The Inadequate Adept

by Simon Hawke

  "It's never failed me before," the pot said.

  "Yes, and look where it's gotten you," said Brewster.

  "Aye, well... sad to say, 'tis a point that I can ill dispute," the pot replied.

  Brewster stared at the enchanted werepot prince and marveled. "I still can't get over it," he said. "What's happened to you defies all known science. How a human being's molecular structure can be altered in such a radical fashion, not to mention the fact that you can speak, when you have no visible means of doing so... it's absolutely mind-boggling."

  " 'Tis magic, Doc," the pot replied. "And 'tis in the laws of magic, and not your science, that you will find the solution that you seek. And I do earnestly hope you find it."

  "One way or another, Brian, I'll find a way to turn you back, permanently," Brewster said. "I just don't know how, yet. It'll be the greatest challenge of my career. But if a man found a way to do this to you, then there has to be a way for me to find out how to reverse the spell."

  "Then 'tis magic you shall need to learn, Doc," the pot said. "And from being kept by a succession of adepts- who, admittedly, failed to restore me-I've nevertheless learned a good deal about sorcery. I shall help you to the full extent of my abilities."

  "Yes, well, it's past time I started doing something about that," said Brewster, as he pulled on his leather breeches and reached for his shirt. "I know I promised that I'd try to help you, but I've simply been so busy with the projects at the keep that I haven't had much time to devote to your problem. You've been very patient, Brian, and you deserve better."

  He could almost hear the shrug in the pot's voice as it replied, " Tis a long time I've been the way I am, Doc. I can suffer it a while longer, if I must."

  "I only wish Shannon had your attitude," said Brewster. "She's starting to become a problem. I think I know what the trouble is, too." He paused in lacing up his shirt. "Until I came along, Shannon was in charge and her leadership was undisputed. Of course, I would never presume to dispute her leadership, but at the same time, I can see where she'd perceive her position as being of secondary importance ever since I arrived."

  "Which is as it should be with a woman and a man," said the pot.

  "No, Brian, you're wrong," said Brewster. "Especially when it comes to a woman like Shannon. If she truly perceived me as her rival, how long do you think I'd last? I'd never survive a test of strength against her. And let's face it, without the brigands, we wouldn't be making any kind of progress here at all. I need to find some way to get her more involved. And at the same time, I promised her greater profit than she could achieve by stealing. I'm going to have to make good on that promise, and I'm going to have to do it soon, or else she'll take matters into her own hands and that'll be the end of it."

  He slipped into his tweed sport coat and stood there, looking down at himself. He spread his arms out in a shrug. "Don't I look a sight?" he said. He was wearing rough, brown leather breeches and a loose-fitting shirt that laced up at the chest. On his feet, he wore soft leather boots. The houndstooth Harris tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches and brown leather buttons didn't quite go with the outfit, but his gray flannel trousers had worn out and his white Oxford shirt was soiled and frayed. "This kind of life is rather hard on clothes," he observed wryly.

  "I think the wool doublet looks rather dashing," the pot replied. "Except for where you had to patch it where the sleeves had worn out at the elbows."

  "They're not worn out," said Brewster. "The patches are really just for decoration. It's just the style."

  "You mean that where you come from, the fashion is to make the clothing look worn out?" asked the pot.

  "Well... I suppose it is," said Brewster. "The first thing the kids do when they buy a new pair of pants is rip the knees out."

  "Why?" asked the pot.

  "I really don't know," said Brewster with a frown. "Anyway, let's go see how things are coming along. Maybe I'll come up with some ideas about where Shannon could fit in. Unless I can get her involved in something that can put her abilities to good use and make her as enthusiastic as the others, she's going to keep feeling left out and she'll wind up growing resentful. And that's one lady whose resentment I would not want to incur."

  He tucked the chamberpot under his arm and went downstairs. The little peregrine bush followed like a shadow, scrabbling after him on its twisted roots.

  It was still quite early, but there was already a great deal of activity on the grounds of the keep. As Brewster crossed the great hall on the first floor of his tower, he was greeted by the brigands already gathered there, who rose to their feet respectfully as he came in.

  "Good morning, Doc," said Fuzzy Tom, pausing in his ingestion of copious quantities of scrambled eggs to stand and incline his great, hairy head and face toward Brewster as he passed. The gesture was almost, but not quite, a bow. His greeting was echoed by Lonesome John and Winsome Wil, who likewise stood and inclined their heads respectfully.

  "Morning, Tom, John, Wil," said Brewster, hastening past them to the kitchen, so they could sit back down and finish their breakfast.

  He'd done nothing to encourage this formality and, in fact, he'd done his best to discourage it, but there seemed to be little he could do about it. It was, doubtless, Bloody Bob who was responsible.

  The aging brigand had once been a famous warrior, serving under kings and dukes and princes, and it was in such service that he learned courtly behavior and the proper way to act around a liege lord. After Brewster had restored his sight by making a crude prescription visor for him, the brawny old ex-warrior had formally sworn allegiance to him and appointed himself Brewster's "loyal retainer." Reverting to his old habits, Bloody Bob had taken to addressing Brewster as "milord" and even dropping to one knee in his presence, a practice he gave up with some reluctance only when Brewster insisted he desist. However, he continued to display at least a token formality toward his "liege," something the other brigands had begun to emulate.

  It was hardly the sort of thing that Shannon could fail to notice and Brewster was concerned that she might take it the wrong way. She was, after all, the leader of the brigands and she had won her position the hard way. Brewster didn't want her to think that he was trying to usurp her place. If Shannon started to regard him as a serious threat to her position, she was liable to take matters into her own hands and Brewster was under no illusions as to what would happen if that came to pass. The results, for him, were liable to be fatal.

  He came into the kitchen, where Pikestaff Pat's wife, Calamity Jane, was busy supervising the preparation of the meals for the day. The kitchen, they had discovered, was the safest place for her. As her name implied, she was the most accident-prone woman Brewster had ever seen. Allowing her to wander about the construction site on the grounds of the keep was a sure fire way to guarantee disaster.

  If there was a ladder within ten miles, Jane would find a way to trip over it and knock down whoever had climbed up it. If there was a bucket placed on some scaffolding, somehow it would contrive to fall at the exact moment that she passed, and in such a way that it would spill its contents all over her and wind up on her head, causing her to stumble and knock into something else, which would start a chain reaction of injuries among the workers that would bring everything to a halt. In the kitchen, however, her jinx did not seem to affect her for some reason and she was completely in her element, cooking up meals that would rival those served in the finest restaurants in London.

  Saucy Cheryl was over at the cutting table, along with Juicy Jill and a couple of other fancy girls from Dirty Mary's Emporium and Hostelry, dressing out the spams for the soap-making operation. She saw Brewster come in, grinned, and waved a bloody cleaver at him. Jane stopped cutting up the vegetables to bring him his morning cup of tea. She handed him the steaming mug, watching his face with an anxious expression as he took a tentative first sip.

  "Very good, Jane," Brewster said with a smile. "Thank you."

  "Have I got it yet, Do
c?" she asked hopefully.

  "Well... no, not quite," Brewster replied, and when he saw the disappointed expression.on her face, he quickly added, "but you're getting closer all the time."

  She smiled, satisfied that she was making progress, and went back to slicing up the veggies. Jane had set herself what seemed to be an impossible task, namely, trying to duplicate English breakfast tea without access to any tea leaves. It had started when Brewster once remarked, rather wistfully, that he missed having good English tea for breakfast and Jane had decided then and there that she'd find a way to duplicate the beverage.

  She took it as a challenge to her culinary and homeopathic skills, and she kept experimenting with all sorts of strange herbal infusions. She had managed to come up with a rather pleasant and tasty brew that was somewhat reminiscent of black Ceylon tea, but there was something about the taste that still wasn't quite right. As a result of her efforts, she had developed a number of recipies for blends of herbal teas, which she kept in ceramic jars on the kitchen shelves, and having once seen her crushing up some peculiar-looking beetles with a mortar and pestle, Brewster had decided that he was not going to inquire about any of her ingredients.

  The brigands were now taking daily tea breaks in the afternoon, when Jane would brew up a number of different blends and serve them in steaming pots in the main hall of the keep. They had helped her name them, too, and some of the more popular blends were Dragon's Breath Brew, Fairy Mist, and a tea that Jane herself became quite partial to and drank throughout the day, which her husband, Pikestaff Pat, had christened Jane's Addiction. It seemed to make her very giddy and Brewster wasn't sure what she put in it, but the one time he had tried it, he found himself starting to hallucinate and had avoided it ever since. Still, with all these teas being produced, Brewster thought there was a good chance they might find a way to market them, which would be yet another potential source of profit for the brigands.

  They now had a number of projects underway that would produce marketable commodities. There were the "many-bladed knives," the first batch of which were almost ready for assembly. There was the soap-making operation, and Mick's "O'Fallon Stoves," and then there was the still, which was producing a good yield of peregrine wine-more properly, a sort of moonshine whiskey brewed from the boiled roots of peregrine bushes. Mick said it was a lot more potent now, something Brewster was willing to take his word for, as the old, cold-brewed stuff had been enough to render him nearly comatose.

  The big question now was how would they market these commodities? The little village of Brigand's Roost was much too small to provide a proper market for their production, and most of the residents were already involved in their new cottage industry. The nearest city, according to Bloody Bob, was miles away, and Brewster did not think Shannon would react too well to the idea of her brigands being used as teamsters to haul the goods to market. Quite aside from which, every one of them had a price on his head, which could make deliveries rather precarious.

  Developing a market posed yet another problem. There wasn't much that they could do in the way of advertising except, perhaps, for putting up some placards. Their business would have to depend primarily on word-of-mouth advertising. And that would take time.

  So there it was again, thought Brewster. Time. The eternal enemy. No matter how he looked at it, it would take time to develop a market, and time for the profits to materialize, time he didn't really have. As far as Shannon was concerned, this "magical manufacturing process" of his was a bit too much like work. Nor would it take too long before the rest of the brigands began to realize that manufacturing, for all the wonders it produced, was remarkably similar to labor. And at that point, he might well wind up encountering the first concerted labor action in the twenty-seven kingdoms.

  The other problem was, of course, that all this left him with no opportunity to search for his missing time machine. It could be anywhere. He hadn't really seen anything of this new world yet. He simply couldn't get away. Somehow, somewhere, there had to be a solution to these problems.

  He went outside, past the boiling kettles where Robie McMurphy and Pikestaff Pat were rendering the spam fat into soap, and around the outside of the keep to the riverbank. Behind him, Thorny rustled along in his wake, like a faithful puppy dog with leaves.

  Brewster walked along the riverbank, thinking to himself, trying to come up with some solutions to the problems that he faced. At a bend in the stream, the water rushed through a small ravine, where the rock outcroppings poked out of the clay banks and made a sort of miniature canyon. There was a pool down there, where the brigands often bathed, and Brewster climbed down to it and sat upon one of the large flat rocks above the water. He reached down and picked up a handful of pebbles from the clay slope and proceeded to toss them into the water as he contemplated this strange state of affairs.

  Absently, he reached down again to pick up a few more stones to toss and his hand came up clutching a blocky lump of clay. He stared at it curiously and broke it up in his palm. It came apart in little square chunks.

  "Doc! Doc, where are you?"

  He looked up toward the sound. "Over here, Mick!" he called out.

  A few moments later, the powerfully built leprechaun came bustling up, pushing his way through the underbrush. He stood up at the top of the small ravine, slightly out of breath.

  "Doc?"

  "Down here, Mick."

  "What are you doin' down there?"

  "Thinking," Brewster replied, as Mick clambered down to him. He gazed thoughtfully at the mineral material in his palm.

  "I came to show you the first finished blades," said Mick, plopping down on the rock outcropping beside him. He seemed very excited as he reached into his belt pouch and withdrew several gleaming knife blades, as yet unassembled. He handed them to Brewster.

  "Well?" he said anxiously. "What do you think?"

  They were larger than the blades in Brewster's Swiss Army knife. Larger blades were slightly easier to make and Mick had thought that they would be more useful and appealing than the smaller blades. The main cutting blade was six inches long and the smaller one measured four inches. There was also a three-inch awl blade and a six-inch saw blade, as well. They were keeping it simple, using just those four blades, to begin with. They were the end result of weeks of unceasing toil on Mick's part, and he was justifiably proud of them.

  To produce the steel, Brewster had designed a large, double-action bellows powered by a belt running off the water-wheel shaft. Mick, Robie, and Bloody Bob had painstakingly constructed it to Brewster's specifications, making it out of leather and a large wood frame. It took up almost the entire room where the grinding stones were, so the milling room of the keep had now also become Mick's second smithy.

  The bellows functioned like a piston, pushing air through the furnace in both directions through a ceramic pipe that came up around the crucible and vented through the ceiling. To turn it off, it was necessary to disconnect the crude, yet effective, rosined belt made from plaited vines. Pig iron was heated in the crucible to the melting point, and the impurities were then removed by adding lime to the molten iron, which resulted in a huge flash of smoke and flame going up the smokestack. When the smoke dissipated, air was blown over the mixture to add carbon dioxide and when there were only small flames left burning atop the molten iron, it was poured out into the molds, where it solidified into steel.

  Without nickel, molybdenum, and chromium, they could not make stainless steel, of course, but what they did get was a fairly good grade of steel that would not rust if it was kept oiled and properly cared for. Mick had originally balked at the idea of using coal, because he said it made "dirty iron," metal with impurities. He had always used charcoal in his foundry, but Brewster showed him how to make coke by preburning coal, burying it, and burning it for a couple of days in a reduced oxygen atmosphere. The impurities were thereby burned off, resulting in coke, which burned hotter and simplified the making of steel.

  Once the ste
el was solidified in the molds, the next step was to take the blades out for polishing and sharpening, which was done before the tempering process, so that the crystals wouldn't break when the blades were sharpened, thereby enabling them to hold an edge better. The blades were then heated until they were red-hot and plunged into oil. Finally, they were wiped down and polished on a wheel run by a leather belt. The wheel itself was made of iron, with leather glued to it for burling. Brewster held the end result in his hands. All that remained now was for the pieces to be riveted together with the handles and the spacers.

  "Beautiful, Mick," said Brewster, admiring his handiwork. "An excellent job. Outstanding. Very nice, indeed." He gave the blades back to Mick.

  Mick beamed with pride. "The best blades I've ever forged," he said with a huge grin. "Truly, Doc, your magical knowledge has improved my craft beyond all my expectations! Think of the swords and daggers I shall be able to make now! S'trewth, there will be no armorer anywhere in the twenty-seven kingdoms to compare with Mick O'Fallon!"

  "I'm glad, Mick," Brewster said. "It was the very least I could do for all the kindness you've shown me."

  "Aye, and 'tis the better part of the bargain I've received," said Mick. "Sure and 'twas a great day for Mick O'Fallon when you arrived in your magic chariot."

  "And I have yet to find the one that's missing," Brewster said.

  "Never fear, Doc, 'twill turn up. You'll see. You've got Rory flying over the forest, keepin' his dragon eye out for it, and he's told the fairies to be on the lookout for it, too. We'll find it, never you mind."

  "I hope so, Mick," said Brewster. "I certainly hope so."

  "Aye, well, in the meantime, things are coming along splendidly," the leprechaun replied. "Now all we need to do is decide what material we'll be using for the handles. Gold, perhaps? Or maybe silver? Faith, and that's all been done before, though. For such a wondrous many-bladed knife, the handles must be something truly special and unique. Unicorn horn, perhaps? Of course, that wouldn't be in plentiful supply...."