The Spriggan Mirror

Chapter Seventeen

“All right, we’ll go back to our flying carpet,” Gresh announced. “Just make way, and we’ll go.”

The spriggans looked at one another and squeaked a few questions back and forth, but then a path gradually opened. Gresh took Karanissa’s hand and led her through the gap and across the meadow, toward the carpet.

Her fingers were warm and delicate; he was careful not to squeeze them.

They were soon clear of the main mass of spriggans. Even so, others were scattered along their route, forming loose lines along either side. Gresh was aware of dozens of bulging little eyes watching him as he released the witch’s hand, unslung his pack, and loosened the drawstring.

Karanissa said nothing. She did not need to ask any questions about his intentions; he was sure she was still sensing his thoughts, even if he was no longer trying to put them into words.

“What happened?” Tobas called, getting to his feet as they neared the carpet. “Did you get the mirror?”

“No,” Gresh said, pulling the box of prepared powders from his pack. “The spriggans don’t want it moved, and in case you haven’t noticed, there are hundreds of them guarding it.”

“Oh. Then what do... what are you doing?”

Gresh had slung his pack back on his shoulder and opened the box and was pulling out a jar of sparkling blue powder. “You killed a dragon once, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with anything? I doubt the spriggans are going to be impressed by my adventures.”

Gresh pulled the cork from the jar. “You did it, right? All by yourself? There isn’t a magic sword or anything involved?”

“Yes, I did it, with a spell, but I still don’t... oh, no. What’s that powder?”

“The Spell of the Revealed Power,” Gresh said, spilling powder into the palm of one hand. “I think you should step away from the carpet.” He managed to push the cork back in place without spilling the powder from his hand.

Tobas did more than step away; he turned and ran, eastward across the meadow toward the drop-off into the trees. Spriggans scattered from his path, squealing in fright.

With a muttered curse, Gresh closed his fist around the precious powder and called, “Come back here!” He dropped the jar back into the box, hastily closed it up, and thrust it back into his pack, all while continuing toward the fleeing wizard.

Tobas stopped and turned. “Gresh, I really don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Do you have a better one? A dragon can chase away the spriggans, and then Karanissa and I can get the mirror out of the cave, and we can get this over with.”

A few spriggans yelped and shrieked, as if in confirmation, and Gresh wished he had been a little more circumspect. He had just removed any doubt the spriggans might have had about his intentions.

That made it all the more urgent to get this done quickly. They really didn’t have time for a long argument, or a careful discussion of every option. There might already be spriggans hauling that mirror out of the cave, and if they did get it away, it would probably not be so easy to find next time. The spriggans would know he wanted to take it from them and wouldn’t answer his questions. They already had the idea of hiding it in a hole humans wouldn’t fit in; the next one might be completely inaccessible. He had to act immediately.

“But just to start, I don’t want to be a dragon,” Tobas said. “Isn’t there something else you can transform? One of your tools? A knife? Or what would it do to you? Haven’t you ever defeated anything powerful?”

“I have no idea what it would do to me,” Gresh admitted, ambling casually across the carpet, past Alorria and toward Tobas. He could understand why someone would be reluctant to be transformed, but he saw no other option. Really, they were fabulously lucky to have someone or something here that could be transformed into something as powerful as a dragon! They needed to take advantage of that good fortune. “That’s exactly why I won’t be trying it on myself. But you defeated a dragon! That’s perfect, Tobas, and I have Javan’s Restorative right here—you know that’s the standard counterspell, don’t you? There’s nothing to worry about. If anything goes wrong, I can change you back in a few seconds!”

“That’s not what worries me—well, yes, it is, but it’s not all that worries me...”

Gresh sighed. They didn’t have time for this. “Tobas, the Guild sent us here to get that mirror. They won’t like it if they find out you refused to help me. Think what they’re paying us! A Transporting Tapestry of your home in Dwomor—isn’t that worth spending a little time under a harmless enchantment?”

“I suppose it is,” Tobas admitted. “But it’s the ‘harmless’ part that worries me. All those spells like the Spell of the Revealed Power where some mysterious magical mechanism we don’t understand decides what the spell will actually do are tricky, untrustworthy things—you can’t be sure just what they’re going to do until you use them.”

“Well, this one should change you into a dragon, shouldn’t it? If we don’t get a dragon, or if there’s something else terribly wrong, I’ll reverse the spell,” Gresh said. “I’ve got the Restorative, and the Spell of Reversal, and Lirrim’s Rectification—I can undo just about anything.”

“I don’t know, Gresh,” Tobas said warily, as the merchant approached. “There’s something we didn’t tell you.”

“‘We’?” Gresh glanced back at the two women on the carpet, Karanissa standing and Alorria seated, both of them watching the two men.

“Yes—they know about it, but I guess Karanissa didn’t think of it. I don’t think that spell will...”

He was interrupted in mid-sentence by a faceful of powder, as Gresh got close enough to fling the glittering blue dust.

There was no point in arguing endlessly; this was their best chance, and Gresh intended to take it.

“Esku!” Gresh shouted the trigger word for the spell as the powder settled on Tobas’s face and shoulders, and a golden glow spread swiftly over the wizard’s entire body. Tobas began to enlarge rapidly, as if he were somehow being inflated, and to elongate. He bent forward at the waist.

Spriggans scattered, screaming like a flock of maddened birds.

“Gresh, you fool!” Tobas bellowed, in a voice that grew louder as he spoke. “The dragon wasn’t the most powerful thing I’ve defeated! I stopped the Seething Death in Ethshar of the Sands!”

The glow brightened, making it impossible to see exactly what was happening to Tobas; Gresh heard fabric tear. The thing that had been the young wizard was on all fours now and still expanding; a tail had thrust out behind it, and wings were unfurling from its back. Gresh had to retreat rapidly to avoid being crushed. Whatever Tobas was becoming was very large, and from the bits Gresh could glimpse through the shimmering glow, bluish-green in color.

Alorria screamed, wordlessly at first, her voice mingling with the shrieks of the spriggans. Finally she cried, “What did you do to my husband?!”

Then the glow abruptly vanished, and Gresh found himself face-to-face with an angry dragon—a very large angry dragon, a good sixty feet from snout to tail-tip, and with a wingspan almost twice that, standing over the torn and shredded remnants of Tobas’s clothes.

Gresh had seen dragons at fairly close quarters before, but never unchained, uncaged, and this close, and so extremely large. He stepped back.

“Gresh!” the monster bellowed, spewing a cloud of sparks and black smoke.

“You can talk!” Gresh said, startled, brushing a spark from his sleeve. He had expected Tobas to lose his voice.

“Of course I can... Oh.” The dragon blinked his immense red eyes, and his voice dropped from a roar like a thunderstorm to a deep rumble. “So I can.”

“Tobas!” Alorria shrieked, clutching the baby to her breast. Alris promptly began to cry hysterically, adding to the cacophony. Dozens of spriggans were still squealing and screaming.

“I’m fine, Ali,” the dragon said, raising his head to look over Gresh at the women on the carpet.

“Fine? You call that fine?”

“Yes, Ali, I do,” the dragon replied. “I’ve been turned into a dragon, but I’m still me. I can talk, I’m healthy and strong. I’d call that fine, given some of the alternatives.” Then he looked down at Gresh again. “You, though, have no idea how dangerous that was! Casting a spell on an unwilling wizard—what did you think you were doing? You’re very, very lucky that you were right, and I turned into a dragon.”

“Well, what else could you have become?” Gresh asked. “What’s more powerful than a dragon?”

“I told you,” the dragon rumbled. “The Seething Death.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Gresh replied. “I never heard of it. It’s more powerful than a dragon?”

“It’s a pool of raw chaos that expands indefinitely, destroying and absorbing everything it touches. The Guild’s masters think it would destroy the entire World if left unchecked, and counterspells don’t work on it!”

Gresh frowned, remembering what Kaligir had said about Tobas’s uneven training. “You defeated it?”

“Yes. I did.” The dragon glared at him.

Gresh started to ask just how Tobas had defeated it, then thought better of it. “The Spell of the Revealed Power doesn’t seem to think so,” he pointed out.

“I should eat you. I really should,” Tobas growled. He ran an immense forked tongue over his lower lip, and Gresh took another involuntary step back.

“Tobas,” Karanissa called. “You’re starting to think like a dragon.”

The dragon looked at his elder wife, then down at Gresh again. He folded his wings. “I think she’s right,” he said. “I’ll need to watch that. But all the same, as I understand it, the Spell of the Revealed Power should have turned me into a bubbling mass of complete destruction instead of a dragon, and if it had, we might all be doomed. You were taking a huge risk, Gresh! You really should have heard me out and not cast the spell.”

“You may be right,” Gresh admitted. He was somewhat embarrassed by his actions. Earlier he had been thinking of Tobas as a dangerous fool for meddling with magic too powerful for him in circumstances where the results might be unpredictable, and here he had gone ahead and done much the same thing himself. It had never occurred to him that Tobas might have mastered anything more powerful than a dragon. He hadn’t really thought there was anything in physical form more powerful than a dragon. Even so, he really should have considered the possibility. “My apologies,” he said. “Apparently whatever guides the spell either considers the dragon more powerful than the Seething Death, or doesn’t think you defeated it.”

“I suspect,” Karanissa called from behind him, “that the spell doesn’t consider the Seething Death a thing at all, and doesn’t it turn the subject into the most powerful thing he’s mastered?”

The man and the dragon both turned to look at her.

“That’s probably it,” the dragon said. “Because I definitely defeated the Seething Death, and it’s definitely powerful enough to destroy the World—but its very nature is that it’s a contagious lack of thingness. Interesting.” He glared down at Gresh. “And very fortunate for us all.”

That made sense to Gresh; after all, it sounded as if this Seething Death was a spell, rather than an object or entity, and despite its name, the Spell of the Revealed Power never revealed anything intangible or evanescent, but only solid things.

But even if it had somehow turned Tobas into the Seething Death, that might not have been so very dreadful. “I still think Javan’s Restorative would have worked,” Gresh said.

“I don’t,” Tobas the dragon replied. “But it should turn me back from this shape readily enough.”

“When we’re safely done with the mirror, yes.”

“Oh. Yes. But you should get on with it. I suspect that the longer I stay in this form the more dragonlike I’ll become, and that could be unfortunate if it goes too far. I can feel it already, I think. You look more and more like food every minute.”

“Yes, of course, I’ll hurry, but if you don’t mind, I must ask—what does it feel like, being a dragon?”

Tobas snorted another shower of sparks. “Tell me, Gresh, have you ever asked a woman what it felt like to be female?”

In fact he had, more or less, and the answers had never been any use. He saw what Tobas meant about the impossibility of conveying such an experience. Still, he could not resist pointing out, “She had never not been female; you haven’t always been a dragon.”

“That’s true, but about all I can tell you is that I feel big and strong and impatient. I believe I can fly if I try, and breathe flame, but I can’t begin to explain how I would do it.”

Gresh grimaced. “Big—yes, indeed! I’ve never seen a dragon so large! I wasn’t expecting it, even after what Karanissa told me. I’d thought she was exaggerating.”

Tobas snorted a little smoke. “Never saw one so large? How many wild dragons have you seen, then?”

“Wild ones? Well, I...” Gresh hesitated, on the verge of giving away one of his trade secrets, then just said, “None, really.”

“Well, no one lets them get this large in captivity, of course.” The dragon looked down at himself, then turned his head to look over his wings and tail. He cocked his head to one side, trying to judge his own dimensions against the trees and flowers. “This does look about the size of the one I killed.”

“It could talk?”

“What? No, it couldn’t. It hadn’t had anyone around to teach it, I suppose, but I’ve always heard that big dragons can learn to talk.”

“Who taught you, then?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Tobas roared. “My father did, of course. I may have the shape of the dragon I slew, but I’m still Tobas of Telven. Now, can we get the mirror?”

“Right, right,” Gresh said, taking a final look up at the dragon before turning his attention back to the cave. “If you can chase away the spriggans, Karanissa and I ought to be able to get the mirror out.” He started walking and called back over his shoulder, “Don’t touch the carpet, you might tear it.”

“Good point,” the dragon said, detouring around the carpet and Alorria and Alris as he followed Gresh. Karanissa, too, marched after Gresh, back toward the cave.

The spriggans had gradually quieted during Gresh’s conversation with the dragon, many of them fleeing the area, but now that the dragon was moving they began to squeal and babble.

“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.