“Rocks,” it said at last. “Trees. Lots of trees. Twelve... twelveteen? Not sound right.”
“Twelveteen,” Gresh said. “You saw forests.” That narrowed down the search; Gresh knew that the southern end of the mountain range extended into open grasslands, and the forests that had once covered the northern end had been cleared for farming. He had had reason to learn such details, since some of the ingredients he sold included forest products—leaves from the topmost branch of a sixty-foot oak, for example, or dew from the underside of a fiddler fern.
Forests—so it wasn’t in Lumeth or Calimor, or anywhere north of Vlagmor. What could he ask that would narrow it down further?
“Did you see a lake as you traveled westward through the forest, or cross a river?”
“No. No lake. No rivers in forest, just little streams. Didn’t cross big river until the long bridge with the guards. And that... thirteenteen? No, that twenty! Twenty, twenty, twenty! Right, twenty?”
“Twenty,” Gresh admitted.
So the mirror was in a cave on the eastern side of a mountain somewhere between Vlagmor and Calimor, and not in the central area where the spriggan’s westward march would have encountered Ekeroa’s lake, or the river that drained the lake and much of the western mountains into the Gulf of the East.
Karanissa had mentioned Dwomor and Aigoa. Gresh was not sure exactly where those were, but he thought they lay somewhere not too far from Ekeroa. If the mirror were still in Dwomor, and Dwomor was where Gresh had thought it was, and the spriggan headed west, it should have seen the lake—but it hadn’t.
That was interesting, but not necessarily significant. Even if the cave was directly east of the lake, if the creature hadn’t headed due west over the mountains it might have missed the water. Depending what time of year it had emerged from the cave, the sun might have risen well to the south of due east, so that it might have headed northwest...
“Go now?” the spriggan asked, interrupting his chain of thought. “Please?”
“Fine,” Gresh said. He did not think he was going to get any more useful information out of the creature. He had used up his questions. He glared at the spilled blood and broken glass, thinking he hadn’t gotten much for the price. “You can go—but don’t come back, ever!” He shook a warning finger at the little creature. “I don’t want ever to see you again!”
“Yes, yes. Not come back. Promise.”
“Good enough.” He stepped aside and even opened the door. The spriggan dashed past him into the street, squeaking wordlessly.
Gresh stood in the door for a moment, watching it flee. He saw his sister Chira approaching, her sorcerer’s pack slung on her shoulder. She waved cheerily, and he waved in return. Cleaning up the blood would have to wait—it had probably already spread as far as it was going to and would have soaked into the planking anyway. It might well need magic to remove it. Talking to his sorcerous sister was more important; he tried not to waste anyone’s time but his own.
A moment later, after apologizing for the mess, he was ushering her to the chairs in the corner and calling to Twilfa to fetch tea.
“So, little brother, what can I do for you?” Chira asked happily, as she tucked her skirt under her and settled onto the velvet. She gave the broken jar a quick glance, then looked at him expectantly as she slid her bag from her shoulder and lowered it to the floor.
Gresh smiled at being called “little brother.” He was over six feet tall, at least six inches taller than Chira, and given his solidly-muscled build and her slim figure, he probably weighed twice what she did. All the same, the four-and-a-half-year difference in their ages ensured that he would always be “little brother” to her.
“I need to find a particular enchanted mirror,” he said. “It’s in a cave somewhere in the Small Kingdoms, in the central mountains—not the area right around Ekeroa, but somewhere between Vlagmor and Calimor, probably on the eastern slopes. A couple of magicians have tried to find it with various methods and failed, but so far as I know they didn’t try sorcery.”
“What kind of mirror?”
Gresh held out his hands as Karanissa had. “A hand mirror, roughly this size,” he said.
Chira looked down at her pack for a moment, considering. “Nothing comes immediately to mind,” she said. “It’s in a cave, you said?”
Gresh nodded.
“So I can’t follow the sunlight to it. And mirrors don’t have any special smell to track. What sort of enchantment is on it?”
Gresh hesitated. “A faulty version of Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm,” he said.
“Wizardry, then?”
“Yes, of course.”
“No ‘of course’ about it,” Chira said, reaching for the shoulder strap of her bag. “There are plenty of other kinds of enchantment.”
“Well, yes, but... you know I work mostly with wizards. And what other kind of magic would make it so hard to find?”
“Demonology. And some kinds of sorcery—we do work with mirrors sometimes.”
“True, true. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “You’re right, you mostly work with wizards, I know that. And I owe you. We both know that. So tell me about Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm—is that one that produces smoke?”
“No, that’s one... well, it doesn’t matter what it ordinarily does...”
“It might,” she interrupted.
“...but this mirror produces spriggans.”
Chira stopped moving, one hand holding the strap at her knee, the other tucked at her side. She stared at him.
“Spriggans?” she said. She glanced at the pool of dragon’s blood. “Like the one I saw running out of here?”
“Yes. Like that one—and yes, that one broke a jar of very expensive blood. Spriggans are a huge nuisance, and this mirror generates them. In fact, it may be the only source.”
“Someone knows where the spriggans came from?”
“So they tell me.”
“And they’ve hired you to find it?”
“We’re negotiating.”
“Why?”
“Why are we negotiating? Because we haven’t agreed...”
“Why do they want you to find it?”
“To destroy it, I think.”
“They don’t know where it is?”
“No. Spriggans carried it off and hid it in a cave, apparently.”
“Your customer told you that?”
“That spriggans carried it off, yes. I found out about the cave myself.”
“How did... No, never mind. I’m sure it’s a trade secret. Except... if one of our sisters could tell you it was in a cave, why couldn’t she tell you where?”
Gresh smiled. Chira did indeed know his methods. “It wasn’t anyone in the family,” he said. “It was an independent informant. He’d seen the cave, but didn’t know the route, or exactly where it was.”
Chira shook her head in amazement. “How do you find these people?”
Gresh turned up empty palms.
“Well, so someone’s hiring you to find this mirror and destroy it. You’re sure about that?”
“I’m sure about hiring me.”
“But destroying it? Not changing it to make something else, something worse?”
That possibility had not even occurred to Gresh. He wondered if Karanissa’s good looks had biased him, and had perhaps kept him from considering potential dangers. “I don’t know for certain,” he admitted. “But rest assured, now that you’ve pointed out the risk, I’ll make absolutely sure of their intentions before I let anyone else touch the thing. Assuming, of course, that I find it.”
Chira snorted. “You’ll find it,” she said. “You always find what you go after, one way or another. You always have. Remember when Mother hid the candy when we were little? It didn’t matter where she put it; you’d always have a piece by bedtime.”
Just then Twilfa emerged, carrying a tray bearing a pot and two cups of tea.
“Mine’s in the kitchen,” Twilfa said.
“You’re welcome to listen,” Gresh said. “It’s all in the family.”
“No, that’s all right,” Twilfa replied. She set the teapot on a nearby shelf, then turned, tray in hand, and retreated toward the kitchen.
Gresh frowned at her departing figure.
“I make her nervous,” Chira said quietly, cradling her teacup.
“You’re her sister,” Gresh protested.
“I’m twice her age,” Chira pointed out. “I was halfway through my apprenticeship by the time she could crawl.”
“Well, I was about thirteen, and an apprentice myself,” Gresh said. “It’s not as if we were playmates, either.”
“But she works for you. She sees you every day. And you don’t carry around a bag of mysterious ancient talismans.”
“No, I sit in a shop full of magic! Blood and body parts on every shelf and a vault with explosive seals only I can open!” Then he waved it away. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“We’ve always been a competitive family,” Chira said. “You were special, being the only boy, so maybe you didn’t...”
“I noticed,” Gresh interrupted. “I definitely noticed. But that doesn’t mean I like it when Twilfa treats you like a stranger.”
“Not a stranger,” Chira said.
“Not a sister, either!”
Chira raised her empty hands. “Never mind that. I’m not here to see Twilfa, or to talk about her.”
“Fine. At any rate, I want to find the mirror. Can you help? And rest assured, I won’t just hand it over to my employer with no questions asked.”
“I can’t see how I can find the mirror directly,” she replied. “It doesn’t give off light or sound or odor, so far as you know?”
“No.”
“And it was an ordinary mirror before it was enchanted, not made of anything unusual?”
“Just a mirror—polished metal, or glass and silver, I suppose.”
“Then I can’t think of anything that would find the mirror itself.” She hauled her pack up onto her lap as she spoke and began unbuckling the straps. “But I do have something that might be useful.”
“Oh?”
She rummaged in the bag as she said, “I have something you can use to find and follow spriggans. Maybe when you get close you can use it to backtrack to the mirror.”
Gresh nodded thoughtfully. “That might help,” he agreed.
She pulled a talisman from the pack, a dully gleaming metal disk that looked rather like a hand-mirror itself, and held it out. “It isn’t specific to spriggans,” she said. “But it can tell you when anything is moving within a hundred feet of you and follow the motion, even if you can’t see anything yourself. You can tell it to watch one movement and ignore another, or tell it to watch for a particular size or speed.”
Gresh accepted the disk warily and looked at its round surface; his reflected gaze looked back at him, far more faintly than from an actual mirror, but still clear enough.
“How does it work?” he said.
Chapter Five
Operating the sorcerous talisman was not as simple as Gresh would have liked. He was sitting in his front room, once again going over the various gestures and commands it obeyed, making sure he wouldn’t forget them, when the front bell jingled. He looked up from the device as Twilfa hurried from the kitchen to answer the door.
He had been practicing with it since Chira left, which had been long enough for Twilfa to clean up the broken jar, wipe up the spilled blood as best she could, and arrange a carpet and a few boxes to hide the bloodstains, which Gresh had promised to have magically removed at the first opportunity. She had scarcely finished that when Tira had arrived at the back door, and Twilfa had barely settled her in the kitchen with a sausage roll and a mug of small beer when the bell rang. Twilfa still reached the front door before Gresh could even slip the talisman into the pouch on his belt. Twilfa was in full bustle this afternoon, rushing around and getting things done with remarkable efficiency. By the time he was upright and had straightened his tunic, she was showing the customers in.
The young man Twilfa ushered into the shop appeared to be in his mid-twenties, but since this was presumably Tobas of Telven, a wizard powerful enough to own a flying carpet, appearances might not mean much in this case. He had dull brown hair and rather pale skin and stood just slightly taller than average. He wore a black tunic trimmed with red and gold, and good leather breeches.
Behind him were two women—the tall, black-haired witch, and a shorter, plumper woman with hair equally black, but curly rather than straight. She had milky-pale skin, whereas Karanissa’s was brown, and the other woman held a bundle in her arms—a bundle with tiny fingers and a face.
The baby was wrapped in fine white linen embroidered in blue and green; its mother wore green velvet and yellow silk. The family could obviously afford to dress well, though Gresh did not think much of their taste—no two of them went together well, not even the mother and child.
“Come in, come in,” he called, tucking the talisman out of sight as Twilfa ushered the foursome through the door. He rose to greet them—and not incidentally, to impress them with his own height and physique. That little bit of psychological advantage might be useful.
Karanissa stepped forward to make introductions. The man was indeed her husband Tobas, the other woman her co-wife Alorria of Dwomor, and the infant was their daughter Alris, who was still at an age where she did little more than stare, wave her hands aimlessly, and occasionally drool.
“She’s named for her grandmother,” Alorria said, as Gresh smiled down at the baby and held out a finger for her to grab. “The queen of Dwomor.”
Gresh managed to hide his surprise at that. When he had first heard the baby’s name, he had immediately wondered whether it deliberately combined elements of both wives’ names, which would have been a remarkable bit of diplomacy. In his admittedly limited experience with polygamists, co-wives tended to treat each other like sisters, which is to say, with a great deal of barely concealed rivalry and an intense interest in maintaining their own place within the family. For a mother to give a baby a name that reflected both women hardly fit that model, so it wasn’t surprising that Alris was not, in fact, named in part for Karanissa, nor that Alorria made sure he knew that—but it was surprising that Alorria’s mother was a queen.
Alorria herself had not been introduced as a princess—but then, she was married to a wizard, and the Wizards’ Guild would not allow someone to be both wizard and royal. Alorria had presumably had to give up her title and her place in the succession when she married Tobas.
Gresh wondered what that place had been. If she had been next in line for the throne then her attachment to Tobas must have been quite intense, but if she had half a dozen older brothers then she hadn’t really given up much of anything. The Small Kingdoms were awash in surplus princesses, due to the tradition that princesses must marry princes or heroes, but princes could marry anyone they chose—emphasis on any one, as multiple marriages complicated the bloodlines and inheritances too much and were therefore not normally permitted for royalty. Which was another reason Alorria’s shared marriage seemed odd.
How in the World had this Tobas wound up married to a witch and a princess? It wasn’t as if it was common for a man to have more than one wife; most women wouldn’t stand for it. Gresh had only very rarely managed to keep company with more than one woman at a time, let alone marry them. Not that he had married anyone, or particularly wanted to.
“Would you like to sit down?” he asked, gesturing toward the velvet chairs.
“There aren’t enough chairs,” Alorria said.
“I’ll be happy to stand,” Gresh said. “Let the ladies be seated.”
“I’m not a lady,” Karanissa murmured.
“I am,” Alorria said, settling onto one of the chairs and cooing at Alris.
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Karanissa started to say something else, then bit it off and took the other chair.
“Your mother was queen of Dwomor?” Gresh asked Alorria as he leaned comfortably against the wall by the hearth.
“She still is,” Alorria said. “And my father is King Derneth the Second.” The pride in her voice was unmistakable.
That eliminated any possibility that Alorria had been exiled from her homeland and had made the best of her situation by marrying a wizard. Tobas could not be a prince himself—the Guild would never have allowed that.
But in that case, if Alorria had obeyed the rules at all, Tobas must have been a hero.
That was interesting.
Gresh remembered that Karanissa had said that the three of them had helped the Guild deal with Empress Tabaea. The details of exactly what had become of Tabaea had not been made public. Apparently the Wizards’ Guild had employed some extremely dangerous magic, and rumor had it that all that had remained of the self-proclaimed empress was her left foot. The overlord’s palace in Ethshar of the Sands had reportedly been gutted in the process, as well. Had it been Tobas who did that?
Gresh glanced at the wizard, who gave every appearance of being a rather ordinary young man. It was hard to imagine him flinging around that sort of high-powered spell.
Even if it had, though, that couldn’t have been what qualified him as a hero in Dwomor. The timing was wrong, as little Alris had certainly been conceived well before Tabaea’s downfall.
Karanissa had said that Tobas rescued her from an other-worldly castle and had accidentally created the first spriggans, but neither of those really seemed the sort of thing that Small Kingdoms royalty would consider adequate heroism. If he had rescued Alorria, or one of her parents—well, perhaps he had.
Gresh pushed the matter aside; maybe he would find out later. Neither of the women seemed particularly reticent.
“Well, Tobas,” Gresh said. “I understand you want me to find a mirror for you.”
“That’s right.” The wizard held up his hands. “About this big. Silvered glass. The sort wizards like to use, but glass, not alloy.”
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