Seamus 6

“You and your leprechaun cohort shall produce alcohol,” Dirk said, “Primarily for use in sterilization.”
Seamus didn’t know what Dirk meant by ‘sterilization’. In fact, most of what Dirk said didn’t register with Seamus, as he was fixated on seeing his cousin Patrick in the fermentarium.

“I will leave you to become acquainted with your work,” Dirk said as he shut the door behind Seamus.

Seamus took stock of the five leprechaun souls before him, three he’d never met before, and one whose temper was rising to a violent extreme. That one was Patrick, who abandoned his position before a mash tun and strode toward Seamus.

“Patrick! It’s so good t-”, was all Seamus could say before Patrick punched him on his left cheekbone.  Seamus recoiled backwards against the closed door, the iron hasps rattled from the impact.

“Seamus Bennigan!” Patrick roared while pointing at Seamus, “you stole my dagger!”
“That was over three centuries ago!” Seamus said, then pointed back at Patrick, saying, “And YOU stole it from Nollaig, anyway!” Seamus pointed to Nollaig, who was raking barley in a large, wooden barrel.
“Did not!” Patrick said while crossing his arms over his chest, “’twas a trade! Feer ‘n square.”
Nollaig stopped raking.
“Fair’n’square my arse!” Nollaig piped in, “Ye call fillin’ me shoes with clay a fair trade?!”
“That was a high quality clay!” Patrick said, “I got it all the way from Northumbria! And ye stee out of thess! It’s between me and Seamus!”
“The hell it is! For all I care, ye both stole it from me!” Nollaig said.
Hoping to quell the quarrel, Seamus cut in, saying, “Perhaps the serpent dagger doesn’t belong to either of ye?”
Patrick and Nollaig, both turned and stared at Seamus with wide and unblinking eyes.
“Aye?” Seamus asked, smiling.
Patrick and Nollaig both threw punches at Seamus’s face. Seamus dodged to the left, only to make contact with Nollaig’s fist to his eye.
Seamus returned punches left and right to both Patrick and Nollaig, hitting both in the face.
Patrick elbowed Seamus in the ribs, sending him to the floor only before kneeing Nollaig in the gut and putting him in a head lock.
Lying belly down on the floor, Seamus grabbed Patrick’s ankle and jerked it to the side, sending both Patrick and Nollaig to the floor. The three leprechauns continued fighting each other over the fermentarium’s stone floor.

Further back in the fermentarium, Art, Conor and Darcy were more or less detached from the scuffle that had just broken out.

Darcy sat at a table, carefully floating a hollow glass tube in a tall cylinder of grain mash, which would later become whiskey. Conor stood by with arms crossed over his chest, watching the fight.
“Have ye e’er heard Patrick or Nollaig mention a dagger before?” Conor asked Darcy.
“Nay, I haven’t,” Darcy said, still watching the glass tube bob up and down in the brown fluid. The glass tube had a lead weight on one end and a long strip of parchment inside. The strip of parchment spanned the entire inside length of the tube, and had a long series of graded lines that each ran parallel to the mash’s water line. Darcy was watching for which line inside the tube that would match the level of the solution that the tube was floating in.

“What’s it matter?” Darcy asked.
“Dunno. Was thinkin’ if we had a dagger, we might be able to kill the vampires,” Conor offered.
Darcy continued to watch the glass tube floating in the mash. Satisfied with how it floated, he observed the reading it gave him and wrote it down on a piece of parchment.
“One,” Darcy said, “we don’t know what this dagger is made of. If it’s like any other dagger forged by an armorer, the blade’s made of steel. You need silver to kill a vampire.”
The trio continued fighting while Darcy talked to Conor.
“And two, there’s no stabbing a vampire while he’s got his wits about him,” Darcy continued, “which leaves breaking into his lair during the day. And we can’t do that, because we don’t know where Lugosi sleeps, and Eamonn’s room is always locked.”
The sound of gurgling fluid could be heard over the fighting as Art finished siphoning off fermenting mash from one barrel to another.

“And thirdly,” Darcy said, “it’s quite obvious none of them actually have the dagger here in the tower.  Even if Seamus had brought it with him, it’d have been confiscated and then melted down for the fabrication project. So the point is moot.”

Art said nothing as he strode passed Conor and Darcy, carrying a leprechaun-sized, wooden, bar stool in his hand.

“If we want to kill the vampires, we’ll need some other route,” Darcy finished.
“Still,” Conor said, “I think this requires further investigation.”

Seamus had Nollaig in a headlock with his left arm, and with his right he had his index finger fish-hooked in Patrick’s cheek, holding both leprechauns in thrall.
Panting, Seamus asked, “Now will you two both just shut it?!”
Without warning, Art swung the wooden bar stool across the back of Seamus’s head, knocking him unconscious.

                        *     *     *
Blackness.
“So, Seamus…” Patrick said.
Seamus was only beginning to wake up.
“Are you still any good picking locks?” Patrick asked.

Seamus opened his eyes to see Patrick sitting in a stool above him, smoking tobacco from a long stemmed pipe. His face had patches of purple on it, similar to the black patches he’d seen on cows. A crusty runnel of blood streamed from one of Patrick’s nostrils down to the corner of his mouth. Patrick blew a long jet of whitish-blue smoke towards the ceiling.

“As good as I ever was,” Seamus replied, wondering what unknown conversation distracted both Patrick and Nollaig from the contentious topic of the stolen Serpentis dagger.

Still lying on his back, Seamus asked, “Why?”

                         *     *     *

Seamus followed Patrick, Nollaig and Conor down the spiral stone stair case into the distillery.

“But won’t the light wake him up?” Seamus asked.

Patrick opened the door and then used the torch in his hand to light two of the distillery’s oil lamps, then set the torch in a wall sconce.

The distillery, like the fermentarium, was full of wooden barrels stacked up against a wall. But unlike the fermentarium, the distillery had a consortium of copper cookware, chiefly copper kettles and an array of copper tubes suspended from wires and steel hangers.

“But that’s the kicker!” Patrick said, “we only need to open his coffin up just a crack!”
“I’ll have you know that I need it open more than just a crack,” Seamus said.
Patrick walked over to the table that had the copper tubes and kettles. Some of the tubes stretched in long, stately arches from one kettle to another. One of the tubes was formed in a long, tight, uniform coil.

“This,” Patrick said as he picked something up beneath the coiled copper tube, “is a freeze wand!”
Seamus studied the golden wand that Patrick was holding up. Seamus could see it had an elegant pattern of engravings on it. Seamus could see a long necked dragon, and Gaelic runes.

“What does it do?” Seamus asked.
“What does it do?!” Patrick said, “it freeze things! The elf gave it to us for our distillery. You say the magic words as you wave it over the condenser,” Patrick gestured towards the coiled copper tubing, “you wait just long enough for the frost to disappear from the copper tubing, and then bring your whiskey mash to a boil. The evaporated whiskey passes through the condenser as a vapor, then condenses back into a fluid as a much stronger distillate.”

“I’m not seeing how this helps us,” Seamus said.
Nollaig handed Seamus a wide, shallow saucer.

                         *     *     *

The saucer was filled to the brim with the warm, yellow liquid. Much of it was splashed all over the distillery’s floor.

“This is exactly the sort of thing you would come up with,” Seamus said to Patrick.
“What are you talking about? I got this idea from you!” Patrick said.
“What am I talking about? What are you talking about?!” Seamus demanded.
“The bucket of piss you threw out yer jail cell. We all heard about it! Eamonn made me clean it up!” Patrick said.
“Oh, yeah,” Seamus said, smiling, “that.”
“Aye… that,” Patrick said, “and now I’m getting back at him.”

Patrick handed the golden wand to Nollaig.
“’ere,” Patrick said to Nollaig, “you do the honors. I still can’t recite any Elvish magic.”

Nollaig passed the freeze wand over the saucer while whispering an Elvish incantation, foreign to Seamus’s ears. The transparent, yellow pool in the saucer frosted over almost instantly. Long, straight cracks formed in the shallow depth of the now frozen leprechaun urine.

“Hurry! Let’s take it down stairs!” Patrick said, almost giggling, the blood under his nose began to run again.

Patrick, Seamus and Nollaig shuffled down the stairs from the distillery to the next door down.
“Why do I have to carry it?” Nollaig asked, some of the frozen urine had already melted a little and ran down the saucer, onto Nollaig’s finger tips.

“Quiet!” Patrick said. He paused, and listened as the three of them stood on the stairway outside of the locked iron door.
“Because,” Patrick continued, “Seamus is the only one in this whole bloody tower that can pick that lock. And I’m holdin’ the torch!”

Seamus inserted the two thin, iron rods into the door’s lock, then began manipulating the pins and wafers inside.

“Why can’t I hold the torch,” Nollaig said, “and you can hold the piss disc! This was your idea anyway!”
“All right,” Patrick said, “when Seamus gets that door open, we’ll trade. You hold the torch, I’ll slip the disc into the coffin.”

Seamus rattled the iron rods in the doors lock with obvious futility and fought back the urge to bang on the door in his frustration.

“Fine,” Nollaig said.

Seamus refocused his efforts with the iron rods, very delicately turning the lock, hearing it slide back within the door.
Seamus turned the knob and nudged the door. It didn’t move.
“I don’t understand,” Seamus said, “I unlocked it.”
“That’s because it’s an iron door,” Patrick said, “ye have to use a bit of force!”
Patrick butted his shoulder against the door, it swung open a few feet with a loud, rusty creak.

“Now you’ve done it, you’ve woke him up!” Seamus said.
“Quite the contrary,” Patrick said, “Vampires can sleep through just about any noise. It’s light that they can’t tolerate. Here, trade!” Patrick traded Nollaig for the frosty saucer.
“Agh! It’s dripping!” Patrick said, “Give me some light, I’m going in.”

Nollaig, holding the torch, followed Patrick into Eamonn’s room.
“Seamus! Come on! We need you to open the coffin!” Patrick ordered.

Seamus stepped through to the dark room. There was nothing in it, save for a coffin in the center and a prolific amount of cobwebs, casting wispy shadows on the walls and ceiling in the orange torchlight.

Patrick was stooped down next to the coffin’s lid, Nollaig stood over him with the torch.
“Well, come on then!” Patrick whispered.

Seamus’s heart was pounding as he entered the vampire’s room.
Visually, there wasn’t anything intimidating about it. Just a coffin in the center of a room.
But the thought of that coffin opening on  its own almost completely unnerved Seamus.

Seamus knelt down next to Patrick, Patrick’s eyes alight with mischief. The rest of his face still battered and somewhat bloody.
“All right,” Patrick said to Seamus, “just open it a crack now, we don’t want the torch light to wake him.”

Seamus stared at Patrick, realizing that his own face probably looked just as bad, only less maniacal and mischievous. The saucer in Patrick’s hands was dripping down his fingers and on to the floor.

Seamus looked away from Patrick to Eamonn’s coffin and pressed his palms up against its lid, then slowly opened it a half inch, then an inch and a half.
Seamus then looked back at Patrick, who was removing the melting disc of leprechaun urine from the saucer and carefully bringing it up to the crack beneath the coffin’s lid. Seamus saw a small drip of blood fall from Patrick’s nose onto the disc just as he slipped it in through the crack.

“No!” Seamus whispered.
“Too late!” Patrick said, “Shut it! Shut it! Let’s get out of here!”

Seamus eased the coffin’s lid shut and followed the other two out of Eamonn’s lair.
“You better lock the door again behind us!” Patrick said to Seamus.
“Why?!” Seamus asked.
“I don’t know, maybe he’ll be less angry when he wakes up,” Patrick said, barely stifling a giggle.

Seamus closed the iron door then inserted his lock-picking pins into the door’s lock.
His fingers trembled almost uncontrollably as he tried to manipulate the lock. He had gotten a good feel for the lock only a couple minutes before, so he tried maneuvering the pins in their perfect, familiar pattern, then rotated the lock counter-clockwise, re-locking the door.

Seamus put his lock picking rods into his vest pocket, then ran up the stairs to the fermentarium, his heart full of the giddy fear that he so missed.