“Tobas!” Alorria called, as the dragon circled around the carpet. “Are you really in there?”
“I’m fine, Ali,” Tobas replied. “We’ll turn me back as soon as we have the mirror.”
That elicited a fresh chorus of yelps and shrieks from the spriggans still scattered across the meadow. “No take mirror!”
“Dragon no take mirror!”
“Not break mirror!
“Not eat mirror!”
“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Tobas growled, a wisp of smoke emerging with his words as he stalked across the meadow. “It’s my mirror, after all—you spriggans stole it from me, and I’ll take it back if I want to!”
That evoked wails and lamentations.
“Tobas?” Alorria called.
The dragon turned his head.
“Shall I get your clothes and try to repair them?” she asked.
Gresh and the dragon exchanged glances.
“That would be helpful, yes,” Tobas called.
“We can use Lirrim’s Rectification on them if she can’t fix them,” Gresh murmured.
“Just get on with it,” the dragon rumbled in reply.
Gresh hurried on across the meadow. About halfway he glanced back over his shoulder, and up, at the dragon. The size of the beast was astonishing. Equally astonishing was the fact that many of the spriggans still hadn’t fled. Oh, they were hurrying to stay out of the dragon’s path and giving it a respectful berth, but they were not all abandoning the area completely, as Gresh had hoped they would. The annoying little creatures were braver—or stupider—than he had expected.
Then he reached the rocks and waited for Karanissa to join him.
“Gresh,” she said, as she stepped up beside him. “I don’t really see how Tobas being a dragon is going to help us. Yes, he’s scared away some of the spriggans, but he can’t very well scare them out of the cave, and that’s where the mirror is. If anything, more of them will hide in there to get away from the dragon. They’ll still weigh the mirror down so that I can’t levitate it.”
Gresh did not answer her immediately. He had hoped the mere presence of a dragon would send every spriggan in the vicinity fleeing over the horizon, but now that that had failed to happen she had a point.
Gresh was not about to let that stop him, though. He had a dragon helping him, and in the present situation that was almost certainly an improvement over a wizard. “Tobas,” he called, “can you breathe a little fire into that cave there? Not too much—I don’t think we want to melt the mirror at this point, not until we’ve had a look at it.”
“I don’t know if I can melt it,” Tobas said, as he lowered his head until his scaled cheek was just inches from Gresh’s own. He had to crane his eight-foot neck awkwardly to bring his eyes down that far. “Dragonfire isn’t really as hot as you might think.” He looked at the rocks, then asked, “What cave?”
“Here,” Gresh said, pointing. “It’s too small for a human—that’s why I can’t just climb in and get the mirror. Spriggans pop in and out easily, but we can’t.”
“I can barely...” Tobas began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he cocked one eye toward the opening. “Oh, I see it.” He lifted his head a little. “Stand back.”
Gresh and Karanissa quickly stepped back.
The dragon spat a gout of flame into the crack in the rocks. Spriggans screamed wildly from the cave. Gresh shied away from the heat, but tried to see into the opening before the glow faded.
Bits of dried grass and other debris had caught fire. He bent down to the opening and shaded his eyes, peering in.
The mirror still lay unharmed on the cave floor, and dozens of spriggans were still scattered about, many of them staring back at him. A few were sooty, but none appeared to have been harmed by the flames.
Well, after all, they were reportedly invulnerable; why would dragonfire hurt them?
“It didn’t work,” Gresh reported.
“Well, here,” Tobas said. “If the problem is that you can’t get into that little cave, I can fix that!” He stalked forward again, but this time kept his head up and raised a foreclaw, and curled it into a fist the size of a boulder. Then he flexed it and formed the claws into a flat plane.
“Oh, I don’t...” Gresh began, as he backed away.
Tobas thrust forward, driving his claw into the crack in the stone as if it were a wedge.
The entire mountainside seemed to shake with the impact; rocks shattered and tumbled. Then the dragon curled his talons, dug them into the stone, and heaved.
The entire front of the cave tore out; Gresh was knocked off his feet by flying rocks and clumps of earth and blinded by clouds of dust. He fell back coughing on the grass of the meadow.
Spriggans were squealing and screaming, of course, and rocks were clattering against one another, as Gresh sat up and tried to wipe his eyes. His hands were as dusty as his face, so it took a moment before he could see again.
When he could he found himself face-to-face with a satisfied dragon. Tobas smiled down at him, baring ten-inch fangs and that forked tongue longer than a man’s arm.
“There,” he said. “The cave is open. I still can’t fit in, but now you can.”
Gresh looked and saw that the transformed wizard was right. He had ripped out several slabs of rock, creating an opening perhaps five feet high and eight feet wide, revealing the interior of the cave. A score or so of spriggans were still perched here and there in the cave, blinking out at the sunlit meadow in surprise.
Gresh got slowly and carefully back to his feet, brushing himself off as best he could, then turned to give the fallen Karanissa a hand up.
“Tobas, are you all right?” Alorria called from the distant carpet.
“I’m fine,” Tobas bellowed back. “Just helping Gresh here.”
“Is the mirror still in there?” Karanissa asked Gresh.
“It must be,” he replied. He stepped forward, staring through the new entrance into the cave. “It ought to be right...”
And that was as far as he got before the cave roof fell in.
Chapter Eighteen
“Oh,” the dragon that had once been an ordinary wizard named Tobas of Telven said. “Perhaps I misjudged.”
“Perhaps you did,” Gresh agreed, looking at the rubble and silently thanking whatever gods might be listening that he had not yet stepped into the cave when the roof collapsed. The dust was clearing, and he could see now that most of the cave was still intact; a section of roof perhaps ten feet wide had fallen in, but that left a good twenty feet of cave on either side.
He tried to judge exactly where he had seen the mirror in there. With the whole area so utterly transformed, it was not an easy calculation to make, but he estimated that the mirror should be just under the left edge of the wreckage.
“It’s there,” Karanissa said from beside him, pointing to roughly the same spot he had been estimating.
“No touch mirror!” shrieked a spriggan from inside the remaining cave.
“Shut up!” the dragon bellowed in reply, spraying sparks.
“No no no no no!” the spriggan insisted, jumping up and down.
The dragon did not argue further, but instead, moving with amazing speed for so large a beast, reached in with one huge talon and flicked the spriggan far back into the depths of the cave. Then he withdrew the claw and turned to Gresh. “Get the mirror, and let’s get out of here.”
“Right,” Gresh said, hurrying into the cave.
The sun was getting low in the west, behind the mountaintop, so even with a big piece of the wall and ceiling removed, the interior of the cave was shadowy and somewhat dim. Gresh knelt by the edge of the pile of debris, looking for the mirror.