Seamus felt the warm sun on his face for the first time in a
long time. Dirk was with him at the top of Lugosi’s tower, completely rebuilt
by the dwarves only the night prior.
“A portal… you mean like a doorway?” Seamus asked.
“Yes,” Dirk said.
Seamus was only familiar with little magic. Little spells he’d learned to help him evade capture by humans. The concept of opening a doorway in time and space was a new concept to Seamus, and Dirk could see that in his mind.
“A doorway to where? Hell?” Seamus asked.
“Maybe,” Dirk said, “though when I think about it, I highly doubt that. If Lugosi wanted to go to Hell, he’d kill himself. Damned as he is.”
“Then where?” Seamus pressed.
“I don’t know,” Dirk replied, “I’ll have to think about it as the nights go by.”
“I thought you said we don’t have much time!” Seamus said.
“I know I said we have less than a month,” Dirk said, “but I also happen to know that we may have enough time to divine Lugosi’s plan and stop him. Maybe kill him.”
“But that is a conversation for another time,” Dirk continued, “the sun is up and I’m tired. We need to go to sleep for tomorrow night’s work.”
Dirk began walking down the open stairway at the top of the tower. Seamus took a last look at the greenery before following.
Seamus and Dirk had walked down the tower’s spiral staircase in silence. It was a long silence, too, as both Dirk’s office and the leprechauns’ fermentarium were both beneath ground and the tower was already very high above ground, and everybody slept where they worked.
Dirk and Seamus passed by the unlocked and uninhabited jail cell, which marked ground level.
Dirk considered what newfound mood the vampires might be in, then considered the leprechauns’ collective health and safety.
“I’ll see you to your room,” Dirk said to Seamus as they passed Dirk’s office.
The two had gotten to the fermentarium, Seamus opened the door. Most of the leprechauns had been sprawled out on fur hides scattered amongst the barrels.
“Where’s Patrick?” Seamus asked, concerned.
One groggy voice responded from the dark, it was Nollaig.
“He’s in the distill’ry,” Nollaig said, then lowered his head back down onto the fur.
Seamus looked at Dirk, Dirk looked at Seamus.
The two continued one floor down to the distillery.
Seamus opened the door to the distillery to find Patrick peeing in a bucket.
“What are ye doing?” Seamus asked, catching Patrick off guard.
Patrick, startled, sprayed just a little on the floor before very hastily buttoning up.
“I was, ah...” Patrick was trying to think of any clever lie he could say, but came up empty handed.
“Dist’lling my own urine,” Patrick finished.
“Pat…” Seamus said as Dirk hobbled into the room towards the still.
“Any luck making yehr so called ‘superpiss’?” Seamus asked.
Dirk inspected what little salty powder that Patrick had extracted from the still.
“Nay, not so much,” Patrick said, “I was thinkin’ maybe I could take the dist’llate and add it back into fresh urine. Mate work that wee.”
“No,” Dirk said, “we could do much better than that.”
“Whatdya mean?” Patrick asked, “How do ye propose we make superpess? All we get out of the still is that there salt.”
“Not quite salt, Patrick,” Dirk said, “You’ve isolated phosphorus.”
Seamus blinked. He thought he’d never hear that word again since being lectured on it by Darcy.
“And what are we supposed to do with phosphorus?” Patrick asked.
Dirk considered how best to explain chemistry to an alcoholic leprechaun who tries to isolate super-urine when he’s supposed to be sleeping.
“We blow things up,” Dirk said.
* * *
Dirk, Seamus and Patrick descended the spiral staircase toward the pipeshop in the tower’s basement. Dirk was the first one through the doorway at the stairway’s terminus. The pipeshop was quiet. The machinery, the forges and the dwarves were all dormant and the torches were extinguished.
Faint daylight descended the elevator shaft, creating an ambient glow for the very center of the shop. Seamus saw the round, iron plate in the floor that had been impacted by a limestone block only a dozen hours prior. The black, slightly rusty metal was about an inch thick, and was no longer a flat circle. Instead, it had a single, large dent in it that tipped a portion of the outer rim upward a few degrees.
Next to the warped, iron plate in the floor was a trap door. Torch in one hand, Dirk opened the door by pulling on the iron hasp opposite the hinges. Seamus saw that the trap door revealed stairs that lead even deeper into the ground beneath the tower. Most of the rooms in the tower that Seamus had spent time in were beneath ground level. The deepest room, Seamus thought, had been the pipeshop, and why not? That’s how far down the elevator shaft went. Seamus hadn’t realized that the dwarves had been working both above and below the room they were presently sleeping in.
Torchlight ablaze on his face, Dirk gazed at the two leprechauns only briefly, then descended into the trap door. Seamus and Patrick followed. The stone steps, Seamus noticed, were not as neatly cut as the stairs that circumnavigated the tower’s elevator shaft. As he descended into the door himself, Seamus noticed a crescent shaped crack of ambient light emanating from the ceiling. The iron plate in the floor of the pipeshop was an access hatch for this previously unexplored work zone. These new stairs, instead of forming a spiral, angled steeply down in one direction.
“This is where the Dverger cut their stone, then?” Seamus whispered.
“Yes,” Dirk replied, “And they continue to dig.”
“Why?” Seamus asked, “I thought they had finished rebuilding the tower.”
“They have,” Dirk said, “but Lugosi needs them to dig.”
The trio had reached the bottom of the steep stairs. Dirk’s single torch only illuminated so much of the rock cavern that they had entered. Not a cavern, Seamus thought, an underground rock quarry. Dirk followed the roughly cut rock wall several paces, gliding the fingers of his free hand over the stony surface. Eventually Dirk stopped as his torch illuminated a vein of yellow that was embedded in the rock wall. The yellow seam in the wall was shaped like the straggled strands of a lightning bolt, permanently fixed in the rock wall.
“Hold this,” Dirk said as he handed the torch to Seamus and pulled a small rock pick out of his belt. The rock pick looked almost like a toy hammer. Using the rock pick, Dirk approached the irregular stripe of yellow rock and carved out chunks of the material, collecting it in his free hand.
“What is it?” Seamus asked.
“Sulfur,” Dirk responed, “Brimstone.”
“Is thess what the dwarves are digging for?” Patrick asked.
“No, they’re looking for something else,” Dirk replied, “We just happen to be lucky enough to have found this vein of sulfur in the quarry.”
Dirk stuffed the handful of yellow rock into his shirt pocket.
“This should do,” the elf said, “We’re done here. Back up stairs.”
* * *
“Keep… the torch, away,” Dirk said with careful emphasis.
Dirk had arranged his ingredients into 3 separate piles on one of the distillery’s work benches. The yellow sulfur rock reminded Seamus of a pile of finely crumbled cheese curds. Next to the sulfur was pile of what looked like salt. Saltpeter, Dirk would insist. Third was a blackened pile of charcoal powder that Dirk had scraped from an unlit torch.
Dirk was adding each ingredient to perfectly balanced scale, then making recordings of his measurements on a scrap of parchment.
“I wish I could refine the saltpeter a bit more…” Dirk said, hovering his hand over one of the scale’s arms, “but this should do.”
“What are we making?” Patrick asked.
Dirk looked at the leprechaun out of the corner of his eye, then back to his work, saying nothing.
Where did you learn this? Seamus thought.
“Liber Ignium ad Comburendos Hostes,” Dirk said, “The Book of Fire.”
Patrick was oblivious to the fact that Dirk had just verbally responded to Seamus’s unspoken question.
Dirk produced a copper tube from one of his shirt pockets. This tube was wider than the ones used in the leprechauns’ still, but much shorter. It could nearly be concealed in the palm of one’s hand. One end of the tube was capped.
Dirk poured the mixture of powders into the copper tube, then inserted a copper cap to the open end of the tube. Dirk kept his thumb over the small hole that was on the new cap.
“We’ll need a lamp wick,” Dirk said.
* * *
Seamus and Patrick stood atop the tower’s newly finished flat, stone roof. There were dark bags under their eyes. All of them had grown accustomed to sleeping through the day and working through the night.
The noon day sun warmed the backs of their necks as they watched Dirk hunched down in the opening of the stairwell. Dirk needed shielding from the wind as he held a torch in one hand.
“I’m only doing this once!” Dirk called from the stairwell.
Dirk took the copper tube and brought its fuse near to the torch. A rooster tail of sparks erupted from the fuse. Dirk dropped the torch and took a few hurried steps to the top of the tower. Dirk cocked his arm back and hurled the copper tube high into the air-
BANG!!!
The copper tube exploded, the sound echoed throughout the land like a single roll of thunder.
Dirk laughed.
“What sort of magic is thess?!” Patrick asked.
Dirk continued laughing, then finished.
“It’s not magic, little one,” Dirk said, “it’s chemistry.”
Seamus’s mind had begun racing for uses of this newfangled explosive. Both vampires needed to be killed within a short amount of time from each other, and this new weapon just might be the trick to accomplishing that. Or else blasting a hole in the side of the tower to allow escape…
“We need to make more,” Seamus said.
“Yes, Seamus, there’ll be time for that. We’ll need more salt-peter, and for that we’ll need more urine,”
“Aye! I can definitely get ye more pess!” Patrick said.
“A portal… you mean like a doorway?” Seamus asked.
“Yes,” Dirk said.
Seamus was only familiar with little magic. Little spells he’d learned to help him evade capture by humans. The concept of opening a doorway in time and space was a new concept to Seamus, and Dirk could see that in his mind.
“A doorway to where? Hell?” Seamus asked.
“Maybe,” Dirk said, “though when I think about it, I highly doubt that. If Lugosi wanted to go to Hell, he’d kill himself. Damned as he is.”
“Then where?” Seamus pressed.
“I don’t know,” Dirk replied, “I’ll have to think about it as the nights go by.”
“I thought you said we don’t have much time!” Seamus said.
“I know I said we have less than a month,” Dirk said, “but I also happen to know that we may have enough time to divine Lugosi’s plan and stop him. Maybe kill him.”
“But that is a conversation for another time,” Dirk continued, “the sun is up and I’m tired. We need to go to sleep for tomorrow night’s work.”
Dirk began walking down the open stairway at the top of the tower. Seamus took a last look at the greenery before following.
Seamus and Dirk had walked down the tower’s spiral staircase in silence. It was a long silence, too, as both Dirk’s office and the leprechauns’ fermentarium were both beneath ground and the tower was already very high above ground, and everybody slept where they worked.
Dirk and Seamus passed by the unlocked and uninhabited jail cell, which marked ground level.
Dirk considered what newfound mood the vampires might be in, then considered the leprechauns’ collective health and safety.
“I’ll see you to your room,” Dirk said to Seamus as they passed Dirk’s office.
The two had gotten to the fermentarium, Seamus opened the door. Most of the leprechauns had been sprawled out on fur hides scattered amongst the barrels.
“Where’s Patrick?” Seamus asked, concerned.
One groggy voice responded from the dark, it was Nollaig.
“He’s in the distill’ry,” Nollaig said, then lowered his head back down onto the fur.
Seamus looked at Dirk, Dirk looked at Seamus.
The two continued one floor down to the distillery.
Seamus opened the door to the distillery to find Patrick peeing in a bucket.
“What are ye doing?” Seamus asked, catching Patrick off guard.
Patrick, startled, sprayed just a little on the floor before very hastily buttoning up.
“I was, ah...” Patrick was trying to think of any clever lie he could say, but came up empty handed.
“Dist’lling my own urine,” Patrick finished.
“Pat…” Seamus said as Dirk hobbled into the room towards the still.
“Any luck making yehr so called ‘superpiss’?” Seamus asked.
Dirk inspected what little salty powder that Patrick had extracted from the still.
“Nay, not so much,” Patrick said, “I was thinkin’ maybe I could take the dist’llate and add it back into fresh urine. Mate work that wee.”
“No,” Dirk said, “we could do much better than that.”
“Whatdya mean?” Patrick asked, “How do ye propose we make superpess? All we get out of the still is that there salt.”
“Not quite salt, Patrick,” Dirk said, “You’ve isolated phosphorus.”
Seamus blinked. He thought he’d never hear that word again since being lectured on it by Darcy.
“And what are we supposed to do with phosphorus?” Patrick asked.
Dirk considered how best to explain chemistry to an alcoholic leprechaun who tries to isolate super-urine when he’s supposed to be sleeping.
“We blow things up,” Dirk said.
* * *
Dirk, Seamus and Patrick descended the spiral staircase toward the pipeshop in the tower’s basement. Dirk was the first one through the doorway at the stairway’s terminus. The pipeshop was quiet. The machinery, the forges and the dwarves were all dormant and the torches were extinguished.
Faint daylight descended the elevator shaft, creating an ambient glow for the very center of the shop. Seamus saw the round, iron plate in the floor that had been impacted by a limestone block only a dozen hours prior. The black, slightly rusty metal was about an inch thick, and was no longer a flat circle. Instead, it had a single, large dent in it that tipped a portion of the outer rim upward a few degrees.
Next to the warped, iron plate in the floor was a trap door. Torch in one hand, Dirk opened the door by pulling on the iron hasp opposite the hinges. Seamus saw that the trap door revealed stairs that lead even deeper into the ground beneath the tower. Most of the rooms in the tower that Seamus had spent time in were beneath ground level. The deepest room, Seamus thought, had been the pipeshop, and why not? That’s how far down the elevator shaft went. Seamus hadn’t realized that the dwarves had been working both above and below the room they were presently sleeping in.
Torchlight ablaze on his face, Dirk gazed at the two leprechauns only briefly, then descended into the trap door. Seamus and Patrick followed. The stone steps, Seamus noticed, were not as neatly cut as the stairs that circumnavigated the tower’s elevator shaft. As he descended into the door himself, Seamus noticed a crescent shaped crack of ambient light emanating from the ceiling. The iron plate in the floor of the pipeshop was an access hatch for this previously unexplored work zone. These new stairs, instead of forming a spiral, angled steeply down in one direction.
“This is where the Dverger cut their stone, then?” Seamus whispered.
“Yes,” Dirk replied, “And they continue to dig.”
“Why?” Seamus asked, “I thought they had finished rebuilding the tower.”
“They have,” Dirk said, “but Lugosi needs them to dig.”
The trio had reached the bottom of the steep stairs. Dirk’s single torch only illuminated so much of the rock cavern that they had entered. Not a cavern, Seamus thought, an underground rock quarry. Dirk followed the roughly cut rock wall several paces, gliding the fingers of his free hand over the stony surface. Eventually Dirk stopped as his torch illuminated a vein of yellow that was embedded in the rock wall. The yellow seam in the wall was shaped like the straggled strands of a lightning bolt, permanently fixed in the rock wall.
“Hold this,” Dirk said as he handed the torch to Seamus and pulled a small rock pick out of his belt. The rock pick looked almost like a toy hammer. Using the rock pick, Dirk approached the irregular stripe of yellow rock and carved out chunks of the material, collecting it in his free hand.
“What is it?” Seamus asked.
“Sulfur,” Dirk responed, “Brimstone.”
“Is thess what the dwarves are digging for?” Patrick asked.
“No, they’re looking for something else,” Dirk replied, “We just happen to be lucky enough to have found this vein of sulfur in the quarry.”
Dirk stuffed the handful of yellow rock into his shirt pocket.
“This should do,” the elf said, “We’re done here. Back up stairs.”
* * *
“Keep… the torch, away,” Dirk said with careful emphasis.
Dirk had arranged his ingredients into 3 separate piles on one of the distillery’s work benches. The yellow sulfur rock reminded Seamus of a pile of finely crumbled cheese curds. Next to the sulfur was pile of what looked like salt. Saltpeter, Dirk would insist. Third was a blackened pile of charcoal powder that Dirk had scraped from an unlit torch.
Dirk was adding each ingredient to perfectly balanced scale, then making recordings of his measurements on a scrap of parchment.
“I wish I could refine the saltpeter a bit more…” Dirk said, hovering his hand over one of the scale’s arms, “but this should do.”
“What are we making?” Patrick asked.
Dirk looked at the leprechaun out of the corner of his eye, then back to his work, saying nothing.
Where did you learn this? Seamus thought.
“Liber Ignium ad Comburendos Hostes,” Dirk said, “The Book of Fire.”
Patrick was oblivious to the fact that Dirk had just verbally responded to Seamus’s unspoken question.
Dirk produced a copper tube from one of his shirt pockets. This tube was wider than the ones used in the leprechauns’ still, but much shorter. It could nearly be concealed in the palm of one’s hand. One end of the tube was capped.
Dirk poured the mixture of powders into the copper tube, then inserted a copper cap to the open end of the tube. Dirk kept his thumb over the small hole that was on the new cap.
“We’ll need a lamp wick,” Dirk said.
* * *
Seamus and Patrick stood atop the tower’s newly finished flat, stone roof. There were dark bags under their eyes. All of them had grown accustomed to sleeping through the day and working through the night.
The noon day sun warmed the backs of their necks as they watched Dirk hunched down in the opening of the stairwell. Dirk needed shielding from the wind as he held a torch in one hand.
“I’m only doing this once!” Dirk called from the stairwell.
Dirk took the copper tube and brought its fuse near to the torch. A rooster tail of sparks erupted from the fuse. Dirk dropped the torch and took a few hurried steps to the top of the tower. Dirk cocked his arm back and hurled the copper tube high into the air-
BANG!!!
The copper tube exploded, the sound echoed throughout the land like a single roll of thunder.
Dirk laughed.
“What sort of magic is thess?!” Patrick asked.
Dirk continued laughing, then finished.
“It’s not magic, little one,” Dirk said, “it’s chemistry.”
Seamus’s mind had begun racing for uses of this newfangled explosive. Both vampires needed to be killed within a short amount of time from each other, and this new weapon just might be the trick to accomplishing that. Or else blasting a hole in the side of the tower to allow escape…
“We need to make more,” Seamus said.
“Yes, Seamus, there’ll be time for that. We’ll need more salt-peter, and for that we’ll need more urine,”
“Aye! I can definitely get ye more pess!” Patrick said.
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