The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

IV

I don’t know much about babies: call it lack of practical experience. Give Judy and me a few years and I expect we’ll do something about that, but not now. Oh, my brother up in Portland has a two-year-old girl and I have some little cousins up there, too, but I can count on the smelly fingers of both hands the number of diapers I’ve changed.

So poor little Jesus Cordero (the irony of the name struck me as soon as I heard it) didn’t look much different from any other new-minted kid to me. He lay on his tummy in the cradle, wriggling in a sort of random way, as if he didn’t really understand he had arms and legs and could do things with them. The only thing in the least remarkable about him to the eye was an astonishingly thick head of black, black hair.

His mother sat on the side of the bed by the cradle. She was nineteen, twenty, something like that; she might have been pretty if she hadn’t looked so wrung out from giving birth. Her husband had a hand on her shoulder. He was about her age, dressed like a day laborer. They talked back and forth in Spainish. I wondered if they’d entered the Confederation legally, and wondered even more if they truly understood what had happened to little baby Jesus.

In the room with them were Susan Kuznetsov—a middle-aged woman, no-nonsense variety, built like a crate—and a priest. He was a tubby little redheaded fellow named Father Flanagan, but he proved to speak fluent Spainish himself. In Angels City, that’s a practical necessity for a priest these days.

“Any question about the diagnosis, Father?” I asked him.

“Not a bit of it, worse luck for the poor boy,” he answered. Listening to him, I wondered if you could speak Spainish with a brogue. But all such frivolous thoughts vanished as he went on: “I was going through the nursery last night the way I always do, blessing the newborns of my creed. I came to this little fellow and—well, see for your own self, Inspector.”

He took off the crucifix from around his neck, set it against the baby’s cheek, murmured a few words of Latin. That’s not my ritual, of course, but I knew what was supposed to happen: because babies, being new to the world, are uncorrupt, the cross should have glowed for a moment, symbolic of the linkage between goodness on the Other Side and the innocence of the baby’s soul. Not for nothing did Scandinavian converts speak of the White Christ.

But nothing was all we saw here. The crucifix might have been merely metal and wood, not one of the most potent mystical symbols on This Side. At its touch, little Jesus twisted his head in the hope that it was a milk-filled breast.

Gently, his face sad, the priest redonned the crucifix. Susan Kuznetsov said, “Father Flanagan called me first thing this morning. Of course, I came out immediately. He repeated the test in my presence then, and I made others so as to be absolutely certain. This baby, though otherwise healthy and normal, possesses no soul.”

Tears stung my eyes. Having something so dreadful happen to a poor tiny kid who’d never even had the chance to commit a sin struck me as horribly unjust. Not even Satan got anything out of it, either, because when Jesus Cordero died, he’d just be gone. What did it mean? Far as I could tell, it meant only that we don’t understand the way things work as well as we’d like to.

“Sir,” I said to the baby’s father (his name was Ramón; his wife was Lupe), “I’d like to ask you some questions, if I may, to see if I can learn how this unfortunate thing happened to your son.”

“Sí, ask,” he said. He understood English, even if he didn’t speak it too well. His wife nodded to show she also followed what I’d said.

The first thing I asked was their address. I wasn’t surprised to learn they lived within a couple of miles of the Devonshire dump; we were only five or six miles away there at the hospital. Then I tried to find out if Lupe Cordero had used any potent sorcerous products during her pregnancy. She shook her head. “Nada,” she said.

“Nothing at all?” I persisted; contact with magic is such a part of everyone’s everyday life that sometimes we don’t even think about it. “Your medical treatments were all of the ordinary sort?”

She answered in rapid-fire Spainish. Father Flanagan did the honors for me: “She says she had no medical treatments till birth; she could not afford them.” I nodded glumly; that’s the story with so many poor immigrants these days. Through the priest, Lupe went on, “The only thing even a little different was that I had morning sickness, so I went to the curandero for help.”

Speaking for himself, Father Flanagan said, “Probably something on the order of camomile tea; few curanderos traffic with Anything important.”

“Probably,” I agreed, “but I have to be thorough. Mrs. Cordero, can you give me the name and address of this person?”

“I don’ remember,” she answered in English. Her face closed up. I could guess what that meant: it was bound to be somebody from her home village back in Aztecia, somebody she didn’t want to see in trouble.

I tried again. “Mrs. Cordero, it’s possible the medicine you received had something to do with your giving birth to an apsychic child. We have to check that out, to make sure the same misfortune doesn’t happen to someone else.”

“I don’ remember,” she repeated. Her face might have been cast in bronze. I knew I wasn’t going to get any answers out of her. I caught Father Flanagan’s eye. He nodded almost imperceptibly. Maybe he’d try to talk some more with her later, maybe he’d just ask around in the neighborhood. One way or another, I figured before too long I’d find out what I needed to know.

Ramón Cordero bent over the cradle, picked up his son. By the smooth way he held the baby in the crook of his elbow, I guessed it wasn’t his first. “Niño lindo,” he said softly. Even more softly, Father Flanagan translated: “Beautiful boy.”

Little Jesus was a nice-looking baby. “Enjoy him all you can, Mr. Cordero,” I said. “Love him a lot. This is all he has. He’ll have to make the best of it.”

“That’s good advice,” Susan Kuznetsov said. She dropped into Spainish at least as fluent as Father Flanagan’s, then returned to English for me: “I told him that many apsychics live extraordinary lives on This Side, maybe to help compensate for not going on after they die. Artists, writers, thaumaturges—”

What she said was true, though she’d just mentioned the good half. There’s pretty fair evidence that the Leader of the Alemans during the Second Sorcerous War was an apsychic, and that he promoted the massacres and other horrors of the war exactly because he wasn’t afraid of what would happen to him on the Other Side: once he was gone, he was gone permanently. That wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to mention to an apsychic’s parents, though.

The baby wiggled, thrashed, woke up with a squall about like what you’d expect from a minor demon who doesn’t care to be conjured up. Lupe held out her arms; her husband set Jesus in them. I glanced down at my toes while she adjusted her hospital robe so she could nurse him. The squalls subsided, to be replaced by intent slurping noises.

“Tiene mucho hambre,” Lupe said— “He’s very hungry.” She seemed pleased and proud, as a new mother should. No, little Jesus’ tragic lack hadn’t fully registered with her.

I stood there for a couple of more minutes, wondering all the while if I ought to say something about Slow Jinn Fizz. Maybe—God willing—Ramzan Durani and his outfit could fill the vacuum at the center of little Jesus Cordero. From what Durani had said, he could fill it. What troubled me was whether he was creating similar but smaller vacuums in other souls. He said not, but even he’d admitted his procedure was still experimental.

In the end, I kept my mouth shut. Part of that was not wanting to raise the adult Corderos’ hopes too much. The rest was simple pragmatism: even though baby Jesus had no hope for eternal life, odds were he wasn’t going to shuffle off this mortal coil tomorrow or next year, either. He had the time to wait while the gremlins were exorcised from Durani’s jinnetic engineering scheme.

I wonder what I would have done if I’d been dealing with a seventy-year-old apsychic in poor health, someone facing imminent oblivion. Would gaining that person a soul (assuming the procedure worked) outweigh the harm inflicted on other souls in the process (assuming it didn’t work as well as Durani claimed)?

I decided I was awful glad Jesus was just a baby.

Lupe raised the little fellow to her shoulder, patted him on the back. After a few seconds, he let out a burp about an octave deeper than you’d think could come from anything so small.

“When will you be going home from the hospital?” I asked her.

“Mañana,” she said.

“I’d like to come by your home that afternoon, if I could,” I said. “I have a portable spellchecker, so I can begin investigating for toxic spells in the local environment, and I’d also like a look at whatever potion you got from your curandero.” I saw from her face that she didn’t understand everything I’d said. So did Father Flanagan. He translated for me.

Lupe and Ramón looked at each other. “No questions about nothing else?” he asked.

They were illegals, then. “None,” I promised. That wasn’t my business. Trying to find out why their son had been born without a soul was. “I swear it in God’s name.”

“You don’ make no cross,” Ramón said suspiciously.

Father Flanagan was giving me a questioning look, too. “Tell them I’m Jewish,” I said. His face cleared. I was sure he didn’t care much for my beliefs, but that’s okay: I wasn’t fond of all of his, either. But we acknowledged each other’s sincerity. He spoke way too rapidly for me to follow what he said to the Corderos, but they nodded when he was through.

Lupe said, “You go, you look, you find out. We trus’ you, the padre say we can trus’ you. He better be right.”

“He is,” I said, and let it go at that. If I’d taken another oath, the Corderos might have thought the first one wasn’t to be trusted. Father Flanagan nodded slowly, understanding what I’d done.

Susan Kuznetsov said, “Besides, Jesus there is a native-born citizen of the Confederation, and entitled to all the protection of our laws.” When she turned that into Spainish, the Corderos beamed; they liked the idea. The woman from the Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health quietly added, “I just wish our laws could do more for the poor little guy.” Neither she nor Father Flanagan translated that.

I said my goodbyes, collected Mistress Kuznetsov’s carte de visite, and flew back to the office. The elves hadn’t magically cleaned up my desk while I was gone. I didn’t care. It could stay dirty a while longer. I picked up the phone and called Charlie Kelly.

The yammering at the other end went on for so long that I wondered if he was back from lunch yet. It was well past two back in D.St.C.; where the demons did those confounded Confederal bureaucrats get the nerve to keep swilling at the public sty like that? All I needed was a minute of no answer on the phone to swell up and bellow like an enraged bull taxpayer, when after all I was a confounded Confederal bureaucrat my very own self.

“Environmental Perfection Agency, Charles Kelly speaking.” Finally!

“Charlie, this is Dave Fisher in Angels City. We just had another apsychic birth close by the Devonshire dump. That makes four in a little more than a year. This isn’t going to be a quiet investigation any more, Charlie. I’m going to find out what’s leaking and why, no matter how noisy I have to get.”

He kind of grunted. “Do what you think necessary.”

“Shit, Charlie, you’re the one who sicced me onto this.” I’m not usually vulgar on the phone and I’m not usually vulgar in the office, but I was steaming. “Now you’re making it a lot harder than it has to be.”

“In what way?” he asked, as if he hadn’t the slightest idea.

When Charlie Kelly goes all innocent on you, check how many fingers and toes you’re wearing. The odds are real good they’ll add up to a number smaller than twenty. I can’t imagine how I kept from screaming at him. “You know perfectly well. Tell me about the bloody bird that keeps singing in your ear.”

“I’m sorry, David, but I can’t,” he said. “I never should have mentioned that to you in the first place.”

“Well, you did and now you’re stuck with it,” I said savagely. “There’s something rotten in the area of that dump. People are being born without souls. People are dying, too, if you’ll remember the Thomas Brothers fire. You started me on this and now you won’t give with what you know? That’s—damnable.”

“I have to pray you’re wrong,” Charlie answered. “But whether you are or not, I can’t give you what you’re asking. This whole matter is bigger than what you seem to grasp—bigger than I thought, too. If I could, I’d shut down your whole investigation.”

This, from a high-powered EPA man? “Good God, Charlie? What are we talking about here, the Third Sorcerous War?”

“If we were, I couldn’t tell you so,” Kelly said. “Goodbye, David. I’m afraid you’re on your own in this one.” My imp stopped reproducing his imp’s breathing; he’d hung up on me.

I don’t know how long I stared at my own phone before I hung up, too. Jose Franco walked past my office door. I think he was just going to nod at me, the way he usually does, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw my face. “What’s the matter, Dave?” he asked, real concern in his voice. He’s a good guy, Jose is. “You look like you just saw your own ghost.”

“Maybe I did,” I said, which left him shaking his head.

Why in God’s name was Charlie Kelly acting altogether too serious about a Third Sorcerous War? The first two were disasters beyond anything imaginable even in nightmares before this century. A third one? If mankind was stupid enough to start a Third Sorcerous War, we’d probably never have to worry about a fourth one, because nobody’d be left to fight it.

And Charlie wouldn’t even tell me who the enemy was liable to be. You ever look back on your life and notice just how many sins you’ve committed to get where you are, how everything that always seemed solid all at once starts to crumble under your feet until you’re peering straight down into the Pit? That was what I felt like after I got off the phone with Kelly. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. No wonder I’d alarmed Jose.

Afterwards, I needed to give myself a good hard shake before I went back to work. When you’ve spent a while contemplating Armageddon, environmental concerns don’t look as big as they did. If the Third Sorcerous War comes along, there won’t be any environment left to protect, anyhow.

I drowned my sorrows in a cup of coffee, wishing it were something stronger. Then, more or less by main force, I made myself call Legate Kawaguchi to find out how Erasmus was doing. People are like that: the world may be going to hell around them (and the Third Sorcerous War would be a reasonable approximation, believe me), but they try to keep their own little pieces of it tidy.

“Ah, Inspector Fisher,” Kawaguchi said after I’d made it through the maze of constabulary operators to his phone. “I was going to phone you in the next few days. We expect that access spirit to become accessible to interrogation within that time frame.”

“That’s good,” I said, both because I hoped I’d learn something that would help my case (and, presumably, Kawaguchi’s) and because I was glad Erasmus would make it. “What other news do you have about the fire?”

“Investigations are continuing,” he answered, which meant he had no news.

Or maybe it meant he just didn’t feel like telling me anything. Constables are like that sometimes. I decided to give him a nudge, see if I could shake something loose: “Have your forensic sorcerers made any progress in analyzing those strange traces the thaumatech picked up at the scene, the ones the consecrated ground erased before she could fully get them into her spellchecker?”

“You have a retentive memory, Inspector.” Kawaguchi did not make it sound like a compliment: more as if he’d hoped I’d forgotten. Yet another phone pause, this one, I suppose, while he figured out whether to try to lie to me. Interesting choice for him. Sure, I was a civilian, but a civilian who worked for a Confederal agency. If he did lie and I found out about it, my bosses could make things unpleasant for his bosses, who would make things unpleasant for him.

He finally said, “The traces remain vanishingly faint, but enhancement techniques seem to indicate some sorceries of Persian origin.”

“Do they?” I said. Slow Jinn Fizz moved up a few notches on the suspect list. So did Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins, an outfit I hadn’t yet got around to visiting. I asked him, “What enhancement techniques do the Angels City constabulary use?” I hoped my own shop could learn something new and useful.

But he answered, “Nothing out of the ordinary, I’m afraid. We had our best results with an albite lens focusing the rays of the full moon on the spellchecker chamber that holds the memory microimps.”

“Yes, that’s pretty much standard,” I agreed. Only a constable would call it albite; the more usual name is moonstone. Because it’s opaque, a moonstone lens removes moonshine from moonbeams, thereby improving recollections.

“Is there anything else, Inspector Fisher?” Kawaguchi asked.

I wondered if I ought to tell him one of my superiors was afraid the case was connected with the Third Sorcerous War. He’d probably think I was moonstruck—or lunatic, if you prefer the Latin. I hoped he’d be right. Better that than Charlie being right. Besides, Kawaguchi had enough worries of his own; a constable’s job is neither easy nor pleasant.

“Anything else?” the legate repeated, more sharply this time.

“No, not really. Thanks for your time. Please do keep me informed on how your investigation is going, and let me know the moment Erasmus becomes available for questioning.”

“I will do that, Inspector. Good day to you.”

The work I’d meant to do that morning took up the afternoon instead. I had to keep up with it somehow, which meant I didn’t get out to Chocolate Weasel as I’d planned to do. I wouldn’t manage to do it tomorrow, either, because I was going to take my little portable spellchecker over to the Corderos’ house to see what it could find there. And after that, I figured Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins had moved ahead of it on my list if Persian magic was involved in the Thomas Brothers fire.

People complain that bureaucracies never accomplish anything. I mean, I complain when a bureaucracy I’m not part of succumbs to inertia. Half the time, though, the problem is too few people trying to do too many things in not enough time. I felt like Sisyphus, except getting over to Chocolate Weasel was just one of the stones I had to try to shove to the top of the hill. I kept running back and forth between them, keeping them all from rolling down to the bottom again but not moving any up very far. And every so often, whether I got one of the old stones to the crest of the hill or not, new ones appeared.

All in all, the image was enough to get a man down on ancient Greek religion.

I shoved stones around till it was time to go home. After supper, I called Judy. One of the things that makes troubles smaller is talking about them. Actually, I suppose the troubles stay the same size, but when they’re spread between two people they seem smaller. I told her about poor little Jesus Cordero, and also about what Charlie Kelly had had to say.

“Maybe one of these days Ramzan Durani can synthesize a soul for the little boy,” she said. She has a knack for remembering names and other details that slip through my fingers like sand. Now she went on, “But this other… My God, David, was he serious?”

“Who, Charlie? He sure sounded that way to me. What really frosts me is knowing how much he knows that he’s not telling.”

“I understand,” she said. “But what are we supposed to do while he’s not telling? Just go on with our lives as if we didn’t know anything was wrong? That’s not just hard, that’s impossible.”

“I know, but what choice do we have?” I answered. “People have been doing it as long as there have been people: carrying on inside their own little circles and holding their affairs together as best they could no matter what was going on around them. If they didn’t, I’ve got a feeling the world would have torn itself to pieces a long time ago.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said, and then, suddenly, “Come over, David, would you? I don’t want to be alone, not tonight, not after what you just told me.”

“Be there in half an hour,” I promised.

I made it, too, with a good five minutes to spare. Judy lives in a flat down in Long Beach, in a neighborhood marginally better than mine. The Guardian at the outer entrance to her building knows me by now, so I didn’t have any trouble getting in. Fair enough; I went there about as often as she came to see me.

I liked her place. It was in an older block of flats than mine, so it had occasional plumbing problems, no ice elemental connection for hot summer days, and a wheezy excuse for a salamander that couldn’t keep the place warm in winter, but there were compensations. The main one, I think, was decently thick walls: you didn’t find out everything your neighbors were up to as if you watched them in a crystal ball.

She’d lived there for five years, and the flat had the stamp of her personality on it. It was crammed with books, maybe even more than mine. The knickknacks (aside from the menorah and brass candlesticks for the Sabbath) were museum copies of Greek and Roman sorcerous apparatus, all mellow clay and greened bronze. The prints on the wall were by Arcimboldo—you know, the fellow who made portraits out of interlocked fish or fruit or imps. They’re endlessly fascinating to look at, and you never can decide just how far out of his tree old Arcimboldo was.

If you think I’m building up to a tale of lurid lovemaking, I’m sorry—it wasn’t like that. We hugged each other, she made some coffee, we talked later than we should have, and when we slept together, that’s all we did: we slept together. If you’re under twenty-five you probably won’t believe me, but sometimes that’s better—and more intimate, too—than twitches and moans. Not, believe me, that I have anything against twitches and moans, but to every thing its season.

My sleep season ended too soon the next morning; the horological demon in Judy’s alarm clock bounced me out of her bed with a bloodcurdling ululation. I hurried back to my place (which luckily wasn’t far out of my way), showered, changed clothes, grabbed a Danish and my portable spellchecker, and headed for the office.

What I had in mind was racing through business in the morning and heading up to the Corderos’ house in the afternoon to take some readings with the spellchecker. That’s what I ended up doing, too, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d had in mind. Something large and unpleasant landed on my desk with a thud.

I don’t quite mean that literally, but the report I was going to have to produce would be fat enough to thud down somewhere. I’ve mentioned that Angels City is in the middle of a drought. The note Bea passed to me explained that some sorcerers up in the north end of the Barony of Angels tried to bring rain with Chumash Indian charmstones, perhaps in the hope that native spirits would have more effect on the local weather than imported white man’s magic.

They got nothing. I don’t mean they didn’t get rain. Nobody’s been able to get much in the way of rain for Angels City the past few years. I mean they got nothing—no sign that the Powers linked to those charmstones were still there to be summoned. What Bea wanted me to do was determine whether the Chumash Powers were in fact extinct.

That’s always a melancholy job. Extinction means something wonderful going out of the world forever, whether from This Side or the Other. The poor Chumash, though, have been so thoroughly dispossessed and assimilated over the last couple of hundred years that no one believes any more in the Powers they once revered. Not only does no one believe in them, hardly anybody even knows they exist. And Powers without believers will die. Even the great Pan is two thousand years dead now.

Heavens, before I could get started, I had to go to the reference library to look up Chumash charmstones and how they fit into the rest of the Indians’ cult. I found out they were used not only for making rain, but also in war (they could make you invisible to arrows), in medicine, and in general sorcery. They tied in with other talismans—’atishwin, the Chumash called those—and with the Powers who helped the Chumash shamans. And now, by what Bea had passed to me, they were just little carved chunks of steatite, as inert as if they’d never had any magical intent at all.

I went up to Bea’s office, shot the breeze with her secretary (Rose really runs that place; if she ever quit, we’d fall apart) until she got off the phone, then ducked in fast before it made noise again. “What’s my priority on this Chumash thing?” I asked her. “The Devonshire project is taking up a lot of my time right now.”

“I know,” she answered. “It still comes first—it’s active, while if the Chumash Powers really are extinct, there’s no hurry about saying so. You’ll want to get a more formal investigation going to check that out one way or the other, have the thaumaturges see if the Chumash gods of the Upper World, the First People, or the Nunashish of the Lower World are still accessible to invocation.”

“You’ve been reading up on this,” I said; up until a couple of minutes before, I’d never heard of the dark, misshapen Nunashish.

She grinned at me. “Of course I have. If I knew about these spirits off the top of my head, they wouldn’t be on the edge of extinction, would they? If it turns out they haven’t gone over the edge, report back to me right away, because we’ll need to try to arrange a preservation scheme—assuming we can afford one.”

Doing a cost-benefit analysis to figure out whether it’s worthwhile to save an endangered deity is so coldblooded that it’s one of my least favorite parts of the job. It is, unfortunately, also all too often necessary. As I noted when I saw Matt Arnold’s door Herm, maintaining a cult for a supernatural being who would otherwise be gone is expensive: it’s the Other Side’s equivalent of a captive breeding program for an animal that’s vanished from the wild.

If the Chumash Powers were still alive, somebody—me, most likely—would have to figure out their role in the local thecosystem, and whether that role justified the money to provide worshipers and whatever else they needed. I’d never been part of the God Squad before. It’s an awesome responsibility, when you think about it.

Bea must have seen the look on my face. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar, David. The odds are that these Powers have just faded away, like so many others the Indians reverenced before white folks—and black—settled here. If that’s so, all you’ll have to do is write up the report. It’s only if the Nunashish and the rest are still around that you’ll have any bigger worries.”

“I know that,” I answered. “Actually, I hope they do survive. But if they do, and if they’re very much enfeebled—which they will be—”

“Yes, I know. Holding a Power’s fate in your hands isn’t easy. In the old days, they were proud of ridding the world of gods in whom they didn’t believe—some of the early Christian writings, the ones from the time of the Great Extinctions in Europe, will sicken you with their gloating. But our ideas are different now; we know everything has its place in Creation, to be preserved if possible.”

“But to be the one who decides if it’s possible, and then to have to live with myself afterwards… it won’t be easy, Bea.”

“If you wanted a job that was easy all the time, you wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Anything else? No? All right, thank you, David.”

I went back to my office and made a couple of calls, got the ball rolling on the Chumash charmstones. Then I plowed through as much of the more routine stuff as I could before lunch. If I’d known how bad lunch was going to be, I’d have worked straight through it. The cafeteria must have assembled the unappetizing glop on my plate with help from the law of contagion: some time a long while ago, it might have been in contact with real food. Two crowns ninety-five shot to—well, you get the idea.

I slid down to my carpet with my spellchecker in my lap. My stomach made small unhappy noises. Hoping they wouldn’t turn into large unhappy noises, I flew on up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley. The brown dirt and yellow-brown dry brush of the pass were getting to look very familiar.

The Corderos lived in a neighborhood that had been upper middle class maybe thirty years before. A lot of the houses still looked pretty nice, but it wasn’t upper middle class any more. Gang symbols and tags, mostly in Spainish, were scrawled on too many walls, sometimes on top of one another. And the houses, even the nice-looking ones, often held three, four, or more families, because that was the only way the new immigrants could afford to pay the rent.

The house the Corderos lived in was like that. Three women and a herd of kids not old enough for school watched me while I set up the spellchecker. All the men, including Ramón Cordero, were out working. Lupe held poor little Jesus and nursed him while she tried to keep track of a toddler who looked just like her.

One of the women—her name was Magdalena—spoke good English. She translated for me when I said, “First things first. Let me check that bottle of tonic you were telling me about, Mrs. Cordero.”

Lupe Cordero rattled off something in Spainish. The woman who wasn’t Magdalena disappeared into the back part of the house. She came back a minute later with a jar that had started out life holding tartar sauce. It was half full of a murky brown liquid. Lupe made a face. “Don’ taste good,” she said.

I actuated the spellchecker with Passover wine and a Hebrew blessing. My rite was close enough to what the women were used to—a Latin prayer and communion wine—that they didn’t remark on it, not even to say I’d omitted the sign of the cross. I was almost disappointed. “Soy jud°o” is one of the Spainish phrases I do know.

I unscrewed the lid of the ex-tartar-sauce jar, sniffed the current contents myself. The brown liquid didn’t smell like anything in particular. I reminded myself that Lupe had drunk it without ill effect, and that Father Flanagan had told me few curanderos trafficked in—or with—anything dangerous. That reminded me: I asked Lupe, “Want to tell me the name of the person you got this from?”

She shook her head. “Don’ remember,” she said stubbornly. I shrugged; I hadn’t expected anything different.

I started to stick the spellchecker’s probe right into the liquid, but the microimps inside the unit started screaming as soon as I got the end of the probe over the rim of the jar. The women exclaimed bilingually. I decided I’d better not put the probe in until I saw what the spellchecker was screaming about.

Words started showing up on the ground glass as the microimps tried to tell me what was wrong. They’d been programmed to write in what was mirror image for them, but they were so agitated that they kept forgetting. It didn’t matter; I could follow either style well enough.

The ingredient listing came first: octli (maguey beer to you), ocelot blood, ferret flesh, dragon blood—I blinked a little at that one, but the Aztecans have dragons, too. Then the spellchecker’s imps started writing UNIDENTIFIED—FORBIDDEN over and over and over. I’d never seen the spellchecker do that before. I never wanted to see it again, either.

“Gevalt,” I muttered under my breath; sometimes English lacks the words you need. I almost wished Judaism had a convenient gesture like the sign of the cross. I could have used one just then. To say I was flummoxed is to put it mildly.

“Let’s try it again,” I said, as much to steady myself as for any other reason. I tried again, from square one, shutting down the spellchecker and reactivating it. You have to be careful if you do that more than once in a short time: the spirits inside can take on too many spirits from the wine and lose memory. But it did make them stop screaming.

This time I reversed the normal order and had them analyze the sorcerous component of the tonic, not the physical ingredients that went into making the complete magic. That’s what I tried to do, at any rate. The screaming started again as soon as the probe got anywhere near the jar.

I looked at the ground glass to see what the microimps had to say. They expressed their opinion in two words: UNIDENTIFIED—FORBIDDEN. They wrote those two words until the whole screen was full, then started underlining them. Whatever had gone into that tonic, in analyzing it I’d sent a boy to do a man’s, or maybe a giant’s, job.

Even moving the probe away didn’t calm the spellchecker imps. They stopped underlining only when I closed the jar as tight as I could. Even then, none of the usual commands or invocations would clear the ground glass or make them stop screaming. I had to shut down the spellchecker to get them to shut up.

“Mrs. Cordero, whatever is in this potion, it’s very strong magic and very dark magic,” I said. Magdalena translated for me. “My spellchecker won’t even confront it, you see. I want two things from you, please.” She nodded. I went on, “First, I want to take this jar to a proper thaumaturgical laboratory for full analysis.”

“Sí, take it,” she said.

“The other thing I want is the name of the curandero who sold it to you,” I said. “Mrs. Cordero, this stuff is dangerous. Do you want another mother to have a baby born like Jesus?”

“Madre de Dios, no,” she exclaimed.

“Good,” I answered, more abstractedly than I should have. I was wondering if the hellbrew in the tartar-sauce jar had caused all the apsychic births around the Devonshire dump. If it had, then the biggest part of the case for leaks against the dump had just collapsed. But if the dump and everybody using it were innocent, who’d torched the Thomas Brothers monastery, and why? All at once, nothing made sense.

I pulled my attention back to the tacky little living room in which I stood (I’m sorry, but an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, while undoubtedly effective as an apotropaic, is not to my mind a work of art if it’s painted on black velvet in luridly phosphorescent colors). Lupe Cordero still hadn’t said who the curandero was. I realized she was waiting to be coaxed. Okay, I’d coax her. “Please, Mrs. Cordero, this information is very important.”

“You don’ tell him who you hear it from?” she asked anxiously.

I hedged. “I’ll try not to.”

To my relief, that was good enough for her. “Okay,” she said. “He call himself CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez, and he have his house up near Van Nuys Boulevard and O’Melveny.” I noted the irony of a curandero operating by a Dutch and Erse corner; Angels City is changing. Lupe went on, “His sign, it say curandero in letters red an’ green.”

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Cordero,” I said, and meant every word of it. I wrote down what she’d told me so I wouldn’t forget it, then left the house and started flying around looking for a public pay phone. I finally found one outside a liquor store whose front window said CERVEZA FRIA in letters three times the size of the ones that advertised COLD BEER.

I called the office from there, and got Rose. When I asked to talk to Bea, she said, “I’m sorry, Dave, she’s already on the phone with someone.”

“Could you ask her to come out to your desk, please?” I said. “This is important.”

One of Rose’s many wonderful attributes is her almost occult sense of knowing when somebody really means something like that (and if there’s a spell to produce the same effect, way too many secretaries have never heard of it). Half a minute later, Bea said, “What is it, David?” It had better be interesting lurked behind her words.

When I’d told her what the spellchecker had done with Lupe Cordero’s potion, she sighed and said, “Well, you were right: that is important. Bring it in to the laboratory right away, David, and we’ll see what really is in it. Then we and the constabulary will drop on Mr.—Hernandez, did you say his name was?—like a ton of bricks. Most of the time these curanderos are only guilty of venial sin, but desouling a baby isn’t even slightly venial.”

“If that’s what did it,” I said cautiously. “But yeah, I’m on my way. I’m just glad the lab survived last year’s budget cuts.”

“So am I,” Bea answered.

Farming things out to private alchemists and wizards would have eaten up just as much budget as maintaining our own analysis unit: specialists, naturally, charge plenty for their expertise. You’re not just paying for what they know now, but for what learning it cost them. And besides, this way we didn’t have to stand in a queue in case we needed results in a hurry.

As soon as I got back to the Westwood Confederal building, I took the jar over to the lab. It’s on the same floor as the rest of the EPA offices, but tucked into a corner and hedged around with protective charms not much different from the ones on the fence outside the Devonshire dump.

Our principal thaumaturgic analyst (bureaucratese for wizard, in case you’re wondering) is a balding blond fellow named Michael (not Mike) Manstein. He’s very good at what he does; he brings an Alemanic sense of precision and order to what’s too often a chaotic art. That he makes me want to stand at attention and click my heels every time I go in to talk with him is by comparison a detail.

“Hello, David,” he said, looking up from the table where he was inscribing a circle with his black-handled knife. “What can I do for you this afternoon?”

I gave him the tartar-sauce bottle and explained where I’d got it and how my spellchecker had reacted to it. His eyebrows came together as he listened; a little vertical crease appeared just above his nose. I finished, “So I’d like you to find out what really is in the jar here and what spells made it strong enough to set off my spellchecker like that. I may have to exorcise it before I can use it again.”

“Interesting.” Michael took the jar from me, wrapped it in a green silk cloth with several magical symbols inscribed on it in pigeon’s blood. “When must you have results from the analysis?”

“Yesterday would be good,” I said. He laughed the small, polite laugh of a man who not only doesn’t have the best sense of humor ever hatched but also has been besieged by importunate clients more times than he cares to remember. I went on, “Seriously, if I can have this tomorrow some time, that would be great. The stuff is suspected of being involved in an apsychia case, and may be linked to several others up in the Valley.”

“Ah, I see. This tells me what I need to set my priorities for the coming work.” Michael Manstein is too compulsively precise to get sloppy with the language and say things like prioritize.

“That’s nice,” I said. Whatever his priorities were, the potion wasn’t at the top of them. He went back to scribing his circle. I turned to go; trying to hurry Manstein is like trying to make the sun rise faster. Then I had an afterthought. “Whose sorcerer’s tools do you use, Michael?”

He finished the circle before he answered; one thing at a time with Michael Manstein. “I order them from Bakhtiar’s,” he said at last. “They’ve always given me good results.”

Back before the Industrial Revolution, a wizard had to be his own smith, his own woodworker, his own tanner. If he didn’t make his instruments himself—sometimes right down to refining the ore from which a metal would be drawn—they wouldn’t be properly attuned to him and would give weak results or none at all.

Modern technology has changed all that. Correct application of the law of contagion allows thaumaturgical tools to keep the mystic links to their original manufacturer even when someone else uses them, while the law of similarity permits their attunement to any wizard because of his likeness to the mage who made them. Some firms take one approach, some the other, some seek to combine the two.

Michael asked, “Why do you want to know that?”

“Because I thought you used Bakhtiar’s tools,” I answered, “and because Bakhtiar’s may be somehow connected to the jar of potion I just gave you. What I know is that Bakhtiar’s dumps at Devonshire, and there may be an involvement between the Devonshire dump case and this stuff. It’s a circumstantial link if it’s there at all, but I figured you ought to know about it.”

“You’re right. Thank you,” Manstein said. “I have a spare set my father brought with him when he came here from Alemania after the First Sorcerous War. I’ll use that to make sure there’s no conflict of sorcerous interest.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “And Michael—”

“Yes?”

“Be careful of what’s in that jar. I have the bad feeling it’s really vicious.”

“I’m always careful,” Manstein said.

The phone yelled at me. I felt like yelling right back. I’d spend most of the morning trying to put together a panel to investigate the thecological status of the Chumash Indian Powers, and I wasn’t having much luck. Half the people I’d talked to seemed convinced in advance that the Powers were extinct and good riddance to them. If you listened to the other half, you’d move eight million people out of the Barony of Angels so the Powers could have free rein as they did in the days when the Chumash lived here.

“David Fisher, Environmental Perfection Agency.”

It wasn’t any of the thecologists, for which I heartily thanked God. It was Michael Manstein. He said, “David, could you come down to the laboratory, please? I’d like to discuss the specimen you brought me for analysis.”

“Okay, if you want me to.” As soon as I’d heard his voice, I’d picked up a leadstick and a pad of foolscap. “But can’t you just tell me what’s in it over the phone?”

“I’d really rather not,” he said. Judging somebody’s tone on the phone is always risky, and Michael wouldn’t be anything but mild and serious even if the world started coming to an end around him. But I didn’t think he sounded cheerful.

Some new safety symbols were up around the lab, but I didn’t pay them any particular attention. Like any wizard worth his lab robe, Manstein was always fiddling with his protective setup. Technology changes all the time; if you don’t keep up, it’s your soul you’re risking. Michael Manstein wasn’t a man to take risks he could avoid.

“What do you have for me?” I asked as I came through the door. He’d arranged more amulets inside the lab, too; a lot of them featured the feathered serpent. I made the connection. “Is it as bad as that?”

He stared at me. His eyes had a slightly unfocused look I’d never seen in them before, as if he’d gone fishing for minnows and hooked the Midgard Serpent. On his lab table stood the ex-tartar-sauce jar I’d given him. Around it was scribed a sevenfold circle. Let me put it like this: they only protect the intercontinental megasalamander launch sites with eight. It wasn’t “as bad as that,” it was worse.

He said, “David, I have been a practicing thaumaturge for twenty-seven years now.” Utterly characteristic of him to be exact; had it been me, I’d’ve said something like going on thirty. He went on, “In that entire period, I do not believe I have ever seen an abomination of this magnitude.”

“Enough to cause apsychia in a fetus?” I asked.

“I’m surprised it didn’t desoul the mother,” he answered. From anyone else, that would have been exaggeration for conversational effect. Michael doesn’t talk that way. He handed me a sheet of parchment. “Here are the preliminary results of the analysis.”

My eyes swept down the list. For a few seconds, they didn’t believe what they were seeing, just as at first you refuse to draw meaning from pictures of camp survivors—and camp victims—of the Second Sorcerous War. Some horrors are too big to take in all at once.

I went back for a second look. The words, curse them, did not change. I made my mouth utter them: “Human blood, Michael? Flayed human skin? Are you sure your techniques distinguish between the substitute and the real thing? Maybe it was a substitute made through contagion rather than similarity?” That would be bad enough, but— I was grasping at straws and I knew it.

But Manstein shook his head. “Probability zero, I’m afraid. I hoped the same thing, but I didn’t just use sorcerous tests: I also employed mechanical forensic analysis. There can be no doubt of the actual human component of this elixir.”

I gulped. What he’d just told me meant that Lupe Cordero, a very nice girl, was also an unwitting cannibal. I wondered how anybody was supposed to break that to her. Poor kid—all she’d wanted to do was keep her breakfast down. As if she didn’t have troubles enough.

I looked at the thaumaturgical column on the parchment. Most of it was innocuous, even beneficial: Manstein had found invocations of the Virgin, the Son (I remembered the name of Lupe’s son), several saints from Aztecia, a couple of minor demons related (his neatly printed note said) to childbirth. But there in the middle of them, standing out like a dragon in a fairy ring: “Huitzilopochtli,” I said.

“Yes.” Michael’s understated agreement held a world of meaning.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t the Aztecian war god have been teetering on the edge of extinction? No one, not even the sort of people who march to save Medvamps, would have shed a tear to see him leave the Other Side for wherever gods go when they die. His influence on This Side has always been baleful, his power fueled by hearts ripped from human victims. What maniac, I wondered, had imagined he should be summoned to strengthen a potion that exalted life, not gore?

But I knew the answer to that: CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez. I must have said the name out loud, for one of Michael Manstein’s butter-colored eyebrows rose an eighth of an inch or so. “The curandero who made this stuff,” I explained.

“Ah,” Michael said. The eyebrow went down.

“Have you called the constabulary about this yet?” I asked.

“No; I thought it appropriate that you be the first to know.”

“Thanks.” I added, “Thanks twice, in fact. I don’t think I’ll eat any lunch today, so my waistline thanks you, too.”

“Heh, heh,” he said, just like that. I’m afraid he really is as straitlaced as that makes him sound.

“We’re going to be involved in nailing this curandero along with the constables,” I said. “I don’t remember the last time anything so nasty got loose in the environment, and God only knows how many jars are still sitting on shelves in the nostrums cabinet or next to the sink. If we’re real lucky, Hernandez will have kept records on the women he’s sold it to so he can try and poison them again with something else. Odds are, though, we’ll have to spread the word through the dailies and the churches.”

“Hernandez may not even be totally responsible,” Manstein said.

“How’s that?” I asked indignantly.

“The tests I performed seem to me to indicate that the mild beneficial influences in the potion were overlain on top of the already present summoning of Huitzilopochtli,” he answered. “The curandero may not have been aware that the latter was present.”

“If he didn’t know it was there, then he’s responsible for being a damned fool,” I snapped, and I meant it literally. “He certainly shouldn’t be allowed to run around loose practicing thaumaturgy and inflicting this garbage”—I pointed at the tartar-sauce jar—“on innocent, ignorant immigrant women.”

“There I cannot disagree with you,” Michael said. “Do you want to call the constabulary, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it,” I said after a few seconds’ thought. “I’ll want to fly up there with them and be in on the arrest, make sure however much of this potion Hernandez has is sealed and then properly disposed of.” I wished Solomon had heard of Huitzilopochtli; that would have made the problem of sealing the vicious stuff simple. But however effective the great king’s design is with jinni, baalim, and other Middle Eastern denizens of the Other Side, it’s useless against New World Powers, except those largely subsumed into a Christian matrix. And Huitzilopochtli, as Manstein’s analysis had shown all too clearly, still had a great deal of independent potency.

Then something else occurred to me: Hernandez’s horrible nostrum might end up in the Devonshire toxic spell dump. Tasting the irony of that, I went back to my office and got on the phone.

The first constable I talked to was a fellow named Joaquin Garcia. “Madre de Dios!” he burst out when I told him what I’d run into. Being of Aztecan descent, he had a culturally ingrained understanding of just how nasty a power Huitzilopochtli was. I knew it in my head; he felt it in his gut. He bumped me up to his superior, a sublegate called Higgins, and he must have given him an earful, too, because Higgins was the soul of cooperation.

“We’ll get going on a warrant for this right away, Inspector Fisher,” he promised. “Any time we get a chance to put one like that out of business, we leap on it.”

He didn’t argue when I said I wanted to go along, either; sometimes constables get stuffy about things like that. I added, “Better make sure your people are well warded, Sublegate: with one potion like that around, who knows what else Hernandez has in there with him?”

“We’ll send out the Special Wizards and Thaumaturges team,” Higgins said. “If they can’t handle it, nobody this side of D.St.C. can. I’ll call you back as soon as we have the warrant. Thanks for passing on the information.”

“My pleasure,” I told him. “I want this guy shut down at least as much as you do.”

After I got off the ether with Higgins, I went back through my files and found the names and addresses of the other three apsychic kids born near the Devonshire dump in the past year. Then I checked in the phone grimoire; two of the families were listed. I called both those houses and, by luck, got an answer each time. What I wanted to know was whether the mothers had bought any potions from CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez.

Both women I talked to answered no. I thanked them and added the data to my notes, then spent a while scratching my head. The curandero’s nostrum was certainly vile enough to have caused Jesus Cordero to be born without a soul, but just because it could have didn’t necessarily mean it had. I kicked myself for not doing a more thorough job around the Corderos’ house, but I didn’t kick too hard. When the microimps in your spellchecker start going berserk, you’d better pay attention to that.

More nearly routine stuff kept me busy the rest of the day. When Bea walked by my office door in the middle of the afternoon and saw me there, she raised an eyebrow and said, “I expected you’d be in the field now.”

I’d hoped to get to Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins myself, but it just wasn’t working. I said, “I’ll probably be out tomorrow or the next day,” and explained what Manstein had found in the potion I’d brought back from Lupe Cordero’s house.

“That’s—revolting,” she said. “You’re right, we need to clamp down on that as hard as we can. With the enormous Aztecian population in Angels City, the last thing we need here is a large-scale flareup of Huitzilopochtlism.”

“It would make worries over Medvamps rather small potatoes, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“I do admire your talent for understatement, David.” Bea headed on down the hall.

Understatement was an understatement. If Huitzilopochtli got established in Angels City, it wouldn’t be fruit trees drained dry, it would be people. I thought about hearts torn out on secret altars, necromancy, ritual cannibalism a lot less refined than the genteel Christian variety.

I also thought about all the other bloodthirsty Powers that would be drawn to the area. The act of human sacrifice is so powerful a magical instrument that it reverberates through the Other Side. All sorts of hungry Things would head this way, wanting their share: “When the gods smelled the sweet savor, they gathered like flies above the sacrifice.” What Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh five thousand years ago remains true today.

They say that’s how the horror happened in Alemania. But the Leader didn’t try to throw the Powers out. Oh, no. He welcomed them with open arms and fed them, I dare say, beyond their wildest dreams.

The whole world has seen what came of that. Not here, I thought. Never again.

Courts in Angels City open at half past nine. At exactly 9:37 the next morning (I asked my watch afterwards), I got a call from Sublegate Higgins. “We have the warrant,” he said. It was so fast, I wondered if he’d used Maximum Ruhollah. Maybe not; he operated out of the St. Ferdinand’s Valley substation, and he’d be sure to have a local judge up there under his spell. He went on, “We’re moving out at ten-thirty. If you’re not here by then, you’ll be late.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and got off the phone. Miserable cowboy, I thought: everything had to be his way. But I headed for my carpet as fast as I could; when you’re dealing with people like that, you don’t want to give them any excuse to mess you up.

Just as well I did, too—I made it to the substation with only about three minutes to spare. Traffic up through the pass was just ghastly. Don’t ask me how, but when a big long-haul transport carpet broke down and had to land, a unicorn got out of its cage. People on carpets and others riding pegasi were trying to herd it back to where it belonged, and weren’t having much luck.

As my carpet crawled through the gawkers’ block, I wondered if they’d have to go to a nunnery to find someone who could calm the beautiful beast. Given Angels City’s reputation, they might have had a tough time finding a virgin outside of one. Catching the unicorn, thank God, was not my worry.

When I finally did get to the constabulary station, Higgins gave me a disapproving look so perfectly flinty he must have practiced it in the mirror. He introduced me to the SWAT team, who looked more like combat soldiers than highly trained mages. I nodded to the thaumatech. “We’ve met before.”

“So we have.” It was Bornholm. “You came up to the Thomas Brothers fire.”

“That’s right. I still envy you your spellchecker.”

“Enough chitchat,” Higgins said. “Let’s fly.”

I’d never ridden on a black-and-white carpet before. Let me tell you, those things are hot. As we shot up the flyways to the curandero’s place, I reflected that the sylphs in the constabulary carpet could have used a little discipline themselves. A couple of turns would have tossed me off on my ear if I hadn’t been wearing my belt. But we got there in a hurry.

Hernandez’s house was on O’Melveny, a couple of lots east of Van Nuys. I hadn’t known whether he had a storefront for his death shop, but no, it was just a little old house with a hand-lettered sign—in green and red, as Lupe Cordero had told me—that said CURANDERO nailed onto the front porch.

Watching the SWAT team operate was something else, too. Police carpets aren’t bound by the governing spells that restrict ordinary vehicles to their flyways. The mages drew an aerial ward circle around Hernandez’s establishment from above before anybody landed. Whatever he had in there, they weren’t about to give him a chance to use it. Constables don’t live to enjoy their grandchildren by taking risks they don’t have to.

Sublegate Higgins used an insulated umbrella (same principle as the footbridge at the Devonshire dump, but applied upside down) to penetrate the circle. With him came four of the SWAT team wizards, Bornholm the thaumatech with her fancy spellchecker, and, bringing up the rear, yours truly. All the firepower that preceded me—the constables were armed for any sort of combat, physical as well as magical—made me wish I was one of the mild-mannered bureaucrats the public imagines all government workers to be; I wouldn’t have minded falling asleep at my desk just then.

Bornholm said, “The spellchecker’s already sniffing something nasty up ahead.”

Higgins rapped on the door. Now the boys from the SWAT team stood on either side of him, ready to kick it down. But it opened. I don’t know what I’d expected CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez to look like, but an Aztecan version of your well-loved grandfather wasn’t it. He had white hair, spectacles, and, until he took in the crowd on his front porch, a very pleasant expression.

That faded in a hurry, to be replaced by bewilderment. “What you want?” he asked in accented English.

“You are CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez, the curandero?” Higgins said formally.

“Sí, but—” The old man smiled. “You need what I got, señor? Maybe you have trouble keeping your woman happy?”

From the way the back of Higgins’ neck went purple and then white, maybe he did have trouble keeping his woman happy. But he was a professional; his voice didn’t change as he went on, “Mr. Hernandez, I have here a warrant permitting the Angels City Constabulary to search these premises for substances contravening various sections of city, provincial, and Confederal ordinances dealing with controlled sorcerous materials, and another warrant for your arrest on a charge of dispensing such materials. You are under arrest, sir. Anything you say may be used against you.”

Hernandez stared as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Señor, you must be mistaken,” he said with considerable dignity. “I am just a curandero; I don’t hardly do no magic worth the name.”

“Did you sell a potion to a pregnant woman named Lupe Cordero a few months ago?” I asked: “One that was supposed to fight morning sickness and keep the baby healthy?”

“I sell lots of these potions,” he said, shrugging. “It could be.”

“Lupe Cordero’s baby was born without a soul,” I told him.

He went pale under his swarthy skin; had he started off fair, he would have ended up the color of his shining hair. He crossed himself violently. “No!” he cried. “It cannot be!”

“I’m afraid it is, Mr. Hernandez,” I said, remembering Michael Manstein’s speculation that the curandero might not even know what all was going into his nostrums. I went on, “Sorcerous analysis of your potion shows that part of its power comes from ingredients and spells consecrated to Huitzilopochtli.”

Like any Aztecans, he knew of the gods his people had worshiped before the Spainish came to the New World. He got paler still; he reminded me of a cup of coffee into which you kept pouring more cream. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, señor, I did not use this, this poison of blood.”

“But it was there,” I said.

“It’s still there,” Bornholm the thaumatech added. “I can detect it inside the house. Nasty stuff.”

“Stand aside, Mr. Hernandez,” Higgins said in a voice like doom. The curandero stood aside, as if caught in a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake up. One of the fellows from the SWAT team took charge of him. The rest of us walked past them into the house.

It was none too neat in there; my guess was that he lived alone. A black-framed picture of a gray-haired woman on the mantle put more force behind the guess.

If he followed Huitzilopochtli, he sure didn’t let it show. The front room had enough garish Catholic images to stock a couple of churches, assuming you put quality ahead of quantity. Candles flickered in front of a carved wooden statuette of the Virgin. I glanced at Bornholm. She nodded; the little shrine was what it appeared to be.

One of the bedrooms was messy; it got a lot messier after the boys from the SWAT team finished trashing it. The kitchen was pretty bad, too: Hernandez was not what you’d call the neat kind of widower. The SWAT team started in there as soon as they were done with the bedroom.

What had been the den was the curandero’s laboratory these days. A lot of the things in there were about what you’d expect to find in an Aztecian healer’s workroom: peyotl mushrooms (few more effective aids in reaching the Other Side), bark of the oloiuhqu plant (which has similar effects but isn’t as potent: it’s related to jimsonweed), a potion of xiuh-amolli root and dog urine that was supposed to prevent hair loss. Personally, I’d rather be bald.

Hernandez had had his triumphs, too: a glass bowl held dozens of what looked like tiny obsidian arrow points. Either they were a fraud to impress his patients or he’d been pretty good at curing elf-shot (from which the Aztecans suffer as badly as the Alemans, although Alemanian elves generally make their arrowheads out of flint).

We also found an infusion for invoking Tlazol-teteo, the demon of desire: not, apparently, to provoke lust, but rather to put it down. The infusion had a label written in Spainish on it. Bornholm the thaumatech translated it for us: “ ‘To be used together with a hot steam bath.’ ” She laughed. “I wouldn’t be horny after a steam bath anyhow, I don’t think.”

If that had been all the curandero was up to, the visit by the SWAT team would have been a waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned crowns. But it wasn’t. Bornholm went over to a table in one corner of the room. She looked at her spellchecker in growing concern. “It’s here somewhere, in amongst this gynecological stuff,” she muttered.

Again, a lot of the stuff you could find at any curandero’s: leaves for rubbing against a new mother’s back to relive afterpangs, herbs to stimulate milk in women with new babies, a douche of ayo nelhuatl herb and eagle dung for pregnant women: all more or less harmless. But with them—

“Bingo!” Bornholm said when she opened a jar of clear liquid. I already knew her spellchecker was more sensitive and powerful than mine; now she showed that, being a constabulary model, it was also better protected against malign influences. Her face twisted as she read from the ground glass: “The microimps are reporting human blood and flayed human skin, all right. Disgusting.”

“Bring Hernandez in here,” Sublegate Higgins ordered. As soon as a couple of fellows from the SWAT team had done so, Higgins pointed at the jar and said, “What’s in there, you?”

“In that jar?” Hernandez said. “Is ferret blood and a little bit dragon’s blood. Is for mostly the ladies who are going to have babies. They get the—” He ran out of English and said something in Spainish.

“Hemorrhoids,” Bornholm translated. “Yeah, I’ve heard of that one.” She gave the curandero a look on whose receiving end I wouldn’t have wanted to be. “Brew this up yourself, did you?”

“No, no.” Hernandez shook his head vehemently. “Dragon blood is muy caro—very expensive. I buy this mix from another man—he say he is a curandero, too—at one of the, how you say, swap meets they have here. He give me good price, better than I get from anybody else ever.”

“I believe that,” I told him. “The reason you got such a good price is that it’s not what he told you it was. Tell us about this fellow. Is he young? Old? Does he come to the swap meets often?”

You can find just about anything at a swap meet, and cheap. Sometimes it’s even what the dealer says it is. But a lot of the time the fairy gold ring you got will turn to brass or lead in a few days, the horological demon in your watch will go dormant or escape—or what you think is medicine will turn out to be poison. The constabulary and the EPA do their best to keep the meets honest, but it’s another case of not enough men spread way too thin.

Hernandez said, “He calls himself Jose. He’s not young, not old. Just a man. I see him a few times. He is not regular there.”

Sublegate Higgins and I looked at each other. He looked disgusted. I didn’t blame him. An ordinary guy named Jose who showed up at swap meets when he felt like it… what were the odds of dropping on him? About the same as the odds of the High Priest in Jerusalem turning Hindu.

That’s what I thought, anyhow. But Bornholm said, “If we can put a spellchecker at the dealers’ gates at a few of these places, I’ll bet they’ll pick this stuff up—it’s that strong. I’ll work weekends without overtime to try, and I’ll be shocked if some other thaumatechs don’t say the same thing. Everybody knows about Huitzilopochtli; no one wants him loose here.”

Greater love hath no public servant than volunteering for extra work with no extra pay. Folks who carp about the constabulary and about bureaucracy in general have a way of forgetting people like Bornholm, and they shouldn’t, because there are quite a few of them.

I said, “If you’ll lend me one of these fancy spellcheckers, I’ll take a Sunday shift myself. I know a lot of people would rather worship than work then, but that’s not a problem for me.”

“I think I’ll take you up on that,” Higgins said after a few seconds’ thought. I’d figured he would; the constabulary doesn’t draw a whole lot of Jews. I wrote down my home phone number and gave it to him. “You’ll hear from me,” he promised.

“I hope I do.” I have to confess: I had an ulterior motive, or at least part of one. The dealers at a swap meet get in early, so they can set up. I figured I’d bring Judy along, and after we were done with the checking (assuming we didn’t find anything), we could spend the rest of the day shopping. Like I said, you can find just about anything at a swap meet.