Whale Mail, page 9
“I’m not the right person to see about that. That’s serious. You should take it to the guards.”
She didn’t react to that. She pressed her lips together.
“The guards can’t help us. The threats are coming from outside the realms.”
“How do you know? Was it a magical message?”
She nodded, once, without meeting his eyes.
He guessed: another screamer? A ransom letter that attached itself to the hands of the person who opened it? A letter that had a built-in threat like it would explode, cause a fire, or start yelling embarrassing facts? With magic from all the realms effective in Tamba, the possibilities were endless.
“And this is related to the screamer you brought in for me to translate? You know more than you’ve told me, right?”
Now her eyes glistened. “Please, help me. I’m scared. You’re the only one I can talk to about this. My brother just won’t listen. He’s destroying himself. He’s destroying us, as a family.”
Dorella came to bring a tray with tea and buns, and they were silent while she set the things on the table. Dorella met Perrin’s eyes. They were pretty good looking out for each other these days. Her intense look seemed to ask if he was all right. He nodded ever so slightly. If anything, this conversation was only uncomfortable for Mirella.
“Have some sweet buns,” Perrin said.
“Thank you, but I’ve already had breakfast.”
Another silence lingered while Perrin helped himself.
“If you really want me to help you, I simply cannot do anything further than what I’ve already done without knowing the truth. So if you want my help, you’ll have to tell me more.”
At first she said nothing, and Perrin was going to suggest they were wasting time. He was annoyed about that. He wanted to enjoy Dorella’s pastries.
But then she started, “About a month ago, my brother received a shipment of goods from the realms that’s ruffled some feathers. There were a number of boxes, mostly filled with junk as far as I could see.”
“Wait, those were the extra boxes that were supposedly part of Atreyo’s collection that you got me to look at, right?”
She nodded. “I hoped that you would see something unusual in them.”
“That stuff was junk. Not remotely of the quality that Atreyo would have been interested in.”
She looked at her hands. “He kept most of the other stuff in his office. He won’t tell me what else is in the shipment, but after yesterday, I’m sure it contains this thing Gaminia is asking for. I don’t know what it is. I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know where my brother got the shipment, but he doesn’t want the authorities involved, which can’t mean anything good.”
“Nope.”
“I know my brother wanted to invest in quality collectors’ items, and I’ve heard him say that he doesn’t want to sell them within Tamba—“
“Because magic is illegal here.”
She looked down. “He wanted to sell the things in other realms.”
“So, where did he get this collection?”
“Apparently some old wizard died, and he’d collected all these things that had to be sold.”
“What does your brother know about magic?”
She shrugged.
Not much, Perrin guessed.
“His business is with special building materials. Marble and black granite and things like that.”
“Why did he buy this collection, then?”
“As I said, he wanted to continue Atreyo’s business. Because he’s… our brother, you know?”
In Perrin’s experience, rich people never did things out of the goodness of their hearts. Not these sorts of things, at least. This had to be because he’d thought he could make money. Maybe he’d been offered something he’d judged too good to refuse, only to discover that he should have refused it.
“Is there a chance I could get to see this collection? The important parts, not the dregs that he doesn’t want, either.”
Mirella shrugged. “He doesn’t want any of the authorities involved. He doesn’t know I’m talking to you.”
“But your house is being broken into and your family is being threatened.”
She shrugged again.
After having initially rejected any of the food, she now grabbed a pastry and sipped from her tea. Perrin felt sorry for her, but he also didn’t want to get too involved because this really was a matter for the Bureau and Inspector Carbin would not be impressed if he went off on his own and investigated.
But if the Dianello family was not happy to make a formal complaint—and all the signs were that they wouldn’t—then there was nothing the Bureau could do. Maybe things needed to get worse before they got better.
He wasn’t sure how much effort and risk he was willing to take for the sake of a family that had treated him as a second-rank citizen for most of the time he’d been with Atreyo.
And he was definitely not going to sneak into Atreyo’s brother’s office without his consent. But Roban had sway over something Perrin could use.
He left Mirella with some homework: questions to answer about the nature of the shipment, where it had come from, who had sold it. If she was concerned, maybe she should do the work. Until such time that something blew up and she had to go to the Bureau after all.
He needed to go to work now, so after seeing Mirella off, he ran upstairs, grabbed two magic sniffers from his growing collection, dressed in his uniform and walked to the Bureau.
The table with the large book to sign in only stood in the hall at night. He wondered if anyone had looked at it yet and wondered why he’d visited at night.
Upstairs in the large room, no unpleasant surprises waited for him, thank goodness. Perrin collected his list of venues to be inspected off the table. The list was quite short, because it also contained the message, the mayor wants to discuss the dragon.
Sure, the mayor wanted that.
But Perrin duly went to see the mayor in his office in the town square, with the plush seats that made him think that if he sat down, he would fall asleep.
The mayor had heard about the dragon.
He said, in his usual self-important tone, “I wanted to speak to you because I’ve been thinking.”
Thinking and Tarlo Firello were two things that didn’t always go together well.
“Since you have so much trouble returning the dragon to Solania, how about we just… keep it here?”
Perrin almost spat out his tea. “Excuse, Mayor, did you say keep it here?”
“You heard me well enough the first time, but yes, that’s what I said. If we could keep it in a large cage or some such, we could turn it into an attraction, you know, for the children of Tamba. They don’t get to see magical creatures often.”
“Oh, I… am not sure if that is such a good idea.”
It was a very bad idea, he was sure of that. One dragon attracted other dragons, because they were known to roam over large distances. And if visitors from other realms saw that Tamba kept a dragon, they would, rightfully, question Tamba’s commitment to keeping magic out. A dragon was a magical creature, after all.
And that was on top of the challenges of containing the dragon while it grew. And who was going to be burdened with the burden that was the dragon? Not the mayor, that was for sure.
“No,” Perrin said. “As an officer of the Bureau of Magic Abuse, I say no. I will see to it that it’s returned to Solania. In fact, I was wondering if the council has any boats available.”
Tarlo Firello laughed. “What? You want to use our ferries to take a dragon all the way to Solania? They are made out of wood. One breath from the creature and that’s bye, bye boat.”
“If it eats only vegetable matter, it won’t breathe fire.”
“I heard it had no issue breathing fire in the past few days.”
“That’s because it’s been eating rats.”
“Ha ha, tell me another story. No, you are clearly being obstinate. I will go to your boss myself and propose that we set up a permanent enclosure for the beast.”
And Inspector Carbin—being funded by the mayor—would have no option but to listen to the harebrained plan. Heavens, she might even want to go along with it for her own reasons.
That wouldn’t end well.
Chapter 14
During the rest of the day, Perrin did his inspections and then made another tour of the warehouses, but no matter how much he pleaded, he found no one to transport a dragon.
Well, he was really stuck in a corner with this beast, because no one wanted it, but no one wanted to help him move the beast back to where it belonged either. And the longer he waited, the more attractive the mayor’s idea of keeping the beast in a zoo would seem to some people, and, knowing the dragon as well as he did, he was absolutely sure that wouldn’t end well.
He could wait until Grandmaster Yorick of Solania finally took an interest in the creature that was legally his, but Perrin suspected that he was beneath that man’s attention and Solania had rather too many dragons already and they didn’t feel particularly worried that one of them was creating havoc elsewhere.
The dragon was quite literally his problem, and he suspected he would need to employ some trickery to get it out of the city.
On his way out of the building in the afternoon, Verbena came to him. He smiled at her. He kind of missed working with Verbena as he had during the dressmakers’ fair.
She said, “You look miserable. Is everything all right?”
“Work is hard,” he said.
“Tell me about it. And trying to work while there is so much going on at home.”
Perrin was hesitant to ask further.
Verbena was a nice kid, who didn’t deserve her recklessly living sister.
Apparently, the latest man and father of impending child number eight had tried to kick Verbena out of the house.
And Verbena demanded that he leave or she would leave and take the older children. Perrin heard there had been a huge fight on the street before the eyes of all. It was all such a sordid story that he felt uncomfortable asking about it, even if she didn’t appear to feel embarrassed. The Verbena who lived with her sister in the harbour district was so different from the one he knew at the Bureau.
While they walked down the stairs, Verbena again asked why he was so miserable.
“I’m still dealing with that dragon,” Perrin said.
“Still?” she laughed. “I thought you put it on the train?”
“Yes, and it half destroyed the carriage and frightened the workers, so they refused to carry it any further.”
“Just like the truck?”
“Yes, sadly.”
“But how are you going to return it to Solania?”
“That is the big question, isn’t it? The trucks won’t carry it. It’s too big for a truck now anyway, and the trains won’t carry it.”
“How about you just let it go? It might find its own way back.”
“Dragons are loyal to the place where they grew up. This one hatched from an egg in the warehouse at the back of the meat works.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “Don’t your books have any suggestions?”
She meant Atreyo’s books of magic. The ones he’d gone to retrieve from Mirella’s house when the previous, illegal, owner of the dragon had tried selling dragon meat in her inn.
He blew out a breath. “They’re magic books. They never talk about how to get rid of magic, only how to use it. The books say nothing about how to transport dragons. Those texts just assume that dragons are free creatures roaming the sky, capable of transporting themselves.”
“Don’t you always tell the new inspectors to read about everything?” She smiled.
There was a lot of information in those books, and unless you knew specifically what you were looking for, it was hard to find anything. But maybe it was time to look at the books again for inspiration.
For one, he might find something to control a dragon now that it was too big and powerful to be controlled by the thunderstaff. And one that was developing a nesting instinct.
“Oh well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
Verbena had far too many pressing problems to bother her with his problems.
He made his way home, halfway expecting Mirella to have turned up again, but she hadn’t, and Dorella was still busy with a couple of customers, packing up a box of pastries. Apparently, there was some kind of festivity going on with the family.
Perrin normally spent this time chatting to Dorella. It was a time of day he enjoyed and looked forward to, but obviously, that wasn’t going to happen today, so he trudged up the stairs where he returned the magic sniffers to their cages and fed the animals. Then he cut some bread for himself, listening out for Dorella’s voice to call him downstairs, but she was still talking to people.
He took Atreyo’s books off the shelf. One was a book of magic foodstuffs and household items. He didn’t think he’d find much in there, so he set it aside for the time being.
He took another book off the shelf, this one an old volume that Atreyo had bought secondhand. He only did that with valuable books, and this was a beautiful book about magical locations.
Not terribly useful in his current predicament, but the book had once belonged to the witch Sabyna, a wise old woman whom Atreyo would see sometimes.
Was she still alive?
She lived on the outskirts of Tamba and was a well-known figure in some groups, even if the rich rarely spoke of her, because she wasn’t one of them, and her loyalties were murky at best. But if she had died, he was sure he would have heard about it.
He leafed through the book and got distracted by a section about Gaminia, the whale kingdom ruled by an ancient whale king. They considered the water on the surface part of their territory and would require permits from ships wanting to cross.
At work, he had checked harbour shipping movements, and spotted the name Roban Dianello on one of the documents.
If Perrin could get Roban to lend him a boat, or pay for the use of a boat, because he was pretty sure Roban didn’t own any boats, Gaminia was more or less on the way to Solania. So if Mirella found the artefact that Gaminia wanted, he could return it… in exchange for use of the boat, and oh, I’m going to make a detour to Solania to return this dragon.
There were footsteps on the stairs.
“Do you still want your tea?” Dorella asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
She had brought a tray with two cups and set it down on the table. She nodded at the books.
“What are you reading?” She looked over his shoulder. “About Gaminia?”
Perrin explained in a few sentences why Mirella had come to see him.
“You are too kind,” she said, offering him a biscuit. “After everything they put you through, I would not give them any time.”
“Normally I wouldn’t, either, but I’ve always found it beneficial to keep talking to people. You never know what you will find out. She must have been extremely desperate to come to me and I was curious. Besides, it is something I do know something about, and as things stand, I can possibly turn this situation to my advantage.”
She chuckled. “It looks like you’re planning something.”
“Not yet, just thinking about the possibilities.”
“You said this screamer message she got comes from the whales. They’re often very tricky creatures. How do you know that they mean what they say?”
“That’s always a question with Gaminia, but screamers are considered to be quite truthful because it’s very hard to imbue them with the message, so it’s not something that just happens along the way.”
“Gaminia would send agents along with the message and personally deliver it, if it’s really that important.”
He gave her a sharp look. “It sounds like you’re familiar with Gaminia.”
“Not really, but when I was much younger, there used to be a business nextdoor selling fancy dresses and trinkets that came from Gaminia.”
“Nott’s Flotsam and Jetsam.” Perrin remembered hearing the business’ name.
She nodded. “Exactly. Did you ever buy stuff there?”
“No, it was gone before I came to Tamba, but everyone was still talking about it.”
“Yes, that’s the one. Nott’s son fancied me for a bit and he told me about all the things his father had to go through in order to bring in these things from Gaminia. Do you know that any ship that crosses the surface of their ocean has to apply for permission?”
“I do.”
“And do you know that only certain people can act as translators? They can translate and repeat what the whales say, but they can’t translate anything back, not because they couldn’t translate words into whale language, but because the whales don’t want to hear it. It’s said they don’t have ears, but that’s ridiculous. Of course, the whales have ears. They’re simply not interested in what we have to say to them.”
“I haven’t heard anyone put it to me in that way.” But it was true. The whales never listened.
“That’s what old Nott told me. I remember it very well, because I was so excited about his son and that our relationship might work, but then he got sent away to learn about magic and I’m just… simple Dorella in Tamba, where magic is prohibited.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“You could have gone with him.”
“Yes, but I would have had to sell my business I spent so much time setting up. What if I hated it over there?”
And that, ultimately, was Dorella. Practical through and through.
“So that’s the sad story about why I know a bit about Gaminia.”
“Was Nott getting most of his stuff from over there?”
“As far as I know, yes. He was always complaining that it was so hard to understand what the whales meant.”
“How did he even conduct trade with them?”
“There are registered sellers, who are allowed to deal with the kingdom, but they would often be called back for strange instructions that something suddenly could or could not be sold. One day, they would be happy to sell stuff made from seaweed, but the next day, it might be a different story because some current had decreed that seaweed was holy or something like that.”
