The Spriggan Mirror loe-9

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

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

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

  Gresh stocked both varieties, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Anything you want.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

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

  “Well, first off, your wife said that the Wizards’ Guild was financing this and would pay any price. Did she mean that literally?”

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

  “Forgive me for being blunt, but I’m a businessman, not a diplomat—how much is that?”

  Tobas sighed again. “Name your price, and I’ll tell you whether we can meet it.”

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

  “Of course.”

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

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Alorria made an unhappy noise in agreement.

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

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

  “I know. That’s good enough.”

  “And there are other loopholes.”

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

  Tobas grimaced.

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

  “I’ll need to talk to Kaligir.”

  “You do that, then.”

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

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

  “There are others?”

  “One more that I know of; others may arise in our discussions.”

  Tobas sighed yet again. “What is it?”

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

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

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

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

  “No? Why wouldn’t you just smash it?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Will they?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That may be so,” Tobas admitted.

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

  “No.”

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

  “It might.”

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

  “We don’t know.”

  “I think we might want to find out before we do anything irrevocable.”

  Tobas hesitated. “We might,” he agreed. “But I have no idea how that would be possible.”

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

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

  “Might there? And what would that be?”

  Tobas looked at his wives, then back to Gresh. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not here, not now. But if you find the mirror, I’m fairly sure we can dispose of it safely.”

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

  Tobas frowned back. “What?”

  “I am not going to just hand the mirror over to you and trust you to dispose of it. It’s too potentially dangerous. If that’s the job, then I’m turning it down.”

  Here was his way out of committing himself to a job he might not be able to do, a way to avoid any risk to his reputation—though it might also cost him the greatest fee he could ever collect.

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

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

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

  “Wizards deal with unknown dangers all the time!”

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

  “Sir,” Karanissa said quietly. “If I might point something out?”

  Gresh turned to her, then glanced toward the passage to the kitchen. He hoped that Twilfa had Tira back there listening, as she was supposed to. “And what would that be?” he asked.

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

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

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

  “Oh, now, really...”

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

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

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

  “Yes, but...”

  “Have you ever seen one die?”

  Gresh blinked again. “What?”

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

  Gresh stopped to think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The risk to his reputation suddenly seemed less important.

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

  “Agreed,” Tobas said.

  “You’ll provide transportation.”

  “Of course.”

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

  “Gladly.”

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

  Tobas and both his wives smiled at him.

  Chapter Six

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

  “I mig
ht,” Gresh said.

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

  “That’s the plan, yes.”

  “Jealous?” Tira asked.

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

  “And they’re telling the truth?”

  “Well, the witch is; I’m not absolutely sure about the wizard. You know reading wizards is tricky. And the other woman, the mother, is so caught up in her own concerns I couldn’t tell you a thing about what she actually believes.”

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

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

  “And Tobas?”

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

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

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

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

  “How should I know?”

  “Did they think he would?”

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

  “Hmm.”