The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

VIII

Monday shaped up as a very good day. Not only did I have a date with Judy, but Maximum Ruhollah had come through with the show-cause order that would let me—Michael Manstein and me, actually—go up and examine the area around the Devonshire dump to see what was leaking and, God willing, find out why. That happened Thursday. He spent Friday quashing appeals from the Devonshire Land Management Consortium.

The order was still good when I got to the Confederal building Monday morning. Had one of the appeals succeeded, the words would have faded right off the page.

They tell stories about officials who go out to conduct their business, open up their briefcases, and pull out a blank sheet of parchment. Nobody dies of embarrassment, but sometimes you wish you could. I reminded myself to check my document before I handed it to Tony Sudakis. If there was anybody I didn’t want laughing his head off at me, he was the guy.

I met Michael Manstein up on the seventh floor. He was packing vials of this, jars of that, silk bags full of other things and tied with elaborately knotted scarlet cords into his little black bag. I scratched my head. “Why not just take a good spellchecker?” I asked.

He glanced up from what he was doing. “I am operating under the assumption that we will be searching around the walls for leaks, David,” he said, as patiently as if I were a kiddygarden pupil. The containment spells would degrade the performance of the microimps in a spellchecker.”

That had certainly happened when I used my own portable to run an unofficial scan of the dump: it hadn’t picked up anything but the containment cantrips. I’d figured a more sensitive model would overcome the interference, but the reason I had Michael along, after all, was that he knew more of such things than I did. “You’re the wizard,” I told him. “Shall we go? Your carpet or mine?”

We ended up taking his; he’d had a special option package installed to insulate his sylphs from the potent magics he often flew with. I didn’t care to risk having my carpet break down and strand me in the middle of nowhere (for which, as detractors of Angels City will tell you, St. Ferdinands Valley is an excellent substitute). As we slid down to the lot, I grinned—no staff meeting for me today.

Michael Manstein flew exactly as you would expect: exactly at the speed limit, exactly where he ought to have been, every change of height or direction signaled at exactly the right time. Exact fits Michael exactly, as you will have gathered.

He parked his carpet in the same lot I’d used when I first came up to the Devonshire dump. We got off and started across toward the dump. I’d taken maybe three steps when I said, “Didn’t you forget to activate your anti-theft gear? You ought to go back and do it; this isn’t a saintly neighborhood.”

His thin, rather pallid face took on an expression I’d never seen there before. If you can believe it, Michael Manstein looked smug. He said, “What’s sorce for the gear is sorce for the gander.”

Sometimes magicians are irritating people. All right, so Michael had better theft protection on his carpet than the usual gear woven into the fibers while it’s still on the loom.

All right, so even if someone succeeded in beating that protection, he’d still be able to tell where his rug had gone. But was that excuse enough for making bad puns about it? I didn’t think so, especially not early in the morning.

The security guard sitting in his glass booth was a different fellow from the one who’d been there the last time I went up to the dump, so he didn’t recognize me. Two EPA sigils and a show-cause order prominently displayed (yes, it still had writing on it) were plenty to get his attention, though. He picked up his phone, called Tony Sudakis, then came back out to us and said, “He’ll be here in a minute.”

Sudakis took longer than that, but not much. The guard set the insulated footbridge over the barrier so Tony could come out and talk with us. He gave me a bonecrusher handclasp, made Michael wince with another one, and said,

“Okay, let’s see the order.”

I gave it to him. He read it carefully, handed it back to me.

“This says you’re authorized to search ‘the surround of the aforementioned property.’ ” He made a face. “Lawyer talk. Anyway, this doesn’t say thing one about coming inside.”

That’s right” I nodded. “We’re trying to see what’s leaking out, after all.”

“Okay,” Sudakis said again. “I am directed by our legal staff to provide no more cooperation than what the order demands. That means that if you need to take a leak, you’ve got to do it across the street. You can’t come into the containment area for anything.” He gave me an apologetic shrug.

“I’m sorry, Dave, but that’s what my orders are.”

“Since we’ll be sniffing around your wall, maybe I’ll just stand up against it if I need to whizz,” I told him. He gave me a funny look; bureaucrats aren’t supposed to talk like that.

Michael Manstein said, “I’m going to get to work now.” He opened up his little black bag and started taking things out of it Sudakis watched him setting up. I watched Sudakis. After a minute or so, I said, “Walk around the comer with me, Tony.”

“Why? You gonna whizz on my shoes?” But he walked around the comer with me.

As soon as we were out of sight of Michael—and, more to the point, the security guard—I gestured as if I were pulling out an amulet. Tony Sudakis might be a bruiser, but don’t ever think he’s dumb. He went through his little pagan ritual with the chunk of amber he wore in place of a crucifix.

When he nodded to me, I said, “Okay, we can’t go inside the dump. I understand your position. But I still want to ask you about something I saw, or thought I saw, when I was in there before. I’d have done it sooner, but I keep forgetting.”

“What is it?” His voice was absolutely neutral; I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to help, was angry at me, curious, or anything. He just set the words out in front of him as if they’d been printed on parchment.

I described as best I could the Nothing I’d seen in the dump, the way, just for an instant, the containment wall seemed to recede to an infinite distance from my eyes. “Did you ever notice anything like that?” I asked him. “It was—unnerving.”

“Sounds that way,” he agreed, and now he let life creep back into his words. He shook his big fair head. “Nope, can’t say I ever did see anything of that sort.” He quickly raised a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, Dave—I believe you. You spend as much time as I have inside that containment area and you’ll see all lands of strange things. Like I said before, you get all those toxic bits of not-quite-spent sorcery reacting with each other and you will see funny things. You’d better believe you will. But that particular one, no. Sorry.”

“Okay, thanks anyhow.” I didn’t know whether to believe him or not; as usual, he was hard to get a spell on. I wondered if it was because he worshiped Perkunas. In a mostly Judeo-Christian country (and the same goes for Muslim lands, too), followers of other Powers often seem difficult to fathom. On the other hand, Tony probably would have been tricky if he’d been a Catholic, too.

“Anything else—anything else short—you want to talk about while the charm’s still on?” he asked.

I shook my head. We went back around the comer to the containment area entrance. The security guard looked moderately entranced himself, watching Michael set up. Tony Sudakis didn’t give Manstein even a glance; he positioned the footbridge, motioned for the guard to pick it up again, and marched in toward his office.

Maybe working in the toxic spell dump for so long had dulled Tony’s sense of wonder. Lots of strange things undoubtedly happened in there, most of the sort you wouldn’t want to see outside a stout sorcerous barrier. But for me—and evidently for the security guard, too—nothing is more interesting than watching a skilled thaumaturgical craftsman at work. And Michael Manstein is one of the best If you’re looking merely to detect the presence of most substances and Powers, you don’t need fancy sorcery. Suppose you want to find out if someone’s spilled sugar under a rug, for instance. Get out some sugar of your own and apply the law of similarity. If you get a reaction in your control bowl, it was sugar under the rug all along (ants everywhere are a good due, too).

But if you’re trying to see whether the influence of, say, Beelzebub is leaking out of a toxic spell dump, you don’t go about summoning up Beelzebub to see if the law of similarity applies—not if you’re in your right mind, you don’t, anyhow. Byproducts from spells that invoke Beelzebub are contained within warded dumps for good reason: you don’t want them getting out into the environment And if you summon the Lord of the Flies outside the containment area, that’s just what’s going to happen.

And so Michael Manstein attacked the problem indirectly.

I mention Beelzebub because that’s Whose influence he was checking for when Tony Sudakis and I came back from our sub rosa (or should I say sub sucino?) chat Instead of even thinking about invoking the demon, he pulled out a jar full of every thaumaturge’s friend, the good old common fruit fly.

Because fruit flies are very simple—and very stupid—creatures, they’re exceptionally sensitive to mage.

Apprentices practice spells with them; if you can’t make your charms work on fruit flies, you’re better off in another line of work.

And when that magic has anything to do with Beelzebub, of course, their sensitivity increases even more. Just by watching the way they flew from the jar, Michael could tell whether the demon’s influence had leaked out where it didn’t belong. It was as elegant and low-risk a test as you could imagine.

Since I’m not a mage myself, to me that just looked like little brownish flies coming out of a bottle. When Michael screwed the lid back on, I figured I could safely interrupt him, so I asked, “Any skin of Beelzebub?”

“None apparent to me,” he answered. The Lord of the Flies is renowned for his trickery, but I do not believe him capable of evading the fruit-fly test; it draws them even more strongly than spoiled plums.”

“Good to hear,” I said, “because I know there are spell byproducts with his influence on them inside the dump.”

“Yes, that is to a certain degree reassuring,” Michael agreed. “If a Power so corrosive as Beelzebub cannot break free of the containment area, that augues well for its chances of holding in other, less aggressive, toxic spells.”

“Who after Beelzebub?” I asked.

“I had thought Huitzilopochtli,” he answered. “He is at least as dangerous as Beelzebub, and we have seen through the case of that wretched curandero’s nostrum that he is active—and seeking to become more active—in the Angels City area.”

Again, he didn’t try to invoke the Aztedan war god: after all, we were doing everything we could to keep Huitzilopochtli from manifesting himself around Angels City. Instead, he performed another indirect test, this one using flayed human skin substitute. It looked like parchment, but it made my flesh creep all the same.

Michael chanted hi a clucking, gobbling language. It wasn’t Poultry; it was Nahuad. Spainish is the dominant tongue in Aztecia today, but many people still use Nahuad in their day-to-day lives, and it’s as much the language of the native Powers as Arabic is forjinni. I hadn’t known Michael knew it, but I wouldn’t bet against Michael’s knowing any particular tiling.

The chant ended. Michael looked down at the square of flayed human skin substitute. It seemed just the same as it had when he took it out of his bag. He grunted softly.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I would have expected to observe some reaction there,” he answered. “Huitzilopochtlic contamination is as likely an inducer of apsychia as any I can think of. But there appears to be no external seepage, at least not as measured by this test.”

“What were you expecting to see?” I asked.

“The influence of Huitzilopochtli was brought into the Devonshire toxic spell containment area by means of flayed human skin substitute. Had that influence spread beyond the containment area, the sheet of the substitute material I have here would have demonstrated it by beginning to bleed.”

I gulped; I was sorry I’d asked. “Would it be—real blood?” I asked.

“In diaumaturgy, ‘real’ is a word almost witthout meaning,” Michael said sniffily. “It would look, feel, smell, and taste real. Whedier it could be successfully removed from the flayed human skin substitute and impplanted in the veins of someone who had suffered a loss from injury or vampirism… Truth to tell, I do not know. It might be worth determining. An interesting question. Yes.”

He pulled a pencil out of the pocket of his lab robe, peered around for something on which he could jot a note.

For one dreadful second, I feared he was going to scribble on the piece of flayed human skin substitute. I don’t think my stomach could have stood that. But at the last minute he fished out a parchment notebook instead, and did his jotting on that.

He spent the rest of the morning and the whole afternoon on tests of that sort. To my amazement and distress, he came up empty every time. No, I take that back: he did find one leak. After four in the afternoon, when both of us were fed up and frustrated enough to try something silly, he tested for stardust, and sure enough, the tip of the wand he was using glowed for a minute.

“Undoubtedly deposited here, along with more unsavory items, by one of the Hollywood light-and-magic outfits in search of a hit,” Michael said.

“But even if stardust is leaking, it’s not toxic,” I said. “The most it could possibly do would be to make somebody popular who doesn’t deserve to be.”

Michael Manstein looked at me as if I were a schoolboy who’d added two and two and come up with three. Not five, but definitely three—I’d fallen short of what was expected of me. Like a good schoolmaster, he set me straight: “The problem is not stardust outside the containment area, David. As you say, that is trivial in and of itself. The problem is that stardust could not possibly get out of the dump if it were not leaking. We have, therefore, established that the leak exists.

What we have not established is which serious contaminants are emerging from it.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling dumb. Odds were awfully good that he was right. Still, though—“You tested for all the dangerous Powers whose influences are likely to be in the dump, and came up with zip. Stardust is pretty elusive stuff; even the light-and-magic people don’t know for sure where it’ll stick. Maybe it did leak out by itself.”

“Indeed,” Michael said. “And maybe you could find a mineral able to create blasts to rival those of megasalamanders, yet I would not lose sleep fretting over the probability of either event. I will take oath upon any scripture you care to select that something—and something malevolent, at that—created the breach through which the stardust emerged. That is my professional judgment.”

You work with experts to get their professional judgment.

If, having got it, you then choose to ignore it, you’d better have a real good reason. I not only didn’t have a real good reason, I thought Michael was right. But if he was, what had gone wrong?

I said, “What bothers me most about detecting the stardust and nothing more serious is that the dump operators will be able to claim that the dust didn’t really come from inside, even though we know it was dumped there.”

“The neighborhood will make it hard for them to substantiate that.” Michael waved to show what he meant I had to nod. If ever a neighborhood remained conspicuously untouched by stardust, the one around the Devonshire dump was it “Why haven’t we found any nastier influences leaking, then?” I asked.

The most obvious reason is a failure in our testing technique,” Michael answered. “I must confess, however, that at this moment I cannot tell you where the flaw lies. All my procedures have in the past shown themselves to be more than satisfactory.”

I asked my watch what time it was. When I found out it was twenty to five, I said, “Let’s knock off for the day and see if we’re more brilliant in the morning.” I wanted to get back to my own carpet so I could go down to my place, pack an overnight case, and then head for Judy’s.

Most days, Michael Manstein’s impressive integrity wouldn’t have let him contemplate taking off early, let alone doing it. When he said, “Why not?” I confess I blinked. He added, “We certainly aren’t accomplishing anything here at the moment with the possible exception of entertaining the security guard.” Maybe he was trying to justify leaving to himself, or maybe to me. At that point I didn’t need any justifying; all I wanted to do was head south.

Michael must have talked himself into it, because he started sticking tools and substances back into his little black bag. I stood there waiting, hoping he wouldn’t get an attack of conscience. He didn’t. As soon as he was through, we walked across the street to his carpet and headed for Westwood.

Traffic was its usual ghastly self. So many carpets on so many flyways meant there was so much lint and dander in the air that the famous Angels City sunshine turned pale and washed-out; a lot of people were rubbing their eyes as they flew. That pollution usually seems worse in St. Ferdinand’s Valley than other parts of town, too; they don’t get the sea breeze there to clear it out What they’re going to have to do one of these days is design a flying carpet that isn’t woven from wool. People have been trying to do that for years; so far, they haven’t managed to come up with one the sylphs like. But if they don’t succeed before too long, Angels City isn’t going to be a place anybody in his right mind would want to live.

I breathed easier—literally and figuratively—when we got out of the Valley and back into Westwood. Michael pulled up beside my carpet in the parking lot. “Are you going to go back up to your office and see what awaits you?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “What’s that New Testament line? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof? Something like that, anyhow. Tomorrow will have troubles of its own. I’m not really interested in finding out about them in advance.”

“As you will,” Michael said. Since it was nearer six than five, he didn’t have any trouble finding a parking space—most people who work at the Confederal Building had gone home. He headed on in anyhow; now that he was here, he’d do some more work. Maybe he was feeling bad about his fall from probity.

Me, I didn’t feel bad at all. Hungry, yes, but not bad. I jumped onto my carpet and headed home. I got off at Imperial instead of The Second, just in case more earth elementals with my name on them were waiting for me.

If they were, I evaded them—I got home unscathed. I stayed just long enough to use the plumbing and toss tomorrow’s outfit into an overnight case. Then I was out the door, down the stairs, back on my carpet, and on my way to Judy’s.

Going down St James’ Freeway into Long Beach in the evening is a gamble. When it’s bad, the carpets might as well be sitting on your living room floor. I could have got there at nine as easily as a little before eight But I was lucky, and so I pulled up in front of Judy’s place right on time.

I used the talisman to let her building’s Watcher know I belonged there, then went up the stairs two at a time to her flat. I knocked on the door. When she didn’t come right away, I figured she was using the plumbing herself or something, so I let myself in.

I took one step in the front room and then stopped, staring. For a second, I thought I’d gone into the wrong flat. It took me a while to realize Judy’s spare key wouldn’t have let me into any place but hers.

But Judy, as befits a copy editor, is scrupulously neat. The flat had been trashed. Books were scattered all over the floor, knickknacks strewn everywhere. Some of them were broken.

Earthquake, I thought, and then, more sensibly, burglars.

I ran into the bedroom, calling Judy’s name as I went.

Nobody answered. On me bed, lying exactly parallel to each other, just the way Judy would have set them there, were a green silk blouse and a pair of linen pants: the right land of outfit to wear to the opening of a nice new restaurant. The bedspread was white. I am, you will have gathered, familiar with Judy’s bed and its bedclothes. The red stain next to the blouse was new. It wasn’t a big stain, but seeing even a little blood is plenty to make your own blood run cold.

“Judy?” My voice came out as a frightened croak. No answer again. I hadn’t really expected one.

The bathroom door was open. The air in there felt humid, as if she’d taken a shower not long before. She wasn’t in there now, though, not anywhere—I yanked back the curtain to be sure.

Burglars faded from my mind. I wished the word would have stayed; stuff, after all, is only stuff. You can always get more. But an uglier, more frightening word took its place: kidnappers.

I didn’t want to dunk if let alone believe it. After what had happened to me on The Second, though, what choice did I have? I ran back to the bedroom, where the phone was.

I snatched up the handset.

Nothing happened. The phone was dead. Ichor dripped from the little cages that held the ear and mouth imps. The front mesh on both cages was pushed in. Whoever had snatched Judy had taken the time to implode the phone before he left with her.

I hurried out to the walkway, went to the flat next door. I knocked, hard. “I need to use your phone to call the constabulary,” I said loudly. Someone was home; St. Elmo’s fire glowed through the curtains and I could hear little noises inside. But nobody came to the door.

Cursing the faintheart to a warmer climate than Angels City’s, I ran downstairs and pounded on the manager’s door.

He answered; opening the door was part of his job. He’d seen me going in and out often enough to recognize me. As soon as he got a good look at my face, he said, “What’s the matter, son?”

I didn’t take offense; that’s how he talks. Besides, he’s old enough to have fought in the Second Sorcerous War (and he has a bad limp, so maybe he did), so he’s old enough and then some to be my father. I said, “May I use your phone, please? I think Judy’s been kidnapped.” As with any magic, saying the word made it real.

“Judy? Judy Ather in 272?” He gaped at me, and men at the door I’d left open, I suppose to confirm that that was the flat I was talking about He stood aside. “You’d better come in.”

His flat could have been furnished from the St Ferdinand’s Valley swap meet; the operative phrase was essence of bad taste. From the couch, his wife gave me a fishy stare.

That was the least of my worries. But he took me to the phone and let me use it, so his carp-eyed wife could stare all she liked.

Even through two phone imps, the Long Beach constabulary decurion sounded bored when he answered my call.

Kidnapping, though, is a word to conjure with when you’re talking to constables.

“Don’t go back into the flat,” he told me. “Stand out in front of the building and wait for our units. It won’t be long, Mr., uh. Fisher.”

I stood out in front of the building. It wasn’t long. Two black-and-whites pulled up, red and blue lanterns flashing.

Right behind them were a couple of plainweave carpets that carded plainclothes constables.

Everybody swept up to Judy’s flat and started doing constabulary-type things: physical searches, spells, what have you. One of the plainclothesmen grunted when he saw the imploded phone. “Looks like a professional job,” he said.

“We aren’t likely to come up with anything much.”

They hadn’t bothered asking me for a statement yet. I said, “This isn’t just an isolated case. I can guarantee you that.”

“Oh? How?” The plainclothesman sounded-skeptical is the politest way I can put it.

As with the bored decurion at the phone desk, I had the words to rock him. I spoke them, one by one: attempted murder, Thomas Brothers fire. Central Intelligence. “You’d better get hold of Legate Shiro Kawaguchi, up in St. Ferdinand’s Valley,” I added. “He can fill you in on the details.”

“All right, sir, we’ll do that,” the plainclothesman said—he was a tall black fellow named Johnson. “Jesus, what kind of mess are we walking into the middle of?”

“A bad one,” I said. “But you’re not in the middle of it; you’re just on the edge. I’m in the middle—and so is my fiancee.”

A fellow wearing forensics crystal balls on his collar tabs came up to Johnson and said, “I ran a similarity check between the blood on the bedspread and the razor I found in a bathroom drawer. They match, so that’s probably Ather’s blood.”

I moaned. That’s a word you hear every so often, but you hardly ever use it, let alone do it This was one of those times. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the belly. Judy, bleeding?

Judy, maybe dead?

I must have said that out loud (though I don’t remember doing it), because the forensics man put a hand on my shoulder and said, “I don’t think she’s dead, sir. There’s evidence of some funny kind of fast-dissipating sleep spell in the flat.

My best guess is, she put up a fight, they slugged her, she kept fighting, and they knocked her out so they could get her away from here.”

I liked him, and believed him, too. He didn’t try sounding like somebody who knew everything there was to know; no pseudo-learned drivel about analyses and reconstructions.

His best guess was what he had, and that’s what he gave me.

I thought it seemed likely, too. The constables in uniform had been knocking on doors through the block of flats. People opened doors for them—even the louse who lived next to Judy and had pretended I didn’t exist. But there’s a difference between getting doors to open and learning anything once they have. The constables came back to Judy’s flat empty-handed: nobody had seen anything, nobody had heard anything.

“That’s insane,” I exploded. “They take an unconscious woman downstairs and out of a block of flats at a busy time of the evening and nobody noticed?”

“Must have been magic,” Johnson said. “If they used it to knock Mistress Ather out, they probably used it to aid the getaway, too.”

“I’ll check that,” the forensics man said, and he bustled out onto the walkway.

“What do I do now?” I said, as much to myself as to anyone else. Half of me wanted to make like a light-and-magic show mercenary and go out slaughtering all the bad guys.

The other half, unfortunately, reminded me that not only did I not know how to get my hands on the bad guys, but that if I went after them—whoever they were— alone, they’d dispose of me instead of the other way round.

Johnson’s answer showed that, as suited a constable, he had a thoroughly practical mind: “What you do now, Mr. Fisher, is come down to the station with us so we can get a sworn statement from you.”

I didn’t know where the Long Beach constabulary station was; I had to follow one of the plainweave carpets back there.

It turned out to be almost on the ocean, in a fancy new building. Legate Kawaguchi would have killed for Johnson’s large, bright, efficient office. Come to that, I wouldn’t have minded having it myself.

Like constables anywhere in the Barony of Angels, the Long Beach crew had a regular library of scriptures on which the people with whom they dealt could swear truthfulness: everything from the Analects to the ZendrAvesta. They pulled out a Torah for me; I rested my hand on the satin cover while I repeated the oath Johnson gave me.

Then he called up their scriptorium spirit to take down my words. I repeated everything I’d said in Judy’s flat, and added detail to go with it. After a while, I paused and said,

“What time is it, anyhow?”

Johnson asked his watch. It said, “Nine forty-one.”

“Could you get me a sandwich or something?” I asked. “I came down here for a dinner date with Judy, and I haven’t eaten since lunch. We were going to try that new Numidian place—”

“Oh, Bocchus and Bacchus?” Johnson said. “Yeah, I’ve seen it advertised. I wouldn’t mind trying it myself. Hang on a minute, Mr. Fisher; I’ll find out what I can round up for you.”

Instead of couscous and Iamb, I had a greasy burger, greasier fries, and coffee I drank only because it would have been an environmental hazard if I’d poured it down the commode. Then I finished giving my statement, and then I said, “What do I do now?” This time I was asking the plainclothesman.

“By to live as normally as you can,” he said. I’d heard that advice before; I was sick of it. How are you supposed to live nomially when people are trying to kill you and they’ve abducted the person who matters most to you in the world?

Johnson must have understood that He raised a lightpalmed hand and went on, “I know it’s a taH order. What we’re going to have to do now is wait for contact—wait for either your fiancee or the people holding her to get in touch with you. Whatever their demands are, say you’ll comply and then let us know immediately.”

“But what if they-?” I couldn’t say it—absit omen and all that—but he knew what I meant “Mr. Fisher, the only consolation I can give you is that if they’d intended to commit homicide, they could have done it They must have some reason for wanting Mistress Ather alive.”

“Thanks,” I said from the bottom of my heart. It made sense. Now all I had to do was pray the kidnappers were sensible people. But if they were sensible people, would they have been kidnappers?

Johnson came around his desk, set a big hand on my ^ shoulder. “You just go on home now, Mr. Fisher. Try and get some rest Do you want one of our black-and-whites to fly up with you, make sure you’re not walking into a trap yourself?”

After a couple of seconds, I shook my head. He looked relieved, as if he’d regretted the offer as soon as he made it I suspected the Long Beach constables were stretched as thin as any other force. It’s an ugly world out there. I’d just had my nose rubbed in how ugly it can be.

He walked out to my carpet with me. “We’ll be in touch, sir. And we’ll also get in touch with that Legate Kawaguchi of yours, and with Central Intelligence, and with the CBI, too, because it’s a kidnapping… What’s funny, sir?”

“I can get in touch with the CBI,” I said. “I work two floors under their Angels City office.” I wondered if Saul Klein would get involved in the case. Nice to have one landsman around, anyhow. He’d certainly be more comfortable to work with than the CI spook; Henry Legion was unnerving.

Johnson patted me on the shoulder again, sent me on my way. I remember very little about flying back to Hawthorne—too much else on my mind, too little of it good. I propitiated the Watcher for my block of flats, glided into the garage, got off my carpet, and headed for the stairway. Once I was inside the building, I didn’t worry about how late it was, or how dark. Stupid, I know, especially after what had happened to Judy. I suppose you’ve never done anything stupid, eh?

A vampire stood grinning at the bottom of the stairs.

Modem medicine can do a lot for vampires: periodic blood impplants to stifle their hunting urge, heliotrope badis to let them go abroad between dawn and dusk (never on Sunday; the correspondence between real and symbolic sun is too strong then), sun-spectacles to keep them from being blinded when they do fare forth by day. Those who choose to—and, I admit, those who can afford to—take advantage of such techniques can lead largely normal lives.

Not all do. Some would sooner follow their instincts and prowl. I hadn’t heard of vampires in Hawdiome, but I wasn’t shocked to encounter one. For one tiling, I dunk I was beyond shock; for another, as I’ve said, this is a pretty rough little town.

Just for an instant, I wondered if he was connected with the bastards who’d taken Judy. I had my doubts. Vampires, if I can mix a metaphor, are usually lone wolves. Odds are, this one was just trying to keep himself fed. Random street crime, however, is just as dangerous to its victim as one that targets him in particular.

The vampire’s eyes glittered. I knew that if I looked into them for very long I’d be fascinated, and then the bloodsucker could do whatever it wanted with me. I reached under my shirt, pulled out something on a chain round my neck.

The vampire must have drought it was going to be a crucifix. Its fanged mouth opened in a scornful laugh. A lot of vampires, especially the ones that survive for very long in Christian countries, are of Balkan Muslim blood, and so immune to the skin of the cross.

But I didn’t pull out a cross. What I wore instead was a mystic Jewish amulet, a seven-by-seven acrostic prepared by the same Mage Abramelin Works that made my blasting rod.

I yanked it off over my head and direw the kaballistic missile at the vampire.

He had quick reflexes—he caught it before it hit him in the face. But that didn’t do him any good. His cry of pain turned to an anguished howl. The Hebrew term for vampires is kepiloth—“empty ones”—and it’s a good description.

Because they’ve lost so much humanity, they’re extremely vulnerable to magical countermeasures. When the acrostic based on the Hebrew word for “dog” hit this one, he had no choice but to transform.

“Get out of here, you son of a bitch!” I yelled, and drew back my foot to give him a good lack. He fled, yelping, tail between his legs.

I picked up the amulet, hung it back around my neck, and trudged upstairs to my flat. Only later, when I was lying down and trying to sleep, did it occur to me that if I hadn’t been emotionally drained from what had happened to Judy, the vampire might have made me panic and drained me in the literal sense before I thought of the amulet. As it was, I just took him in stride and did the right thing without even thinking about it Every so often, lying there, I’d ask my watch what time it was. The last answer I remember getting was 2:48.

Going to work on three hours’ sleep is one of those nightmares everybody has once or twice. A lot of the time, a new baby in the house is the reason. Not for me. Thinking about a baby made me think about Judy. We’d had so many plans—I didn’t want to think about throwing them all away.

A cup of coffee with breakfast. Another cup of cafeteria mud the minute I got in, and another one right after that One more half an hour later. I felt myself wind tighter and tighter. By God, I’d get through the day. If tonight ever came, I’d probably be too buzzed to sleep then. One things at a time, though. Get through the day first. That meant more phone calls. I didn’t feel the least bit guflty about using my office; my personal affairs and those of the toxic spell dump case had become inextricably intertwined. First I called Saul Klein upstairs.

“Saul, this is David Fisher down in the EPA again,” I said. “I want—no, I don’t want to, but I have to—report a kidnapping.”

“This is the report that we received from the Long Beach constabulary last night?” he asked. When I said yes, he went on, “Is dus connected with the minisingers case you were telling me about a little while ago?”

I’d forgotten the minisingers. I discovered that, along with tired and worried, I could be embarrassed, too. “No, it doesn’t have anything to do with dial. If you’ve received that Long Beach report, Saul, does that mean you’ll be on the case?”

“I’ll be involved, yes,” he answered. “Is it convenient for you that I come down and discuss matters now? You’re on the sevendi floor, is that right?”

“Yes, and sure, come on down. Can you stop at the cafeteria and bring a couple of cups of coffee? I’ll pay for them.”

He came; we drank coffee; he asked all the same questions Johnson had the night before. Numbly, I gave the same answers. He scribbled notes. When I was done, he said,

“We’ll do everything we can for you, David, and for Mistress Ather. I promise you that” I noticed he didn’t promise they’d get her back alive and unhurt; he must have known belter than to make promises he might not be able to keep.

When he left, I called Henry Legion. The spook said, “I shall be there directly.” He was, too, faster crosscountry than Saul Klein had been from two floors up. Of course, Henry Legion hadn’t had to stop for coffee.

I told my story for the third time. Repetition made it feel almost as if it had happened to someone else—almost but not quite. The CI spook said, “This is disturbing. Events are moving faster than crystal-ball projections had indicated. My opinion is that your scanning around the toxic spell dump may well have been the precipitating factor.”

“But except for a little stardust, we didn’t find anything,” I said, nearly wailing, as if I were I kid who got caught and walloped for peeking in a bedroom window witthout even seeing anything interesting.

“You may know third,” the spook said. “I would doubt the perpetrators do.” Then he disappeared on me. I hate that. It always gives him the last word.

Two down. My next call was to Legate Kawaguchi. I wondered if he’d still be off on his other case, but no, I got him. “This is in relation to the kidnapping of Mistress Ather whom I met at the Thomas Brothers fire?” he asked when he heard it was me, so the Long Beach constables must have already talked with him.

That’s what this is in relation to, all right,” I said heavily.

“I can’t imagine any other reason for kidnapping Judy, especially when whoever did it also tried to kill me a few days ago.”

“I can imagine other reasons,” Kawaguchi said. Before I could start screaming at him, he went on, “I admit however, that your scenario appears to be of the highest probability. As you will have surmised”—and as I had surmised—“I have discussed this matter with the Long Beach force. I would, however, also be grateful for your firsthand account” I gave it to him. One more repetition, I thought one more movement out of the realm of reality and into that of discourse. In a way, it was a sort of anti-magic. Magic uses words to realize what had only been imagined. I was using them to turn tragedy and horror into memory, which is ever so much easier to handle.

When I was through, Kawaguchi said, “Did you learn from the forensics man what sort of sleep spell he detected at your fiancee’s flat?”

“You know, I didn’t,” I answered. “His plainclothesman—Johnson—and I went down to the Long Beach station so I could make my sworn statement there, and the forensics fellow didn’t stick his head into Johnson’s office while I was giving it.”

“I shall inquire,” Kawaguchi said. His words were spaced a little too far apart, as if he was writing and talking at the same time.

I said, “I wanted to check with you, too, Legate, to see if you have any new answers that would help dear up who did this to Judy.” Whoever it was had also undoubtedly arranged to have the earth elemental dropped on my flying carpet. At the moment, that seemed utterly unimportant to me.

“New answers, no,” he said. “I have some new questions, however: there has been vandalism relating to the Garuda Bird project at the Loki plant in Burbank, vandalism behind a hermetic seal.”

“That is supposed to be impossible,” I said, now speaking slowly myself—I was scrawling a note to call Matt Arnold.

“Many things once supposed impossible have come true,” Kawaguchi said. “Take virtuous reality, for example.”

“Thank you,” I exdaimed. “That reminds me of something else I wanted to ask you: what’s the more usual name for Pharwnachrus mooinno?”

Kawaguchi actually laughed; I hadn’t been sure he could.

“My apologies, Inspector; I should not have read the name to your secretary straight off the laboratory report. The common name for the bird in question is the quetzal.”

“Quetzal?” I slammed into that head on, as if my carpet had run into a building. “Are you sure?’

“Confirmed by an ornithologist and an Etruscan ornithomancer,” Kawaguchi said.

“You’re sure,” I admitted. “But that’s crazy. Michael Manstein—he runs the sorcery lab here—and I went around the Devonshire dump yesterday, and we found no trace of Aztedan sorcery leaking. He even tested with flayed human skin substitute for Huitzilopochtlism.”

“I have told you what I know,” Kawaguchi said. The possibility remains that the feather was somehow altered in its translation from virtuous reality into our own merely mundane space and time; as I noted at the time, if would not be accepted as evidence in a court of law. Another alternative is that the feather is indeed derived from a quetzal, but was deliberately placed within range of the scriptorium spirit Erasmus’ sensorium for the purpose of misleading us.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Or it might be real—whatever that means in connection with something out of virtuous reality.”

“Exactly so,” Kawaguchi said. “Ockham’s Razor argues for that interpretation, although the others cannot be ignored.”

I shave my data with Ockham’s Razor, too; it’s the most practical tool to use in preparing baseline data for projections and such. But, like any other razor, it will cut you if you’re not careful with it “Thanks for the information, Legate Kawaguchi,” I said.

“Would you do me one more favor, please. Would you call a spook named Henry Legion at Central Intelligence back in D.StC.”—I gave him the number—“and tell him what you’ve just told me? It’s something he needs to know, believe me. Use my name; it’ll help you get through to him.”

“I shall do as you suggest,” Kawaguchi answered slowly.

“The implications, however, are—troubling.”

“I know.” When I’d first heard Charlie Kelly reluctantly admit the possibility of the Third Sorcerous War, it chilled me for days. Now, as far as I was concerned, it was old news.

Judy bulked ever so much larger in my thoughts. I couldn’t worry about the whole world going up in smoke; that’s too much for any mere man to take in. But when some damned—I hope—bastard kidnaps the woman you love, you understand that real well. Kawaguchi and I said our goodbyes. He promised again that he would call Henry Legion. Me, I called Loki, and eventually got connected to Matt Arnold. “I just got off the phone with Legate Kawaguchi of the ACCD,” I told him.

“He said you had a break-in and some vandalism on the Garuda Bird project.”

“That’s right,” he answered. “One of our people was critically injured, too.”

“Kawaguchi didn’t say anything about that,” I said. “What happened?”

“He was bitten by a snake.” Even over the phone, I could hear Arnold’s voice turn grim. “Some dever sorcerer found a way to beat a hermetic seal. Did the constable tell you about that?”

“He mentioned that it had been done, but not how,” I answered. “You sound like you know.”

“I do, yes,” Arnold said. “There’ll be some sleepless nights up in Crystal Valley until they can bring their sorceware up to date.”

“You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that,” I agreed.

“How was it done? Everyone’s always claimed hermetic seals are proof against just about anything.” I heard the silence that meant he didn’t want to tell me. Quickly, I added,

“Remember, I have a professional interest in this. Any magic that can beat such a powerful seal has to have serious consequences for the environment.”

“All right,” he said grudgingly. “I guess I can see that. But don’t go spreading the word to all and sundry, you understand?”

“I’m not a reporter or a newsman for the ethemet,” I replied with dignity.

“Okay,” he said. “What happened was, the bastards used one of Hermes’ own attributes to break the seals he was supposed to oversee. It was a very clever application of the law of similarity, I’ll say; I wish whoever came up with it would have put as much energy into something legitimate.”

“Go on,” I said.

“The snakebite has something to do with it”

He paused again. I realized I was supposed to figure out why. Some other morning, I might have enjoyed playing intellectual games. That particular day, I just didn’t have it.

“I’m sorry; I must be dense,” I said—my troubles weren’t any of his business. “Can you explain it for me?”

A sniff conveyed across the ether by two phone imps carries an impressive weight of scorn. Matt Arnold said, “Think about the kerykeion Hermes carries.”

“The what?”

He made another impatient noise. As far as I was concerned, lucky for him he was at the far end of a phone connection. The EPA doesn’t have the money—or the secrets—to get hermetic seals, so I had no reason to be familiar with the minutiae of Hermes’ cult Maybe he realized that, or maybe he just wanted to get me off the phone so he could go back to whatever he’d been doing before I called. He said,

“The Latin term for the kerykeion—not really proper, you know, for talking about a Greek Power—is the caducous.”

That I did understand. “The staff with the…” My voice trailed away. “Snakes,” I said in an altogether different tone of voice. “No wonder you said the bite had something to do with it.”

“That’s right,” he said, as if there might be some hope for me after all. They used the affinity of all snakes to the ones of the caduceus to weaken the seal and let them get into our secure areas.”

“Sneaky.” I added, “I hope you told Legate Kawaguchi about that. If one set of bad guys figures out a stunt, everybody will be using it two weeks later.” Then something else occurred to me. “How did your vandals get to the hermetically sealed areas, anyhow? You had some tough-looking guards out front when I was there.”

They got lulled to sleep.” Arnold sounded as if he didn’t like to admit that “Some land of spell or other—Kawaguchi’s forensics people haven’t got back to me with the data.”

Excitement ran through me: it sounded a lot like the way Judy’s kidnappers had operated. I wrote that down so I wouldn’t forget it, and promised myself I’d call Plainclothesman Johnson as soon as I was off the phone with Arnold.

While I still had him on the ether, though, I asked, “What land of snake bit your man?”

“It was a fer-de-lance,” Arnold answered. “Nasty thing—the venom makes you bleed internally as if you had a vampire gnawing you from the inside out Lucky it’s a relative of our local rattlesnakes; the antivenin spells for the one were efficacious enough—we hope—against the other. Like I told you, Jerry’s still on the critical list, but they think he’ll pull through.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “But why a fer-de-lance in the first place? Why not use our rattlers?”

“For one thing, it’s more poisonous, if that’s what the bastards were after. And for another, if the sorcerers were Aztecians, they’d be more familiar with their native serpents than ours.”

“And if they weren’t, they could throw suspicion on Azteca by planting snakes native to that realm.” I was thinking about the quetzal feather. “HI now, I’d suspected the Persians more than anyone else. I wondered if I’d have to change my mind. I also remembered Persians’ deviousness; if they could hide their schemes by implicating someone else, they’d do it. And I remembered I still hadn’t visited Chocolate Weasel.

Matt Arnold said, “Forensics ought to let us know before too long.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

“I’ve already wasted so much on this miserable business, a little more doesn’t matter now.” With that encouraging word, Arnold hung up on me.

I called Johnson. When he answered, my ear imp yelled into my ear, so I suppose he was yelling at his mouth imp:

“Did the kidnappers call you? Or your fiancee?”

“I’m sorry, no.” How sorry I was! I explained what I’d heard from Matt Arnold, then asked, “Has your forensics man been able to identify the sleep spell that was cast in Judy’s flat?”

“Hold on,” he said. “That’s in my notes—I saw it. Let me look.” The imps reproduced the noise of shuffling parchments. Then I heard Johnson say, “Yeah, here it is,” more as if to himself than to me. After a few more seconds, he must have put the handset up to his mouth again, because his voice came back loud and clear: I’ve got it, Mr. Fisher. Forensics says it’s an Aztecian spell, summoning the Power named the One Called Night, the one from the Nine Beyonds, to cast sleep on the victim. There’s a note here that it’s not generally used with good intent. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, sir.”

“Not half as sorry as I am to hear it,” I answered. But I wasn’t surprised, or not much. Either Aztecians really were behind this or somebody was putting on one hell of a bluff—and I mean that literally. The higher the evidence mounted, the more I doubted it was a bluff.

From its own point of view, after all, Aztecia has owed the Confederation a big one for a long time. Angels City used to be Aztecian territory, after all. So did St. Francis, up north.

So did the Arid Zone and New Aztecia further east, and Snowland, and Denver and all the rest of Ruddy. With them, Azteda would be a great nation. Without them, the Confederation wouldn’t be.

And that’s just in the sphere of mortal politics. I thought about what Henry Legion had said about the shift in the balance of Powers. It was already plain that Huitzilopochtli wanted his own back. And if that green feather meant what it seemed to, so did Quetzalcoati. The two Powers had been rivals before the Spainish came. If they’d composed their differences… if that was so, then Heaven help the Confederation. Heaven had better help, anyhow.

I called Legate Kawaguchi back. When I got him, I asked,

“What kind of sleep spell knocked out the guards at the Loki plant in Burbank?”

“That’s in my notes,” he answered, just as Johnson had.

He was quicker to find the answer than the Long Beach constable had been. “Here we are. The report indicates that it was an Aztecian spell, one invoking the Power variously called the Page and the Crackler, sending the spirits of the victims to the Nine Beyonds.”

“The Nine Beyonds!” I said. “Is this Power also known as the One Called Night?”

“I don’t see that name here. Let me check with forensics and call you back.” He did, too, inside of five minutes.

“Inspector Fisher? The answer to your question is yes. Forensics wants to know how you knew; this Power is not commonly invoked in Angels City.”

“I just got off the phone with Long Beach. The One Called Night is the Power that put Judy to sleep.”

Kawaguchi was nobody’s fool. “I shall consult immediately with Plainclothesman Johnson,” he declared. “This link must be explored to the fullest extent possible.”

More goodbyes. After they were through, I sat staring at the phone, wondering whether to call Henry Legion again or give Tony Sudakis a piece of my mind. Before I could do either, Rose stuck her head into my office and said, “Bea would like to see you and Michael up front, please. You weren’t there for staff meeting yesterday, so she wants to catch up on what you’ve been doing.”

“No,” I said. It came out utterly flat, as if—ridiculous notion—somebody built a mechanical that could talk.

Rose stared. She knows I’m not fond of staff meetings, but when the boss says come unto this one, he cometh; and when she says go unto that one, he goeth, at least if he knoweth what’s good for him. “But, David—” Rose began, trying to bring me to my senses.

“No,” I said again. “Can’t. Too busy. I was just going out into the field when you came in.” It wasn’t true, but I could make it so. I got up from my desk, started for the door. If Rose hadn’t got out of the way in a hurry, I’d have walked right through her.

“David, are you all right?” she called after me as I trudged down the hall.

“No,” I answered. Being very tired is kind of like being drunk; it makes you say the first thing that pops into your head. You often regret it later. I wondered if I’d still have a job to come back to even as I was sliding down to the parking lot It’s a good thing I’d come to know St. Ferdinand’s Valley well over the past few weeks: I could fly up to the Devonshire dump without having to think about where I was going.

I wasn’t real good at thinking, not then. When I’d told Rose I was about to go out and do field work, I hadn’t had the slightest idea where I’d go and do it. Grilling Tony Sudakis face to face instead of over the phone was the closest thing to a good idea I’d had.

This time, the security guard didn’t need to see my EEA sign before he got on the phone with Sudakis. A minute later, he set up the footbridge and I went into the containment area. As I walked up the warded path toward Sudakis’ fortress of an office, I looked for the patch of Nothing I’d seen a couple of times before. Rather to my relief, I didn’t notice it, not then.

Sudakis opened the outer door himself. He probably started to say something pleasant and meaningless, but one look at my face made him change his mind. “You all right, Dave?” he asked.

I gave him the same answer I’d given Rose: “No.” To him, though, I amplified it “I was supposed to go out to dinner with my fiancee last night after I got back from examining this place. I didn’t get to do dial When I went down to her flat, I found she’d been kidnapped.”

“That’s terrible,” he exclaimed, a comment I could hardly disagree with. He started to take me inside, then stopped in his tracks. Say what you like about Antanas Sudakis, he’s plenty sharp. He looked back at me. “Wait a minute,” he said slowly. “You dunk there’s some land of connection between us and that, don’t you? Listen, Dave, I’m here to tell you that—”

I overrode him: “You bet your sweet ass I dunk there’s a connection. Tony. I’ve drought there was a connection ever since the Thomas Brothers monastery burned down. I really thought there was a connection when a couple of louts tried to kill me after I got off the freeway one afternoon—”

“When what?” Now he interrupted me.

I realized I hadn’t told him about that, so I did. Then I went on, “And now, the day after the EPA wizard and I scan this place, Judy gets snatched. What am I supposed to dunk, Tony? What would you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said, hardly louder than a whisper. He was shaken—I could see that. His left hand reached for the little amber amulet he wore under his shirt. He made it go down by what looked like a deliberate effort of will. I decided to shake him up some more; “And just so you know, Tony, you do have a leak in your containment setup. Michael Manstein and I found Hollywood stardust all around your walls.”

“Stardust is harmless,” he said, rallying as gamely as he could.

“Yeah, but if stardust is leaking, what else is getting out with it?” Michael had had to make that obvious point for me; now I took malicious pleasure in hitting Sudakis over the head with it He was tough. I’d known that already. “You didn’t find anything else, did you?” he demanded.

“No, but we will. Us only a matter of time and thaumaturgy, and you know it as well as I do.” I took a deep breath, tried to calm down. “Anyway, that isn’t what I came up here for. I wanted to find out who you called when Michael and I got to work out here. Whoever it is either did the kidnapping themselves or else called somebody to arrange to have it done.”

The only call I made was to the Devonshire Land Management Consortium office,” he said. “I had to let them know so-they-could—” He ran down like a mechanical watch as he realized what he was saying. He kicked at the cement under his feet “Oh, shit.”

Them or somebody connected with them,” I said. “It just about has to be.”

I thought he’d give me more arguments, more denials, but he didn’t “Yeah,” he said in a voice like ashes.

“So what are you going to do about it?” I said, pushing hard. “Be a good little consortium soldier and pretend none of this has ever happened? You can. It would be legal. You’d probably even get promoted. But could you look at yourself in the mirror whenever you went into a men’s room?”

“Fuck you, Dave,” he said evenly. I did try to hit him then.

He caught my fist before it connected. I’d known he was stronger than I am, but not how much. If he’d hit me back, somebody else would be telling you this story. But he didn’t He just hung onto me for most of a minute, then said, “You done being stupid?”

I nodded. He let me go. “Good. You don’t want to fay preaching at me again. It won’t push me in the direction you want me to go. You got that?” He waited until I nodded again before he went on, “Okay. Now that you’ve got that straight I’d do everything I can to help you get your lady back. For my reasons, mind you, not yours. We’re wasting time here.”

“I don’t think I understand you at all,” I said.

“I don’t think you do, either.” It wasn’t pejorative: more as if he was stating a law of nature. Maybe he was. As I’ve said, I’d never dealt with anybody of European origin who still clung to his people’s old gods, not in an artificial cult like that of Hermes, but as part of a tradition as old and serious as my own. Balance of Powers, I thought and then wondered whose side Perkunas was on. After enduring umpty hundred years of Christianity, the Lithuanian Power might be as eager as Huitzilopochtli to get his own back.

But no matter where his god stood, I thought Tony stood with me. Almost dragging me in his wake, he started down the walk toward the exit. I happened to look back toward his office at just the right time. “Wait!” I exclaimed, and grabbed his arm.

It was like taking hold of the Juggernauts car; once he got moving, he didn’t want to stop for anything. “Look back there,” I said in a tone heading toward desperate. That’s what I was talking about before.”

Grudgingly, he turned around. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

“I don’t see anything, either,” I answered. “I see Nothing.

Here, stand right where I am now.” I moved off the spot he moved onto it. He shook his head, started to go. Now I was desperate. “Stand on tiptoe,” I suggested; I’m several inches taller than he is.

He gave me a look that would have wilted me under any other circumstances. When I stayed crisp, he shrugged and went up on his toes. A second later, he said something in Lithuanian that I didn’t understand. Then he dropped back into English: “You were right after all, Dave. I don’t know what that is.”

Neither did I. At the moment, I couldn’t see the Nothing; the dump just looked like a weedy vacant lot. But when I’d stood where Tony was now, the wall beyond that point seemed to recede into infinite space. And yet, at the same time, it was obviously right where it belonged. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that; I got the feeling I wasn’t sensing it entirely through normal vision.

Tony Sudakis came down off tiptoe. He was, as usual, briskly derisive. “When you see something you don’t understand in a toxic spell dump, you’d better start trying to find out what it is just as fast as you can,” he said. “Why don’t you call your wizard—his name was Manstein, right?—and have him get up here? The sooner he can find out what’s going on over there, the sooner we can start trying to deal with it”

“Aren’t you the same fellow I heard yesterday talking about how if Michael or I set so much as a toe inside the confines of the dump, your people would sue us until the vulture let Prometheus’ liver alone?”

“Go ahead, rub it in,” he said. “Yeah, I’m that guy. But I’m also the guy you’ve finally convinced. So come on back to my office.”

I was never so happy to turn around in my life. As we headed back toward the squat, ugly fortress, I asked, “Do you know what got dumped in that area? The more I can tell Michael, the quicker he’ll be able to identify what’s going on.

“Makes sense,” Sudakis said. He looked over toward where we’d seen that. Nothing. It wasn’t there now, of course, because we weren’t in the right spot. “That’d be about, hmm. Area 37. I’ll check for you.”

He pawed through the files, muttering all the time: “No, can’t be that one—that one was exorcised two years ago…

“Maybe this one? No, forget it—I know everything roc’s eggshell can do… Hah!”

“Hah?” I echoed.

“Gotta be this one, Dave. Three-four months ago, one of the Baron’s Watchers of the Shore found the remains of what sure looked like a major conjuration out on Malibu Beach.

They tested the junk for thaumaturgical activity, but it came back negative—and I mean real negative, like there’d never been any magic around it since time began. Nobody believed that, not from the way the stuff was laid out. so they brought it here and dumped it in spite of the tests.”

“I remember that one,” I said. There were letters in the Times complaining about the waste of taxpayers’ crowns.”

“That’s it,” Tony agreed. “You ask me, me only thing worse than the government spending money when it doesn’t need to is not spending it when it does need to.”

I started to pick up the phone, then stopped. “You said ’stuff was laid out. What kind of staff?”

He looked down at his parchments. “Funny stuff—like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Staffs with stone disks mounted on one end, others with those shells called sand crowns instead. If I had to guess, I’d say the stones were carved flat to look like the sand crowns. And there were other staffs, long and short, topped with feathers. Looked like some kind of Indian ritual, maybe, but not one I know.”

“Okay.” I got on the phone and called Michael. While I waited for him to answer, I worried some more: balance of Powers. Indian magic would not be well—inclined toward what I drought of as peace and order, not now.

“Environmental Perfection Agency—Michael Manstein speaking.”

“Michael? Hi, it’s David Fisher. Listen, I’ve got a new job for—”

Michael interrupted, something he hardly ever does:

“David, where are you. What on earth are you up to? Bea is quite vexed”—a word only he would come up with—“with you and Boss is practically in tears.”

That made me feel bad, but it would have made me feel worse if I didn’t feel pretty bad already. In words of one syllable, I explained where I was and what I was up to. I also told him about Judy, which explained why I was up to it “Good heavens, David,” he said, about as big an outburst as you’ll ever hear from him. “No wonder your behavior was so anomalous.”

“Yeah, no wonder at all,” I grunted. Anomalous wasn’t the word for it; shitty was. I could blame it on endless worry, no sleep, and too much coffee, but in the end it came back to me. If you’re not responsible for what you do in this world, who is?

“Have you discovered anything of import in your return to the Devonshire toxic spell containment area?” Michael asked, graciously not saying anything more about what sort of beast I’d been.

“As I matter of fact, I have.” I told him about the Nothing, then put Tony Sudakis on the phone so he could confirm it Tony gave the handset back to me. Michael was saying, shall fly there forthwith to investigate. Your description strikes me as extremely urgent.” He hung up.

“He’s on his way,” I said to Sudakis.

“Okay,” he answered. “I’d better stay here, then, to make sure he can get in and do what he needs to do. What about you? You gonna wait here with me?”

I thought about it, shook my head. “I’ve got to get back and mend my fences. Listen, do you have a telephone at home?” I waited till he nodded, then said, “Would you give me your number? I may need to get hold of you any time.

Like it or not—and I’m not saying you’re liable; please understand that—you’re in the middle of this, too—and they’ve got Judy, whoever they are.”

He scrawled it on a scrap of parchment. “Here you go. Call when you need to.”

“Thanks.” I went out the door, down the warded path (I didn’t even look back for the Nothing this time), over the footbridge, and out to my carpet. On the way back to St. James’

Freeway, I passed a florist’s shop. I stopped and bought Rose some roses. Sometimes words aren’t contrition enough.

Rose’s eyes went wide when I set the vase on her desk She pointed to the closed door to Bea’s office. “She’s in a meeting right now, but she’ll want to see you when she gets out And thank you, David. You didn’t have to do this.

Michael told me what your trouble was. I’ll pray for you.”

Rose is one of the good people. If God was in a mood to listen to anybody. He’d listen to her. “I did have to do this,” I said. “It’s the stuff before that I shouldn’t have done.”

She waved that aside and started to say something more, but I was already on the way back to my office. No matter how much of a big, hairy thing I’d been, I found she’d faithfully taken my messages while I was out. One was from Henry Legion. I’d have to call him back, I thought Then I looked at the next one. It was from Judy.