smell promising, just dust, moldering cloth, wormy wood, rusting iron, sheep bones ... mmm, sheep bones.
Spit Fyre pushed his nose into a tall tower of finely balanced wooden boxes, which stretched about twenty feet high into the darkness. The tower wobbled precariously.
"Out of the way, everyone!" Alice yelled, pushing Jenna and Nicko back out on the street with herself and Alther, who did not want to be Passed Through by a load of dead sheep. A deluge of boxes crashed to the ground, bouncing off Spit Fyre and landing all around him.
When Alice, Alther, Jenna and Nicko peered warily inside, the dragon was almost buried in boxes. He lifted his head, shook off a shower of dust and splinters and set about crunching open the first smashed box. A pile of yellowing bones and what looked like an old sheepskin rug fell out.
"Ugh!" said Jenna, who had recently developed a particular dislike of bones. "What has he got there?"
"Sheep," said Alice, raising her voice over loud crunching, cracking sounds as Spit Fyre bit into the contents of the first box. "It's sheep bones. He's eating one of the Sarn herd. Oh, well."
Gingerly, Alice, Jenna and Nicko stepped back inside and picked their way through the boxes. Jenna could just make out the words written on the side of one of the still-intact boxes in an old-fashioned scrawl that had turned brown with age: SACRED HERD OF SARN. BOX VII OF XXI. URGENT. FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY. They were almost obliterated by two more words stamped over them in a commanding, unfaded red: DUTY UNPAID.
"Spit Fyre!" Jenna shouted, pushing her way through to reach the dragon. "Stop it! Give that to me. Now!" Spit Fyre looked down at Jenna out of the corner of his eye and carried on crunching through sheep number VII. It was his food and he was not giving it to anyone else - not even to his Locum Imprinter. She could go and find something of her own to eat.
"It doesn't matter," puffed Alice as she and Nicko pushed the door closed and the warehouse became shrouded in darkness.
"But they're sacred sheep," said Jenna. Spit Fyre cracked another bone and gulped it down with a loud gurgle.
"That I doubt very much." Alice chuckled. "I reckon they're most likely part of the Sacred bones scam that the Customs Office stamped out about a hundred years ago. I wouldn't worry about it. Best use for them, if you ask me. They've not been much good to anyone else. In fact, I did hear that a farmer from the High Farmlands had bought them thinking that they were a live flock. When he came down to pick them up and realized that he'd bought a load of boxes full of old bones he refused to pay the duty and threw the Customs Officer into the harbor. Spent thirty days in the Customs House lock-up for his trouble."
With firm instructions to Spit Fyre that he must behave himself and go straight to sleep when he had finished the sheep, Jenna and Nicko left the dragon crunching his way through the Sacred Herd of Sarn and followed Alice and Alther to the top of the warehouse.
The NightUllr growled as Jenna and Nicko walked in.
"Ouch!" Nicko gasped. At the sight of the panther's green eyes shining in the light of Alice's candle, Jenna had grabbed his arm hard. Which was, thought Nicko, unusually jumpy for Jen.
Snorri sat up, woken by Ullr's rolling growl. Her sleepy eyes focused with surprise on the two newcomers. "Kalmm, Ullr," she said.
"Snorri?" asked Jenna, recognizing the white blond hair in the dark.
"Jenna? It is you?" Snorri untangled herself from the wolfskin and, with the NightUllr padding at her side, she stumbled across the rough wooden floor to greet Jenna.
"Hello, Snorri." Nicko's voice came out of the dark and gave Snorri a shock. "Nicko ... I ... I did not know you were coming to the Port also?" she said in her singsong accent that Nicko liked so much.
"Neither did we," said Nicko grimly. "Stupid dragon circled above the Port for hours. Thought we'd never land. Freezing cold up there."
"I would rather be in my boat." Snorri smiled.
"So would I," said Nicko. "Give me a boat anytime - even a paddleboat. I saw Wolf Boy paddling over to the Forest and I'd have swapped that dragon for one of those any day - even a pink one."
"I don't think Wolf Boy's right about Septimus being lost in the Forest,"