something that could not go wrong once the spell was cast properly in the first place—though it could be lost through carelessness or by choice. He had dreamed about this since childhood and long ago settled on what he would demand.
“And as my payment I want eternal youth and perfect health,” he said. “I won’t insist on a specific spell, but it must be permanent youth. I do not want to ever be older than I am now.”
“Um,” Tobas said. He glanced at Karanissa.
“That’s my price,” Gresh said. He nodded at Karanissa. “If she’s told me the truth, exactly such a spell was cast on her centuries ago, so please don’t tell me it isn’t possible.”
“I can’t do that,” Tobas said.“I haven’t been able to provide it for myself or Alorria yet, let alone anyone else.”
Alorria made an unhappy noise in agreement.
“Someone provided it for her,” Gresh said with another nod toward Karanissa.
“Derithon the Mage,” Tobas said. “He’s been dead for centuries. It isn’t immortality, you know; Karanissa can still die, just like anyone else. It just won’t be of old age.”
“I know. That’s good enough.”
“And there are other loopholes.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to explain them to me.”
Tobas grimaced.
“You said the Guild would pay any price; well, that’s my price.”
“I’ll need to talk to Kaligir.”
“You do that, then.”
“I’ll see him as soon as I can, and we’ll get an answer for you. I think he’ll agree, but I can’t promise.”
“Well, that’s good enough for now. So that’s the first point.”
“There are others?”
“One more that I know of; others may arise in our discussions.”
Tobas sighed yet again. “What is it?”
“I need to know why you want the mirror. I will not be a party to seriously destructive spells.”
“We want to smash it, of course!” Alorria said before either of the others could reply. “I’m sick of these spriggans!”
Gresh nodded. That was what he wanted to hear. He looked at Tobas.
“She’s right,” he said. “We want to smash it—if that will stop it from producing spriggans. Or destroy it by some other means, or neutralize it somehow. We won’t know for certain until I get a good look at it.”
“No? Why wouldn’t you just smash it?”
Tobas grimaced. “Because we don’t know what that would do. If every fragment then starts spewing out spriggans, or some new sort of creature, that would be even worse, of course.”
“Could that happen?” Gresh asked, startled. He had not thought of that possibility.
“We don’t know,” Tobas said. “Nobody does. The spell that created the mirror only happened once, by accident, when I made a mistake in Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, and I don’t know what the mistake was, so we can’t analyze it and guess at the spriggan spell’s exact nature when we don’t have the mirror in hand. Scrying spells can’t see it, even the most powerful ones, since it happened outside the World. And they can’t find the mirror, or study it. We don’t know exactly why, but presumably it’s just the nature of the spell.”
The project was beginning to sound less appealing again. Being the person who let the spriggan mirror be smashed and unleash some new horror on the World would be very bad for his reputation, even worse than not finding the mirror in the first place. “So you don’t know anything about the spell, except that it makes spriggans?”
“And it was intended to be the Phantasm. That’s right. We know that the mirror pops out a spriggan every so often—the intervals vary, but it seems to generate at least a dozen a day, usually far more. The spriggans are not all identical and seem to be changing slightly over time. The first few spriggans never had any claws, for example, but some of them do now. And we know that if you close the mirror in a box the spriggans will appear anyway until they burst the box from inside…”
“Will they?”
“Oh, yes. I tried that, before I lost it. Those spriggans were very unhappy by the time they finally broke free. I think that may be why they were so determined to get the mirror away from me, so I couldn’t do it again with a stronger box. Spriggans do seem to care about each other, in their own confused fashion, and they seem to want the mirror to keep on making more of them.”
“Stupid little creatures,” Alorria muttered, as Alris patted a tiny hand against her mother’s shoulder.
“They can’t help it,” Karanissa whispered.
“So if the mirror is smashed—wait, do we know it can be smashed? Some magical artifacts are unbreakable.”
“We don’t know,” Tobas admitted. “It was dropped onto a hard floor once or twice after it was enchanted and didn’t break, but that was never from a significant height, and its failure to break didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary to me at the time.”
“I think a spriggan caught it every time it was dropped,” Karanissa added.
“That may be so,” Tobas admitted.
“We don’t know what will happen if it is smashed?”
“No.”
“So breaking it might mean we have dozens of smaller enchanted mirrors spewing out spriggans, or something worse?”
“It might.”
“And if it’s broken, what happens to all the spriggans it’s already produced?”
“We don’t know.”
“I think we might want to find out before we do anything irrevocable.”
Tobas hesitated. “We might,” he agreed. “But I have no idea how that would be possible.”
“If we brought it to be studied, perhaps?”
“Perhaps, and we may do that—but Gresh, there may be a way to ensure that its destruction won’t do anything terrible even if we can’t do any elaborate analysis.”
“Might there? And what would that be?”
Tobas looked at his wives, then back to Gresh. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not here, not now. But if you find the mirror, I’m fairly sure we can dispose of it safely.”
“Are you?” Gresh frowned. He hated secretive customers. He had plenty of secrets of his own, of course, but he always resented it when other people had them,
