am not going to just hand the mirror over to you and trust you to dispose of it. It’s too potentially dangerous. If that’s the job, then I’m turning it down.”
Here was his way out of committing himself to a job he might not be able to do, a way to avoid any risk to his reputation—though it might also cost him the greatest fee he could ever collect.
The others all stared at him. Alorria’s mouth fell open. “You’d give up a chance at eternal life?” Alorria asked.
“Gresh, I admit the mirror might be dangerous, but you know the Wizards’ Guild already has spells far more dangerous,” Tobas said. “We used one to kill Tabaea, right in Ederd’s palace, and had to use another one to cancel that one out. We have spells that could destroy the entire World, and you’re worried about giving us a mirror that spits out spriggans?”
“A mirror of unknown capabilities that happens to spit out spriggans.”
“Wizards deal with unknown dangers all the time!”
“But I don’t always care to help them do it!”
“Sir,” Karanissa said quietly. “If I might point something out?”
Gresh turned to her, then glanced toward the passage to the kitchen. He hoped that Twilfa had Tira back there listening, as she was supposed to. “And what would that be?” he asked.
“While it’s true we don’t know what else the mirror may do in the wrong hands, we know what it does do in its current situation,” she said. “It produces spriggans, and it seems to do so endlessly. Do you want the whole World flooded with them?”
Gresh blinked at her. “Oh, they’re a nuisance, but I’m sure…”
“No,” Karanissa said, cutting him off. “You don’t understand. They’re a serious danger.”
“Oh, now, really…”
“They have existed for six or seven years now, correct?”
“Well, I didn’t see any until much more recently, but it’s been a few years…”
“There are over half a million of them in the World now,” Karanissa said, interrupting again. “The wizards could determine that much. More are appearing every day, usually dozens or even hundreds more. They’ve spread everywhere. They get into everything.”
“Yes, but…”
“Have you ever seen one die?”
Gresh blinked again. “What?”
“Have you ever seen a dead spriggan? Have you ever seen one die? Have you ever seen one injured?”
Gresh stopped to think.
“They break things constantly; they trip people; they play with sharp things and hot things and dangerous things; they’re stupid and clumsy, and they’re attracted to magic, which we all know is very dangerous stuff. But have you ever seen one die? Seen one bleed? Seen one missing fingers or toes?”
“They feel pain…” Gresh said slowly. He had observed that a few times.
“Yes, they do—if you slap one, it’ll wail. And they get hungry, and cold, and all the rest—but they don’t die. They can’t be killed by natural means. And that mirror is spitting out more and more of them. If we don’t stop it, spriggans will eventually fill up the entire World, packed side by side from Tintallion to Vond—but we won’t be around to see it, because we’ll all have starved to death long before that, when they’ve eaten all the food.”
Gresh stared at her for a moment. Then he said, “Oh.”
There was no need to ask whether anyone had tried to kill spriggans; the creatures were so annoying that of course people had tried to kill them. He had never really thought about it before, but it was obvious. The witch was absolutely right; he had never seen one injured, never seen a dead one lying in the gutter with the drowned rats after a heavy rain, nor anywhere else. No wizard displayed a stuffed spriggan in his workroom with the snakeskins and dragon skulls and pickled tree squids.
As for disposing of them magically—well, magic didn’t work properly on spriggans. Everyone knew that; it was part of the problem. There were undoubtedly ways to kill them, or at least remove them from the World, but whether those ways could be used safely and effectively was less certain.
A world totally flooded with spriggans was still decades or centuries away. Gresh knew he wouldn’t live to see it without magic, but the idea of a constantly increasing supply of spriggans, more and more and more of them every year…
The risk to his reputation suddenly seemed less important.
“I’ll want to know more about how you plan to dispose of the mirror,” he said. “If not here and now, then when the time is right. I won’t turn it over until I’m satisfied with your plans.”
“Agreed,” Tobas said.
“You’ll provide transportation.”
“Of course.”
“You’ll show me where all your adventures with the mirror happened, if I ask.”
“Gladly.”
Gresh nodded. “Then get Kaligir to agree to a payment of a hundred and ten percent of all my expenses and eternal youth, a contract with no trickery or ways of weaseling out of it, and we have a deal.”
Tobas and both his wives smiled at him.
CHAPTER SIX
“My little brother is going to save the World,” Tira said, as Gresh and two of his sisters seated themselves at the kitchen table.
“I might,” Gresh said.
“And get eternal youth in exchange!” Twilfa said.
“That’s the plan, yes.”
“Jealous?” Tira asked.
Twilfa turned to glare at her. “Aren’t you?”
“Oh, maybe a little—but death is a natural part of life, and if everyone lived forever the World would fill up with people instead of spriggans.”
Twilfa did not reply to that, but Gresh did not need even a witch’s limited ability to hear other people’s thoughts to know she thought Tira was mouthing foolish platitudes. “I’ll probably trip and break my neck a sixnight after they perform the spell,” he grumbled. Then he turned to Tira. “I take it you heard everything.”
“Yes.”
“And they’re telling the truth?”
“Well, the witch is; I’m not absolutely sure about the wizard. You know reading wizards is tricky. And the other woman, the mother, is so caught up in her own concerns I couldn’t tell you a thing about what she actually believes.”
“She didn’t say much, in any
