"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 9 - The Spriggan Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

there were dozens of them running around loose in the castle, and some of them came through to the
World with us. They stole the mirror so we couldn’t break it and hid it somewhere, and it’s been popping
out spriggans ever since.”
Gresh stared at her, considering this, keeping his face expressionless.
Spriggans had started appearing a few years ago, without explanation; they had just suddenly
been there, getting underfoot, poking into everything, babbling nonsense. It was just one or two at first,
but they had gradually been growing more common. Divinations had not, so far as he knew, been able to
determine their origin, although everyone was fairly certain they were a product of wizardry. He had
never before heard anything about spriggans coming from an enchanted mirror. They were, as Dina had
said, drawn to magic in general, and wizardry in particular—but, annoyingly, most magic did not work on
them.
That was typical of wizardry; other spells almost never worked properly on something that was
already enchanted.
And here was this person, claiming that someone named Derry—no, someone named
Tobas—had created them accidentally, by miscasting Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm.
Gresh knew a good deal about how the Phantasm worked. It was his business, as a wizards’
supplier, to know as much as possible about all wizardry, so he made a point of coaxing as much
information as he could from not just Dina, but every other wizard he sold to. He did not think he had
actually picked up any Guild secrets yet, but he certainly knew more about wizardry than the vast
majority of people.
The Phantasm was an easy spell, one many wizards had learned before they had finished the third
year of apprenticeship. Who was this Tobas who had botched it so spectacularly?
But that wasn’t entirely fair, he told himself. Dina had told him that if a spell went wrong, there
was no way to predict what it would do. It might just do nothing, like her ruined spell of the night before,
or it might do a variant of the intended spell, or it might do something completely different, and the effect
might be utterly out of proportion. The famous Tower of Flame in the Small Kingdoms had supposedly
been created when someone sneezed while performing a simple fire-lighting spell, after all. Perhaps this
spriggan-generating mirror was the result of just as innocent a mistake.
“When did this happen?” he asked.
“5221,” Karanissa replied. “Some time in Leafcolor, or possibly at the very end of Harvest.”
“Six and a half years ago, going on seven.” That was well before Gresh had ever heard of
spriggans, so that fit the facts. “Why are you only looking for the mirror now?”
“We were busy.” She turned up an empty palm. “And we thought the spriggans were harmless.
And we didn’t know the mirror would produce so many. At first we didn’t think it would produce any,
once it was out of the castle.”
“Just who is ‘we’? You and your husband, or are others involved?”
“My husband and his other wife and I.”
Other wife? The husband staying with the baby while Karanissa saw to business suddenly made
sense. “And your husband is this wizard named Tobas of Telven, then?”
“That’s right.”
“You hadn’t mentioned that he had another wife.”
“It wasn’t relevant.”
“She wasn’t involved in creating the mirror?”
“No. She’s not a magician.”
Gresh nodded and inquired no further about that, although he was curious. Other people’s family
arrangements were not his business.
Magical objects sometimes were, though. “And you want me to find this spriggan- generating
mirror for you.”
“Yes. You come highly recommended; Telurinon and Kaligir both spoke well of you.”
Once again Gresh found himself staring silently at the woman for a moment before he spoke.