“That’s surely better than nothing,” Gresh said. “Perhaps we can find a way to keep on casting it, over and over?” He looked up, and even on a dragon’s face the dubious expression Tobas wore was easy to recognize.
“Well, let’s see what it does,” Gresh said, stubbornly. “We might as well.”
“I admit I don’t see what harm that one can do,” Tobas said. “Unless it breaks the mirror into four pieces again.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Gresh said, with a tug at his beard. “It might, mightn’t it?”
“We could wait until it’s more than half an hour since the mirror was repaired,” Karanissa suggested.
Gresh looked out across the meadow, past Tobas in the draconic form he did not want to keep, at Alorria, who was sitting on the carpet, holding Alris in one arm and tugging at Tobas’s ruined clothes with the other. He looked at the hordes of spriggans milling about, some of them clearly looking for ways to get at the mirror.
“I don’t think we should wait,” he said. “I have the Restorative, or I could even just use the Spell of Reversal again.” He pulled the final unopened jar from his box, wiggled the cork free, then sprinkled a little purple powder over the mirror, and said, “Esku!”
The flash was bluish this time, but after it had faded away the mirror lay on the cave floor just as before and still in one piece. Relieved that it was intact and disappointed that it was not doing anything obvious to reduce the spriggan population, Gresh leaned over and looked into it. He saw only his own reflection looking back at him.
“Nothing,” he said.
Karanissa suddenly reached out and grabbed a spriggan before it had time to react. She held it with one hand around its legs, the other pinning one arm to its body.
The other arm waved wildly about as it squealed, “No no! No hurt! No hurt!”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Karanissa told it. “I’m going to see if I can send you back where you belong.” She tossed the creature onto the mirror.
It landed on the glass with a soggy thump, got up, brushed itself off, and scampered away unhurt, giggling hysterically.
“I’d say it isn’t exactly sucking them back in,” Gresh remarked.
Karanissa leaned over and peered down into the mirror, holding her long hair back out of the way with one hand. “It would seem not,” she agreed.
“So that didn’t work, and we have no other spells to try, so we’re back to trying to figure out some way to get it out of here and across the valley to the no-wizardry zone,” Gresh said.
“Maybe,” Karanissa said, still staring into the mirror. “Or maybe not.”
Gresh looked at her. “Maybe not?” He looked down at the mirror. “Why maybe not?”
“Well, look at it,” the witch said. “Maybe the spriggan didn’t get sucked in, but have you seen anything come out of it since you cast that spell?”
Gresh blinked. He stared at the mirror. No spriggans were climbing out of it—but it had only been a couple of minutes. He felt a twinge of hope, but quickly suppressed it.
“Not yet,” he said. “But that may not mean anything.”
“It feels different,” Karanissa said. “It’s still magical, still enchanted, it hasn’t gotten any weaker or stronger, but it feels different.”
“Can you tell how?”
Karanissa turned up an empty palm. “No,” she said.
“Tobas?” a distant voice called.
“Ali?” The dragon had been watching the events in the cave with interest, but now he lifted his scaly head and turned to look at Alorria. Gresh, too, glanced in her direction.
“What’s going on?” Alorria asked, the words barely intelligible over the intervening distance. “How long are these spriggans going to keep us here? The sun’s going down. Are we going to be stuck here all night?”
The dragon’s head swung back to the cave for a moment. “Excuse me,” Tobas said, “but I’ve been neglecting Ali.” He started to turn away—this time not just by bending his neck, but by turning his entire body.
“Wait a moment,” Gresh called. “If you leave, we’ll be overrun by spriggans, and they’ll take the mirror.”
“If you get too close to the carpet you may panic them into doing something unfortunate,” Karanissa said. “Or you may do something unfortunate, without meaning to.”
The dragon hesitated, then said, “I’ll just turn around and talk to Ali from a safe distance.”
Karanissa and Gresh exchanged glances. “That should work,” Gresh acknowledged.
“Good.” With that, and with much scraping of scale on rock and rustling of gigantic wings, the dragon turned around, sending spriggans running in various directions squeaking madly, until at last the very tip of his tail slithered across the rocks he had ripped out of the mountainside and curled into the mouth of the cave.
“She’s right that the sun’s setting,” Karanissa said, once the dragon had completed his rotation.
Gresh’s reply was drowned out by the dragon roaring across the meadow to Alorria, reassuring her that everything was fine, and that the other two were just experimenting with the mirror to see if they could remove the enchantment.
Alorria called back, but Gresh and Karanissa could not make out her words. After a moment, by mutual consent, they decided to ignore the conversation between the princess and the dragon and turn their attention back to the mirror. Ordinarily making themselves heard over the dragon’s bellowing might have been difficult, but Karanissa’s witchcraft took care of that.
“There still haven’t been any more spriggans,” Karanissa said. “It really does feel different. Before it felt as if it were directed away, somehow, and now it seems directed here.”
“Well, the Spell of Reversal...” Gresh began; then he stopped. “Wait,” he said. “It was directed away before?”
“Yes,” Karanissa said. “Definitely.”
“Away where?”
Karanissa hesitated, then turned up a palm. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not anywhere in the World.”
“So it was pulling the spriggans from another world into ours?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you said now it’s aimed here.”
“Yes.”
“But it didn’t suck that spriggan into another world. And we looked into it, and it didn’t suck us in.”
“I know. I never said I understood it. I’m a witch, not a wizard.”
“Oh, I doubt a wizard would do any better,” Gresh assured her. “They rarely really know what they’re doing—it’s all rote formulas and instinct. They don’t actually understand their magic.”
“I know most of them don’t; Tobas certainly doesn’t. Some of them seem to do a little better. I thought Derithon had a better grasp of what he was doing than most, but I was very young then, and that might have been my own naivete.”
“Derithon was your first husband, four centuries ago?”
“Well, we weren’t formally married. I was his mistress. Or technically, a lieutenant assigned special duties under his command.”
Gresh blinked. “Lieutenant?”
“In the military of Old Ethshar. The Great War was in progress, after all. I was serving in reconnaissance, using my witchcraft to locate enemy magicians, when we met.”
“Of course.”
Somehow, despite knowing she was four hundred years old, he had never connected her with the Great War that had ended more than two hundred years ago—but of course she had grown up during the War, and like all magicians of the time would have been conscripted into the military.
The World had been so utterly different then—no wonder Karanissa had said she felt out of place now!
Gresh wondered whether he, too, would feel out of place four hundred years from now, if he completed the job he had come here to do and received the payment he had been promised. That was an odd thought. Was that why so few openly ancient people were around? After all, wizards had been using eternal youth spells for centuries, and even if only a few in each generation ever managed to work them, undying wizards ought to be accumulating, but Gresh hadn’t met more than a handful, at most. Did they withdraw from human society because it was no longer familiar, because it was too different from what they had known when young?