Gresh turned to look at the spriggan that had crept up behind him. “Then I’m right?” he asked.

The spriggan turned up an empty hand. “Not know,” it said. “But sounds right.”

“So you’re just an image of a spriggan that looked in a mirror in another world?”

“Think so, yes.”

“That’s why the Restorative and the Rectification didn’t do anything,” Gresh said, as he continued to work out the details in his own mind. “Because the spell didn’t go wrong, it just went differently, so there wasn’t anything to restore or rectify. There’s no intelligence involved, just an enchanted object, so Javan’s Geas can’t do anything-nobody is making our spriggans, they just happen whenever a real spriggan looks at the mirror in the other world.”

“I’m still not sure I understand,” Karanissa said. “How did you figure this out? Why is this copy of me here?”

“She’s what gave it away,” Gresh said. “When I saw she was smaller than you. The reflections in a mirror are smaller than the originals because of perspective-they’re reduced in size, the amount depending on how far from the mirror the original is. She’s smaller than you because she’s a reflection-or really, a reflection of a reflection. It’s that second step that’s why she isn’t reversed.”

Karanissa stared at him in annoyance, while the imitation appeared politely interested. “Gresh, what are you talking about?” the original demanded.

He sighed; it was all so obvious to him now he didn’t see why Karanissa hadn’t grasped it. “When I used the Spell of Reversal,” he said, “the direction of the spell reversed. Instead of creating solid images of creatures from the spriggans’ world in our World, the magic began creating solid images from our World in the spriggans’ world. Every living thing that looked in our mirror during that half-hour or so had a mirror-image copy climb out of the other mirror, the mirror in the spriggans’ world. I looked in the mirror, you looked in it, that spriggan we tried to toss back in-copies of us all must have climbed out in the spriggans’ world. A copy of you was still there in the spriggans’ world when the reversal wore off, and it looked in the mirror, so a copy of the copy climbed out here.” He pointed at the duplicate Karanissa. “That’s her-a mirror image of a mirror image. She doesn’t have a name or any memory because she really didn’t exist until the mirror reflected her into being. She and the spriggans have no odor because smells don’t reflect.” He considered for a moment, then said, “I’m a little surprised that there’s no image of me appearing. I must have been reflected into the other world, too. Maybe my duplicate-or duplicates, since I looked in the mirror more than once while it was reversed…” He stopped, and looked down at the mirror, but nothing was trying to climb out of it; that was a relief. He had been momentarily concerned that half a dozen copies of Karanissa and himself might appear.

According to his theory, in some alien world where spriggans were apparently the dominant form of life, images of Karanissa and himself had climbed out of a mirror. He wondered what was happening to those images, what they were doing, what the real spriggans thought of them. Would they be pests, the way the spriggan images were? They were almost certainly indestructible, like spriggans-after all, you can’t hurt an image; it isn’t really there, it’s in the mirror, and only appears to be anywhere else. Spriggans were indestructible because a reflection can’t be harmed by striking the reflection itself. A reflection is destroyed when the mirror it’s in is destroyed. That’s why the spriggans thought they would die if the mirror was destroyed. The mirror’s enchantment somehow made the reflections seem solid and able to interact with the real world when the original was no longer looking in the mirror, but they were still just images.

When the spell had been suspended but not broken, when the mirror had been in the sphere where wizardry didn’t work, that had changed, and the reflected spriggans had somehow had their own independent and vulnerable existence. That was one part of the spell that Gresh didn’t entirely understand, but then, wizardry was a chaotic and complex thing. In any case, the magic was working properly now, and the mirror’s creations, whether spriggan or human, were all part of the mirror itself, and therefore couldn’t be harmed as long as the mirror wasn’t harmed.

That would make those reflected people in the other world harder to manage.

The reflections of Karanissa and himself were presumably much larger than spriggans, unless there were some weird factor he hadn’t thought of involved. Even if they weren’t playfully troublesome, like spriggans-and the Karanissa-image standing a few feet away didn’t seem to be-they must be a nuisance just because of their size. It seemed that he and Karanissa had inadvertently unleashed a brief plague of giants on that unsuspecting other world.

That mirror in the other world was presumably indoors somewhere-mirrors generally were, and if it had been out in the open, wouldn’t they have occasionally had creatures other than spriggans climbing out of it, during these past few years? The rooms and corridors would have been built with spriggans in mind. Real spriggans were presumably somewhat larger than their Ethsharitic images, but not that much larger. Those duplicates of Karanissa and himself must have been jammed into spaces far too small for them, much as the spriggans had been when Tobas shut the mirror up in a box.

The spriggans had eventually burst that box. Those reflected Greshes and Karanissas had probably exploded an entire building. The real spriggans were probably pretty upset about that.

The reason only one Karanissa had been reflected back might be that she was still wedged against the mirror somehow; she hadn’t yet climbed out of the wreckage and was blocking the others.

That would also explain why no more spriggans had emerged yet.

Assuming, of course, that his theory was right, and he wasn’t just building up nonsense. Maybe what had really happened was that throwing all those spells at the mirror had finally changed the nature of the enchantment completely, into something unrelated to spriggans.

“Karanissa,” he said. “You said you can sense changes in the spell?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Is it back to its original form now?”

“As far as I can tell, yes.”

That fit with his theory-but he could still be wrong. He didn’t think he was, but he had to keep the possibility in mind.

If he was right, he still had to figure out what to do about it. The Wizards’ Guild wanted the mirror destroyed, but the spriggans didn’t. It appeared that destroying the mirror wasn’t as simple as he might have hoped. Breaking it into pieces made matters worse, and dragonfire hadn’t harmed it, but at least it wasn’t as indestructible as the images it created.

If it were smashed to the point that it ceased to function as a mirror and no longer reflected anything, that would probably do the job-grinding it to dust might to be sufficient, and if they could get it to the wizardry-dead area and grind it to dust there, that would almost certainly do it. Getting it to the dead area was the challenge, with thousands of spriggans determined to prevent it.

Grinding it to dust anywhere other than the dead area did not seem like a good idea; there would inevitably be intermediate stages when the spriggans would be multiplied, and he could not ignore the hideous possibility that every single glittering grain might still serve as a functional mirror as far as the spell was concerned.

If they ground it to dust in the dead area, what was to prevent spriggans or other creatures from someday bringing out those still-enchanted specks, each of which might function as a mirror? That was a nightmarish possibility. Tracking down a particle of dust and dealing with it would be far more difficult than locating an intact hand-mirror.