Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Spriggan Mirror

“About three-fourths of a mile, I’d say. A little less if it sloped steeply downward.”

“Oh.” A cave that long was not out of the question, but it seemed unlikely that the spriggans would have carried the mirror so deep into the earth.

On the other hand, the spriggan had not originally said it emerged in a cave. It had said it was inside a mountain. Three-quarters of a mile would definitely be well inside.

He needed to capture another spriggan for questioning; that was all there was to it.

Then he looked at the talisman and saw the golden trace of a moving spriggan ahead. “That way,” he said, pointing.

Tobas obeyed.

A second spriggan’s trail appeared, and a third, all three moving west to east.

That was interesting, that they were all going in the same direction. They might be heading away from the cave, looking for somewhere they could have more fun. Instead of directing Tobas toward the three of them, therefore, Gresh decided to backtrack them. “West,” he said.

The carpet sailed on, just above the treetops, down one slope and up the next, as Gresh studied the talisman. He spotted more spriggans in the forest below-and all of them seemed to be moving east.

Then their numbers began to increase; the talisman sparkled with their trails, and now some were veering north or south.

But none were going west, even now.

Gresh looked up. The carpet was rising steeply. They were rounding the northern end of the cliff now, moving out of sight of the fallen castle, and the spriggans were still scattering out from somewhere to the west.

But hadn’t the spriggan said the castle was in sight of the cave mouth?

No. It had said that a ruin was, but it had never really said what ruin. Gresh had just assumed it was the crooked castle.

“Are there any other ruins around here?” he asked.

Tobas glanced back at him. “There’s an entire abandoned town up on that mountainside,” he said, pointing up at the top of the cliff.

“It’s in the dead area?”

“Oh, yes. That was where we first found out that wizardry didn’t work.”

“Ah.”

They swept up over the top of the slope, and Gresh could see the ruined town. That, he decided, might well be the ruins the spriggan had meant-yes, it had said it saw a castle or a tower, but it had admitted it knew nothing of architecture. “That way,” he said, pointing. “As close as you can get without going in the sphere.”

They flew on for several more minutes while Gresh tried to locate more spriggans and determine which direction they were moving, but they had become scarce again. Finally Tobas said, “We need to head back soon.”

Gresh hesitated, looking up at the sun. It was almost brushing the mountaintops ahead.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“If you like.”

“I do,” Gresh said. “I’m sure the mirror is around here somewhere. We just need to find it.”

“That is the general idea,” Tobas agreed. He gestured, and the carpet swooped upward and headed toward Dwomor Keep.

For their second day of searching Gresh insisted on an earlier start and told Tobas to start just to the west of the ruined town. He also stuck a long-handled net through his belt before departure and added a few snares to the items already in his little shoulder-pack.

They spent an hour or so exploring from the air, and Gresh was able to locate what appeared to be a point of origin from which spriggans were radiating to the north and east-but not to the south, because that would have led them through the no-wizardry area, and very few to the west, directly over the mountains. That neatly explained why so few found their way to Dwomor, which lay to the southwest.

Gresh had Tobas circle over the area, looking for a cave.

The area was a mountainside facing east, and much of it did indeed have a view of the ruined town on the western slope of the next mountain over. The fallen castle lay beyond that, at the foot of the cliff east of the town. A trail led off to the southwest, and Tobas assured him that that led, by a somewhat circuitous route, back to Dwomor, but it passed through the no-wizardry bubble, so the spriggans presumably avoided it.

The forest did not completely cover this particular mountain; several areas were bare brown rock. There were grassy and mossy patches, as well, and brush-covered areas where the slope was too steep or the soil too thin for trees. Gresh scanned these carefully, looking for a cave-mouth, but he saw none.

Chira’s talisman was sparkling and sizzling with spriggans as they circled, and here they were moving in every direction, so that no exact center could be found, no spot from which they all radiated. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of spriggans in the bushes and trees below. Gresh saw a few running across open country, as well.

It was obvious that some of them did not immediately leave the area once they had emerged from the mirror. Gresh wondered what they found to eat; some of the bushes had apparently been nibbled on, but that would hardly feed the numbers the talisman was reporting. The wizards had assured him that spriggans didn’t need to eat, that they were incapable of starving to death, but they certainly liked to eat and felt hungry when they didn’t. There couldn’t possibly be enough food for the spriggans below unless they were eating tree bark and dry grass, or just dirt.

In fact, the number of spriggans below was rather intimidating. Somehow Gresh had assumed that as soon as they came out of the mirror they all promptly marched off looking for people to annoy, but apparently that was not exactly the case. Karanissa had said there were half a million of the little pests in the World, and Gresh had pictured them being fairly evenly spread over the entirety of it, from Vond to Tintallion, but now he was beginning to wonder whether a significant portion hadn’t stayed right here. Chira’s talisman was glittering as if a wizard had cast some sort of glamour on it.

For the first time it occurred to Gresh that he might not be able to simply walk into the cave and pick up the mirror. If there really were hundreds of spriggans down there, and they wanted to defend it, he might face a real challenge.

Even after a dozen circles he could not see a cave anywhere. He had to conclude that it was under the trees somewhere. He didn’t want to go over the whole mountainside on foot, but it didn’t seem he was going to spot it from the air.

“Land,” he told Tobas.

“Anywhere in particular?” the wizard asked.

“No. Wherever is convenient.”

Tobas nodded and sent the carpet downward, landing it on a relatively level patch of meadow well up the mountain. Spriggans fled squealing as its shadow swept over them, and the carpet came to rest, crushing a few square yards of delicate yellow wildflowers.

Gresh stood up and looked around. Downslope to the east the meadow ended in a rocky outcropping and a sudden drop-off, and below that was a patch of forest-mostly birch and aspen, from what Gresh could see. To the north was a stretch of broken ground and tangled brush. Westward the meadow rose gradually for perhaps fifty yards, then suddenly gave way to steep bare stone jutting upward toward the peak. To the south the meadow dropped away at the shoulder of the mountain, providing a spectacular view of forested hills rolling away into the distance.

Gresh pulled the net from his belt, holding it halfway along the handle, and looked about. He had seen dozens of spriggans as the carpet descended, but they had all apparently taken cover. “Hai!” he called. “Anyone here?”

“They were all over the place a moment ago,” Tobas said.

“They still are,” Gresh said. He had spotted several of the silly creatures, crouching down to blend in with the tall grass, weeds, and flowers. It appeared there was a reason they were green. “Anyone want to talk to me a little?” he called.