Timothy Tinkletap the onomatopoeic toy maker who had chosen the surname for that purpose, smiled as he worked on his latest invention because he'd just completed an assembly that did produce exactly that sequence of sounds.
The 'tinkle' came from the tinplate armour he had painstakingly fitted to the jointed metal skeleton of a knight mounted on a charger and the 'tap' from the ball peen hammer used to embed the fastening pins into the horse's wooden body.
Then another thought caused him to frown because of late it was becoming difficult to obtain tinplate of the gauge and quality his models required and he wondered what problems were affecting the supply.
If need be he could substitute silver paint to finish the thin steel with but it never lasted very long and once it started to chip and flake the steel rusted quickly whereas hot dipped tin coatings were far superior in both appearance and durability.
The previous year he'd had reason to take a long enforced 'holiday' on the advice of his assassin friend Stiv, during which he'd been introduced to the tin mining goblins almost accidentally as he took shelter in what he'd thought was a cave.
At first it seemed as if this was a mistake from which he'd be lucky to escape with his life but his mechanical ability had saved him when he helped the miners solve a difficult hydraulic problem and afterward had been welcomed as a friend of the piskies as they were known in the West of Brythan.
Brythan's economy was largely self contained because as some traders sourly put it "We dusn't have anything them as lives over the sea wants and they dusn't have nothing us uns can afford." this was for the most part true. Brythan had no currency of its own, trading was mostly done by barter and being an agrarian economy it could feed itself very well.
The only real source of actual income was between the mercantile traders for luxury goods the demand for which was restricted to the few large land owners. Tin from the West was traded for wines from the South East seas, a monopoly jealously guarded by the Free Nations whose specially made fortified wines were the only ones able to withstand a long sea voyage.
Western tin was highly valued abroad for its quantity and quality for which the piskies demanded and got a very good exchange for the wine concentrate that when diluted gave triple the original market value as table wines preferred by those of any substance over Brythans national beverage of ales and stout.
The tin trade was the weather cock to Brythans national prosperity so any drop in availability had long term consequences for home and abroad. Through the brownie network Tim could find out what was causing this unusual shortage.
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