragon’s fangs were and that he could see a faint smoldering glow coming from somewhere behind those fangs.

“Tobas....” Karanissa began, from behind Gresh.

“Fortunately,” the dragon said, interrupting her, “I think it’s a reasonable agreement. Still, I would appreciate it if in the future you would at least try to obtain my consent before casting spells on me.”

“I was planning to,” Gresh said, trying to hide just how relieved he was. “I just wanted to get the hard part out of the way first, and I was fairly sure it would be easier to talk sense to you than to a horde of spriggans.”

“Hmph,” said Tobas, producing a faint shower of sparks. Gresh quickly brushed off one that landed on the shoulder of his tunic. “Shall we get on with it, then?”

“Keep the Spell of the Revealed Power handy, in case the spriggans change their minds,” Karanissa urged.

Gresh glanced at her, trying to assess whether she was genuinely just trying to offer a helpful suggestion, or if there was some other reason she might want her husband turned into a dragon again, or if she was being sarcastic.

He couldn’t tell. He liked to think he was fairly good at figuring women out, after growing up among twelve sisters, but he could read nothing from Karanissa’s expression. He decided not to worry about it as he readied the jar of orange powder that would cast Javan’s Restorative.

“You might want to tell Ali what’s happening,” Karanissa suggested.

“She’s feeding the baby,” Tobas said.

“All the more reason to avoid any big surprises.”

“Um,” Tobas said. He lifted his head and called, “Ali, Gresh is about to turn me back!”

“Good!” Alorria shouted back. “Your clothes are... well, I did my best.” Gresh grimaced.

The dragon’s immense head swung back around and lowered down toward Gresh as he raised a generous pinch of orange powder. He flung it at the dragon and shouted, “Esku! ” The transformation was not quite as spectacular in this direction; rather than a golden flash and extensive reshaping, there was merely a flicker of blue, an odd shrinking, and then Tobas was standing in the meadow in human form, naked and blinking.

“Hai,” he said. “That was odd.” His voice was faint and unsteady. He turned his head to one side, then to the other. “It’s so stiff,” he said. “And everything’s so dim and warm and quiet.”

“What’s stiff?” Gresh asked.

“My neck.” The wizard stretched, rolling his head from side to side. “That long neck was really rather convenient.”

“You’ll have to tell us about it sometime,” Gresh said. “But first....” He flung a pinch of dark red powder at Tobas and proclaimed, “Never give anyone the spriggan mirror— esku!” The powder flashed and vanished.

Another pinch followed before Tobas had even finished blinking.