Gresh looked down at the little creature, which blinked up at him from a niche in the cave wall. “No smash,” he agreed.
For a moment he wondered why the spriggan didn’t want the mirror broken. After all, it only seemed to produce more spriggans. Perhaps the little creature didn’t like crowds, or recognized that the World didn’t have room for all those spriggans?
Though that made the creatures’ unwillingness to give up the mirror that much more mysterious. If they didn’t want more spriggans, why were they so determined to protect the mirror?
“Then what do we do with it?” Karanissa asked, interrupting his thoughts.
“Well, it seems to me that our first goal here is to prevent it from making any more spriggans,” Gresh said. “Isn’t it? The Guild’s worried that the whole World might fill up with spriggans, so if we can stop the mirror from making more, that’s a good start. Dealing with the spriggans we already have is a separate issue, as is destroying it permanently. The first thing we want is to stop it from producing more.”
“How do you propose to do that, if we can’t just smash it?” Karanissa asked.
“We could take it to the dead area…” Tobas began, but the resulting squeals and screams from the spriggans deterred even a dragon from finishing the sentence.
“Give back mirror,” a spriggan called from atop a nearby rock. “You give back, spriggans take it and go away, and give back flying rug and lady and baby. No give mirror, no lady, no baby, no rug.”
“And we’d be back where we started,” Gresh said. “No, I don’t think we’ll do that.”
“I don’t know, Gresh,” Karanissa said. “What about Ali and the baby?”
“They aren’t trying to hurt them,” Gresh said, though not as confidently as he would have liked.
“If we tried to take the mirror to the no-wizardry area they probably would.”
“True enough,” Gresh admitted. “If we can’t take the mirror to the dead zone…” He looked up at Tobas. “You made that no-spell place, didn’t you?”
“The one over there?” Tobas said, waving his head toward the opposite slope. “No. That’s been there for centuries. A wizard named Seth Thorun’s son did it.”
“What about the one in Ethshar of the Sands?”
“I made that, yes.”
“Could you do it again, here?”
Several spriggans squeaked in protest at this suggestion. The dragon ignored them, as he snorted smoke and said, “Not in this shape. Not to mention that it’s forbidden-the Guild outlawed the spell long ago. They gave me a special dispensation for what I did before, but I don’t have any dispensation to do it again. On top of that, I didn’t bring the ingredients, since it is forbidden, and I never expected to have a use for it.”
“Well, what ingredients do you need?”
“Oh, no-I’m not telling you that. It’s forbidden. Using it carries the death penalty. Besides, I can’t do it as a dragon, and if you turned me back now, how long do you think it would be before all these spriggans swarmed over us and took the mirror away from us? Not to mention that they’d interrupt the spell-it takes several minutes.”
“Swarm…?” Gresh looked out and realized that Tobas was right. The dragon had interposed himself between the cave and the horde filling the meadow. A few spriggans were indeed in the cave, but the main body was out there, apparently kept away only by Tobas’s presence.
So Tobas would have to remain a dragon for now, and that meant they had no wizardry available except for the powders and potions in Gresh’s box.
Well, he had chosen those spells for exactly this purpose. None of these were intended to destroy the mirror outright, but he hoped one of them might break the enchantment on it and turn it into a harmless disk of silvered glass.
He would have preferred to try them under more controlled circumstances, but that didn’t appear to be an option. He had to do something to end this stand-off without giving the mirror back to the spriggans, and he had brought all this prepared magic, with the Guild’s blessing. He might as well see whether any of it would do the job.
“Karanissa, could you keep the spriggans away for a moment?” he asked, as he seated himself cross-legged on the cave floor. He set the mirror on his lap, then pulled over the box of spells.
He wanted to be as cautious as possible, starting out with the spells least likely to have unforeseen effects. That made his first choice fairly simple. Javan’s Geas could be used to command anyone not to do something, and it lasted indefinitely-but no one ever used it on inanimate objects, for obvious reasons. The mirror might be something more than a mere inanimate object, though, so Gresh pulled out the appropriate jar and sprinkled a pinch of dark red powder on the mirror.
This was exciting, using magic himself. He had certainly seen plenty of magic, but he had rarely gotten to use it himself. Turning Tobas into a dragon might have been reckless, even frightening, but it had also been fun. It had given him a sensation of power. This experiment with the mirror was far less likely to produce spectacular results, but it was still a bit of a thrill.
He could hear spriggans protesting, but none interrupted him. Apparently Karanissa’s witchcraft was up to the task of keeping them away. “Make no more spriggans-by this spell I charge you,” he proclaimed. “Esku.”
The powder flashed into non-existence, but the mirror appeared unchanged.
“Make no more spriggans,” Gresh repeated, just in case he had misremembered and the command was supposed to come after the invocation.
“How do we know it worked?” Karanissa asked, looking down at the mirror. She was panting slightly from the effort of keeping the spriggans back.
“We just wait and see whether any more spriggans appear,” Gresh answered, as he closed the jar and slid it back into its place in the box. “After all, they’ve been popping out often enough! No wonder there are half a million of the little pests, if they appear this… Oh, drat.”
A spriggan was heaving itself up out of the mirror.
“It didn’t work,” Karanissa said.
“It didn’t work,” Gresh agreed. He reached for the box.
The glittering white powder of Lirrim’s Rectification flashed silver instead of gold, but had no visible effect at all, and after a five-minute wait the mirror produced another spriggan, demonstrating that the original spell was still working. The spriggan appeared just the same as the others. If the Rectification had had any effect at all, it wasn’t obvious.
“I’d hoped that would turn it into Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm,” Gresh said. “I’m not sure why it didn’t-after all, that’s what the spell was originally intended to be.”
“Maybe wizardry just doesn’t work on the mirror,” Karanissa said, as she slumped against the cave wall, exhausted.
“That’s possible,” Gresh admitted. “But I really hope that’s not the case.”
“Maybe it’s been too long since the original spell,” Tobas said, peering down through the opening where the cave roof used to be.
“That doesn’t seem likely,” Gresh said. “From what I’m told, wizardry usually isn’t time-limited that way-I mean, you can always reverse Fendel’s Superior Petrifaction, even if the victim’s been stone for centuries.” He glanced around. “It might be because there are half a million spriggans out there who think this version of the mirror is exactly what it should be.”
“That could be,” Tobas said.
Gresh tried Javan’s Restorative next, over the dragon’s objections. Tobas pointed out that they had already used the Restorative on the mirror once without removing the enchantment and argued that they really shouldn’t waste another portion of their very limited supply of a very precious spell.
Gresh ignored him and cast the spell, which did absolutely nothing. Spriggans continued to emerge from the mirror at irregular intervals.
The horde of spriggans in the meadow continued to hold Alorria, Alris, and the flying carpet hostage. They bickered and squeaked among themselves, but made no attempt to charge past the dragon. Every so often one would try to sneak past alone, but Tobas spotted most of these and chased them away.
“What does that leave?” Tobas asked, as he brushed a few unusually courageous spriggans back with his tail. “What else have you got in that box?”
“The potions obviously won’t help,” Gresh said. “The mirror can’t drink them. The two powders we haven’t
