do you want to talk to Chira?” Twilfa asked, when Tira was out of sight. Chira was the family sorcerer, and Karanissa had not mentioned trying sorcery.
Gresh considered that, then nodded. “I think that’s a good place to start, and she definitely owes me one.” He had located several sorcerous items for Chira over the past few years and had been generous in pricing them. Karanissa’s omission of sorcery from her list was probably just an oversight, and Gresh did not see how any sorcery he was familiar with might help, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.
“I’ll fetch her,” Twilfa said, rising.
“And if you see any spriggans on the way, try to catch one,” Gresh said.
Twilfa paused. “You want to have one here for Chira to try her talismans on?”
“I want to ask one a few questions,” Gresh answered. “For all I know, we may not need any magic to find this mirror.”
Twilfa blinked. “You think it might just tell you where the mirror is?”
Gresh turned up a palm. “Why not?” he asked. “Spriggans are stupid little creatures, and they seem to want to be cooperative—why wouldn’t it tell me?”
“If it’s that easy, wouldn’t this Karanissa have already tried that? Or her husband?”
“They’re magicians, at least in theory. She’s a witch; he’s a wizard—they’re accustomed to doing things magically. It may have never occurred to them just to ask.”
Twilfa started to say something, then stopped and thought for a moment. “You could be right,” she admitted.
Gresh smiled at her. “You’re learning,” he said. “Magicians are just as fallibly human as anyone else.”
Twilfa stuck her tongue out at him and turned away.
Gresh watched her go, then leaned back and began planning.
The mirror was probably still somewhere in the Small Kingdoms—why would the spriggans have taken it anywhere else? He could accept Karanissa’s offer of transport by flying carpet, but how big a carpet was it? How much could it carry? It might be better to travel on the ground.
Although his customers were nominally buying the mirror, what they really wanted was its destruction; should he bring tools for breaking it? An ordinary mirror could be smashed readily enough, but enchanted items had a tendency to be uncooperative in unexpected ways.
Of course, depending on just what he did to locate it, he didn’t necessarily want Tobas and Karanissa to know how he found it; if customers found out how simple some of his methods actually were it could hurt his business.
He needed to talk to a spriggan, no question about it, to find out as much about the mirror as he could. He glanced down the passage toward the shop; naturally, no spriggans were in sight. When he was busy and had no use for the little pests they were everywhere, getting underfoot and making a mess, but now that he wanted one, there were none to be found.
Well, Twilfa might have better luck in apprehending one. Or he could stroll down Wizard Street later and listen for outbursts of profanity or the sound of falling crockery.
Then the doorbell jingled, and he rose hurriedly to attend to his customer.
Ordinary trade filled the remainder of the morning. Twilfa returned shortly before lunch with word that Chira was busy at the moment but would be along later and that all the spriggans seemed to be hiding.
“Of course,” Gresh said.
They had finished a meal of salt ham and cornbread, and Twilfa was clearing the table when Gresh heard a thump. “What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” Twilfa asked, stacking the pewter plates.
A loud crash sounded from the front of the shop.
“That,” Gresh said, as he leapt up and dashed down the passage.
As he had expected, he found a spriggan sitting on the floor below a high shelf, surrounded by broken glass and drying blood. The creature looked up at him as he entered, then sprang to its feet and ran for the door.
Gresh darted in front of it, cutting off its escape. It stopped dead and looked up at him, crestfallen. Its big pointed ears drooped.
“Sorry sorry sorry,” it said, in a high-pitched squeak of a voice.
Gresh smiled. “Of course you are,” he said. “I’m sure you didn’t mean any harm at all, did you?”
The spriggan stared up at him uncertainly, its bulging round eyes fixed on his face.
“You were just curious about what was in the bottle, right?”
Hesitantly, the spriggan nodded, never taking its eyes from Gresh’s face.
“And you certainly didn’t mean to spill dragon’s blood worth five rounds of gold all over my carpet, did you?”
The ears drooped even further. “Sorry,” the spriggan said.
“Do you know how much five rounds of gold is?”
The spriggan blinked once, its thin, pale eyelids seeming to appear out of nowhere. “No?”
“It’s a very great deal of money. You now owe me a very great deal of money.”
The creature looked panic-stricken. “Spriggan doesn’t have money,” it squealed.
“I can see that,” Gresh said. The spriggan was naked and only about eight inches high; there was nowhere it could hide a purse, or even a single coin.
Gresh had never bothered to take a good hard look at a spriggan. The first few he had encountered had been glimpsed from afar, or in the process of fleeing, and by the time he saw one close up and relatively still he had lost any interest in the little pests. Now, though, he stared down at the creature that crouched before his feet, studying it.
It was roughly human in shape—but it also looked a good bit like a frog, an impression aided by its lipless, oversized mouth and bulging pop-eyes. Its shiny, hairless skin was a dull green—Gresh thought he had seen a few that were more of a brown color, but this one was definitely an ugly shade of drab green. It came no more than halfway up his shin; if it stood straight and stretched its bony arms, those long-fingered little hands could probably reach his knee.
This one apparently had no fingernails; some of them did, though. He remembered hearing that some could use their fingernails to pick locks.
Why did some have nails, and some not? Was there any significance to the different colors? There were plenty of unanswered questions about spriggans. No one knew whether they had one sex or two—or, Gresh supposed, more. No one knew why they all seemed to speak the same sort of broken Ethsharitic, or whether they had names. Not one had ever, so far as Gresh knew, admitted to having any name but “spriggan.” They generally spoke of themselves in the third person, but Gresh wasn’t sure if that was universal.
One thing he discovered, having one this close, was that they did not seem
