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 case,” Gresh said. “But the witch was telling the truth? Spriggans don’t die?”
“She certainly believes it. Whether it’s a fact I can’t be sure.”
“And Tobas?”
“He seemed to be telling the truth. He felt surprisingly forthright for a wizard. Usually they’re so bound up with worrying about keeping all the Guild’s secrets that they can hardly be honest about anything even when they try. This one, though—I think it may be because he’s still young, and he’s been lucky, and that’s made him over-confident, but so far as I could tell he wasn’t trying to mislead you at all. The only time he held anything back, he told you.”
“Maybe it’s because he really, really wants that mirror,” Twilfa suggested.
“That could be it, actually. He might have been so focused on getting the mirror that he wasn’t worrying about anything else.”
Gresh frowned. “Do you think Kaligir will agree to my terms?” he asked Tira.
“How should I know?”
“Did they think he would?”
“Yes—but I don’t think they know him very well.”
“Hmm.”
“So how will you find the mirror?” Twilfa asked. “That spriggan you talked to didn’t know where it is.”
“That’s not the only spriggan in the World.”
“That’s sort of the point,” Tira remarked.
“You know, there must be some way to kill them,” Twilfa said. “Maybe not a natural one, but magic can do almost anything. Couldn’t a demon eat one, or a warlock’s magic squash one?”
“Maybe,” Gresh said. “And there may well be wizardry that can destroy them—but the cure might be worse than the disease. Maybe that spell that killed Empress Tabaea could kill spriggans, but from what I’ve heard the spell could have destroyed the World if it hadn’t been stopped. Even if we knew how to kill them, if they don’t die naturally and that confounded mirror keeps spitting out more…I want to find the mirror and put an end to it, so we don’t wind up in the middle of an everlasting war against the little pests.”
Twilfa shuddered.
“So when you find the mirror, what are you going to do with it?” Tira asked.
“I don’t know,” Gresh admitted.
“Will you give it to Tobas?” Twilfa asked.
“I told you, I don’t know. I barely know the man.”
“Does Dina? Being a wizard and all.”
“I don’t know—and I want to talk to Dina, in any case. I need to know more about the magic involved. Maybe she can give me some idea what Tobas has in mind. Twilfa, could you…”
“I’ll go,” Tira said.
Gresh looked at her in surprise. “I thought you and Dar had business this afternoon.”
“It can wait.”
“Well, that’s…that’s very generous