The Spriggan Mirror. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ would need to bring money and his usual assortment of tools, and since he was undoubtedly going to be dealing with spriggans, he thought some snares would be useful. He would also bring a bag of candy—he had heard that spriggans liked honey-drops.

      He had a set of snares and nets intended for catching rabbits or hawks, but they should serve well enough for spriggans.

      Were there any particular trade goods that might be useful in mountainous country? Nothing came immediately to mind.

      He mulled over possibilities for several minutes, until Twilfa called him to help a customer whose needs were somewhat esoteric, and who did not trust a teenaged assistant to meet them.

      Trade was brisk for the next hour or so, and he became so involved in conducting his normal business that Dina’s arrival caught him by surprise. “What can I get for you?” he asked, before he remembered that he had sent for her.

      “A less troublesome brother,” she replied.

      He smiled crookedly and gestured for her to follow him to the chairs by the fire. “Well, I’m afraid the supply is limited, and we’ll just have to see if we can modify the one you have, rather than replace him. I’m sorry, Dina; thank you for coming. I hope the transmutation spell went well?”

      “I haven’t done it,” she said. “It takes eight hours, so I have to do it at night, when I won’t be interrupted. I don’t have an apprentice to stand guard, not since Inria made journeyman.”

      “Oh, of course. I hope it will go well, then.” He gestured for her to sit.

      She remained standing. “What did you want me for, Gresh?”

      Gresh glanced around. Twilfa was making change for the last of the other customers over at the far side of the shop. The vault was standing open, and the fire was burning low, but otherwise everything was in order. No one appeared to be listening in—though of course someone might be using a scrying spell on them. The shop was warded against such spells, but no ward was perfect.

      “Have a seat, please, Dina; I have some questions I need to ask you.”

      “What sort of questions?”

      “To begin with, tell me everything you know about Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.”

      “Lugwiler’s…? You know the basics, don’t you? It’s a third-order invocation requiring a mirror, black sand, spider’s ichor, a rat’s eyeball, three crow feathers, the long outside bone from a bat’s left wing, and the wizard’s own saliva.” She made a surreptitious gesture indicating that there was another ingredient she was not listing, which did not surprise Gresh. He knew that most spells used the wizard’s dagger somehow, and that for some reason this was not ordinarily mentioned. She settled into the chair, still speaking. “It’s generally used as a minor curse and has no obvious other use, though it’s always possible someone might think of one. It’s handy in that it doesn’t require anything from the intended victim, not even a true name, though in normal usage it won’t take effect until a line of sight is established between the victim and the enchanted mirror. It can be triggered by a command from the wizard when he sees that connection, or set as a booby-trap for the next person who happens into the mirror’s effective area. Why are you asking me this?”

      “Because I’ve been asked to retrieve a mirror that was used in a failed attempt at it,” he said, taking the other chair. “Are there known ways it can fail?”

      “Well, yes, of course—it can dissipate harmlessly, or attach the curse to the wizard instead of the intended victim, or detonate the mirror, which wouldn’t leave anything to retrieve.”

      “Detonate?”

      “Explode. Shards of glass or metal everywhere. One of Dabran’s apprentices did that once and almost took out her own eye, not to mention smashing assorted jars and a good lamp and scaring Dabran’s cat half to death.”

      Gresh nodded. “It’s supposed to produce a phantasm, right? A monstrous little creature that only the victim can see?”

      “Well, an image, anyway. No one’s entirely sure just what the phantasm itself truly is—whether it’s a living creature or a malign spirit or a minor demon or an illusion or what, or whether it’s really where the victim sees it, assuming he’s seeing something real to begin with. One theory is that what the spell actually does is affect the victim’s vision so that he’s catching glimpses of another reality, one inhabited by these hideous little things. Another is that the creatures, whatever they are, are all around us all the time, and what the spell does is to let the victim see things that are normally invisible to us. Mostly, though, we assume it’s just an illusion, that the spell plays tricks on the victim’s mind.”

      “What do the phantasms look like?”

      “How should I know?”

      “You’ve never seen one?”

      “No one’s ever had a reason to put a curse on me, thank you very much, dear brother.”

      “But you learned the spell as an apprentice, didn’t you?”

      She glared at him. “As it happens, no, I didn’t. Have I ever bought rat’s eyeballs from you? I’ve read about it, and I got the formula in a trade with Sensella of the Isle, but I’ve never tried it—Dabran’s apprentice, whatever her name was, made me wary. And even if I had, if I did it properly I wouldn’t see the phantasm.”

      That was mildly inconvenient. Gresh had hoped to get every detail of the spell, perhaps see it performed, in order to give him more background, and it appeared Dina couldn’t readily provide that. She did have the formula, but trying a new spell always carried some risk. He was sure she wouldn’t do it unless he paid for it.

      Of course, he could count that as a research expense and charge Tobas and the Guild for it. He might resort to that.

      “So it can dissipate, or explode, or hit the wrong target,” he said. “Has it ever produced something other than the expected phantasm, that you know of?”

      “Well, now, who knows what the expected phantasm is? For all we know, every victim might be seeing something different. Most of the victims don’t compare notes, and the descriptions usually boil down to, ‘Oh, ick!’ They mostly involve hair and claws and eyes, but don’t get into a lot of specifics—for one thing, the victim usually only sees the phantasm from the corner of her eye, and it’s gone when she looks for it.”

      “Someone could try it twice and see whether they get the same image.”

      “They could. Maybe someone has. I haven’t, and no one’s ever mentioned it to me. This isn’t a spell that gets a great deal of attention, Gresh.”

      “Well, perhaps it should. It appears that on one occasion it did produce something else, instead of a phantasm.”

      “And they want you to recover that particular mirror to see if they can do it again?”

      “Something like that.”

      “It probably won’t work—that spell has half a dozen deliberate variables in it, depending on exactly how you want the curse to operate, as well as all the usual ways to mess it up. The mirror probably isn’t what mattered.”

      Gresh СКАЧАТЬ