Whale Mail, page 5
“Instead of arguing about it, can you suggest something we can do about it?” Perrin said.
“It’s got to leave my warehouse!” Parvo’s face had gone red again. The spit flew out of his mouth. “We won’t put up with this… this creature any longer!”
“We’re just going to walk it down the street and put it up in an inn, right?”
Parvo glared at Perrin, and Perrin glared back.
“I think you do understand the problem,” he then said. “You just want someone else, and not the Bureau, to be saddled with it.”
“Inspector Carbin is right: you advertised yourself to us as an animal handling facility. Forgive us for not being an animal handling facility. That’s why we hired you: to look after it. But if you want to break your contract, we will need some time to—”
“No. No more time. No more excuses. I want the beast gone. We’re part of the mail office, not the Bureau of Magic Abuse. We look after goats and pigeons, sheep and horses. We don’t know how to keep a dragon. We don’t know what to feed a dragon. And, to be perfectly fair with you, our charter does not cover the shipment of dragons. My staff have no training in the handling of dragons.”
“It still needs to be sent back to Solania, for the safety of all citizens of Tamba. We’re all doing our civil duty, and we are not equipped for handling dragons, either. We all need to do our part. Especially if we’re paid to do it.”
“Maybe so, but it won’t be staying in our storage facilities. You can have your money back. Take that beast out of my warehouse. Today. If not gone by tomorrow morning, our charge for holding it will double, and if it’s not gone the day after, it will double again, and this will continue until it’s gone. And if you don’t make a serious attempt to pick the beast up, or you’re stalling deliberately, I will release it, and then we’ll see how quickly you can act.”
Chapter 8
Officer Parvo would not persuaded to make a compromise, ridiculous as his demands were. The dragon had to be gone today. Of course, he was also right about his office being unprepared to care for a dragon, and both Perrin and Inspector Carbin understood that.
The poor man and his staff had dealt with most of the animal’s misbehaviour for the past few months. But they had also happily taken the Bureau’s money to look after it while the Bureau found a way of returning the beast to Solania.
So after Parvo had left the office in big angry strides, with the threat that he’d release the dragon if no one came to pick it up, Inspector Carbin told Perrin that he had better start making arrangements to find somewhere else for the dragon as soon as possible.
Inspector Carbin said, “I very much doubt he will actually release the animal, but he’ll definitely double his charges. And we’re on a tight enough budget already and I don’t want to have to go to the council to explain why the beast is still here—”
Perrin opened his mouth—
“Yes, I know and understand the difficulties we’ve had, but we really need to move on a resolution to our dragon problem.”
“But how are we going to get it back to Solania?” Perrin asked. “We tried the courier and didn’t work. We tried the train and that didn’t work. And each of those attempts was a major effort, with people building the crates and the downstairs office applying for thousands of permits. The only option I can see left to us is to hire a magician, but that won’t go down well with the council or the citizens. Some people tell us to just release the beast, but no one can assure us that the dragon will go home. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. This dragon hatched here. The first creature it saw was probably a local cat or something, or, heaven forbid, some miscreant in the harbour district. The dragon considers Tamba its home, and once we release it, there is no catching it if it decides to hang around.”
“I know, I know.” She raised her hands. “But we need to solve it. Grandmaster Yorick is still expecting the beast to return to Solania, yes?”
“As far as I know. I mean, he’s not been very communicative…”
Grandmaster Yorick was a whole different chapter all by himself.
“Look, Perrin, give this top priority. I can take you off inspections until the beast is safely gone. It shouldn’t take you very long once you can dedicate all your time to the problem, if I give you all the time you need.”
“And the resources?” Meaning: money.
“And resources.”
Perrin heaved a sigh.
“I don’t know, but I’ll do my best, I guess.”
“No, not guess. This time, we have to really get rid of it. You have become one of my most trusted employees. I rely on you to solve this problem.”
Perrin returned to his desk, his mind filled with despair about the insurmountable problem he faced.
Where would he find someone with the equipment and knowledge to safely transport the dragon, given that he didn’t trust magicians?
Dealing with the ancient Solanian magician Yorick had been a challenge by itself. The man was hard to pin down, evasive and condescending in his correspondence.
Perrin pulled out the two letters he had received from the man, written in such an elaborate style that the text was barely legible.
Apparently, the grandmaster said, it was Tamba’s fault that the dragon was in town because “there are no magical protections” and “clearly you need a half-decent magician to save you from yourselves.”
Perrin had discarded many rudely-written responses to those words.
The grandmaster had, however, and no doubt grudgingly, agreed in black and white to rehabilitate the dragon once Perrin could get it to Solania, because the grandmaster had explicitly stated that travel to Tamba—that most dull and drab of places, he said—was beneath him or the officials of the Solanian grand council and as such he thought that “The time and efforts of members of the Solanian council are better spent on matters that concern the Solanian people.”
And those people, it transpired, didn’t care much for dragons. They had plenty of other dragons and felt no particular ownership towards this one.
Apparently also Solania had a law against the export of dragon eggs to prevent a situation just like the one they found themselves in.
Perrin had tried so very hard to ask for one of the grandmaster’s disciples to come and help transport the beast with more forceful means than the pitiful thunderstaff that Perrin had, which was little more than a cattle prod in disguise and only resulted in making the dragon angry these days.
But Grandmaster Yorick was a master in obfuscation, and for every letter Perrin wrote, he would take ages simply to send an infuriatingly vague response, or worse, have his bureaucrats send a vague response.
This had gone on far too long.
So instead of going home—he’d looked forward to getting one of Dorella’s cakes—he went to the harbour front railway freight storage warehouse.
The department that dealt with animals was at the back of the building, a large open hall where the smell of straw wafted out of the doorway.
A few horses stood in their pens, and two men were moving barriers so that the animals could be led into the train carriage that waited on the other side.
There were also a couple of crates that contained fat white geese, sticking their necks through the openings and making their displeasure about being caged up known.
A peacock in a cage next to the geese sat in the straw, its head tucked under its wing, ignoring the noise made by its neighbours. The magnificent tail—all folded up—was scrunched against the side of the bars.
Further into the warehouse, a female employee was trying to coax two donkeys out of their pens to walk through the hall and into a train carriage.
Both animals were extremely restless, snorting and tossing their heads.
“Ah, you’re the guy from the Bureau,” she said, meeting Perrin’s eyes. “I’ll be glad when that monster is gone. Loading the horses takes twice as long. They’re that nervous. Go on, take the wretched thing out of here.”
She jerked her head in the direction of the back wall.
In this place stood a large crate made from thick wooden beams fortified with bars of iron that surrounded the structure.
A grate made of similarly thick iron bars sat at eye level, and from within the darkness beyond came the sound of snorting and scuffling.
As Perrin came closer, followed by the young employee from the front office, an eye appeared behind that tiny window. The iris was vivid orange, the pupil slitted like a cat’s.
There was also—and Perrin hadn’t seen this before—a smattering of bright gold spots in the iris. It could be a trick of the light in this shed, or… He’d read that a dragon’s eye colour indicated its health. He had to look it up once he finally got home.
The dragon’s head angled in a way that suggested that it curved its neck in order to look through the opening, that the rest of its body was much taller, pushing the ceiling of the crate.
That beast grew bigger by the day.
It blew out a breath, and while its nostrils were behind the wall of the crate and not visible through the tiny window, Perrin could hear the loud huff and smell the hot air.
Perrin had read in his books that dragons only breathed fire if they ate a lot of meat, so he’d instructed the handlers to give the creature pumpkins, because they were in season, but this led to a new problem: a vegetarian dragon was not a happy dragon.
A diet of pumpkins was also not a long term healthy situation.
The eye moved as the young man led Perrin past the crate. It was disturbing, as if the beast knew him.
That dragon was getting horribly big pretty fast.
“Don’t go too close,” the man said.
Perrin had no such intention. The smell of the hot breath was enough to put him off.
The young man continued, “The beast is much smarter than you’d think. It hates us. The other day, one of my workers walked past, and it turned around in the cage, pressing its rear end to the window. And then… not to be too crude, but if you’d want to clear a building, dragon farts are a very good way of doing it. The smell!”
“The gas would make them a fire hazard,” Perrin said.
The man gave him a suspicious look, as if he was working out whether Perrin was serious or having him on. A bit of both, probably.
In a way, he felt sorry for the creature. It should be in the Solanian mountains, soaring over the peaks, catching mountain goats or whatever dragons ate. At any rate, not eating pumpkins—no offense to the pumpkins.
The employee led him to the side of the shed.
“See, here we have a crane strong enough to lift the crate with the dragon inside. You can back a cart or a truck in here.”
Perrin looked at the mechanism of metal beams, hooks, chains and pulleys. It looked sturdy, and he knew the railway moved shipments of marble and iron.
Getting the dragon out of here was not that hard. Keeping it under control once it was on the train was the issue.
But why?
Did it not understand what was happening and did it panic?
“I first need to find an alternative place to house it,” he said.
“That should be easy. There are plenty of warehouses around.”
“It will need to be close to the station, so we get the crate on the train—”
“No.”
“What, no?”
“We’re the providers of animal transport carriages and we’re not taking the beast anymore.” He stood with his hands planted at his sides. “I thought our boss had made that clear.”
“But I still need to get it out of here.”
“You’ll have to find some other way.”
Perrin had already tried a truck, but that hadn’t worked so well, either. “Surely, there are other railway transport providers?”
“None that I know of that deal with animals. You could get some dodgy operator if you’re lucky. I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“Then what do you suggest I do?” Perrin spread his hands.
“Get a truck.”
“We’ve tried a truck already! It didn’t even make it out of the city. The owner complained about the weight, and that has only increased.”
“You could use a boat. The weight wouldn’t be an issue.”
Huh.
A boat.
That was an option Perrin hadn’t yet considered. Solania was on the coast. Travel was shorter overland, but the boat was a possibility.
But it would need to be a big boat.
And the dragon would have to remain on the deck for quite a few days. He’d also have to find someone willing to take the dragon on, and that was going to be hard after the two mishaps.
It would also be expensive to hire a boat of the right size. And it would take time to find one. Possibly more time than he had. He knew very little about boats.
But he had travelled on boats with Atreyo. And as far as he remembered, Atreyo’s brother had interests that involved boats.
It was definitely something worth considering.
After assuring the man he’d remove the dragon as soon as he could, Perrin went to scope out some warehouses for temporarily housing a dragon, and he was mostly informed that they didn’t cater for live animals—he didn’t even mention that the animal would be a dragon, although one or two of the owners were suspicious about someone from the Bureau of Magic Abuse asking for animal housing, while in uniform. Did the Bureau not look after their own magic sniffers, a man asked. Perrin wasn’t sure if he was serious. But he was carrying the cage with the magic sniffers after all.
He found an owner who didn’t seem to care much about what he stored, but this man didn’t seem to care much about anything else either, including the state of the building and the fact that the only access road to it wound between two other warehouses and the alley was so full of rubbish that it would need to cleared before a truck with the crate could pass.
Also, Perrin would need to find his own people to look after the dragon while he frantically sought a way to get the beast back to Solania.
There was a distinct shortage of dragon handlers in town. Or just any kind of animal handlers who didn’t run at the sound of the word dragon.
It grew late and later still. He grew hungry and cranky. His arm grew tired from carrying the magic sniffers, and the poor things were getting annoyed as well. They needed to be fed.
So he gave up and went home. Whether Parvo was bluffing about releasing the dragon or not, Perrin couldn’t do anything about it. The Bureau had one cage suitable for a dragon, the dragon was in it, and moving it elsewhere was not easy.
Chapter 9
Perrin’s next couple of days were filled with trying to find another spot for the dragon, and finding handlers, and when he finally found these things, in a warehouse in the not so very illustrious harbour district, then finding transport to move the dragon there.
This required a large wagon with a flat bed. The mail office warehouse had a crane, but the place where it was to be moved did not, so he needed to find one of those as well, unless he wanted to pay for hiring the truck and park it and the dragon in the warehouse for as long as it took him to find another solution.
It infuriated him that both the truck and the crane belonged to the railways, whose services Parvo said he couldn’t use, except when calling it “private contracts”. This included paying more than twice the regular rate, having to do it after hours—supposedly for “safety”, but more likely because those “private” contracts could only use the crane and wagon after the railway employees had gone home and no longer needed them, and probably also with tacit knowledge of their bosses.
Perrin spent a lot of time dealing with this, and it was time he didn’t get to spend with his magic sniffers, including Frida’s impending litter. She was getting bigger and bigger. The brood would need a new cage, and he should also think about selling some of his other animals to businesses that imported a lot of their wares. But although people had expressed an interest in buying magic sniffers, he didn’t want to sell them to just anyone, and he also didn’t want to break any laws while doing it.
Magic sniffers were not magical creatures. They were large mountain rats that lived in proximity to dragons and had developed sensors to detect dragons, because dragons ate magic sniffers and detecting dragons as early as possible was a matter of survival.
But magic sniffers came from Solania, and anything that came out of that realm was viewed with suspicion in Tamba. On top of that, things that came from Solania might become the subject of random claims from Solania’s mercurial Grandmaster Yorick as soon as he got a whiff that something from his realm was worth money outside Solania. Dragons were not worth money. They cost money.
Perrin wanted to pre-empt claims from Solania before advertising his magic sniffers for sale. Which also meant he needed to build a new cage for Frida’s almost-adult brood.
But that infernal dragon occupied all his time. It was growing rapidly and would soon be too big for the only cage the Bureau owned that was big enough to contain it.
Contrary to what he’d been told by Parvo and the official railway operator, Perrin found a different, private, railcar business who would consider transporting a dragon. They specialised in carrying horses and cattle and other agricultural animals. This company’s office was at the edge of town, where one might find these types of animals.
Perrin went to visit it, but while the owner said he was keen, Perrin wasn’t impressed with the facilities. Oh, they were good enough for cows and horses, but Perrin didn’t think the business owner appreciated how big and dangerous a dragon was.
The dragon in question, cooped up in the cage now installed in the new warehouse, grew increasingly impatient.
Perrin had gotten a chance to read up on the eye colours. Apparently, a dragon’s eyes changed colour when it approached maturity. The gold flecking indicated that the animal was female. Wasn’t that great? Because female dragons were the strongest and most aggressive, being the ones defending the nest.
