“Then let’s get this carpet moving.”
Tobas made a gesture, and the carpet rose gently. “Where to?” he asked.
Gresh pointed northwest, the same direction the spriggan had. “That way.” He grimaced. “I just wish I knew how far a spriggan wanders in four days.”
“Well, it’s about a three-day hike from here to Dwomor Keep for a human, if you aren’t particularly rushing.” The carpet started drifting forward, as well as up.
“Somehow I doubt a spriggan would get anywhere near that far.”
“So do I.”
Gresh looked around as the carpet reached treetop level, then protested, “I said that way!”
“We can’t,” Tobas replied. “That would take us through an edge of the dead place. The sphere.”
Gresh bit back a retort; he supposed the wizard had a point. The detour would make it that much harder to follow the spriggan’s direction, though.
But then, how sure was he that the spriggan had been right? It undoubtedly knew which way it had been walking when it reached that thicket, but it had probably wandered back and forth during those four days; the direction was at best an approximation. With a sigh, he picked up Chira’s talisman and began searching for more spriggans.
A pair skittered by briefly, at the edges of the device’s range—but then the carpet swooped around into a loop, spiraling upward to top a cliff and get over a rocky peak that intruded on their course, and Gresh lost contact with them.
They soared over the mountaintop and began descending the much gentler western slope. Suddenly the talisman sparkled and buzzed with the presence of spriggans ahead—but only briefly and unevenly.
“Slow down!” Gresh called.
Tobas gestured, and the rug slowed. “What is it?”
Gresh did not answer; instead he studied the talisman, trying to make sense of its responses. It took him a moment to remember that it did not detect spriggans as such; it detected motion. The creatures ahead had been moving, then stopped, but every so often one would shift position, and the talisman would flicker.
They were hiding, obviously.
Or perhaps the local squirrels sometimes sat up on their hind legs and looked around; that would probably show up in just the same manner. He sighed. “Keep going,” he said. “But not too fast.”
Tobas obeyed.
Gresh kept a close watch on the talisman, but looked up every so often to scan the surrounding countryside for caves. The spriggan he had questioned had said the mirror was inside a mountain, so the cave was in a mountainside, not down in the valley below. There were plenty of mountainsides in sight, but none had any obvious openings in them.
He had hoped that the cave would be the obvious place, in the cliff right next to the fallen castle, but if Tobas was right that was impossible—that was inside the dead-to-wizardry zone.
At least, unless the cave stretched back far enough into the mountain to reach beyond the sphere...
“Are you sure the dead area is a sphere?” he asked.
“Yes,” Tobas said.
Gresh was slightly startled that the wizard did not hesitate or qualify his response in any way, but gave a quick flat affirmative that left no room for argument. “What if there were a tunnel going back into the cliff?” he asked. “How far would it have to go to get out of the area?”
Tobas looked off to the left, toward the cliff and the castle’s towers showing above the trees, and considered the question carefully.
“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.
Chapter Fifteen
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.