The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

V

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 Bomholm. 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: Hemandez 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: peyoti mushrooms (few more effective aids in reaching the Other Side), bark of the olotuhqu plant (which has similar effects but isn’t as potent: it’s related to jinnsonweed), a potion of xiuh-amolli root and dog urine that was supposed to prevent hair loss. Personally, I’d rather be bald.

Hemandez 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 Tiazol-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. Bomholm the thaumatech translated it for us: “To be used together with a hot steam bath.’” She laughed. “I wouldn’t be homy 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’ hardearned crowns. But it wasn’t. Bomholm went over to a table in one comer 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 nelhuati 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?” Hemandez 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,” Bomholm 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.” Hemandez 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.

Hemandez 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 Bomholm 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—its 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 Bomholm, 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 v A couple of days after we put Cuauhtemoc Hemandez out of business, Sublegate Higgins did indeed call me to set up Sunday surveillance at one of the Valley swap meets. That evening, I called Judy to see if she could come along with me. As I’d hoped, she could. After we’d made the date, we kept on talking about the whole expanding case for a while.

I was saying, “If Hemandez can show he gave Lupe Cordero that vile potion out of ignorance rather than malice, he’ll get a lighter sentence than he would otherwise.” °I don’t think ignorance is a proper defense in case like that,” Judy said. “If a cwandero doesn’t know what he’s doing, he has no business trying to do it.” Dealing with grimoires every dav, she takes an exacting view of magic and its abuses.

“I’m not sure I agree with you,” I said. “Intent counts for a great deal in sorcery. It—” I heard a noise from the front part of the flat and broke off. “Listen, let me call you back. I think somebody’s at the door.”

I went out to see who it was: most likely one of my neighbors wanting to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar, I figured.

But somebody wasn’t at the door, he was already inside, sitting on a living room chair. I could still see the chair through him, too, so it was somedisembody.

“How’d you get in here?” I demanded; as I may have said, I have more than the usual line of home security cantrips. I gave fair warning: “I forbid thee, spirit, in the name of God—Adonai, Elohim, Jehovah—to enter within this house.

Depart now, lest I smite thee with the consecrated blasting rod of power.” You don’t (or you’d better not) bluff when you say you’re packing a rod; mine was in the hall closet behind me.

But the spirit didn’t move. Calm as could be, he said, “I think you’ll want to reconsider that.” He traced a glowing symbol in the air.

If you’ve ever been to a light-and-magic thrillshow, you probably think you know that symbol. As a matter of fact, the one you think you know isn’t the genuine article: close, but not quite. Only specially authorized beings may sketch the true symbol and have it take fire for them. I happen to know the difference. My eyes got wide. An ordinary Joe like me never expects to meet a real spook from Central Intelligence.

“What do you want with me?” I asked hoarsely.

The CI spook looked me over. “We take an interest in Huitzilopochtli,” he said. “Maybe you’ll tell me what you know about the recent manifestation you uncovered.”

So I told him. And as I talked, I found myself wondering just what the devil I was getting into. Every step into the toxic spell dump case seemed to drag me deeper into a polluted ooze from which I feared I’d be lucky to escape with my soul intact After I was through, the spook sat there for quite a while without saying anything. I watched him, I watched the chair through him, and I tried to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit together. Evidently my visitor from Central Intelligence was doing the same thing, because he finally said, “In your opinion, what, if anything, is the relationship between the various elements you have outlined: the leaking spell dump, the monastery arson, the possibilities inherent in the Garuda Bird project, the decline of the local Powers, and this trouble with the curcmdero and his potions?”

“I didn’t think there was any connection between the Chumash and the rest of the mess,” I exclaimed; that hadn’t even occurred to me. “As for the other things, I’m still digging, and so is the Angels City constabulary. If you want my gut feeling, I think some of the other things will prove tied together, but I don’t see how right now—and I don’t have any sort of evidence to back me up.”

“Never underestimate the value of gut feelings,” the spook said seriously. “You ignore them at your peril. The finding at Central Intelligence is essentially the same as yours; otherwise they would not have sent out a spectral operative”—that’s spook-talk for spook—“to bring an overview back to D.StC.”

Etheric transport is of course a lot quicker than the fastest carpet: the spook could just cut directly through the Other Side from the District of St. Columbaand back, a privilege denied to all mere mortals save a handful of saints, dervishes, and boddhisatvas, none of whom, for various good reasons, was likely to be in the employ of Central Intelligence.

I said, “Since you’ve come crosscountry to interview me”—that seemed a politer phrase than interrogate me—“maybe you’ll tell me something, too.” When the spook didn’t say no, I went on, “Is this case somehow connected with worries about the Third Sorcerous War?”

The spook got up from the chair, took a couple of steps toward me. “How did you make that connection?”

His voice was quiet, and cold as hemlock moving up toward the heart. He took another step in my direction. I don’t have a big front room; he was already halfway across it.

Three more steps and he could do—I didn’t know what, but I’d read enough spy thrillers to make some guesses: reach inside my head and pinch off an arteiy, maybe. Unless a good forensic sorcerer helped do my autopsy, I’d go into the Thomas Brothers’ demographic records as just another case of apoplexy, younger than most.

I slapped backward, yanked open the closet door, whipped out the blasting rod, and pointed it at the spook’s midsection. “Back off!” I told him. This rod is primed and ready—all I have to do is say the Word and you’re cooked.”

Of course, my flat would be cooked, too; a rod operates on This Side as well as the Other. But I figured I had a better chance of escaping from a burning flat than from a CI spook.

He stood very still. He didn’t come forward, but he didn’t move back, not even when I thrust the rod out toward him.

As he had before, he said, “I think you’ll want to reconsider that. Unless you’re packing something very much out of the ordinary, you’ll hurt your books and furniture much more than me.”

I knew the military had developed some high-level protection for their own spectral operatives; it seemed reasonable that a Central Intelligence spook would enjoy the same shielding. Come to that, some of the goetic technology has trickled down to the Underworld, which makes constables unhappy. On the other hand—“This is a Mage Abramelin Mogen David Special,” I said.

“I don’t care how well you’re warded against Christian or Muslim magic: this is the fire that dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Now the spook backed up. Being transparent, his features were hard to make out, but I thought he looked thoughtful.

“You could be bluffing,” he said.

“So could you.”

“Impasse.” He went back to the chair, sat down again. I lowered the rod, but I didn’t let go of it The spook said,

“Since we are uncertain of each othefs powers, shall we proceed as if the recent unpleasantness had not taken place?

Let me ask you again, with no threat intended or implied, why you believe this case my be connected to national security issues.”

“Well, for one thing, why would you have walked through my door if it weren’t?” I said.

The spook grimaced mistily. “Heisenberg’s Thaumaturgic Principle: the mere act of observation magically affects that which is being observed. I console myself by remembering I’m not the first to fall victim to it, nor shall I be the last.”

I didn’t want any kind of spook, not even a philosophical one, in my front room. I went on, “If it makes you feel any better, I was worried about it before I ever set eyes on you.

Too many big Powers involved: Beelzebub, the whole Persian mess I haven’t got to the bottom of yet, now Huitzilopochtli.” I didn’t mention Charlie Kelly. I wasn’t sure he deserved my loyalty, not any more, but he still had it.

“I must advise you to keep your suspicions to yourself,” the spook said after a longish pause {he might as weU have been on the telephone ran through my mind—one of those maddening bursts of irrelevance that will pop up no matter what you do). “Reaching the wrong ears, your prophecy could become self-fulfilling.”

“It might help if you’d tell me which ears are the wrong ones.” If I sounded plaintive, can you blame me?

He shook his murky head. “No, for two reasons. First, the information is classified and therefore not to be casually disseminated under any circumstances. And second, the more you know, the more apt you are to betray yourself to those who may have reason to be interested in your knowledge.

Your basic assumption should be that no one may be privy to your speculations. If anyone with whom you come into contact shows undue interest in this area, summon me at once from Central Intelligence headquarters in D.StC.”

“How do I get hold of you in particular?” I asked—I mean. Central Intelligence has a lot of spooks on the payroll.

“My name is Legion,” he said. “Henry Legion.” He turned around, walked out through my chair and wall, and was gone.

Next day, thank God, was Friday. Traffic was light going in, as it often is on Friday mornings. I wasn’t fooled; I knew I’d have the usual devilish time getting home. I tried not to think about that. Maybe, I told myself as I floated up the elevator shaft, I’d have myself a nice easy day, knock off early, and beat the weekend crunch on St James’ Freeway.

I walked into my office, took one look at the IN basket, and screamed. Sitting there was one of the ugliest Confederal forms ever designed. In big block letters, the cover said, REQUEST FOR ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT. Slightly smaller letters added, PROPOSED IMPORTATION OF NEW SPECIES INTO BARONY OF ANGELS.

Having got the scream out of my system, I merely moaned as I sank into my chair. Who, I wondered, wanted to bring what into Angels City, and why? I just wished Huitzilopochtli had to fill out all the forms he’d need to establish himself here legally: we’d be free of him till Doomsday, or maybe twenty minutes longer.

Huitzilopochtli and his minions, unfortunately, didn’t bother with forms. With trembling fingers, I picked up the report request and opened it. Somebody, it seemed, was proposing to schlep leprechauns over from the Auld Sod in hibemiation, revive them once they got here, and establish a colony in Angels City.

At first glance it looked reasonable. We have a good number of Erse here, and a lot more who pretend they are when St. Padraig’s Day rolls around. The leprechauns wouldn’t have any trouble feeling at home in Angels City. Tracking the little critters to their pots of gold would help a few poor folk pay off the mortgage. The odds were about like winning the lottery, but who doesn’t plunk down a few crowns on the lottery every now and again?

The way of environmental issues, though, is to get more complicated the longer you look at them. Figuring out how leprechauns would affect the local thecology wasn’t going to be easy: tracing the interactions of beings from This Side is complicated enough, but when you start having Powers involved—I moaned again, medium loud. One of the things I’d have to examine was the impact importing leprechauns would have on the Chumash Powers (assuming those weren’t extinct). If the Chumash Powers were still around, hanging by a metaphorical fingernail, would bringing in leprechauns rob them of the tiny measure of devotion they needed to survive?

Bea walked by the open door just in time to hear that moan. She stuck her head into the office. “Why, David, whatever is the matter?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.

This,” I said, pointing to the orange cover of the environmental impact report request. “Do you by any chance have a spell for making days forty-eight hours long so I can do everything I’m supposed to?”

“If I did, I’d use it myself,” she said, “but I don’t think God’s been in the habit of holding back the sun since Joshua’s day.”

“This is going to be a bear to handle,” I said, “especially on top of the Devonshire dump case and the Chumash extinction study—” St. Elmo’s fire came on above my head, just like you see in the cartoons. “That’s why you passed it on to me: so I could run it parallel to the Chumash project.”

That’s right, David.” She smiled sweetly. Bea isn’t what you’d call pretty, but she can look almost angelic sometimes: being sure you’re on the right path will do that for you, I guess. She went on, “I figured it would be better to have both of them in your hands than to make two people run back and forth checking with each other all the time and maybe working at cross purposes.”

“Okay,” I said; put that way, it made sense. Bea didn’t get to be boss of my unit on the strength of an angelic smile; she has a head on her shoulders.

The easiest way to handle the issue would be to work up two scenarios,” she said: “one for the leprechauns’ environmental effects without worrying about the Chumash powers, the other assuming those Powers do still manifest themselves here.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” I scribbled a note on a scrap of foolscap on my desk. “Thanks, Bea.”

“Any time,” she said, sweetly still, and went off to inflict impossible amounts of work on someone else. To be fair, I have to admit she worked like a team ofPercherons herself. And she had put her finger on the most efficient way to handle the two studies side by side. They still wouldn’t be easy or quick. I’d have to design simulations approximating the immediate effect of leprechauns on the thecology of Angels City with and without taking into account the Chumash Powers. Then an EPA wizard would animate the simulations and follow them under the crystal ball as far into the future as he could, noting changes every year or two until the images faded into uncertainty.

I’d have to justify every assumption I used in my initial simulations, too. The people who wanted to import leprechauns in carpetioad lots and the folk who were convinced bringing in even one wee fellow would disrupt the local thecosystem would both be preparing their own models and running them under crystal balls. I’d need to demonstrate that mine were the most accurate representations of what was likely to happen.

All of which meant that I didn’t get out to Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins that afternoon, let alone Chocolate Weasel.

And neither I nor anybody else did any fancy spellchecker sniffing around the Devonshire dump to try to find out just what (if anything) was leaking out.

People long for the days (or at least they say they do) when the king ruled instead of reigning, when the power of the barons was undiluted, when the prime minister kept quiet and did what he was told. They say the government’s gotten too big, too complex.

Maybe they’re right some of the time. I couldn’t teD you for sure; politics is a brand of theology that never excited me. But I will tell you this: some important EPA work wasn’t getting done because my department didn’t have enough people to deal with projects as fast as they came up. Am I supposed to assume we’re the only government outfit with that problem?

I know I worked overtime that night; I made it to the synagogue with bare minutes to spare before the rabbi started singing L’khah dodi to welcome in the Sabbath. Judy was sitting so close to the front on the women’s side that she didn’t even see me come in. I didn’t manage to nod at her—let alone say hello—until the service was done.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” she said after we hugged.

“Work.” I made it sound like the four-letter word it was.

“Listen, have you eaten yet?” I grimaced when she nodded.

“All right, you want to come along with me anyhow? I’ll get you pie and coffee or something. I flew straight here from the office.”

“Sure,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

We ended up at a Lenny’s not far from the synagogue: a step up from the Golden Steeples, a step down from a real restaurant. I just wanted to feed my face—and they do have pretty fair pie.

And besides, I thought, remembering Henry Legion, it wasn’t a place that was likely to have a Listener planted in it.

I hadn’t called Judy back to tell her about the spook: by the time he got out of my flat, I was imagining people (and Things) listening to my phone calls. When I was through, she stared at me for a few seconds. Then she said, “You’re not making that up,” in a tone of voice that meant she’d been wondering right up to the end.

“Not a bit of it.” I was a little hurt she had trouble believing me, but only a little, because I would have had trouble believing a story like that from anybody else. I mean, people don’t just start having visits from spooks with threatening manners… except I did. I added, “From what he said, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”

“David Fisher, if you even thought of keeping me in the dark, I’d show your picture to a mirror and then break the mirror,” she said indignantly.

“I sort of expected as much,” I said. “Thing is, from what Henry Legion said, it’s liable to get dangerous.”

“You didn’t worry about that when you took me to the Thomas Brothers fire—”

I tried to interrupt: “I didn’t take you there; you invited yourself.”

She rode over me like the demon horses of the Wild Hunt. “-and you invited me to the swap meet with you day after tomorrow.”

“I did that before the spook showed up,” I muttered.

“Do you want me not to come?” she said. “Do you want me not to go back to your flat with you tonight? Do you want, me not to bother going ahead with the arrangements for the;. wedding? Do you think I’m afraid? Don’t you see I want to’ get to the bottom of this as badly as you do?”

I did the only thing I could possible do at that particular moment: I surrendered. I did it literally—I took a white handkerchief out of my pocket and waved it in the air between us. Judy, bless her, went from furious to giggling in the space of a second and a half. The waitress who’d been about to refill my coffee cup undoubtedly figured I’d gone out of my mind, but that was a small price to pay for keeping my fiancee happy.

Only trouble was, I was land of afraid myself.

After sunset Saturday, I flew up to St. Ferdinand’s Valley to pick up the heavy-duty constabulary spellchecker. An advantage of dealing with the constabulary is that they never close (given human nature, they’d better not). A disadvantage is that their parchmentwork is even more cumbersome than what the EPA uses (and if you didn’t think that was possible, you’re not the only one). By the language of their forms, they figured I’d abscond with the gadget the second their backs were turned unless I promised not to in writing ahead of time.

“Why don’t you just lay a gear on me?” I asked sarcastically.

“Oh no, sir,” said the clerk who kept shoving parchments at me. “That would be a violation of your rights.” Apparently signing away my life wasn’t.

Because I spent so long signing forms, I didn’t get back to my place until going on ten. I lugged the spellchecker upstairs (it was nominally portable, but being part troll didn’t hurt if you wanted to carry it more than a few feet), put it down so I could open the door, picked it up again with a grunt, and set it down in the middle of the front room.

“It’s about time you got back,” Judy said. “I was starting to worry about you.”

“Forms,” I said, and tried to make it sound as blasphemous as one of your more usual maledictions. I must have managed, because Judy laughed. I stretched. Something in my back went pop. It felt good. I suspected I’d lost about half an inch of height manhandling the spellchecker up to my flat. Maybe the pop meant I was getting it back again. I glared at the gadget “Miserable thing.”

“Twenty years ago, there weren’t any portables,” Judy reminded me. “Ten years ago, one with the capacity of the ’checker in your closet would have been bigger and heavier than this beast. Ten years from now, they’ll probably pack even more microimps into a case you can cany around in your hip pocket.”

“Too bad they haven’t done it yet,” I grumbled, and stretched some more.

Judy gave me a sidelong look. “Are you trying to tell me you want me to get on top tonight?”

“If that’s what you’d like,” I said. Far as I can see, it’s wonderful either way, or any others your imagination conjures up.

She asked her watch what time it was. A tiny vertical frown line appeared between her eyes.

“Whatever we do, let’s do it soon. We’re going to have to get up early to make it to the Valley when the swap meet dealers start coming in.”

So we did it soon, and it was fine. Judy is one of the most thoroughly pragmatic people I’ve ever met, but that doesn’t keep her from being able to enjoy herself. It just means she makes sure she blocks out the time in which to enjoy herself.

My alarm clock woke us up much too early on an otherwise perfectly good Sunday morning, then laughed at us as we staggered around like a couple of the not-quite-living dead. I swore I’d have to get a new clock one day soon. I think I’ve said that before, but this time I really meant it.

I showered, then shaved while Judy went in after me. I was dressed by the time she came out, and fixed breakfast while she got that thick, wavy hair of hers dry. Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee—very basic. I threw the dishes in the sink for later, did my he-man weightlifting routine with the constabulary spellchecker, and offwe went They hold the Sunday morning swap meet at the Mason Fly-In. By night it’s the biggest outdoor light-and-magic house in the Valley. By day it’s just an enormous parking lot, so they get some extra use—and some extra crowns—out of the space.

Because we were good and early, we got to park dose to the dealers’ entrance, for which my overworked back was heartily grateful. The only people there were a couple of guards drinking coffee from a big jug. They looked like (and turned out to be) sunlighting off-duty constables.

Their names were Luke and Pete; I had trouble remembering which one was which. They both had the same short, dark hair, the same watchful eyes, the same big shoulders. They’d been told we were coming—somebody was on the ball there. They helped set up the spellchecker at the side of the gate, then poured more coffee for Judy and me. It was nice and hot; the jug must have had a tiny salamander in the base.

Some of the new storage vessels have a salamander on one side and an ice elemental on the other, so they can keep hot things hot and cold things cold. The only problem is, you don’t want to drop them. If the partition between the two elementals breaks, they fight like cats and dogs.

I explained what I was looking for, and why. Both guards looked grim. Pete—or maybe it was Luke—said, “I hope you nail the bastard. I got three kids at home; I don’t like thinking about anything like that happening to one of ’em.” Luke—or was it Pete?-pointed to the spellchecker and said, “I wish that thing could spot theft along with sorcery. It would sure make the department’s life a lot easier.”

Pete(?)—anyway, the other one—said, “I was at a briefing about theft detectors a couple of weeks ago. From what I heard, they operate by spotting guilt in a perpetrator’s soul. Trouble is, most perpetrators don’t feel enough guilt to set ’em off.”

Judy said, “I understand they’ve recently identified the sorcerous component of intent. That may make some new lands of anti-theft magic possible, provided the discrimination spell routines are sensitive enough to tell real larceny from a merchant’s legitimate appetite for profit”

The guards had given her the usual looks a man gives an attractive woman. They were polite about it—nothing to bother her or me. Now they looked at her in a different way.

I’d seen that happen a lot of times before, when people realized how sharp she was. I just smiled; I’ve known it for years.

“I sure hope they make something like mat work,” Pete said. “An awful lot of stuff you see here is stolen. Everybody knows it, but how do you prove it? If you could—”

“It’ll happen,” Judy said. “Not tomorrow, probably not the day after, either, but ifU happen. The principles are there.

The gremlins are in engineering the actuating sorcery and the support systems.”

“By God, I’d cheer for anything that made my job easier for once,” Pete said.

“I’d cheer louder if I thought the techniques would just be used for tracking down thieves, but I’ve got a bad feeling they won’t,” Judy said. The more effective magic becomes, the more the powers that be will use it to poke into ordinary people’s lives. That’s the way things seem to work, anyhow.”

Pete and Luke represented the powers that be. Now they looked at each other, but neither of them said anything—I told you they were polite. For that matter, I’m part of the powers that be, too, but I stood with Judy on this one. People often don’t realize how precious just being left alone is.

Even if the guards had decided to aigue, we’d have been too busy to cany it very far: dealers started showing up. Pete and Luke checked their permits and made sure they’d paid for their stall space. Judy and I monitored the spellchecker as they came through the gateway. Some of them had their goods and stall setups on carts that they pushed or pulled, others piled them onto little carpets. That sort isn’t Byway—legal, but it’s awfully handy for hauling things around.

Quite a few dealers weren’t happy about passing in front of a spellchecker. “What is this, the airport?” one of them grumbled.

So many dealers asked questions that my spiel got real smooth real fast By the time the first four or five had gone by, I’d taken out my EPA sigil and set it on top of the spellchecker. I’d point to it and say, “We’re looking for a very specific contaminant that we have reason to believe is being sold at swap meets, perhaps unwittingly. Nothing else we notice will get cited.”

That probably wasn’t quite true; if somebody’d come by with something as conspicuously illegal as a crate of black lotuses (better known as Kali’s flowers), for instance, we wouldn’t have let him take them in. But, to my relief, nothing like that happened, and the explanation kept the dealers from getting antsy.

Heavens, what a lot of stuff there was! Clothes, food, jewelry, nostrums (the microimps in the spellchecker seemed dubious a few times, but not dubious enough to make me stop anybody), ethemet receiver imp modules (I wondered how many of those were stolen), toys both mechanical and sorcerous, guitars, grimoires (Judy looked more than scornful at the quality)-I could go on for a lot longer.

The dealers were as varied as the stuff they sold: men, women, blonds, blacks, Aztedans, Persians, Hanese, Samoans, Indians in dhotis and saris, the other flavor Indians in feathers. I watched one bronze-skinned fellow slip out of his work shirt and put on a feather bonnet. He noticed me watching him, grinned land of sheepishly. “Gotta look authentic if you want the people to buy your medicine, man,” he said as he pushed his cart past me.

“Why not?” I answered agreeably. I glanced down at the spellchecker. From what the microimps had to say about them, the medicines weren’t strong enough to be worth buying. I wondered if the alleged Indian was even as genuine as the stuff he sold.

The next fellows through were a pair of Aztecans. The had a rug with their stuff on it, and were chatting with each other in Spainish.

Judy gave me a hard shot in the ribs with her elbow.

“Huh?” I said. Then I looked at the ground glass in the spellchecker. If they hadn’t been trained to tell what they were sensing, the little imps would have run and hid. As it was—My stomach lurched when I saw what they reported.

“Hold on there, you two,” I said sharply They hadn’t noticed me or the spellchecker. “What’s the matter?” one of them asked at the same time as the other one said, “Who are you?”

I picked up my sigil. “Environmental Perfection Agency,”

I said. “What do you have in those boxes?”

“Nostrums,” one of them answered. “I got a friend, his brother-in-law hunts dragons down in Aztecia. He gets the blood, sells some to us, we dilute it, sell some here. Everybody makes some money.”

He didn’t sound like a crook, just a fellow doing a job.

That’s what he looked like, too, he and his friend both: ordinary guys in work shoes and jeans, cotton tunics and caps.

The first thing you learn is, you can’t tell by looking. Pete and Luke came alert They didn’t move toward us, not yet, but they quivered like lycanthropes just before the full moon rises.

“Which one of you is Jose?” Judy asked suddenly.

The one in the red cap jerked in surprise. “How’d you know that, lady?”

I unreeled the long probe from the spellchecker (actually, I wished I had one of those eleven-foot Rumanians). Tm going to have to ask you to open one of those jars of dragon blood for me,” I said.

Jose shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” He flipped the lid off one of the boxes. The jars inside looked like the ones Cuauhtemoc Hemandez kept in his workroom. Once upon a time, they’d held mayonnaise. Now… As soon as Jose unscrewed a top, I knew what they held: Judy, who was at the spellchecker, made a small, strangled noise. I’d told her what kind of stuff was in there, but hearing about it doesn’t pack the same punch as seeing it in the ground glass.

I waved to Pete and Luke. They came trotting over. The fellow in the blue cap, who’d kept pretty quiet up till now, saw them and said, “What the hell’s going on?”

Thafc just what I want to know,” I snapped. Considering what was in the jars, I meant it literally. I turned back to Jose.

“You ever sell any of this, ah, ‘dragon blood’ to a cumndero named Cuauhtemoc Hemandez?”

“I sell to lots of people, man,” he answered. They pay cash. I don’t ask who they are. You know how that goes.” He spread his hands and looked at me, one man of the world to another.

I knew how it went, all right. It meant he didn’t pay taxes on the money he made at the swap meets. It’s theoretically possible for the Crown to keep track of all the crowns in the Confederation. The financial wi2ards in the gray flannel suits back in D.StC. would love to do it, too. Trouble is, of course, that the sorcery involved is so complex that it makes getting the Garuda Bird off the ground look like tossing a roc by comparison. And so people like Jose will go on cheating on what they owe, and people like you and me will end up footing the bill for them.

Except now Jose was facing some time at public expense of an altogether different sort. I said, “By what the spellchecker shows me, sir, there isn’t any dragon blood in here. There’s human blood, and human skin, and”—I looked back at Judy, who nodded—“a godawful strong stink of Huitzilopochtli.”

Jose and blue-cap (I found out later his name was Carlos, so I’ll call him that) looked at each other. If they weren’t utterly appalled, they should have been making their money at the light-and-magic shows, not swap meets. They wouldn’t have gotten it in cash, but they’d have made enough to keep from complaining.

As soon as he heard Huitzilopochtli, Pete (or maybe Luke) said, “You gentlemen are under arrest. Anything you say may be used against you.”

The off-duty constable who hadn’t arrested the nostrums peddlers—whichever one he was—headed for the office.

“I’ll call the station, get ’em to send a squad carpet over here.”

As soon as he’d gone maybe twenty feet toward the door, Jose and Carlos tried to run for it. Being off duty, Pete carried only a club. He yanked it out and pounded after Jose.

That left me with Carlos. “Be careful, Dave!” Judy yelled at my back. It was good advice. It would have been even better had I been in a position to take it.

Carlos was a little wiry guy, and shifty as a jackrabbit. But every one of my strides ate up twice as much ground as his.

He looked over his shoulder, saw I was gaining, and didn’t watch where his feet were going. He fell splat on his face. I jumped on him.

His hand darted for one of the pockets in his jeans. I didn’t know what he had in there: maybe something as simple as a knife, maybe a talisman like the ones at Loki, except with a demon ordered to attack whoever was bothering him.

Whatever he had, I didn’t care to find out the hard way, either. I grabbed his wrist and hung on for dear life.

“Don’t be stupid,” I panted. “You won’t get away, and you will get yourself in more trouble.”

“Chinga tu niadre,” he said: no doubt sincere, but less than germane. Then he tried to knee me in a place which would have interfered with my carrying out his instructions.

I managed to twist away so I took it in the side of the hip.

It still hurt, but not the way it would have. As if from very far away, I heard people shouting back and forth, the way they do when they have no idea what’s going on and just get more confused trying to find out Carlos took another shot at refaceting my family jewels.

Then, from right above us, somebody yelled, “Freeze, asshole!” Somewhere in his past, Carlos must have painfully found out what happened when you disobeyed that particular command. He went limp.

Very cautiously, I looked back over my shoulder. There was (I think) Luke with his club upraised to do some serious facial rearrangement on anybody who felt like arguing with him. “He’s all yours,” I croaked, and got to my feet.

I hadn’t noticed till then that I’d torn my pants, ripped a chunk of hide off one knee, and scraped an elbow, too—not quite as bad. Things started to hurt, all at the same time. I felt shaky, the way you do in the first few seconds after a traffic accident Pete had hold of Jose. Luke was frisking Carlos: turned out he’d had a blade in his pocket, maybe two inches long.

Not exactly a terror weapon, but not something I’d have wanted sliding along—or maybe between—my ribs.

Judy ran up. “Are you all right Dave?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, taking stock one piece at a time. I hadn’t been in a fight since I was in high school; I’d forgotten the way you could taste fear and fury in your mouth, the way even your sweat suddenly smelled different.

I’d sort of hoped she’d throw her arms around me and exclaim, “Oh, you wonderful man!” Something like that, anyhow. As I’ve remarked, however, Judy is a very practical person. She said, “You’re lucky you weren’t badly hurt, you know that?” So much for large dumb masculine hopes.

A little man with a big mustache burst out of the office Luke had been heading for when the fun and games started.

By then Luke had Carlos handcuffed. He pointed to me and said, “Here, Iosef, fix this guy up, would you? Unless I miss my guess, he’s been working harder than he’s used to at the EPA.”

Iosef looked at my elbow, my knee, and my pants. “You’re right,” he told Luke. His accent—seems everybody has an accent in Angels City these days—was one I couldn’t place.

He reached up, patted me on the shoulder. “You come with me, my friend. We fix you up.”

I came with him. He fixed me up, all right. He sat me down in the office (an amazing collection of pictures of girls and succubi filled one wall; I was glad Judy hadn’t come along, even if she wouldn’t have done anything more than sniff), bustled out, and returned a couple of minutes later with a fellow who toted a black bag.

The doctor—his name was Mkhinvari—had the same odd accent as Iosef. He looked at my elbow, said, “Roll up your pants,” looked at my knee. “Is not too bad,” he said, which was about what I thought.

He cleaned the scrapes (though, being a doctor, he called them abrasions) with spirits, which hurt worse than getting them had. Then he touched each one with a bloodstone to make it stop oozing, slapped on a couple of bandages, and went his way. Iosef said, “Now we fix trousers. You wait here.” I dutifully waited there. This time he came back with a gray-haired woman. “This is Carlotta. She’s best in the business.”

Carlotta nodded to me, but she was more interested in my pants. She touched the two edges of the hole together, murmured under her breath. Yes, I know you’ll say any tailor’s shop has somebody who specializes in repairing rips. It’s easy to apply the law of similarity because the torn material is in essence like the untom doth around it, and to use the law of contagion to spread that cloth over the area with which it was formerly in contact But on most repairs you’ll be able to see, if you look closely, the seam between the real cloth and the whole dodi from which the fix was made. Not with Carlotta’s work, though. As far as I could tell, the pants might never have been torn. I even got the crease back.

That left a fair-sized bloodstain. Carlotta turned to Iosef and said, “Shut the door, please.” After he did, she reached into her sewing bag and pulled out a little nightbox, of the sort that are made so carefully no light can get in. When she opened it, a small pallid fuzzy creature crawled out “Vampire hamster,” he explained. They are drawn to doth and—well, you will see.”

The vampster didn’t like even the tiny bit of day sliding under the bottom of the door; it made a snuffly noise of complaint Before Carlotta could tell him to, Iosef went over and shoved a dirow rug into the crack. The vampster relaxed. Carefully—any undead, even a rodent, needs to be handled with respect—Carlotta picked it up by the scruff of the neck and set it on my pants leg.

I sat very still; I didn’t want the creature going after blood I hadn’t already spilled. But itwas well trained. It sniffed around till it found the stain on my trousers, then stuck out a pale, pale tongue and began to lap the blood right out of the dodi. When it was finished, not a trace of the stain was left… and the vampire hamster’s tongue had turned noticeably pinker as my blood began to enter its circulation.

When Carlotta plucked it off me, it wiggled and hissed; it was feeling frisky now. She plopped it back into the nightbox, closed the lid, and touched a crucifix to the latch so the vampster couldn’t get out by itself.

My pants didn’t even feel damp. I guess vampire hamsters don’t have spit And the stain was all gone. “Thanks very much,” I said to Carlotta. That’s beautiful work.”

“Tor a friend of Iosefs, it’s a pleasure. Of course”—she waved at the wall of succubi and giris—“Iosef has lots of friends.”

I’d have shriveled up and died (or at least looked for a nightbox to hide in) after a crack like that, but Iosef must have been shriven against embarrassment. “Oh, if only they were,” he said, rumbling laughter. “I would the young, but I would the happy.” He turned to me. “You are all right?”

“I am all right,” I answered. Thanks for taking care of me.”

I went back outside, blinking against the daylight as if I were undead myself. The black-and-white constabulary carpet had just flown in. One of the constables the looked just like Pete and Luke, except he was blond) took my statement.

“You’ll hear from us, Inspector Fisher,” he promised.

“Good enough.” I looked over to where his partner was transferring the vile potion from Jose and Carlos’ rug to the squad carpet “Handle that stuff with extreme respect. You don’t want it spilling.”

“So we’ve been warned.” He nodded back toward Luke and Pete, then touched the brim of his cap. “God give you good day.”

He went back to the carpet to keep an eye on Carlos and Jose. Judy walked over to me. She inspected the bandage on my elbow, then the knee of my trousers. She felt the material. I winced, anticipating she’d poke the raw meat under there, but she didn’t. “That’s a wonderful patch job,” she said.

“Iosef has connections,” I said. “I just wish people were as easy to repair as clothes.” The elbow and knee were throbbing again.

Luke ambled up and said, “Now that we’ve dropped on the guys you were looking for, shall we let the rest of the dealers in without running ’em past the spellchecker?” He pointed outside the gates. Nobody had gone through since the dustup with Jose and Carlos started. Now they were lined up like carpets on St. James’ Freeway on Friday night, and not moving much slower.

“Sure, go ahead,” I told him. “Like you said, we caught the people we wanted.” Glad cries came from the dealers when Luke started waving them through. I stuck my head into Iosefs office and asked if I could store the spellchecker there so Judy and I could do some shopping. When he said yes, I cut across the incoming stream of dealers and lugged the gadget back across. I wondered for a moment if it would react to the pictures of succubi, but it didn’t. Iosef sure seemed to, though.

Judy said, “I’m glad we caught them. Now we can enjoy our own Sunday knowing they won’t be spreading their poisons to anyone else.”

That pair won’t, anyhow,” I agreed, but I wondered how much other contraband would get sold right here at this swap meet, and at all the others around Angels City. A lot, unless I missed my guess. I tried not to think about that.

The dealers who’d been delayed were all setting up their stalls in a tearing hurry. When you try to rush things, a lot of the time you end up doing them wrong. Some of the dealers seemed as if they were doing music hall comedy turns: poles and awnings and signs would go up, then a second later they’d fall down again. One guy had his skin fall over three times in a row. After the third time, he gave it a good kick.

Maybe that knocked the gremlins loose, because on the fourth try it stayed where he put it.

A couple of minutes later—right at ten—I found out why—the dealers were in such a frantic rush. The customer gates opened then, right on time, and never mind that the dealers had been delayed. Iosef was not about to waste a chance: if he’d held up the customers, some of them might have gotten miffed and gone home.

And customers he had aplenty: Jews, Persians, Hanese and Japanese, and Indians, none of whose Sabbath rituals were disturbed by getting there on Sunday and spending money. Along with them were a goodly—but not godly—number of folks I’d have guessed to be Christian, both of Aztecan descent and every other variety. Some people of any faith feel more attachment to money than to any other god.

It may seem crazy, but every once in a while I wish the Confederation were a little less prosperous, a little less secure. In flush times, people think of themselves, and the devil with anybody and anything else. They sometimes need reminding that what’s happening now isn’t Forever.

Which probably sounds like sour grapes, since I was out there shopping right alongside everybody else. But you wouldn’t—I don’t think—have found me there on a Saturday.

Judy and I wandered up one asphalt aisle and down the next, pausing at one stall here, another one there. Judy picked up a green silk scarf that went well with her redbrown hair. I bought a new alarm clock; I was sick of the shrieking horror I had at home, and even sicker of it laughing at me. This one was made in Siam, with a native horological demon. It cost less than five crowns. If I didn’t like it, I’d toss it, too, and try one more time.

We both got sausages on buns from a Persian fellow’s pushcart. Given his own faith, he wasn’t one who’d sell pork.

I think I mentioned that one of the dealers had brought in a load of grimoires. Getting a scarf or a dock at a place like that is one thing, but it never ceases to amaze me that people think you can acquire sorcerous skill and power on the cheap. As with anything important, you need to learn from the one who’s best, not the one with the best price.

Naturally, Judy paused at the display. She flipped through a couple of volumes, turned away shaking her head. The fellow who was hawking them scowled in disappointment; he thought he’d found another sucker.

That bad?” I asked.

“Worse,” she said. “The fatter book there is one of those compendia of spells in the public domain, and they’re in the public domain because they weren’t very good to begin with.

The other one, the one in the blue binding, is one of those teach-yourself-to-be-a-mage-in-three-weeks books. I spotted a couple of typos toward the end. They might be dangerous under other circumstances.”

“Why not now?”

“Because ninety-nine people out of a hundred won’t get far enough in the course to stumble across them and the odd one, the one who does stick to it, will have learned enough to spot them before he does something stupid.”

“Okay, I see what you’re saying. That makes sense.”

But once she got rolling, Judy wasn’t one who stopped easily: “The folks who buy those things are the same women who’ll plunk down fifty crowns for a ‘magic’ cream to make their breasts bigger—or men who’ll pay a couple of hundred for ‘magic’ to make something else bigger. The only magic there is the one that the people who sell this land of junk have for spotting fools.”

She didn’t bother to keep her voice down; a couple of middle-aged ladies who’d been about to inspect the grimoires took off for another stall as if they’d been caught looking at something blasphemous. “Lady, please,” whined the guy who was peddling the junk. Tm tryingto make aliving.”

“So why don’t you try to make an honest one?” she said, but then she threw her hands in the air. “What’s the use?”

I’d seen her in those moods before. The only thing to do is get her interested in something new. I said, “Look over there at the jewelry that woman is selling. It isn’t something you see every day.”

All I’d aimed at was distracting Judy, but by sheer luck I turned out to be right. Some of the pieces from the jeweler—TAMARISK’S GEMS, her skin said—were of the modem sort, clunky with crystals, but even those were in finer settings than you usually find at a fancy store, let alone a swap meet. And the rest—Judy is enamored of things Greco-Roman. A lot of the necklaces, bracelets, rings, and other pieces were copies so skulful that, but for their obvious newness and their profusion, they might have been museum pieces. And Tamarisk, a sharp-faced brunette who wore her hair tied up in a kerchief—knew her business, too.

Her eyes lit up when Judy pointed at what looked to me like a gold safety pin and called it a fibula, and she practically glowed when Judy identified a little pendant head dangling from a necklace as a bulla. They lost me after that; as far as I knew, they might have been incanting when they started throwing around terms like repousse and lost wax. I saw how Judy’s eye kept coming back to a Roman-style ring with an eagle in low relief on a wide, flat gold bezel. It was in profile; a tiny emerald highlighted its visible eye. Normally I would have said it was a man’s ring… but Judy’s last name is Ather, after all, and AtHer means eagle.

In the most speculative voice I could come up with, I remarked, “You know, hon, I haven’t found you an engagement ring yet”

Eveiy once in a while, you say the right thing. Judy, as you will have garnered, is a steady, serious person—more so than I am, and I lean in that direction myself. Making her face light up as if the sun had just risen behind her eyes isn’t easy.

Watching it happen made me light up, too.

Then I got hugged, and then I got kissed, and all the while Tamarisk was just standing there, patient as the Sphinx, and I figure every smooch I got upped the asking price of that ring about another fifteen crowns, but so it goes—some things are more important than money. That’s what I told myself, anyhow.

We haggled for a while; considering that Tamarisk knew she had me where she wanted me, she was more merciful than she might have been—but not much. When we finally agreed on a price, she said, “And how will you pay? Cash?”

“No; I don’t like to carry that much on me. Do you take Masterimp?”

“Certainly, sir. I’d lose half my business if I didn’t.”

I dug into my hip pocket, pulled out my wallet and from it the card. Tamarisk took a receiver plate out from under her display table. When I was a kid, credit was a complicated business, full of solemn oaths and threats of vengeance from the Other Side on renegers and much default anyhow because so many people find gold and God easy words to confuse.

It’s not that way any more. A lot of the mystique is gone, but so is a lot of the risk. Modem technology again: as with the burgeoning phone system, ectoplasmic cloning has made all the difference. I put my thumb on the card to show I was its rightful possessor. Tamarisk did the same with the receiver plate. Together we declared how many crowns we’d agreed to transfer from my account to hers.

The conjoined microimps in the card and the plate completed the circuit by etherically contacting the accounting spirits at my bank, which confirmed that I did have the crowns to transfer. As soon as the transaction was complete, the card started sliding around on the plate as if it were on a ouija board. I picked it up and stuck it back in my wallet.

Then, with Tamarisk smiling the smile of a businessperson who’s just had a good day, I picked up the ring and set it on Judy’s finger. Because I’d found the style a little masculine, I was afraid it would be big. Tamarisk said,

“I’ll size that for you if you need me to.”

But Judy held up her hand and showed both of us that it fit well. She and I grinned, liking the omen. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you, David.” I got Idssed again, which couldn’t help but improve things.

Tm always glad to see my customers happy,” Tamarisk said, beaming, “and I hope you won’t take it amiss if I tell you I also do wedding rings.”

“I think we may just make a note of that,” I said in my most solemn voice as I pocketed one of her cartes de visite.

Judy nodded. With a last backward look at the other lovelies on display, we wandered off to have a look at the rest of the swap meet.”

Judy kept murmuring, “It’s wonderful,” over and over.

She’d hold up her hand so the ring would sparkle in the sun and the little emerald catch fire as if it were the eye of a living bird. I said, “First chance you get—maybe tomorrow evening—you ought to take it to a jeweler you trust. I know it looks good and I know Tamarisk seems fine, but I want to make sure you only have the best.”

“I’ll do that,” she said, and then, a moment later, “or maybe I won’t have to. We’ve got a constabulary—quality spellchecker sitting in the office waiting for us. If it won’t tell us whether we’ve just bought faiiy gold, what good is it?”

True enough,” I admitted. “And if anything is wrong—not that I think there will be—Mistress Tamarisk will have a visit from Pete and Luke when she sets up here next week.”

“Which one of them is which?” Judy asked. “Oh, good!” I exclaimed. “I’m not the only one who couldn’t tell, then.” And when somebody like Judy has trouble telling two people apart, you know there isn’t much to choose between them.

Before long, we went back to the dealers’ gate: after Tamarisk’s stall, the rest of the meet was strictly a downhill slide. I manhandled the spellchecker out of Iosefs office, poured out a little wine to enspirit the microimps, and touched the probe to Judy’s ring.

Physically it was gold and copper in a ration of three to one: it had an 18-karat stamp, and lived up to it. The little emerald was a real little emerald. That was plenty to satisfy me, but as long as the microimps were looking at the ring, I let them examine its magical component as well.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d drawn a blank: jewelry is a trade you can, if you so choose, cany on largely without sorcerous aid. But no—Tamarisk had worked a small spell of fidelity on it, by analogy with the legionary’s faithfulness to his Eagle as a symbol of Rome. That just made me happier: what better enchantment to find on an engagement ring?

Judy was reading the ground glass upside down. When she saw that, she squeezed my hand, hard. I shut down the spellchecker, hauled it to my carpet, and took it back to the constabulary station. I got a round of applause when I brought it in. “Sign him up!” somebody shouted, which made me grin like a fool.

We flew back to my block of flats after that. When we got back up to my place… well, I won’t say I got molested, because I didn’t feel in the least that it was a molestation, but it was something on that order. Judy and I liked pleasing each other in lots of different ways, which also augured well for the days that would come after we stood under the kiwppah together.

After Sunday, worse luck, comes Monday. With Monday, worse luck, would come the weekly office staff meeting. As if that weren’t enough to start things off on the wrong foot, congealed was the only word that fit traffic on St. James’ Freeway. What with my weekend peregrinations, I was starting to think I lived on that miserable freeway It’s a curse of Angels City life.

When at last I got up to my desk, I discovered somebody had put a toy constabulary badge on top of the papers in my IN basket. “What’s this about?” I said loudly, carrying the souvenir out into the hall.

Several people heard me squawk and stuck their heads of out their offices to see what was going on. “We didn’t know till yesterday that we had a real live hero here in the office,”

Phyllis Kaminsky said. She batted her eyes at me in a way she’d evidently borrowed from the succubi she was trying to control. From her it came off as more sardonic than seductive.

“That’s right,” Jose Franco chimed in. “I wish my garlicspraying program would get as much good ethemet publicity as Dave pulled in last night.”

“Oh, God,” I said, and meant every word of it. “What have they been saying about me?” I didn’t really want to know.

One more argument against having an ethemet receiver: that way you don’t have to listen to what reporters do to things you were involved in.

“We heard what a brave fellow you were, breaking up this contraband ring and capturing the leader singlehanded,”

Martin Sandoval said. The graphic artist paused before he stuck the gaff in me: “So we all clubbed together to buy you that symbol of our appreciation.”

I looked down at the little tin badge. If it cost half a crown, whoever bought it got cheated. “I do hope it won’t bankrupt you generous people”

Bea swept into the office just then. “What won’t bankrupt whom?” she asked, which meant everybody had to tell the story all over again. I resigned myself to getting ribbed worse than Adam until people got tired of the joke. Bea said, “I know a better way to commemorate the occasion: David can lead off at the meeting this morning.”

“Thank you, Bea,” I intoned. If she’d told me I could leave after I’d given my report, that would have been worthwhile. As it was, I figured I’d taken the early lead in the running for the dubious achievement of the week award.

I went back into my office and did as much as I could till half past nine, which was meeting time. Just to make sure we couldn’t pretend to forget and so accomplish something worth doing before lunch, Rose called everyone to remind us all to come on up to Bea’s office. Even Michael Manstein was there, looking out of place in his white lab robe among all the business domes and Martin’s casual getup (since he doesn’t go out in the field, he can dress as he pleases, the lucky so and so).

“Good morning, everyone,” Bea said when we’d all assembled, bright and not too eager, before her. “I think we’ll begin with David this morning. By all accounts, he’s had the most exciting week of any of us.”

I flashed the little tin badge and growled, “Now listen up, everybody, or else.”

Actually, my report went pretty well. Michael backed me up on the sorcerous details of the potion I’d found at Lupe Cordero’s, and everyone looked suitably grim on hearing them. I told about the arrest of the curandero who’d sold Lupe the stuff, and about being lucky enough to come across Jose and Carios on Sunday.

“Your diligence does you and the EPA credit, David,” Bea said, which was enough of a brownie point to make me want to set out a bowl of milk.

The other nice thing about having been so busy with all that stuff was that I didn’t get in trouble for the too numerous tilings I hadn’t managed to accomplish during the week.

The toxic spell dump investigation perse was stalled; I hadn’t managed to get out to Bakhtiars Precision Burins, let alone Chocolate Weasel or the light-and-magic outfits. I still didn’t know whether the Chumash Powers were coming or going.

And as for the leprechauns, well, the environmental impact survey hadn’t started going anywhere, either.

All of which meant, of course, that for the next several days I’d be running around like acephalous poultry, trying to catch up on those projects and whatever else landed on me in the interim. Not a pleasant prospect to contemplate of a Monday morning.

Bea said, “Jose, you and Martin are going to report together, am I right?”

They did. Martn produced the mockup for a poster of an ugly little green fellow sinking his fangs into an orange. The text said, HE’S NOT YOUR FRIEND—DONT GIVE HIM A RIDE in English and Spainish.

That’s very good,” Bea said, “very good indeed. It ought to make a lot of people who have been raising the roof about gariic spraying see Medvamps in a whole new light You can start reproducing it right away, as far as I’m concerned.

Comments, anyone? Am I missing something?”

With a lot of bosses, you’d better not dislike something after they said they loved it. Bea, bless her, isn’t like that.

Michael Manstein stuck up his hand and said, “The poster does not accurately reflect the appearance of the Mediterranean fruit vampire.”

He was right, of course. Medvamps (not that Michael would use such a colloquialism) are as pale as any other undead creatures, and the sap they suck from fruits and vegetables is commonly clear, too. But Bea said patiently,

“We don’t need to be precisely accurate here, Michael. We want to get across the notion that the Medvamp is a dangerous pest, not something that ought to survive and flourish in Angels City. Does the poster meet that objective?”

Manstein shrugged. “It should be obvious in any case.”

And it would be obvious, too, if everyone were as rational as Michael. The general run of people being what they are, though, rationality needs all me help it can get The poster was passed by acclamation and we went on to Phyllis. By then it was getting close to eleven o’clock, and my stomach was starting to rumble. But Phyuis had landed a project even uglier than my intertwined investigations of the Chumash Powers and the wisdom of naturalizing leprechauns: she’d started doing a study on the pros and cons of changing the way Angels City handles its sewage.

Not to put too fine a point on it. Angels City produces a whole lot of shit. For tile last many years—Phyllis, who is a very thorough person, said how many, but I forget—we’ve used the demon Vepar to process all this waste. Vepars provinces are the sea and putrefaction, so the arrangement has always seemed logical enough.

The trouble is, members of the Descending Hierarchy just aren’t reliable. Lately, as the population of Angeles City has grown, so have the number of sewage spills and the number of days the water in St. Monica’s Bay is too foul for swimming or fishing or anything else.

And so there’s been some serious discussion of transferring the job to Poseidon. If anyone on the Other Side has a vested interest in keeping the ocean clean, he’s the One. Not only that, he also has power over earthquakes. In Angels City, that matters. Having one Power in charge of both those aspects of local life might well save the taxpayer some crowns.

Or it might not Poseidon’s cult, like that of Hermes, is artificially maintained these days. Angels City would have to pay into the fund that municipalities and organizations which use the sea god’s services have set up to provide for his worship. That wouldn’t be cheap. Vepar, like any Judeo-Christian demon, has enough genuine believers to keep him active without any expense the city would have to assume.

Bea asked, “What communities are currently using Poseidon to handle their sewage, and what sort of results have they gotten?”

“There are several,” Phyllis said. “The first one that occurs to me is Athenaiy’Piraievs over in Ellas—”

“Not a fair comparison,” Michael Manstein put in. “In Ellas the god comes much closer to having a continuous tradition of worship than he would in Angels City, and is likely to be significantly more efficacious. I will be happy to provide documentation to support this assertion.”

Phyllis glared at him; no doubt he’d just undercut the example she was going to use. But when Michael says a comparison isn’t appropriate, he wSi have evidence to back him up. Fumbling a little, Phyllis talked about Carthage instead (I watched Michael stir in his seat, but he kept quiet).

The real trick, I gathered from what she had to say, was keeping Poseidon happy about getting his hands dirty, so to speak. Some Powers with artificially maintained cults are pathetically eager to do anything at all, as long as they keep their last handful of worshipers. Others have more pride.

Poseidon seemed to be part of the second group.

“But he does do a satisfactory job when properly incentivized?” Bea persisted. Michael visibly flinched when he heard that, but again held his tongue. Bea was a bureaucrat, after all; every so often, she went and talked like one.

That is my impression,” Phyllis answered. “Let me remind you: if Vepar were perfectly reliable, we’d have no reason for contemplating a change. And there’s the added benefit of increased earthquake protection.”

“Or increased earthquake risk, if the deity is angered,”

Michael said. Phyllis glared at him again, but I think he was right to point out the problem. Environmental issues are the most complicated ones this side of theology, and reading the text of the world is often (though not always) more prone to ambiguity than interpreting a sacred scripture.

Bea said. Thank you for the presentation, Phyllis. Do you think you’ll be able to give a preliminary recommendation on whether to pursue making this change in, hmm, two weeks’ time?”

“May I have three?” Phyllis asked.

Bea scribbled something on her calendar. “Three weeks it is.” She looked around at the rest of us. “Does anyone have anything more?” I sat very still, willing silence on everybody around me. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t Today, to my vast relief, it did; nobody said anything. Bea looked around again, just in case she’d missed someone on her first check. Then she shrugged. Thank you all.” That was the signal for us to get up and head for the door as fast as we could without being out-and-out rude. “Oh, and David—” Bea called after me.

Caught! I turned around. “Yes?” I said, as innocently as I could.

“I do hope you’ll have more progress to report on your other projects at our next meeting,” Bea said.

“I’ll do my best,” I promised, thinking that if I had fewer projects I could get more done on each of them. I also made a note to myself, not for the first time, that Bea didn’t miss much. And, I thought but didn’t dare say, I could also get more done if I didn’t have to spend dose to half a day every week in staff meeting.

The papers on my desk were starting to create a rampart effect, as if I were going in for trench warfare, d. la the First Sorcerous War. I was just getting ready for a serious assault on them when the phone delivered a sneak attack from the flank.

“Environmental Perfection Agency, David Fisher,” I said, hoping the switching imps had misspelled and given me a wrong number.

But they hadn’t.

“Inspector Fisher? This is Legate Kawaguchi, of the Angels City Constabulary Department.”

I sat up straighter. “What can I do for you. Legate?” I stopped feeling guilty about getting interrupted: after all, the call involved one of the other projects I was working on. Bea would be pleased.

“Can you come up to the Valley substation, please, Inspector?” Kawaguchi said. The scriptorium spirit Erasmus now appears capable of communicating.”

I wanted to whoop with glee, right in his ear. I don’t know how I stopped myself. “I’m on my way. Legate,” I chortled.

The ramparts on my desk would undoubtedly get higher while I was out of the office. So what? I told myself: this is more important.

Which was true, but sooner or later I’d have to catch up with the other stuff anyhow. I tried not to think about that as I hurried toward the slide.