“What’s going on?” Alorria asked, the words barely intelligible over the intervening distance. “How long are these spriggans going to keep us here? The sun’s going down. Are we going to be stuck here all night?”
The dragon’s head swung back to the cave for a moment. “Excuse me,” Tobas said, “but I’ve been neglecting Ali.” He started to turn away-this time not just by bending his neck, but by turning his entire body.
“Wait a moment,” Gresh called. “If you leave, we’ll be overrun by spriggans, and they’ll take the mirror.”
“If you get too close to the carpet you may panic them into doing something unfortunate,” Karanissa said. “Or you may do something unfortunate, without meaning to.”
The dragon hesitated, then said, “I’ll just turn around and talk to Ali from a safe distance.”
Karanissa and Gresh exchanged glances. “That should work,” Gresh acknowledged.
“Good.” With that, and with much scraping of scale on rock and rustling of gigantic wings, the dragon turned around, sending spriggans running in various directions squeaking madly, until at last the very tip of his tail slithered across the rocks he had ripped out of the mountainside and curled into the mouth of the cave.
“She’s right that the sun’s setting,” Karanissa said, once the dragon had completed his rotation.
Gresh’s reply was drowned out by the dragon roaring across the meadow to Alorria, reassuring her that everything was fine, and that the other two were just experimenting with the mirror to see if they could remove the enchantment.
Alorria called back, but Gresh and Karanissa could not make out her words. After a moment, by mutual consent, they decided to ignore the conversation between the princess and the dragon and turn their attention back to the mirror. Ordinarily making themselves heard over the dragon’s bellowing might have been difficult, but Karanissa’s witchcraft took care of that.
“There still haven’t been any more spriggans,” Karanissa said. “It really does feel different. Before it felt as if it were directed away, somehow, and now it seems directed here.”
“Well, the Spell of Reversal…” Gresh began; then he stopped. “Wait,” he said. “It was directed away before?”
“Yes,” Karanissa said. “Definitely.”
“Away where?”
Karanissa hesitated, then turned up a palm. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not anywhere in the World.”
“So it was pulling the spriggans from another world into ours?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you said now it’s aimed here.”
“Yes.”
“But it didn’t suck that spriggan into another world. And we looked into it, and it didn’t suck us in.”
“I know. I never said I understood it. I’m a witch, not a wizard.”
“Oh, I doubt a wizard would do any better,” Gresh assured her. “They rarely really know what they’re doing- it’s all rote formulas and instinct. They don’t actually understand their magic.”
“I know most of them don’t; Tobas certainly doesn’t. Some of them seem to do a little better. I thought Derithon had a better grasp of what he was doing than most, but I was very young then, and that might have been my own naivete.”
“Derithon was your first husband, four centuries ago?”
“Well, we weren’t formally married. I was his mistress. Or technically, a lieutenant assigned special duties under his command.”
Gresh blinked. “Lieutenant?”
“In the military of Old Ethshar. The Great War was in progress, after all. I was serving in reconnaissance, using my witchcraft to locate enemy magicians, when we met.”
“Of course.”
Somehow, despite knowing she was four hundred years old, he had never connected her with the Great War that had ended more than two hundred years ago-but of course she had grown up during the War, and like all magicians of the time would have been conscripted into the military.
The World had been so utterly different then-no wonder Karanissa had said she felt out of place now!
Gresh wondered whether he, too, would feel out of place four hundred years from now, if he completed the job he had come here to do and received the payment he had been promised. That was an odd thought. Was that why so few openly ancient people were around? After all, wizards had been using eternal youth spells for centuries, and even if only a few in each generation ever managed to work them, undying wizards ought to be accumulating, but Gresh hadn’t met more than a handful, at most. Did they withdraw from human society because it was no longer familiar, because it was too different from what they had known when young?
That didn’t really seem reasonable. Karanissa didn’t fit in well because she had spent four hundred years trapped in a castle, but she didn’t seem to want to give up human company, by any means. Most people would have lived through the changes as they happened and could have adapted.
No, there must be some other explanation for the scarcity of ancients.
Scarce or not, he had one here to advise him. “You think they understood wizardry better back then?” he asked.
“Maybe. At least I think Derry did-but he was a couple of centuries old.”
“Oh.” There it was again, the idea of living for hundreds of years and watching the World change around you-but Derithon hadn’t withdrawn from humanity.
Or had he? He had kept his mistress in that weird castle in the tapestry and had flown around the World in another castle, rather than living among ordinary people.
But he had met Karanissa and seduced her. He hadn’t been a hermit.
Or had she seduced him, perhaps? Gresh suddenly wondered whether the Spell of the Revealed Power might turn Karanissa into the likeness of the long-dead Derithon the Mage and whether that might be useful.
He was not about to test out that theory without some careful planning; he had had enough of throwing spells around recklessly. Tobas had been right to criticize him.
“Still no new spriggans,” Karanissa said, interrupting his thoughts.
Gresh glanced down at the mirror, and as he did he caught a glimpse of a pair of pop-eyes watching him from a corner of the cave. The spriggans did not seem upset by whatever the Spell of Reversal had done. There was no ongoing barrage of squeals, nor were there any wild dashes toward the mirror to protect it.
It might be time to ask them a few questions, while waiting to see whether any spriggans emerged before the Spell of Reversal wore off-or after, for that matter. After all, interrogating spriggans had been more obviously useful than wizardry so far.
“Karanissa, would you…” he began.
He did not need to finish the request; she had heard his thoughts. Her hand flashed out and closed on the spriggan’s legs, and a moment later it was hanging upside-down from her fist, squealing. Several other spriggans were calling protests from elsewhere in the cave.
“Shut up!” Gresh ordered.
The captured spriggan’s complaints died down to terrified whimpering, and the others fell completely silent.
“We aren’t going to hurt you,” Gresh told it. “If you answer all my questions truthfully for the next half-hour, we’ll let you go.”
“Not fun,” the spriggan whined.
“Sometimes life isn’t fun,” Gresh told it.
It nodded desperately.
“Good. Karanissa, why don’t you turn our guest the other way up, so it can talk more easily?”
Karanissa righted the creature, but did not loosen her grip.
“Now, my little friend, what do you know about this mirror?” Gresh asked, pointing.
The spriggan looked down and gulped. “That where spriggans come from,” it said. “That what gives spriggans magic, protects spriggans from harm.”
“It does?” Gresh’s gaze fell to the mirror for a moment, then flicked back to their captive. “How does it protect you?”
“Not tell!” another spriggan called from a dozen feet away. Gresh threw a pebble at it, and it fled with a squeal.
