The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

III

When I got to work Monday morning, somebody ambushed me in the parking lot. No, it’s not what you think; this fellow standing outside the entrance to my building called out, “Are you EPA Inspector David Fisher?” When I said I was, he came trotting over to me, stuck a glass globe in front of my face, and said, “I’m Joe Forbes, Angels City Ethernet Station One News. I want to ask you some questions about the tragic Thomas Brothers fire Friday night.”

“Go ahead,” I said, peering cross-eyed into the globe. The imp inside had enormous ears, mournful little eyes, and a mouth that stretched all the way across its face. I’d never seen an ethernet imp before.

Forbes shifted the globe back toward his own mouth. “How are you involved with the Thomas Brothers, and why were you called to the scene of the fire shortly after it occurred?” He held the globe out to me again.

“I’d been using some Thomas Brothers records in an ongoing EPA investigation, and the constabulary were trying to find out if there was any connection between that investigation and the fire,” I answered, truthful enough but not what you’d call forthcoming.

As I talked, I watched the little imp in the globe. Its ears twitched with every syllable I spoke. Its mouth moved in a rather exaggerated parody of human speech. I’ve never had any reason to learn to read lips, but I didn’t need long to notice it was echoing what I said, about half a beat behind me. It was transmitting my words back to Ethernet Station One, either to one of its own clones that would relay what I said on to the master broadcasting imp so all the master’s clones in people’s sets could hear, or else to a Listener that would speak them in front of the master imp at a time more convenient for the station crew.

Joe Forbes took back the globe. “Do I understand correctly, Inspector Fisher, that an immaterial witness survived the fire and may yet provide important information about the case?”

I’d talked to Kawaguchi the afternoon before. From what he said, Erasmus was probably going to pull through its ordeal, though the access spirit wouldn’t be in any shape to answer questions for a while yet. Actually, Erasmus didn’t have any shape at all, but you know what I mean.

I started to tell Forbes as much, but had second thoughts. I didn’t know how many people listened to the ethernet news, but could I afford to assume none of the people who’d burned the monastery did? And if those bastards were listening, could I afford to tell them they’d botched the job on Erasmus? They might try again, and they might do it right the next time.

All this went through my mind in about the time it took to finish exhaling, inhale, and begin to talk. If Forbes had caught me on an inhale, I must have just started talking before I stopped to think. As it was, I said, “I really think that’s something you ought to take up with the constabulary. They know more about it than I do.”

Forbes looked unhappy; I guess he saw from my answers that he wasn’t going to get any exciting revelations from me. He asked a couple of innocuous questions, then tried once more with something substantive: “What sort of Thomas Brothers records were you using in your own investigation?”

Maybe he’d hoped I’d not notice that one was charmed, and would blab away. But I didn’t; I answered, “I’d rather not comment, since the investigation is still under way.” The fellow’s laziness irked me as much as anything else. If he’d known This Side from the Other, he could have gone down to the Criminal and Magical Courts Building and found the parchments I’d filed to get my search warrant. But no—he wanted me to do his work for him.

Well, I had enough work of my own. I said as much: “I’m sorry, Mr. Forbes, but I really have to get upstairs now.”

“Thank you, Inspector David Fisher of the Environmental Perfection Agency,” Forbes boomed, just as if I’d told him something worth knowing. I pitied his poor imp. It didn’t look very bright, but I wouldn’t have been very bright after listening to and transmitting the mind-numbing stream of chatter Forbes turned out.

I’d hoped to start getting some serious work done on the sorcerous contamination at the Devonshire dump itself, but I hadn’t taken into account its being Monday morning. Monday morning under Beatrice Cartwright is a ritual that, while not as old as the Mass or synagogue Sabbath rite, is every bit as sacred: the staff meeting.

Monday morning, everybody in the department sits around for two, two and a half hours listening to what everybody else is doing. About ninety-nine times out of a hundred, what everybody else is doing is, to put it mildly, irrelevant to what you’re doing yourself, and you could better spend the time actually doing whatever it is you can’t do while you’re sitting around in staff meeting (thank God we’re an Agency, not a Department, the way some people back in D.St.C. want; if we were a Department we’d probably meet twice a week, not just once).

I mean, in an abstract kind of way I was glad to hear that Phyllis Kaminsky was working closely with the constabulary to make several Angels City streets less congenial to succubi; vice of that sort does need to be combated. But even if her report did earn Phyllis a pat on the fanny from Bea, I didn’t need to know all the ichor-filled details.

And I didn’t need to know about the aerial garlic spraying Jose Franco was working on with some of the horticulture people at UCAC to try to slow down the little vegetable vampires that have played such havoc with the local citrus crop over the past few years, ever since they got here in a cargo of imperfectly exorcised lemons from Greece. It wasn’t that I had anything against Jose or his project; I don’t want to have to pay three crowns for an orange any more than anyone else. But just the same, Medvamps aren’t my biggest worry in the world.

For that matter, even though people looked more interested than usual (which isn’t saying much) when I talked about the Devonshire mess, it didn’t have a whole lot to do with their lives or their jobs. But Bea likes to soak it all in, so every Monday morning we meet. World without end, amen, or so it seems in the middle of a staff meeting, anyhow.

At last we were released; I felt as if I were upward bound from purgatory (no, not a Jewish concept, but useful all the same). I staggered off to the jakes with the staff graphic artist. “At least here I know what I’m doing,” I said as we stood side by side. Mart°n laughed and nodded; he’s about as fond of staff meetings as I am.

Having accomplished at least one worthwhile thing that morning, I went back to my desk to see if I could make it two. I wished the thaumatech had been able to catch more about the incendiary sorcery that had torched the Thomas Brothers monastery; it might have given me a better notion of which toxic spell components to be alert for, and from that which consortia to suspect. But if magic were just wishing, life would be too simple to stand.

I made myself a new chart, an expanded version of the one I’d done on my kitchen table the week before. This one broke things out not just by consortium and type of business, but also by specific type of contaminant. In lieu of turning the chart three-dimensional, I assembled a neat battle line of quills, each in an inkstand of a different color (to be sure I had enough, I’d borrowed some from Mart°n’s immense supply).

Just when I was ready to buckle down to some serious work, the phone yammered at me. I didn’t say what I thought, but I thought it real loud. That, of course, didn’t make the phone shut up. I spoke to the mouthpiece imp: “David Fisher, Environmental Perfection Agency.”

“Good morning, Dave—Tony Sudakis calling.”

“Good morning, Tony. How are you?” Half my annoyance went away; at least the call had something to do with the case I was working on. “What’s up?”

“I heard about the Thomas Brothers fire over the weekend. Terrible thing. Those are good people there. We need more like ’em.”

“That’s certainly true. But there are less like them now—eleven less, I understand.”

“Yeah, I know.” A pause. I was getting used to pauses from people I talked with, which is not to say I liked them any too well. Once Tony was finally done with his, he went on, “I just want you to know that the Devonshire Land Management Consortium didn’t have thing one to do with this fire.”

I chewed on that, found I didn’t care for the taste. As politely as I could, I pointed out, “Tony, you can speak for yourself, but how can you go about declaring your whole consortium innocent?” Oh, he could declare it, sure, but how was he supposed to make me believe it?

He surprised me—he found a way that sort of worked: “The consortium management staff is contributing twenty-five thousand crowns to the constabulary’s reward fund for the capture and conviction of whoever fired the place.”

“Interesting,” I said, and it was; interesting enough to write down, in fact. Figuring out exactly what it meant wasn’t so simple. The most obvious interpretation was that management staff was innocent. The other possibility was that somebody up there was guilty as sin and had found a particularly devious way to cover his—or even her—tracks. In the absence of further data, I just had to note it and go on.

Sudakis was dealing with my pause now. Into it, he said, “You don’t take anything on trust, do you, Dave?”

“I trust in God,” I answered. “He has a more reliable record than most of the people I know.”

“Life must be easy if you can honestly give all your allegiance to one omniscient, omnipotent deity,” Sudakis said. “But I didn’t call you up to talk theology with you. I wouldn’t mind doing that over some beer one day, but now now. I’ve said what I needed to say, and I’ve got the usual swamp full of alligators here.”

He meant that more literally than most people who use the line—and his particular swamp held worse things than mere alligators. We said our goodbyes and hung up. I looked at the phone for a few seconds afterwards. Maybe Sudakis never had reconciled himself to Christianity, or to monotheism generally. That last comment of his made me wonder. Well, the Confederacy is a free country. He could believe whatever he wanted, as long as the didn’t go burning down monasteries to make his point.

“Interesting,” I said again, to nobody in particular, and started squeezing the undines out of my own swamp.

I’d decided to note the contaminants from the smaller companies first, before I tackled the light-and-magic outfits and the aerospace consortia. If one of the little guys was dumping something spectacularly illicit, my hopes was that it would stand out like a mullah in the College of Cardinals.

I was amazed to see just how much nasty stuff some of the little guys messed around with. Take the outfit called Slow Jinn Fizz, for instance. Heaven help me, they were using things there I wouldn’t have expected to find coming out of Loki’s Cobold Works. I mean, they were stowing stove-in Solomon’s Seals at Devonshire. You think for a while about the thaumaturgical pressure it takes to deform one of those things, and the likely effect on the surrounding countryside when you try it, and you’ll have some idea why I noted that in red.

Chocolate Weasel had just as many nastinesses, things EPA men in most of the Confederation wouldn’t see once in a thousand years—Aztecian stuff, almost exclusively. My stomach did a slow flipflop when I saw one neatly written item on their dumping manifesto: flayed human skin substitute.

As I think I’ve said before, human sacrifice is—officially—banned within the Aztecian Empire these days. But it used to be a central part of the Aztecian cult. One whole twenty-day month of their old calendar, Tlaxipeualiztli (say it three times fast—I dare you), means “boning of the men,” and almost all of it had parades where priests capered around wearing the skins of sacrificial victims.

Obviously, death magic is some of the strongest sorcery there is. But modern technology has eliminated the need that was formerly perceived for it. Proper application of the law of similarity lets the Aztecians produce by less bloodthirsty means the same effect they used to get from ripping the hearts out of victims. But it’s still a daunting item to find on a form.

There are also rumors that some of the flayed skin substitute isn’t created through the law of similarity, but rather through the law of contagion. Yes, I’m afraid that means what you think it does: the substitute material gains its effectiveness by touching a real flayed human skin, one hidden away since the days when such sacrifices were not only legal but required.

The Aztecians spend a lot of time denying those rumors. The EPA spends a lot of time checking them—we don’t want that kind of sorcery getting loose in this country. Nothing’s ever been proved. But the rumors persist.

I noted that one down in red ink, too. Chocolate Weasel, I thought, would get a visit from some inspector soon; if not me, then someone else. Properly manufactured flayed skin substitute isn’t illegal, but it is one of the things we like to keep an eye on.

None of the other little firms that used the Devonshire dump put anything quite so ferocious in it, though I did raise an eyebrow to see how many roosters’ eggshells Essence Extractions was getting rid of. “Cockatrices,” I said out loud. The little creatures are dangerous and always have been ferociously expensive because they’re so rare, but I wondered if these folks hadn’t found a way to turn them out in quantity.

I looked thoughtfully at that manifest before I went on to the next one. If Essence Extractions had found a way to produce lots of cockatrices, they were sitting on the goose that laid the golden egg. Pardon the botched ornithological metaphor, but it’s true. And the dumping records gave some good clues on how they were going about it. Tony Sudakis hadn’t worried about confidentiality for nothing.

Seeing the folks who are trying to thwart you as people just like yourself rather than The Enemy (in Satanic red sometimes, not just capital letters) isn’t easy. You’re better off dealing with them that way, though, because it’s surprising (or revolting, depending on how you look it at) how often they have a point.

I knocked off at five, slid down to the ground. Pickets were marking on the sidewalk off to one side of the parking lot. Pickets marched outside the Confederal Building about three days out of five, touting one cause or another (sometimes the people touting one cause run into those touting another, and then there can be trouble).

These particular pickets weren’t just marching; they were chanting, too: “Hey, hey, waddaya say, let’s throw out the EPA!”

That flicked my curiosity. I wandered over to see what they were upset about. Their signs spoke for themselves: SAVE OUR STRAWBERRIES! was one. Another said, STOP AERIAL GARLIC SPRAYING! And a third—BETTER MEDVAMPS THAN TURNING MY BACK YARD INTO AN ITALIAN DELI! I liked that, actually, even if I couldn’t agree with it.

Sometimes protesters will listen to reason. I decided to give it a try, remarking to a fellow with a blond beard, “You know, if we let Medvamps establish themselves here, they’ll wipe out a good part of our agriculture. Look what they’ve done to the Sandwich Islands.”

“I don’t care about the Sandwich Islands, pal,” Blond Beard answered. “All I know is that as far as I’m concerned, garlic stinks. I have to smell it every hour of the day and night, and I think it’s making me sick. And it’s gotten into my flying carpet, and the sylphs don’t like it any better than I do. I may have to trade the stupid thing in, and with the performance shot, I won’t get near what it’s worth. So there!”

“But—” I started. Blond Beard had stopped paying attention to me; he was chanting again. I gave up and headed back to my own carpet. Reminding him that all the people in the spraying area had been warned to cover up their carpets or bring them indoors wouldn’t have changed his mind, it would just have made him angrier than he was already. Some people might as well be zombies, for all the constructive use they get out of their free will.

As I started to fly toward the freeway, I noticed a familiar-looking man holding a glass glove up to the mouth of one of the picketers. It was Joe Forbes of Ethernet Station One. “Thanks a lot, Joe,” I muttered. Thousands of people, I had no doubt, would hear about the imaginary evils of garlic spraying just as if they were thaumaturgically established.

I hoped he’d have the integrity to interview an EPA sorcerer or somebody from the citrus business, too. But even if he did, the views of people who didn’t know anything except what they didn’t like would in effect get equal weight with those of folks who’d been studying the problem since it first bared its teeth. I sighed. What could I do about it? People out picketing and raising a ruckus were “news,” regardless of whether they had any facts to back them up.

The freeway was jammed, too, which didn’t do anything to improve my mood by the time I finally got home.

Next morning, I started adding to my chart some of the toxic spell components the aerospace firms dumped at Devonshire. I hadn’t been at it for more than a couple of hours before I saw I’d have to talk with my boss.

Bea was on the phone when I went up to her office. Sometimes I think she’s had that imp permanently implanted in her ear. As soon as she laid down the handset, I scurried in. Before the phone could go off again, I tossed my still only half-done chart on the desk in front of her.

Her eyes followed it down. When she saw some of the things I’d written in red, she gave a real live theatrical gasp. “Good God in heaven, are we actually storing these things inside a populated area?” she exclaimed, raising a shocked hand. Her gaze lingered on the flayed human skin substitute. Even though it’s legal, it’s appalling to contemplate.

“Looks that way,” I said, “and this isn’t all of it, by any means. I wanted to ask you to let me do some afternoon fieldwork this week, maybe talk to some of the people who use this stuff and see if there aren’t substitutes. Or even substitutes for the substitutes,” I added, wondering if a second-generation ersatz skin would be magically efficacious.

“Go ahead,” she told me without hesitation; she really is a pretty good boss. “Do one other thing first, though: call Mr. Charles Kelly and let him know what sort of mess he’s landed this office in. I’ve already had words with him about that, but you can emphasize it, too. If we have to holler for help from the District of St. Columba, I don’t want him to be able to say he wasn’t warned in advance.”

Burning brimstone makes you think of demons. Bureaucratic finagling has a smell of its own, too. I went back to my desk and made the call. When I got through to Charlie, he sounded jovially wary, a combination implausible only to someone who’s never taken his crowns from the government. “What can I do for you this afternoon, David?” he boomed. I’d expected him not to bother remembering it was still morning for me, so I wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t.

“You’ve hear about what happened out here over the weekend?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question.

For a second, though, he sounded as if it was. “Only news out of Angels City I’ve heard is that monastery fire.” He hesitated, just for a second. I could almost see the ball of St. Elmo’s fire pop into being above his head. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that’s connected to the Devonshire case?”

“I sure am, Charlie. Eleven monks dead of arson, in case all the news didn’t make it back East.” Without giving him a chance to rally, I pushed ahead: “My boss Bea says she’s already spoken to you about the way I got this case. It’s bigger than you thought, it’s bigger than I imagined when you dropped it on me. You should be aware that we may have to have help from D.St.C.”

“If you do, you’ll get it. Eleven monks. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Charlie being of the Erse persuasion, I thought that would hit him where he lived.

“Something else,” I said: “Don’t you think it’s time to level with me and stop playing coy about the ‘bird’ who tipped you to the trouble at the Devonshire dump?”

This time, Kelly’s pause lasted a lot longer than a second. Even through two phone imps and three thousand miles of ether, he sounded unhappy as he answered, “Dave, I’d tell you if I could, but I swear I can’t. I’m sorry.”

I blew exasperated air out my nose, hard enough to stir the hairs of my mustache against my upper lip. “Okay, Charlie. Play a game with me, then. Is your feathered friend from groups involved with any of these…?” I named the Garuda Bird, Quetzalcoatl, the Peacock Throne, (hesitantly) the Peacock Angel, and, as an afterthought, the phoenix.

More silence from Charlie. Finally he said, “Yeah, the bird’s in there somewhere. Believe me, I’m taking a chance telling you even that much. So long.” And he was gone, faster than a Medvamp out of a Korean restaurant.

Nice to know one of the ideas Judy and I had come up with was the right one. It would have been nicer still, of course, to know which. I thought about what he’d said and, as well as I could tell over the phone, how he’d said it. Maybe politics wasn’t what sealed his lips. Maybe it was fear. That was the first time I started getting a little bit fearful myself.

Well, onward—no help for it unless I felt like quitting. And if I did that, not only would I not want to look at myself in the mirror but Judy would drop me like something just up from the Pit. So off I went to Slow Jinn Fizz, the closest outfit I’d yet found that had a red-letter contaminant on my chart.

The carpet ride up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley took about twenty minutes. Slow Jinn Fizz was on the chief business flyway of the Valley, Venture Boulevard. The address itself was enough to tell me the outfit had money. The building argued for that, too: an elegant gray stucco structure with SLOW JINN FIZZ in neat gold letters on the plate glass window by the entry door. Underneath, in smaller (but just as gold) letters, it added, A JINNETIC ENGINEERING CONSORTIUM.

“Aha!” I said before I walked in. The combination of the name and the Solomon’s Seals discarded at the Devonshire dump had made me figure jinnetic engineering was what Slow Jinn Fizz was all about. Nice to be right every so often.

A dazzling blond receptionist, as expensive-looking and probably as carefully chosen as the rest of the decor, gave me a dazzling white smile. “How may I help you, sir?” she asked in the kind of voice that suggested she’d do anything I asked.

I reminded myself I was engaged. The smile congealed on her face when I pulled out my EPA sigil. “I’d like to see Mr. Durani, please, in connection with some of your firm’s recent dumping activities.”

“One moment, Inspector, uh, Fishman,” she said, and disappeared into the back of the building.

Ramzan Durani came out a couple of minutes later, in person. He was a plump, medium-brown fellow in his mid-forties who wore a white lab robe of Persian cut and an equally white turban. “Inspector Fisher, yes?” he said as we shook hands. I gave him a point for getting it right even though his receptionist hadn’t. “We spoke on the phone last week, did we not?”

“That’s right, sir. In a way, this is about the same matter.”

“I thought it might be.” He didn’t seem as volatile in person as he had over the phone, for which I was duly grateful. “Please come with me to my office, and we shall discuss this further.”

The only thing I’ll say about his office is that it made Tony Sudakis’ look like a slum, and Tony’s beats mine seven ways from Sunday. He poured mint tea, gave me sweetmeats, sat me down, and generally fussed over me until I felt as if I’d gone back to my mom’s for Rosh Hashanah dinner. I don’t care for the feeling at my mom’s and I didn’t care for it here, either.

I answered it with bluntness: “Devonshire dump is under investigation for leaking toxic spell components into the surrounding environment. We haven’t learned exactly what’s getting out yet, but I can give you an idea of how serious the problem is by telling you there have been three cases of apsychia in the area over the past year alone.”

“And you think we are to blame? Slow Jinn Fizz?” Durani bounced—no, flew—out of his chair. His volatility was still there, all right; I just hadn’t conjured it up in polite greetings. “No, no, ten thousand times no!” he cried. I thought he was going to rend his garment. He didn’t; he contented himself with grabbing his turban in both hands, as if he feared his head would fall off. “How can you accuse us of such an outrage? How dare you, sir!”

“Calm yourself, Mr. Durani, please.” I made a little placating gesture, hoping he’d sit down again. It didn’t work. I went on quickly, before he threw the samovar at me. “Nobody’s accusing Slow Jinn Fizz of anything. I’m just trying to find out what’s going on at the dump site.”

“You dare accuse Slow Jinn Fizz of causing apsychia!” He extravagantly wasn’t listening.

“I haven’t accused you,” I said, louder this time. “Have—not. I’m just investigating. And you must admit that Solomon’s Seals are very potent magic, with a strong potential for polluting the environment.”

Durani cast his eyes up to the ceiling and, presumably, past it toward Allah. “They think I am destroying souls,” he said—not to me. He glared my way a moment later. “You wretched bureaucratic fool, Slow Jinn Fizz does not cause apsychia. I—we—this consortium—am—are—is on the edge of curing this dreadful defect.”

I started to get angry at him, then stopped when I realized what he’d just said. “You are?” I exclaimed. “How, in God’s name?”

“In God’s name indeed—in the name of the Compassionate, the Merciful.” Durani calmed down again, so fast that I wondered how much of his rage was real temper and how much for show. But that didn’t matter, either, not if he really was on the edge of beating apsychia. If he could do that, I didn’t mind him chewing me out every day—and twice on Fridays.

“Tell me what you’re doing here,” I said. “Please.” People have been trying to cure apsychia since the dawn of civilization, and probably long before that. Modern goetic technology can work plenty of marvels, but that…

“Jinnetic engineering can accomplish things no one would have imagined possible only a generation ago,” Durani said. “Combining the raw strength of the jinn with the rigor and precision of Western sorcery—”

“That much I know,” I said. Jinnetic engineering outfits have fueled a lot of the big boom on the Bourse the past few years, and with reason. The only way their profit margins could be bigger would be for the jinni to fetch bags of gold from the Other Side.

But Durani had found something else for them to do Over There: jinn-splicing, he called it. What he had in mind was for the jinni to take a tiny fraction of the spiritual packet that made up a disembodied human soul, bring it back to This Side, and, using recombinant techniques he didn’t—wouldn’t—describe, join it with a bunch of other tiny fragments to produce what was in essence a synthesized soul, which could then be transplanted into some poor little apsychic kid.

“So you see,” he said, gesturing violently, “it is impossible—impossible, I tell you!—for Slow Jinn Fizz or any of our byproducts to cause apsychia. We aim to prevent this tragedy, to make it as if it never was, not to cause it.”

Whether what he aimed at was what he accomplished, I couldn’t have said. For that matter, neither could he, not with any confidence. Sorcerous byproducts have a way of taking on lives of their own.

But that wasn’t what was really on my mind. “Have you actually transplanted one of these, uh, synthesized souls into an apsychic human being?” I knew there was awe in my voice, the same sort of awe the Garuda Bird program raises in me: I felt I was at the very edge of something bigger than I’d ever imagined, and if I reached out just a little, I could touch it.

“We have transplanted three so far,” he answered with quiet pride.

“And?” I wanted to reach out, all right, reach out and pull the answer from him.

“The transplants appear to have taken: that is to say, the synthesized souls bond to the body, giving the apsychic a true spirituality he has never before known.” Durani held up a warning hand. “The true test, the test of Judgment, however, has not yet arisen—all three individuals who have undergone the transplant procedure remain alive. Theory indicates a risk that the synthesized soul may break up into its constituent fragments when its connection to the body is severed at death. We shall research that when the time arises.”

“Yes, I’d think so,” I said. A soul, after all, exists in eternity: it lives here for a while, but it’s primarily concerned with the Other Side. What a tragedy it would be to give a living man a soul, only to have him lack one when he died and needed it most. Worse than if he’d never had one, if you ask me—and till that moment, I’d never imagined anything worse than apsychia.

Something else struck me: “What happens to the souls from which you’re taking out your little packets? Are they damaged? Can they still enspirit a human being?”

“This is why we take so little from each one,” Durani answered. “To the limits of our experimental techniques, no measurable damage occurs. Nor should it, for is not God not only compassionate and merciful but also loving and able to forgive us our imperfections?”

“Maybe so, but do your artificial imperfections leave these, hmm, sampled souls more vulnerable to evil influence from the Other Side?” The further I got into the case of the Devonshire dump, the more hot potatoes it handed me. This new technique of Durani’s was astonishing, but what would its environmental impact be? The lawsuits I saw coming would tie up the ecclesiastical courts for the next hundred years.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but I mean that literally. For instance, suppose somebody does something really horrible: oh, suppose he burns down a monastery. And suppose he’s able to convince a court that, on account of the Durani technique, he’s been deprived of 1% or 0.1% or 0.001% of the soul he would have had otherwise. Is he fully responsible for what he did, or is it partly Durani’s fault? A smart canon lawyer could make a good case for blaming Slow Jinn Fizz.

Or suppose somebody does something horrible, and then claims as a defense that he’s been deprived of part of his soul by the Durani technique. How do you go about proving him wrong, if he is? I’m no prophet, but I foresaw the sons of a lot of canon lawyers (and the nephews of Catholic canonists) heading for fine collegia on the profits of that argument alone.

And here’s another one: let’s suppose the Durani technique is as safe as he says it is, and doesn’t do irreparable harm to anybody’s soul. Let’s suppose again that his synthesized souls have even been passing the test of Judgment. But nothing manmade can hope to match God’s perfection. What happens if a misassembled soul does break apart on death, leaving a poor apsychic all dressed up with no place to go? To what sort of recompense is his family entitled?

All at once, I wished again that magic were impossible, that we just lived in a mechanical world. Yes, I know life would be a lot harder, but it would be a lot simpler, too. The trouble with technology is that, as soon as it solves a problem, the alleged solution presents two new ones.

But the trouble with no technology, of course, is that problems don’t get solved. I don’t suppose apsychics, suddenly offered the chance for a better hereafter, would worry about risks. I wouldn’t, in their shoes.

I guess nothing is ever simple. Maybe it’s just as well. If things were simple, we wouldn’t need an Environmental Perfection Agency and I’d be out of a job.

Caught in my own brown study, I’d missed a couple of sentences. When my ears woke up again, Durani was saying, “—may develop a sampling technique to bring back components only from what you might term mahatmas, great souls, those who have spirit to spare.”

“Very interesting,” I answered, and so it was, though not altogether in the way he’d intended it. Sounded to me as though he had some concerns over safety himself. I wondered who his lawyers were. I hoped he had a good team, because I had the feeling—the strong feeling—he’d need one.

“Is there anything further, Inspector Fisher?” he asked. He’d relaxed now; I guess he only got vehement when he thought his interests were endangered. A lot of people are like that.

“That’s about it for now,” I told him, whereupon he relaxed even further. He thought the operative phrase there was that’s about it; I thought it was for now. He’d done something new and splendid, all right, but I wasn’t sure he’d ever realize any profit from it. He hadn’t had a lawyer at his beck and call the week before. He’d need one soon, or more likely a whole swarm of them.

Remembering his call reminded me how many I—and Bea—had fielded all at once. I asked my watch what time it was, found out it was a few minutes before three. I decided to go over to the Devonshire Land Management Consortium offices and find out just how so many of their clients found out about the EPA investigation so fast.

My sigil got me into the office of a markgraf in charge of consortiate relations, a redheaded chap with hairy ears whose name was Peabody. He showed a full set of teeth undoubtedly kept so snowy white by sympathetic magic (I wondered what would happen if a forest fire spilled soot all over the snow to which those teeth were attuned).

I give him credit: he didn’t try to cast any spells over me. “Of course we notified our clients,” he said when I asked him my question. “Their interests were impacted by your search of files at the containment site, so we might have been liable to civil penalty had we kept silent.”

“All right, Mr. Peabody, thanks for your time,” I said. Put that way, he had a point. I might have thought better of him if he’d talked about loyalty instead of liability, but how much can you expect from a mercenary in a fancy suit?

After that, I headed for home. I picked up a daily once I got off the freeway, for the sake of the sport more than anything else. Over in Japan, I saw, the Giants had beaten the Dragons for their league title. And closer to home, the Angels and Blue Devils played to a scoreless tie.

“Might as well be real life,” I muttered when I saw that. Then I shook my head. In real life, the Cardinals would never have been higher in the standings than the Angels.

But looking at the score gave me an idea. I called Judy. “Feel like a Zoroastrian lunch tomorrow?” I asked her.

She giggled. “Sounds good. But to make it perfect, I ought to fly my carpet. After all, it’s an Ahura-Mazda.”

“That’s right, you did buy an import last year, didn’t you?” I said. “But let me pick you up instead afterwards anyhow.” I explained what I was doing with my red-letter list.

“That’ll be fine,” Judy said. “Nice you get a chance to be away from the office part of your day. Too bad it couldn’t be mornings, though.” She knows how much I hate staff meetings.

I smacked myself in the forehead. “I should have thought of that. But listen to what I came across today—” I told her about Ramzan Durani and Slow Jinn Fizz.

“That’s exciting!” she breathed. “To give those poor people hope… Have they worked all the gremlins out of the process?”

“I couldn’t tell you. Durani talks like he has, but it’s his operation, so you’d expect him to.”

“Yes,” Judy said. “Of course, even if he has, the moment anything goes wrong the lawyers will say he hasn’t. The spiritual implications are—overwhelming is the word that comes to mind.”

“You know one of the reasons I love you?” I said. She didn’t answer, just waited for me to go on, so I did: “You see implications. So many people don’t; they just go ‘Oh, how marvelous!’ without stopping to think what their marvels end up costing them.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice surprisingly serious. “That doesn’t sound anywhere near as romantic as something like ‘You have beautiful eyes,’ but I think it gives us a much better promise of lasting. I feel the same way about you, just so you know.”

“What, that I have beautiful eyes?” I said. She snorted. I added, “Besides, I told you that was just one of the reasons. I wish you were here right now, so we could try one of the others.”

“Now what might that be?” She sounded so perfectly innocent, she was perfectly unbelievable. She didn’t even believe herself: “I wish I were over there, too, honey, but I’ve got to finish working out this astrology problem for my class. Reconciling western and Hanese systems is a bitch and a half. I’ll see you tomorrow for lunch.”

“Twelve-thirty all right?”

“Sounds good. ’Bye.”

Judy works in a part of East A.C. where you hear Spainish spoken in the streets about as often as English. The rage for Zoroastrian diners has reached even there, though. Next year, no doubt, they’ll be passÇ; right now, they’re fun.

The one trouble with those places is that Judy and I can’t enjoy them to the fullest, because a lot of their dishes feature deviled ham. We managed, though. I ate angel-hair pasta and devil’s-food cake, while she had a deviled-egg-salad sandwich and angelfood cake. Just names, sure, but names have power.

“So where are you going this afternoon?” Judy asked while we waited for the waitress to bring us our lunches.

“Up to Loki, in Burbank,” I said. “I have the feeling their parchmentwork didn’t report half of what they’re dumping. They have a real reputation for secrecy; nobody except them and the military knows what goes on at the Cobold Works up in the desert, and nobody at all, it looks like, knows—or will say—what comes out of the Cobold Works.”

“They’re working in the Garuda Bird project, too, aren’t they?” Judy said.

“That’s right—and if you think I’m going up there partly so I can learn more about that, you’re right,” I admitted. Space travel has fascinated me ever since the first magic mirror let us see the far side of the moon back when I was a kid.

The girl carried our plates over to us just then. “Thanks,” I said as she set them down. Because she looked as if she’d understand it better, I added, “Gracias.”

“De nada, señor,” she answered, smiling. She hardly seemed old enough to be working full time. Maybe she wasn’t. People who come up to Angels City to get away from Azteca find out soon enough that the sidewalks aren’t paved with gold here, either. They do what they can to get by, same as my great-grandparents did a hundred years ago. Most of them will.

It was a pleasant lunch. Any time with Judy was pleasant, but the good food and the chance to be out and about in the middle of the day (she’d been right about that the night before) just added to it. I hated to leave, but she had to get back to work and I needed to be at the Loki plant early enough in the afternoon to do some useful work.

I parked my carpet in the loading zone in front of Hand-of-Glory’s office, kissed Judy goodbye before I took off. It was a pretty thorough kiss, if I say say myself. This ten-year-old who should have been in school made disgusted noises as he walked by. I didn’t care. Give him a few more years and he’d find out about the sweet magic between man and woman.

I waited there till I saw Judy safe indoors, then headed up the Golden Province Freeway to Burbank. The Loki works weren’t far from the little airport there. They were big and sprawled-out enough to have separate buildings and lots for each of the consortium’s many projects; I flew around till I found a sign that said SPACE DIVISION and had a stylized Garuda bird under it. I parked my carpet as close to the sign as I could, then walked off some of my lunch hiking toward the entrance.

Inside, where they didn’t show from the parking lot, were guards armed with pistols and holy water sprayers. I presented my EPA sigil. Even though I’d phoned ahead in the morning, I could see how little ice it cut here. The guards were ready to take on major foes, from This Side or the Other. One bureaucrat wasn’t worth getting excited about.

Which is not to say they weren’t thorough. They turned a spellchecker on my sigil, to make sure it wasn’t forged and hadn’t been tampered with. One of them carefully compared the image on my flying license to my face. The other waited till the first was done, then called my office to confirm I really did work there. He didn’t ask me for the number; he looked it up himself.

Only when they were satisfied did they phone deeper into the building. “Magister Arnold will come to escort you shortly, sir,” one of them said. “Here is your visitor’s talisman.” He pinned it on me, then added, “Once you pass through that door, the demon in the talisman will be roused and will sting you if you get more than fifteen feet away from Magister Arnold. Just so you know, sir.”

“What happens if I need to use a toilet?” I asked.

“Magister Arnold must accompany you to the facility, sir,” he answered, unsmiling. The guy outside the Devonshire dump had billed himself as a security guard. This Loki fellow really was one.

I found another question: “Suppose I ditch the talisman once I go inside?”

“First, sir, any attempt to do so would rouse the demon. Second, once inside the door there, the talisman will weld itself to your clothing and remain bonded to it until you emerge. If you’re a good enough sorcerer, sir, you can beat the talisman, but you’ll set off a great many alarms in the process, and will be apprehended in short order.”

“I don’t want to beat it and I don’t want to be apprehended,” I said. “I was just curious.” The guard nodded, polite but unconvinced. His job was being unconvinced, and he was real good at it.

Magister Arnold came out a couple of minutes later. He was a big, rangy fellow in his mid-fifties, in a lab robe almost as fancy as Ramzan Durani’s. “Call me Matt,” he said after we shook hands. “Come along with me now.”

I came along. The door closed behind us. I gave the talisman a surreptitious yank. Sure enough, it was stuck to the front of my shirt. I’d figured it would be. Loki took security seriously.

I found out just how seriously when we got to the door of Arnold’s office: it was hermetically sealed. Now I grant you that Hermes is a good choice of protector for an aerospace office—in his wingfoot aspect, he’s naturally related to flight sciences, and who better to propitiate in a security system than the patron deity of thieves?

But merciful heavens, the expense! A security system isn’t just a seal; the backup is a lot more important. Maintaining a whole cult at a level sufficient to keep its god active and alert will kill you with priests’ fees, fanes, sacrifices, what have you. I wondered how much of the bill Loki was paying itself and how much it was passing on to the taxpayer. Somehow cost overruns never turn out to be anybody’s fault. They’re just there, like crabgrass, and about as hard to weed out.

Be that as it may, Magister Arnold rubbed the toggle that served as the door Herm’s erect phallus. The Herm must have recognized his touch, for it smiled and the door came open.

It closed behind us with a definitive-sounding snick. “Coffee?” Arnold asked, waving to a pot that sat on top of a little asbestos salamander cage.

“No, thanks,” I answered; I’d just as soon drink vitriol as muck that was reheating all day. And besides— “You really don’t feel like following me down the hall if I have to use the men’s room, do you?”

“Oh, yes, of course. That’s right, you’re wearing a visitor’s talisman, aren’t you? I hope you don’t mind if I have a cup?” At my inviting wave, Arnold poured himself one. It looked as thick and dark and oily as I’d figured it would. Even the fumes were enough to make my nostrils twitch. When he set the cup down, he asked, “So what have we done that’s brought the EPA down on us?” He didn’t say this time, but you could hear it behind his words.

“I don’t know that you’ve done anything,” I answered. “I do know that somebody’s spells are leaking out of the Devonshire dump, and I also know that whoever that somebody is, he’s murdered monks to keep his secret.”

That got Arnold’s instant and complete attention. His eyes gripped me like the Romanian giants Eastern European sorcerers use to handle magical apparatus they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot Pole. He was quick on the uptake. “The Thomas Brothers fire is connected to this affair, is it?” he said. “A bad business, very bad.”

“Yes.” I let it go at that; no need for him to know I was personally involved with the monastery fire. I pulled out my chart. “As near as I can tell from this, Magister Arnold, Loki puts more toxic spells into Devonshire than anybody else—and the ones I have here are those you admit to publicly.”

“For the record,” Arnold said loudly, “I deny there are any others.” His tone was just as sincere as Tony Sudakis’, and told me (in case I hadn’t been sure already) a Listener was in there with us.

I liked that tone even less from the magister, because I knew he wasn’t on my side while I hoped Sudakis was. All Arnold wanted to do was play with his projects, whatever they happened to be. It wasn’t that I doubted their worth. I didn’t; as I’ve said, I’m demons for the space program myself. But nobody has any business fouling the nest and then pretending his hands are clean.

“For the record,” I answered, just as loudly and just as snottily, “I don’t believe you.” Arnold glared; my guess was that nobody’d talked to him like that for a while. I let him steam for a few seconds, then said, “Are you seriously telling me nothing too secret to get into your EPA forms goes on at the Cobold Works?”

“What Cobold Works?” he said, but he couldn’t keep a twinkle from his eye. That the establishment in the desert exists is an open secret. But his smile disappeared in a hurry. “If it’s too secret to go into the forms, Inspector Fisher, it’s also too secret to talk about with you. No offense, but you need to understand that.”

“I’m not out to betray our secrets to the Hanese or the Ukrainians,” I said. “You need to understand that, and to understand that the situation around the Devonshire dump is serious.” I tossed him the report on birth defects around the site. As he read it, his face screwed up as if he’d bitten into an unripe medlar. “You see what I mean, magister.”

“Yes, I do. You have a problem there, absolutely. But I don’t believe the Loki Space Division, at least, is responsible for it. If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll tell you why.”

“Go ahead,” I said. Nobody I’d talked to would even entertain the idea that he could be responsible for the leaks. Well, I didn’t find the idea entertaining, either.

“Thanks.” Arnold steepled his fingers, more a thoughtful gesture, I judged, than a prayerful one. He went on. “I gather this toxic spell leak is believed to be through the dump’s containment system rather than airborne.”

“Yes, I believe that’s true,” I said cautiously. “So?”

He nodded as if he’d scored a point. “Thought as much. I’m not breaking security to tell you that Space Division spells are universally volatile in nature, with byproducts to match. That’s not surprising, is it, considering what we do?”

“I suppose not,” I said. “What exactly is your consortium’s role in getting the Garuda Bird out of the atmosphere?”

That did it. He started rolling like the Juggernaut’s car, which, considering the project we were talking about, isn’t the worst of comparisons. Loki was in charge of two project phases, the second of which (presumably because it dealt with air elementals) had been split into two elements.

“First, we handle the new spells pertaining to the Garuda Bird itself.” Arnold pointed to a picture tacked onto the wall behind him: an artist’s conception of the Bird lifting a cargo into low orbit, with the curve of the Earth and the black of space behind it. Even in a painting, the Bird is something to see. Think of a roc squared and then square that again—well, the Bird could turn a roc into a pebble. For a second, I forgot about being an investigator and felt like a kid with a new kite.

“The Bird is magic-intensive anyway,” Arnold went on. “Has to be, or else that big bulk would never get off the ground. But we’ve had to upgrade all the spell systems and develop a whole new set for upper-atmospheric and exatmospheric work. They do fine in similarity modeling; pretty soon we’ll get to see what the models are worth. You with me so far?”

“Pretty much so, yeah,” I answered. “What’s this other phase you were talking about? Something to do with sylphs?”

“That’s right. Turns out our models show that max-Q—”

“What?”

“Maximum dynamic pressure on the Bird,” he explained grudgingly, and then, because I still didn’t get it, added more grudgingly still, “Maximum air buffeting.”

“Oh.”

I’d distracted him. He gave me a dirty look, as if he were a wizard who’d forgotten the key word of an invocation just as his demon was about to appear in the pentacle. When I didn’t rip off his head or swallow him whole, he pulled himself together. “As I was saying, max-Q on the Garuda Bird occurs relatively low in the atmosphere, due to sylphic action on the traveler through the aery realm.”

“Sylphs are like that,” I agreed. “Always have been. How do you propose to get them to act any different?”

“As I said before, we have a two-element approach to the problem—”

He pulled a chart out of his top desk drawer and showed me what he meant. If he hadn’t been an aerospace thaumaturge, he would have called it the carrot-and-stick approach. As it was, he talked about sylph-esteem and sylph-discipline.

Sylph-esteem, I gathered, involved making the sylphs above the Garuda Bird launch site so happy they wouldn’t think about blowing the Bird around as it flew past them. Like a lot of half-smart plans, it looked good on parchment. Trouble is, sylphs by their very nature are happy-go-lucky already, and also changeable as the weather. How do you go about not only making them even more cheerful than they were already but also making them stay that way?

If you ask me (which Magister Arnold didn’t), sylph-discipline is a better way to go. Putting the fear of higher Powers into the sylphs might well make the air elementals behave themselves long enough to let the Garuda Bird get through. True, you couldn’t keep it up long, sylphs being as they are, but then, you wouldn’t need to.

“For sylph-discipline to be effective, timing is of the essence,” Arnold said. “Implement your deterrence activity too soon and the elementals forget the brief intimidation; implement it too late and it is useless. We are still in the process of developing the sorcerous systems that will enable us to ensure minimal sylphic disturbance as the Garuda Bird proceeds on its mission.”

“If you’re still developing them, am I correct in assuming that no byproducts from that element of your project would appear on my list of contaminants from Loki?”

“Let me check, if I may,” he said. He looked at my chart, just as I’d looked at his. “No, that’s not correct. Some of this activity with Beelzebub comes from our shop.”

I remembered the patch of flies at the Devonshire dump and shivered a little. Dealing with Beelzebub involves some of the most potent, most dangerous sorcery there is. I said, “Sounds like overkill to me. Why pick such a mighty potentate of the Descending Hierarchy to overawe the air elementals?”

My guess was that asking the question would prove a waste of time, that Arnold would baffle me with technical jargon till I gave up and went away. But he fooled me, saying, “It’s really quite straightforward, at least in broad outline. We shall require the Lord of the Flies to inflict a plague of his creatures on the sylphs to distract them from the passage of the Garuda Bird.”

“You don’t think small,” I said. Then something else occurred to me: “But what’s to keep the flies from tormenting the Garuda Bird along with the air elementals?”

Magister Arnold smiled thinly. “As I said, it’s straightforward in broad outline. Details of the negotiations with the demon are anything but simple, as you may imagine. He is, if you will forgive me, hellishly clever.”

“Yes.” I let it go at that; if it were up to me, I’d have come up with some other way of distracting the sylphs. After a couple of seconds, I said, “Don’t byproducts from a conjuration involving Beelzebub have a chance of sliding through the underground containment scheme at the dump? They aren’t all volatile, as you claimed before.”

“I suppose that’s true.” Arnold sounded anything but happy about supposing that was true, but he did it anyhow. I give him credit for that. He tried to put the best face on it: “You haven’t alluded to these particular byproducts as being the ones which are leaking, however, Inspector Fisher. Until you show me evidence that they are, I hope you will forgive my doubts.”

“Okay, fair enough,” I said. Going around the edges of the dump with a sensitive spellchecker, checking air and earth, fire and water for sorcerous pollutants would blow Charlie Kelly’s request for discretion further into space than the Garuda Bird could carry it, but that couldn’t be helped, not now.

I got up and started to leave. I’d just about made it to the door when I remembered the demon imprisoned in my visitor’s talisman. I turned around and headed right back toward Magister Arnold. He was coming after me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t mention it.” His voice was dry. “My own peace of mind is involved in keeping you healthy till you get out the door, you know. Just think of all the parchmentwork I’d have to fill out if an Environmental Perfection Agency inspector got stung to death by the Loki security system. I wouldn’t get any real work done for weeks.”

Knowing the EPA bureaucratic procedures as I do, I was sure he was right about that. Then a couple of casually uttered words sank in. “Stung to death, Magister Arnold?” I said, gulping. “The security guard didn’t mention that little detail.”

“Well, he should have,” Arnold answered testily. He must have noticed my face chance expression. “Before you ask, Inspector, we do have a permit to incorporate deadly force into our security setup because of the sensitive nature of so much of what we do here. If you like, I will be happy to show you a copy, complete with chrysobull, of that permit.”

“No, never mind.” The assurance in his voice said he wasn’t bluffing. And if I wanted to check, I could do it at the Criminal and Magical Courts building. “But visitors should be warned before they enter the secure area, sir. They’d have more of an incentive for following instructions carefully.”

“Oh, it seems to work out all right. We haven’t lost one in a couple of weeks.” The aerospace man had a perfect deadpan delivery. At first I accepted what he’d said without thinking about it, then did a double take, and only then noticed the very corners of his mouth curling up. I snorted. He’d got me good.

He led me out to the door by which I’d entered. As soon as I was on the far side of it, I took off the talisman (now I could) and all but threw it at the security guard. “You didn’t tell me it was lethal,” I snarled.

“If your intentions were good, sir, you didn’t need to know,” he answered. “And if they were bad, you also didn’t need to know.”

He should have been a Jesuit. After I got done gasping for air, I slunk out toward my carpet, then headed for home. It was still early, but if I’d gone someplace else and done my song and dance, I’d have been late. I was late the day before. Put the two days together, I figured, and they’d come out even. It was the sort of logic you’d expect after a Zoroastrian lunch, but it satisfied me for the moment.

Because I was early, I made good time on the way back down to Hawthorne. Of course, that left me rattling around my flat for a chunk of the afternoon. I’m usually good at just being there by myself, but it wasn’t working that day. I didn’t feel like going out and going shopping; besides, with next payday getting close and the last one only a ghostly memory, the ghouls had been chewing on my checking account.

I decided to do something to put crowns into my pocket, not take them out. I had three or four sacks of aluminum cans rattling around under the sink and in my closet; I took ’em out (which freed up space to put in more), carried ’em down to my carpet, and headed for the local recycling center.

SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT AND SAVE ENERGY, said the sign outside: RECYCLE ALUMINUM. I nodded approvingly as I lugged the cans over. Some programs sell themselves as being good for the environment when they’re not, but recycling isn’t one of them.

The fellow at the center tossed the cans on the scale, looked back at a little chart on the wall behind him. “Give you two crowns sixty,” he said, and proceeded to do just that.

The small change went into my pocket, the two-crown note into my wallet. “Thank you, friend,” I told him.

“Any time,” he answered. “See you again soon, I hope. You’re making some sorcerer’s life easier.”

I let that go with a nod. Since I work for the EPA, I would have bet I knew more about it than he did. Recycled aluminum lets magicians use the law of similarity to extract more of the metal directly from the ore; it’s a lot cheaper and more energy efficient than the alchemy they have to resort to when they’re working without any aluminum source… to say nothing of the preposterous and expensive mechanical processes you have to use to coax aluminum free of the minerals that contain it. Were it not for sorcery, I doubt we’d ever have learned what a wonderfully useful metal aluminum is.

Two crowns sixty wouldn’t come close to paying the bill from the Department of Water and Powers I’d found in my mailbox. The bill was up from last month, too; the Department, a little clipped-on notice said, had gained approval for a three percent increase in salamander propitiation fees. Everything costs more these days.

The money I’d got for the aluminum cans would just about cover a hamburger, though not the fries that went with it. A Golden Steeples was right around the corner from the recycling center. I went in there, spent my dividend and a bit more besides. It was a long way from a gourmet treat, but when you’re eating by yourself, a lot of the time you don’t care.

A newspaper rack stood just outside the Golden Steeples: it used the same kind of greedy little imp that dwells in pay phones. I stuck in the right change, pulled out a Times. If I’d tried to take more than one, the imp would have screamed blue murder. I think it’s a shame the racks have to resort to measures like that, but they do. Life in the big city.

Back in my flat, I opened a beer and drank it down while I read the daily. One of the page-nine stories directly concerned me: Brother Vahan was appealing to the Cardinal of Angels City for a dispensation to allow cosmetic sorcery for one of the monks badly burned in the Thomas Brothers fire.

I prayed that the Cardinal would grant the dispensation. Cosmetic sorcery can do marvelous things these days. If the doctors and wizards have a recent portrait of someone before he was burned, they can use the law of similarity to bring his appearance back to what it used to be. Function doesn’t follow superficial form, of course, but a burn victim gains so much by not becoming a walking horror show.

Trouble is, the Cardinal of Angels City is a stiff-necked Erseman who takes the mortification of the flesh and God’s will seriously. The story said he was considering Brother Vahan’s appeal, “but the issuance of a dispensation cannot be guaranteed.” He was liable to decide God wanted that monk disfigured, and who were we to argue with Him?

That sort of attitude never made sense to me. Far as I can see, if God wanted burn victims to stay ugly forever, He wouldn’t have made cosmetic sorcery possible. But then, I’m just an EPA man, not a theologian (and especially not a Catholic theologian). What do I know?

St. George and the Dragon was splashed all over the entertainment section (and I wondered what the Cardinal thought about that). I hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the blonde by the Hollywood Freeway to tell if she was the one falling out of her minitunic in the ads. I wasn’t about to go to the light-and-magic show to find out, either. That miserable publicity stunt had cost them at least one cash customer.

When I got to work the next morning, more pickets were marching out alongside the Confederal Building to protest the aerial spraying for Medvamps. I shook my head as I went up the elevator to work. Some people simply cannot weigh short-term inconvenience against long-term benefit.

As soon as I got to my desk, I started working like a man possessed; had a priest wandered by, he probably would have wanted to perform an exorcism on me. But I banged through the routine parts of my job as fast as I could so I’d have time to investigate the Devonshire case properly. I wanted to get out to Chocolate Weasel that afternoon.

The best-laid plans—

I’d just managed to get the wood on top of my desk out from under the usual sea of parchments and visible to the naked eye once more when the phone started yelling at me. Unlike some people I know, I don’t usually have premonitions, but I did this time. What I smelled was trouble. The phone hadn’t given me much else lately.

“David Fisher, Environmental Perfection Agency.”

“Mr. Fisher, this is Susan Kuznetsov, of the Barony’s Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health…”

“Yes?” I’d never heard of her.

“Mr. Fisher, I’m calling from Chatsworth Memorial Hospital. I was going to notify the St. Ferdinand’s chapter of the Thomas Brothers, as is usual in such cases, but due to the recent tragedy there, that was impossible. When I called the East Angels City Thomas Brothers monastery, I was referred to you.”

“Why?” I asked. My mind wasn’t on the Devonshire dump, not that minute. But then, before she could answer, I put together whom she worked for, where she was calling from, her likeliest reason for wanting to get hold of the Thomas Brothers, and their likeliest reason for passing her on to me. “Don’t tell me, Mistress Kuznetsov—”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Fisher. We’ve just had an apsychic baby born here.”