The Inadequate Adept

by Simon Hawke

  "I think he tends to forget that," King Billy replied.

  "Then remind him," said Queen Sandy. "Be assertive!"

  "Suppose he gets angry?"

  "Oh, for heaven's sake, William! What if he does? Exert your authority! You are the king!"

  "True, dearest, but you know how I detest emotional confrontations. They always make my stomach feel queasy."

  "All these petitions should make your stomach feel queasy," she replied. "Each petition is more demanding than the last, and each bears more signatures, as well. If this sort of thing keeps up, soon these petitions will grow into a movement, and then the movement will grow into a revolt. I don't know about you, William, but I have no wish to see my head displayed upon a pike."

  "You exaggerate, my dearest," King Billy said with a smile. "Such a thing could never come to pass. We are quite well protected by our palace guard, you know."

  "How many men make up the palace guard?"

  "One hundred and fifty of our finest soldiers," said King Billy confidently.

  "And how many signatures are on that last petition?" asked Queen Sandy dryly.

  "Hmmm. I fear I see your point," King Billy said. "This really is a most awkward situation. But what would you have me do?"

  "Go to Warrick," said Queen Sandy. "No. On second thought, 'tis past time for you to start acting more kingly. Send for Warrick and order that he come to you with a full accounting of his actions. Command him to tell you what he has done with all those people. Insist upon a complete explanation. Each time the royal sheriff fills the dungeons, Warrick empties them again. What's become of all those prisoners? Aren't you in the least bit curious? And while you're at it, you might rescind some of these new edicts the royal sheriff keeps coming up with. It would show that you have not ignored all those petitions and that you are responsive to the wishes of your people."

  "The royal sheriff wouldn't care for that," King Billy said. "He'd think that I was undermining his authority."

  "He has no authority except that which you give him!"

  "Well, I suppose that's true," King Billy admitted, "but you know how he is when he doesn't get his way. He becomes quite surly and he threatens to resign. He really can be very difficult, you know."

  "Then remove him from his post and appoint another sheriff!"

  "But, Sandy, dearest, he's my own brother!"

  Queen Sandy rolled her eyes and sighed with exasperation. "Well, I can see that this discussion is getting us nowhere. I really don't know what to do with you, William. I've tried, by the gods, I have really tried to talk some sense into you, but despite all of my best efforts, you simply refuse to listen. You seem to care more about what Warrick might think, and what your brother might think, than you do about what your own wife thinks. Well, so be it. Since it seems you care nothing for my advice and my opinions, then there is little point in going on with this. You do what you want, William, I'm going to bed."

  "Now, dearest, don't be upset," King Billy said, getting up and holding his arms out to her. Only instead of the expected hug, he wound up catching the blanket she tossed to him. "What's this?"

  "What do you think? 'Tis your blanket. I wouldn't want you to catch a chill, sleeping on the sofa."

  "The sofa? But, dearest-"

  "Good night, William." She took him by the shoulders, turned him around, and firmly marched him out of the royal bedchamber, shutting the door behind him.

  "Sandy!"

  He heard her bolt the door behind him.

  "Uneasy is the head that wears the crown," King Billy said, shaking his uneasy head with resignation. And with a long and melancholy sigh, he headed for the royal sofa.

  By this point, the reader might be wondering-as was Queen Sandy-about what's been happening to all these people who have been disappearing from the royal dungeons, after being turned over to you-know-who. Never fear, your faithful narrator hasn't forgotten about them and you're about to find out exactly what did happen to them, but first we'll have to backtrack just a bit.

  From the moment Brewster's first time machine materialized in the sky high above the Redwood Forest, deployed its automatic parachute, and floated gently to the ground, it boded ill for anyone who came in contact with it. Perhaps it was simply one of those machines, you know the ones I mean, those which are somehow, mysteriously, inherently evil. Now there are those who will insist that this sort of thinking is utter nonsense, that machines are simply devices, inanimate objects with no personality whatsoever, and in fact, your faithful narrator was once one of these skeptics. However, an unfortunate experience with a motorcycle that purely tried to kill me every time I threw a leg over it-and not just once in a while, mind you, but every single time-changed my thinking on that issue. Some machines are just plain nasty.

  Brewster had trouble with it right from the beginning. At first, it simply wouldn't work right. Then, it worked too well, and too quickly, disappearing on its journey without Brewster. It had drifted for a considerable distance and landed in the center of a road right where Long Bill, Fifer Bob, and Silent Fred were serving their shift, lurking in the hedgerows.

  "What do you think it is?" Fifer Bob said as they slowly circled the strange device.

  "Some sort of magical contraption," Long Bill said knowingly.

  "What makes you think so?" asked Fifer Bob.

  "Well, it came down out of the sky, didn't it?" said Long Bill. "What else could it be?"

  "I don't think we should touch it," Fifer Bob said. "It might be dangerous."

  Silent Fred stood behind him, stroking his red beard thoughtfully. He did a lot of thinking, Silent Fred did. Because he hardly ever spoke, no one was ever quite certain what he was thinking about, but he sure did a lot of it.

  "You think anyone's inside there?" asked Long Bill.

  "Hallo!" shouted Fifer Bob. "Anyone in there?" He waited, then approached a little closer, peering through the plastic bubble. "I don't see anyone inside."

  "Knock on it," said Long Bill.

  "You knock on it," said Fifer Bob.

  "Well, to knock on it, I'd have to touch it, wouldn't I?" Long Bill replied. "You said it could be dangerous."

  "So you want me to knock on it? No, thank you. Use your staff."

  " 'Tis a brand new staff," Long Bill protested.

  Silent Fred neatly solved the problem by stepping up behind Fifer Bob and giving him a shove. Bob cried out as he came in contact with the machine, then pushed himself away from it as if it were burning hot. He spun around to confront Silent Fred, who merely shrugged.

  "Must be okay to touch it," said Long Bill. "Now the question is, what do we do with it?"

  "It must be worth some money," Fifer Bob said.

  "Aye, I suppose we could sell it," said Long Bill, scratching his long jaw. "There's that wizard who lives a few days journey down the road toward Pittsburgh."

  "Blackrune 4?" said Fifer Bob. "But what if he's the one who made it? We couldn't sell a wizard his own property now, could we?"

  "Perhaps not," Long Bill said, "but there may be a reward for finding it. Besides, I do not think he could have made this strange device. He's not much of a wizard, from what I hear."

  "We should be taking this to Shannon," Fifer Bob said.

  "Then we'd have to share the proceeds with the others," Long Bill said. "If we sold it ourselves, and kept quiet about it, we could keep it all."

  "Shannon wouldn't like that," Fifer Bob said. "She'd skin us, she would."

  "Not if she didn't know about it," said Long Bill.

  They exchanged conspiratory glances.

  "Get the cart," Long Bill said.

  After a great deal of grunting and groaning and heaving and a couple of near hernias, they managed to wrestle the machine up onto a cart and take it to the wizard known as Blackrune 4, who promptly cheated them by paying them off with changeling money. (That's the kind that turns into something else after the transaction has occurred. In the case of the three brigands, they found themselves
with a large bag of acorns by the time they returned home, and rather man risk humiliation by admitting they'd been cheated, to say nothing of the considerable risk of bodily harm they would incur if the other brigands found out what they'd done, they simple wrote it off as a bad business transaction and kept their mouths shut.)

  The wizard known as Blackrune 4 had been the next to suffer from the jinxed machine. After trying a whole succession of divination spells in an attempt to discover the purpose of the peculiar apparatus, he managed to stumble onto a spell that tapped into its energy field, activating it by magical remote control. The result was that the machine transported him to Los Angeles without actually going anywhere itself, which meant that he was stranded. Arrested for vagrancy and suspicion of being a graffiti artist, the wizard wound up serving some time in the drunk tank, eventually becoming one of those street people who wander around talking to themselves and gesturing wildly all the time. Stubbornly, Blackrune 4 kept trying to conjure up his spells, only none of them would work. Eventually, he just went batty.

  The next victim of the missing time machine was Blackrune 4's apprentice, who waited a decent length of time before deciding that his master wasn't coming back from wherever he had disappeared to, then took the time machine to the Grand Director of the Sorcerers and Adepts Guild, who questioned him at length as to exactly what Blackrune 4 had done before he disappeared. To make certain the apprentice had it right, he made him step into the machine, then spoke the spell that Blackrune 4 had used. The apprentice vanished, to reappear in New York's Greenwich Village, where after a brief period of confusion, he wound up living with a cute, nineteen-year-old performance artist and singing lead vocals in a thrash rock band. But then, he was young, and as we all know, kids are pretty resilient. So, all told, he didn't come out of it too badly. (In fact, his first album was shipped platinum.)

  After the way the apprentice had vanished into thin air, the Grand Director realized that he had something fairly powerful on his hands, so he embarked upon a long series of cautious experiments. One by one, without bothering to tell King Billy about it, he had prisoners brought up from the royal dungeons and strapped into the time machine, whereupon he spoke the spell and watched to see what happened, each time hoping he could somehow discover exactly how it happened.

  Now, the royal dungeons weren't exactly full to capacity to begin with, much to the royal sheriff's disappointment, for he dearly loved making arrests. As laid-back and mellow as King Billy was, his younger brother, Waylon, was surly and mean-tempered. Even as children, the boys were as different as two boys could possibly be. William liked to feed small animals with bread crumbs and leftovers from his meals. Waylon liked to kill and torture them in a dazzling variety of ways. In other words, he wasn't a very nice lad. And as he grew older, he didn't get any better. In fact, he got worse.

  Waylon resented the fact that his brother was king due merely to the accident of having been born first. It wasn't fair, thought Waylon. And quite probably, it wasn't. Billy was born only a year earlier and he automatically got to be the king, while Waylon didn't automatically get to be anything. Billy had made him royal sheriff, but he could just as well have decided to make him nothing and there wouldn't have been anything Waylon could do about it. But then, that's the way life is. One of the most pernicious ideas ever foisted upon a gullible public is the notion that life ought somehow to be fair. It isn't, and nothing says it should be. (Trust me, I looked it up. Couldn't find it anywhere.) Unfortunately, people keep going through life thinking that it should be fair, which results in a lot of really frustrated and unhappy people. And Sheriff Waylon was certainly no exception.

  The trouble was, he didn't really have a lot to do. With King Billy's laissez faire attitude toward government, it was actually quite difficult to get arrested in Pittsburgh. You pretty much had to do something fairly nasty. Stealing was against the law, of course, but one actually had to be caught stealing, and The Stealers Guild could provide a number of very helpful pamphlets to show cutpurses and alleymen how to avoid being caught. Most large cities were like that. Simply because some activity happened to be against the law, that did not mean that there couldn't be a perfectly legal guild devoted to the practitioners of that activity. The Stealers Guild was a good case in point.

  The Stealers Guild met in The Stealers Tavern, on the corner of Cutthroat and Garotte, a popular watering hole for all types of questionable characters of questionable character. In fact, Sheriff Waylon hung out there quite a lot. He was on a first-name basis with the tavern keeper, all the serving wenches, and most of the regulars, as well. These regulars were all a bunch of criminals, of course, but unless Sheriff Waylon could actually catch them in the act, he couldn't touch them. (Unless, of course, he could find witnesses to testify against them, but since there was no such thing as a Witness Relocation and Protection Guild, there wasn't very much chance of that.)

  "Good evening, Sheriff," the regulars would say to Waylon. "Arrest anyone today?"

  Sheriff Waylon would scowl and hammer his fist upon the bar and say, "If the law had any teeth in it, by the gods, I'd arrest the whole bloody useless lot of ya!"

  "Aye, 'tis a terrible thing," the regulars agreed, nodding sympathetically. "Here, have yourself a drink, Sheriff. 'Twill make you feel better."

  And so the days went for Sheriff Waylon, sitting in The Stealers Tavern and suffering the humiliation of having all the criminals buy him drinks, then staggering home in a numb, drunken stupor, where he would have to listen to his wife's monotonous harangue. "If you'd only been born a lousy year earlier, I could have been Queen! But, noooooo...."

  However, all that changed when Waylon's big brother, the king, came to the Grand Director's alabaster tower to protest his minions snatching people off the streets for his experiments, which had brought about the first in a long stream of angry petitions. Their solution to the problem had been to use the prisoners in the royal dungeons, instead of people abducted off the streets, which had seemed reasonable to King Billy, only the royal dungeons had already been depleted. However, the Grand Director had a solution to that problem, as well. Why not introduce a few new edicts, he suggested, to tighten up on miscreants and thereby obtain a few more prisoners?

  "'Twas an excellent idea, too," said Warrick. "The streets were teeming with criminals, and 'twas time something was done about it."

  Don't interrupt. And wait your turn.

  "You cannot avoid me by referring to me as the Grand Director or as you-know-who," said Warrick. "I know what you're up to."

  Look, do you mind? I'm doing some narrative exposition here.

  "Well, then, get on with it. The tale is beginning to drag."

  Suddenly, an earthen vessel on a shelf where Teddy was dusting became dislodged. It fell and struck Warrick on the head, shattering and knocking him unconscious.

  "Ooops," said the troll.

  Now then, where were we? Ah, yes, we were discussing the introduction of new edicts to clamp down on lawlessness in Pittsburgh and keep a fresh supply of prisoners flowing into the royal dungeons. Not wanting to be troubled with thinking up new edicts by himself, the king agreed to let the royal sheriff handle that extra bit of paperwork, and that was when Sheriff Waylon truly came into his own.

  With the king's naive carte blanche, Waylon devised a whole slew of unprecedented, new, repressive edicts, the better to ensure that there would be more laws for the populace to break. With Waylon's inherent talents for flowery legalese and obfuscation, these edicts were written in such a way that hardly anyone could understand them, which practically guaranteed numerous arrests. The effect this had on Waylon was dramatic. Almost overnight, he changed completely.

  He became imbued with a new sense of purpose as his deputies started making more arrests, and he felt a great deal happier, as well. He began to comb his hair and trim his beard and, in general, pay more attention to his overall appearance. Even his wife noticed the change.

  "Is that a new suit?" she asked
him.

  "Aye. I've bought a brand-new wardrobe, all in black velvet, trimmed with scarlet. 'Twill be my new look. Very dashing, don't you think?"

  " Tis been a long time since you bought me a new dress."

  "What's wrong with the old one?"

  "What was wrong with your old suit?" she countered.

  " Twas worn and threadbare. And not very stylish. The royal sheriff has to look the part, you know, for people to respect the office."

  "What about the royal sheriff's wife?"

  "Her office is to scrub the floors and do the cooking. She needs no new dress for that."

  "Well, aren't we high and mighty all of a sudden? Scrub the floors and cook, is it? And I, who could have had a score of royal servants to do the cooking and the cleaning and new dresses by the closetful if you'd been born before your brother! But noooo, instead of queen, I'm Mrs. Royal Sheriff, thank you very much, and must keep inside for shame of being seen in my old rags, while my husband dresses like a bloody peacock and carouses all night in the taverns! Respect for your office, is it? I'll show you respect, you oaf!"

  "Oh, by the way, my love, have you heard about the brand-new edict yet? The one concerning shrewish wives?"

  "No," she ventured cautiously.

  "Just signed into law this morning," Waylon said cheerfully. "Any husband complaining of a shrewish wife may have his complaint investigated and if the claim's discovered to be true, the offender is dragged off to the royal dungeons."

  "And who does the investigating?" she asked uncertainly.

  "Why, the royal sheriff, of course."

  "I see," she replied. " Tis a most handsome suit, my husband. What would you like for dinner?"

  Eventually, word began to spread that the prisoners in the royal dungeons were being taken to the alabaster tower of Warrick the White, from which they never again emerged. Exactly what was done with them there was something no one knew for certain, but that only whetted the public appetite for fresh rumors, which were always available from the local rumor mongers. Almost every street corner in Pittsburgh had one now, because it was a sellers market, and the Rumor Mongers Guild was handing out fresh licenses as quickly as they could have the scrollmakers make them up.