The Spriggan Mirror loe-9

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

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

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

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

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

  “You have some kind of powerful countercharm there?”

  “What? No, I... Not exactly.”

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

  “Not just... Well, after a fashion.”

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

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

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

  “No. It just... suspended it, I suppose. And the Transporting Tapestry, and everything else. The carpet can’t fly there—it’s just a carpet. For that matter, I suppose Karanissa ages any time she’s in there—but the instant the mirror was somewhere normal, spriggans must have started popping out again. And the tapestry still works, the carpet flies, and Karanissa doesn’t age, as long as they’re somewhere normal. If I use the Spell of the Spinning Coin and then I go in there, the coin still spins—but I can’t spin one when I’m there, even if I immediately leave for someplace else. You do understand that this is a Guild secret and to reveal it may carry a death sentence?”

  “You’re revealing it to me.”

  “We’re on Guild business, and you’d already figured part of it out, and I can’t see any way to not tell you if you’re going to look for the mirror around here. I don’t think Kaligir would appreciate it if you wasted all his powders and potions by trying to use them in there.”

  Gresh grimaced. “That’s a good point. Or even just wasting time searching the area, if you’re really sure the mirror can’t be in there.”

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

  “Four hundred years?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that.”

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

  Tobas sighed. “Yes.”

  “Does witchcraft still work there? Or sorcery?”

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

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

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

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

  Reluctantly, Tobas admitted, “Yes.”

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

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

  “What? Who?”

  “Never mind. It’s a sphere, centered on top of the cliff.”

  Gresh nodded thoughtfully. “Two miles. And in Ethshar of the Sands?..”

  “None of your business. Much smaller.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Fourteen

  They had made roughly a quarter-circle around the fallen castle when Gresh finally spotted a spriggan. “Down!” he barked.

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

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

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

  “No! You’re grabbing!”

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

  “No grabbing?”

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

  “Promise?”

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

  “You first.”

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

  “You first.”

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

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

  “No grabbing,” Gresh agreed.

  “Talk?”

  “Talk.”

  “What talk?”

  “I want you to tell me a few things.”

  “Fun things?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What things?”

  “Where did you come from?”

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

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

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

  “How far?”

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

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

  “Not today.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “No. How much more talk?”

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

  “Why?”

  “I promised I would.”

  “Stupid promise.”

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

  “You no fun.”

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

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

  “In a cave?”

  The spriggan frowned. “How you know that?”

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

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

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

  “I heard that,” Tobas said.

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

  “You were interrogating that spriggan.”

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

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

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

  “But anyone could do that!”

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

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

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

  “But... just asking?”

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

  “By asking spriggans.”

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

  “But you just... just asking...”

  “Yes. You’d be surprised how often asking questions gets answers. Very few people—or creatures—are as obsessed with secrecy as you wizards are.”

  Tobas stared at him for a moment, then said, “I was right. You are smarter than I am. It’s good common sense, and I didn’t think of it—though now I feel as if I should have. With wits like that, why didn’t you become a magician, or go to work for the overlord?”

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

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

  “Then let’s get this carpet moving.”

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

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

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

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

  “So do I.”

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

  “We can’t,” Tobas replied. “That would take us through an edge of the dead place. The sphere.”

  Gresh bit back a retort; he supposed the wizard had a point. The detour would make it that much harder to follow the spriggan’s direction, though.

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

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

  They soared over the mountaintop and began descending the much gentler western slope. Suddenly the talisman sparkled and buzzed with the presence of spriggans ahead—but only briefly and unevenly.

  “Slow down!” Gresh called.

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

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

  They were hiding, obviously.

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

  Tobas obeyed.

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

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

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

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

  “Yes,” Tobas said.

  Gresh was slightly startled that the wizard did not hesitate or qualify his response in any way, but gave a quick flat affirmative that left no room for argument. “What if there were a tunnel going back into the cliff?” he asked. “How far would it have to go to get out of the area?”

  Tobas looked off to the left, toward the cliff and the castle’s towers showing above the trees, and considered the question carefully.

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

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

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

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

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

  Tobas obeyed.

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

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

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

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

  But none were going west, even now.

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

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

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

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

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

  “It’s in the dead area?”

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

  “Ah.”

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

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

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

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

  “If you like.”

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

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

  Chapter Fifteen