Gresh looked around and realized that all the existing spriggans had also been multiplied by four. Obviously, the link between the mirror and the spriggans was stronger than he had realized, and the breaking of the mirror had to be undone immediately.
That called for magic.
“Oh, gods and demons!” he muttered, as he snatched the pack from his shoulder and hauled out the box of powders. As he did he was imagining all those poor innocent people throughout the World who had been being harassed by spriggans, and who suddenly found each of the little monsters transformed into a quartet. Something had to be done now.
Well, that was why he had brought all these countercharms. He popped open a jar of sparkling orange powder and strode over to the broken mirror, kicking aside four spriggans that happened to be in the way, then unceremoniously dumped a pinch of the powder over the four shards and barked, “Esku!”
The powder vanished in a golden flash, and the four pieces snapped together as if drawn by magnets, then healed back into a single mirror, which Gresh quickly snatched up before a spriggan could get it. A quick glance out at the meadow showed that the immense mass of spriggans had been reduced by three-fourths, restored to its original still-alarming size. The cave’s population was similarly reduced. Even the four that had emerged from the broken mirror appeared to have merged into one.
“What spell was that?” Karanissa asked, as Gresh struggled to get the cork safely back into the mouth of the jar without dropping the mirror.
“Javan’s Restorative,” Gresh told her.
“Don’t waste that!” Tobas said, peering in from above. “We need that to turn me back.”
“There’s plenty left,” Gresh assured him. “I’m not going to waste it. Besides, wouldn’t Lirrim’s Rectification or the Spell of Reversal work?”
“I don’t know,” Tobas rumbled. “The Rectification turns things into what they ought to be, not necessarily what they were, and for all I know the spell might decide I should be a dragon. The Spell of Reversal only reverses things so far—if I stay a dragon more than half an hour or so, it won’t do the job.”
“It hasn’t been half an hour yet,” Gresh pointed out. Despite all that had happened since Tobas was transformed, it hadn’t really been very long at all. “I doubt it’s been a quarter of one.”
A spriggan—one spriggan—began to climb out of the mirror and found Gresh’s palm in the way. Gresh quickly turned the disk over and lowered his hand so that the creature could escape.
“So we have the mirror,” he said. “And smashing it isn’t a good idea—if we’d broken it into a hundred pieces we’d probably all have smothered to death.” He glanced up at the dragon. “Well, all but Tobas, anyway.”
“No smash,” a spriggan said timidly. “Please?”
Gresh looked down at the little creature, which blinked up at him from a niche in the cave wall. “No smash,” he agreed.
For a moment he wondered why the spriggan didn’t want the mirror broken. After all, it only seemed to produce more spriggans. Perhaps the little creature didn’t like crowds, or recognized that the World didn’t have room for all those spriggans?
Though that made the creatures’ unwillingness to give up the mirror that much more mysterious. If they didn’t want more spriggans, why were they so determined to protect the mirror?
“Then what do we do with it?” Karanissa asked, interrupting his thoughts.
“Well, it seems to me that our first goal here is to prevent it from making any more spriggans,” Gresh said. “Isn’t it? The Guild’s worried that the whole World might fill up with spriggans, so if we can stop the mirror from making more, that’s a good start. Dealing with the spriggans we already have is a separate issue, as is destroying it permanently. The first thing we want is to stop it from producing more.”
“How do you propose to do that, if we can’t just smash it?” Karanissa asked.
“We could take it to the dead area...” Tobas began, but the resulting squeals and screams from the spriggans deterred even a dragon from finishing the sentence.
“Give back mirror,” a spriggan called from atop a nearby rock. “You give back, spriggans take it and go away, and give back flying rug and lady and baby. No give mirror, no lady, no baby, no rug.”
“And we’d be back where we started,” Gresh said. “No, I don’t think we’ll do that.”
“I don’t know, Gresh,” Karanissa said. “What about Ali and the baby?”
“They aren’t trying to hurt them,” Gresh said, though not as confidently as he would have liked.
“If we tried to take the mirror to the no-wizardry area they probably would.”
“True enough,” Gresh admitted. “If we can’t take the mirror to the dead zone...” He looked up at Tobas. “You made that no-spell place, didn’t you?”
“The one over there?” Tobas said, waving his head toward the opposite slope. “No. That’s been there for centuries. A wizard named Seth Thorun’s son did it.”
“What about the one in Ethshar of the Sands?”
“I made that, yes.”
“Could you do it again, here?”
Several spriggans squeaked in protest at this suggestion. The dragon ignored them, as he snorted smoke and said, “Not in this shape. Not to mention that it’s forbidden—the Guild outlawed the spell long ago. They gave me a special dispensation for what I did before, but I don’t have any dispensation to do it again. On top of that, I didn’t bring the ingredients, since it is forbidden, and I never expected to have a use for it.”
“Well, what ingredients do you need?”
“Oh, no—I’m not telling you that. It’s forbidden. Using it carries the death penalty. Besides, I can’t do it as a dragon, and if you turned me back now, how long do you think it would be before all these spriggans swarmed over us and took the mirror away from us? Not to mention that they’d interrupt the spell—it takes several minutes.”
“Swarm?..” Gresh looked out and realized that Tobas was right. The dragon had interposed himself between the cave and the horde filling the meadow. A few spriggans were indeed in the cave, but the main body was out there, apparently kept away only by Tobas’s presence.
So Tobas would have to remain a dragon for now, and that meant they had no wizardry available except for the powders and potions in Gresh’s box.
Well, he had chosen those spells for exactly this purpose. None of these were intended to destroy the mirror outright, but he hoped one of them might break the enchantment on it and turn it into a harmless disk of silvered glass.
He would have preferred to try them under more controlled circumstances, but that didn’t appear to be an option. He had to do something to end this stand-off without giving the mirror back to the spriggans, and he had brought all this prepared magic, with the Guild’s blessing. He might as well see whether any of it would do the job.
“Karanissa, could you keep the spriggans away for a moment?” he asked, as he seated himself cross-legged on the cave floor. He set the mirror on his lap, then pulled over the box of spells.
He wanted to be as cautious as possible, starting out with the spells least likely to have unforeseen effects. That made his first choice fairly simple. Javan’s Geas could be used to command anyone not to do something, and it lasted indefinitely—but no one ever used it on inanimate objects, for obvious reasons. The mirror might be something more than a mere inanimate object, though, so Gresh pulled out the appropriate jar and sprinkled a pinch of dark red powder on the mirror.