The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

X

People were standing on the sidewalk rubbernecking the way they always do when something goes wrong. Over on the dump side of the street, a couple of constables were laying down the ritual yellow tape that keeps rubberneckers from getting too close to the action.

Michael and I hurried across. The constables saw our EPA sigils and demystified a stretch of tape so we could cross the line. “Did you get a hazmat team here?” I asked one of them. “Yeah, we did,” he said. I thought they had; there were more black-and-whites in the parking lot than constables outside the dump. But while his partner put the magic back into the line, the fellow went on, “The guy who runs the dump tried to get an EPA hazmat team, too, but it was already on an urgent call, worse luck.”

Luck had nothing to do with it; I’d told Kawaguchi he was liable to need that team at Chocolate Weasel. And he was, God knows. But Tony Sudakis was liable to need it here, too.

No magic yet has made people able to be two places at the same time. They’re working on it, I understand, with thaumatechnology based on what they’ve learned with ectoplasmic cloning, but so far it happens only in light-and-magic shows and sorcerous fiction stories. Too bad. Boy, could we have used it. The security guard recognized Michael and me. Without being asked, he brought out the footbridge so we could cross into the containment area. As soon as we did, he yanked it away as fast as he could. In principle, that was smart; you didn’t want to weaken the magical containment scheme in any way. In practice, I was afraid it would do about as much good as sunglasses under the megasalamander blast Professor Blank had mentioned.

About three steps down the warded path that led to Tony Sudakis’ office, I stopped dead in my tracks. Tony hadn’t been kidding—you could see the Nothing from anywhere on the walkway now. You felt that if you leaned forward, you might fall straight toward it forever. And he’d been right about the feeling that pervaded the dump, too; it was as if the Nothing were an egg quivering on the verge of hatching.

But that wasn’t the only thing that made me stop and stare. The constables from the hazardous materia magica team weren’t working only from the warded path—they’d actually gone into the dump itself to come to grips with the Nothing.

Sure, they knew what they were doing. Sure, they were draped with so many different kinds of apotropaic amulets that they looked like perambulating Christmas trees. Sure, their shoes had cold-iron soles to insulate them from the thaumaturgic vileness that littered the place. All the same, they put their souls on the line, not just their soles. I wouldn’t have gone out there for a million crowns.

For Judy? Yes, without a second thought. If you don’t know what really matters to you, why bother living?

Tony Sudakis was up on the roof of his office. He saw Michael and me, waved, and disappeared. A minute later, he came pounding down the path toward us. He had a hard hat on his head, his cravat was loosened and his collar open. He was a foreman again, not an administrator, and looked as if he loved it.

“Glad you got here,” he said. “Dave, on the phone you sounded like you know more about this shit than maybe anybody. You want to brief Yolanda there?” He pointed up ahead to one of the hazmat team people.

Up till then, I hadn’t noticed the boss of the team was a woman. She was black, slim, maybe my age—not half bad, though she looked both too smart and too tough to be model pretty.

I told her what I knew about the Chumash Powers, and what I’d heard from Professor Blank not an hour earlier.

When I was through, she crossed herself. “What are we supposed to do, then?” she said. This is worse than we’re really set up to face. Maybe a military team would be a better bet to resist” I doubt that,” Michael put in. “Military teams are configured against specific security threats—Persian, Aztecian, Ukrainian. But the Chumash, till this moment, have never posed a danger to the Confederation. Warrior priests and the like will not be able to help us.”

Yolanda scowled; you could tell she was the kind of person who wanted to get right in there and do things, then worry about consequences later. “What do the two of you recommend, then?” she demanded.

Do as weU as you can, was the answer that immediately sprang to mind. If the Chumash Powers remanifested themselves with the burst of thaumaturgic energy Professor Blank had feared, there was nothing else to do, and even that wouldn’t help. But you always have to play the game as if you think you’re going to win—which, when you get down to it, is also part of dying well.

So I said, “Delay. Every second we keep that Nothing encysted buys us time to evacuate the neighborhood. It may not help, but then again, it may. Tony, I presume you have procedures in place for an emergency evacuation?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You’d better implement them, then. EPA orders, if you like.”

“You got it, boss.” He went back to his office on the dead run. If his procedures were like most people’s, he’d have a bunch of spells completed but for the last word or pass or whatever, so he could but them into effect one after another, bang,bang, bang.

Sure enough, maybe thirty seconds later we heard a dreadful cacophony from the cacodemons mounted at each comer of the containment fence. It reminded me, fittingly enough, of the air raid warnings that would help mark the start of the Third Sorcerous War.

After they’d screeched for a while, the cacodemons started yelling, “Evacuate the area. Evacuate the area. Contamination may escape from the Devonshire containment site. Evacuate the area.” Then they shouted what I think was the same thing, only in Spainish.

They were loud enough to be heard for miles. That was why they were there, but they made talk inside the containment area just about impossible for anybody who wasn’t an accomplished lip-reader. I was sure my ears would ring for the next couple of days—assuming I was still around in a couple of days.

Michael stuck his head next to mine, bawled in my ear,

“Delay is all very well, but to the end futile. Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Chumash Powers will succeed in breaking free of their encystment and returning to This Side, with the accompanying energy release you have described.”

He turned his head so I could y

ell into his ear. It was my turn, after all. Yell I did: “I know, but we’ll get some people away, so when the Great Eagle and the Lizard and rest get out, they won’t do the damage they want to.”

I turned my head. Michael shouted. “Possibly not. The damage they do inflict, however, will be more than adequate to satisfy anyone not—” I’m sure he kept talking after that, but I stopped hearing him. I was running for Tony Sudalds’ office as fast as my legs would cany me.

He was coming out as I dashed in. He might as well have been Phyuis Kaminsky—I almost bowled him over. “Phone,”

I said, panting. Inside the blockhouse, the noise from the cacodemons was just too loud, not deafening.

“Sure, go ahead.” He followed me back up the hall. I made my call, talked for maybe a minute and a half, hung up. When I was done, Tony stared at me, big-eyed. “You drink that’ll work?” he asked, unwontecally quiet.

“Let me put it this way,” I answered. “If it doesn’t, do you think these concrete blocks are going to save us?” He shook his head. I went on, “I don’t, either. The hazmat mages out there will delay all they can, but how long is that. Sooner or later, probably sooner”—I realized I was echoing Michael—“the Chumash Powers wttl break out. And when they do—”

“Bend over and loss your bum goodbye. Yeah,” Sudakis said. “How much time do you drink they need to buy?”

“I just don’t know,” I answered. “Burbank isn’t far, but I don’t know how much prep they have to do first. All we can do now is wait and hope.”

We walked back out into the unbelievable din together. I bawled into Michael’s ear; Tony yelled into Yolanda’s (no question he got the better half of that deal). Michael shouted back at me, “Not the best chance, but I see none better.”

Then he walked over to scream, presumably, the same dring at Tony.

“I wish I had your connections,” Yolanda shouted at me.

“I wish I didn’t have them,” I answered, “because that would mean dris miserable case never happened.”

She nodded grimly. We all stared toward the east, like the Kings of Orient with somebody extra thrown in for luck.

Trouble was, all the luck in this case had been bad.

I tfiought about poor little Jesus Cordero. Seeing if the Slow Jinn Fizz jinnetic engineering techniques could make him a soul hadn’t seemed urgent. He was just a baby, after all; years and years would go by before he had to worry about forever vanishing from the scheme of things. That’s what I’d thought. But if the Chumash Powers burst forth, he’d be gone for good. Not even limbo. Just gone.

Out in the dump, one of the hazmat mages crumpled like soggy parchment I couldn’t tell whether the toxic spell residues had overcome him or whether he’d just broken under the burden of delaying the burst. Yolanda leaped off the warded path and dragged him back toward its very tenuous safety.

One he was back on the path, he pulled himself into fetal position and lay there shivering: sorcerous shock of some kind, sure enough. He was breathing, and he nodded his head when Yolanda shouted at him, so he wasn’t critical.

Since he wasn’t, the rest of us kept looking eastward. Either we’d be saved, in which case we could treat the hazmat mage later, or we wouldn’t, in which case nothing we did for him now would matter anyway.

I preferred the first choice, but wouldn’t have bet anything big on getting it.

Suddenly, Tony Sudakis’ finger stabbed out. “Isn’t that-?” He didn’t go on, maybe for fear his words would induce it not to be.

“I don’t think it is,” I yelled—hard to sound bitter when you’re yelling, but I managed. “More likely to be a big cargo carpet on me landing approach toward Burbank airport”

We all watched for another couple of seconds. Tony shook his head. “A carpet heading into Burbank would be getting smaller. This is getting bigger.”

“So it is,” Michael said. He forgot to yell, but I read his lips. When Michael forgets to do something he should, you know he’s under strain. We all were. I didn’t want to think he was right, just because that would have made getting my hopes dashed all the crueler.

But after another few seconds, there could be no doubt. The speck in the air we were watching swelled out of speckdom far faster than any carpet could have, and it didn’t have a carpet’s shape, either. I saw great wings beat majestically.

“The Garuda Bird!” I shouted—with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my might, as the Bible says.

The Bird came on unbelievably fast. Two or three more flaps and it was hovering over the dump. Of course, it didn’t need to work its wings the way a merely material creature of flesh and feathers would have. The Other Side suffused it; it was, after all, an avatar of Vishnu. As Matt Arnold had said back at the Loki works, it couldn’t have flown—or existed at all—as a material creature; when it hovered above the dump, its wings spanned the entire width of the containment area and more, and cast the ground into shadow almost as deep as night It looked much like the poster in Arnold’s office—those incredible wings supporting a huge—chested body that didn’t look birdlike at all to my mind. Nor was its head anything like that of a natural bird, but for the hooked beak that took the place of nose and mouth. The rest, especially the eyes, looked more nearly human, and the feathers on top of its head, instead of being peacock—brilliant tike those of the body and wings, were black and soft like hair.

The wings beat again, right over our heads. The blast of wind from a flap like that should have blown walls down, and blown dust motes like us into the next barony, but it didn’t After a moment, I realized why: since it flew more by magic than with its wings, their flapping was just a symbolic act, not quite a real one. And thank God for that; it wasn’t something I’d worried about when I called Matt Arnold.

The Garuda Bird threw back its anthropomorphic head and let out a bellow that sounded like a tuba about the size of a city block played by a mad giant wfao’d quit halfway through his first tuba lesson. Let me put it like this: by comparison, the squalling cacodemons were quiet and melodious.

One thing, or rather two sets of things, thoroughly ornithomorphic (ah, Greek!) about the Garuda Bird were its talons. In fact, it was the most talented bird I’d ever seen: those enormous gleaming daws could have punctured the Midgard Serpent, by the look of them. I would have paid a good many crowns to watch that fight—from a safe distance, say the surface of the moon.

Now, as the Bird hovered over the Devonshire dump, its left foot closed on the Nothing. The hazmat mages pelted back out of the way. I found I was holding my breath. This was something else I hadn’t had figured when I called Arnold: was the Garuda Bird’s magic strong enough to penetrate the encystment the Chumash Powers had thrown up around themselves? If not—well, if not, I told myself, we weren’t any worse off than we would have been without the Bird.

When the Garuda Bird’s talons struck the Nothing, sparks flew, but the talons didn’t go in. I was praying and cursing at the same time, both as hard as I could. The Garuda Bird bellowed again, this time in fury. I staggered, wondering if the top of my head would fall off and whether I’d ever hear again.

The muscles in the Garuda Bird’s monster drumsticks bunched. That’s what I saw, anyhow, though I knew it was only a quasi—physical manifestation like the Bird’s flapping wings. What it meant was that, on the Other Side, the Garuda Bird was gathering all its thaumaturgic force.

Its claws closed on the Nothing once more. More sparks flew. The Bird cried out yet again, but its talons still would not penetrate. I thought we were doomed. But then, ever so slowly, the needle tips of those immense claws began sinking into the Chumash Powers’ shell of withdrawal.

Tony’s mouth was wide open. So were Michael’s and Yolanda’s and mine. We were all shouting for all we were worth, but I couldn’t hear any of us, not even me.

The Garuda Bird’s feet disappeared into Nothing. You couldn’t see them. They were just-gone. I stopped shouting. My heart went into my mouth. The Garuda Bird wasn’t a power that had had to hide itself away to keep from going extinct; the belief of hundreds of millions of people fueled it Never in my most dreadful nightmares had I imagined that it wouldn’t be able to overcome the Chumash Powers that hid inside the Nothing if once it broke their shell.

The Bird’s next roar carried a note of pain. It flapped its wings again: almost a real flap this time, for dust rose in a choking cloud from the dry dirt of the dump. Through the dust, I saw more of the Garuda Bird’s leg than I had before.

“It’s coming out!” I cried, coughing.

Another flap, more dust, still another wingbeats Then, with a pop! in my head that felt like the psychic equivalent of the one you’d make by sticking your finger into your mouth against the inside of your cheek, its feet came all the way out of the Nothing. In its daws writhed the Lizard.

Yolanda grabbed me and kissed me on the cheek. A good thing she did, too, because Tony Sudakis slapped my back so hard, I might have staggered off the warded path and into the dump if she hadn’t been holding on to me.

No matter how joyful he was, Michael Manstein didn’t do things like slapping people on the back. He shouted, “Brilliantly reasoned, David! The similarity between lizards and snakes was enough to touch off the Garuda Bud’s instinctive antipathy.”

“Yeah,” I said, which I admit wasn’t a fitting response to praise like that. But I was too busy watching the fight above my head to get out more than the one word.

The Chumash Lizard was an alligator lizard the size of the biggest anaconda you ever saw. If you live in Angels City, you know about alligator lizards. They’re the most common kind of lizard around here. The material ones can get more than a foot long, with yellowish bellies and dirt-brown backs striped with black. For critters their size, they have large, sharp teeth. The ones on the Chumash Lizard looked to be a couple of inches long, and it had a whole mouthful of them.

Alligator lizards also have little short legs, which makes them look even more ophidian than most lizards (they’re related to glass snakes, which aren’t snakes but lizards with no legs at all). My guess—my hope—was that that would just make the Garuda Bird madder.

The Lizard made horrible hissing noises and bit at the Garuda Bird’s legs. However huge and fierce it was, though, it had no more chance against the Bird than an ordinary alligator lizard would have against an eagle that decided to have a reptilian lunch. Crunch! With a noise like a monster cleaver biting into a side of beef, the Garuda Bird bit off the Lizard’s head and about the front third of its body. Ichor spattered down all over the dump. Luckily, it didn’t splash any of us—talk about your hazardous materia magica.

The Chumash Lizard’s body convulsed and thrashed even more wildly than before. Even material lizards are hard to kill. Lizards that are also Powers… But all the thrashing didn’t stop the Garuda Bird from gulping down the rest of the lizard.

Michael tapped me on the shoulder. “I believe you may now definitively declare one Chumash Power extinct,” he yelled.

“You know what?” I yelled back, °I don’t miss it a bit.

Dreadful thing for an EPA man to say, isn’t it?”

“I find myself less scandalized than I might be under other circumstances,” Michael said.

With another earsplitting bellow, the Garuda Bird tried to poke its clawed feet into the Nothing. Again, it was hard work. But the Bird didn’t have to back up and make a second effort—slowly but surely, talons, toes, and feet sank into the Chumash Powers’ sphere of encyshnent and disappeared.

The Bird let out a pain-filled screech like the one it had made when (I guess) it seized the lizard. It started flapping its wings again in that half-material way it had used to force itself out of the Nothing. Feet, toes, talons reemerged—and then, with another of those psychic popy’s, the Garuda Bird was free once more.

It didn’t come out of the Nothing empty-footed, either.

Its claws held what the Chumash called the Great Eagle. I will admit, a golden eagle with a body the size of a Siberian tiger’s is pretty Great - under other circumstances, as Michael had put it Up against the Garuda Bird, the Chumash Eagle might as well have been a sparrow.

The Eagle, unlike the Lizard, didn’t try to fight. It wriggled, twisted, broke free, and streaked for the sky. I feared it would get away: it seemed so much more graceful in the air than the ponderous Garuda Bird. But the contest wasn’t only, or even mostly, bird body against bird body. It was magic against magic, too, and the Garuda Bird had not only its native Indian potency but also all the souping up the Loki Kobold Works had given its sorcerous systems. It didn’t just fly—it was destined for space. It shot after the Eagle faster than the eye could follow.

High in the sky, the Eagle tried to dodge—if it couldn’t flee the Garuda Bird, maybe it could outjink it But no. One of those immense feet closed on it, and this time there was no escape. I heard a despairing shriek fade and the. Hovering above the dump, the Garuda Bird devoured its prey. A couple of big feathers came spiraling down into the containment area—all that was left of the Chumash Eagle.

“We’ll have to decontaminate those,” Yolanda said.

“As soon as you do, there’s another Chumash Power that won’t show up in the Barony of Angels again,” I said. As an EPA inspector, I felt bad about that. As somebody who was wondering whether he’d still be alive five minutes from now, I figured I’d worry about the long-term consequences of the Great Eagle’s demise later, if there was a later.

High overhead, the Garuda Bird let out a roar that made all its earlier cries seem like whispers. It folded its wings and stooped like a hawk onto the Nothing. I braced myself—uselessly, I knew. When that bulk hit, the earth wouldn’t just shake, it would quake, San Andreas notwithstanding.

A split second before the Bird’s talons seized the Nothing, another psychic pop sounded in my head, this one bigger than the other two put together. The talons closed on empty air—the Nothing was gone. Somehow—sorcerously, of course, but don’t ask me about the Kobold Works’ proximity spells, because I don’t know from nothin’—the Bird stopped in midair without touching the ground.

I looked out at the far wall of the Devonshire dump, and it seemed only as far away as it should have. The sense of the imminent immanence of something eminently dreadful’s becoming dreadfully evident was gone, too. I looked over at Tony Sudakis. “I think you can tell the cacodemons to shut up,” I yelled at him.

He flipped me a salute-casual but, I thought, not faked—and trotted back toward his office. As he did so, the Garuda Bird rose into the air (without a single flap) and headed east, back toward Burbank. That took more weight off my mind: my guess was that the Bird would have stayed around had it sensed any remaining trouble.

Just the same, I walked over to the spot on the path from which I’d first noticed the Nothing, a million years ago: that’s what it felt like, anyhow. I wasn’t quite there yet when the cacodemons closed their mouths. Sudden silence hit me as hard as the squalls of alarm had before.

I knew just where that spot was now. I looked out across the weed-strewn dirt toward the Nothing and saw—nothing.

I was never so glad not to capitalize an “n” in my whole life.

“I think they’re gone,” I said, words which ranked right up there with the first dme I told Judy, I love you.

“I believe you are correct,” Michael said. “What we sensed, in my opinion, was the Chumash Powers abandoning any contact with This Side to keep the Garuda Bird from reaching into their encystment, dragging them out one by one, and destroying them. Thaumaturgic analysis will eventually confirm or refute this, but it is a tenable working hypothesis.”

“I’m with you,” Yolanda said. “If they went away like that, they won’t be back.” She wiped her forehead with a sleeve.

I’m not sure she really grasped just how bad a hazmat she’d helped hold at bay, but none of what her team did for a living was easy.

“Perkunas and the Nine Suns, I hope not.” Tony Sudakis clutched his amber amulet in one beefy fist.

“Let me use your phone one more time?” I asked him.

“I’ll call Professor Blank at UCAC; he’s been running a study for me to find out whether the Chumash Powers really have become extinct. I think we can safely say two of them have, but he’d be the best fellow to evaluate what’s become of the others.”

“Be my guest.” Sudakis waved me toward the blockhouse.

It wouldn’t have done a bit of good against what had almost come forth from the dump, but suddenly it looked strong and secure again.

I got hold of Blank. He was still in his office, wondering, I suppose, whether the building was going to collapse around him. When I told him what had happened at the dump, he let out a sigh of relief so heartfelt even phone imps couldn’t spoil it, then promised to send his research team out as fast as carpets could get from UCAC to Chatsworth. Since it was heading into late afternoon, that wouldn’t be any too fast, but the urgency level had gone down, too.

Then I called Legate Kawaguchi to see how the constables were doing at Chocolate Weasel. Him I didn’t get; instead, some other constable bawled in my ear, “You can’t talk to him, bud, whoever you are. He’s down at the war, and I’m headin’ that way myself.” He hung up with a crash that that phone imps did an uncanny job of reproducing.

That sent me out of Tony’s office on the run. I filled him in on what Blank had said, then passed on the rest of the word to Michael. The only thing that can mean is Chocolate Weasel, I think,” I said. “We’d better get over there as fast as we can.”

“I concur,” Michael said.

Yolanda—her last name, I finally had the chance to notice on her badge, was Simmons—said, “Where’s this Chocolate Weasel place? Sounds like we might do some good there, too.”

“Your team is welcome to follow my carpet,” Michael said.

“Will the health of the gentleman who collapsed suffice for the venture?”

“I’m okay,” the gentleman said, and sat up to try to prove it. He still didn’t look okay, but he was game, anyhow. “All the stuff in here just overloaded my protective systems for a minute there.”

“It’s liable to be worse at Chocolate Weasel,” I said, but he shook his head—he didn’t think it was possible. I envied him his innocence.

The security guard put down the footbridge for us, and we trooped out. Then the fellow took off his uniform cap and bowed, which made me feel great. The guard might not have know who’d done what, but summoning the Garuda Bird wasn’t something you could ignore.

Thanks to the cacodemons’ announcing an emergency evacuation, traffic around the dump was unbelievably snarled. We passed Chocolate Weasel’s address on to the hazmat team and followed them instead of the other way round: they had constabulary lanterns on their carpets, which helped move people out of their way.

About halfway to Chocolate Weasel, we met head-on a rush away from that area. I gulped, remembering what the constable who’d answered Kawaguchi’s phone had said about a war. Maybe he hadn’t been exaggerating.

A constable in full combat gear, material and thaumaturgic, was turning back traffic heading in Chocolate Weasel’s direction. The hazmat team’s lanterns got them through;

Yolanda’s shouted encouragement and our EPA sigils did the job for us.

“You know, Michael,” I said, “just once today, I’d like to fly away from the scene of a disaster.”

“I have considerable sympathy for this point of view,” he answered. “However—”

“Yeah,” I said. When duty calls, you’d better do it. Doing it and liking it, though, were not the same critter.

When Yolanda asked another constable exactly where we were going, he directed her to a command post at the comer of Nordhoff and Soto’s. The reason that was the command post, I discovered when we followed her there, was that it was as close to Chocolate Weasel as you could get without being in immediate danger of getting yourself messily lolled.

Sure enough. Legate Kawaguchi was there, in uniform and helmet—not Constabulary Department standard issue, but samurai-style, with the man of his clan affixed to the forehead to help protect him against malignant magic.

He didn’t act surprised to see me. “Good afternoon, Inspector Fisher. I must admit, you were not in error concerning the nature of that building ahead.” He pointed east I looked that way myself. A thin column of smoke rose from the Chocolate Weasel facility. Tell me that’s not what I’m afraid it is,” I said to Kawaguchi.

“I wish I could,” he answered. They are tearing the hearts from victims and kindling fires in their chests. We face the apparition not only of Huitzilopochtli but also of Huehueteoti, the fire god.”

“In proper Aztedan ritual, that practice occurs only at the completion of the Five Empty Days between the end of one year and the start of the next,” Michael said, as if objecting not so much to the slaughter as to its taking place outside canonical limits. Sometimes he can be quite exasperating.

Kawaguchi said, “My guess is that they’re going outside the usual pattern to try to bring the Powers to full potency outside their native land.”

Michael said, grudgingly, “Yes, I suppose such a procedure might be efficacious. It remains most irregular, however.” You see what I mean?

“Where are they getting their victims?” I asked; to me, that was more important than whether they were following all their own rules for the sacrificial rites. I thought about the two guys at the Spells ’R’ Us place who’d let me borrow the spellchecker. I thought about them spreadeagled on an altar with their chests hacked open. I wanted to be sick.

“Resistance backed by thaumaturgy of a high order began as soon as our first units responded into the parking lot,”

Kawaguchi answered. “My best guess is that several employees volunteered to become the initial victims to trigger their Powers’ presence here.”

“Again, this seems likely,” Michael agreed.

I nodded, too. Kawaguchi probably had the right of it, despite his curiously bloodless way of describing sacrifices of the bloodiest sort. But constables, who see so much blood in their work, need to ward themselves from the reality of what they do with mild-seeming words. After all, words have power, too.

Then something else occurred to me. “You said those were the initial victims. Have there been more?”

“Unfortunately yes, an unknowable but large number,”

Kawaguchi said. “Because of the strength of the Powers evoked within the Chocolate Weasel building, we have been compelled to draw back our lines several times. The perpetrators have taken advantage of this to raid surrounding businesses and homes. We do not know the precise status of all individuals captured, but some will almost certainly have been employed to nourish Huitzilopochtli and Huehueteod.”

I thought about some poor lunk whose stomach decided to growl while he was flying up Nordhoff. He’d spot the Golden Steeples, pull in, grab himself a burger… and end up with his still-beating heart torn out of his body, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’d have to be a very thoroughgoing Calvinist to find the mark of divine plan in that.

Then I had a worse thought. Much worse. I’d been acting on the assumption that the people from Chocolate Weasel had something to do with kidnapping Judy. If she was hidden away somewhere in the building when the constables flew into the lot…

“God forbid,” I whispered. I tried not to think about it, to tell myself it was impossible, but I knew too well it wasn’t.

Just then, the roof of the building that housed Chocolate Weasel started burning a lot brighter. It wasn’t an ordinary flame; it wasn’t even like the flame from a salamander, which is powered from the Other Side but manifests itself here.

This flame you didn’t just see; you felt it in the place where prayers come from. I close my eyes, but that didn’t help. My soul still felt scorched.

“Huehueteod,” Legate Kawaguchi and Michael said in the same breath. Quietly, Michael added, “One must conclude that the sacrifices within the building have reached a critical mass, allowing him to manifest himself fully in Angels City.”

“I wonder how long we have to wait for Huitzilopochtli,” I said numbly.

“He being a greater Power, more sacrifice will be necessary to bring him onto This Side,” Michael answered.

“Hueheuteod’s manifestation, however, will only speed his translation from the Aztecian gods’ realm on the Other Side to our present location.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said. Michael gave me a puzzled look, then recognized irony and nodded.

The flames on the roof leapt higher. After some delay, thick smoke began to rise as real flames joined the spectral ones emanating from Huehueteod. I wondered how the people inside the Chocolate Weasel building were faring now that it burned around them. Maybe Huehueteod protected them from the flames so they could go on sacrificing. Or maybe they’d just keep doing what they were doing until they burned to death. Every faiUi has its martyrs willing, even eager, to the for the greater glory of the Powers they reverence.

I wished the Aztecians would have shown their piety another way.

Kawaguchi was shouting into a constabulary-model ethemet set. It held two different imps, so he could both send and receive messages. He looked toward the burning building, then to Michael and me. “Are you gentlemen familiar with the Hanese ideogram for the term ‘crisis’?”

“I am,” Michael said; I might have guessed he would be.

He went on, “It combines the ideograms for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity.’”

Kawaguchi looked surprised and maybe a little disappointed that,a pale blond chap had stepped on his lines. But he nodded and said, “Exactly so. And developments here have now reached the crisis stage. If in the next few minutes Huitzilopochtli succeeds in manifesting himself as dioroughlyas Huehueteod has—”

That was the danger, all right. If it happened. Angels City was in more trouble than it had ever known. The only problem was, I didn’t see any skin of the opportunity.

“I have been in touch with the archdiocese of Angels City,” Kawaguchi said. They will do what they can for us.”

“An acute strategic move. Legate,” Michael said, nodding in approval. The Power based at Rome successfully overcame those centered on Tenochtitlan almost five hundred years ago; with luck, it will do so again.”

“Alevai,” I said, a most un-Catholic endorsement of his sentiment. But I didn’t stop worrying, or even slow down.

The Spainish who’d brought Christianity to Aztecia were fanatics, nothing else but; they had to be, or else they never would have tried it. But over the years, the Church has turned fat and lazy and rich and comfortable. The fanatics were in the Chocolate Weasel building now, doing their best to fuel the revival of the old Aztecian gods.

Balance of Powers, I thought, and shivered.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked Kawaguchi. “Exorcists to come and try to drive Huitzilopochtli back to the Other Side before he can fully establish himself here?”

The constable, you will have gathered, was a worn, dour fellow. Now he surprised me with a wall-to-wall smile. The response the cardinal offered me was nowhere near so halfhearted.”

I wished he hadn’t said halfhearted, not when you thought about how Huitzilopochtli and Huehueteod were being summoned into Angels City. But the cardinal, that stiffnecked Erseman—I’d thought he was on the fanatical side when he refused to grant the burned Thomas Brothers monks a dispensation for cosmetic sorcery. Most of the time, I still thought that kind of fanaticism out of place in our century.

But right this minute, it might end up saving all our asses—and maybe our souls, too.

Kawaguchi kept watching the sky. Had Quetzalcoad shown any skin of manifesting himself along with the other Aztecian Powers, I would have tried to get hold of Burbank again to see what the Garuda Bird could do against the Feathered Serpent As things were, though, I didn’t see how the Bird could help.

I wondered what Kawaguchi was waiting for. Whatever it was, I hoped it would be good—and powerful. Something nasty—something else nasty, I mean—was going to happen inside that building any minute now. I could feel it coming, in the same part of the inner me that felt the growing presence of Huehueteod like a bad sunburn.

Suddenly, Kawaguchi pointed. I spotted a flying carpet, way above the usual flyways and ignoring their traffic grid as if it didn’t exist. Maybe it had a constabulary clearance that overcame all the anti-flying invocations that gave people and business their privacy… or maybe it was under the control of a higher Power.

As it got closer, I saw it was a big carpet, a freight hauler, and heavily loaded. It was gold, with a white cross—the colors of the Vatican flag. I knew the Vatican rug would also bear a woven—in legend in white—IN HOC SIGNO VINCES—but it was too high and too far away for me to be able to read that.

It was heading straight over the Chocolate Weasel building. Huehueteod’s magical fire flamed up to meet it. I was afraid the flames would bum down the carpet and everybody on it. But one thing I give the Catholic Church—it has a saintly hierarchy in charge of looking out for more different things than all the bureaucrats in D.StC. put together. St. Florian watches specially over those who must contend with fire. I have no idea whether his power would have been enough to overcome Huehueteod down inside the Chocolate Weasel building, but it sufficed to keep the god from crisping the carpets. One of the monks riding the carpet (I could see his bare pate shining in the late afternoon sun) tipped a big earthenware urn down onto the roof of the Chocolate Weasel building, then another and another and another, mediodical as if he were on a carpet bombing run over Alemania in the Second Sorcerous War.

Those ums and whatever they held were heavy—I could hear them smashing on and maybe through the roof from several blocks away. And whatever was in them was spectacularly efficacious. The constant heat on my soul that radiated from Huehueteod went away, as if my spirit had suddenly dived into a clear stream. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He refresheth my said ran through my head.

I turned to Kawaguchi and Michael Manstein and asked,

“What are they dropping on them?”

They both stared at me as if I were an idiot. Then Michael said, “That’s right, you are Jewish,” as if reminding himself.

Very gently, he went on, “It’s holy water, David.”

“Oh.” All right, I was an idiot. In fact, I was doubly an idiot not only was the stuff thaumaturgically potent in and of itself, it was also perfect symbolically—what better to oppose fire of any sort than its opposite among the elements?

Once Chocolate Weasel took all the punishment it had urned from the carpet, Kawaguchi blew a long, shrill blast on a whistle. SWAT teams, Yolanda’s hazmat crew, and the EPA hazmat outfit swarmed toward the Chocolate Weasel building. Ordinary constables, the guys with mostly passive sorcerous gear and merely physical weapons—the grunts—followed in their wake.

“They were thrown back twice before,” Kawaguchi said, more to himself than to me or Michael. This time—”

This time they moved forward. The SWAT team wizards carried holy water sprinklers like the ones the Loki guards in Burbank packed. Those hadn’t been enough to protect them against the growing might of the Aztedan Powers before.

Now those Powers had been reduced by bombardment from On High, so to speak. And now the SWAT teams advanced cautiously toward the parking lot in front of Chocolate Weasel, then toward the building itself.

I got distracted at that point: the archdiocesan carpet floated down and landed just a few feet from me. “Good afternoon, Inspector Fisher,” one of the monks on it said. “I wondered it I might see you here today. Somehow it seems fitting.”

“Brother Vahan!” I exclaimed. “It certainly does.” I trotted over to shake his hand. “Were you the bombardier up there?”

“I was indeed,” he said with a sober nod. “God moves in a mysterious way. His wonders to perform. Not scriptural, but in this case accurate.”

A curate? No, you’re an abbot, my mind gibbered. I forced myself back to the here-and-now: “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I was in the cardinal’s office, beseeching him on bended knee to reconsider his prohibition against my brethren’s use of cosmetic sorcery to restore their appearance, when Legate Kawaguchi’s communication reached His Eminence. He thought me an appropriate agent for the task requested, and I was pleased to obey him in this instance.”

Brother Vahan was stubborn to the point of being bullheaded, if he kept after the cardinal to change his mind once he’d decided to do something. You don’t do that if you’re in monastic orders; you are, after all, sworn to obedience along with poverty and chastity. My guess was that Brother Vahan wouldn’t have said a word about the cardinal’s decision had it affected him. For his monks, though, he’d argue—a good man.

And I could see why the cardinal would have wanted him on that carpet: who would have more strength of purpose going up against the probable destroyers of the Thomas Brothers monastery than its abbot?

“As to the other, I gather His Eminence told you no again?” I said.

His thick eyebrows—virtually the only hair he had on his head—twitched upwards. “From what do you infer that?”

“You said you were happy to obey him ‘in this instance,’ ”

I answered. “I took it to mean you weren’t happy about the other.”

“Most Jesuitically reasoned.” His thin smile said he was teasing me. It went away too soon. “I’d rather he had refused me this and granted the other. Many could have done what I just did, but who except me will speak for my brethren?”

I didn’t know what to feel: pleased with myself for understanding the way Brother Vahan’s mind worked, angry at the cardinal for sticking to his refusal like a pricldeburr, or pleased His Eminence had the gumption to commit his best to a crisis. Those last two were inextricably mixed, which only complicated things more.

Faint across a couple of hundred yards came shouts from the constables and then pops of pistol fire. Normally pistols are nothing to scorn—they’re about the most dangerous mechanical hand weapons around. After everything I’d been through that day, those pops and the clouds of gunpowder smoke I saw rising from the parking lot seemed about as consequential as the firecrackers whose cousins they were.

Kawaguchi pulled out his own pistol, cocked it, checked his flint, and then trotted down Nordhoff toward Chocolate Weasel. Michael and I started after him, but a constable about the size of both of us put together shook his head and rumbled, “That wouldn’t be smart.” He stepped in front of us and spread his arms wide to make sure we listened to him.

Since he was doing a pretty good impression of the Great Hanese Wall, I stopped. So did Michael.

That meant we had to wait. Waiting is harder than doing.

When you’re doing, you don’t have time to worry. When you’re waiting, if you’re anything like me, you think about all the things that could go wrong. I’d waited for the Garuda Bird. I’d waited for the carpet from the archdiocese. I was waiting again. I was sick of it. I waited anyhow, peering down Nordhoff to see what I could see.

Not too much, not for a while. Then I heard more pistol pops, and then people started coming back up the street. Some of them were constables, some prisoners with their hands in the air. As they got closer, I saw that several sets of those upraised hands were red, with drips running down toward the elbows. I heard someone make a sick, gulping noise, and realized a moment later it was me.

One of the SWAT team wizards was carrying an obsidian knife. Another one walking beside him kept spraying it with holy water. I gulped again. That knife, I had no doubt, belonged in the Devonshire dump. If ever spells were guaranteed harmful to the environment, they’re the ones that go along with human sacrifice.

I recognized one of the prisoners—Jorge Vasquez. He saw me at about the same time I saw him. I thought about making some crack about his getting shut down for EPA violations along with everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Even captured, he looked too smart and tough for me to want to twit him.

Behind him came Legate Kawaguchi, who was busy loading another charge of powder and ball into his pistol as he walked along. Brother Vahan called to him: “Do any within that building require my services?”

Kawaguchi finished ramming home the ball before he looked up. “For last rites and such, you mean. Brother?” He shook his head. “Just corpses in there.”

“Martyrs,’’ Brother Vahan said, his voice grim. Their reward shall surely come in heaven.”

I wondered about that was somebody who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time a martyr in the same sense as a person who deliberately invited death for the sake of his faith? I’m neither Catholic nor theologian, so I can’t tell you what Brother Vahan should have been thinking by the standards of his church.

That was the least of my worries, anyhow. I lunged for Kawaguchi in a way that almost made him level his newly loaded pistol at me. “Did you—” I choked on fear and had to force myself to go on: “Did you find Judy in there?”

Ib my relief, he slipped the pistol back into its holster.

Then he said, “Inspector Fisher, I neither searched extensively through Ae Chocolate Weasel building nor closely examined the bodies of the victims around the altar.” Something else to be decontaminated, I thought. Kawaguchi was continuing, “So long as you understand these limitations, sir, I can state to you that I did not see a corpse matching the description of your fiancee in that—that abbatoir.”

Kawaguchi talks like an upper-level constable: as if every word he says is going to show up in a written report or as courtroom testimony Real Soon Now. For him to pick a word like abbatoir… all at once I was glad the very large fellow in the blue uniform hadn’t let me follow the legate.

I was also gladder than I could say that—subject to his careful limitations—he hadn’t found Judy. If I chose to believe that she wasn’t there because he hadn’t found her, can you blame me?

Michael said, “Legate, can we lend any further assistance?” We hadn’t lent Kawaguchi much assistance before that I’d noticed. Michael is usually too precise to make a slip like that, but after everything that had happened during the day, can you blame him, either?

Thank you, sir, but I think not,” Kawaguchi answered.

He turned to me. “Inspector Fisher, you did your best to warn me of the magnitude of this threat I must concede that at the time of our telephone conversation I did not have a full appreciation of it. My apologies for that error.”

“Who would have believed this?” I said. My guess was that Kawaguchi still didn’t have a full appreciation of what he’d been part of today. Put what happened here together with our desperate struggles back at the Devonshire dump, let both containment efforts fail, and Angels City goes light off the map. And who could say what was happening elsewhere in the Confederation, or would have followed Azbedan success here? Maybe we’d put a spike in the wheel of the Third Sorcerous War.

“David, I shall take you back to Westwood now,” Michael said in a tone that brooked no argument. I wasn’t in a mood to argue, anyhow; now that the terror which had kept me hopping most of the day was easing, I could feel myself subsiding into something with all the crisp decisiveness of a bowl of tapioca pudding. More boneless with every step, I walked over to his carpet. We headed down toward the Venture Freeway. I told myself I never wanted to see St Ferdinand’s Valley again.

When we got to the Confederal Building, Michael got off the carpet and headed for the entrance instead of going home. He gave me a bemused look when I fell into step beside him. “I may as well keep working,” I told him. “The more I have to do, the less time I have to worry.”

“Ah,” he said, “The anodyne of distraction,” Which is what I’d just said, but I hadn’t managed to boil it into four words.

If I didn’t have anything urgent on my desk, I figured I’d write up what I’d been through today. The EPA, like any government agency, thrives on documentation, and I must confess that I’ve been indoctrinated to the point where I sometimes don’t believe something is real until it’s committed to parchment On the other hand, if Moses had had to fill out all the EPA forms parting the Red Sea would have required, the Bible would be written in Egyptian.

Only one message waited for me, from a woman named Susan Kuznetsov. I frowned, trying to remember who she was. Then name and face matched: the no-nonsense gal from the Barony’s Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health who’d reported little Jesus Cordero’s apsychia to me.

I asked my watch the time: going on six. Mistress Kuznetsov had impressed me as the hard-working type, so I called her back. Sure enough, I got her. “Inspector Fisher!” she said, I thought she sounded pleased. “I’d expected you’d be gone for the day.” °I just got back in,” I told her. “What can I do for you?”

“Inspector, the Cordero family has been contacted by a consortium styling itself Slow Jinn Fizz,” she answered. “This consortium mentioned the possibility of instilling a soul into the infant, something they had been given to believe was impossible. Unlike too many poor and poorly educated families, the Corderos called me for advice instead of allowing themselves to be taken in by probable charlatans. My preliminary investigation, however, indicates that Slow Jinn Fizz may perhaps be able to deliver on some of its claims. I called you to learn whether it’s yet come under EPA scrutiny yet”

“As a matter of fact, I was out there myself, right around the time Jesus Cordero was being born,” I said.

When I didn’t go on right away, Susan Kuznetsov said,

“And? Are they flimflam men like so many outfits with impressive claims?”

“You know, I don’t really think so,” I answered. “I think they’re right on the edge of making psychic synthesis possible, and I think the procedure may well have important benefits for apsychic patients and give them at least a chance at life after death.”

“Really?” She sounded surprised. “You recommend the procedure, then?”

“I didn’t say that,” I told her, and then explained: “I don’t knew where or from whom the pieces of soul the jinni are synthesizing come from, or whether Slow Jinn Fizz is solving one problem now at the expense of widespread psychic depletion years, maybe even generations, down the line. It’s certainly a tempting technology, but you know who the Tempter is.”

“I certainty do,” she said. “So you’d suggest the Corderos stay away from it?”

If she’d asked me that the day before, I would have said yes. Thanks to modem medicine, Jesus Cordero had every chance of living to a ripe old age, and psychic synthesis would be investigated and refined until people understood all the gremlins in the process. That would be the right time for him to have a soul implanted.

But after what had happened at the Devonshire dump and then at Chocolate Weasel, I felt less easy about that waitfor—developments approach. Just because the odds said you were likely to lead a long life didn’t mean you would: a big piece of Angels City had almost gone up in flames. If you were an apsychic, could you afford to take a chance like that?

Would you want to, knowing extinction awaited?

“Mistress Kuznetsov,” I said carefully, “the EPA hasn’t taken a position on Slow Jinn Fizz and what it does. Before we do, we’ll have to weigh short-term benefits against lowergrade long-term risks. My guess is that the technology won’t be allowed out of the experimental stage and into general use for many years.”

“I know that much already,” she answered. “The people from Slow Jinn Fizz said as much to the Corderos, and I give them credit for it. What I’m realty asking is, what would you do if that were your kid?”

“If it’s my kid, I worry about saving him first and everything else later,” I said. “Isn’t that what being a parents all about? But just because that’s what I’d do doesn’t mean it makes good public policy.”

“That’s fair,” she said. “Let me put it a different way, then; would the EPA have kittens if the Slow Jinn Fizz experimental protocol expanded to include Jesus Cordero?”

“Right now, the answer to that is no,” I said. Too much else—bigger stuff—was going on for us to worry about Slow Jinn Fizz right now, but I didn’t tell that to Susan Kuznetsov.

I hoped that one day (one day soon. God willing) things would slow down to the point where we’d be able to worry about the problems synthesized souls present No doubt they were important but they weren’t world-threatening, so for now they’d just have to wait And besides, I told myself, how much environmental damage on the Other Side would manufacturing a soul for one little boy cause? Not much, surety, and it would do so much good for Jesus Cordero.

You know, of course, which road is paved with good intentions. So do I. So does the EPA. The real question wasn’t what would happen when one apsychic kid got a soul. The real question was what would happen when jinnetic engineering and jinn-splicing techniques began stirring up the psychic material of the Other Side on a large scale, I didn’t have any answers for that. Neither did anybody else. The EPAs job was to make sure we found those answers before exploiting those techniques got us into trouble, not afterwards. But to give Jesus Cordero, a series of one case, a chance at life after life—why not?

Mistress Kuznetsov said, “Inspector, I want to thank you for being flexible; you’re going to make the Corderos very happy, and as for Jesus—he won’t understand what’s happened for a long time yet, but when he does, he’ll be eternally grateful.”

“I hope so, anyway,” I said. “The technique is experimental and, from what Ramzan Durani told me, it hasn’t yet undergone the test of mortality. But when you’re in that position, you have to grasp at straws, don’t you?”

“That’s my view as a public health officer, certainly,” Susan Kuznetsov said. “I wasn’t sure how the EPA would view the matter.”

“If you’d said you wanted to add a thousand people to the experimental list I would have given you a different answer.

But one little boy, and one I’ve met—”

“Yes, the law of contagion does remind us of how important personal contact is, doesn’t it? I was just afraid you’d be working against contagion, as I often have to do, rather than allowing it full scope.”

“Not this time,” I answered quietly. Letting Jesus Cordero have a chance to beat apsychia wasn’t as big a thing as thwarting the Chumash Powers or keeping Huitzilopochtli and his fiery friend from establishing themselves in Angels City, but it felt just as good. Maybe better—as Susan Kuznetsov had said, this was personal.

I only wished the rest of my personal worries were doing as well. No word of Judy, none at all.

To keep myself from thinking of that and what it might mean, I plunged into the environmental impact report on what importing leprechauns into Angels City was liable to do to the local thecology. I made more progress in an hour and a half than I had in the past two weeks. No wonder; now I could make my prognostications secure in the knowledge that the Wee Folk weren’t going to have any adverse effect on the Chumash Powers. I’d taken care of that myself, in spades.

Eventually, I supposed, I’d get around to feeling bad about siccmgthe Garuda Bird on them. An EPA man, after all, is supposed to protect endangered Powers, not exterminate them. From their point of view, I couldn’t really blame the Lizard and the Great (but not Great enough) Eagle and the rest for wanting to overturn the balance of Powers and twist things back to the way they’d been before the first Europeans touched the New World.

But, along with a couple of hundred million other people, I live in the world that’s sprung from the European expansion. And, as Michael Manstein said, we’d done more and better with this land than its original inhabitants would have in the same length of time. So while I figured I’d eventually get round to feeling bad, it wouldn’t be any time real soon.

Speaking of Michael, he poked his head into my office about then. “I’m going home now,” he said. “Perhaps you should do the same.” He clearly wasn’t used to me working | longer hours than he did. He was right. I went home. I ate something (don’t ask me what), then went to bed. Worries or no, I slept almost as soundly as if I’d been in Ephesus: the aftermath of nearly dying a couple of times during the course of a day. If my alarm dock hadn’t screamed me awake, I might be snoring yet No sooner had I got to the office than the phone started yelling. I came this close to knocking over my cup of cafeteria coffee grabbing for it. “Environmental Perfection Agency, David Fisher.”

“Inspector Fisher, this is Legate Shtro Kawaguchi, Angels City Constabulary Department.” Kawaguchi spoke as if he were introducing himself for the first time. “Inspector Fisher, interrogation of the suspect Jorge Vasquez has led us to your fiancee, Mistress Judith Ather.”

I let out a whoop that rattled my windows. “That’s wonderful, Legate! When can I see her?” He didn’t answer right away. My joy crashed into dread. “Is she—all right?”

“Unfortunately, Inspector Fisher, I must tell you she is not,” Kawaguchi answered. “You will perhaps remember that an Aztecian Power, variously called the Cracker, the Page, and the One Called Night, was involved in the abduction of Mistress Ather.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“From what our forensics man has to say. Inspector, it appears that the One Called Night, to use the name with which you appear to be most familiar, has carried Mistress Adier’s spirit into the realm known as the Nine Beyonds. We have recovered her body. She appears to be physically unharmed; she will eat or drink if food or water is placed in her mouth.

But as for anything more than that… I’m very sorry, Inspector Fisher, but at present it is just not there.”

“What do we do, then?” I asked hoarsely.

“Our preliminaiy and tentative thaumaturgic efforts to restore her to herself have failed; she does not seem as responsive to certain rituals as we had hoped.” Kawaguchi paused. “I believe you are Jewish. Is Mistress Ather, also?”

“Yes.”

That may account for part of it, then. Most rituals designed to counter the Craclder assume a Catholic victim, and would be less efficacious in rescuing one from a different faith. While we continue to do our utmost, I suggest you also pursue every flyway that occurs to you. Otherwise, Inspector, I can offer no guarantee that Mistress Adler’s body and spirit will ever be reunited.”