Whale Mail, page 11
“You really need to take responsibility for this creature,” the man said before Perrin had a chance to greet him.
Oh no, this was again about that infernal dragon.
“What has it done this time?” Perrin said while putting the magic sniffer cage on the desk and doing his best not to roll his eyes.
“That beast has almost destroyed the cage,” the man said. “We’ve had a carpenter come in to put extra planks of wood to reinforce it. You’ll be getting the bill.”
Perrin opened his mouth—
“Yes, we gave it things it could destroy to keep it busy, as you suggested, but it won’t be long before it breaks out and then you will have to pay for all the damage that it does to the warehouse. We are not a zoo. You really must put this creature somewhere else.”
“I know,” Perrin said, and he sighed. “I’m working on it.”
But the truth was, he had run out of goodwill and out of places for the dragon. He had nothing, because he’d already burned through all the types of businesses that would normally provide this service.
So he assured, once again, that he would deal with the dragon soon. He could see in the man’s face that he didn’t have much trust that it would actually happen.
He then mulled over the very limited remaining options while doing his rounds through the inns with the magic sniffers.
Some people had even suggested killing the creature, and while he thought that was a repulsive thing to do, he also wondered if that was even possible.
Yes, Laeticia and her boyfriend Gaeron had raised dragons from eggs and killed them, but that was when the dragons were still very young and it was possible for a few people to subdue them.
The Bureau’s mistake, of course, was to let the dragon grow as big as it had while trying to solve the problem diplomatically. When Perrin had finally obtained the funds to hire a truck to take the dragon back, the creature had been too strong for the truck. And the same happened with the train.
That left only one option. A boat.
Which the Bureau would never fund because they disliked anyone involved in shipping and sea trade.
But he could get Roban to pay for it… if he could get Roban to give him the item—the Horn of Truth—that Gaminia wanted.
He needed to be smart about this.
So, after he had finished his round of inspections and whizzed through his reports, he wrote down his plan. It was big. He was not so crazy as to try to enact it without Inspector Carbin’s knowledge, and when he went into the office later in the afternoon just before she was about to go home, he shut the door, because he envisaged there might be some shouting.
Several of his colleagues gave him suspicious looks as he went into the office. They knew he had been trying to find a solution for the dragon, and no doubt they had heard about his latest troubles.
Inspector Carbin read over his plan and didn’t say anything for a while.
Then she looked up and met his eyes.
“It’s courageous,” she said. “A number of people could get very angry at you for trying this. If it fails. Especially if it fails. These are people we’d normally try not to anger. People who walk the moral high ground on dealing with pirates and such. Those who consider all seafarers pirates.” Mainly those on the council.
“I understand and I agree. I would rather not have to do this, but I’m not sure what else we can do. We’ve tried everything, and it takes care of two problems at the same time. We absolutely need to get rid of that dragon. It’s a danger to everyone in town.”
She nodded. “Yeah.” She blew out a breath. “Well, I wish you luck. This could cost us all our jobs, but I trust that you won’t do things that are too silly. At least I’m glad it won’t be me visiting the Dianello family.”
Perrin left the office with a sense of deep dread in his stomach. He wasn’t sure that the trust in him was well-placed.
He went back to his desk and spent some more time writing out a letter, and after he had checked and double-checked it several times, he copied it onto nice paper and took it to the house of the Dianello family.
Roban Dianello lived with his family in a house next door to his parents. Perrin had never spent much time in this particular house, because the family always met at the parents’ place, but since Roban was now the self-proclaimed owner of Atreyo’s business, he should do this officially and professionally as a proper inspector of magic would.
He knocked on the door and when a servant opened it, said he wanted to speak with Roban about business. He was still wearing his inspector uniform, so he figured the man would suspect what this might be about.
It was all part of the game.
The servant asked Perrin to wait inside on a chair put next to the door for that purpose.
The house was not as old as the Dianello family home, and didn’t carry the weight of history that made changing it almost immoral.
As a result, Roban had made changes to the house that made it more modern. Gone was the large and opulent hall that served only to impress visitors, but that sucked up heat and created a useless void inside the house.
The new hall—where Perrin waited—was functional and big enough for the things that people did in halls: store and put on their coats, wait for someone or receive deliveries.
The rest of the front of the house was a study and teaching space for Roban’s teenage children and those children—a boy and twin girls—were completing some kind of science project when Perrin sat on that chair.
Voices drifted through the hallway, and Perrin thought he could hear the words Magic Inspector.
A moment later, Roban himself came to the hall.
He looked Perrin up and down, no doubt recognising him.
Perrin feared briefly that Mirella had talked about him, in which case he would see through the plan in less than a second. And he would be angry, and accuse him of blackmailing, which he was trying to do—sort of.
As he stood here, he realised how he didn’t know this man very well, because he always seemed a bit distant, and he’d found no special reason to dislike him, since Mirella and Atreyo’s father already took up that space.
“Hmm, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you,” Roban said. “What brings you here?”
Perrin tried to find a denigrating tone in his words, but didn’t hear it.
“I could spend a long time explaining, but it’s best that I let this do the talking.” Perrin gave him the letter.
Roban took it and unfolded it. Perrin watched his face while he was reading. He took quite a long time reading, and let an uncomfortable silence lapse after he had finished, but looked over the text again.
Perrin wondered whether he was going to get angry or tell him to go away. In which case, they might as well release the dragon because he had tried.
Then he said, his voice flat, “You want me to hire a boat to return a dragon to Solania? Why would I lend you a boat?”
“Because I need one and the Bureau doesn’t own one.”
He squinted at the letter. “But if the Bureau can’t pay for its own boats, why should I have to?”
“Because I might reveal to the council that you have a thing called the Horn of Truth, which is the reason that we’ve been having trouble with pumans.”
“Huh.”
He looked at the letter again and then back at Perrin. Then he said again, “Huh. Come into the office and we’ll talk further.”
Perrin followed Roban through the hallway into a comfortable and widely spaced office.
Instead of the usual desk, and a chair to face the desk where the visitors could sit, this office consisted of a number of smaller tables with numerous chairs placed around them.
Not a regular office at all.
“I am not quite familiar with the type of business you do,” Perrin said.
“We do a number of different types of business,” Roban said, “but my wife and I mostly use this room to have meetings with our tutors.”
“Tutors?”
“My wife runs a school where people can come to have private tuition.”
“You mean children?”
“Yes, but also adults. We do all kinds of tuition. Whether it is for children or for adults. The other day we did training for firefighters.”
It was interesting, and something Perrin filed away in the back of his mind.
He might not want to work with the well-off citizens of the town, but life became very hard if you took that position in public. They owned the businesses and had the money to make things happen, as he was experiencing right now.
Roban offered Perrin a drink, but he preferred to stay alert.
They sat down on a set of armchairs in the corner of the room.
Eventually, after making some small talk about how nice the furniture was, Roban began, “I wouldn’t be amenable to making deals, but I admit I’m in a bit of a bind, and there might be something you could do for me in exchange for my cooperation.”
It was indeed as Perrin had worked out.
“So it’s true that you bought old Fallon’s collection. Hoping to make a quick sale of the valuable items, and not knowing that the collection had already been picked over by magicians in Solania and only the troublesome items remained.”
“If I find that swindler who sold it to me, I will have his head on a stake.”
“You will have to come to the Bureau for that.”
“I don’t live under the illusion that you will be able to do more than I can do by myself.”
“Maybe not, but at least it will have the endorsement of the council and the mayor, and that has to be worth something. As opposed to, for example, going to jail for serious misuse of magic.”
Roban gave him a serious look and blew out a sigh.
Then he got to his feet.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
He preceded Perrin into a storeroom where he opened the door to an old cabinet. On the shelves inside stood boxes and jugs and jars, all crammed together and sometimes stacked on top of each other.
Vials of strange substances, contraptions with many arms and levers, ornate boxes, old books, bottles with potions and illegible labels, pots with dried herbs and much, much more.
Roban took a rusted metal case from the back of the top shelf. He placed it on a table in the room and opened the lid.
Inside the box, on a bed of dried seaweed, lay the fabled trumpet.
Just like the old man from the shop had told Perrin, it was encrusted with marine growths and didn’t look like it would still produce a sound.
Perrin was not a magician, but as he set eyes upon the thing, his skin pricked. He swore he could feel the magic swirling around the room, coming from this ancient object of the sea.
He took in a breath, reached out to touch it, but withdrew his hand.
Roban said, “It’s all right, it won’t fall apart. It’s quite sturdy despite the way it looks. It doesn’t work, by the way. I mean—as a trumpet.”
“Can’t you feel the magic?”
Roban frowned.
“This is definitely the thing that Gaminia wants and that they’ve been turning over the city for.”
“They can buy it back if they want.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works. It was theirs to begin with. It was stolen from the palace in mysterious fashion.”
“I bought the collection fairly.”
“Many items in it were stolen or cursed. That was why you could buy it at a cheap price. Because no one else wanted it.”
“That’s untrue. I had to bat away other contestants for it.”
“Locals from Tamba, no doubt, who had no idea what they were bidding on. Tamba was the only place where such a thing can be sold. Because everyone else would have known that the collection was trouble.”
Roban said nothing. His mouth twitched. Then he blew out a breath. “Anyway, I want to be rid of this thing. It’s endangering my family.”
“That’s why I have an offer.”
“Ah. I could have known that you’d only become involved because you wanted something.”
“That’s often the case, and the same could be said about you. But in the end, you have a problem and I have problem, and maybe we can put the two together and come to an agreement.”
Roban snorted. “Just tell me what you want and maybe we can talk business.”
Perrin explained the situation he found himself in with regard to the dragon. The presence of the dragon in town was not exactly a secret, so he wasn’t giving away key information here. As he spoke, he watched Roban’s face grow increasingly dubious.
“So, to be short, you ask me to risk my business contacts with shipowners in order to transport this dragon back to the wizards of Solania who don’t even want it back?”
“Don’t tell me that you don’t realise how much damage a dragon you can do in Tamba. And you’re asking me to risk my life to go and return this thing to the whales?”
They looked at each other for a while, and Perrin could see the thoughts whirl behind his eyes.
After a while, Roban said, “Supposing I were to arrange a ship—and I stress to you this wouldn’t be my ship because I don’t own ships—could you take the whole collection back to Solania? I don’t even care about the money anymore, I hate to think what other troublesome items are going to be in it. It was a mistake to buy it, and if I get my hands on the misfit who sold it to me, he will regret ever having met me, but meanwhile, I want to be rid of it.”
Perrin grinned.
Chapter 17
Captain Anko stood on the deck of his ship with his arms crossed over his chest. He was a well-known figure in Tamba’s shipping world, a towering man with broad shoulders and a head full of curly fox-coloured hair which he wore in a thick plait that hung over his shoulder and down the front of his leather vest.
His face held an incredulous smirk, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
“You want me to do what?” he asked, and he laughed, a booming sound that echoed over the deck and adjacent quayside.
The ship next to Captain Anko’s ship, the Seven Winds, was being loaded and the captain’s loud laughter drew some curious looks from the dock workers lugging large sacks into the nearby warehouse.
“I know it is a strange job,” Perrin said. “But you will be rewarded fairly for your efforts.”
“Ho, but what is fair for a trip that is dangerous and might be a risk to my ship and my crew?”
“Roban Dianello stands as guarantor for the payment.”
The man in question had said very little since he and Perrin had stepped onto the deck of the ship. He leaned against the railing, his arms crossed over his chest. He clearly didn’t want to be there. Under normal circumstances, he would consider being forced into this arrangement as a sign of defeat.
Captain Anko snorted. “Ho, that’s all very well, but neither of you landlubbers are going to carry the dragon on your ship.”
Perrin said, “The dragon won’t be your responsibility. The beast will be locked up for all of the journey. I will come with it, and we will provide all its food and look after its needs. The only thing you need to do is to make sure that we get to Solania.”
“And stop off at Gaminia, right?”
“That should be easy. It’s along the way.”
“No, no, no, you don’t understand. Nothing is easy about Gaminia. For any normal trip, we avoid the place like the plague. When you cross the border, it’s like sailing into a floating net. A huge floating net. Every time you cut yourself loose, they come up with some other ridiculous permit they want you to have gotten.”
“We will take care of that. I’ve already applied for the permits. We will be returning something that they have asked for. They will be happy to see us.”
“Ho! That has to be the first time the whales are happy about anything to do with any creature that lives on the land. I don’t like them at all. We normally sail along the coast to avoid them. It’s a bit longer and there can be pirates, but I rather deal with that than having to decipher the nonsense spouted by these whales. There’s stories of ships held up for weeks for some stupid thing, while the cargo rotted and then the whales accused the captain of fouling the water when they had to ditch the load.”
Perrin was rather sick of the man’s complaining. Since coming on board, Captain Anko had only wanted to argue and make excuses.
“Look, we can stand here all day to talk about reasons not to go to Gaminia. I understand, I know, it’s not an easy place. But Roban wants to have this troublesome item returned to the kingdom, and that is what you’ll be paid for. The only thing you need to do is to provide transport and you’ll be seen as a hero by all of Tamba. I will look after the rest.”
The captain gave Perrin a sideways look. “Ho. I don’t go much for this hero stuff. Most of those we call heroes are not half as great when you start looking closely. I’d rather be safe. And Roban wants me to do this?” He again looked sideways at Roban as if hoping that this was, after all, a joke of some kind.
Roban nodded and returned to his stare and his silence.
Perrin continued, “Roban obtained the trumpet by accident. We’ve worked out that the trumpet is the cause of the unrest and criminal activity in town. The reason why pumans have been roughing up people and breaking into businesses.”
“And my crew.”
“See? There is a benefit even to yourself.”
“Hmph. As long as you do all the negotiation with those whales. They’re nasty creatures. Not like the gentle giants that we are led to believe.”
“Yes, we will deal with all of it,” Perrin said.
“Well, I guess I don’t have any reason to object. I still don’t like it, mind, and you had better stick to your promises, and if something goes wrong, none of it is my fault, right?”
Perrin assured him that all he needed to do was to sail the boat. In fact, the further the captain and crew kept from the dragon or the trumpet, the better.
The captain reluctantly agreed to do the job. He still kept looking at Roban for signs that this was a joke or that Roban didn’t really want this job done, but Roban had his own reasons to want this done. Perrin didn’t even think he knew half of it, just that it put Roban in a difficult situation if found out. He didn’t object, and Captain Anko had no reason to object either. A job was a job. Payment was good.
