The Spriggan Mirror

Chapter Ten

Gresh stared at the tapestry in astonishment. He had never seen anything quite like it; the realism, the attention to detail, was amazing. Neither stitch nor brush-stroke was visible at first glance—if not for the slight billowing as it moved in the breeze created by the opening drapes, and the neatly sewn silk binding at the hem, he might almost have taken it for a painting, or even a window.

The image on the tapestry was also unlike anything he had seen before. It was a single scene, a picture of a castle—but it was a castle out of a nightmare, a weird structure of black and gray stone standing on a rocky crag, framed against a red-and-purple sky, approachable only by a narrow rope bridge across an abyss. Faces and figures of demons were carved into the structure at every opportunity; the battlements were lined with gargoyles, and monstrous stone visages peered around corners, from niches, and from the top of every window. A dozen towers and turrets jutted up at odd angles, some topped with rings of black iron spikes, others with conical roofs carved to resemble folded bat-wings. Even the one visible door was surrounded by a portico carved to resemble a great fanged mouth.

“Don’t touch it,” Karanissa warned.

“I won’t,” Gresh assured her, as he realized what he was looking at. “That’s a Transporting Tapestry, isn’t it? One that goes out of the World completely?”

“Yes. And it leads to our real home, more or less.”

“The castle? You live in that?”

“Most of the time—at least, since Tabaea’s death. Before that we spent most of our time in Dwomor Keep, where Tobas was the court wizard for Alorria’s father.”

Gresh remembered the story Karanissa had told him when she first came to his shop—that she had spent four hundred years trapped in a wizard’s castle, and Tobas had rescued her. That was presumably the castle he had saved her from. And she had later said that the Guild had ruined the tapestry that had been the only exit from the castle.

“How do you get out of it?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re planning to sleep there tonight...”

“We have another Transporting Tapestry in the castle,” Karanissa explained. “When the Guild ruined our old one while they were trying to stop Tabaea, they replaced it with another that comes out near here. That’s why we bought this house and relocated to Ethshar of the Sands—it’s where we can get out of the castle.” She sighed. “At first I thought I’d like that—I never really felt very welcome in Dwomor Keep, after all, since it’s Alorria’s home.”

Gresh started to ask a question about the relationship between the two women, then caught himself. He did not want to pry into their personal lives uninvited. “It hasn’t worked out?” he asked instead.

“We don’t really belong here,” she said. “Tobas is from a little village in the Pirate Towns, Alorria is a princess from the Small Kingdoms, I’m from the distant past—none of us really fits in a city like this. When I was here as a girl it wasn’t a city at all; it was General Torran’s staging area for the western campaign—they were still dredging the ship channel and drawing up plans for the city wall, and Grandgate was one tower called Grand Castle because there wasn’t a wall yet to put a gate in. There wasn’t any palace or city, just tents and wooden sheds.”

Gresh glanced out the window at the street and tried to imagine that; he failed.

“Now there are more people in the Grandgate district alone than in all of Dwomor, so Alorria is as lost here as I am,” Karanissa continued. “The Guild brought Tobas here because he’d been doing research in countercharms, trying to fix some of the things that had gone wrong back in the mountains, so someone thought he was some sort of expert and called him in to help against Tabaea’s magic Black Dagger, and he didn’t argue—he thought it would be fun, and that he might know something useful. He does have the formulas for plenty of spells, including some that had been lost for centuries, but all the same, he’s not really that good a wizard—more than good enough for Dwomor, or anywhere in the Small Kingdoms or outlying lands, but here in the three Ethshars he’s only up to journeyman level, really. He doesn’t know anyone except Telurinon and a few other wizards...” She let her voice trail off, and sighed.

“He seems to have the Guild’s respect,” Gresh said.

“Yes, he does, and he earned it,” she agreed. “He was the one who finally stopped Telurinon’s stupid miscalculation from destroying the whole city. They showed their respect by ordering him to find and stop the spriggan mirror—typical of them. If you do one impossible thing your reward is to be asked to do another.”

“But he made the mirror in the first place?”

“Which is why we didn’t argue when they told him to stop it. He does feel responsible. So he’s been running around the city talking to magicians and conferring with Lady Sarai and so on, until finally someone suggested we talk to you, and here we are. But when this is all done, we’re going to have to hold a family conference and decide just where and how we want to live.” She looked at the tapestry. “We may have to give that castle up—or at least, spend much less time there.”

Gresh glanced at the image and shuddered; he could not think of giving up that horror as a real loss.

Then Karanissa shook herself. “That’s all for later, though. Tonight we’ll be sleeping in the castle, so that Tobas can collect some things he needs from the workshop there, and you can have this place to yourself. We’ll be back out first thing in the morning and off to Dwomor.”

Gresh started to nod, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the workshop where the mirror was first enchanted?”

Karanissa looked at him. “Yes. Why?”

“There might be evidence...”

“No.” Karanissa held up a hand. “We checked, very carefully.”

“You’re absolutely certain the mirror isn’t still in there somewhere?”

“Oh, yes. We saw it go through the tapestry to the mountains. Besides, we haven’t seen any new spriggans in the castle in years—there are still about half a dozen that never left, but we only see those same ones, never any others.”

“Hmm.” He was not absolutely convinced. He had seen people lose things in plain sight often enough to have no faith at all in the human ability to see what was actually in front of them, and after his twenty questions a few days before he had far more respect for how deceptive spriggans could be. But Karanissa was a witch and probably knew what she was talking about.

Even a spriggan would know a castle was not a cave—or could there be a cave somewhere in that stone mass the castle sat upon?

“Are there any ruins in that... that place?” he asked.

“What place?” Karanissa glanced from him to the tapestry. “The void? No, there are the two stones—the little one at this end of the bridge, and the big one holding the castle. That’s all. There’s nothing a ruin could stand on, nowhere it could be.”

Then at any rate, the mirror had not been in there when that particular spriggan emerged from it, and it wasn’t likely it had gotten there since.

“Thank you.” Gresh gave the tapestry a final look, then turned away and headed back down the stairs to rejoin the others. Karanissa came close behind.

Alorria looked up from playing with Alris’s fingers. “Showing off the castle, Kara?”

“Just explaining where we’re going tonight, Ali.”

Alorria made a face. “The baby and I may just wait out here,” she said. “I hate crossing that bridge.”

Tobas exchanged glances with Karanissa, and Gresh thought that the two of them were not entirely displeased by Alorria’s words. “I thought you didn’t want to be alone,” Tobas said.

“I won’t be—I’ll have Gresh to protect me.”

That prompted an awkward silence that was finally broken by Alorria saying, “I assume we can trust him well enough. He doesn’t want to antagonize the Guild, after all. He won’t let anything happen to us.”

“Of course I won’t,” Gresh said.

“And I can manage the baby by myself for one night, Tobas.”

“Of course you can,” Tobas agreed.

“It’s not as if we’re in any danger of being eaten by a dragon or attacked by Vondish assassins here in the city.”

“You aren’t in any danger from them back in Dwomor, either,” Karanissa said.

“Well, you never know,” Alorria said.

It was plain from Karanissa’s expression that she thought you did know, but she didn’t say anything further on the subject.

“You can always change your mind, Ali,” Tobas said. “We’ll leave the door unlocked.”

“I’ll be fine here with Gresh.”

“All right, then. Let us see about finding some supper, shall we? Kara? I’d rather not deal with a crowded inn, if we have any food here.”

“We have wine and cheese in the kitchen and half a salted ham, but there’s no bread.”

“I saw a baker just across the street,” Gresh offered. “I could buy a loaf.”

“And bill the Guild for it, I suppose,” Tobas said.

“Of course!”

“I’ll see what I can do, then,” Karanissa said, heading for one of the two doors at the back.

Half an hour later the four adults sat down around the little table in the kitchen, where Karanissa had set out a simple but satisfactory meal. Gresh had purchased a few sweet cakes, as well as a loaf of good bread; Karanissa had boiled generous slices of ham; and Tobas had found the butter, cheese, and wine. During supper’s preparation the conversation had been casual and fragmented, but now Gresh turned to Tobas and said, “Tell me how you came to enchant the mirror in the first place, in as much detail as you can. You never know what information might turn out to be useful, and I’d like to have the story now, just to be sure that I don’t need to look around inside that haunted castle of yours before we go on to Dwomor.”

Tobas tore off a chunk of bread and buttered it thoughtfully, then began his story. “I grew up in the village of Telven, near the eastern end of what you’d call the Pirate Towns, and I didn’t bother with an apprenticeship when I was twelve because I was my father’s only acknowledged child, and I expected to inherit his ship, Retribution. When a demonologist sank it and left me orphaned at the age of fifteen, I had to change my plans, but of course by then I was too old for any respectable apprenticeship.”

He took a bite of bread, then continued. “Fortunately for me, there was an old wizard named Roggit who lived in the marshes just outside of Telven. I used to think he was too senile to see that I was obviously too old, but now I’m fairly sure he took pity on me. Either way, he took me on despite my age. Unfortunately, he wasn’t much of a wizard, and he was even less of a teacher, and his health was terrible. I lived with him for a year and a half, or maybe it was closer to two years, and while he did get through all the essential initiations in that time, by the time he died peacefully in his sleep he had only taught me one useful spell—Thrindle’s Combustion.”

“Unfortunate,” Gresh said. “But presumably you inherited his business, as his apprentice at the time of his death—did his family contest that because of your age?”

“He didn’t have any family, any more than I did,” Tobas said. “But as for his business, such as it was, he had put an explosive seal on his book of spells, and I didn’t know any better than to open it. The whole house burned to the ground, book and all, and I was left with nothing.” He took another bite. “So I set out to seek my fortune—not that I had much choice, after losing two separate inheritances.”

He went on to describe making his way to Ethshar of the Spices, where he had discovered no one had any use for a wizard who hadn’t finished his apprenticeship and knew just one spell. In desperation he had signed up to slay a dragon in the Small Kingdoms, more or less accidentally, as much to stay out of the hands of slavers as because he thought it was a good idea. He told Gresh about his first visit to Dwomor, sparing no details, to Alorria’s dismay. She tried to defend her homeland, but Tobas refused to retract his negative comments. He explained about the terms on which the dragon-hunters had been hired and how they had been divided up into teams.

By the time he finished his account of wandering in the hills northeast of Dwomor Keep, finding Derithon’s fallen flying castle, salvaging the Transporting Tapestry, and stumbling through it to join Karanissa in her captivity, supper had been eaten, a bottle of wine had been drunk, the daylight had faded away, and the candles had been lit.

Tobas explained how he had begun working his way through Derithon’s massive collection of spells, trying as many of the easy ones as he could to gain enough practice that he might have a chance of surviving attempts to use higher-order wizardry to get Karanissa and himself out of the castle and back to the World. He described every detail he could remember of his failed attempt at Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.

Gresh listened closely and had him review several portions before permitting him to continue the story.

The spriggans had stolen the mirror just as he carried it through the revitalized Transporting Tapestry, back out in the World, and he had not seen it since. He had married Karanissa, and then more or less accidentally slain the dragon after all. In order to collect the promised reward he had been required to marry Alorria, as well—which, he was quick to note, was no hardship. He had never planned on having two wives, but he certainly didn’t mind.

He glanced from one woman to the other at that point, but no one else commented.

There were parts of the story that did not seem to make sense, Gresh thought—the account of removing the Transporting Tapestry from the fallen flying castle, for example. How and why had Tobas removed it without going through it?

And for that matter, why had the castle fallen in the first place? Presumably Varrin’s Greater Propulsion had failed, but why? A wizard of Derithon’s obvious accomplishments wouldn’t have been careless with something so important as the enchantment holding up his home. Was there some inherent flaw in the spell?

And there was the way Tobas had simply let the spriggans run off with the mirror without pursuing them, and how it had been years before spriggans started turning up in any numbers.

There was something Tobas wasn’t telling him. Gresh suspected that it was related to the wizard’s plans for disposing of the mirror.

“We should go,” Karanissa said, as Gresh asked a few more leading questions, hoping for some further hint. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, and you need to pack up things from your workshop.”

“A long day, but not a strenuous one,” Gresh pointed out. “You’ll just be sitting on a carpet all day.”

“That’s tiring enough for me,” Karanissa said.

“But you haven’t said a word yet about how you helped Lady Sarai defeat Empress Tabaea,” Gresh protested.

“That has nothing to do with the mirror or the spriggans,” Tobas said. “And it is getting late.” He rose.

Gresh glanced at Alorria, hoping that she would insist her husband brag about his part in defeating the mad magician-thief who had somehow temporarily overthrown the overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, but she was dozing off, and the baby in her arms was sound asleep. He sighed.

He would be traveling with these people for days, perhaps months. There would be time to worm the truth out of them.

“I suppose it is,” he conceded.

Karanissa rose and leaned over to touch Alorria’s shoulder. “Ali,” she said. “Time for bed.”

“Uh?” Alorria started; Alris stirred but did not wake. Then Alorria nodded. “Oh, yes. Bed. Yes.” She rose, as well.

“I’ll clean up,” Gresh said, but as he looked around he realized that while he and Tobas had been talking, Karanissa had already cleared away most of the dishes and other evidence of their supper.

“We’ll see you in the morning,” Karanissa said.

“Come on upstairs, Ali,” Tobas said. “We’ll get you and the baby tucked in.” The family headed for the stairs.

Gresh watched them go, while brushing the last crumbs from the table and taking the empty wineglasses to the scullery tub.

Something in the mountains of the Small Kingdoms had downed a flying castle, centuries ago. Something in that same area had apparently interfered with two Transporting Tapestries. Tobas had apparently thought the spriggans would not be a problem there, even though he had considered them a hazard in his otherworldly castle. Something associated with Tobas had defeated an incredibly powerful rogue magician, allegedly gutting the interior of the overlord’s palace in the process and leaving nothing of Tabaea but her left foot, when the Guild’s ordinary efforts had failed. And if Karanissa was to be believed, the Guild’s failed attempts had endangered the entire city. And a Transporting Tapestry had been permanently ruined somewhere in the process.

On top of all that, Tobas was reputed to be an expert on countercharms—though Karanissa denied that he deserved that reputation.

Gresh frowned.

He could think of one explanation for everything, though it might not be the right one. It fit with a few other rumors that he had heard about Tabaea’s demise, as well. All of this could be explained if Tobas had stumbled upon an all-powerful countercharm of some sort, presumably one created long ago, perhaps as a weapon in the Great War. Such a charm might have brought down the flying castle, rendered the tapestries and the mirror temporarily inert, eventually destroyed one tapestry permanently, and erased both Tabaea’s magic and whatever magic the Guild had used unsuccessfully against her.

That would also account for the secrecy; the Wizards’ Guild would not want it widely known that so powerful a defense against their magic existed. It would account for why they were sending Tobas to deal with the mirror, rather than a more experienced wizard. He probably had the charm, if it existed, in his possession and was not willing, or perhaps not able, to loan it to anyone else.

Gresh had not noticed any jewels or amulets or other obvious magical devices on Tobas anywhere; he carried a knife and pouch on his belt, like most people, but wore no rings or brooches or pendants, so far as Gresh could see.

The charm might not be anything so obvious, of course; it could be a rune burned into Tobas’s flesh, or a pebble in his pocket, or... well, almost anything. If it existed at all.

Presumably, Tobas intended to use it on the mirror and make sure the effect was permanent this time. That would be a very satisfactory conclusion to the whole business.

A general-purpose countercharm like that would be very useful and very valuable—but Gresh told himself not to get greedy or do anything stupid; it wasn’t his, it almost certainly wasn’t for sale, and he was getting paid quite enough for the mirror as it was. Trying to obtain or duplicate this theoretical charm would almost certainly annoy the Wizards’ Guild, and that could ruin his business and get him killed.

No, he would leave it alone. He would find the mirror, collect his reward, and go on to live a very, very long and prosperous life without it.

It really was late now, and he was tired. Perhaps in the morning he would think of another explanation for the holes in Tobas’s story and realize that such a countercharm probably didn’t exist at all. He picked up one candle, blew out the other two, and headed for the stair.

He did make one small detour, though, peering through the other door off the little front parlor. As he had expected, it led to a wizard’s workshop, but a very small and poorly stocked one; the crude workbench was dusty and bare, the four shelves above it half-empty. If the parlor, kitchen, and attic had not already made it obvious, this workshop demonstrated that the little house really wasn’t much of a home to Tobas and his family—at least, not yet.

He closed the door carefully and climbed the steps.

Alorria and Alris were sound asleep on the nearest bed; Tobas and Karanissa were nowhere to be seen, but the tapestry shimmered eerily in the candlelight. Cautiously, Gresh set down the candle and closed the drapes over it. He did not want to wake up in the middle of the night and see that ghastly image, or worse, stumble into it while looking for a chamber pot or something.

He then made his way to the farthest bed, so as to have as much space as possible between Alorria and himself. There he pulled off his boots, peeled off his socks, blew out the candle, and then fell back onto the down-filled mattress.

His last waking thought was the realization that he could tell by the faint scent lingering on the pillow that this was Karanissa’s bed.