The Spriggan Mirror loe-9 Read online

  The party and their belongings were now clustered into a small, sparsely furnished parlor; a dusty hearth filled one end of the room, while a few chairs and a small table were scattered about elsewhere. The plank floor was bare; Gresh suspected that the flying carpet currently tucked under Tobas’s arm usually lay on it. Two doors led to back rooms, and a steep staircase led to the upper story—Gresh could see the slanting ceilings that reduced that second floor to a fraction of the size of the already-tiny ground floor.

  The place was considerably smaller than his own home and business; it did not look like the house of a wealthy wizard, to say the least. Even Akka and her useless husband had a more luxurious home, though it was in worse repair, and Gresh suspected they had gone far into debt to pay for it.

  “Welcome to my home,” Tobas said. “You can sleep here tonight, if you like, or take a room at an inn on Grand Street, whichever you prefer. I think Karanissa can provide us with some supper, or there are the inns for that, too, as you please.”

  Gresh looked around at the utter lack of a couch or any likely place a guest room might be hidden away and concluded that staying here would probably mean sharing a bedroom with three adults and a baby. The adults weren’t a real problem unless one of them snored, but the baby...

  “You’ll have the place to yourself, if you stay here,” Karanissa said, as if reading his thoughts. As a witch, she very well might be reading them. “We’ll be sleeping elsewhere.”

  “Where?” he asked, startled.

  “I’ll show you,” the witch said. “Come on.”

  Gresh followed as Karanissa led him up the stairs, which emerged, as he had expected, into a single good-sized attic room. Sunlight spilled in through windows on either end, and for most of its length the two long sides slanted in. Three beds and several bureaus and nightstands were arranged between the stairs and the rear wall. The front area, above the parlor, was almost empty, with just a pair of velvet-upholstered chairs at one side.

  The portion above the parlor hearth was somewhat different from the rest; here the side wall was vertical, closing in the chimney, rather than sloping, and a pair of heavy gray drapes hung on it. As Gresh reached the top of the stair, Karanissa strode to these drapes and pulled a cord, drawing them back to reveal a tapestry.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “That’s where we’ll be.”

  Chapter Ten

  Gresh stared at the tapestry in astonishment. He had never seen anything quite like it; the realism, the attention to detail, was amazing. Neither stitch nor brush-stroke was visible at first glance—if not for the slight billowing as it moved in the breeze created by the opening drapes, and the neatly sewn silk binding at the hem, he might almost have taken it for a painting, or even a window.

  The image on the tapestry was also unlike anything he had seen before. It was a single scene, a picture of a castle—but it was a castle out of a nightmare, a weird structure of black and gray stone standing on a rocky crag, framed against a red-and-purple sky, approachable only by a narrow rope bridge across an abyss. Faces and figures of demons were carved into the structure at every opportunity; the battlements were lined with gargoyles, and monstrous stone visages peered around corners, from niches, and from the top of every window. A dozen towers and turrets jutted up at odd angles, some topped with rings of black iron spikes, others with conical roofs carved to resemble folded bat-wings. Even the one visible door was surrounded by a portico carved to resemble a great fanged mouth.

  “Don’t touch it,” Karanissa warned.

  “I won’t,” Gresh assured her, as he realized what he was looking at. “That’s a Transporting Tapestry, isn’t it? One that goes out of the World completely?”

  “Yes. And it leads to our real home, more or less.”

  “The castle? You live in that?”

  “Most of the time—at least, since Tabaea’s death. Before that we spent most of our time in Dwomor Keep, where Tobas was the court wizard for Alorria’s father.”

  Gresh remembered the story Karanissa had told him when she first came to his shop—that she had spent four hundred years trapped in a wizard’s castle, and Tobas had rescued her. That was presumably the castle he had saved her from. And she had later said that the Guild had ruined the tapestry that had been the only exit from the castle.

  “How do you get out of it?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re planning to sleep there tonight...”

  “We have another Transporting Tapestry in the castle,” Karanissa explained. “When the Guild ruined our old one while they were trying to stop Tabaea, they replaced it with another that comes out near here. That’s why we bought this house and relocated to Ethshar of the Sands—it’s where we can get out of the castle.” She sighed. “At first I thought I’d like that—I never really felt very welcome in Dwomor Keep, after all, since it’s Alorria’s home.”

  Gresh started to ask a question about the relationship between the two women, then caught himself. He did not want to pry into their personal lives uninvited. “It hasn’t worked out?” he asked instead.

  “We don’t really belong here,” she said. “Tobas is from a little village in the Pirate Towns, Alorria is a princess from the Small Kingdoms, I’m from the distant past—none of us really fits in a city like this. When I was here as a girl it wasn’t a city at all; it was General Torran’s staging area for the western campaign—they were still dredging the ship channel and drawing up plans for the city wall, and Grandgate was one tower called Grand Castle because there wasn’t a wall yet to put a gate in. There wasn’t any palace or city, just tents and wooden sheds.”

  Gresh glanced out the window at the street and tried to imagine that; he failed.

  “Now there are more people in the Grandgate district alone than in all of Dwomor, so Alorria is as lost here as I am,” Karanissa continued. “The Guild brought Tobas here because he’d been doing research in countercharms, trying to fix some of the things that had gone wrong back in the mountains, so someone thought he was some sort of expert and called him in to help against Tabaea’s magic Black Dagger, and he didn’t argue—he thought it would be fun, and that he might know something useful. He does have the formulas for plenty of spells, including some that had been lost for centuries, but all the same, he’s not really that good a wizard—more than good enough for Dwomor, or anywhere in the Small Kingdoms or outlying lands, but here in the three Ethshars he’s only up to journeyman level, really. He doesn’t know anyone except Telurinon and a few other wizards...” She let her voice trail off, and sighed.

  “He seems to have the Guild’s respect,” Gresh said.

  “Yes, he does, and he earned it,” she agreed. “He was the one who finally stopped Telurinon’s stupid miscalculation from destroying the whole city. They showed their respect by ordering him to find and stop the spriggan mirror—typical of them. If you do one impossible thing your reward is to be asked to do another.”

  “But he made the mirror in the first place?”

  “Which is why we didn’t argue when they told him to stop it. He does feel responsible. So he’s been running around the city talking to magicians and conferring with Lady Sarai and so on, until finally someone suggested we talk to you, and here we are. But when this is all done, we’re going to have to hold a family conference and decide just where and how we want to live.” She looked at the tapestry. “We may have to give that castle up—or at least, spend much less time there.”

  Gresh glanced at the image and shuddered; he could not think of giving up that horror as a real loss.

  Then Karanissa shook herself. “That’s all for later, though. Tonight we’ll be sleeping in the castle, so that Tobas can collect some things he needs from the workshop there, and you can have this place to yourself. We’ll be back out first thing in the morning and off to Dwomor.”

  Gresh started to nod, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the workshop where the mirror was first enchanted?”

  Karanissa looked at him
. “Yes. Why?”

  “There might be evidence...”

  “No.” Karanissa held up a hand. “We checked, very carefully.”

  “You’re absolutely certain the mirror isn’t still in there somewhere?”

  “Oh, yes. We saw it go through the tapestry to the mountains. Besides, we haven’t seen any new spriggans in the castle in years—there are still about half a dozen that never left, but we only see those same ones, never any others.”

  “Hmm.” He was not absolutely convinced. He had seen people lose things in plain sight often enough to have no faith at all in the human ability to see what was actually in front of them, and after his twenty questions a few days before he had far more respect for how deceptive spriggans could be. But Karanissa was a witch and probably knew what she was talking about.

  Even a spriggan would know a castle was not a cave—or could there be a cave somewhere in that stone mass the castle sat upon?

  “Are there any ruins in that... that place?” he asked.

  “What place?” Karanissa glanced from him to the tapestry. “The void? No, there are the two stones—the little one at this end of the bridge, and the big one holding the castle. That’s all. There’s nothing a ruin could stand on, nowhere it could be.”

  Then at any rate, the mirror had not been in there when that particular spriggan emerged from it, and it wasn’t likely it had gotten there since.

  “Thank you.” Gresh gave the tapestry a final look, then turned away and headed back down the stairs to rejoin the others. Karanissa came close behind.

  Alorria looked up from playing with Alris’s fingers. “Showing off the castle, Kara?”

  “Just explaining where we’re going tonight, Ali.”

  Alorria made a face. “The baby and I may just wait out here,” she said. “I hate crossing that bridge.”

  Tobas exchanged glances with Karanissa, and Gresh thought that the two of them were not entirely displeased by Alorria’s words. “I thought you didn’t want to be alone,” Tobas said.

  “I won’t be—I’ll have Gresh to protect me.”

  That prompted an awkward silence that was finally broken by Alorria saying, “I assume we can trust him well enough. He doesn’t want to antagonize the Guild, after all. He won’t let anything happen to us.”

  “Of course I won’t,” Gresh said.

  “And I can manage the baby by myself for one night, Tobas.”

  “Of course you can,” Tobas agreed.

  “It’s not as if we’re in any danger of being eaten by a dragon or attacked by Vondish assassins here in the city.”

  “You aren’t in any danger from them back in Dwomor, either,” Karanissa said.

  “Well, you never know,” Alorria said.

  It was plain from Karanissa’s expression that she thought you did know, but she didn’t say anything further on the subject.

  “You can always change your mind, Ali,” Tobas said. “We’ll leave the door unlocked.”

  “I’ll be fine here with Gresh.”

  “All right, then. Let us see about finding some supper, shall we? Kara? I’d rather not deal with a crowded inn, if we have any food here.”

  “We have wine and cheese in the kitchen and half a salted ham, but there’s no bread.”

  “I saw a baker just across the street,” Gresh offered. “I could buy a loaf.”

  “And bill the Guild for it, I suppose,” Tobas said.

  “Of course!”

  “I’ll see what I can do, then,” Karanissa said, heading for one of the two doors at the back.

  Half an hour later the four adults sat down around the little table in the kitchen, where Karanissa had set out a simple but satisfactory meal. Gresh had purchased a few sweet cakes, as well as a loaf of good bread; Karanissa had boiled generous slices of ham; and Tobas had found the butter, cheese, and wine. During supper’s preparation the conversation had been casual and fragmented, but now Gresh turned to Tobas and said, “Tell me how you came to enchant the mirror in the first place, in as much detail as you can. You never know what information might turn out to be useful, and I’d like to have the story now, just to be sure that I don’t need to look around inside that haunted castle of yours before we go on to Dwomor.”

  Tobas tore off a chunk of bread and buttered it thoughtfully, then began his story. “I grew up in the village of Telven, near the eastern end of what you’d call the Pirate Towns, and I didn’t bother with an apprenticeship when I was twelve because I was my father’s only acknowledged child, and I expected to inherit his ship, Retribution. When a demonologist sank it and left me orphaned at the age of fifteen, I had to change my plans, but of course by then I was too old for any respectable apprenticeship.”

  He took a bite of bread, then continued. “Fortunately for me, there was an old wizard named Roggit who lived in the marshes just outside of Telven. I used to think he was too senile to see that I was obviously too old, but now I’m fairly sure he took pity on me. Either way, he took me on despite my age. Unfortunately, he wasn’t much of a wizard, and he was even less of a teacher, and his health was terrible. I lived with him for a year and a half, or maybe it was closer to two years, and while he did get through all the essential initiations in that time, by the time he died peacefully in his sleep he had only taught me one useful spell—Thrindle’s Combustion.”

  “Unfortunate,” Gresh said. “But presumably you inherited his business, as his apprentice at the time of his death—did his family contest that because of your age?”

  “He didn’t have any family, any more than I did,” Tobas said. “But as for his business, such as it was, he had put an explosive seal on his book of spells, and I didn’t know any better than to open it. The whole house burned to the ground, book and all, and I was left with nothing.” He took another bite. “So I set out to seek my fortune—not that I had much choice, after losing two separate inheritances.”

  He went on to describe making his way to Ethshar of the Spices, where he had discovered no one had any use for a wizard who hadn’t finished his apprenticeship and knew just one spell. In desperation he had signed up to slay a dragon in the Small Kingdoms, more or less accidentally, as much to stay out of the hands of slavers as because he thought it was a good idea. He told Gresh about his first visit to Dwomor, sparing no details, to Alorria’s dismay. She tried to defend her homeland, but Tobas refused to retract his negative comments. He explained about the terms on which the dragon-hunters had been hired and how they had been divided up into teams.

  By the time he finished his account of wandering in the hills northeast of Dwomor Keep, finding Derithon’s fallen flying castle, salvaging the Transporting Tapestry, and stumbling through it to join Karanissa in her captivity, supper had been eaten, a bottle of wine had been drunk, the daylight had faded away, and the candles had been lit.

  Tobas explained how he had begun working his way through Derithon’s massive collection of spells, trying as many of the easy ones as he could to gain enough practice that he might have a chance of surviving attempts to use higher-order wizardry to get Karanissa and himself out of the castle and back to the World. He described every detail he could remember of his failed attempt at Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.

  Gresh listened closely and had him review several portions before permitting him to continue the story.

  The spriggans had stolen the mirror just as he carried it through the revitalized Transporting Tapestry, back out in the World, and he had not seen it since. He had married Karanissa, and then more or less accidentally slain the dragon after all. In order to collect the promised reward he had been required to marry Alorria, as well—which, he was quick to note, was no hardship. He had never planned on having two wives, but he certainly didn’t mind.

  He glanced from one woman to the other at that point, but no one else commented.

  There were parts of the story that did not seem to make sense, Gresh thought—the account of removing the Transporting Tapestry from the fallen
flying castle, for example. How and why had Tobas removed it without going through it?

  And for that matter, why had the castle fallen in the first place? Presumably Varrin’s Greater Propulsion had failed, but why? A wizard of Derithon’s obvious accomplishments wouldn’t have been careless with something so important as the enchantment holding up his home. Was there some inherent flaw in the spell?

  And there was the way Tobas had simply let the spriggans run off with the mirror without pursuing them, and how it had been years before spriggans started turning up in any numbers.

  There was something Tobas wasn’t telling him. Gresh suspected that it was related to the wizard’s plans for disposing of the mirror.

  “We should go,” Karanissa said, as Gresh asked a few more leading questions, hoping for some further hint. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, and you need to pack up things from your workshop.”

  “A long day, but not a strenuous one,” Gresh pointed out. “You’ll just be sitting on a carpet all day.”

  “That’s tiring enough for me,” Karanissa said.

  “But you haven’t said a word yet about how you helped Lady Sarai defeat Empress Tabaea,” Gresh protested.

  “That has nothing to do with the mirror or the spriggans,” Tobas said. “And it is getting late.” He rose.

  Gresh glanced at Alorria, hoping that she would insist her husband brag about his part in defeating the mad magician-thief who had somehow temporarily overthrown the overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, but she was dozing off, and the baby in her arms was sound asleep. He sighed.

  He would be traveling with these people for days, perhaps months. There would be time to worm the truth out of them.

  “I suppose it is,” he conceded.

  Karanissa rose and leaned over to touch Alorria’s shoulder. “Ali,” she said. “Time for bed.”

  “Uh?” Alorria started; Alris stirred but did not wake. Then Alorria nodded. “Oh, yes. Bed. Yes.” She rose, as well.