“There.”
She was right; a faint flicker of orange was visible, and Tobas steered the carpet toward it. He did not know what the light was, but it appeared man-made and was not the Tower of Flame. At this point that was good enough.
They wound up as guests for the night at a small farmhouse where the man of the house had been out with a lantern, checking on a soon-to-calve cow.
When they first arrived and asked the startled and drowsy farmer where they were, they were assured that they were only a mile or two from Dwomor Keep. Upon hearing the castle was close Tobas wanted to continue on and try to find it, despite the now-total darkness, but just then the first drops of rain began to fall, and the others unanimously overruled him. They hastily hoisted their luggage, rolled up the carpet, and hurried into the cottage, Gresh almost banging his forehead on the lintel.
After the wife and teenaged sons were awakened, Gresh paid the family of farmers generously for a late supper and the use of several beds, even though the beds were just piles of straw and some rather malodorous blankets crowded into various corners of house and barn.
Unlike the sleeping accommodations, the meal was entirely satisfactory, as the family had just that day butchered a hog and had a good supply of vegetables and beer to accompany the fresh pork. The entire party ate heartily after their long and weary day, then tottered off to bed with as little conversation as possible.
Gresh had slept on worse bedding on occasion, on various buying trips; he awoke feeling fine. Most of the others had no real problems, but Alorria had not done as well as some and was alternately yawning and complaining as the company gathered in the main room of the farmhouse shortly after dawn.
Gresh was mildly surprised to discover that all four spriggans had stayed the night and not wandered off seeking fun, but there they were when he arose, clustered around Tobas and his luggage, ready to continue their adventure. As their hosts fried up a pound or so of bacon for breakfast, Gresh and Tobas studied the spriggans carefully and concluded that these were, in fact, the same four, and there were no others to be seen, either running loose or in Tobas’s valise. The mirror had not produced any more during the night. Presumably the mirror in the spriggans’ world was safely shut away in a box and would never again spew unwelcome visitors into the World.
Since they had opened the valise to check for spriggans, Tobas lifted out the mirror for inspection. “You really did it,” he said, marveling as he turned carefully wrapped glass over in his hands. “You got me the mirror.”
“It’s my job,” Gresh replied gruffly. “You saw it last night.”
“But it seems more real by daylight. Before I’d only just been turned back to my natural form and was surrounded by spriggans. It was hard to be sure just what was real under those circumstances!”
Gresh could not argue with that.
An hour later the ten of them-Gresh, Tobas, Alorria, Alris, Karanissa, the reflected Karanissa, and the four spriggans-spilled off the carpet onto the platform outside the tower window at Dwomor Keep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Gresh decided to spend a day or two in Dwomor before heading back to Ethshar of the Rocks to collect his fee; after all, once he was paid he would have all the time in the World. Besides, he had spent more than enough hours crowded onto the flying carpet, and a brief stay would allow him and Tobas to tidy up loose ends, such as making certain no more spriggans were emerging.
That was easy enough to ascertain, since the mirror was wrapped in cloth-so long as the wrappings stayed in place, no spriggans had appeared, since any new arrival would have had to loosen the bindings to fully materialize. They had been too tired to fully appreciate that at the farmhouse, but now it seemed sufficient evidence.
The mirror was carefully placed in Tobas’s tower workshop, where the four spriggans were set to watch over it with strict orders not to touch it, or to meddle with anything else. Gresh had some doubts about ordering them not to meddle and considered using Javan’s Geas on them, but eventually decided that if Tobas wanted to risk it, that was his problem, and Gresh wasn’t going to waste a bunch of valuable magic safeguarding anything. Especially since he still didn’t know whether or not Javan’s Geas would work on spriggans.
As for the enchanted powders themselves, Gresh had tucked the pack in a corner when they first came in from the flying carpet’s landing platform. He saw no need to move them; none of the residents of Dwomor Keep were going to be foolish enough to steal from the wizard’s apartments.
Figuring out what to do about the false Karanissa was a little more difficult. By general consent of everyone involved except the image herself-and even she didn’t seriously object-she had been locked away in one of the four small bedrooms in the wizard’s tower, out of sight of the castle’s other inhabitants but with an adequate supply of food and water, until such time as the others had decided how she should be handled.
Karanissa thought she was harmless and should be released; Alorria thought she was a monster that should be destroyed; and the two men did not yet have fixed opinions.
Over breakfast and a subsequent glass of wine, Gresh explained to Tobas exactly what had happened in the cave and detailed his theories of just how the mirror’s magic worked, which included a description of the reflection’s initial appearance. That did not bring them to any quick agreement on what should be done with her.
Alorria did not stay around to listen to the debate; she had stated her position and had more urgent concerns, such as showing Alris off to the king and queen again. Karanissa stayed, but had little to say; for the most part she left the discussion to the two men.
“She’s just an image. We should use Javan’s Restorative to make her disappear,” Tobas said.
“Would it do that?” Karanissa asked.
“I think it would,” Tobas said. “The Restorative turns things into what they were before they were enchanted or broken or transformed, and she wasn’t anything before she was enchanted.”
“If that would work on her, it would work on spriggans,” Gresh said thoughtfully. “That might be a way of disposing of them. An expensive one, though. I wonder if it would work?”
“It ought to.”
“Then it could be used to make any magical creation vanish?”
Tobas hesitated. Gresh suspected he was reconsidering his position. Javan’s Restorative was a powerful countercharm, but surely it wasn’t that powerful!
“I think we should try it on her,” Tobas finally said.
“Why?” Gresh demanded. “She hasn’t done anything to harm anyone. How sure are you it will make her disappear, anyway?”
“I’m not sure at all,” Tobas admitted. “I’m not comfortable having her around, though-she’s an imitation of my wife, after all!”
Gresh glanced at Karanissa. “One wife, yes,” he said. “Which is probably why the other wants her destroyed. She feels outnumbered. And you probably find it unsettling, having a copy of one of your wives. If she weren’t a second Karanissa, but the image of a stranger, would you still want her destroyed?”
“Probably not,” Tobas admitted. He frowned thoughtfully. “All right, you’ve made your point.”
Gresh was not at all sure he had adequately conveyed his feelings on the subject, partly because he was not entirely certain himself what they were. He had originally been considering finding a way to erase the reflection himself, but the more he thought about it, the more repulsive the idea seemed. He was beginning to suspect it would amount to murder; the reflection certainly considered herself a person, and anyone seeing her would think she was human.
He had already decided that killing half a million spriggans would be wrong; how would killing this one pseudo-human be any different? These magical reflections might not be entirely real, might not be “complete” in some way, but they certainly seemed to have feelings and desires and intelligence-they could speak and act and showed every other sign of being rational beings. Calling it “erasing” or “unmaking” didn’t change the fact that it was killing, ending a life.
But turning a reflection loose in the World didn’t seem like the best idea, either. Where would she go? What would she do? If she was like the spriggans she didn’t really need to eat. She couldn’t starve to death, but she would get painfully hungry if she didn’t get regular meals.
