The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Read online

  I didn’t have to wait long; as I’d expected, Brother Vahan used only the best and most thoroughly trained spirits. Ghostly images of documents began flashing onto the access screen, one after another—records from ten years ago. “Hold on!” I said after a few seconds.

  The spirit appeared. “I obey your instructions, child of Adam,” it said, as if daring me to deny it.

  “I know, I know,” I told it; the last thing I wanted was to get the heart of the access system mad at me. “I don’t need to look at every individual report, though. Let me have the numbers in each category for the two periods. When I know what those are, I’ll examine specific documents. That way, I’ll be able to see forest and trees both.”

  The spirit looked out at me over the tops of its spectral spectacles. “You should have no difficulty in maintaining your mental view of both categories,” it said reprovingly. That’s easy for someone on the Other Side to say, but I have the usual limits of flesh and blood. I just stared back at the spirit. If it kept acting uppity, I’d sic Brother Vahan on it. After a last sniff, it said, “It shall be as you desire.”

  One by one, the numbers came up on the screen. The Thomas Brothers certainly did have a well-drilled scriptorium spirit; the creature wrote so its figures ran the right way for me to read them. It hardly needed to have bothered. I’m so used to mirror-image writing that I read it as well as the other kind. Maybe learning Hebrew helped get my eyes used to moving from right to left.

  When the final figure faded from view, I looked down at the notes I’d jotted. Births were up in the most recent year as opposed to ten years ago; St. Ferdinand’s Valley keeps filling up. Blocks of flats have replaced a lot of what used to be single-family homes. We aren’t as crowded as New Jorvik, and I don’t think we ever will be, but Angels City is losing the small-town atmosphere it kept for a while even after it became a big city.

  The rate of healings hadn’t changed significantly over the past ten years. “Spirit,” I said, and waited until it appeared in the access screen. Then I played a hunch: “Please break out for me by type the healings for both periods I’m interested in.”

  “One moment,” it said.

  When they came up, the data weren’t dramatic. I hadn’t expected them to be, not when the overall frequency had stayed pretty much constant. But the increased incidence of elf-shot within the pool of healings was suggestive. Elves tend to be drawn to areas with high concentrations of sorcery. If the Devonshire dump were as clean as it was supposed to be, there shouldn’t have been that many elves running around loose shooting their little arrows into people. Elf-arrows aren’t like the ones Cupid looses, after all.

  Exorcisms were up, too. I asked the access spirit for sample reports for each period. I wasn’t after statistical elegance, not yet, just a feel for what was going on. I got the impression that the spirits who’d needed banishing this past year were a nastier bunch, and did more damage before they were expelled, than had been true in the earlier sample.

  But the numbers that really leaped off the page at me were the birth defects. Between ten years ago and this past year, they’d almost tripled. I whistled softly under my breath, then called for the scriptorium spirit again. When it reappeared, I said, “May I please have a listing of birth defects by type for each of my two periods?”

  “One moment,” the spirit said again. The screen went blank. Then the spirit started writing on it. The first set of data it gave me was for the earlier period. Things there looked pretty normal. A few cases of second sight, a changeling whose condition was diagnosed earlier enough to give her remediation and a good chance at living a nearly normal life: nothing at all out of the ordinary.

  When the birth defect information for the year just past came up on the ground glass, I almost fell off my chair. In that year alone, the area around the Devonshire dump had seen three vampires, two lycanthropes, and three cases of apsychia: human babies born without any soul at all. That’s a truly dreadful defect, one neither priests nor physicians can do a thing about. The poor kids grow up, grow old, die, and they’re gone. Forever. Makes me shudder just to think about it.

  Three cases of apsychia in one year in a circle with a five-mile radius… I shuddered again. Apsychia just doesn’t happen except when something unhallowed is leaking into the environment. You might not see three cases of apsychia in a year even in a place like eastern Frankia, where the toxic spells both sides flung around in the First Sorcerous War still poison the ground after three quarters of a century.

  I finished writing up my notes, then told the spirit, “Thank you. You’ve been most helpful. May I ask one more favor of you?”

  “That depends on what it is.”

  “Of course,” I said quickly. “Just this: if anyone but brother Vahan tries to learn what I’ve been doing here, don’t tell, him, her, or it.” Scriptorium spirits, by their nature, have very literal minds; I wanted to make sure I covered both genders and both Sides.

  The spirit considered, then nodded. “I would honor such a request from a monk of the Thomas Brothers, and am instructed to treat you as one for the duration Brother Vahan specified. Let it be as you say, then.”

  I didn’t know how well the spirit would stand up under serious interrogation, but I wasn’t too worried about that. Shows how much I knew, doesn’t it? I guess I’m naive, but I thought the automatic anathema that falls on anyone who tampers with Church property would be plenty to keep snoops at arm’s length. I’m no Christian, but I wouldn’t have wanted an organization with a two-thousand-year track record of potent access to the Other Side down on me.

  Of course, the veneration of Mammon goes back a lot farther than two thousand years.

  I stopped by Brother Vahan’s office on the way out so I could thank him for his help, too. He looked up from whatever he was working on—none of my business—and said two words: “That bad?”

  He couldn’t possibly have picked that up by magic. Along with the standard government-issue charms, I wear a set of my own made for me by a rabbi who’s an expert in kabbalistics and other means of navigating on the Other Side. So I knew I was shielded. But abbots operate in this world, too. Even if he couldn’t read my mind, he must have read my face.

  “Pretty bad,” I said. I hesitated before I went on, but after all, I’d just pulled the information from his files. All the same, I lowered my voice: “Three soulless ones born within that circle in the past year.”

  “Three?” His face went suddenly haggard as he made the sign of the cross. Then he nodded, as if reminding himself. “Yes, there have been that many, haven’t there? I talked with the parents each time. That’s so hard, knowing they’ll never meet their loved ones in eternity. But I hadn’t realized they were all so close to that accursed dump.”

  An abbot does not use words like accursed casually; when he says them, he means them. I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t noticed the apsychia cluster around the dump. That wasn’t his job. Comforting bereaved families was a lot more important for him. But the Thomas Brothers collected the data I used to draw my own conclusions.

  “Elf-shot is up in the area, too,” I said quietly.

  “It would be.” He got up from behind his desk, set heavy hands on my shoulders. “Go with God, Inspector Fisher. I think you will be about His business today.”

  I didn’t even twit him about turning One into Three, as I might have if I’d come out of his scriptorium with better news. Blessings are blessings, and we’re wisely advised to count them. I said, “Thank you, Brother Vahan. I just wish I thought He was the only Power involved.”

  He didn’t answer, from which I inferred he agreed with me. Wishing I could have come to some other conclusion, I went out to my carpet and headed over to the Devonshire dump. I drove around it a couple of times before I set down. Scout first, then attack; the army and the EPA both drill that into you.

  Not that I learned much from my circumnavigations. You think dump, you think eyesore. It wasn’t like that. From the outside, i
t didn’t look like anything in particular, just a couple of square blocks with nothing built on them, nothing, at least, tall enough to show over the fence. And even that fence wasn’t ugly; ivy climbed trellises and spilled over inside. If you wanted to, you could probably climb those trellises yourself, jump right on down.

  You’d have to be crazy to try it, though. For one thing, I was certain catchspells would grab you if you did. For another, the ornaments on the perimeter fence weren’t just there for decoration. Crosses, Magen Davids, crescents, Oriental ideograms I recognized but couldn’t read, a bronze alpha and omega, a few kufic letters like the ones that lead off chapters of the Qu’ran… Things were being controlled in there, Things you wouldn’t want to mess with.

  They weren’t being controlled well enough, though, or babies around the dump wouldn’t come into the world without souls. I dribbled a few drops of Passover wine onto my spellchecker, murmured the blessing that thanked the Lord for the fruit of the vine.

  The spellchecker duly noted all the apotropaic incantations on the wall… and yes, there were catchspells behind them. But it didn’t see anything else. I shrugged. I hadn’t really expected it to: its magical vocabulary wasn’t that large. Besides, if the sorcerous leakage from the dump was so obvious that anybody with a thirty-crown gadget from Spells ’R’ Us could spot it, Charlie Kelly wouldn’t have needed to send me out to look things over. Still, you’d like things to be easy, just once.

  There was a parking lot across the street from the entrance. I set my carpet down there, chanted the antitheft geas before I climbed off it. I do that automatically; Angels City has had big-city crime for a long time. Leave a carpet unwarded for even a few minutes and you’re apt to find it’s walked with Jesus.

  I crossed in the crosswalk. They still call it that here, though in a melting pot like Angels City it also has symbols to let Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Parsees and Buddhists, and several different flavors of pagan (neo and otherwise) get from one side of the street to the other in safety. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you’re a Samoan who still worships Tanaroa. Run like hell, I suppose.

  The entryway to the Devonshire dump projected out several feet from the rest of the wall. A guard in a neat blue denim uniform came out of a glassed-in cage, tipped his cap to me. “May I help you, sir?” he asked politely, but in a way that still managed to imply I had no legitimate business making him get off his duff and step outside.

  I flashed my EPA sigil. At a toxic spell dump, that effectively turns me into St. Peter—I’m the fellow with the power to bind and loose, at least. The guard’s eyes widened. “Let me call Mr. Sudakis for you, Inspector, uh, Fisher, sir,” he said, and ducked back into his cell. He grabbed the phone, started talking into it, waited for his ear imp to answer, then replaced the handset in its cradle. “You can go in, sir. I’ll help you.”

  Help me he did. The gate was the kind with the little wheel on the bottom that retracted in back of the fence. He pushed it open. Behind it was a single, symbolic strand of barbed wire, with a placard whose message appeared in several languages and almost as many alphabets. The English version read, ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO UNAUTHORIZED ENTER HERE. Dante always makes people sit up and take notice.

  The guard moved the wire out of my way, too. Behind it was a thin red line painted on the ground which went across the gap where the two sections of wall came out to form the entryway. The guard picked up a little arched footbridge made of wood, set it down so that one end was outside the red line, the other inside. He was very careful to make sure neither end touched the strip of paint. That would have breached the dump’s outer security containment, and doubtless cost him his job no matter how many backup systems the place had.

  “Go ahead, sir,” he said, tipping his cap again. “Mr. Sudakis is expecting you. Please stay within the confines of the wires and the amber lines inside.” He grinned nervously. “I don’t know why I’m telling you that—you know more about it than I do.”

  “You’re doing what you’re supposed to do,” I answered as I mounted the little footbridge. “Too many people don’t bother any more.”

  As soon as I’d got off the bridge, the guard picked it up and put it back on his side. The amber lines on the concrete and the barbed wire strung above them marked the safe path to the administrative office, a low cinderblock building that looked like a citadel in both the military and sorcerous senses of the word.

  I looked around as I walked the path. I don’t know what I’d expected—blasted heath, maybe. But no, just a couple of acres of weeds, mostly brown now because nobody’s spells have been able to bring much rain the past few years. And yet—

  For second or two, the fence around the dump seemed very far away, with a whole lot of Nothing stretching the dirt and brush the same way you’d use bread crumbs to make hamburger go farther. Astrologers babble about the nearly infinite distances between the stars. I had the bad feeling I was looking at more infinity than I ever cared to meet, plopped down there in the middle of Chatsworth. Magic, especially byproducts of magic, can do things to space and time that the mathematicians are still trying to figure out. Then I looked again, and everything seemed normal.

  I hoped the wards the amber lines symbolized were as potent as the ones the red line had continued. By the data I’d taken from the Thomas Brothers’ chapter house, even those weren’t as good as they should have been.

  A stocky fellow in shirt, tie, and hard hat came out of the cinderblock building and up the path toward me. He had his hand out and a professionally friendly smile plastered across his face. “Inspector—Fisher, is it? Pleased to meet you. I’m Antanas Sudakis; my job title is sorcerous containment area manager. Call me Tony—I’m the guy who runs the dump.”

  We shook hands. His grip showed controlled strength. I was at least six inches taller than he; I could look down on the top of his little helmet. Just the same, I got the feeling he could break me in half if he decided to—I’m a beanpole, while he was built like somebody who’d been a good high school linebacker and might have played college ball if only he’d been taller.

  He wasn’t hostile now, though. “Why don’t you come into my office, Inspector Fisher—”

  “Call me Dave,” I said, thinking I ought to keep things friendly as long as I could.

  “Okay, Dave, come on with me and then you can let me know what this is all about. All our inspection parchments are properly signed, sealed, blessed, fumigated, what have you. I keep the originals on file in my desk; I know you government folks are never satisfied with copies called up in the ground glass.”

  “What sorcery summons, sorcery may shift,” I said, making it sound as if I was quoting official EPA policy. And I was. Still, I believed him. If his parchmentwork wasn’t in order, he wouldn’t brag about it. Besides, if his parchmentwork wasn’t in order, he’d have more to fret about than a surprise visit from an EPA inspector. He’d be worrying about the wrath of God, both from bosses who didn’t pay him to screw up and maybe from On High, too. A lot of things in the dump were unholy in the worst way.

  His office didn’t feel like a citadel, even if it had no windows. The diffuse glow of St. Elmo’s fire across the ceiling gave the room the cool, even light of a cloudy day. The air was cool to breathe, too, though St. Ferdinand’s Valley, which like the rest of Angels City was essentially a desert before it got built up, still has desertly weather.

  Sudakis noticed me visibly not toasting. He grinned. “We’re on a circuit with one of the frozen water elementals up in Greenland. A section of tile here”—he pointed to the wall behind his desk—“touched the elemental once, and now it keeps the place cool thanks to the law of contagion.”

  “Once in contact, always in contact,” I quoted. “Modern as next week.” A lot of buildings in Angels City cool themselves by contagious contact with ice elementals. That wasn’t what I meant by modern; the law of contagion may be the oldest magical principle known. But regulating the effect so people feel comforta
ble, not stuck on an ice floe themselves, is a new process—and an expensive one. The people who made a profit off the dump didn’t stint their employees; I wondered how the leak had happened if they had money like this to throw around.

  Once his secretary had brought coffee for both of us, Sudakis settled back in his chair. It creaked. He said, “What can I do for you, Dave? I gather this is an unofficial visit: you haven’t shown me a warrant, you haven’t served a subpoena, you don’t have a priest or an exorcist or even a lawyer with you. So what’s up?”

  “You’re right—this is unofficial.” I sipped my coffee. It was delicious, nothing like the reconstituted stuff that makes a liar of the law of similarity. “I’d like to talk about your containment scheme here, if you don’t mind.”

  His air of affability turned to stone as abruptly as if he’d gazed on a cockatrice. By his expression, he’d sooner have had me ask him about a social disease. “We’re tight,” he said. “Absolutely no question we’re tight. Maybe we’d both better have priests and lawyers here. I don’t like ‘unofficial’ visits that hit me where I live, Inspector Fisher.” I wasn’t Dave any more.

  “You may not be as tight as you think,” I told him. “That’s what I’m here to talk about.”

  “Talk is cheap.” He was hard-nosed as a linebacker, too. “I don’t want talk. I want evidence if you try and come here to say things like that to me.”

  “Elf-shot around the dump is up a lot from ten years ago till now,” I said.

  “Yes, I’ve seen those numbers. We’ve got a lot of new immigrants in the area, too, and they bring their troubles with them when they come to this country. We have a case of jaguaranthropy, if that’s a word, a couple of years ago. Try telling me that would have happened when all the neighbors sprang from northwest Europe.”