RavensDagger

  Chapter Two Hundred ay-Six - Have You Tried Asking?

  “So, how are we going to do this?” I asked.

  “That depends,” Amaryllis said. Her head feathers were still dripping a little, even though she’d just patted her head down with a towel a moment ago. I wasn’t so dry myself--I strapped my breastpte on and it felt a bit humid. ing magic wasn’t drying magic, that was a whole other thing.

  “Depends on what?” I asked.

  Amaryllis closed her locket and turowards me. “It depends on how seriously we want to take this little side-mission of Sylvie’s.”

  “Well,” I said as I tilted my head to the side and ed out my (human) ear with my pinkie. “I think she wasn’t lying about the cargo thing. It doesn’t sound all that plicated. Go to the port, ask around, discover why the issing, then ask the people there to send it back to the grenoil.”

  “I don’t think it will be that simple,” Amaryllis warned.

  “Ah, it could be many things,” Awen said. She seemed to be feeling a little bit better now that she was all dressed up and ready to go. The bathhouse might have strained her social skills a little; she was a bit of an introvert. “But, ah, we won’t know what those things are until we go and look.”

  I bobbed my head up and down. “Awen has a good point, we’ll never find out if we don’t go and check things out on our own.”

  Amaryllis shrugged, “Then we go and find out. I feel like we’re moving without muowledge on our side though. This doesn’t tell us much.” She waved the stack of papers that the secretary had given us. There were maybe fes in all, most of them copies of forms and tracts that used a lot of words to say very little. They did have the cargo’s information though, doumbers, mas, and the supposed port of arrival.

  “It’s a start,” I said. “e on, it’s still early in the day. Maybe once we’re done we do a little bit of sight-seeing? We keep getting sidetracked from pying tourist.”

  “It’s hardly a priority to go around and gawk,” Amaryllis said. “Besides, once you’ve seen one sylph building, you’ve seen them all. A box is a box.”

  I held back a giggle, because while it was funny--and irely wrong, the sylph did like their straight angles--it wasn’t terribly o mo eion’s architectural style like that. I was sure they had good reasons to build everything in such a square way.

  We exited the bathhouse, and after a bit of chatting to figure out which hich, headed out towards the e of Goldenalden.

  The port that the cargo was supposed to be at wasn’t the same one we had arrived at. There were a few ports around the edge of the city, and we were heading to ohat was further in, past the red district to the south.

  The further we travelled, the more the city ged, especially as we moved past the first set of walls and into the district. The buildings of Goldenalden were clearly all kept at a det level of repair, but as we left the ter of the city, there were still signs that maybe there wasn’t as much maintenance going on.

  There were also fewer and fewer non-sylph the further from the purple district we moved. I started to feel a bit unfortable from all the strange looks we were getting from the sylph we crossed.

  It had to be worse for Amaryllis. While I got curious gnces, she got ht gres and hostile gnces. Some sylph kids would point to her and then run off screaming when roached.

  It wasn’t very o see, really. They didn’t know Amaryllis except that she was a harpy and they were being kind of rude. Then again, Amaryllis could be a bit rude right back, which probably wouldn’t help things if they did actually try to talk to her.

  We arrived on the edge of the port soon enough, a part of the city that was quite busy. Carts moved by, tugged along by big draft horses or smaller donkeys or even strange goats of all things.

  Because of the way that Goldenalden ced right on the side of a mountain, it meant that rge ses of the city were much lower than the parts above. The airship port used that to its full advantage, with the shear wall used as free space from which they could build big docks where ships were parked.

  A few rger, boxier vessels were moving into the port even as roached, one of them being guided in by a tugboat.

  “That looks like the right spot,” Amaryllis said. She gestured to a lighthouse stig out of the side of the port, with a domed roof that had some plex assembly of mirrors and reflectors on gantries being worked by a pair of sylph. A sort of longer-range signalling device, I guessed. The bottom half of the tower looked more like an office building, with brick walls and windows all over looking into older-style offices.

  “It says Port Authority on the side,” Awen said.

  “Good enough for me,” I said.

  We crossed a busy road--after looking both ways, of course--then moved across the equally busy yard to the port authority. There were a couple of dozen rge warehouses not too far away, many of them with their doors open and cargo flowing in and out nearly stantly. I imagihat maybe the things we were looking for were in one of those.

  We stepped into the port authority. The lobby was a tight little spot, with a ter at the end blog off the rest of the room from the entrance. Sylph in officewear were moving about, shuffling papers over and generally looking quite busy.

  “Broccoli, you might want to do the talking here,” Amaryllis said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I am,” Amaryllis said. “I have the impression that the sylph here aren’t the well-bred and polite sort that we’ve been dealing with so far.”

  “Oh,” I said. That was disheartening to hear. Then again, it was just a hunaryllis’ part, maybe things weren’t nearly so bad.

  I walked up to the ter at the front. Unfortunately, it wasn’t occupied. That was, until I fgged doassing office worker with a wave. “Hello?” he asked.

  “Hi,” I said. I decided that maybe things would be better if the office worker thought I was someone a little more important than just pin-old Broccoli Bunch. People in general teo be a little more responsive and respectful to people they thought were in charge of things. It wasn’t great, but that’s how a lot of people acted. “I’m Captain Bunch, of the Beaver Cleaver, and I’m here because I’m looking for some cargo that I think was mispced.”

  “Huh,” the office sylph said. “You’ll want to take that up with Isaac. Sed floor, he back.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He darted off, tinuing on with whatever work was on his pte. I go my friends, got a few shrugs in respohen moved around the ter and towards a stairwell at the back. We didn’t make it far before a sylph dy with a mean looking scowl intercepted us. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Uh, to the sed floor?” I said. I probably didn’t sound all that certain, which was fair seeing as I wasn’t. “To see a Mister Isaac about some missing cargo.”

  “Do you have an appoi?” she asked.

  “Do we need one?”

  “Obviously,” she snapped.

  “Cool! I get an appoihen?” I asked. I tried to smile to make sure she didn’t feel slighted.

  I don’t think it worked. “Your sort are always barging in where you don’t belong,” she muttered. “You get an appoi by mail. Do you know how to write?”

  I worked my jaw. That hadn’t been all. “I think I’ll just take my ces and go check to see if he’s busy or not. It'll be faster that way.”

  “I’ll call security,” she said.

  I bli her. “I thought you might be trying to help us at first, but you’re really not. Don’t you have better things to do?”

  That arently not the right thing to say, because the sylph dy became extra snippy and stomped off. “I will be getting security,” she snapped as a parting shot.

  “Awa, we should probably go upstairs faster,” Awen said.

  “Good idea,” I said. “I could probably have hahat better.”

  “I was about to use some magic to tie her beak shut and puppet her into a closet,” Amaryllis said.

  I sidered it for a moment. “That would be a lot ruder than what I said, I think. Also, probably illegal.”

  “Yes, but it would have taught her an important lesson about the value of being polite ters. Did you see her level? She had no business being so rude to three people who outmatch her so pletely.”

  “Amaryllis, you know that judging people just based on their strength isn’t nice.”

  “It’s not about being ’s about having on sense,” Amaryllis said.

  The sed floor was the same as the first, a big open-floor office broken up by pilrs here and there. There were lots of filing ets aire rooms to the side filled with properly aacks of paper.

  I stopped a younger sylph alking by and asked him to point us towards Isaac’s office. That turned out to be an office way out oher end of the floor. It had a door, but it was held open, probably because of all the sylph slipping in and out of the room.

  A bigger sylph lopped behind a huge desk, imperiously looking es and pages of notes and mas that others pced before him. He’d sign them, sometimes make a note, and occasionally he’d bark something to the sylph who’d given him the page before they ran off again.

  “Maybe you two should wait out here,” I said. It looked a little cramped in there.

  “Sure,” Amaryllis said. “We’ll keep a. Scream if you need some help.”

  I nodded and slid into the room. At a guess, mister Isaac was the sylph in charge. The pages he was taking were as. He seemed to be the equivalent of a living puter, though I’d never seen a puter dress someone down for making a mistake before.

  When it was my turn I stepped up to his desk, pced the papers with the information for our cargo down before him, then smiled as best I could. “We’re looking for this,” I said.

  He stared at the page, then brought his head up. “Who in the world are you?” he snapped.

  “Captain Bunch,” I said. “I’m here on behalf of the grenoil embassy. Their cargo seems to have been mispced so I’m, ah, iigating.”

  “Are you even allowed to be here?”

  “Would I be here if I wasn’t allowed to be?” I asked. The answer was yes, yes I would be there if I wasn’t allowed to be because that robably the case.

  He stabbed a finger on the page. “Warehouse seventy-four. If it’s not there, the Mitchhum family probably stole it, that’s their area.” He shoved the paper forwards. “Now go, some people are w here.”

  “Thanks!” I said as I took the pages back. Warehouse seventy-four, that seemed easy enough to find.

  “Broccoli,” Amaryllis said as she barged in.

  “More weirdos,” Mister Isaac muttered.

  “We have pany, the security kind,” Amaryllis said.

  “Oh, shoot.” I looked around the office. There was a window at the back. A gnce down revealed that it was a two floor drop to the ground below. I’d fallen from way higher. “Awen, e in my arms, Amaryllis, you glide down?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Isaac protested as we opened his window. I ologizing the eime.

  Awen g onto me as we hopped out of the window and made our escape. Now we just had to find the cargo. Easy-peasy!

  ***

  RavensDagger

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