The alchemist's quarters were easy enough to find - most of the fortress's towers weren't surrounded by gouts of colourful smoke. The guard climbed the spiral staircase encircling the tower and knocked on the door.
"It's open!" answered a reedy, scholarly voice from within. The guard pushed his way in and held up the large cage in his hands.
"Brought your rats, sir" the guard said. The alchemist glanced up briefly from his work and gestured towards an empty patch of table, upon which the guard placed the ratcage. Satisfied, the alchemist returned to his chemicals, and the guard took the opportunity to look around the room. True to expectations, it was stuffed to the brim with mysterious and esoteric alchemical paraphernalia - arrayed on the room's numerous worksurfaces were more bottles and strange glass instruments, filled with colourful bubbling liquids and sparkling vapours and surrounded by diagrammed and densely annotated scrolls and tomes. Numerous boxes and crates were stacked precariously up to the ceiling, containing and supporting innumerable bottles and phials - and, for some reason, a large stuffed alligator. The guard looked around with bewildered interest.
"So... what's it like being a freelance alchemist?" he asked.
The alchemist looked up, as if noticing the guard for the first time, then shrugged. "Well, it provides, I suppose," he answered. "Gets me out and about... not a bad line of work, all told."
The guard nodded, and watched as the alchemist propped an open-ended tube on a tripod, carefully angling the open end to face the room's window and placing its closed end in a carefully-built tinder pile. As he pored over a nearby tome, the alchemist poured a number of esoteric ingredients into the thin vessel.
"What are you making?" the guard asked.
"Your master has engaged me to devise a means of getting rid of a neighbouring baron," the alchemist patiently explained, "so to that end I'm concocting a number of poisons - this one will be Alverick's Invisible Inhumator Potion." As he said this, he added a quantity of white powder to the mixture.
The guard nodded vaguely, casting his gaze over the alchemist's artifacts once again. His eyes alighted upon a small open case, containing a number of colourful, perfectly formed spheres of dfferent sizes and materials. He picked up a small lead one and began gently tossing it from hand to hand.
The alchemist glanced over at the guard. "Careful with that, please - that's one of the fabled Ostrobothnian Orbs of Maagista Voimaa. I'd rather not lose it, it's worth rather a lot of money."
"Oh really? How much?"
"Err... about one thousand, one hundred and thirty-eight gold pieces, give or take."
Upon hearing the orb's value, the guard lurched as if he'd been stung. The distortion of his playful juggling sent the ball up in the air, and his flailing attempts to retrieve it only knocked it away further. It sailed across the room and landed perfectly within the angled tube and rolled down to the bottom.
"Oh... bugger, sorry about that," the guard apologised ineffectually as the alchemist arched a reproachful eyebrow at him. Quailing under this stern teacherly glare, his gaze fell to his feet and he wrung his hands shyly.
The alchemist rolled his eyes and peered down into the tube. "Hmmm... looks as though it's gone right in." He waved away some of the smoky fumes emitting from the tube's aperture, and bent down to pick up something to remove the ball. All of a sudden - CRACK! - from the tube came a deafening report, a tongue of fire and a lot of smoke. The guard reflexively threw his arms up in front of his face, and the alchemist collapsed in a startled foetal position. Eventually he gingerly stood up again, staring aghast at the fume-spewing tube.
"Was... was the poison supposed to explode like that?" the guard asked.
"No, not exactly..." the alchemist replied, rubbing his chin and reaching for his recipe tome. He peered at the text, then frowned and wiped his sleeve over the top of the page. "Hmm. Apparently I just concocted some of Afuanolc's Flammable Fulminator Powder." He put the tome back on the worksurface and shut it petulantly. "They ought not make that calligraphic writing so bloody inscrutable."
The guard ceased his self-effacing posture. "I suppose we'd better find that orb, then." The alchemist nodded in agreement, and the pair began casting around on the floor for the ball. After a moment, the guard happened to look up at the window, and saw in its centre a perfectly round hole, surrounded by a spider's web of cracks. He nudged the alchemist and pointed the exit wound out to him. They stood up and clustered at the window, looking down at the bailey. There was a bit of a commotion gathering near a row of archery targets. The guard and the alchemist exchanged pained grimaces and filed out of the room to investigate.

When the pair arrived at the target range, the situation became more clear - a number of men were gathered around a body on the floor, which turned out to be that of a squire. The guard and the alchemist elbowed their way into the crowd and peered down at the corpse.
In the ex-squire's forehead, beneath the pudding-bowl haircut, was a smallish wound of suspiciously similar dimensions to the Ostrobothnian lead orb. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the squire's expression was a rather startled one.
The alchemist cleared his throat. "What's happened here, then? Don't worry, I am a professional."
A knight by his shoulder lifted his visor. "W-well, we were practising our archery," he stammered, holding up his longbow by way of explanation, "and this squire went to collect our arrows, a-and then he just collapsed with this hole in his head... and that's what happened, really." He trailed off and let his visor fall back into place.
The alchemist nodded, sharing a brief wince with the guard. "I see. I trust this won't disrupt castle affairs too much?"
"No, we must have hundreds of squires," a pikeman answered, gesticulating dismissively with his polearm. "But what I want to know is, how'd it happen?"
The alchemist stroked his beard thougtfully, then lifted the squire's head by his mop of hair and rapped the back smartly with his other hand. Out of the brand new orifice popped the lead orb, which landed on the squire's doublet in a small puddle of blood and brain matter. The guard picked it up and turned it over in his hand, before wiping it off and passing it to the alchemist.
"Well, this would appear to be the culprit. Must've been dropped by an eagle," he said authoritatively.
The pikeman frowned in confusion. "What would an eagle want with a metal ball?"
"Nothing at all," the alchemist continued smoothly, "I imagine that must be why he dropped it." Before anyone could notice the paradox in this statement, he stood up and tossed the ball up in the air once or twice. "In any event, I suppose I'd better take this away before it causes any more damage, or..." The alchemist trailed off at this point, his brow furrowing in sudden thought. He looked at the lead sphere in his fingers with dawning enlightment, before turning sharply around and beckoning the guard to follow him.
"Come on, you. We've got some work to do..."

* * *

"So, what are we doing out here? Surely one doesn't need an archery range to show off poisons?"
"Indeed not, sire, but my research took me in an interesting and unanticipated direction," replied the alchemist, standing besides his employer, the lord of the castle and baron of the surrounding lands. Across the target range, the guard was setting up a training dummy dressed in full plate. Satisfied with its placement, he ducked behind a target and fetched a long, thin object, which he brought over to the baron and the alchemist and held out for inspection.
The main body of the object was a long, hollow metal tube, attached by means of an intricate mechanism to a wood-hewn base similar to the stock of a crossbow. Just before the mechanism, a telescope had been attached to the tube by means of tightly coiled metal wire, and a pair of small hooks either end of the tube held a thin metal rod with a blunted plug at the end.
The baron gave the device an appraising look, then looked up at the alchemist with an eyebrow arched queryingly. "A weapon?" he hazarded.
"Quite so sire," the alchemist affirmed, "but one quite different to any you may have seen before. Observe."
With this, he nodded to the guard, who hefted the device and began to operate it. In the end of the tube he dropped a lead ball much like the alchemist's Ostrobothnian artifact, following it with a small wad of parchment. This he pushed down the tube with the metal rod, before pulling back a curved part of the object's complex mechanism, in which a small piece of flint had been mounted. The part gave a loud click and stayed in place, held by a spring, while the guard produced a phial and poured a generous measure of black powder into a small pan before the flint. WIth these preparations complete, the guard pressed the wooden stock of the device to his shoulder, pointed it towards the dummy, and squeezed a lever beneath the main body of the mechanism. The flint came down upon the steel pan like a hammer and sent up a little shower of sparks, igniting the powder and producing a loud CRACK!
The baron gave a start at the sudden noise. He collected himself and examined the device once more. "So that explosion I heard from your quarters yesterday was meant to happen, then?" he asked.
"After a fashion, sire, yes," the alchemist said, beckoning him over to the dummy. "Regardless, if you'd care to examine our target..." He stood beside the armoured dummy and pointed to a neat hole that had been gouged in the breastplate. The baron squinted at the hole, then started to smile evilly as its implications dawned on him.
"In trying to brew you poisons, I and my assistant here have instead devised a weapon that outdoes its peers in just about every respect! What man would dare oppose one whose armies wield such tools of fulminary fury?!" he declared melodramatically.
"Very good! You've certainly earned your price!" the baron remarked, taking the weapon from the guard and cradling it lovingly. "So what do you intend to call this excellent device?"
"Well, I hadn't really thought about that much, but... well, it's traditional to name a new device after its inventor, in this case me, so why not call it... the Fiery Armament of Vestroferromalkamorpheus 8th!"
The baron adopted a slightly bewildered expression. "Er... a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?"
Vestroferromalkamorpheus deflated a bit. "I thought it had a bit of a ring to it, but... well, what else would you suggest we call it, sire?"
The guard raised a hand. "I helped invent the thing. Maybe we could name it after me!"
Vestroferromalkamorpheus gave him a skeptical look. "Oh, really? Go on then, tell me your name."
The guard told him.
"Pah, preposterous! A name like that would never catch on! What self-respecting warrior would ever want to wield a weapon called a "Gun"?!"