Whale Mail, page 4
This one looked like one of those old-fashioned bric-a-brac secondhand places that sold whatever weird and wonderful items they could lay their hands on.
But if so, the shop put very little effort into selling their wares. The window display was boxed off with a plank of wood blocking the view into what would be the shop window. The area above the plank was dark, showing only the glow of a single light within.
The window was dirty with grime. The paint on the door and window frame was peeling.
He waited and waited.
He was standing for so long in front of the grocery shop that the owner came out to ask him if he wanted to buy anything.
Perrin said he didn’t, and then when the shop owner kept looking at him, felt compelled to move along. Not that there was an obvious place to hide.
He pulled his hat over the side of his face because he had to go past the dingy shop, and hoped that the puman people inside the shop wouldn’t see his inspectors uniform.
He peeked into the shop while walking through the street.
It was very dark inside. A yellowed piece of paper stuck to the inside of the window. It said, Outside shop hours, please knock. The bell doesn’t work.
That boded well.
What would people want here outside shop hours, anyway? An emergency purchase of second hand rubbish? It didn’t look like anyone visited the place, even during shop hours.
He waited in front of another shop where the windows were dark and everyone had gone home for the day, until eventually the two pumans came out into the dusk, and disappeared at a trot across the street and into the alley.
Now what should he do? Follow them or go into the shop?
He was alone and not on duty. He wasn’t much good at climbing or running, or, heaven forbid, fighting. If he followed and something happened, then Inspector Carbin would have his hide. He’d become acquainted with that unpleasant experience in the past, and it was not one he was keen to repeat.
So, go into the shop then.
Because he also felt that if he relayed this story tomorrow, someone would have expected him to do something.
Perrin crossed the street and climbed the low step to the door.
He half expected—or hoped?—it to be locked, but it opened with nothing more than a creak. Right. The bell didn’t work.
Behind the grime-covered door in desperate need of a coat of paint, he found a cluttered shop with bare floorboards, shelves and tables full of randomly stacked items, ranging from old books to blackened silver cutlery, to dusty mismatched glasses, to little tables and chairs. Some were still in boxes, some of them stacked on top of each other and shoved under the display tables.
The owner of the shop sat behind the counter at the back wall. He was an old man with wispy grey hair. His face was utterly unfamiliar to Perrin. He shrunk into the corner, wide-eyed, when Perrin came in.
“I didn’t buy anything from them, I swear,” he said. His voice cracked with age.
“I haven’t even asked my question yet,” Perrin said.
“No, but you’re here because of those weird people who came in here just now, right? I have nothing to do with them, I swear!”
“Calm down, calm down. I did see them coming in, but I’m not interested in your business, but I’d like to know what they’re after and what they asked you.”
“I don’t know, I swear. I have nothing to do with them.” His eyes were wide. “I’m an honest man. I don’t have anything to do with that… magic stuff. You can search my shop if you want.”
Perrin looked around. Now that his eyes had become used to the dimness, even more of the mess in the shop was clear. Boxes stood on the floor, a variety of secondhand rubbish spilling out. Search that? Er. No.
“I’m also much less interested in your business than in their business.”
The man stared at him, as if he was a mouse disturbed at night in the kitchen while eating the cheese.
Perrin continued, “Why were they here? Do you have a debt to anyone?”
“Me? No. I always pay everything on time. They said they were looking for stolen items that might have been sold on to secondhand shops… I asked them what item they were looking for so I could help them, but they wanted to see everything I had. Look at the mess they made.” His voice shook.
He gestured at a couple of open boxes on the floor, all of them with a jumble of items inside. Several items also lay on the floor, ranging from old forks to a rusty compass, two unused notebooks with yellowing paper and many other pieces of junk.
“I’m only an old man. I don’t have big, expensive things. Nothing like they would come out of the realms to find.”
Perrin walked over and took a peek at the stuff on the floor. He couldn’t imagine that anyone would pay much for this junk that looked to have been sitting in these boxes for many years.
He picked up an old book. The covers were so faded that it was difficult to read the title, especially in the darkness. He opened it. The yellowed pages appeared to contain children’s bedtime stories. He was about to put it back in the box when something caught his attention.
A white porcelain teapot with tiny pink flowers painted on the round belly. If he was not mistaken, this came from the same vendor where Atreyo and his family bought their tableware, and he knew this because Mirella had perused the catalogues extensively when she got married.
He picked it up. It was dusty, but complete. It had probably been dumped here because at some point it had become separated from its matching cups.
But Dorella adored this sort of stuff.
He carried it over to the counter.
“These strangers, did they threaten you?”
“Don’t know what you call threatening. Did they grab me or point a knife at me? No. But they said that if it turned out that I was lying about having stuff and they found anything, they would take it and they would force me to pay a fine.”
“So they did threaten you. How can you fail to let them know about something if they don’t tell you what they’re looking for?”
“See? You understand! That’s the problem. They came to harass me, an old man who has done nothing wrong, and make unreasonable demands that I have no hope of meeting. It’s all about lording it over us shopkeepers.”
“Whatever they’re doing, they’re not allowed to be in Tamba.”
“It didn’t look like they cared a lot about that. I’m just an old man selling a few things, you know? I have no interest in trying to play games with people from the realms. Did that in my youth. Got the scars, too.”
“Well…” Perrin shrugged and looked around the messy shop. “Put everything back on the shelves. They obviously found nothing. But for the future, remember this. I am Perrin and I’m a magic inspector from the Bureau of Magic Abuse. If ever something similar happens or you hear anything that disturbs you, report it to the Bureau. There is not much point in leaving these characters to sow terror on the streets and letting them get away with it by keeping quiet about it. That’s not how we lead our lives in Tamba.” Then he gestured at the counter. “How much for the teapot?”
Chapter 7
When Perrin came home with the teapot, Dorella was in the kitchen doing the washing up.
“Late again?” she said, with her back to the door.
“Yes. I have something for you.”
“Oh?” Now she turned around, wiping her hands on her apron.
Perrin took the teapot from his bag. “I thought you might like this.” He held it out. Just now, he noticed it was a bit dusty.
“Oh, you silly. It’s gorgeous, but you shouldn’t have to do this. The shop does well enough for me to buy my own teapots.”
“Sorry, it’s a bit dusty. I should have cleaned it first.”
“Oh, I have just the thing to fix that. I bought this at the markets a while back.”
She opened a cupboard and took out a bottle with a syrupy concoction inside.
“It seemed like a good buy to clean things, and he was demonstrating it at the stand. It worked beautifully.”
“Dorella?”
“What?” She turned around, her face red.
She spread her hands and let them sink again. Her eyes glittered.
“I really don’t need a teapot. I’m a bit…” She shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a little thing. I saw it for sale while at work and thought you might like it.”
“It’s not a little thing at all. Nobody ever buys me presents.”
“Well, this can be our teapot when we have tea together. If I ever find any cups and plates that match it, I’ll buy them, too.”
“That would be lovely. Just a teapot for after work. Not a work teapot.”
That settled the matter, and when Perrin came back from work the next day, he found the teapot all scrubbed and shiny, sitting on the table in the corner where they usually sat, with a set of pink tea cups and matching plates, which rather suited the ensemble.
She wanted to know where he had bought the teapot so she could chase up the rest of the set.
“The cups might have been broken,” Perrin said.
“I doubt it. I know these types of people. They’re very precious with their tableware. Probably someone thought they could make more money selling them separately.”
Probably.
So Perrin told her about the old fellow and his dingy old shop.
Dorella, being Dorella, then offered some gossip about him, which confirmed what Perrin had already observed: that he’d owned the place for a long time, that he had inherited the business from his father who used to run a thriving clothes shop, but the son had little interest in dealing with staff and all the suppliers and the council, or going to fairs to sell fancy clothing. He was unmarried and lived at the back of the shop.
Perrin thought that would be the last he saw of the old fellow.
He went back to his inspections, and over the next few days, on his way home, glanced at the shop but never saw anything else that disturbed him, nor any sign that the owner had been sufficiently shaken by the experience to clean his windows and at least make an effort to appeal to the general public.
He fully expected never to see the old man again, and for a few days, he didn’t, and his life became consumed by another, bigger problem. Shall we say, a dragon-sized problem.
Because in a previous adventure, he’d seized an illegal stash of dragon eggs and a baby dragon. The Bureau had packed up the eggs and shipped them back to Solania a long time ago. But you couldn’t just put a dragon in a box and let the mail service deliver it, even if you had a delivery address, and that was another story all by itself.
Dragons came from Solania, but even within that realm, no one owned dragons. No one even liked dragons. They could be useful. They were often a menace, but there were many dragons in the Solanian mountains, and no one in Solania could be sufficiently bothered by the presence of one of their dragons in another realm to cooperate with—or pay for—measures to send it back.
And, to add to the problem, what had once been a baby dragon quickly became a larger dragon. Dragons were strong and had vicious claws that could rip through timber walls, that could prise open doors, that could bend rods of metal, as the dragon in question had demonstrated repeatedly.
Dragons also had a foul temper and farts that made even the most determined dragon tamer run for the exit. And dragon tamers were in short supply in Tamba in the first place.
Perrin had tried putting the beast on a truck, but a burnt-out truck and an angry transport operator later, the dragon was back in town. He even counted himself lucky that they’d been able to trick the beast into entering a storage crate and they’d been able to catch it.
He’d finally put the beast on the train back to Solania, in the company of a specially-trained handler and enclosed in a fortified cage.
Stupidly maybe, he had assumed it would be the last he saw of the beast…
Or that his life would remain as calmly in control as it was that one particular afternoon when he returned from his inspections.
As he plonked the cage with the magic sniffers on his desk, he became aware of a disturbance in the office at the back of the room, Inspector Carbin’s office, where a man raised his voice.
In that office, behind the windows, Inspector Carbin sat at her desk with her arms crossed over her chest and a man stood on the other side of her desk, waving his hands as he shouted at her. Perrin couldn’t see his face and didn’t recognise his voice, but he wore a railway uniform.
“What’s going on?” Perrin asked his colleague on the next desk.
“I don’t know. He was in the office when I came back. They were already shouting at each other then.”
“They were talking about paying damages,” another colleague said.
“For what?” someone else asked.
The first man shrugged. “I didn’t hear that.”
But a deep sense of suspicion crept over Perrin, because this wouldn’t be the first time that infernal dragon created trouble.
Oh, no, not again.
He wanted this very much not to be about the dragon. He wanted to be rid of the dragon, as he should be, because a dragon, being a magical creature, was obviously not allowed to be in Tamba, and it should go back to where it came from. But in the past few months, a lot in his job had been about the dragon, at the most inopportune moments.
And he’d been so sure he’d finally banished that dragon out of his life, and here it was again.
At that moment, Inspector Carbin looked out the window into the main office. Her eyes met Perrin’s. She rose from the desk and strode to the door.
“Perrin, can you come in here?”
Oh, yes, definitely. This was about the dragon.
Under the curious stares of all those in the large office room, he walked through the aisle between the desks to Inspector Carbin’s office.
The visitor’s expression barely remained polite as Perrin entered and shut the door behind him, enclosing the three in a tense silence.
“This is officer Parvo from the railway freight despatch office,” Inspector Carbin began. “Officer, this is Inspector Perrin, our inspector in charge of this matter. Perrin, I’m afraid there has been a bit of an issue.”
“I’m guessing it’s about the dragon,” Perrin said.
“Your dragon.” Parvo’s nostrils flared. His face was still red from arguing with Inspector Carbin.
“It’s nobody’s dragon, which is part of the problem,” Perrin said. “It came from Solania, but it doesn’t belong to—”
“Excuse me, this is your dragon. You told us to transport a crate. The contents of the crate are yours. We only look after the delivery of the goods to the nominated address. We do not tamper with the contents of the crates. This is your crate and your dragon. And your beast has now destroyed two crates and the interior of a train carriage.”
“It destroyed the crate? But how could that have happened? We used the strongest crate we could find.”
“You tell me. We put the crate on the train as agreed.”
“Did you allow the handler in the carriage?”
“Yes. We did everything as we discussed. The animal handler would agree with me if he had the opportunity, but was so distraught, he’s resigned on the spot and has left town, leaving us short an animal handler for the transport of less troublesome creatures that we actually make money transporting on trains, like horses. Now, what am I going to do?”
Inspector Carbin snorted. “Find another animal handler. That is not our problem. Get on with the story and tell the inspector what happened and what you want from us.”
Parvo shot her an angry look.
“What happened is clear. This dreadful creature started to destroy your ‘strongest ever’ crate before we were even out of town. It had escaped before the train was out of the country. Fortunately, the driver noticed and could stop the train and could turn around in time so we could put it back in the cage. You can be lucky that the carriage was made from steel and the dragon hadn’t yet worked out how to open the door or it would have escaped into the city.”
“Did you follow all our instructions?”
“Yes! But instructions are no good when facing a dragon that’s so angry it has flames coming out of its ears. At that time, instructions are nothing. When you’re facing a menace that is worse than hell itself, and you’re on a moving train with no help. That was the predicament my poor employee found himself in and that caused him to leave his job. Now I’m short on qualified workers. Because of your dragon.” He glared at Inspector Carbin and then at Perrin.
“You have animal handlers. You assured us that you could take care of it,” Inspector Cabin said.
“Well, I’m here to inform you that we are done with this dragon. You come to pick it up and take it out of our warehouse. We’re not dealing with it anymore.”
“Where are we going to put it? Up here in the office?” Perrin protested.
“I don’t care. We have suffered enough losses and terrorising of our mail room and transport staff. I’ve lost people because of this beast. Can I also remind you that it set fire to a mail delivery, it escaped and upset the mail storage area so that we had to spend three days sorting it. And now this. We’re a mail office, not an animal facility.” He looked pointedly at Perrin’s cage with the magic sniffers that still stood on his desk.
Inspector Carbin snorted. “Well, if you would just take steps to keep the dragon in the cage—”
“Don’t you think we haven’t tried? You should have seen the long list of all the things we told the rail employees not to do. As you might realise, a dragon is not just another parcel you can pick up and put wherever you want.”
“I do realise that,” Inspector Carbin said, sounding prim. “You still advertise yourself as being a facility that deals with the transport of animals. As far as I know, the dragon is an animal.”
“I don’t think you realise anything at all. I don’t think the Bureau has any idea what they’re dealing with. Just send it on the train, those were your very words. There is nothing just about a dragon, not even a baby one that’s rapidly becoming a big angry dragon.”
