“Mean big, big water, great big huge water. Is ocean? Ocean’s eleven.”
“So when you got to the coast you turned aside and walked up the coast to the city.”
“Turned aside twice. First time long ago, then not so long at all. Twelve.”
Gresh struggled to remember his geography. The second time would be when the spriggan reached the west coast, of course, but the first time…
That would have been the Gulf of the East, the water between the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars and the Small Kingdoms.
“The first time you turned aside-you walked around the very big water and crossed a long bridge across more water, and then headed west again?”
“Yes, yes! Long bridge with guards.”
“Across the Great River.”
“What comes after twelve? Thirty?”
“Thirteen,” Gresh said automatically, as he tried to choose his next question.
Chapter Four
“Thirteen,” the spriggan said.
Gresh frowned. He was using up his twenty questions faster than he liked.
He had made progress, though; knowing that the spriggan had turned aside at the Gulf of the East and crossed the toll bridge on the Great River meant that it had, indeed, come from the Small Kingdoms.
But how far had it come? Where in the Small Kingdoms had it started? Gresh couldn’t very well search all of the two hundred or more little principalities for one little hand-mirror.
“How long did it take you to walk from the mirror to the first big water? How many mornings?”
The spriggan turned up empty palms. “Don’t know,” it said. “Didn’t count. Is fourteen?”
“Yes,” Gresh admitted, annoyed with himself for wasting a question. He knew the spriggan couldn’t count, and the stupid little thing probably hadn’t maintained anything like a steady pace in its journeying.
A thought struck him. Had it started in the Small Kingdoms? What if it had started east of the Small Kingdoms, in the Great Eastern Desert?
“Have you ever seen a desert?” he asked. “A big sandy place, where no one lives and there are no trees or farms?”
“No,” the spriggan said. “Would be no fun, huh?” It hesitated. “Fiveteen?”
“Fifteen.”
So the mirror was definitely in the Small Kingdoms. He had five questions left to narrow it down.
“Do you know which kingdom the mirror is in?”
“No. Not good with names. Or kingdoms. Sixteen, yes?”
That was no surprise. “Is the mirror in the mountains, or on the plain, or in the forests?”
“Um…” The spriggan was clearly struggling to think. “Yes,” it said. “Seventeen. That almost twenty?”
“Getting close,” Gresh said. “But you didn’t answer the question-which is it, in the mountains or on the plain or in the forest?”
“Mirror is in mountain,” the spriggan said. “Eighteen.”
“No, that’s just seventeen! You didn’t answer the question the first time.”
“Wasn’t same question! Did answer!”
“It was the same question! You just didn’t hear it right the first time.”
“Was two questions!”
Gresh glared at the spriggan, and the spriggan glared back. Then something registered.
“Wait a minute,” Gresh said. “Did you say the mirror is in a mountain? You mean inside a mountain?”
“Yes,” the spriggan said, folding its spindly arms across its narrow chest. “Said that, meant that. Nineteen.”
“It’s in a cave?” Gresh said, before realizing that he might have just thrown away his last question.
“Yes. Tenteen.”
Gresh caught himself, closed his lips tight, closed his eyes, and did not correct the spriggan. Instead he tried to think what else he could ask.
He opened his eyes and glanced at Twilfa, who had obviously been listening and had, just like him, barely caught herself before calling out a correction. He could see her biting her lip as she turned away and hurried down the passageway to the kitchen, out of sight.
Gresh had no idea how many more questions he could get away with; it could be just one, or it could be a dozen before the spriggan caught on. He couldn’t afford to waste any.
“What time of day does the sun first shine in the mouth of the cave?” he asked.
The spriggan considered that for a moment, then said, “Middle of morning, maybe? Not sure. Um… eleventeen?”
Then the cave mouth faced more east than west and was probably on the eastern slope of a mountain.
“From the mouth of the cave, what buildings could you see? Castles, towers, farmhouses, villages, anything?”
“Only building was broken one. Castle or tower or something. Don’t know names of buildings.” The spriggan looked puzzled. “Is eleventeen? Said that before?”
“No, you didn’t say it before,” Gresh lied as he considered that. “Eleventeen is right.”
A ruin. Nothing else. That made sense; if there were inhabitants in the area they might have noticed the steady stream of spriggans coming down from the cave. Word would have gotten around.
Or up from the cave, he reminded himself. Caves could occur at the bottoms of mountains as well as the tops.
This one, wherever it was, was in sight of a ruined fortification in otherwise uninhabited terrain, far enough from civilization that no one had recognized it as the source of spriggans.
Unfortunately, to the best of Gresh’s knowledge, that described a good-sized portion of the mountainous central Small Kingdoms, from Zedmor in the northwest to Lumeth of the Towers in the southeast.
Lumeth of the Towers…could the cave be in sight of those towers, the gigantic ancient ruins rumored to be older than humanity itself?
But there were three of those, not just one, according to the travelers Gresh had spoken with.
“When you came out of the cave and went west over the mountains, what did you find?”
The spriggan blinked at him. It hesitated.
“Rocks,” it said at last. “Trees. Lots of trees. Twelve…twelveteen? Not sound right.”
“Twelveteen,” Gresh said. “You saw forests.” That narrowed down the search; Gresh knew that the southern end of the mountain range extended into open grasslands, and the forests that had once covered the northern end had been cleared for farming. He had had reason to learn such details, since some of the ingredients he sold included forest products-leaves from the topmost branch of a sixty-foot oak, for example, or dew from the underside of a fiddler fern.
Forests-so it wasn’t in Lumeth or Calimor, or anywhere north of Vlagmor. What could he ask that would narrow it down further?
“Did you see a lake as you traveled westward through the forest, or cross a river?”
“No. No lake. No rivers in forest, just little streams. Didn’t cross big river until the long bridge with the guards. And that…thirteenteen? No, that twenty! Twenty, twenty, twenty! Right, twenty?”
“Twenty,” Gresh admitted.
So the mirror was in a cave on the eastern side of a mountain somewhere between Vlagmor and Calimor, and not in the central area where the spriggan’s westward march would have encountered Ekeroa’s lake, or the river that drained the lake and much of the western mountains into the Gulf of the East.
Karanissa had mentioned Dwomor and Aigoa. Gresh was not sure exactly where those were, but he thought they lay somewhere not too far from Ekeroa. If the mirror were still in Dwomor, and Dwomor was where Gresh had thought it was, and the spriggan headed west, it should have seen the lake-but it hadn’t.
