Dragon Soup, page 6
He tried to voice his argument. “This man is clearly an important supplier and customer of people in this town.”
“And? Do you think I should have given him the pin back? Don’t you think it’s magic?”
“No, but…” He hesitated. If his argument was people deemed important by the council can keep their magic, then he didn’t have much of an argument.
Verbena continued. “He shouldn’t take magic. He knows it’s forbidden. It’s a condition of entering Tamba.”
But of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. Things rarely were.
“Can I have a look at that?”
Perrin held up his hand, and Verbena dropped the pin in his palm.
The thing was made of silver, with a little flower at the top. The many petals were long and narrow, like those of a daisy. A yellow jewel made up the flower’s heart.
Perrin’s skin shimmered where the metal touched his hand. “This is a glamour.”
A glamour was a type of “illusion magic” that was harmless, because changing the appearance of fabric was all the pin did.
Atreyo used to have an uncle, an old fellow with a long beard, who collected these things, and he had explained the workings of these localised types of magic. He knew enough about it to make Perrin wonder—and he and Atreyo would talk about this on the way home—whether he could cast glamours. Because in Tamba, all different magic types worked. Atreyo would explain that a glamour wasn’t always as harmless as it looked when it interfered with other types of magic, like mind-bending magic or animal magic.
Did the uncle ever get inspected? He’d died a few years ago. Perrin wasn’t sure what happened to the collection.
Atreyo’s business never got inspected, that was for sure.
Inspection wasn’t for the well-heeled. It was for the inns and the shops of the ordinary people.
Until recently, Perrin hadn’t even known about the existence of magic inspectors. He’d probably have laughed if someone had told him back then, that there were people who scoured the inns and businesses in town using rat-like things which scoped out petty magic used by shop owners to pretty up ordinary shop wares.
The question that was growing in his mind was: if everyone knew that this type of magic was everywhere and if it indeed fell under the forbidden goods, why didn’t the inspectors go after whoever imported the stuff? Or the people who profited from this forbidden trade?
Verbena put the pin in a leather bag—which dulled much of the magic except the drawstring still exuded sparks—and put it in her pocket to be reported on.
She patted the lid, proud of her catch.
“What happens now?” Perrin asked when they had left the workshop and were back in the streets of the city.
“We’ll report it to Inspector Carbin. Haven’t you found any magic yet?”
Perrin shook his head.
“That’s strange. I’ve found heaps.”
He glanced at the magic sniffers. Fergus hid under the straw, asleep as usual. Yaro sat in the corner, bobbing to and fro with Perrin’s steps. He was not asleep yet, but probably would be soon.
“Do you think there is something wrong with my magic sniffers?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Let me have a look.”
They stopped in the street. It was quite busy.
A man grumbled about blocking the flow of foot traffic through the narrow passage. There were shops on both sides and people looking at wares or waiting to be served further slowed the movement of the crowd.
Verbena squinted into the cage Perrin held up.
Yaro had now wrapped his tail around his body. His eyes were drooping.
“They look very plump and heathy,” Verbena said. “The light-coloured one’s fur is a bit uneven, but the tail is very fluffy. I like the jacket.”
“That one is Fergus. The other one is Yaro.”
Verbena laughed so loudly that people watched her. “Seriously, you’ve given them names?”
“Yours don’t have names?”
“No, I have enough trouble remembering the names of all my six cousins when they’re naughty and try to open the cage. My sister has far too many children. They’re all boys, too. I don’t know how many times I have to tell them that I can’t open the cage because the magic sniffers are both male and they’ll fight. Those boys are noisy and can be really annoying. ”
“Oh. I live alone.”
Verbena met his eyes. Perrin hated the pity in her expression. The expression that held questions about why he had fallen from his previously comfortable position and why he was trying—and failing—to work for a living.
After an uncomfortable silence, she averted her gaze to the magic sniffers again and continued, “What are you feeding them?”
“Just fruit and grains, as they told us.”
“Then what do you think is wrong with them? They look fine to me.”
“They don’t want to find magic? They’re lazy?”
He eyed Verbena’s magic sniffers. They were both running around in the cage, tails in the air.
“Do you think I could be feeding them too much?”
“No, they look healthy.”
“You said ‘plump’ before.”
“In a good way. You’ve just been unlucky not to have found magic. I heard someone in the office say that on any given day, only a few inspectors find something that’s worth reporting.”
All right. That had to be it. He just hadn’t found anything yet. He still thought the magic sniffers were lazy. Maybe he needed to give them more space to run around.
When they finished the inspections for the day, Perrin and Verbena went back to the office, where it was busy and the air was buzzing with activity as inspectors compared notes and talked and laughed about magical items they had found.
Perrin watched Verbena fill in the Forbidden Magical Item form and deposit it, with the pin, on the desk at the office entrance. The paper went sparkly pink where the pin touched it.
In fact, the whole desk was shimmering and sparkling. He counted at least fifteen items ranging from a small box with buttons that jumped up and made bird noises to a tiny painting of a beautiful young woman who shouted obscenities when you looked at the picture. What was the fine for being found with illegal magic?
Chapter 8
Perrin found it hard to ignore the disturbing thoughts the events of the day left him with.
He asked Verbena what she thought was the most important role of the inspectors.
“To find illegal magic, of course!” she said. “So that the different types of magic don’t start doing funny things with each other where the realms all meet. In the book Inspector Carbin handed out, it says there used to be certain families and tribes that were allowed to use magic in Tamba, but because all the realms touch, you can do glamour magic with one thing and weather magic with another and no one can figure out all the different magics that are happening at the same time. And sometimes the magics kind of mix and become something new and different. And that can be dangerous.” She squinted at him. “You read the book, too, didn’t you? You ask such strange questions.”
“I’m thinking.” And it wasn’t really a book. It was an over-sized pamphlet that over-simplified magic to an almost criminal extent.
Verbena laughed. “Don’t think too much, my sister always says, because in the time you’re thinking, you could be doing something.”
Maybe that was true. Life was much simpler when you didn’t question things. That happened when people were happy. But once you saw one injustice, you saw them everywhere.
On the one hand, Perrin felt dumb that he had for so long ignored the lives of ordinary people. On the other hand, his experience with the life of rich families provided him with unique insights.
When giving him his temporary inspector badge, Inspector Carbin had paused and mentioned his unusual attributes and the fact that no one like him had ever held a position as inspector before. They might “give it a try” as she had said, but he also wondered why, if she didn’t want someone who asked pointy questions, she had appointed him. He understood that positions as inspector were quite competitive and that in his place, she could have appointed any number of young and inexperienced people who would always do exactly as she said.
Hmmm, was an untold story waiting to come out?
After work finished, later than usual because of their changed schedule, he walked back through town to the teahouse.
The new inn Traveller’s Rest was still attracting an extra-ordinary number of customers, and people even queued out the door.
Inside the packed dining room, he spotted a group of forty-odd people sitting at tables that had been pushed together. A man just finished speaking. He had his back to the door, so Perrin could only see the back of his green robe.
The people in the group broke out in rapturous applause and cheering. Even some people at adjacent tables clapped.
“What’s going on there?” Verbena asked.
“I have no idea.”
Perrin recognised a few people at the table, all of them local owners of small businesses. He didn’t see Laeticia anywhere.
“Who’s that clown in the green robe?” Verbena asked.
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“No, but did you hear what he said?”
Perrin hadn’t. Her young ears were obviously better than his.
“He said that the Magic Free Zone is nonsense.”
“He’s probably a visiting dressmaker.” With such a flamboyant garment, he had to be. But then why would local business people cheer when he said the Magic Free Zone was nonsense?
Maybe Verbena had mis-heard.
It pained Perrin to see that The Happy Dragon nextdoor was much quieter.
“Do you know anything about this new place called Traveller’s Rest?” he asked Dorella when he came to the teahouse where she was in the kitchen preparing icing and batter for the next day.
“That place has gotten incredibly popular very quickly,” Dorella said, while vigorously whisking cream. “I hear a lot of good stories about it.”
“But?”
“What but?”
“I can hear a but in your voice.”
She blew out a breath. “They’re competitors, obviously, and Columbina of The Happy Dragon has been saying that she has taken a big hit.”
“Columbina is one of your competitors, too.”
“Not really. They don’t do tea and cakes, and we don’t do dinner. Columbina is a friend. She’s an honest person.”
Yes. Perrin agreed with that. “Do you know anything about Columbina’s waitress, Laeticia, who is now working at Traveller’s Rest. I saw her acting like she was the manager of the place.”
“Acting like is not the same as being the manager. Waitresses don’t manage inns.”
“No, that’s why I was surprised. Do you know who does own the Traveller’s Rest?”
Dorella frowned. “I don’t, actually. I was told it was some rich person on the council who is just in it for the money. It took me by surprise that the place has gotten such a good reputation this quickly. Usually those investors don’t know who to hire and only hire the cheap chefs.”
“Who is the chef?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed. “I’m too busy with my own work to keep up with all the latest gossip. I can find out, if you want.”
“I would like to know if you hear anything about the place,” Perrin said. “But please don’t put yourself into difficult situations getting the information. It’s not that important. I’m just curious.”
Dorella said that she would be careful and Perrin rewarded her by buying a pastry that looked particularly delicious.
She brought it to his room on a platter with a pot of tea and plate and cup with a ring of pink roses around the rim. It wasn’t quite as fancy as Atreyo’s dinnerware, but nevertheless very nice and homely.
Dorella even insisted that she wanted no payment.
Perrin protested. “I’m a customer.”
“But I would have had to give the pastries to the poor house, anyway. I can’t sell these pastries tomorrow. The crust goes soggy and the cream dries out. It would be bad for my reputation.”
Perrin imagined the orphans, outcasts, widows and cripples of the city around a table with a plate full of Dorella’s pastries.
He didn’t know what to feel about that. Terrible, because he’d never considered doing anything for those people, many of whom were in trouble through no fault of their own, and he also felt good, because Dorella was a good person if she did this, and also…
“Tell me, why is it that I elicit people’s pity?”
She met his eyes squarely. “Because you seem lost. At your age, you should be part of a family or a business, but yet, here you are.”
He didn’t fit in, that was it. Not here, not at his work.
After Dorella had left, Perrin took his notebook out of the cupboard and spent some time staring at his Plan For Making Life Worth Living Again.
He sat on the lone chair at the table and looked out the window to the top windows of the shops on the other side of the street. The sun was about to go down, and the low light gilded the roofs. A cat sat stalking a group of seagulls across an alley that was surely too wide for it to jump. Would cats really attack magic sniffers, as Verbena had said? He didn’t think so.
For the next day, which was the first full day of the Dressmaker’s Fair, Perrin and Verbena were scheduled to patrol the town hall, which was the main venue for the event.
Whenever Perrin had come into the town hall since moving to Tamba from the regional town where his family lived, he had either come to listen to a speech or a watch performance and the hall would be full of tables and chairs.
Today, however, all the tables and chairs had been moved to the side. An orchestra played in the corner and people stood in groups on the floor, talking. Waiters in colourful garb moved between the guests with trays overflowing with outlandish snacks or crowded with glasses full of colourful drinks.
Perrin and Verbena split up at the entrance to increase their coverage of the crowd.
As it turned out, dressmakers on a work gathering wore their most outlandish creations. Some were so elaborate that they took up a lot of space. He wondered how some of them even got through doors, and whether their outfit would be heavy.
Perrin slunk in between the groups.
He was supposed to mingle with the crowds and casually blend in.
Of course, he was also supposed to do this while carrying the cage with two magic sniffers. The poor things were agitated, and constantly scratched and bit at pieces of fabric, hair or fingers that brushed past the bars of the cage. And Perrin could do little about people bumping into the cage, because it was so busy.
People gave him strange looks or made comments about Fergus’ jacket being suitable attire to come to this event. They would show their friends and they would laugh.
He walked to the other side of the hall and back again, time after time.
The food smelled really good, but Inspector Carbin had warned them very strenuously that they were absolutely forbidden to eat anything in public spaces while on duty. He was already looking forward to getting home to his stale bread and jam—well, maybe not.
He was walking back in the direction of the door when a group of out-of-town visitors in colourful clothing came in his direction.
One of the men carried an earthenware container that caught Perrin’s attention: a pot with some sort of sigil on it. And then he noticed the person carrying it: the wizard he had first seen in The Happy Dragon, who had asked for dragon soup and had given Laeticia the money. He was with a man Perrin had come to know as one of the event’s organisers, the most expensive dressmaker in Tamba, Elro of the Katando family, who owned shops and businesses throughout town. Atreyo used to frequent the business.
The wizard met Perrin’s eyes.
He looked away. Did he remember that Perrin had sat at the next table in The Happy Dragon?
Not only that, Perrin noticed that Elro Katando wore a rich green robe that looked suspiciously the same as that worn by the man he’d seen making a rapturous speech in the Traveller’s Rest yesterday. The man who, according to Verbena, had said that the Magic Free Zone was a dumb thing.
Well, that was interesting.
As Perrin walked the other way, he didn’t watch where he was going and the next moment, he almost crashed into someone.
While he regained his balance, his elbow connected with the edge of a tray carried by a waiter. Glasses and their contents went everywhere: over the waiter’s apron, on the floor, and over the front of Perrin’s clothes. The two magic sniffers also copped a load.
Glass shattered, liquor went all over the floor, on people’s clothing and their shoes.
A woman squealed. Red liquor had spilled all over the bottom half of her dress.
Bystanders shuffled out of the way of the mixture of glass shards and liquor.
The waiter let go of one end of his empty tray and tilted his face, exasperated, to the ceiling.
“I’m so sorry,” Perrin said.
“No, it was his fault. He was walking too fast,” one guest said. This was an elderly fellow in a rich blue robe and lots of jewellery, with his grey hair in a straggly ponytail.
“Things like this happen,” the woman next to him said. Her dress resembled a tent—a bright pink one. She wore her hair piled on her head in a tottering bun. Her eyelids flashed green paint at him whenever she blinked.
“Give me a broom. I’ll clean it up,” Perrin said to the waiter, who was collecting the biggest glass shards on his tray.
