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 withdrew 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.
