Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [32]
Totenkinder had gray hair and wore a print dress — lavender Pale Laurels on a tan field. She carried a wicker knitting basket that contained assorted yarns and needles. “I always prefer my comfy rocker,” she said.
Peter remained standing, still formal and on guard, until Totenkinder had fully seated herself into her rocker. Then he sat down in the second client chair, which was now, one supposed, the only one. He placed the flute case back into his lap.
“You really aren’t supposed to have that,” Beast said, nodding towards the plastic and metal case as he moved around to take his own seat behind his desk.
“Excuse me?” Peter said.
“The flute. What is it you call it? Frost? It’s magical, right?” Beast took his seat, which squeaked loudly as he leaned back in it. “By the terms of the Fabletown Compact, all magical things spirited out of the Homelands were supposed to be turned over to us, so we can safely store them down here in the business office, where they can be held in trust for the benefit of the entire community. Technically I should confiscate it.”
“But Frost doesn’t belong to Fabletown. It belongs to me.”
Totenkinder didn’t join in the conversation, or seem to take any particular note of it. She simply set her basket in her lap and took up her knitting, gently rocking back and forth in her chair, and humming a quiet, tuneless tune to herself.
“Well, see, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Beast said. “If every individual Fable had the same attitude — if they were allowed to keep all of the enchanted things they brought with them to the mundy world, the things would be scattered all over the place, unprotected and uncatalogued. How long then would it be before a mundy got hold of something he shouldn’t? There goes the big secret. Our magical nature would be exposed to the world at large. Or worse yet, it would be easier for one of the Adversary’s agents to steal something valuable and powerful that he could use against us, rather than we use against him.”
“Does he have many agents here in the mundy world?” Peter said. There’d been a few incidents in the recent past, involving the incursion of the Adversary’s forces into Fabletown. Once even a full-scale battle between Fabletown and a company of the Empire’s elite troops. But Peter hadn’t taken part in it, and had assumed, like many others, that the so-called Battle of Fabletown had decisively taken care of any Empire interlopers.
“Officially, I’m not at liberty to say,” Beast said. “But strictly between you, me, and the lamppost, what do you think? We’d be foolish not to assume the Empire has clandestine assets in this world, keeping an eye on us, just as we’d be foolish not to have our agents in place, keeping an eye on them.”
“Which we do, I suppose?” Peter said. “Strictly between you, me, and the lamppost?”
“No comment.” Beast said. “But to get back to the matter of your flute, in addition to keeping bad things away from the mundys, storing everything in the business office insures that magic items of military significance don’t fall into enemy hands.”
“I think the argument could be made,” Peter said, “that putting everything into one place is exactly the kind of policy that made us vulnerable to enemy attack. Wasn’t the fact that we had all our eggs in one basket the very reason the Empire thought they could capture them in a single direct attack? Did