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 themselves 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.”
“It hasn’t been half an hour yet,” Gresh pointed out. Despite all that had happened since Tobas was transformed, it hadn’t really been very long at all. “I doubt it’s been a quarter of one.”
A spriggan-one spriggan-began to climb out of the mirror and found Gresh’s palm in the way. Gresh quickly turned the disk over and lowered his hand so that the creature could escape.
“So we have the mirror,” he said. “And smashing it isn’t a good idea-if we’d broken it into a hundred pieces we’d probably all have smothered to death.” He glanced up at the dragon. “Well, all but Tobas, anyway.”
“No smash,” a spriggan said timidly. “Please?”
