let me pass the time swiftly, so I lost track of time, and had no idea it had been that long. At last, though, a young wizard named Tobas of Telven happened to find the secret room and the Transporting Tapestry. He found his way into the castle, and eventually he figured out how to get us both out again. While he was looking for a way out, though, he went through Derry’s book of spells, studying the situation and learning more magic. One spell he tried, Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, went wrong, and instead of producing the phantasm, it produced a spriggan.”
Gresh held up a hand. “What do you mean, ‘produced’?”
“Do you know how the spell works?”
“I think I’ve heard of it.” He had heard Dina and others describe it, but he wanted to hear his would-be customer’s version.
“Well, it requires a mirror, and in this case, instead of creating the phantasm it was supposed to create, the spell enchanted the mirror, and the spriggan climbed out of the mirror as if the glass were a door. A minute or two later another spriggan did the same thing, and a moment after that a third, and they kept coming. That’s where all the spriggans come from. By the time we got the tapestry working again there were dozens of them running around loose in the castle, and some of them came through to the World with us. They stole the mirror so we couldn’t break it and hid it somewhere, and it’s been popping out spriggans ever since.”
Gresh stared at her, considering this, keeping his face expressionless.
Spriggans had started appearing a few years ago, without explanation; they had just suddenly been there, getting underfoot, poking into everything, babbling nonsense. It was just one or two at first, but they had gradually been growing more common. Divinations had not, so far as he knew, been able to determine their origin, although everyone was fairly certain they were a product of wizardry. He had never before heard anything about spriggans coming from an enchanted mirror. They were, as Dina had said, drawn to magic in general, and wizardry in particular—but, annoyingly, most magic did not work on them.
That was typical of wizardry; other spells almost never worked properly on something that was already enchanted.
And here was this person, claiming that someone named Derry—no, someone named Tobas—had created them accidentally, by miscasting Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.
Gresh knew a good deal about how the Phantasm worked. It was his business, as a wizards’ supplier, to know as much as possible about all wizardry, so he made a point of coaxing as much information as he could from not just Dina, but every other wizard he sold to. He did not think he had actually picked up any Guild secrets yet, but he certainly knew more about wizardry than the vast majority of people.
The Phantasm was an easy spell, one many wizards had learned before they had finished the third year of apprenticeship. Who was this Tobas who had botched it so spectacularly?
But that wasn’t entirely fair, he told himself. Dina had told him that if a spell went wrong, there was no way to predict what it would do. It might just do nothing, like her ruined spell of the night before, or it might do a variant of the intended spell, or it might do something completely different, and the effect might be utterly out of proportion. The famous Tower of Flame in the Small Kingdoms had supposedly been created when someone sneezed while performing a simple fire-lighting spell, after all. Perhaps this spriggan-generating mirror was the result of just as innocent a mistake.
“When did this happen?” he asked.
“5221,” Karanissa replied. “Some time in Leafcolor, or possibly at the very end of Harvest.”
“Six and a half years ago, going on seven.” That was well before Gresh had ever heard of spriggans, so that fit the facts. “Why are you only looking for the mirror now?”
“We were busy.” She turned up an empty palm. “And we thought the spriggans were harmless. And we didn’t know the mirror would produce so many. At first we didn’t think it would produce any, once it was out of the castle.”
“Just who is ‘we’? You and your husband, or are others involved?”
“My husband and his other wife and I.”
Other wife? The husband staying with the baby while Karanissa saw to business suddenly made sense. “And your husband is this wizard named Tobas of Telven, then?”
“That’s right.”
“You hadn’t mentioned that he had another wife.”
“It wasn’t relevant.”
“She wasn’t involved in creating the mirror?”
“No. She’s not a magician.”
Gresh nodded and inquired no further about that, although he was curious. Other people’s family arrangements were not his business.
Magical objects sometimes were, though. “And you want me to find this spriggan- generating mirror for you.”
“Yes. You come highly recommended; Telurinon and Kaligir both spoke well of you.”
Once again Gresh found himself staring silently at the woman for a moment before he spoke. Telurinon was one of the most powerful wizards in Ethshar of the Sands and was rumored to be a high official in the Wizards’ Guild. He had reportedly supervised the Guild’s efforts to remove a usurper from the overlord’s throne last year, though of course no one would admit to telling Gresh anything of the sort. And Kaligir, here in Ethshar of the Rocks, was definitely a high official in the Guild—when his name and the question of his status came up a year or so back Dina had admitted he was a Guildmaster and had hinted that he was perhaps the city’s senior Guildmaster.
“You know them?” he asked.
“We know Telurinon. We helped him dispose of poor Tabaea. We’ve met Kaligir once or twice; he was the one who directed us here, at Telurinon’s suggestion.”
The mere fact that this woman knew those two names made it much less likely that she was mad, but her story was more outlandish than ever. She and her husband had helped defeat the self-proclaimed Empress of Ethshar who had briefly taken power in Ethshar of the Sands last year? And it seemed she and her husband got their shopping suggestions from the upper echelons of the Wizards’ Guild.
Add that to a magic castle, eternal youth, the accidental creation of the spriggans that plagued the World, and it was a little much to accept.
“How did you come to be asking their advice?”
Karanissa frowned—the first time Gresh had seen her do so. “They weren’t advising us as much as ordering us,” she said.
“Oh?”
“The Wizards’ Guild holds my husband responsible for the spriggans,” Karanissa explained. “They summoned us to a meeting, back in Snowfall, and told us as much. A good many wizards have been complaining about the silly things and demanding the Guild do something. They’ve caused a lot of trouble. There’s a man named Ithanalin who got turned to stone or something when he tripped over a spriggan, and was petrified until his apprentice taught herself enough magic to cure him…”
“Kilisha,” Gresh said. “I know Ithanalin and Kilisha.” That was a mild exaggeration; he had met them, even sold them a few things, but no more than that. He remembered the fuss
