| abstract
| - The feast was everything that Brox could have imagined, and more. The reader might wonder how a sly, lazy trickster like Kip Adar came to be employed by a prince. The way this came about is indeed an interesting tale, one that can best be told by recounting the fox-wizard's life story. One might expect that a fox-furry like Kip Adar would be a child of the forest, but nothing could be further from the truth; he grew up in the city as a street urchin. His father was a rogue who left the family early on, having discovered that he liked adventuring more than he liked fatherhood. Kip (as he was known then) became something of a rogue himself, far more interested in chasing girls or wandering the streets with friends than in learning a trade. Kip gravitated toward magic, partly because he found that he had a natural talent for it, but mostly because using magic was easier than working. As a teenager he knocked on the doors of the local houses of sorcery, begging to be allowed in as an apprentice, but he was always shooed away; he had no money to pay for schooling, and the sorcerers preferred elves and humans. A fox-furry like Kip was seen as little more than a stray dog that happened to walk on two legs. Anyway, Kip picked up enough knowledge about magic to work a few simple spells, and at last he was hired by a cranky old wizard named Zalivar, who ran a small, run-down magic shop in the city. Working at a magic shop might sound exciting, but in truth it was the very lowest of all jobs in the field of magic. The pay was bad and the work was worse. Kip found himself unloading wagons full of dragon guts, cutting minotaur horns into tiny pieces that had to be painstakingly weighed and stored in jars, and stirring cauldrons filled with smelly potions. Most of the customers were also far from interesting; the majority were peasants looking for a cheap love potion to slip into a neighbor girl's soup, or farmers demanding magic powders that would help their crops grow, or housewives begging for a cure for warts or gout or toothache. And on top of everything else, the job could be dangerous. Spells, after all, can sometimes backfire, especially those spells cast by a novice. Magic potions, when incorrectly mixed, can even explode, as Kip learned one day when a vat filled with ogre blood erupted (luckily his back was turned at the time, so his handsome face was untouched, but he lost a patch of fur between his shoulder blades). Zalivar did nothing to make the job easier or more pleasant. The old wizard was a stern taskmaster, quick to anger and slow to forgive. Kip was afraid of the old wizard at first, and worried that he would soon be fired and back on the streets. But in time the young fox realized that his job was secure, because nobody else wanted it. Who, after all, would want a dull, dangerous job with lousy pay and a screaming boss? So Kip began to follow his natural inclination to do as little work as possible. If Zalivar's eye was upon him, he worked. If Zalivar wasn't around, Kip took a break. Sometimes his breaks lasted most of the day. The old wizard knew this, but there was little that he could do except to scream more often. Kip began to interpret his boss' screams by their volume. A few harsh words could be safely ignored. An angry, long-winded speech required a nod of the head and a few minutes of half-hearted labor. But a scream that rattled the rafters meant that it was time to get back to work. Fortunately for Kip, Zalivar was too old to manage more than two or three of these rafter-rattling screams a day. There were some good things about working in the magic shop. For one thing, though the pay was meager, it was better than nothing. Kip had never held a job before, so that first payday, when Zalivar grudgingly dropped a few silver coins into his palm, was one of the greatest thrills of the young fox's life. He could actually go to an inn and buy a steak dinner! He could walk down to the hatter's shop and buy himself a sharp little beret! Sure, the money was always gone in no time, but at least he got to fondle it for a moment before it got away. (Kip never saved any of it, of course. It was his nature to spend his money as quickly as possible.) Another good thing about the job was that it allowed Kip to meet a wide variety of people. True, most of the customers were of little use or interest to him, but now and then a pretty cat-girl or fox-lady might wander into the shop. Such customers got prompt attention. Members of the nobility also received excellent service, for Kip realized that making friends with the wealthy could pay dividends someday. But the best part of the job was the fact that it gradually transformed Kip from an untrained street magician into an actual wizard. Zalivar didn't really intend to give his fuzzy employee any useful training, but on the other hand he couldn't do everything himself. So it was common for the old wizard to be upstairs, working one of the more complex enchantments, while Kip was downstairs, brewing a simple potion while also making himself available behind the front counter in case a customer arrived. Over time, Kip became an expert on the simpler potions, which of course meant that Zalivar began making him produce more complex potions. By the time Kip had worked at the shop for five years, he knew as much about magic potions, salves, creams and powders as any graduate of the University of Alchemy. It also helped that Kip liked to read. Zalivar had a library upstairs, filled with books about magic. Most of these books simply gathered dust, for the wizard no longer cared about any magic spells except those that dealt with the creation of potions that people would buy. But Kip was interested in all things magical. So, although he was forbidden from going upstairs unless the master summoned him, the books from the library had a way of somehow turning up in the little first-floor storage room that served as Kip's bed chamber. At midnight most nights the young fox could be found reading a book of magic by candlelight while his master slept. Kip had little fear of being caught, for old Zalivar was usually fast asleep an hour after sunset. An ambitious fellow in this situation might have saved his money over the years, gathered together some leftover materials, and eventually opened his own magic shop. Kip Adar, however, was not an ambitious fellow. After seven years of work, his entire savings amounted to one shiny little copper piece that he kept under his pillow for luck. He had no thought of opening his own shop, and his ideas about the future centered primarily on his next clandestine meeting with the pretty cat-girl who worked in the flower shop across the street. So Kip was entirely unprepared one winter morning when he found that he had been allowed to sleep past dawn for the first time in months. Although he welcomed the extra sleep, Kip feared that something was wrong. And indeed it was. Zalivar had died in his bed during the night. The old wizard had two sons, both of whom had moved away and neither of whom had any interest in running their father's musty old magic shop. So they put the shop up for sale, at a cost of 500 gold sovereigns. Kip looked at his lucky penny, which constituted his entire life's savings, and realized that he wasn't going to be running the shop. He hoped of course that the next owner might let him keep his job, but that hope died quickly. The only offer Zalivar's sons received was from Jarugan, a hard-driving businessman who owned another magic shop on the other side of town. Jarugan had little love for Kip; they had clashed years earlier, when Jarugan had insisted that Kip got fox hairs into all of Zalivar's potions, and Kip had retaliated by telling all the local furries that Jarugan hated anyone who had fur, with the result that the furries began buying all their potions and cures from Zalivar, not from Jarugan. So Kip realized that he was about to be unemployed. He had no money, but he still had his wits. Jarugan's men made an inventory of Zalivar's stock, and Kip quickly noticed that this inventory was missing one item. In a hidden compartment in his upstairs bed chamber, Zalivar had kept a bottle filled with a special anti-poison potion. Kip knew about this secret potion because he had helped brew it. Like any wizard, Zalivar had had enemies, and he feared that someone might try to poison him. So he'd brewed up an expensive, little-known potion, one drop of which made its user immune to any poisons for a full year. It was a chalky, foul-tasting liquid, but very potent; it essentially coated its user's throat and stomach with a magic spell that negated all poisons. Each year, on New Year's Day, Zalivar took a sip of this potion, then hid it away for the rest of the year, secure in the knowledge that he could not be poisoned that year. Now Zalivar was gone, but the hidden bottle containing the anti-poison potion was still three-quarters full. And no living person knew that it existed except Kip. Therefore, on the winter night before Jarugan would take full possession of the shop, Kip slipped into his old master's empty bed chamber, found the hidden potion and tucked it into his coat. "This is my severance pay," he chuckled to himself as he set off under the cover of darkness. Kip had met Prince Ludovic once, a year earlier, when the prince had come into the shop as a customer. The prince had expressed interest in purchasing something that might protect him from poisons. He didn't know about Zalivar's special potion, and the old wizard didn't tell the prince about it, because he had no intention of selling it; he didn't have the ingredients that would allow him to brew another one of those potions, and the one that he'd already brewed was being kept for his own personal use. So Zalivar had instead sold the prince a more common, cheaper and less useful anti-poison potion, one that could be drunk to neutralize a poison only after the poison had been consumed. This potion wasn't effective against all poisons, and it could be used only once, but the prince had decided that it would do, so he'd handed over several gold coins (far more than the potion was worth) and left the shop. Kip grinned at the memory. If the prince had been willing to pay so much for a crummy potion like that, the fox could scarcely imagine what sort of pay he'd get for the priceless bottle hidden in his coat! It hadn't been easy for Kip to gain an audience with Prince Ludovic; on three occasions doors were slammed in his face. But he'd persisted, and at last he'd found himself in the presence of the great man. And when he'd displayed the fabulous treasure that he'd hidden in his coat, the prince's attitude had changed from haughty impatience to cheerful welcome. A deal was quickly arranged. The prince admitted that the potion was worth hundreds of gold sovereigns, but unfortunately he had a great many expenses and was reluctant to pay that much money right at the moment. But the prince ruled, among other things, the House of Fox, so he offered Kip a position as one of the chief sorcerers in that organization, at a handsome salary. Kip accepted, and in view of his newfound status, he soon began using his family name of Adar, which was considered more elegant than the name Kip. And so Kip, the lowly apprentice in a run-down magic shop, became known as Adar, a highly-respected sorcerer in the House of Fox who reported directly to Prince Ludovic. But beneath his rich robe he was of course still just Kip, a sly rogue with a great deal of interest in ladies, luxuries, magic spells and magic potions, but very little interest in work. And this explains his keen interest in Brox of Boggan, the clever little fellow who had arrived at the door with a sack full of magic potions. Aside from his lack of fur, Brox of Boggan reminded Kip Adar of himself.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)