The Title of Temperance (The Adventures of Ichabod Temperance Book 8) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Magician in the Court of King Arthur, do hereby return you the Sun!”
    “Come before the royal dais, Ichabod.”
    “Yessir!”
    “I shall Knight thee as a member of my regime! I would have thee as a Knight of the Round Table!”
    “Aw, shucks, that’s awfully nice of you Mr. King Arthur, sir, but I ain’t one to put on airs. You see, I come from a place where we do not have a nobility class. Under the law, all men are created equal.”
    “All men created equal? Why that’s absurd! You are in the midst of England’s finest nobility! Do you mean to say that you believe that a mere peasant is the same as a Lord of Manour?”
    “Yessir! We elect our leaders from out of the ranks of the citizenry.”
    “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”
    “Then how would you have us address thee?”
    “Oh, I reckon just ‘Ichabod’ will work fine.”
    “Let us all proclaim your name. Hail, oh mighty wizard, hail, Ichabod.”
    “Hail, Ichabod!”
     
     

Chapter 4
Full Steam Ahead
    “Thank you, Merlin, your warning of approaching dragon swarms came just in time, methinks. It is providential that you could foresee their coming and cast a spell to send them away again before anyone even saw them!”
    “Yes, Sire, but the effort was exhaustive, and expensive.”
    “Fear naughtte, my lieutenant wizard, I shall recompense thee. That reminds me, where is my executive wizard?”
    “Awaken thy senses, Ichabod; thou art on!”
    “Hunh? Oh, thanks, Spykey. Howdy and good afternoon, King Arthur.”
    “Well art thou met, Ichabod. Tell thy King of thine progress made upon thy professed inventiveness?”
    “Oh, yessir! We’ve gots all sorts of devices getting ready to be built! I’ve had to put a lot of work into the preparations first, though.”
    “Tell your King of these preparations.”
    “Yessir, well, I been around to your armourers, metallurgists, and miners to see what I could do to advance a few of their techniques. Your foundries didn’t amount to more than a field of little stacked brick ovens with bellow attachment. It ain’t easy getting iron to melt, but I got a few advancements in oven design in the works. What I have in mind uses a theory of bouncing the heat of a supplemental oven onto the cooking metal. In the long run, we’ll get us a pretty little blast oven going, but this will work in the mean time.”
    “More steel for me to play with! Jolly good, Ichabod!”
    “Thank you, Sire! Well, the need for raw material is going up so I have a few things brewing to help miners harvest their manna from beneath the Earth’s surface more efficiently and safely. I have instructed some of the boys in how they should track their subterranean quarry with logic and geology, instead of haphazard, hoping to get lucky.”
    “Merry, I thought luck was all there was to mining. What a surprise that you are able to turn your, what was it you called it?”
    “Science.”
    “Yes, ‘science’, to even these labours.”
    “I’ve got a some boys scrounging up a few items to concoct a batch of explosives to speed the mining capabilities.”
    “Prithee, what are these ‘explosives’, of which thou speakest?”
    “I reckon they’re kind of like Mr. Merlin’s little poofy smoke bombs he is fond of tossing, but more acute.”
    “Enough to crack rocks?”
    “Yessir.”
    “Be this magic?”
    “Science/magic, Sire.”
    “The arms and armour will pour as water from thy shops, Ichabod.”
    “Well, sir, I’m wanting to set some of the steel aside for foundry use. That is, I want to pour molten steel into molds to build precision instruments.”
    “But I like armour, Ichabod!”
    “Yessir, but uh, I have got the blacksmiths punching out some gears, cogs, and rods and such. The better bits of steel are being re-made into springs.”
    “Explain.”
    “Long, thin, flat pieces of steel that have been coiled ‘round and ‘round until lots of resisting tension is contained within.”
    “Ah, much like the way I like to ‘twang’