the grass.
Then one shocked voice said, “Not allowed!”
“Mirror stays in cave,” another added.
“Spriggans could die,” said a third.
“Promised candy if we showed cave,” someone said. “Didn’t say fetch mirror.”
“How do I know it’s really in there?” Gresh countered.
The spriggans looked at one another; then a large brownish one said, “Wait.” With surprising agility, it hopped up to the crack in the rocks and trotted into the opening-it barely had to duck at all
Gresh ducked his head, though, to peer into the cave after the spriggan. He shaded his eyes and tried to follow the creature’s movement.
It was sliding down a slope; Gresh could see its brown back as it slipped into the gloom of the interior. The crack did open out, and the spriggan vanished into the darkness.
“Bring light!” the spriggan called.
Gresh blinked, then looked around. He pulled up a clump of dead weeds and twisted them into a makeshift torch, then called to Tobas, “Do you have a tinderbox?”
“Something better,” Tobas called back, as he fumbled at his belt-pouch. “Hold that thing up.”
Gresh obeyed, and a moment later Tobas did something with his dagger and a bit of orange powder, and one end of the bundle of weeds burst into vigorous flame-so vigorous, in fact, that Gresh had to move hastily to avoid being burned. He flung the flaming stalks into the cave.
Then he stooped and peered in after them and saw the brownish spriggan dragging the burning twist of weeds. The flame illuminated the cave’s interior quite well.
Gresh was astonished by what he saw; once past the impossibly narrow entrance the cave was really quite good-sized. It extended at least fifteen or twenty feet back into the mountain, and much of it was high enough that a man could stand upright. It seemed to extend across the full width of the rock face, at least fifty feet from end to end-it was hard to be sure, with only the central portion lit. This whole section of slope, it appeared, was hollow. It looked as if a chunk of the mountainside had folded down upon itself, long ago-as if a cliff or ledge had collapsed and wedged itself across the top of what had been a small gully, covering it completely but not filling it in.
There were dozens of spriggans in there, shielding their eyes against the sudden glare, as the brownish one stood in the center of the cave holding his improvised torch near a small shining disk. As Gresh watched, a pair of scrawny green arms rose up out of the disk’s surface, as if it were the surface of a tiny pool, and then a spriggan pulled itself up with those arms, hopping out of what could only be the infamous mirror.
“There!” the brownish one called. “See? See?”
“I see,” Gresh acknowledged. “Come on up and get your candy, then.”
“Me, too!” shrieked one of the others, and a wild chorus of squeals erupted.
The brownish spriggan left the torch in the cave as it scampered back up to the opening, and out into the sunlight; Gresh waited until it emerged, then handed it the large honey-drop.
The spriggan promptly stuffed the candy in its mouth and smiled stickily at Gresh.
A hundred others shrieked, and two hundred hands stretched out hungrily. Gresh quickly began distributing the candy, making sure no one got more than one piece.
The bag emptied very quickly, and he handed it to a spriggan while saying apologetically, “All gone.”
“Nooooo!” wailed a score of high-pitched voices, as the one with the bag turned the sack inside out and began desperately licking the last bits of sweet from it. Gresh held out his empty hands and retreated away from the cave mouth.
“Tobas,” he said in a conversational tone. “I think we should go now.” He glanced back over his shoulder.
The carpet had risen to perhaps three feet above the ground, and Tobas was watching uneasily as spriggans jumped up and down around it, trying to leap up onto it.
“Tobas?”
The carpet drifted higher, but no closer.
“Tobas!”
The wizard finally looked up and noticed Gresh moving away from the cave. He wiggled his fingers, and the carpet came swooping across the meadow. Gresh turned and ran for it, leaping onto it as Tobas brought it past.
A moment later the two men were seated safely on the carpet, Tobas at the front and Gresh near the back, sailing some twenty feet above the ground. The meadow below them seemed to be covered in spriggans shrieking for candy or shouting about mirrors and promises.
“It’s in there,” Gresh said grimly.
“What is?” Tobas asked.
“The mirror, of course. It’s in the cave there.”
“What cave? I saw you poking at the rocks, but I didn’t see a cave.”
Gresh let his breath out in an exasperated sigh. “There’s a cave,” he said. “But the entrance is much too narrow for humans. The spriggans can climb in and out easily, but we can’t.”
“Oh. And the mirror’s inside? You’re sure?”
“I saw it,” Gresh said. “I saw a spriggan climb out of it.”
“So it’s really there? It’s not a fake?”
“Unless someone is casting some rather sophisticated illusions, it’s really in there.”
“We have to get in there, then.”
“Yes, of course,” Gresh agreed. “I had figured that much out myself. We need to get in there, or get the mirror out somehow. The question is, how? The spriggans don’t want to bring it out; they seem to have some sort of agreement among themselves that it must stay in there.”
“Why?”
“How should I know? One of them said that if it was brought out they could die, but I don’t have any idea why.”
“So we can’t just bribe them to fetch it? I saw how much they liked that candy of yours.”
“I don’t think so-not unless we bring enough candy for the entire half-million of the little pests, and I’m not sure even that would do it.”
“Then how can we get it out?”
Gresh grimaced. “You’re the wizard,” he said. “I was hoping you might have an idea.”
“You’re supposed to be the expert on fetching things.”
“And I can find a way, don’t you ever doubt it-but I hoped you might have a nice easy one.”
Tobas considered that for a moment, looking down at the rocks and the seething mass of spriggans. “Ordinarily I might suggest using Riyal’s Transformation to shrink down to mouse size, but somehow I don’t think I want to go down there while I’m smaller than a spriggan,” he said.
“We might keep that as a last resort,” Gresh said.
“The Cloak of Ethereality would let me walk through the stone,” Tobas said. “But it only works on the wizard casting the spell, so I’d need to go in alone, and I couldn’t carry anything while ethereal, so I’d need to stay in the cave until it wore off and then hand the mirror out to someone.”
“That might work.”
“Then I’d need to use it again to get out. It takes eight hours to wear off-there’s no known way to reduce the time.”
“It still might work.”
“I’m not thrilled by the idea,” Tobas said. “Are there spriggans in the cave? Because they might not be very happy to see me in there, ethereal or not. And whoever I pass the mirror to… well, I wouldn’t be able to help much if anything happened before the eight hours were up.”
“Is there some way you could levitate the mirror out?”
Tobas considered that for a moment, then turned up an empty hand. “Varen’s Levitation would work if I could touch the mirror, and if wizardry will work on it-if it’s magic-resistant, like spriggans…”
“You need to touch it?” Gresh interrupted.
“Yes.”
