The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Read online

  “What’s there?” Sudakis asked when I turned my head.

  “Nothing,” I said, but I meant—I guessed I meant—it with a small n. I laughed a little nervously. “A figleaf of my imagination.”

  “You work here a while, you’ll get those for sure.” He nodded, hard. I wondered what all he’d seen—or maybe not seen—since he started working here.

  When we got out to the front gate, the security guard again carefully placed the footbridge so it straddled the red line. I felt like a free man as soon as I was on the outside of the dump site. Sudakis waved across from his side, then went back to his citadel.

  It wasn’t until I’d crossed the crosswalk, chanted the phrase that unlocked the antitheft geas on my carpet, and actually gotten into the air that I remembered the vampires, the werewolves, the kids born without souls, all the other birth defects around the Devonshire dump. Getting outside the site didn’t necessarily free you from it. Were that so, I wouldn’t have had to make this trip in the first place.

  Midday traffic was a lot thinner than the usual morning madness. I was more than twice as far from my Westwood office in the Confederal Building as I was when I left from my flat, but I didn’t need any more time to get there than I do on my normal commute. I slid into my reserved parking space (penalty for unauthorized use, a hundred crowns or an extra year for your soul in purgatory, or both—judge’s discretion: if he thinks you won’t rate purgatory, he’ll just fine you), then walked inside.

  The elevator shaft smelt of almond oil. At the bottom was a virgin parchment inscribed with the words GOMERT and KAILOETH and the sigil of the demon Khil, who has control over some of the spirits of the air (he can also cause earthquakes, and so is a useful spirit to know in Angels City). The almond oil is part of the paste that summons him, the other ingredients being olive oil, dust from close by a coffin, and the brain of a dunghill cock. “Seventh floor,” I said, and was lifted up.

  As soon as I got into the office, I called Charlie Kelly. He listened while I told him what I’d found, then said, “Nice piece of work, Dave. That confirms and amplifies the information I’d already received. Go to work on that warrant right away.”

  “I will,” I promised. “I know just the judge: I’ll take the information over to qadi Ruhollah. He’s about the strictest man in A.C. when it comes to environmental damage.” I chuckled. “For that matter, he’s a rigorist on just about everything—Maximum Ruhollah, we call him out here.”

  “Sounds like the fellow we need, all right,” Kelly said. “Anything else?”

  I started to say no, but had to think better of it. “There is one other thing, as a matter of fact. Sudakis—the dump manager—wondered how you’d heard something new might be wrong at his place when no one out here had a clue. I couldn’t give him an answer, but it made me curious, too.”

  As it had once or twice when he’d called me at home, the silence stretched longer than imp relay could account for by itself. Finally Charlie said, “A bird told me, you might say.”

  “A little bird, right?” I started to laugh. “Charlie, I stopped believing in that little bird about the same time I found out the stork only brings changelings.”

  “However you want it,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you, and more than I ought to.”

  I thought about pushing some more, but decided not to. People back in D.C. are supposed to have good sources; they justify the fancy salaries that come out of your purse and mine by knowing what’s going on all over the country and how to find out about it even if the people who are doing it don’t want it found out. But I was still moderately graveled that somebody a continent away had picked up on something I hadn’t heard the first thing about right in my own back yard.

  “Get the warrant, Dave,” Charlie said. “We’ll go from there, depending on what we learn.”

  “Right,” I said, and hung up. Then I grabbed a sandwich and a cup of coffee at the little cafeteria in the building. They perfectly balanced virtue and vice: they were lousy but cheap. Lousy or not, my stomach stopped growling. I made another phone call.

  The phone on the other end must have yammered for quite a while, because I listened to my imp drumming his fingers on the inside of the handset until at last I got an answer: “Hand-of-Glory Press, Judith Adler speaking.”

  “Hi, Judy—it’s Dave.”

  “Oh, hi, Dave.” I thought her voice went from businesslike to warm, but with two phone imps between us I had a hard time being sure. “Sorry I took so long to pick up there. I was in the middle of a tough passage, and I wanted to get to the end of a sentence so I could be sure I wouldn’t miss even a single word when I went back to it.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said. “Doing what you do, you have to be careful.”

  Hand-of-Glory Press, as you’d guess from the name, publishes grimoires of all sorts, from simple ones on carpet maintenance up to the special secret sort with olive-drab covers. Judy’s their number one proofreader and copy editor. She’s the most intensely detail-minded person I know, and she needs to be. An error in a grimoire on flying carpets might end you up in Boston, Oregon, instead of Boston, Mass. An error in a military magic manual might leave you dead, or worse.

  She said, “So what’s up?”

  “Feel like going out to dinner with me tonight?” I asked. “I ran into something interesting today, and I wouldn’t mind hearing what you think of it.” Knowing someone who can see not only forest and trees but also count leaves is wonderful. Being in love with her is even better.

  “Sure,” she said. “Meet at your place after work? I ought to be able to get there before six.”

  “You’ll probably beat me there, then, the way traffic on St. James’ has been lately,” I told her.

  “Sounds good.”

  “There’s a new Hanese place a few blocks away that I want to try.”

  “Sounds good to me, too. You know how much I like Hanese food.”

  “See you tonight, then. Now I’ll let you get back to what you were doing. ’Bye.”

  I went back to work, too, although my mind wasn’t really on the main project that currently infested my desk. A couple of days before, a big carpet carrying fumigants had overturned in an accident, spilling finely ground linseed, psellium seed, violet and wild parsley root, aloes, mace, and storax. Because they’re materials used in conjurations, I had to draft the environmental impact statement.

  I could have just written no impact and let it go at that: the fumigants were harmless in and of themselves, and required combustion and ritual to become magically significant. A two-word report, however, would not have made my boss happy, and might have given people outside the EPA the idea that we didn’t take seriously the job we were doing.

  So, instead, I wasted taxpayers’ time and parchment writing five leaves that ended up saying no impact but did it in a bureaucratically acceptable way. I do sometimes wonder why governmental agencies have to act like that, but it seems as universal as the law of contagion.

  Suffused in virtue, I dropped the draft of my statement on my boss’ desk for her changes, then went down the slide, out to my carpet, and onto the freeway. Sure enough, traffic was beastly, especially down by the airport. Not only was everybody getting on and off there, but the flight lanes for the big international carrier really cramp air space for local travelers.

  Judy was waiting for me when I got home, as I’d thought she would be. We’d been seeing each other for about two and a half years, then; I’d gotten her a spare entry talisman and given her the unlocking Word for my door pretty early in that time, and she’d done the same for me.

  She greeted me with a pucker on her lips and a cold beer in her hand. “Wonderful woman,” I told her, which might have helped heat the kiss a little. She got a beer for herself, too. We sat down to drink them before we went out.

  Judy’s a big tall brunette with hazel eyes and a mass of wavy brown hair that falls halfway down her back. She doesn’t walk, exactly; when she moves, it’s
more like flowing. She looked too feline ever to seem quite at home on my angular apartment-house furniture. I enjoyed watching her all the same.

  “So what did you come across today?” she asked.

  I finished my beer and said, “Let’s talk about it at the restaurant. If I start explaining it now, we won’t get to the restaurant, and then you’ll think I invited you over just to lure you into bed.”

  “It is nice to know you occasionally have other things on your mind,” she admitted, upending her own bottle. “Let’s go, then.”

  We rode on my carpet; the safety belts held us companionably close. The restaurant parking lot had a sign with a big Hanese dragon breathing ornately stylized fire and a blunt warning: TRESPASSERS WILL BE INCINERATED.

  Judith smiled when she saw it. I didn’t. I live in a moderately tough part of town, and I figured there was at least one chance in three the sign was no joke.

  Wonderful smells greeted us just inside the entrance. The only trouble with Hanese restaurants is that so much of what they serve is forbidden to those who observe the Law. Sea cucumbers I can live without, but I’ve heard so much about scallops and lobster that I’m always tempted to try them. But how can a man who’d break what he sees as God’s Law be trusted to uphold the laws of men? I was good again. So was Judy, whose job and whose life also took discipline.

  Still, you can’t really complain about hot and sour soup, beef with black mushrooms, crispy duck, and crystal-boiled chicken with spicy sauces. Everything was good, too; this was a place I’d visit again. While Judy and I ate, I told her about the Devonshire dump.

  “Three cases of apsychia this year?” she said. Her eyebrows went way up, and stayed way up. “Something’s badly wrong there.”

  “I think so, too, and so does the dump administrator—fellow named Tony Sudakis—even though he won’t say so where a Listener can hear him.” I sipped my tea. “You deal with magic more intimately than I do, maybe even more intimately than Sudakis: intimately in a way different from his, anyhow. I’m glad you’re worried; it tells me I’m right to feel the same way.”

  “You certainly are.” She nodded so vigorously, her hair flew out in a cloud around her head. Then her eyes filled with tears. “Just think of those poor babies—”

  “I know.” I’d thought about them a lot. I couldn’t help it. Vampires and lycanthropes have their problems, heaven knows, but what hope is there for a kid with no soul? None, zero, zip. I drank more tea, hoping it would cleanse my mind along with my palate. No such luck. Then I told Judy what Charlie Kelly had said about a bird telling him something might be amiss at the dump. “He wouldn’t give me any details—he wanted to be coy. What do you suppose he meant?”

  “A bird? Not a little bird?” She waited for me to shake my head, then started ticking off possibilities on her fingers. “First thing that occurs to me is something to do with Quetzalcoatl.”

  “You just made dinner worth putting on the expense account,” I said, beaming. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  I felt stupid for not thinking of it, too, for no sooner had I spoken than a busboy stopped at the table to clear away some dirty dishes. Unlike our waiter, he wasn’t Hanese; he was stockier, a little darker, and spoke his little Anglo-Saxon with a strong Spainish accent. A lot of the scutwork in Angels City gets done by people from the south. As Sudakis had said, more of them come here every year, too. Times are so hard, people so poor, down in the Empire that even scutwork looks good to a lot of people.

  Angels City, much of the Confederation’s southwest, used to belong to the Empire of Azteca. The nobles, some of them, still plot revenge after a century and a half. For that matter, though most people in the Empire speak Spainish these days, some of the old families there, the ones that go back before the Spaniards came, go right on worshiping their own gods in secret, even though they go to Mass, too. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, is much the nicest of those gods, believe me.

  The old families crave the Empire’s old borders, too, even if their own ancestors never ruled hereabouts. They call our southwest Aztlan, and dream it’s theirs. The way immigration is headed, in a couple of generations that may be true in all but name. Some people, though, might not want to wait. So, Quetzalcoatl.

  Judy asked, “What ideas have you had yourself?” Thinking is hard work. She didn’t want to do it all herself, for which I couldn’t blame her.

  I seized a big, meaty mushroom on my chopsticks, then said, “The Peacock Throne crossed my mind.”

  Judy was chewing, too. She held up a finger, swallowed, then said, “Yes, I can see that, especially since—didn’t you say?—you know some Persian firms use that dump?”

  “That’s right. Sudakis told me so.” The Peacock Throne is the one which was warmed by the fundament of the Shahan-Shah of Persia until the secularists threw him out a few years ago. St. Ferdinand’s Valley has a large Persian refugee community. And if Persians had been whispering in Charlie Kelly’s ear, I wouldn’t have any trouble getting a warrant from old Maximum Ruhollah, either. He was plus royal que le roi, if you know what I mean.

  “After the Peacock Throne, the next possibility I thought of was the Garuda Bird project,” I went on. “Aerospace and defense are Siamese twins, and a lot of defense outfits use the Devonshire dump.”

  Judy nodded, slowly. Her eyes caught fire. So did mine whenever I thought about the Garuda Bird. Up till now, no one’s ever found a sorcerous way to get us off Earth and physically into space. People have even talked about trying to do it with pure mechanicals, though anybody who’d fly a mechanical in a universe full of mystic forces is crazier than any three people I want to deal with.

  But the Garuda Bird project links the ancient Hindu Bird with the most modern western spell-casting techniques. Before long, if everything goes as planned, we’ll try visiting the moon and the worlds in person, not just by astral projection.

  “There’s a good-sized Hind community up in the Valley, too,” Judy said.

  “That’s true.” It was, but I didn’t know how much it meant. Angels City and its metropolitan area are so big, they have good-sized communities from just about every nation on earth. If God decided to build the Tower of Babel now, he’d put it right here: the schools, for instance, have to try to teach kids who speak close to a hundred different languages, and some towns have laws that signs have to be at least partly in the Roman alphabet so police, firefighters, and exorcists can find the places in case of emergency.

  I ate another mushroom, then said, “Any more ideas?”

  “I didn’t have any others until you mentioned the Peacock Throne,” Judy said, “but that made me think of something else.” She didn’t go on; she didn’t look as if she wanted to.

  “Well?” I asked at last.

  She looked around and lowered her voice before she spoke; maybe she didn’t want anybody but me hearing. “There’s the Peacock Throne, but there’s also the Peacock Angel.”

  Not everybody, especially in this part of the world, would have taken her meaning. But while neither one of us is a sorcerer, we both deal with the Other Side as much as a lot of people who make a good living at wizardry. I felt a chill run up my back. The Peacock Angel is a euphemism the Persians use for Satan.

  “Judy, I hope you’re wrong,” I told her.

  “So do I,” she said. “Believe me, so do I.”

  I remembered the knot of stirring flies I’d seen in the dump—Beelzebub is very high up (or low down, depending on how you look at things) in the infernal hierarchy. And that Nothing—had I really seen it, or was it just jitters at being in a—literally—spooky place? If it was real, what, or Who, caused it? Those were interesting thoughts. I didn’t like any of them.

  Suddenly a little bit of Nothing seemed to fall like a cloak over the warm, comfortable restaurant. I didn’t want to be there any more. I waved for the bill, pulled money from my wallet to cover it, and left in a hurry. Judy didn’t argue. Even euphemisms can bring trouble in their wake.
r />   My flat felt like a fortress against our gloom. As soon as I’d locked the door and touched the mezuzah that warded it, Judy came into my arms. We hugged, hard, just holding each other for a long time. Then she said, “Why don’t you bring me another bottle of beer?”

  When I got back from the icebox with it, she’d taken from her purse two small alabaster cups, thin to the point of translucency. Into each she poured a little powder from a vial she carried. I’d once asked the ingredients of the “cup of roots,” and she’d told me gum of Alexandria, liquid alum, and garden crocus. Mixed with beer, it was a contraceptive that dated back to the ancient Egyptians. I was convinced it worked: not only had it never failed us, how many ancient Egyptians have you seen lately?

  Just to be safe, though, I also followed Pliny’s advice and kept the testicles and blood of a dunghill cock under my bed. Unlike the old Roman’s, mine were sealed in glass so they wouldn’t prove contraceptive merely by stinking prospective partners out of the bedroom.

  If you ask me, making love, especially with someone you do love, is the most sympathetic magic of all. Afterwards, I asked Judy, “Do you want to stay the night?” I admit I had an ulterior motive; she’s different from most of the women I’ve known in that she often feels frisky in the morning.

  But that night she shook her head. “I’d better not. I’d have to take the cup of roots again if you wanted me, and I don’t want to drink beer and then steer a carpet through rush-hour traffic.”

  “Okay.” I hope I gave in with good grace. If you love somebody not least for having a good head on her shoulders, you’d better not get annoyed when she uses it.

  She went into the bathroom, came back and started to get dressed, then stopped and looked over at me. “Could we try again tonight?”

  “ ‘Try’ is probably the operative word.” But I was off the bed like a shot and heading for the kitchen. “Woman, you’ll run me out of beer and make me go up with the window shade, but you’re nice to have around.”

  “Good,” she said, a smile in her voice. Beer in hand, I hurried back toward the bedroom. Her nice, sensible head was not the only reason I loved her. No indeed.