The project was beginning to sound less appealing again. Being the person who let the spriggan mirror be smashed and unleash some new horror on the World would be very bad for his reputation, even worse than not finding the mirror in the first place. “So you don’t know anything about the spell, except that it makes spriggans?”

“And it was intended to be the Phantasm. That’s right. We know that the mirror pops out a spriggan every so often-the intervals vary, but it seems to generate at least a dozen a day, usually far more. The spriggans are not all identical and seem to be changing slightly over time. The first few spriggans never had any claws, for example, but some of them do now. And we know that if you close the mirror in a box the spriggans will appear anyway until they burst the box from inside…”

“Will they?”

“Oh, yes. I tried that, before I lost it. Those spriggans were very unhappy by the time they finally broke free. I think that may be why they were so determined to get the mirror away from me, so I couldn’t do it again with a stronger box. Spriggans do seem to care about each other, in their own confused fashion, and they seem to want the mirror to keep on making more of them.”

“Stupid little creatures,” Alorria muttered, as Alris patted a tiny hand against her mother’s shoulder.

“They can’t help it,” Karanissa whispered.

“So if the mirror is smashed-wait, do we know it can be smashed? Some magical artifacts are unbreakable.”

“We don’t know,” Tobas admitted. “It was dropped onto a hard floor once or twice after it was enchanted and didn’t break, but that was never from a significant height, and its failure to break didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary to me at the time.”

“I think a spriggan caught it every time it was dropped,” Karanissa added.

“That may be so,” Tobas admitted.

“We don’t know what will happen if it is smashed?”

“No.”

“So breaking it might mean we have dozens of smaller enchanted mirrors spewing out spriggans, or something worse?”

“It might.”

“And if it’s broken, what happens to all the spriggans it’s already produced?”

“We don’t know.”

“I think we might want to find out before we do anything irrevocable.”

Tobas hesitated. “We might,” he agreed. “But I have no idea how that would be possible.”

“If we brought it to be studied, perhaps?”

“Perhaps, and we may do that-but Gresh, there may be a way to ensure that its destruction won’t do anything terrible even if we can’t do any elaborate analysis.”

“Might there? And what would that be?”

Tobas looked at his wives, then back to Gresh. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not here, not now. But if you find the mirror, I’m fairly sure we can dispose of it safely.”

“Are you?” Gresh frowned. He hated secretive customers. He had plenty of secrets of his own, of course, but he always resented it when other people had them, as well, even though he knew it was unreasonable of him. “I’m not sure. This thing sounds as unpredictable as the Tower of Flame. I’m afraid I can’t just trust you on this.”

Tobas frowned back. “What?”

“I am not going to just hand the mirror over to you and trust you to dispose of it. It’s too potentially dangerous. If that’s the job, then I’m turning it down.”

Here was his way out of committing himself to a job he might not be able to do, a way to avoid any risk to his reputation-though it might also cost him the greatest fee he could ever collect.

The others all stared at him. Alorria’s mouth fell open. “You’d give up a chance at eternal life?” Alorria asked.

“Gresh, I admit the mirror might be dangerous, but you know the Wizards’ Guild already has spells far more dangerous,” Tobas said. “We used one to kill Tabaea, right in Ederd’s palace, and had to use another one to cancel that one out. We have spells that could destroy the entire World, and you’re worried about giving us a mirror that spits out spriggans?”

“A mirror of unknown capabilities that happens to spit out spriggans.”

“Wizards deal with unknown dangers all the time!”

“But I don’t always care to help them do it!”

“Sir,” Karanissa said quietly. “If I might point something out?”

Gresh turned to her, then glanced toward the passage to the kitchen. He hoped that Twilfa had Tira back there listening, as she was supposed to. “And what would that be?” he asked.

“While it’s true we don’t know what else the mirror may do in the wrong hands, we know what it does do in its current situation,” she said. “It produces spriggans, and it seems to do so endlessly. Do you want the whole World flooded with them?”

Gresh blinked at her. “Oh, they’re a nuisance, but I’m sure…”

“No,” Karanissa said, cutting him off. “You don’t understand. They’re a serious danger.”

“Oh, now, really…”

“They have existed for six or seven years now, correct?”

“Well, I didn’t see any until much more recently, but it’s been a few years…”

“There are over half a million of them in the World now,” Karanissa said, interrupting again. “The wizards could determine that much. More 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.”