Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-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 breastplate on and it felt a bit humid. Cleaning magic wasn’t drying magic, that was a whole other thing.

“Depends on what?” I asked.

Amaryllis closed her locket and turned towards 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 cleaned out my (human) ear with my pinkie. “I think she wasn’t lying about the cargo thing. It doesn’t sound all that complicated. Go to the port, ask around, discover why the cargo’s missing, 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 much knowledge 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 four pages in all, most of them copies of forms and contracts that used a lot of words to say very little. They did have the cargo’s information though, dock numbers, manifests, and the supposed port of arrival.

“It’s a start,” I said. “Come on, it’s still early in the day. Maybe once we’re done we can do a little bit of sight-seeing? We keep getting sidetracked from playing 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 not entirely wrong, the sylph did like their straight angles--it wasn’t terribly nice to mock an entire nation’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 way was which, headed out towards the outer edge 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 one that was further in, past the red district to the south.

The further we travelled, the more the city changed, especially as we moved past the first set of walls and into the next district. The buildings of Goldenalden were clearly all kept at a decent level of repair, but as we left the center 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 uncomfortable from all the strange looks we were getting from the sylph we crossed.

It had to be worse for Amaryllis. While I got curious glances, she got outright glares and hostile glances. Some sylph kids would point to her and then run off screaming when we approached.

It wasn’t very nice to 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 was placed right on the side of a mountain, it meant that large sections 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 larger, boxier vessels were moving into the port even as we approached, one of them being guided in by a tugboat.

“That looks like the right spot,” Amaryllis said. She gestured to a lighthouse sticking out of the side of the port, with a domed roof that had some complex 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 large warehouses not too far away, many of them with their doors open and cargo flowing in and out nearly constantly. I imagined that 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 counter at the end blocking 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 hunch on Amaryllis’ part, maybe things weren’t nearly so bad.

I walked up to the counter at the front. Unfortunately, it wasn’t occupied. That was, until I flagged down a passing 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 plain-old Broccoli Bunch. People in general tended to 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 misplaced.”

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

“Thanks,” I said.

He darted off, continuing on with whatever work was on his plate. I glanced to my friends, got a few shrugs in response, then moved around the counter and towards a stairwell at the back. We didn’t make it far before a sylph lady with a mean looking scowl intercepted us. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Uh, to the second 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 appointment?” she asked.

“Do we need one?”

“Obviously,” she snapped.

“Cool! Can I get an appointment then?” 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 can get an appointment by mail. Do you know how to write?”

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

“I’ll call security,” she said.

I blinked at 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 was apparently not the right thing to say, because the sylph lady 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 handled that better.”

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

I considered 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 to strangers. Did you see her level? She had no business being so rude to three people who outmatch her so completely.”

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

“It’s not about being nice, it’s about having common sense,” Amaryllis said.

The second floor was the same as the first, a big open-floor office broken up by pillars here and there. There were lots of filing cabinets and entire rooms to the side filled with properly organized stacks of paper.

I stopped a younger sylph who was walking by and asked him to point us towards Isaac’s office. That turned out to be an office way out on the other 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 was plopped behind a huge desk, imperiously looking over pages and pages of notes and manifests that others placed 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 an eye out. 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 cargo manifests. He seemed to be the equivalent of a living computer, though I’d never seen a computer dress someone down for making a mistake before.

When it was my turn I stepped up to his desk, placed 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 misplaced so I’m, ah, investigating.”

“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 was probably 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 working 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 company, the security kind,” Amaryllis said.

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

“Sure,” she said.

Isaac protested as we opened his window. I was apologizing the entire time.

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

***