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.
The Spriggan Mirror
A Legend of Ethshar
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.
“It’s over there a little farther,” Karanissa said. She had followed him in and was pointing at a small mound of rubble.
“If the ceiling fell on it, it’s probably smashed,” Gresh said. “That would be an end to the matter right there!”
“It isn’t smashed,” Karanissa said. “I can sense it.”
“I knew it couldn’t be that easy,” Gresh grumbled. He pushed aside a few rocks where Karanissa had pointed, and sure enough, there was the mirror, dusty but intact.
“No no no no no!” shrieked a spriggan, leaping on his hand and startling him so badly he fell backward onto the hard-packed dirt of the cave floor.
“Get away!” Karanissa shouted, diving toward the spriggan. It sprang aside, and she snatched up the mirror.
Half a dozen other spriggans seemed to appear from nowhere, jumping and squeaking and trying to grab the mirror away from the witch. She ignored them as she straightened up. Then she looked down at them, lifted the mirror high above her head, and shouted, “Get back, or I’ll smash it on the rocks here and now!”
The spriggans immediately stopped leaping at her skirts and backed away, whimpering. For a moment no one moved or spoke-then the silence was broken by the squealing of several voices out on the meadow, squealing that continued and grew in volume.
Gresh sat up, brushing himself off, and stared up at the mirror gleaming in the witch’s hand. He paid no attention to the shrieking and babbling outside the cave. He could not see how the spriggans could stop them now, no matter how upset they were. The dragon should be able to shoo them away well enough. “We have it,” he said.
“I have it,” Karanissa said. “Now what do we do with it?”
“We get it out of here,” Gresh told her. He got to his feet and turned toward the opening.
Then he stopped dead, as Tobas said loudly, “Gresh? We may have a problem here.” He sounded worried.
Gresh had not known a dragon could sound worried, but Tobas unquestionably did-and looking out through the hole in the hillside, Gresh could understand why.
Tobas’s right wing blocked much of his view, but by leaning a bit Gresh could see out, and he did not like what he saw. Save for the area immediately around the dragon, the meadow was completely covered in spriggans-and that included the flying carpet. Spriggans were climbing on Alorria’s lap, tugging at her hair, and poking at Alris, who was, quite understandably, crying.
Alorria had been screaming for some time, Gresh realized, but her high-pitched voice had been lost in the noise the spriggans made.
“I can’t chase them away,” Tobas said. “I might hurt Ali or the baby. Or the carpet. There are so many of them!”
“So I see,” Gresh said.
Like Gresh, Karanissa had turned to see what was happening outside the cave, but she had continued to hold the mirror up above her head, well away from any spriggans-except now Gresh saw movement from the corner of his eye and turned to see a spriggan climbing out of the mirror onto Karanissa’s wrist.
“Augh!” she shrieked. “It tickles!”
The spriggan itself looked confused and clambered awkwardly down her arm to her shoulder, then slid down her dress to the ground, where it said, “What happening?”
Several other spriggans started to reply, but Gresh shouted, “Get away from her!!”
The newborn spriggan squealed and scampered away, but the other spriggans nearby-there were at least a dozen in the cave with the two humans-stood their ground.
Alorria, out there on the spriggan-swarmed carpet, was still screaming, and a glance upward showed Gresh that Tobas was becoming seriously agitated.
Gresh did not want to be around a panicking dragon.
“Calm down, everyone!” he shouted. “Just calm down a moment!”
“And then what?” Tobas demanded.
“You tell them what I say, so they can all hear,” Gresh said.
“Tell them what?”
“First off, tell them we have their precious mirror, and if they don’t get off Alorria right now, we’ll smash it on the rocks!”
“Yes! You hear that, spriggans?” The dragon’s roar seemed to shake the mountainside, and a few loose stones tumbled from the broken edges of the cave roof. “Get off my wife and daughter, or we’ll smash the mirror! Now!”
The spriggans hurried to get off Alorria and Alris-but they did not, Gresh noticed, get off the carpet.
“Give back mirror!” a spriggan shrieked from somewhere in the mob.
“Why is it so important to them?” Karanissa asked.
“I don’t know,” Gresh admitted.
“What should I do with it?”
Gresh considered that for a moment before replying.
They did not know whether they actually could smash the mirror; the only way to find out would be to try. The spriggans seemed to utterly dread that possibility; might it be that the mirror’s destruction would mean they, too, would perish? More than one had said they might die if the mirror was destroyed; did they even know what would happen, any more than the humans did?
He had come here to see that the mirror was destroyed; why not try to do it? Yes, wizardry could have unforeseen effects, but really, how likely was it that smashing it would be any worse than leaving it alone?