The Spriggan Mirror

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Some of the stars didn’t seem to be staying; apparently clouds were starting to gather, which would not help matters.

  “I hope so,” Tobas said, turning the carpet to the southwest. “I’m hoping to navigate by the glow from the castle windows.”

  “They don’t close the shutters?” Gresh asked, startled.

  “They usually miss a few,” Karanissa reassured him. Tobas was too busy peering into the gloom to respond.

  “We could stay up here on the mountain until morning,” Gresh suggested, as he noticed the carpet drifting closer to a sharp-looking tree than he liked. “It might be safer than flying in the dark.”

  “No!” answered Tobas and both his wives. The carpet picked up speed.

  “I wish I knew where we’re going,” the reflection said plaintively, as she looked around in obvious consternation. “It’s windy up here.”

  “We’re going to Dwomor Keep, assuming we can find it in the dark,” Gresh told her. “It’s a big old castle, but reasonably comfortable.”

  “Is it? Why are we going there?”

  Gresh tried to explain, with both the human reflection and the four spriggans listening intently and asking questions, and that kept him and the real Karanissa busy for the better part of an hour. By then the sky was overcast, hiding the stars and moons, so that the carpet seemed to be soaring through nothingness. Alorria was dozing, and Alris was still sound asleep.

  Gresh leaned forward and whispered to Tobas, “Do you know where we are?”

  “No,” Tobas admitted. He explained that he no longer had any idea where they were. He was just looking for a light, any light, that he could aim for. Gresh pointed out a faint orange glow far off to their left, but Tobas shook his head.

  “That’s not it,” he said.

  “How do you know?” Gresh demanded.

  “Because that’s the Tower of Flame,” Tobas said. “I’ve seen it before. It’s a good thirty leagues away. It would take hours to get there, and there’s nothing there we want.”

  “Oh,” Gresh said, staring at the distant glimmer. He had heard of the legendary Tower of Flame all his life, but he had never seen it before.

  From this distance it really didn’t look like much.

  “There’s a light,” the reflection said, pointing ahead

  “Where?” both men asked, turning to see.

  “There.”

  She was right; a faint flicker of orange was visible, and Tobas steered the carpet toward it. He did not know what the light was, but it appeared man-made and was not the Tower of Flame. At this point that was good enough.

  They wound up as guests for the night at a small farmhouse where the man of the house had been out with a lantern, checking on a soon-to-calve cow.

  When they first arrived and asked the startled and drowsy farmer where they were, they were assured that they were only a mile or two from Dwomor Keep. Upon hearing the castle was close Tobas wanted to continue on and try to find it, despite the now-total darkness, but just then the first drops of rain began to fall, and the others unanimously overruled him. They hastily hoisted their luggage, rolled up the carpet, and hurried into the cottage, Gresh almost banging his forehead on the lintel.

  After the wife and teenaged sons were awakened, Gresh paid the family of farmers generously for a late supper and the use of several beds, even though the beds were just piles of straw and some rather malodorous blankets crowded into various corners of house and barn.

  Unlike the sleeping accommodations, the meal was entirely satisfactory, as the family had just that day butchered a hog and had a good supply of vegetables and beer to accompany the fresh pork. The entire party ate heartily after their long and weary day, then tottered off to bed with as little conversation as possible.

  Gresh had slept on worse bedding on occasion, on various buying trips; he awoke feeling fine. Most of the others had no real problems, but Alorria had not done as well as some and was alternately yawning and complaining as the company gathered in the main room of the farmhouse shortly after dawn.

  Gresh was mildly surprised to discover that all four spriggans had stayed the night and not wandered off seeking fun, but there they were when he arose, clustered around Tobas and his luggage, ready to continue their adventure. As their hosts fried up a pound or so of bacon for breakfast, Gresh and Tobas studied the spriggans carefully and concluded that these were, in fact, the same four, and there were no others to be seen, either running loose or in Tobas’s valise. The mirror had not produced any more during the night. Presumably the mirror in the spriggans’ world was safely shut away in a box and would never again spew unwelcome visitors into the World.

  Since they had opened the valise to check for spriggans, Tobas lifted out the mirror for inspection. “You really did it,” he said, marveling as he turned carefully wrapped glass over in his hands. “You got me the mirror.”

  “It’s my job,” Gresh replied gruffly. “You saw it last night.”

  “But it seems more real by daylight. Before I’d only just been turned back to my natural form and was surrounded by spriggans. It was hard to be sure just what was real under those circumstances!”

  Gresh could not argue with that.

  An hour later the ten of them—Gresh, Tobas, Alorria, Alris, Karanissa, the reflected Karanissa, and the four spriggans—spilled off the carpet onto the platform outside the tower window at Dwomor Keep.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Gresh decided to spend a day or two in Dwomor before heading back to Ethshar of the Rocks to collect his fee; after all, once he was paid he would have all the time in the World. Besides, he had spent more than enough hours crowded onto the flying carpet, and a brief stay would allow him and Tobas to tidy up loose ends, such as making certain no more spriggans were emerging.

  That was easy enough to ascertain, since the mirror was wrapped in cloth—so long as the wrappings stayed in place, no spriggans had appeared, since any new arrival would have had to loosen the bindings to fully materialize. They had been too tired to fully appreciate that at the farmhouse, but now it seemed sufficient evidence.

  The mirror was carefully placed in Tobas’s tower workshop, where the four spriggans were set to watch over it with strict orders not to touch it, or to meddle with anything else. Gresh had some doubts about ordering them not to meddle and considered using Javan’s Geas on them, but eventually decided that if Tobas wanted to risk it, that was his problem, and Gresh wasn’t going to waste a bunch of valuable magic safeguarding anything. Especially since he still didn’t know whether or not Javan’s Geas would work on spriggans.

  As for the enchanted powders themselves, Gresh had tucked the pack in a corner when they first came in from the flying carpet’s landing platform. He saw no need to move them; none of the residents of Dwomor Keep were going to be foolish enough to steal from the wizard’s apartments.

  Figuring out what to do about the false Karanissa was a little more difficult. By general consent of everyone involved except the image herself—and even she didn’t seriously object—she had been locked away in one of the four small bedrooms in the wizard’s tower, out of sight of the castle’s other inhabitants but with an adequate supply of food and water, until such time as the others had decided how she should be handled.

  Karanissa thought she was harmless and should be released; Alorria thought she was a monster that should be destroyed; and the two men did not yet have fixed opinions.

  Over breakfast and a subsequent glass of wine, Gresh explained to Tobas exactly what had happened in the cave and detailed his theories of just how the mirror’s magic worked, which included a description of the reflection’s initial appearance. That did not bring them to any quick agreement on what should be done with her.

  Alorria did not stay around to listen to the debate; she had stated her position and had more urgent concerns, such as showing Alris off to the king and queen again. Karanissa stayed, but had little to say; for the most part she left the discussion to the
two men.

  “She’s just an image. We should use Javan’s Restorative to make her disappear,” Tobas said.

  “Would it do that?” Karanissa asked.

  “I think it would,” Tobas said. “The Restorative turns things into what they were before they were enchanted or broken or transformed, and she wasn’t anything before she was enchanted.”

  “If that would work on her, it would work on spriggans,” Gresh said thoughtfully. “That might be a way of disposing of them. An expensive one, though. I wonder if it would work?”

  “It ought to.”

  “Then it could be used to make any magical creation vanish?”

  Tobas hesitated. Gresh suspected he was reconsidering his position. Javan’s Restorative was a powerful countercharm, but surely it wasn’t that powerful!

  “I think we should try it on her,” Tobas finally said.

  “Why?” Gresh demanded. “She hasn’t done anything to harm anyone. How sure are you it will make her disappear, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure at all,” Tobas admitted. “I’m not comfortable having her around, though—she’s an imitation of my wife, after all!”

  Gresh glanced at Karanissa. “One wife, yes,” he said. “Which is probably why the other wants her destroyed. She feels outnumbered. And you probably find it unsettling, having a copy of one of your wives. If she weren’t a second Karanissa, but the image of a stranger, would you still want her destroyed?”

  “Probably not,” Tobas admitted. He frowned thoughtfully. “All right, you’ve made your point.”

  Gresh was not at all sure he had adequately conveyed his feelings on the subject, partly because he was not entirely certain himself what they were. He had originally been considering finding a way to erase the reflection himself, but the more he thought about it, the more repulsive the idea seemed. He was beginning to suspect it would amount to murder; the reflection certainly considered herself a person, and anyone seeing her would think she was human.

  He had already decided that killing half a million spriggans would be wrong; how would killing this one pseudo-human be any different? These magical reflections might not be entirely real, might not be “complete” in some way, but they certainly seemed to have feelings and desires and intelligence—they could speak and act and showed every other sign of being rational beings. Calling it “erasing” or “unmaking” didn’t change the fact that it was killing, ending a life.

  But turning a reflection loose in the World didn’t seem like the best idea, either. Where would she go? What would she do? If she was like the spriggans she didn’t really need to eat. She couldn’t starve to death, but she would get painfully hungry if she didn’t get regular meals.

  Gresh could easily imagine her winding up as one of the miserable, homeless residents in Soldiers’ Field, or as a slave, or as one of the whores in Wargate; he didn’t like any of those ideas.

  Of course, she was an attractive woman; she might be fortunate enough to find a trustworthy protector. And she might be a witch; no one had yet determined that definitively, one way or the other.

  Using Lirrim’s Rectification to turn her human might be a good idea—assuming it would work—because at least then she would be no more tempting to abusers than any other homeless and beautiful orphan. Gresh had some unpleasantly lurid thoughts about what might happen if a slaver or a Wargate pimp found out that an indestructible woman was available and unguarded; it would be better to remove that possibility. The Rectification might fill in some of the holes in her memory—assuming they were holes. She had been created with a complete working knowledge of the Ethsharitic language and an understanding of such concepts as marriage and dragons, but had not known whether she was a witch, whether she was married, or any number of other things. If she had arrived completely ignorant, like a baby, needing to learn to walk and talk, that would have made sense. If she had started out believing herself to be Karanissa, with all Karanissa’s memories, Gresh would have understood. This halfway state, where she had most or all of Karanissa’s general knowledge but none of her personal and specific knowledge, was confusing. Lirrim’s Rectification might change that.

  Or there might be other spells....

  “We should ask her,” he said, abruptly arriving at a conclusion he now thought he should have reached long ago.

  “Ask her if she wants us to erase her?”

  “No—or rather, not just that. We should offer her all the options we can think of and ask which she wants.”

  “Without promising she’ll get her first choice,” Tobas said. “If she says she wants to marry me, the answer’s no—I can barely handle two wives, and three is out of the question.” He grimaced. “For one thing, Alorria would kill me. Or her, or both of us.” He glanced at Karanissa. “I doubt Kara would be pleased, either.”

  “You know, in her present condition, she can’t be killed while you’re protecting the mirror.”

  “Ali would find a way.”

  “Or I would,” Karanissa interjected.

  “One of you just might,” Gresh agreed. “So the marriage option is unavailable—but really, we ought to let her choose what she wants.”

  Tobas sighed. “I suppose. Or perhaps we could just deliver her to one of the Guildmasters, and let the Guild decide?”

  “No,” Gresh said. “She wasn’t part of our agreement, and I’m not giving her to Kaligir.”

  “I was also thinking of Telurinon.”

  “Nor him.”

  Tobas gave in. “All right, then—we’ll ask her what she wants.”

  Gresh finished his wine, set the glass on the table, and rose to his feet. “Now?”

  “I don’t see any reason to wait.” Tobas stood, as well, and the two men headed for the stairs. Karanissa gulped the last of her wine, then followed.

  In the tower apartment they made their way up the stairs and unlocked the door to the little-used bedroom where the reflection had been confined. They found her seated on the edge of the bed, staring intently at a tapestry she had taken off the wall and now held stretched across her lap.

  She looked up at their entry.

  “What are you doing with that tapestry?” Tobas asked, puzzled.

  “Seeing how it’s made,” the image replied. “Studying the weave.”

  Gresh suspected that further inquiry about her activities would be a waste of time, and before Tobas could say anything more he said, “We’ve come to ask you a few things. Important things.”

  “I’m not sure I know anything important,” the reflection replied.

  “Actually, we came to ask what you want, not what you know,” Tobas told her.

  “Oh?” She lowered the tapestry.

  “We’ve been discussing what we should do with you,” Gresh explained. “We finally decided that it wasn’t really up to us—you should decide.”

  “But you know so much more about the World than I do!”

  “But it’s your life we’re discussing.”

  “Well, that’s true. So what is it you want me to decide?”

  Tobas and Gresh exchanged glances; then Gresh said, “I know you consider yourself a person, but you aren’t exactly a human being; you’re a magical reflection of one. You were created fully grown, instead of being born and growing up; you have no name; and the witch here says that there are parts missing—it may be that you don’t have a soul, she isn’t quite sure. If the spriggans are right, you’re bound to the mirror that made you in several ways and immune to physical harm as long as the spell is active. You aren’t entirely real; you’re a magically solidified image that thinks it’s real.”

  “I am? Is that what I am?” She looked fascinated, but not particularly troubled by this revelation.

  “We’re fairly certain,” Tobas said. “But it’s possible our theories are wrong.”

  “As a magical creation of this sort,” Gresh said, pressing on, “you may have some difficulties in dealing with human society. In any case, you definitely aren’t going
to be permitted to stay here in Dwomor Keep; your resemblance to the woman you’re reflected from, Karanissa of the Mountains, would make your presence inconvenient and upsetting to several people here.”

  “Where else is there?” the image asked.

  “Hundreds of places, from uninhabited wilderness to huge cities,” Gresh told her. “You can go wherever you please, so long as it isn’t here.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?”

  “Because we were coming here, and we hadn’t yet decided what to do with you. It seemed cruel to leave you alone in the mountains.”

  “But now you want to send me away?”

  “Eventually, yes. But there are a few other matters to resolve first.”

  “Go on.”

  “We have some magic powders—they’re downstairs, where I left them. We think one of them would undo the spell that created you; if you don’t care what happens to you, it would be simplest for us if we just uncreated you. If we’re right about what the spell would do, you’d just cease to exist; there’d be no pain or discomfort of any kind. You’d just be gone. We aren’t sure it would work, but we think so. Would you... would that be acceptable to you?”

  She stared at him. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m not suicidal.” She frowned. “I thought you were having trouble with an excess of spriggans. Aren’t they the same sort of reflection I am? If you have a spell like that, why haven’t you uncreated them?”

  “Two reasons,” Gresh said. “First, it’s ordinarily a very expensive spell. I only have a supply of the powder form because the Wizards’ Guild wanted me to be well equipped for dealing with the magic mirror. Second, up until we actually found the mirror, and saw you come out of it, we had no idea how it worked and didn’t think the spell would do anything to spriggans. We didn’t know they weren’t entirely real.”

  “Oh. I suppose that makes sense. But I still don’t want anything to do with it.”

  Gresh sighed, though he wasn’t surprised. “All right, then. We have another spell that transforms things into what they were meant to be. We think—again, we aren’t absolutely certain—that it would turn you into a real human being. After that you would be free to go wherever you chose, other than this castle, and do what you please.”