The Spriggan Mirror

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Interesting. Do you have any other spells? Perhaps the one that turned him from a dragon to a man?” She gestured at Tobas.

  “That’s the one that would unmake you,” Gresh said. “He was a man first.”

  “Then what about the spell that turned him into a dragon?”

  “I don’t think that would do anything to you; it might be interesting to try it and see, though.”

  “Would it turn me into a dragon?”

  “No. I think I can say that much.”

  “Oh. Are there any others, then?”

  Gresh and Tobas looked at one another, then back at the reflection.

  “Not really, no,” Tobas replied. “That’s the lot.”

  “So my choices are to remain as I am, to cease to exist, or to turn human?”

  “Yes. We think.”

  “If I turned human and didn’t like it, could you change me back?”

  Tobas and Gresh exchanged glances again. “The Spell of Reversal?” Gresh asked.

  “It ought to work,” Tobas agreed.

  Gresh turned back to the reflection. “You’d have about half an hour to decide; after that, I don’t think we could turn you back.”

  “Javan’s Restorative might work, too,” Tobas suggested.

  Gresh frowned. “Maybe,” he admitted.

  “Well,” the reflection said, “if I have a choice of two possible modes of existence, it seems to me that I ought to try them both before deciding which I want.”

  Gresh nodded. “Very sensible,” he said. “Then you want us to turn you human? Or rather, try the spell that we think will turn you human?”

  “You aren’t sure?”

  “I’m afraid not. But we both really do think it will work.”

  “Then I’ll try it.”

  Gresh smiled reassuringly. “I’ll go fetch the powder.” He turned and left the room, bound for the stairs.

  Just outside the bedroom door he almost tripped over a spriggan, but caught himself against the wall of the passage. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Heard voices,” the spriggan said. “Came to see whether voices were bad mirror thieves trying to sneak up on us.”

  “There aren’t any mirror thieves around here,” Gresh said, annoyed. “That’s why we brought it here, so it would be safe.”

  “Yes, yes. Sorry sorry.” The spriggan scampered back toward the stairs. Gresh watched it bound up a few steps, then pause to catch its breath. Gresh decided not to waste any more time on it. He marched down the passage and down the stairs to the sitting room, then crossed to the corner where he had left his pack.

  He considered hauling the whole thing upstairs, but he was afraid that if he did, Tobas and Karanissa might get caught up in the excitement and start throwing spells around, wasting the powders. He had gotten a little carried away himself out on the mountain. It was the first time he’d ever had so much magic right there in his own hands, and he’d been perhaps a bit careless with his powders, but he was calmed down now and didn’t see any need to put needless temptation in anyone’s path.

  He thought he understood now why wizards didn’t ordinarily keep many spells around in powder form. It was too easy to use them. The temptation to just fling a powder and say a word was much stronger than Gresh had imagined. Working a spell from scratch every time meant that a wizard had to think about what he was doing, instead of acting on impulse. Gresh knew he had been lucky that none of his enchantments had ended in disaster, and he did not want to push his luck too far. He intended to take the remaining powders and potions back to Ethshar with him and, if the Guild did not reclaim them, sell them for a healthy price. He did not care to let anyone else experiment with them, trying them all out to see what they might do to the reflected Karanissa, or to spriggans.

  So he did not bring the whole box. Instead he opened the pack, pulled out the box, and found the jar of white powder, still mostly full—he had used only one pinch from this one so far, less than any of the others. He pulled it out, pushed the pack back in the corner with his foot, and then headed back up to the bedroom. He heard the spriggans squeaking somewhere above him as he climbed the stairs, but ignored them as he marched back up the passage.

  He did wonder idly how much damage they were doing to Tobas’s laboratory, but did not let it concern him.

  Tobas and the two Karanissas were waiting in the bedroom; the two women were seated side-by-side on the edge of the bed, the wizard standing before them. For a moment Gresh was uncertain which woman was which, but then he got close enough to see the height difference.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, opening the jar. “You’ll have about half an hour to decide which sort of existence you prefer. If you wait any longer than that the Spell of Reversal won’t change you back, and we don’t know whether Javan’s Restorative will work.”

  “It ought to,” Tobas said.

  “I’m ready,” the image said. The original Karanissa moved down the bed, farther away from her duplicate, to make room.

  Gresh flung a generous pinch of white powder at the smaller Karanissa and proclaimed, “Esku!!”

  There was a blinding silver flash; Gresh blinked, trying to clear his vision. When he did he saw two identical Karanissas sitting on the bed—truly identical; the size difference had vanished.

  So had all differences between their facial expressions and even their position. Both were sitting bolt upright, staring at their own hands. Both spoke in perfect unison, saying, “By all the gods, Gresh—what have you done?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “I don’t understand,” Gresh said, looking from one woman to the other. “What happened?”

  Both of them looked at him, which was oddly reassuring, because at least it meant they were no longer in exactly the same position. “Don’t you see?” they said, still speaking in unison. “It turned the reflection into what it was meant to be—but it wasn’t just meant to be human, it was meant to be me!”

  “What?”

  “We’re both me!” they insisted. “I have two bodies, but they’re both me! I can still remember everything from the moment I emerged from the mirror—we can both remember it—but we’re both Karanissa!”

  “Gresh, I think we better undo this,” Tobas said.

  The two women turned to look at one another, moving in perfect synchronization. “Oh, how strange!” they said, as they stared at one another. “Yes, I think we should reverse this!”

  Gresh stared, fascinated. “But this is.... Shouldn’t we....What is it like?”

  Karanissa—both of her—looked at him. “It’s very hard to describe,” they said. “When I used witchcraft to hear people’s thoughts it was.... Well, no, it wasn’t anything like this, really, because there isn’t anyone else, there’s just me, but I’m in two places at once.”

  “Do you see things double, then?”

  “No, no—I just see more.”

  “Gresh, I don’t think this is the time....” Tobas began.

  Gresh turned. “It’s exactly the time,” he said. “We have half an hour before we need to reverse the spell, so why not try to learn more about it while we can?”

  “Because we might lose track of time. Could you at least go get the powder for the Spell of Reversal and keep it ready?”

  “I think that would be a good idea,” the Karanissas said, turning to look at one another again. “I really don’t think I want to stay like this indefinitely.”

  Reluctantly, Gresh acknowledged the wisdom of this. “I’ll go get it, then—and meanwhile, Karanissa, could you please take note of anything particularly interesting?”

  As the two women stared at each other they made an odd noise that Gresh took for agreement. He turned and headed for the stairs.

  Something green peeked up over the steps, then squeaked and scampered down. That spriggan was clearly bored with watching the mirror do nothing, Gresh thought, as he reached the head of the staircase and started down.

  At the foot of t
he stairs he turned toward the corner, then froze in horror.

  He had shoved his pack into the corner by the door to the platform, but he had not bothered to fasten it. Now he found himself looking at all four spriggans, each of them holding one of the jars of magical powder—two in the sitting room, one on the sill of the open door to the platform, one on the platform itself.

  Even as he stared, readying an angry shout, he mentally cursed his own stupidity. He knew spriggans were attracted to magic; he knew the spriggans were getting bored guarding the mirror; he knew they had been told not to touch anything in the workshop. No one had said anything about not touching the contents of the sitting room.

  “Put those down!” he bellowed.

  All four spriggans immediately dropped their jars.

  The two jars in the sitting room landed with a slight thump, undamaged.

  The one on the doorsill flew up out of the startled spriggan’s hands, came down hard on the stone, and cracked.

  The one on the platform was not so much dropped as flung sideways; it landed rolling, and both Gresh and the spriggan watched in helpless dismay as it kept on rolling, right off the edge of the platform. As the label and clear glass alternated Gresh could see dark powder inside, but he could not be completely certain whether it was blue, purple, or dark red.

  A few seconds later he heard the distant sound of breaking glass as it shattered on stonework somewhere far below.

  “Oops,” the spriggan on the platform said. It looked up at Gresh with an embarrassed grin.

  Gresh stared at it, wanting to scream at it, but unable to think of any words that were even remotely appropriate. Then he marched forward to collect the jars before any more damage could be done and to see which spells he still had.

  The two unharmed jars held Javan’s Restorative and the Spell of the Revealed Power.

  The cracked jar contained the dark red powder for Javan’s Geas.

  The jar of purple powder that could produce the Spell of Reversal was gone.

  “Oh, blood, pain, and death!” Gresh cursed, as he hurried out on the platform and looked down, hoping that perhaps part of the jar had survived, intact enough to hold a dose of the powder. Perhaps if he used the potion for the Spell of Retarded Time he could climb down and collect enough of the powder and still get back before the half-hour was up....

  “Jar broken,” the spriggan said sadly, as it stood beside Gresh and looked over the edge with him.

  “Could fix it?” another spriggan said, coming up behind them.

  “Fix how?” the first spriggan asked.

  “With magic powder?”

  That was a possibility Gresh had not yet considered; he started to say something, but before he could, the spriggan who had dropped the jar on the platform leaned over the edge and shouted, “Esku!” at the top of its squeaky little voice.

  There was a red-gold flash, and a suddenly intact jar came sailing up at them; Gresh stepped back, startled, and narrowly missed being hit by it as it flung itself onto the platform and rolled to a stop at the spot where it had been dropped.

  Gresh stared at it, astonished. He had not thought of that, and the spriggans had. They had recognized the powder by color and had known how to use it from watching him back in the cave. Furthermore, they had actually done it, and it had worked! He had not known spriggans could actually work that sort of magic—but then, it was the powder that really did it; all anyone else had to provide, once the powder was flung, was the trigger word.

  “Jar fixed!” the spriggan said happily, pointing.

  “Yes, it is,” Gresh agreed, as a horrible suspicion struck him. He reached down and picked up the jar and held it up to the light.

  It was empty.

  Words once again failed him; he bit down so hard he thought his teeth might crack. That spell had retrieved the jar, but it had used up all the powder! It had all been flung, and it had all been consumed in one flash—enough powder to work the tenth-order Spell of Reversal eight, or nine, or perhaps even ten more times, all of it gone to repair a cheap glass jar.

  He stepped quickly in off the platform, before the spriggans could find a way to break any of the other jars.

  “Don’t touch these!” he ordered emphatically, pointing at the three he held. “Ever!”

  Then he tucked them all back into the box in his pack, hoping the cracked one wouldn’t shatter, put the lid on, pulled the drawstring tight, lifted the pack onto his shoulder, and hurried upstairs, hoping that Tobas was right about Javan’s Restorative being sufficient.

  He was almost at the top when he heard the sitting room door open and Alorria’s voice call, “Tobas? Are you in here?”

  “We’re up here,” he called over his shoulder as he turned the corner into the short corridor. He did not wait for Alorria to respond, but hurried to the bedroom.

  Tobas and the two Karanissas were just as he had left them, save that all three looked worried.

  “What was the shouting about?” Tobas asked.

  “The spriggans spilled the powder for the Spell of Reversal,” Gresh explained. “We’ll have to use Javan’s Restorative. And Alorria’s here.” He set the pack on a bedside table and fumbled with the drawstring, which he now found he had pulled so tight it would not loosen.

  “Didn’t you say you didn’t think that would work?” both Karanissas said.

  “Tobas is the wizard here, and he thought it would—ow!—work,” Gresh said, as he struggled with the pack.

  “It ought to,” Tobas said nervously.

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “Well, it can’t hurt you,” Tobas said. “It restores anyone or anything to its healthy normal state.”

  The Karanissas looked at one another. “But what’s normal for a magical image?” they asked.

  “What’s going on in here?” Alorria asked from the doorway, just as Gresh finally managed to unjam the cord and open the pack.

  “We’re just trying a few things,” Gresh said, as he carefully pulled out the jar of orange powder.

  “Might she entirely cease to exist?” the Karanissas asked.

  Alorria stared at the two women on the bed. “What did you do?” she demanded. “I can’t tell them apart, and they’re both talking at once!”

  “It’s possible,” Tobas told Karanissa.

  “Tobas!” Alorria shouted. “I asked you a question!”

  “A spell went wrong,” Gresh said, as he closed the pack and set it on the floor. “We’re trying to fix it, but the spriggans have been making it difficult.”

  “What kind of a spell?”

  “Fifth-order,” Gresh said unhelpfully, as he opened the jar.

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” the Karanissas said, eyeing Gresh as he approached, orange powder in the palm of his hand.

  “I’m not, either,” Tobas said. “Gresh, I know what I said earlier, but I’ve changed my mind.”

  “We have to do something,” Gresh said. “What kind of a life can she have like that?”

  “How can you tell which one is which?” Alorria asked.

  Gresh had been about to fling the powder at the Karanissa on the right, on the assumption that she was the rectified reflection and the spell would restore her to either her former state as a solidified image, or to nonexistence, but he suddenly stopped.

  “She might just disappear,” Tobas said. “That would be murder.”

  “She might,” Gresh agreed, staring at the right-hand Karanissa.

  “She isn’t real!” Alorria protested.

  “This one is the copy, isn’t it?” Gresh asked, gesturing at the right-hand woman.

  “Yes, it is,” Tobas said. “They didn’t switch while you were away. But really, Gresh, shouldn’t we....”

  He stopped as Gresh flung the powder—on the left-hand Karanissa.

  “It can’t hurt her,” he explained. “Esku!”

  There was a golden flash.

  For a moment, no one moved; then the two Karanissa
s turned to look at one another, but Gresh could see that it wasn’t the same inhumanly synchronized motion they had displayed before. Both were still full-sized, however; the right-hand one had not been shrunk back to her original size.

  “That was....” they both began—but their voices were not perfectly matched anymore. They both fell silent; then the right-hand one pointed at the other.

  “I think it worked,” the left-hand Karanissa said.

  “I’m still rectified, still human,” the right-hand one said. “But we’re separate.”

  “I’m just me again,” the left-hand one—the original—said. “I don’t have her memories anymore.”

  “But I still have hers,” the right-hand one said. She frowned. “I suppose that means she’s Karanissa and I’m...someone else, a blend of the two.”

  “Fine,” Alorria said. “Then you can go back to Ethshar with Gresh. One witch-wife around here is plenty!”

  “But I remember—I was married to you,” the right-hand witch said to Tobas. “I’m your wife.”

  “Oh, no,” Tobas said. “No, you aren’t. Two wives are plenty. I’m married to her, and her, and nobody else.” He pointed first at Karanissa, then at Alorria.

  The nameless woman looked at Karanissa for a moment, and Gresh was certain that even if they were no longer the same person in two bodies, they were still both witches capable of communicating silently. He wondered what was passing between them.

  “You need a name,” he said, before Tobas or Alorria could say anything more. “Any suggestions?”

  “You could call yourself Assinarak,” Alorria suggested. “That’s the mirror image of ‘Karanissa.’”

  “That’s not a name!” Tobas protested.

  Gresh caught himself just before he said “Not to mention stupid and ugly” aloud; there was no need to antagonize the king’s daughter.

  “And I’m not just a mirror image any more,” the nameless woman protested. “I intend to be my own woman, not just a copy. No, I’ll call myself Esmera.”