The Spriggan Mirror loe-9

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “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.

  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 wit
hdrew 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 the
mselves 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.”