Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Spriggan Mirror

“We don’t know,” Gresh said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“Well, as far as I know, I didn’t exist until a couple of minutes ago.”

Gresh looked at the original. “You say she doesn’t seem entirely human?”

“She doesn’t seem entirely real,” Karanissa corrected him.

“Do spriggans? Could she be a spriggan in human form?”

“I’m a person,” the duplicate interjected. “I do know that much.”

“She…” Karanissa tilted her head and studied the copy. “She’s not a spriggan, but there is a similarity. I never noticed it before, but you’re right, spriggans aren’t all there, either. If I hadn’t had real humans to compare her to, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with her.”

“There isn’t anything wrong with me!” the duplicate protested.

“Stand up and let me look at you,” Gresh suggested. “Let’s see if you really are an exact duplicate of Karanissa.”

The two women exchanged glances, then rose and turned to face Gresh, standing side-by-side in the fading daylight.

“Oh,” Gresh said. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

The two were identical in appearance in every detail except for one. The dresses were the same fabric, the same cut, belted identically, with the same knot at the same place; the hair was the same length and luster, with every lock and curl matching; the eyes were identical in color and shape; the teeth matched; the nose and mouth were indistinguishable-except for one thing.

The copy was smaller than the original.

She was proportioned exactly like the real Karanissa, but she was about two inches shorter, a shade thinner, and not quite as wide at shoulders, bust, waist, or hips. Her fingers were slightly shorter; her eyes and mouth were slightly smaller. She was the exact image of Karanissa, but somehow shrunken.

Image, he thought. Mirror image.

Gresh looked down at the mirror, then back at the two women.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

He felt simultaneously brilliant and foolish-brilliant because he now was certain of exactly how the mirror’s magic worked, and foolish because it had taken him so long to guess the truth.

It probably explained how Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm worked, too.

It explained why spriggans were indestructible while the mirror’s magic was working, but not when it wasn’t. It explained why none of them had names when they emerged, why they sometimes varied in appearance but were sometimes identical, why they didn’t feel entirely real to witches, and why they had no odor. It explained why they emerged at apparently random intervals, and why the mirror had kept working when broken, but multiplied everything by four.

“Oh, what?” Karanissa asked, visibly annoyed.

“They’re images,” Gresh explained. “Mirror images. They aren’t really here in the World at all; they’re in the mirror.” He leaned forward and sniffed at the smaller woman, and as he had expected, smelled nothing at all-no scent of woman whatsoever.

She looked puzzled at his action, but did not shy away, or make any comment.

“Images? What?” the original Karanissa asked. “What are images?”

“Spriggans. The ones we see and talk to aren’t real spriggans; they’re just mirror images. The real spriggans are in another world somewhere, a world that has a mirror in it that’s magically connected to this one. I wonder whether the reason Tobas’s spell went wrong in the first place is because he was doing it in that purple void, instead of here in the World. Instead of linking to the world of the Haunting Phantasm, he linked this mirror to the world of spriggans, which is related to the void the same way the phantasm world is related to this one.”

“But the Haunting Phantasm doesn’t keep spewing out pests.”

“The worlds are different, of course, so the rules are different, and the magic is different. Wizardry is like that.” He turned up an empty palm. “Or maybe he just made a mistake; wizardry is like that, too.”

Karanissa shuddered. “Sometimes I hate wizardry.”

The reduced copy-the image, as Gresh now thought of it-looked from one of them to the other, then said, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Spriggan understand,” a squeaky voice said from behind Gresh’s right shoulder.

Gresh turned to look at the spriggan that had crept up behind him. “Then I’m right?” he asked.

The spriggan turned up an empty hand. “Not know,” it said. “But sounds right.”

“So you’re just an image of a spriggan that looked in a mirror in another world?”

“Think so, yes.”

“That’s why the Restorative and the Rectification didn’t do anything,” Gresh said, as he continued to work out the details in his own mind. “Because the spell didn’t go wrong, it just went differently, so there wasn’t anything to restore or rectify. There’s no intelligence involved, just an enchanted object, so Javan’s Geas can’t do anything-nobody is making our spriggans, they just happen whenever a real spriggan looks at the mirror in the other world.”

“I’m still not sure I understand,” Karanissa said. “How did you figure this out? Why is this copy of me here?”

“She’s what gave it away,” Gresh said. “When I saw she was smaller than you. The reflections in a mirror are smaller than the originals because of perspective-they’re reduced in size, the amount depending on how far from the mirror the original is. She’s smaller than you because she’s a reflection-or really, a reflection of a reflection. It’s that second step that’s why she isn’t reversed.”

Karanissa stared at him in annoyance, while the imitation appeared politely interested. “Gresh, what are you talking about?” the original demanded.

He sighed; it was all so obvious to him now he didn’t see why Karanissa hadn’t grasped it. “When I used the Spell of Reversal,” he said, “the direction of the spell reversed. Instead of creating solid images of creatures from the spriggans’ world in our World, the magic began creating solid images from our World in the spriggans’ world. Every living thing that looked in our mirror during that half-hour or so had a mirror-image copy climb out of the other mirror, the mirror in the spriggans’ world. I looked in the mirror, you looked in it, that spriggan we tried to toss back in-copies of us all must have climbed out in the spriggans’ world. A copy of you was still there in the spriggans’ world when the reversal wore off, and it looked in the mirror, so a copy of the copy climbed out here.” He pointed at the duplicate Karanissa. “That’s her-a mirror image of a mirror image. She doesn’t have a name or any memory because she really didn’t exist until the mirror reflected her into being. She and the spriggans have no odor because smells don’t reflect.” He considered for a moment, then said, “I’m a little surprised that there’s no image of me appearing. I must have been reflected into the other world, too. Maybe my duplicate-or duplicates, since I looked in the mirror more than once while it was reversed…” He stopped, and looked down at the mirror, but nothing was trying to climb out of it; that was a relief. He had been momentarily concerned that half a dozen copies of Karanissa and himself might appear.

According to his theory, in some alien world where spriggans were apparently the dominant form of life, images of Karanissa and himself had climbed out of a mirror. He wondered what was happening to those images, what they were doing, what the real spriggans thought of them. Would they be pests, the way the spriggan images were? They were almost certainly indestructible, like spriggans-after all, you can’t hurt an image; it isn’t really there, it’s in the mirror, and only appears to be anywhere else. Spriggans were indestructible because a reflection can’t be harmed by striking the reflection itself. A reflection is destroyed when the mirror it’s in is destroyed. That’s why the spriggans thought they would die if the mirror was destroyed. The mirror’s enchantment somehow made the reflections seem solid and able to interact with the real world when the original was no longer looking in the mirror, but they were still just images.