Whale Mail, page 1
Whale Mail
BUREAU OF MAGIC ABUSE
PATTY JANSEN
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
About the Author
More By This Author
Chapter 1
It was towards the end of the day and work was almost done when Perrin climbed the stairs to the top floor of the Bureau of Magic Abuse.
He wore his spiffy new uniform: black trousers and a crisp white shirt with a scarf with the council’s emblem on it, a grey hat and a dark red trench coat.
It was a great uniform, even if he said so himself, and with his knowledge of fine clothing from his previous life, he had a hand in having it designed.
In one hand, he carried his cage with two magic sniffers, each in a separate compartment. Both animals were running backwards and forwards through the straw in the bottom of the cage. They were hungry. For the younger animal, Mika, one out of Perrin’s own litter, this was the first trip on duty. For most of the day, Yaro, the older animal and Mika’s father, had kept the youngster in check, but now both were too excited to hide in the straw and pretend nothing was happening.
As Perrin climbed the stairs, the animals both stood on their hind legs, front paws holding onto the bars of the cage, bushy tails bobbing as Perrin walked. Excited and very alert in a where is my food? kind of way.
At the top of the stairs, Perrin came out into the large room that held the rows of desks for the magic inspectors to take their notes and fill in their forms and report books at the end of the work day.
This room exhibited the usual state of organised afternoon chaos. Each desk belonged to an inspector. The desks stood in rows placed between book cases with their messy shelves overflowing with books and papers. Cages with magic sniffers stood everywhere. A couple of animals were hissing at each other through the bars of their cages while their owners caught up on events of the day.
Perrin hauled the cage with the magic sniffers in between the desks, greeting his colleagues along the way.
It had been a fairly normal day as far as things were normal in a magic inspector’s life. Perrin had gone around the local inns and a couple of shops in town to check on their store rooms for illegal magic. He had chatted with the owners, whom he knew well by now. After starting in the job almost a year ago, he felt like he had settled in to his tasks.
He pulled the big book off the shelf and opened it at the page where he had left off the previous day, recording the discovery of a few magic items in a vegetable shop. He had warned the owner, and the owner had assured him that he would make repairs, dispose of the items and notify the supplier of those items of the discovery of illegal magic. Perrin had gone back to check today, and found that the offending items were packed in a box, ready to be shipped back to whatever magical realm they had come from.
The magic inspectors were keeping Tamba safe, because magic was not allowed here. Tamba was a place between the worlds where all types of magic worked, and allowing each and every one of them into town would be extremely dangerous.
But the magic inspectors were on top of things.
While Perrin started to write his report, someone walked past his desk, someone sounding puffed and bothered, someone wearing the red trenchcoat but brightly striped red and white stockings.
Perrin looked up. “Verbena!”
“Yes?”
She turned around. Her face was red from rushing. She always tended to be on the late side and therefore always had to hurry.
“What’s with the socks?”
“These ones?” She lifted the hem of her coat, showing the offending bright, hand-knitted items for all to see. Several inspectors raised their eyebrows. “My sister made them for me.”
“Didn’t Inspector Carbin say that any clothing we can wear underneath our uniform has to be dignified and muted in colour?”
“Oh.” Her cheeks grew even more red. “She got some red wool at the markets but it wasn’t enough, so she made white stripes. I think it looks nice. Do you really think Inspector Carbin won’t like them?”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to wait what she says.”
Perrin didn’t think the inspector would like them, because brightly striped socks didn’t fall under any definition of dignified, but he could also not get himself to say that. He quite liked them. It was something that his deceased flamboyant partner Atreyo would have liked, whose passing—three years ago—he’d commemorated last week, alone in his room with a candle on the windowsill.
Likely, Verbena’s sister had bought white wool because it was cheaper, or because she had unpicked a garment she had either found or been given by one of her “patrons”. And it was a wonder that, with seven children by seven different fathers, Verbena’s sister had any time to knit at all.
Verbena grabbed a book off the shelf, and Perrin watched her brightly striped socks bob up and down as she walked to an empty desk.
At that moment, the receptionist from the public office downstairs came running up the stairs.
“There is a fight in the harbour,” this man called out. His face looked red and flustered.
He was one of the administrative people who worked not directly for the inspectors, but to service all the Bureau of Magic Abuse’s employees in the building. The public office was one of the recent additions to the Bureau’s services. In the room downstairs, citizens could come to have items checked for magic free of charge, so that no one could complain that they didn’t know that an object contained magic because they couldn’t afford to pay any of the private operators who, half the time, were only interested in selling additional magical items in order to detect magic anyway.
“A fight?” Inspector Carbin said. “I presume the guards are dealing with it?” She was just coming out of her office, also about to go home, by the look of things. She looked around the office. Her gaze landed on Verbena’s socks. Her eyebrows flicked up.
“Apparently, a magical device was used,” the man said.
“What? In the middle of the city? That’s a bit hard to believe.”
“That’s what he said. I believe he’s a witness. He specifically asked for action from the Bureau,” the man said.
“Is this person still here?” Inspector Carbin asked.
Perrin could almost hear her desire to roll her eyes in her voice. She was about to go home after all.
“I will tell him to come upstairs.”
The man disappeared again.
Inspector Carbin pulled a face but went into her office.
She gestured for the inspectors to stay.
Great. Now Perrin was stuck here with a bunch of cranky and hungry magic sniffers. That was his punishment for doing his job properly and not getting out the door quickly enough.
The receptionist returned quickly with another man, who looked like a dock worker straight from the harbour front. He was huge and had hands as big as shovels. His face was broad, his hair messy, and he looked around the office as if he came into a magical realm.
He seemed star-struck.
“This is Bix. He works as a labourer in the harbour. He was inside the venue where the fight started.”
The man looked around at the bookcases, the rows of desks, the work schedules pinned on the walls, with his mouth hanging open.
The receptionist prompted, “Now, Bix, tell the inspectors what you’ve seen and what you just said to me.”
“Well,” the man said and then he looked around the twenty-odd officers in uniform who were still in the room.
The receptionist reminded him: “Do tell us, because if it is true what you’re saying, we need to act quickly.”
“For some days now, we seen these strange characters in the harbour,” the man said.
Inspector Carbin snorted. “Surely strange characters come into the harbour all the time. This wouldn’t be the first time that something shady happens out there?”
Her voice trembled with sarcasm. Boy, she really did want to go home.
The man opened his mouth, but closed it again. He stared at her. For as much as such a huge man could be afraid of a slight, middle-aged woman, he looked afraid.
“My colleague is a little touchy today,” the receptionist said to him. “But please tell us what you saw today.”
The worker turned to the receptionist and continued, “They was strange characters, with masks over their faces. They was all covered up with long jackets and gloves and that. There was rumours they was whalers. Some said they was buying harpoons.”
Inspector Carbin said, “As disgusting and illegal as that is, it’s also the responsibility of the regular guards.”
“Please forget about the embellishments of the story,” the recepti onist said to his charge. “I don’t care who or what they were. Tell us what you saw.”
“But it’s important what they were. Because that’s what got them into trouble. They was buying things they was not supposed to have and doing things they was not supposed to do. Even in the harbour. The city people may not think much of us, but we got standards.”
“The story, please.”
“Well, I went into The Happy Sailor, like we do mostly after work, and I notice this ruckus at the back of the room.”
“Ruckus?”
“You know, a fight. People yelling at each other, with bad language. Real bad language. The owner, good old Pip, was trying to calm them down because he’s the one that gets to pay for the broken windows and stuff.”
“Who was fighting?”
“That was these strangers. And they got someone with his back against the wall. I didn’t think much of it because it was only Duco and he is always getting himself into trouble, ripping people off and that. But then I noticed the others. And they was the strangers. Duco is a small time swindler, but he doesn’t usually mess with the big guys. He doesn’t mess with magic. But these guys, they was something different altogether. Wearing masks, covering up their entire bodies. They had yellow eyes, like a snake. One man takes out this device like a magical globe and then he put it against the throat of poor old Duco that him and his mates cornered. This magical glowing snake came out of the globe and it wound around the man’s neck and forced him to speak. But what he said made no sense, and the words sounded like they came out of the depths of hell.”
All the magic inspectors looked at each other, and worry flitted over one or two faces.
And then Inspector Carbin said, “A truth globe.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear anyone tell me what it was. But it was scary. And Duco was so scared he wet his pants. Not that he often needs a lot of help doing that, much as he’s half-pissed most the time.”
Inspector Carbin continued, “Truth globes are highly dangerous, because they are rarely about the truth. That’s what they will tell you, but they can be used to make people confess to things they never did just so that they can be punished.”
“Yeah, that’s what these people did. They were asking poor Duco if he had something they was looking for, and he said that he knew where it was, so they took him away. But none of us believed that. Duco has nothing. He knows nothing. If he ever gets anything, he sells it to pay his debts to other shady characters. And the stuff he gets involved in is nothing that people from the realms would send anyone with scary glowing globes to get. There was no way that this man would have known where this thing was.”
“What was it they were asking for?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was noisy, I didn’t hear and I don’t know anything about stuff like that anyway.”
“And they took him away just like that?”
“Well no, because that was how the fight started, because Duco, for all that he’s shady, got some angry friends, and his brother was also watching. They started this fight, and then one of these strange masked characters pulls out another magical thing and starts blasting people with it. That’s when I got scared and I came here.”
“You mean that’s happening still right now?”
“Still going on as I came here. The guards are there, but they can’t do much. They was just watching outside. They said someone go to warn the Bureau, so I did. That’s all.”
A worried expression came over Inspector Carbin’s face. The inspectors were used to dealing with magic used in kitchens of inns. They weren’t set up as a magical fighting force, but if a magical item had come into the city already, they were the only ones who could do something about it.
“Let’s go check it out,” she said.
Chapter 2
The man seemed disappointed when Inspector Carbin said they needed to prepare and they’d check it out later. He’d probably expected to come running back to the fight with a knight in shining armour in tow, in the form of a group of magic inspectors.
After the man had left with the receptionist, Inspector Carbin gathered all the magic inspectors that were still in the upstairs room in her office. They were about ten in total, and this included Perrin and Verbena.
They all looked at each other.
“Guess we’re the unlucky ones,” said Regis. He was one of the inspectors who had been at the bureau for at least ten years and commanded great respect from his colleagues.
A few chuckled, uneasily.
“We need to sort out what’s going on here,” Inspector Carbin said, her voice grave, and she explained what the man had told her for those who hadn’t heard the story.
When she finished, she said, “I appreciate that none of this is in your job description, but it is not in mine either. I don’t think anyone in the council realised how quickly magic would seep into the city once they started encouraging people from the realms to visit. We’ve been caught sleepwalking. We thought we would have to deal with magic potions and other small stuff, but we’re going to have to employ people with more serious magic skills.”
This was already agreed by the council, in fact. It was just that finding those people who were also willing to work in Tamba was a challenge.
Come and work as magician for the purpose of stamping out magic was not a great job advertisement, since magicians derived their fame from magic and therefore had an interest in the continuation of magic.
Inspector Carbin sighed.
“But that doesn’t help us right now. If there are people in town using serious magic, we are the town’s only defense against it, unprepared as we are. I am asking for volunteers, but I am also going to suggest to you that your willingness to help will be looked upon kindly when the time comes for promotions and such.”
She looked around, but no one dared speak up that they didn’t want to come. They were very much in this together.
They all understood Tamba’s precarious situation, and also if they did nothing, the next round of trouble would be worse.
Inspector Carbin continued, “But I’m also aware that there will be a risk to you, and therefore I’ll authorise something we’ve never done: the use of magical items. We have a store of them in this building, and some will be very useful for protecting our staff members.”
Yes, there were storage rooms downstairs that held confiscated items of magic.
“Before anyone says it, I will confess that the irony of using magic to combat illegal magic is not lost on me, but I guess the priority is that we all want to go home after we do a job like this.”
There were no jokes or smart comments.
There had been a genuine change in the general atmosphere at the Bureau. The magic inspectors realised that theirs was more than just another job that anyone could do if you showed them how and paid them enough.
Being a magic inspector could be dangerous. Very dangerous.
Perrin followed the inspectors down the stairs.
The walls in the stairwell displayed images of the short but proud history of the Bureau.
It started with the creating of the agency, not even fifteen years ago, by Inspector Carbin, then of the Mayor’s Department of Law. The formal declaration of the inception of the agency hung on the wall. The Bureau’s moving into the building two years later. A commemorative plaque was a reminder of that event.
Various paintings depicted other historic scenes. The extension of the building to include a second floor. The arrival of cages of magic sniffers. A class on how to spot magic by a visiting Solanian grand wizard.
Over the more than ten years of its operation, inspectors had confiscated many magical items. Most were small things, like magic buttons that cast an illusion over a cotton shirt that made it look like silken brocade. Or magic sugar that made those who ate it want more.
