The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

IX

I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the little piece of parchment in my hand. Every feeling you can imagine ran through my mind—joy that Judy was alive, fear that she was in their clutches, hope, worry, rage, all of them jumbled together at once in a way that would have made me dizzy even if I hadn’t been running on no sleep and too much coffee.

Eventually I started thinking as well as feeling. The message, not surprisingly, left no return number. I ran back j down the hall (I almost ran into Phyllis Kaminsky, too) to | Rose, threw it on her desk. “I meant to tell you about this, David,” she said, “but what with the flowers and all, it went right out of my mind. I’m sorry.”

So even Rose could make mistakes. I hadn’t been sure it was possible. But it didn’t matter, not right then. “Never mind,” I said. “How did she sound? What did she say?”

“She just asked for you and hung up when I told her you were out of the office,” Rose said. “I didn’t know anything was wrong then.” She gave me a reproachful look; if I’d told her earlier, she might have been able to do more.

“You have to remember, I’ve only spoken with her the couple of times she’s come up here and occasionally taken messages for you—and no one ever sounds like herself on the phone.”

Miserable phone imps—But no sooner had that thought crossed my mind than I ran up the hall (and almost ran down Phyllis again; she let out an indignant squawk) back to my office.

I wished Michael were still here instead of up at the Devonshire dump. I’d read that a good wizard could sometimes trace a phone call even after the etheric connection between the imps at the opposite ends was broken.

Phone imps are nearly identical, one to another—that’s what ectoplasmic cloning is all about. Nearly, but not quite.

As Bacon’s Troscintto puts it. There’s a divinity that shapes our ends. Rough-hew them how we will.” Tiny imperfections get into the cloning process—macro identical, but micro different That’s why the phone switching system works so well: because the imps are so like one another and spring from the same source, the laws of similarity and contagion make establishing contact between any two of them easy. And because they aren’t quite identical, each can be assigned its own place in the telephone web.

“God, I’m an idiot!” I exclaimed a moment later. God, I presume, already knew this. Michael Manstein was a good wizard, sure, but he wasn’t the only good wizard involved in this case—the CBI had plenty of skilled mages, just two floors up. I called Saul Klein, told him what had happened.

“I’ll send someone right to you,” he said as soon as I was through. Henry Legion might have got down to my office faster than the wizard did, but I don’t think any mere mortal could have. She was a Hanese woman who came up just past my elbow, but she seemed smart and businesslike as all getout. She introduced herself as Celia Chang.

“What time would this telephone call have been placed?” she asked.

I looked down at the parchment. Rose, bless her efficient soul, had made a note of it. Ten twenty-seven,” I answered.

“And it’s now”—she paused to ask her watch—“five minutes past twelve. A little more than an hour and a half. The etheric trail should not be impossibly cold. Let me see what I can do, Mr. Fisher.”

From the efficient way she went about things, I gathered this wasn’t the first time she’d traced phone calls—probably not the fifty—first either. If anybody had to use that particular thaumaturgy a lot, it would be the CBI. I felt easier, I’d been wishing she were Michael, but now I decided I didn’t need to worry about it She opened her little black bag, took out what looked like a telephone handset but wasn’t (I’d never seen a blue porcelain phone, anyhow), and set it on the desk next to my phone. “Does the telephone consortium know you have gear like that?” I asked.

“Officially, no,” she said. Her smile made her look much younger and prettier than she had without it. “Unofficially—ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” Like anybody else with an ounce of concern for the world to come, she was hesitant about being forsworn.

“Never mind,” I told her.

She took a copper cable from one pocket other lab robe, used it to connect her blue box to the real telephone. As she did so, she made a face. “Properly, this should be silver,” she said. “It’s a better conductor of sorcerous influences than copper—but it’s also more expensive, and so it’s not in our thaumaturgical budget. If I were in private practice—” She shook her head. “If I were in private practice, I’d be less useful. I’m sure you have to manage on fewer resources than you find ideal, too.”

“How right you are,” I said.

She was making small talk while she could, just to put me at my ease. When the need for serious conjuration came, she started ignoring me. That was all right; I hadn’t expect anything different. Wizards dealing with the Other Side don’t need their elbows joggled, even metaphorically.

Mistress Chang might have been Hanese by blood, but she used standard Western sorcerous techniques, ones that date back to the Species of Origen and some of them even farther. No reason she shouldn’t have; for all I knew, her ancestors might have come to the Confederation a couple of generations before mine. After censing the copper cable (and stinking up my office), she took two metal plaques, each inscribed with a demon’s seal, and affixed them to the cable.

“I don’t need a full manifestation from either Eligor or Botis,” she explained, “but I do require the application of some of their attributes: Eligor discovers hidden things, while Botis discerns past, present, and future. Now if you will excuse me—”

The first gesture of her elegantly manicured hand was a wave to get me to move back a couple of steps. The next was a pass that accompanied her conjuration. Calling up demonic attributes without getting raw demon, so to speak, is a tricky business; I watched quietly and respectfully while she did what she had to do.

It was more like coaxing than commanding: no impressive circles or pentagrams, no manifest thyself or eternal torment shall overwhelm thee. At the climax of the incantation, she just said, “Help me, please, you two great Powers.” I tell you, modem sorcery lacks the drama it had in the good old days.

But we can do things now that our ancestors never dreamt of trying. When Celia Chang pointed to the plaques on the cable, the seals that bound Eligor and Botis, which had been black squiggles on silver metal, began to glow with a light that outshone the St Elmo’s fire on the ceiling.

The light started to fade, then grew again. They’re searching through time for the etheric connection,” Celia Chang said. Just then, Botis’ seal blazed for a moment; I had to blink and turn my head aside. The CBI wizard softly clapped her hands together. “We have the fix in time. Now to see whether Eligofs allegory algorithm can uncover the missing phone number.”

I didn’t know what we were waiting for—probably for Eligofs seal to flare up the way Botis’ had. That didn’t happen; its squiggles continued to shine as they had before. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Eligor’s seal: it looks rather like an open mouth with a rubber arrow threaded through its upper lip.

Arrow or not, though, that sort of a mouth up and spoke like the old Roman godlet Aius Locutius: one number after another, until there were ten. Celia Chang and I both wrote them down as Eligor gave them to us. By the time we’d recorded the last one, the lines on both plaques had stopped glowing.

“Let’s compare them,” the wizard said. I handed her the scrap of parchment on which I’d taken down the numbers.

She held out the one on which she’d written them. We’d both heard the phone number the same way. She asked, “Is this number familiar to you?”

“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not Judy’s; it’s not any phone number I’ve seen before.”

“I expected as much, but you never know,” she said.

“We’ll have to go to the telephone consortium, then, and learn to whom the number belongs—if anyone, of course. It might be a public phone.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said in a hollow voice. Hard for me to imagine kidnappers having a victim make a call from a pay phone in the middle of the morning, but it was possible, especially if they knew of one that couldn’t be easily seen from the street.

Mistress Chang said, “We’ll be in touch with you as soon as we learn anything, Mr. Fisher.” She packed up her sorcerous impedimenta, nodded to me—still businesslike, but with, I thought, some sympathy, too—and strode out of the office.

My stomach growled, fortunately a couple of seconds after that. What with all the coffee I’d poured down there, it had been growling on and off for a while now, but this was a different note. It wanted food. No matter what your mind tries to do to you, your body has a way of reminding you of life’s basics. I went over to the cafeteria and bought myself a vulcanized hamburger—as a matter of fact, it was cooked so hard that Vulcan, had he been of a mind to, could have carved the battle reliefs that he’d put onto the shields of Achilles and Aeneas right onto the surface of the meat. I ate it anyhow; at the moment, I didn’t much care what I fed my fire, as long as it filled me up. And I washed it down with more coffee.

The stuff was starring to lose its power to conjure up my demons. I found myself yawning over the last of my fries.

But no rest for the weary; I plodded back to the office to see what I could accomplish.

In short, the answer was not much. Part of the reason was that I jumped halfway to the ceiling every time the phone yarped, hoping it would be Judy again. It never was. None of the calls I got was of any consequence whatsoever. Every one of them, though, broke my concentration. In aggregate, they left me a nervous wreck.

Along with hoping one of the calls would be from Judy, I also kept hoping one wouldn’t be from Bea. I just didn’t have it in me to play staff meeting games right then, and I wasn’t real thrilled about having to bear up under sympathy, either.

Atlas carried the whole world, but right now I had all the weight on me I could take.

But Bea, to my relief, didn’t call. Except for relief, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Looking back, though, I think she didn’t call precisely because she knew I couldn’t deal with it. Bea is a pretty fair boss. I may have mentioned that once or twice.

The phone squawked yet again. When I answered it, Celia Chang was on the other end. “Mr. Fisher? We have located that telephone whose number I traced a little while ago. It is, unfortunately, a public phone up on the comer of Soto’s and Plummer in St. Ferdinand’s Valley.”

“Oh,” I said unhappily.

“I am sorry, Mr. Fisher,” she said, “but I did think you would want to know.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said, and hung up. I never have figured out why you thank someone who’s given you bad news - maybe to deny to the Powers that it’s really hurt you, no matter how obvious that is.

After Celia Chang’s call, the phone stopped making noise for a while. I tried to buckle down and get some work done, but I still couldn’t make my mind focus on the parchments in front of me. I’d write something, realize it was either colossally stupid or just pointless, scratch it out, by again, and discover I hadn’t done any better the next time. All I could think about was Judy—Judy and sleep. In spite of all that coffee, I was yawning.

About half past three, someone tapped on my door. Several people had been in already; news of what had happened was getting around with its usual speed in offices. I knew they meant well, and it made them feel better, but it just kept reminding me of what Judy had gone through and might be going through now. Still, once more couldn’t make me feel much worse than I did already. “Come in,” I said resignedly.

It was somebody I worked with, but somebody who already knew what was going on. “Hello, David,” Michael Manstein said. “I trust I am not intruding?”

“No, no,” I said—someone else would have been, but not Michael. “Here, sit down, tell me what that thing—that Nothing—I mean—in the Devonshire dump is.”

He folded his angular frame into a chair, steepled his long pale fingers. “First tell me if you have any word of your fiancee,” he said. So I had to go through that again after all. He listened attentively—Michael is always attentive—then said, “I am sorry you were out of the office when Judith called. I wish I could have been here when the CBI wizard traced the call, as well. I have had occasion to attempt that twice, but succeeded in only one instance. An opportunity to improve my technique would have been welcome.”

I had the feeling he was more interested in the magic for its own sake than the reason it had been used, but I couldn’t get angry about that—it was Michael through and through. I tried again to make the carpet fly my way: “So what was that Nothing? Did you analyze it?”

“I did,” he answered. “As best I could determine, it is—Nothing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I know I sounded peevish—nerves, exhaustion, coffee again.

Michael didn’t notice. What he’d found intrigued him too much for him to pay attention to details like bad manners.

He said, “It is, in my experience, unique: an area from which all the magic has been removed, not externally, as would be normal, but internally. Whatever Powers are involved are still contained within the barrier established around them, but have in effect created that barrier to shield them from the surrounding world—or vice versa. I have no idea how to penetrate the barrier from This Side.”

“Could whatevers in there burst out from the Other Side?” I asked.

“It is conceivable,” Michael said. “Since I am of necessity ignorant of what lies inside the barrier—think of it as an opaque soap bubble, if you like, although it is almost infinitely stronger—I cannot evaluate the probability of that possibility.”

I worked that through till I thought I understood it. Then I said, “Why does the, the Nothing make everything behind it look so far away?”

“Again, I cannot give a precise answer,” Michael said, “I believe I do grasp the basic cause of the phenomenon, however: the barrier is in effect an area where the Other Side has been removed from contact with This Side. The eye naturally attempts to pursue it in its withdrawal, thus leading to the impression of indefinitely great distance behind it.”

“Okay,” I said. That made some sense—certainly more than anything I’d thought of (which, given my current state, wasn’t saying much). But it raised as many questions as it answered, the most important of which was, how do you go about separating This Side and the Other? They’ve been inextricably joined at least since people and Powers became aware of each other, and possibly since the beginning of time.

Michael said, “If your next question is going to be whether I have a theoretical model to explain how this phenomenon came to be, the answer, I regret, is no.”

“I regret it, too, but that’s not what I was going to ask you,” I said. Michael raised a pale eyebrow; to him, finding a theoretical model ranked right up there with breathing. My mind was on simpler things: “I was going to ask if you’d come with me to inspect Chocolate Weasel tomorrow morning.” I explained how more and more of the evidence was pointing toward an Aztedan connection.

“Beaten a hermetic seal, have they?” Michael murmured; again, the thaumaturgy interested him more than anything else. He went on, “We’ll be seeing learned articles on that for some time to come. But yes, I will be happy to accompany you to Chocolate Weasel. Where is the facility located?”

“In St. Ferdinand’s Valley, near the comer of Mason and Nordhoff,” I answered. That wasn’t a part of the Valley I’d learned yet; the Devonshire dump was north of it, while the businesses and factories I’d visited were farther south and east. I figured Michael or I could find it, though.

He said, “Shall we take my carpet again, and meet here as we did yesterday?”

“All right,” I answered. I was just as glad that he’d fly us up into the Valley; at the moment, I wondered whether I’d be able to get myself home tonight Michael headed for the lab, no doubt intent on catching up on whatever he’d had to abandon when I called him from the Devonshire dump. I asked my watch what time it was—a little before four. Not quite soon enough to go home, but too late to do anything useful (assuming I could do anything useful) to the parchments on my desk.

I decided to try to call Henry Legion. I realized there was an advantage in dealing with a spook rather than a person (the first I’d found, so I treasured it): even though it was just about seven back in D.C., he was likely to be on the job. At least, I didn’t think spooks had families to go home to.

And sure enough, I got him when I called. “Inspector Fisher,” he said. “I was hoping I would hear from you. What have you learned since this morning?”

So I told him what I’d learned: the hermetic seals, the quetzal feather, the fer-de-lance, the One Called Night, the Nothing. It took a while. Until I told him what all I’d found out in the course of the day, I hadn’t realized how big a forest it made; one tree at a time had been falling on me.

But, to shift the figure of speech, I had a lot of pieces. I didn’t have a puzzle.

“I shall convey your information to the appropriate sources,” he said when I was through. “Inspector Fisher, the Confederation may well owe you a large debt of gratitude.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but right now that doesn’t matter much to me. All I want to do is get Judy back, and I don’t think I’m much closer than I was.” Maybe fitting some of the pieces together would help. I asked, “Is it the Aztecians that we’ve bumped up against here?”

“Your information makes that appear more likely,” he answered, maddeningly evasive and dispassionate as usual.

I was too tired to get angry at him. I just pushed ahead; “If it was the Aztedans, why did they attack the Garuda Bird?”

The CI spook hesitated—I must have asked the right question. “The answer which immediately springs to mind is that the Garuda Bird is the great enemy of serpents, being the representative of birth and the heavens, while serpents are in the camp of death, the underworld, and poison.”

“The great enemy of serpents,” For a second, it didn’t mean anything—I was beat Then an alarm dock started yelling inside my head. “Quetzalcoati.”

“This though had occurred to me, yes,” Henry Legion said.

“What do we do?” I demanded.

“Prayers come to mind,” the spook answered, which, while sensible, was not what I wanted to hear. He added,

“Past that, the best we can. Call if you require my assistance, Inspector Fisher; I shall do what I can for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was talking to a dead line; he’d hung up.

Someone tapped on the door. I looked up. Now, as the day wound down, it was Bea. I gulped. She wasn’t the person I wanted to see right then. Or at least I thought she wasn’t, until she said quietly, “I just want you to know, David, that my prayers will be with you tonight.”

From Henry Legion, the suggestion of prayer had had the undertone that even that probably wouldn’t help the mess we were in. Bea, though, sounded calmly confident it would make everything all right. I liked her attitude better than the spook’s. But then, Henry Legion knew more about what all was wrong than she did.

I’m sorry I didn’t come see you,” I muttered. I wasn’t just sorry; I was ashamed of myself. But that’s not something you can casually say to your boss.

I guess she was good at reading between the lines. She said, “If you like, we can talk about it more tomorrow. Why don’t you go home and try to get some rest now? You’ll be better for it” She made shooing motions, then smiled. “My mother used to do that to chase chickens off the back porch.

I haven’t thought about it in years. Go on home now.”

“Thank you, Bea,” I said humbly, and I went on home.

I don’t remember what I cooked for supper that night, which is probably just as well. I thought about going to bed right afterward, but if I did that, I knew I’d wake up at three in the morning and stay up. So I rattled around in my flat instead, like a pea in a pod that was much too big for it. The quiet in there felt very loud. I wished I had an ethemet set to give myself something to occupy my ears and maybe my mind. Being alone with yourself when you’re worried is hard work. I tried to work, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words.

The phone yelled. I banged my shin on the coffee table in the front room as I sprang up and dashed off to answer it. It was some mountebank selling microsalamander cigar lighters. I’m afraid I told him where to put one before he let the salamander loose. I limped back out front after I hung up.

I picked up my book again. I should have been reading something useful, maybe about the Garuda Bird or Quetzalcoati. But no, it was a thriller about thirteen guys on a spy mission to Alemania during the Second Sorcerous War.

I was at the exciting part—the Alemans were trying to drive them into the alkahest pits still bubbling from the First Sorcerous War. Even so, I kept losing track of what was going on. The phone again. I almost hoped it was another huckster, I’d taken savage, mindless pleasure in baiting the first one.

Too much had happened to me, with no chance for me to hit back at anyone. If a miserable salesman chose that moment to inflict himself on me, it was his lookout “Hello?” I snapped.

“David?” The progressive distortion from two phone imps couldn’t mask the voice. All my rage evaporated even before she went on, “It’s Judy.”

“Honey,” I whispered; just hearing for sure that she was alive took my breath away, I made myself talk louder: “Are you all right?”

“I’m—fair,” she said, which made me fearful all over again. She hunted on: “Don’t ask questions, Dave. You have to listen to me. They won’t let me talk long. They say you have to stop messing around with things that aren’t your business, or else—” I waited to hear what the “or else” was, but she’d stopped. I was afraid I could figure it out for myself.

“Tell them I say I’ll do whatever they want,” I answered. I hoped she’d get the distinction: just because I said it didn’t mean I would.

“Be careful, Dave,” she said. “They aren’t joking. They—”

Her voice cut off. Faintly, as if the imps were reproducing the words of someone farther from the phone, I heard,

“Come on, you.”

“Honey, I love you,” I said. While I was talking, though, somebody hung up the phone. I don’t think Judy heard me.

I spent a while wishing damnation on the wretches who’d snatched her, then pulled myself together and called the Long Beach constables. Plaindothesman Johnson had the night off; I got some other worthy, name of Scott. He heard me out, then said, “Thanks for passing on the information, sir. We’ll do what we can with it”

Which meant as I knew only too well, they weren’t going to do much. It did tell them, as it had me, that Judy was still on This Side. That did count for something to them, and it had counted for a lot more than something to me. I had fresh hope.

I called the CBI. Saul Klein had gone home, but the fellow who answered the phone knew what was going on with the case. I asked him, “Can you send someone down to try to trace the call? Your Mistress Chang managed to do it earlier today.”

“Well, why not?” the CBI man said after he thought it over. “Don’t hurt to try.” He read me back my home address to make sure he had it right, then said, “We’ll have someone there in half an hour or so.”

It was more like forty-five minutes, but that didn’t surprise me. I drive St. James’ Freeway every day; I know how things can be down there. When the rap on the door came, I opened it with my left hand. My right hand was holding the blasting rod; after what had happened to Judy, I wasn’t taking any chances.

The weedy little fellow outside gave back a pace when he saw I was carrying a rod, which meant he almost went ass over teakettle down the stairs. He rallied fast, though.

“Can’t say as I blame you, six,” he said, and flashed a CBI sigil that said he was an intermediate thaumaturgic analyst—by which I learned the CBI has silly job tides, too—named Horace Smidley. I lowered the rod right away. He might not have looked like the light-and-magic show version of a CBI man, but he sure did look like a Horace Smidley.

I led him to the phone. He went through the same tracing ritual Celia Chang had used earlier in the day back at the office. He wasn’t as smooth as she had been—he was only an intermediate thaumaturgic analyst after all—but he got the job done. The quasi-mouth that formed Ehgors seal spoke its series of digits, then fell sflent once more.

That’s the same number they used when they called before,” I said.

“Is it? Careless of them.” Smidley made a ducking noise in the back of his throat; I got the idea that he disapproved of carelessness no matter who perpetrated it, even if it made catching the bad guys easier. He went on. “I’ll take the information back with me.”

“What do you think it means?” I asked. “Are they holding Judy somewhere dose to there and using that phone because it’s convenient to them?”

That is most probable,” he said; he and Michael Manstein would have got on well together. The other possibility is that they are deliberately transporting her a long distance to mislead us. Possible, as I say, but risky: any accident or flying violation that a constable happens to observe destroys what up to now has appeared a well-organized scheme.”

Again, you could tell he liked organization, no matter who was using it or for what purpose. I worry about people like that; the Leader of Alemania had had a lot of them behind him. Horace Smidley, though, was on my side, for which I was duly grateful. I thanked him for taking the trouble to come down at night “My pleasure,” he said, and then, to my mind, weakened the answer by adding, “And my duty.” He headed down the stairs—intentionally this time—and then, I presume, on back to Westwood.

Me? I shut the door after him, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I don’t remember another thing until the alarm clock scared me awake the next morning.

It was going to be a hot one. I could tell as soon as I got out of bed. Even after a long night’s sleep, I still felt tired, but out my bedroom window I saw that the wind stirring tile eucalyptus tree next door was some from out of the northeast what they call St. Ann’s wind. That always strikes me as rude, or don’t you think naming a wind after the Virgin’s mother implies she talked too much?

The wind swirled hard enough to shake my carpet as I headed for the freeway. When I flew past a vacant lot, I watched the dust devils spinning tumbleweeds around and tossing them up into the sky. There are more dust devils these days than there used to be; I’ve always said cutting the budget for meteorological exorcists was a mistake. One day the devils will join forces and blow down a building or three, and fixing things will end up costing a lot more than we’re saving now.

But what politician looks to the future? I wondered why I was bothering myself, come to that. If the Third Sorcerous War broke out, dust devils would be the least of my—and everyone else’s—worries.

Michael was waiting for me in the parking lot. “Have you received any news?” he asked as I walked up to his carpet. “They made Judy call me last night,” I said, nodding.

“Whoever they are, they want us to stop investigating anything that has anything to do with the Devonshire dump—or else.”

Michael gave me a curious look. “Yet you are still here.”

He turned on to Wilshire to get to St. James’ Freeway for the trip up into the Valley.

“Yeah, I’m still here,” I said. “I don’t believe stopping would really make them turn Judy loose. And besides… the deeper we get into this case, the more important it looks.”

God, help me, I was starting to think like Henry Legion. Saving the world, not just one person, looked bigger all the time.

We got off the Venture Freeway at Winnetka and headed north, Michael flying, me navigating. It was a mixed kind of neighborhood, first a business block, then a row of homes, then some more businesses. Once we flew past what looked half like a school, half like a farm. I glanced down at my map.

“That’s the Ceres Institute of St. Ferdinand’s Valley.” In spite of everything, I laughed. “Angels City is an ecumenical place.”

“Another artificial cult,” Michael said; his business is keeping up with such things. They say the goddess really does improve agricultural productivity.”

“I wonder how much maintaining her cult adds to the price of produce, though.” Cost-benefit analysis again. You can’t get away from it in our society: it was the same kind of thing I was doing to see whether the Chumash Powers would be worth preserving if they did still happen to exist That reminded me I’d have to call Professor Blank one of these days and see what more he’d harassed his graduate students into finding out “We should be getting dose,” Michael said.

“We are,” I answered, after a check of where we were.

The next major cross street is Nordhoff. You’ll want to turn left there. Mason is the next fair-sized street that will cross it, about half a mile west of Wimietka.”

“Very good.” Michael swung into the leftmost flight lane at Winnetka and Nordhoff. We had to wait for all the southbound carpets to go past before we could turn, though.

Strange how rules of the road that were codified for horses in Europe long before anyone outside the Middle East was flying carpets still govern the way we handle traffic. Sorcery, of course, maintains anything old and curious because being old and curious makes it powerful in and of itself. I’d never thought of traffic rules falling into that category, though.

The north side of Nordhoff was a light industrial park, with one big rectangular box of a building following another.

The south side was mostly houses, though the comer with Mason boasted a liquor store, a Golden Steeples that probably did a land-office business from all the working types across the street, and also a Spells ’R’ Us.

Chocolate Weasel was in the industrial park, a couple of buildings past Mason. Michael let his carpet down in an open space near the front door. As I undid my safely belt and stood up, I noticed that a lot of the carpets in the lot were old and threadbare. People didn’t work here to get rich, that was obvious.

Michael picked up his little black bag. We walked over to the entrance side by side. The first thing that hit me when we went inside was the music. There were minisingers involved in the case after all—I’d have to tell Saul Klein. But they weren’t playing lieder—oh my, no. The inside of Chocolate Weasel sounded like an Aztedan bar in East A.C.—or maybe like one down in Tenochtitlan—both in style of music and in volume. I must confess I winced.

All the chatter inside was in Spainish, too. No, I take that back: I heard a little clucking Nahuad, too. No English, not until people noticed us. I got the idea people who didn’t look Aztedan didn’t pop into Chocolate Weasel every day. The Aztedan community in Angels City is big enough to be a large city of its own, and doesn’t have to deal with outsiders unless it wants to.

By the looks they gave us, we were outsiders they didn’t want to deal with. Those looks got darker when we pulled out our EPA sigils, too. Suddenly everyone in the place developed a remarkable inability to understand English.

Michael foiled that ploy, though, by asking for the head of the firm in fluent Spainish.

I wondered if the secretary would fall back into Nahuad; she was one of the people I’d heard using it If she did, though, Michael would give her another surprise. I wondered how many pale blonds spoke the old Aztedan language. Not many seemed a fair guess.

But, rather to my disappointment, she didn’t. In fact, hearing Michael use Spainish made her unbend enough to remember she knew some English after all, which put me back in the conversation. She took us down the hall to the consortium markgrave’s office.

Jorge Vasquez looked at us with about as much enthusiasm as a devout Hindu confronted with a plate of blood-red prime rib. He was a handsome fellow in his early forties, and doing quite well for himself: unless I missed my guess, his suit would have run me dose to two weeks’ pay.

He shoved our sigils back across the desk at us, then leaned forward to glare. “I am sick and tired of harassment by the EPA,” he said. “You people have the attitude that our spells must be perverse because they are based on the authentic rituals of our people. It is not true; our procedures are no more wicked than the thaumaturgy the Catholic Church works through transubstantiation.” He pointed to the crucifix on the wall behind him.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” I answered. “Myself, I’m Jewish.” I didn’t elaborate; what it meant was that I found any ritual of human sacrifice, no matter how symbolic, on the unpleasant side.

Vasquez didn’t say anything, but his nostrils flared. So he wasn’t real fond of Jews, eh? Well, that was his problem, not mine.

I went on, “In any case, this visit has nothing to do with the merit of your rituals, only with the way you’re preparing your toxic spell byproducts for disposal. The Devonshire dump is leaking, and leaking something noxious enough to cause an outbreak of apsychic births in the neighborhood.

Considering some of the materials and cantrips you use, I hope you can understand how we might be concerned”

“I tell you again, Inspector Fisher, this is bigotry in action,” Vasquez said. “We run a dean shop here. What do you think we are doing, attempting to bring about the dominion of Huitzilopochtli over Angels City?”

That was one of my major concerns, but telling him so didn’t seem politic. I just said, “Why don’t you take us over to your flayed human skin substitute processing facility? That’s the likeliest source of thaumaturgic pollution here, I think.”

“It is a legitimate sorcerous substance, permissible under the laws of the Confederation,” Vasquez said hody. “I repeat, you are harassing Chocolate Weasel by singling us out—”

“Bullshit,” I said, which made him sit up straight in his chain not the first time lately I’d surprised somebody by not talking the way an EPA inspector was supposed to. I didn’t care. If he was hot, I was steaming. I went on, “You are not being singled out, sir. I’ve been visiting businesses that dump at Devonshire for weeks now. You’re not being discriminated against because you’re Aztecian, either—I’ve hit Persian places, aerospace firms, what have you. But even you won’t deny flayed human skin substitute is a dangerous substance, I hope? Now we can do this politely on an informal level or I can go out, get a warrant, and turn this place inside out. How do you want to play it?”

He calmed down in a hurry. Somehow I’d thought he might. He said, “What sort of tests do you have in mind?”

I looked at Michael—he was the expert. He said, “I intend to use the similarity test with my own piece of skin substitute to see if uncontrolled Huitzilopochtlic influences are present.” He was going to try the same test he’d used back at the dump, in other words.

I didn’t know what Vasquez would say about that—maybe start complaining about theological discrimination. But he didn’t; he just got up and said, “Come with me, gentlemen.”

I concluded he was a lot like Ramzan Durani of Slow Jinn Fizz: plenty of bluster when he was excited, but a reasonable man underneath. Fine with me; I’d had it up to here with arguments.

As soon as we left the office, the racket from the mariachi minisingers came back full force. That kind of music has its enthusiasts. Unfortunately, I’m not any of them. And the minisingers, true to their Alemanic Ursprung, gave it a slight oompah beat that did nothing to improve matters.

The workers on the factory floor glared at Michael and me as we went by. Not everybody loves the EPA. Too bad.

The Confederation would be contaminated a lot worse than it is if we weren’t around.

Squares of flayed human skin substitute lay at the bottom of vats. Even though the stuff was legal, it turned my stomach. Michael said, “Take one out for me, please.” Vasquez translated his request into Spainish. One of his men reached in and fished out a dripping sheet “It’s darker than the substitute you have in your lot,” I remarked.

Vasquez said, “This is the residue of the tanning baths.

Proper cleansing will restore the usual shade.”

Michael Manstein raised an eyebrow at that but he didn’t say anything, so I let it ride. I said, “I trust you have proper import certificates for the flayed human skin substitute?”

“I shall fetch them immediately,” Vasquez said. “Please do not let my absence delay you in your tests.” He headed back toward his office.

Michael got to work with his sheet of human skin substitute and the one the worker had pulled out of the vat. I clutched my kabbalistic amulets. I was ready for anything from his sheet of substitute starting to bleed to all hell breaking loose. I was ready for what might have been worse than hell breaking loose: I was ready for Huitzilopochtli alive and in Person and in a bad mood. I wasn’t sure I’d get out of Chocolate Weasel in one piece if that happened, but I had a chance.

Jorge Vasquez came back while Michael was still incanting. He handed me the certificates I’d asked for. Sure enough, they showed he was bringing in flayed human skin substitute produced by the law of similarity, as certified by some high sorcerer down in Tenochtitlan, the point of origin of the stuff. The certificate had Aztecian export stamps and Confederation import stamps right where they belonged. On parchment Chocolate Weasel was as legal as could be.

“Thanks very much, Mr. Vasquez,” I said. “You maintain excellent documentation.”

“I have to,” he answered, his tone bitter, “It is the only way I can protect myself from harassment because I am an Aztecian businessman serving my people on Confederation soil.” He was back to that song again. I let it alone; nothing I could say was going to make him change his mind.

Michael spoke a last couple of magical words, lifted the wet sheet of flayed human skin substitute from the one he’d taken out of his little black bag. “No skin of bleeding,” he said, sounding as surprised as he ever did—which is to say, Vasquez, who didn’t known him well, wouldn’t have noticed any change in his voice. “I must conclude that the specimen from the vat is thaumaturgically inactive with respect to Huitzilopochtli.”

“I could have told you as much,” Vasquez said. “In fact, I did tell you as much, but you chose not to listen. Are you satisfied?”

I nodded, reluctantly. I’d thought we’d surely find the pot of gold at Chocolate Weasel (which reminded me I’d have to do something one of these days about the study on naturalizing leprechauns). Michael said. The data we have obtained leave us no reason to be dissatisfied,” which struck me as damning with faint praise. He must have been disappointed, too.

“I presume you will have the courtesy to mention this in your written report,” Vasquez said with icy, ironic politeness.

“I also trust you will be making that report soon.”

I knew a hint to get out of there when I heard one. I’d have liked to stay and snoop some more, but after Michael failed to find any trace of Huitzilopochtlic influence on the flayed human skin substitute, I didn’t see how I could. I waited for Michael to finish packing the tools of his trade, then dejectedly followed Vasquez back to his office.

In front of that office, he sank another barb: “I hope you gentlemen can find your own way out. Good day.” He went inside and closed the door after him.

We found our own way out. Once again, nobody up front took any interest in us except to speed us on our way. I was ready to go, too. I’d had such high hopes everything would break open at Chocolate Weasel. But what did we get there?

Nothing, the same as we’d got everywhere else. It wasn’t just a case any more, either. Judy’s life lay on the line.

“Damnation,” I said as we scuffed our way across the lot toward Michael’s carpet “No skin of it there, not so far as I could prove,” he said,

“although, so far as I know, flayed human skin substitute, unlike the authentic product, comes in only one color and is merely toughened, not darkened, by the tanning process.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s interesting, but if you found no skin of Huitzilopochtli, it’s nothing more than interesting.”

“My thought exactly,” he said, sitting down and reaching for his safety belt A tattered old carpet on its last fringes flew slowly into the lot, settled into a parking space maybe fifty feet from us. The two guys on it were talking in Spainish, and paid us no attention whatever. One of them wore a red cap, the other a blue one.

That rang a vague bell in my mind, but no more. Then the fellow in the blue cap turned his head so I got a good look at his face. You don’t soon forget the looks of a guy who’s tried to bounce your balls—it was Carlos, the charming chap from the swap meet. And the man with him was Jose. They got off their carpet—they didn’t bother with safety belts—and went on into Chocolate Weasel.

I stood there staring after them. “Come on,” Michael said, a little querulously. “Having failed here, we may as well return to the office and more productive use of our time.”

“Huh?” He snapped me back to myself. “We haven’t failed here—your test may have, but we haven’t.” He looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about. After a moment, I realized he didn’t. I explained rapidly, finishing, Those are the two who sold Cuauhtemoc Hemandez his poison, full of real human skin and the influence of Huitzilopochtli. What are they doing at Chocolate Weasel if it’s really as legit as your test showed?”

“A cogent question.” But Michael was frowning. “Yet how could the similarity test I employed on the flayed human skin substitute be in error? It was conducted under universally valid thaumaturgic law.”

A dreadful suspicion was growing in me. I didn’t want to speak it out loud, for fear of making it more likely to be true—or maybe it was more the worry that comes out in the phrase. Speak of the devil. I did say, “I’m not questioning supernatural law, just the assumptions you made the test under. And I think I know how we can find out if I’m right. Come on.”

“What are you doing?” Michael said, but he unbuckled, got off his carpet, and, little black bag in hand, followed me across the street.

A salesman came up smiling when we walked into the Spells ’R’ Us store, me still a couple of paces in front of Michael. “Good morning, sir—sirs,” he said, amending things when he realized we were together. “What sort of home thaumaturgics can I interest you in today?’

I showed him my EPA sigil. A couple of seconds later, Michael got his out, too. He still didn’t know what I was up to, but he’d back my play. The salesman—he looked like a college Idd—stopped smiling and looked real Serious.

“As you see, we’re from the Environmental Perfection Agency,” I said. “We’re in the middle of an investigation and we urgently need a spellchecker. I’d like to borrow one from you and activate it for a few minutes.”

The kid gulped. “I can’t authorize that myself, sir. I’ll have to get the manager.” He fled into the EMPLOYEES ONLU section of the store to do just that.

The manager looked like what his salesman would turn into in about ten years: he’d added a mustache to the mix, and lost his zits and some callowness. He listened to my story, then asked, “Are you investigating us?” I got that one real quick: if I said yes, he’d say no.

But I could say no with a clear conscience. When I did, the manager led Michael and me over to the display of spellcheckers against one wall and waved to show us we could help ourselves.

Since money was no object, I chose a fancy Wmesap from Crystal Valley. Then I asked the fellow, “Does that liquor store next door carry Passover wine, do you think?”

“You use that ritual, do you?” He looked interested, as if he wanted to talk shop but knew it wasn’t the right time or place. “Yes, I think they would, sir. This part of the Valley has a fairly large Jewish population.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “May we use this unwrapped one here? I don’t want to inconvenience you any more than I have to. Believe me, I appreciate your cooperation.” I turned to Michael. “You can wait here, if you like. I’ll bring back the wine.” At his nod, I trotted out of the Spells ’R’ Us.

Sure enough, the liquor store had what I was after: big square bottle with a neck long enough to use as a clubhandle in a pinch, label with a white-bearded rabbi, a fellow who looks like the Catholic conception (excuse me) of God the Father peering out at you. Because it’s specially blessed, Passover wine is thaumaturgically more active than your average enspirited grape juice, so it’s available all year round.

I bought a bottle of sweet Concord—just picking it up brought back memories of childhood Seders, when it was the only wine I got to taste all year—and took it back to the home thaumaturgics emporium.

Michael said, “If you plan to go back inside, David, and if your conjecture is accurate, there is a significant probability that the staff will make a sizable effort to disrupt your activity.”

My feeling was that there was a significant probability the Chocolate Weasel staff would make a sizable effort to disrupt me if I was right, and never mind my activity. But I said, “If they’re doing what I think they’re doing in there, I don’t think we’ll need to go back inside.”

While we talked back and forth, the salesman and Spells ’R’ Us manager stood off to one side, listening so hard I thought they’d grow asses’ ears the way King Midas did in the Greek myth. At another time or place, it might have been funny. I went outside, Michael following again. The two guys from Spells ’R’ Us watched through their plate—glass window.

I could figure out what they were thinking when they saw me point a spellchecker probe at Chocolate Weasel—something on the order of. What’s been across the street from us for God knows how long? It was a good question. With luck, I’d have a good answer soon.

The rich, fruity smell of the Passover wine came welling out of the bottle when I broke the seal. I poured a capful (they make the cap just the right size to hold the usual activating dose—good ergonomics) into the spellchecker receptacle and chanted the blessing. No sooner had I finished the boray pri hagcfen and added omayn than the screen lit up with a smile. The microimps inside were happy and ready.

But, even though I aimed the probe at the Chocolate Weasel building, the spellchecker didn’t pick up anything from it. It identified the magic associated with the flyway, and also the crosswalk cantrips, not all of which, as I’ve noted, are Christian by any means. I said something unfortunate and added disgustedly, “You’d think they didn’t work any magic at all in there.”

“Which we know is not the case,” Michael said. “This suggests to me that the building is shielded against probes from outside.”

“You have to be right,” I said. “But what can we do now?

Go on in? Like you said, if we do that, we’re liable not to come back out again.”

“I am of the opinion that we have sufficient information to seek a warrant and let the constabulary deal with the matter from here on out,” Michael said. “The staff of Chocolate Weasel are consorting with criminals, and the building’s being so tightly sealed is suspicious in and of itself. The blanking of the sorcery within goes far beyond any that would be required to prevent industrial espionage.”

Just then the front door to Chocolate Weasel opened and a couple of women came out. No matter how good the place’s shielding was, I’d already found out it wasn’t topologically complete like the Devonshire dump’s: I hadn’t had to cross over an insulated footbridge to get in. That meant influences could go out through the opening, too.

I looked down at the ground glass on the spellchecker.

The microimps saw something across the street, all right, something they didn’t like one bit. Words started forming:

UNIDENTIFIED—FORBIDDEN. I felt as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water down my back. The door to Chocolate Weasel closed quickly and the damning words disappeared from the ground glass, but they remained imprinted on my mind. I’d hoped never to see their like again, but here they were.

“That’s the same spellchecker reaction I got when I probed the potion that curandero gave Lupe Cordero,” I said. “Now I know why your similarity ritual failed, Michael.”

I was glad I hadn’t had lunch yet; I might have thrown up right on the sidewalk in front of Spells ’R’ Us.

Michael shook his head. “I’m afraid your logical leap went past me there.”

“You were testing for similarity to flayed human skin substitute,” I said. “I don’t think that’s substitute in there—I think that’s real flayed human skin.”

“Yes, that might conceivably throw off the accuracy of the test.” Sometimes Michael is almost off in a virtuous reality of his own. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised he thought about the testing first, but I was. Still, he does connect to the real world. After a couple of seconds, his eye got wide behind his spectacles. “Dear God in heaven, there are thousands of square feet of flayed human skin substitute in those vats. If it is the genuine material rather than the substitute—”

“Then a lot of people have ended up dead, Huitzilopochtli is well fed, and the whole stinking world may come down on our heads.” I didn’t realize I’d started spouting doggerel till the words were out of my mouth.

Tt is now imperative—no, mandatory—that we notify the authorities forthwith,” Michael said.

Since he was right, I shut down the spellchecker (no doubt to the microimps’ relief) and took it back into Spells ’R’ Us.

“Thanks very much, gentlemen,” I said. “We appreciate the help. Now can you tell us where the nearest pay phone is?”

There’s one outside the Golden Steeples,” the manager answered, “if it hasn’t been vandalized.”

The salesman blurted, “But can’t you tell us what’s going on?”

I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s against EPA policy to reveal the results of an ongoing investigation. As I say, you’ve helped, though.”

Leaving them frustrated, we headed across Mason toward the Golden Steeples. The closer we got, the less optimistic I was about finding the phone in working order. The local street gangs had vandalized the building, scrawling tags like HUNERIC and TBASAMUND on the wall in big, angular letters. Graffiti are an environmental problem, too, one for which we don’t have a good answer yet.

And sure enough, when we came up to the pay phone, I saw that somebody—presumably the punk who went by that monicker—had carved the name GELIMER into the base of the phone and used either a tweezers or a little levitation spell to get the coins out through the narrow slits he’d cut Of course, once he violated the integrity of the containment system, the coin-collecting demon was also able to escape, and pay phones are rigged so their imps stay dormant unless he collects his fee. The phone, then, might as well not have been there.

Unless—I turned to Michael. “Are you a hot enough wizard to get around Ma Bell?”

“Possibly—with time and equipment we lack at the moment,” he said. “Finding another pay phone would be more efficient”

Ergonomics again. Whether it’s what size to make the cap on a bottle of wine or deciding to spell or not to spell, you can’t get away from it. “Let’s go back to the carpet, then,” I said. “We’re sure to pass one as we fly back to the freeway.”

We crossed over to the Chocolate Weasel parking lot. Me, I wasn’t what you’d call enthusiastic about setting foot there again, but I didn’t feel too bad because I was doing it only to leave the place for good.

Though I didn’t really need to, I picked up the map to check the route south. We could either head back to Winnetka the way we’d come and then down, or else we could fly west to…

“Michael,” I said hoarsely, “I know where we can find a pay phone.”

“Do you?” He glanced over to me. “I did not think you were overly familiar with this section of St. Ferdinand’s Valley.”

Tm not,” I said. “But look.” I pointed to the map. The next major flyway, a couple of blocks west of where we were, was Soto’s. And the next decent-sized street north of Nordhoff was Plummer. “I know there’s a pay phone there because that’s where Judy called me from.”

“Good heavens,” Michael said. “The concatenated implications—”

“Yeah,” I said. “Chocolate Weasel is involved in something really hideous, they’re doing their best to hide if it leaks out of the Devonshire dump, we find out about it (I find out about it, I mean), somebody tries to get rid of me, somebody does kidnap Judy, and then they make her call me from a phone just around the comer from Chocolate Weasel.”

“Since there is a phone at that location, and since it was undoubtedly working as recently as last night, I suggest we use it,” Michael said. He lifted the carpet off the Chocolate Weasel parking lot eased onto Nordhoff, and flew west toward Soto’s. Just getting away from Chocolate Weasel felt good, as if I were escaping cursed ground. Considering what I thought was going on inside the building, that might have been literally true.

Michael turned right onto Soto’s and flew up to Plummer.

The comer there had a bunch of little shops. I didn’t see a pay phone in front of any of them. I wondered if Celia Chang and Horace Smidley had screwed up. But what were the odds of their both screwing up the same way? Astrologically large, I thought.

“When a solution is not immediately apparent more thorough investigation is required,” Michael said, a creed which for the research thaumaturge ranked right up there with the one hammered out at Nicaea.

He parked the carpet in front of a place whose skin had two words in the Roman alphabet—DVIN DELI—and a couple of lines in the curious pothooks Armenians use to write their language. I don’t read Armenian myself, but I’ve seen it often enough to recognize the script.

Sure enough, the fellow behind the counter in there looked like Brother Vahan’s younger cousin, except that he sported a handlebar mustache and had a full head of wavy iron-gray hair.

“God bless you, what can I do for you gentlemen today?” he said when Michael and I walked in. “I have some lovely lamb just in, and with yogurt and mint leaves—” He kissed the tips of his fingers.

Even if mixing meat and milk wasn’t kosher, it sounded good to me. I hated to have to say, “I’m sorry, we’re just looking for a pay phone.”

“Across the street, behind the camiceria next to the Hanese bookstore,” he said, pointing. “I don’t know why they didn’t put it out front, but they didn’t. And when you’ve made your call, why don’t you come back? I have figs and dates preserved in honey, all kinds of good things.”

He was a salesman and a half, that one. I got out of the Dvin Deli in a hurry, before I was tempted into spending the next hour and a half there, buying things I didn’t need and half of which I wasn’t permitted to eat.

The Hanese bookstore also had a two-word English skin—HONG’S BOOKS—and the rest was in ideograms. For a couple of seconds, I didn’t see the pay phone back of the Aztecian meat market. It was on the far side of a very fragrant trash dumpster; nobody flying casually down the street would have noticed anything going on while whoever had Judy made her call me. The camiceria’s back door didn’t have a window, either, so people in there might not have spotted anything amiss, either.

I dug in my pocket, found change, and fed it into the greedy little paw of the pay phone’s money demon. I called Plainclothesman Johnson, Saul Klein, and Legate Kawaguchi, in that order. Johnson and Klein weren’t altogether convinced that Chocolate Weasel was involved in Judy’s kidnapping, though they both said the evidence was better than anything else they had. Kawaguchi said I’d handed him enough so he could give Chocolate Weasel a good going-over.

“Don’t just send constables,” I warned him. “That place is major sorcerous trouble. If you don’t call out a hazardous materta magica team for it, you’ll never, ever need one.”

“I appreciate your concern, Inspector Fisher,”

Kawaguchi said, “but I assure you that I shall make all necessary arrangements. Good day.” Shut up and let me do my job, was what he was saying. I just hoped he knew the kind of trouble his people were liable to walk into at Chocolate Weasel.

After that, I had to cadge some more change from Michael. I called Bea to let her know what was going on.

Instead of Bea, I got Rose, who told me the boss was at a meeting away from the Confederal Building and couldn’t be reached no matter what for the next couple of hours.

“Wonderful,” I said. “Listen, Rose, dungs are liable to start felling on your head any minute now.” I explained how and why.

She just took it in stride. I would have been surprised at anything less. Whatever needed doing, she’d take care of it as if Bea were standing behind her giving orders. We’re unbelievably lucky to have her, and we know it When I was done, she said, I have two important phone messages for you. One is from Professor Blank at UCAC and the other is from a Mr. Antanas—is that right?—Sudakis at the Devonshire dump.”

“Yes, Antanas is right. Thank you, Rose. We’ll be back at the office soon, and I’ll attend to the calls then. ’Bye,” I said, and hung up. I’d been meaning to call Blank, and I wasn’t all that surprised to hear from him first. But I wondered why he said it was urgent for me to call him back—nothing about his investigation of the Chumash Powers had been urgent up till now. And I wondered what had bitten Tony on the backside. Just my luck to be out of the office when two important calls came in.

Michael said, “Before we leave this site, I suggest that you examine it most carefully. I would be willing to wager the CBI has tried already, but if you find anything here which you can identify as belonging to Mistress Ather, the law of contagion may enable us—or the constabulary, or the CBI—to trace her present whereabouts. No guarantees, of course, sorcerous countermeasures having become so effective these days, but a chance nonetheless.”

So I looked. God, did I look! Leaving something behind was just the sort of thing Judy would have done if she got the chance—anything to give us a better shot at finding her. I went down on my hands and knees and pawed through weeds and pebbles like a wino after a lost quarter-crown, hoping, praying, she’d managed to drop a button or something.

No luck. All I got was the knees of my pants dirty. Finally I admitted it, even to myself. “Sorry, Michael, but Acre’s nothing here. In the adventure stories, people always manage to leave a clue while the bad guys aren’t watching. I guess it doesn’t work that way in real life.”

“It would appear not to,” he agreed. “This is my first encounter with a situation which might reasonably fall into that category, so my experience is as limited as yours. I suspect, however, that if real criminals made as many errors as those in adventure stories, virtue would triumph in the real world more often than it does.”

“I suspect you’re right,” I said glumly, brushing at my trousers. Some of the dirt looked to be there to stay. I sighed, feeling useless and also, irrationally, as if I’d let Judy down.

“Let’s head back to the office, then—we’re wasting time here. From what Rose said, I’ve had a couple of calls that need answering right away.”

“I also have other work upon which I could be usefully engaged,” Michael said. That made me feel bad all over again; I hadn’t even asked him what I was disrupting by dragging him up to the Valley again and again. But he went on, “Seeking information which will aid in the rescue of your fiancee necessarily takes priority over other concerns.”

“Thank you, Michael,” I said as we walked back to his carpet His glance over at me was puzzled, as if he wondered what I was thanking him for. Maybe he did. He thinks so well that I sometimes wonder about the rest of his spirit I noticed that he flew down Soto’s to the freeway instead of going back to Winnetka. With Michael, I think it was gust for the sake of greater efficiency. I’d have done the same thing, but not on account of that I just wouldn’t have wanted to swing back any closer to Chocolate Weasel than I had to.

When we got back to the Confederal Building, I bought something allegedly edible from the cafeteria; while I fought it down, I kept thinking about lamb with yogurt and mint leaves - sinful as bacon for me, but it sounded delicious all the same—and candied dates. Then, with my fireplace full of fuel—and with a heartburn to prove it—I went to my office and picked up the phone.

Professor Blank sounded blunter than phone imps could normally account for when he answered the phone, so I figured I’d caught him at lunch twice running, and probably a brown bag one. UCAC boasts better eateries than we have here, which meant he was either tight with a crown or else dedicated to what he was doing.

I’d been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt even before he said, “I’m so glad you returned my call, Inspector Fisher. I’ve been waiting here at my desk, hoping you would.”

“I just now got in,” I answered, starting to feel guilty because I’d eaten lunch before I called him back. “Rose, our secretary, said it was urgent, so you’re the first call I’ve made.” That, at least, was true. “What’s up?”

“I trust you will recall,” he began, which meant he didn’t trust any such thing, “that when we last spoke I was uncertain whether the Chumash Powers were extinct or had, so to speak, encysted themselves on the Other Side, abandoning all contact with This Side for an indefinite period, perhaps in the hope of being lured back Here should more worshipers appear to propitiate them.”

He hadn’t said all that when we talked before; some of it he must have worked out since then. But he had said enough of it to let me answer, “Yes, I remember that. Do you know which is true now?”

“The latter, I’m afraid,’’ he said, “and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word.”

I’d figured it was the latter; having learned that the Chumash Powers were in fact extinct wouldn’t have been news urgent enough for him to haunt his office waiting for me to call back. But I hadn’t though even finding them active would be frightening. “What’s to be afraid of?” I asked.

“The Powers are indeed encysted; new regression analysis establishes that beyond any statistical or theological doubt,” he said. “But it’s a topologlcally unusual spherical encystment Are you aware. Inspector, that the surface of a sphere can be continuously deformed until it is inside out?”

“Well, no,” I said. “What does that have to do with the Chumash Powers?”

“It’s a good approximation of what those Powers seem to have done on the Other Side,” he answered. “As I said in our earlier conversation, they seem to Taawe taken a hole and pulled it in afterward, apparently leaving nothing behind.”

Something he said there made a bell toll in my mind, but before I could figure out what It was, he went on, “The problem, from our point of view, is that the Powers, if my calculations are correct, can reverse their encystment and burst out violently at any time they choose.”

“Violently?” I echoed. “How violently?”

“Crystal-ball prognostications vary; the scenario is unique and so many of my parameters are uncertain,” he said. “If, however, they release maximum magical energy, the effects on the surrounding area will be somewhere between those of a megasalamander ignition just above it and an earthquake, oh, approximately on the order of magnitude of the one that hit the city of St. Francis in the early years of this century. The effects will be different, you understand, because they’ll be primarily thaumaturgic rather than physical, but the size of the event will be more or less in that range.”

“Jesus,” I said, which shows how acculturated I am. Foolishly, I added, “No wonder they didn’t want to bother making rain.”

“No wonder at all. Inspector,” Professor Blank said. “Neither I nor my staff have been able to determine where the interface between the Chumash powers’ encystment and This Side is presently located. We would have expected it to be in the extreme northwest of the Barony of Angels, for that was formerly Chumash territory, but, as I say, we have not succeeded in detecting it I hope that, with your greater resources, the Environmental Perfection Agency will do what we have not accomplished. Good day.”

He hung up on me. I wanted to loll him. “Hello. Here comes a catastrophe. I’ve found out it’s on the way, but I can’t deal with it All up to you, Dave. Good luck, pal.” That’s what was left at the bottom of the alembic. In my nose, it smelled like old catbox.

Instead of committing murder, I called Tony Sudakis. He didn’t sound as if I’d caught him at lunch, but he had something in common with Professor Blank anyhow: he sounded scared. “Dave? It’s you? Perkunas and the Nine Suns, I’m glad to hear from you! You know that thing—I mean, that Nothing—you spotted in the containment area? It’s going through some changes, and I don’t like ’em even a little bit”

“Changes? What land of changes?” I asked, thinking I didn’t need one more thing to worry about on top of everything Professor Blank had just dumped on me.

“Well, for one thing, you can notice the effect from anywhere along the safety walk now, and I can see it from the roof of my office, too. Eerie, if you ask me. But there’s worse.

I can feel something starting to build over there, even through the wardspells, like the world’s gonna turn inside out any minute now. It’s bad. I don’t even know if the outer containment wall will hold this one. And if it doesn’t—”

He let it hang there. I gulped. I didn’t like the way it sounded, not even slightly. “What have you done so far?” I asked.

“I’ve called for a SWAT team, but a lot of those are busy somewhere else,” he answered. I had a hunch I knew where, too: theywere taking down Chocolate Weasel. Tony went on,

“I called you for two reasons. You were the guy who spotted the Nothing in the first place, and the wizard you had with you seems pretty sharp. Man, I tell you, I think I need all the help I can get on this one.”

“I’ll get Michael. We’ll be there as fast as we can fly,” I promised. Then something Sudakis had said really hit me. I echoed it “Inside out.”

“What’s that?’ Tony said. “Listen, if you and your buddy Manstein don’t get here in a hurry, there may not be any here to get to, you know what I mean?”

Inside out,” I repeated. “Tony, didn’t you say the stuff in that zone came from the beach up in Malibu?”

“Yeah,” he said. “So?”

“Way up at the northwest edge of the Barony of Angels, right?”

“Yeah,” he said again. “What are you flying at, Dave?”

“Get a hazmat team there right now,” I said, fear knotting my belly: I thought I knew why Professor Blank’s grad students hadn’t found the Chumash Powers’ encystment site where they thought it was supposed to be.

“I’ve been Hying to,” Tony protested. “They won’t listen to me.”

Tell ’em the guy who tipped ’em to Chocolate Weasel says this is liable to be a thousand times worse. Tell ’em that Use my name. They’ll come, all right”

“You know what’s going on.” Even through the phone imps, he sounded accusing.

“I’m afraid I do. I’m coming anyway.” I hung up on him for a change. Then I ran down the hall, yelling for Michael like a man possessed. He listened to me for fifteen seconds, tops, grabbed his black bag, and sprinted for the slide, me right behind him. We piled onto his carpet and hightailed it back to St. Ferdinand’s Valley. Knowing what we were heading for, I wished we were flying the other way. When he was good and ready, he delivered his verdict.

I mean it just like that—he really sounded magisterial:

There is, I believe, much truth in the view you express.

The great European theological and economic expansion of the past five hundred years, coupled with the enormous growth of thaumaturgic knowledge that spearheaded, among other things, the Industrial Revolution, has indeed had a profound impact on both the politics and thecology of the rest of the world. I can hardly be surprised to learn that long-established Powers, chafing under the pressure of European-imposed belief structures imposed by superior military and magical force, are actively seeking to overwhelm that force.”

“You mean you approve?” I stared at him.

“That is not what I said,” he answered, more sharply than usual. “I said I am not surprised that the Powers and, presumably, the peoples who reverence them, seek to regain their former prominence. I did not say I wished them success in that effort. Such success would be the greatest disaster the world has ever known, or so I believe, at any rate.”

“You get no argument from me,” I said.

“I had not expected you to disagree,” he said. “You have a reasonable amount of sense, by all appearances.”

I wanted to reach over and pat him on the knee. “Why, Michael, I didn’t know you cared,” I said. From his point of view, he’d just given me the accolade, and I knew it “Facetiousness aside,” he amended. I just grinned. He ignored that and went on, “Let us take the Americas, for instance, they being the most dearcut examples of a massive human and thecological transformation in the past semimillenium.”

“Okay, take the Americas,” I said agreeably, gesturing to show he was welcome to them. Truth was, as long as I was schmoozing with Michael, I didn’t have to think (as much) about either Judy or the likelihood that Armageddon was liable to come bubbling out of a toxic spells dump.

Michael gave me a severe look. “Facetiousness aside, I said.”

“Sorry,” I told him. “You were saying?”

“Nothing of great complexity; nothing, in fact, that should not be obvious to any reasonably objective observer: that we immigrants have done more and better with this land in the past five hundred years than its native peoples would have accomplished during the same period.”

“Nothing that isn’t obvious, eh?” I said, grinning wickedly.

“Plenty of people, natives and immigrants both—I’d use your phrase: why not?—would say you’ve just committed blasphemy, that we’ve done nothing but slaughter and pollute in what was, for all practical purposes, paradise on earth.”

“I find only one technical term appropriate to use in response to that viewpoint: bullshit.” Michael delivered his technical term with great relish. “I am not saying that slaughter did not take place; I am not denying that we pollute—working as I do for the Environmental Perfection Agency, how could I? I do deny, however, that this was, in a manner of speaking, government work for the earthly paradise.”

“Careful how you talk, there,” I said. “You work for the government yourself, remember?”

Michael refused to be distracted. “Leaving aside the habits of the natives of the islands off the coast, whose tribal name gave English the word ‘cannibal,’ the two most prominent cultures in the Americas five hundred years ago were the Aztecs, also cannibals, who fueled themselves both theologically and in terms of protein through human sacrifice, and the Incas, whose theology was benign enough but who regimented themselves more thoroughly than the Ukrainians would have tolerated before their latest crisis.”

“You’re hitting below the belt, talking about peoples who didn’t live in what’s now the Confederation,” I protested.

“What about the noble warriors and hunters of the Great Plains?”

“Well, what about them?” he asked. “The culture they now revere and think of as ancient did not exist and could not have existed before the coming of the Europeans because their own ancestors had hunted the American horse to extinction—hardly good environmental management, in my opinion. And the firearms they used to defend their territory—bravely—against encroaching whites were all bought or stolen from those same whites, because they did not know how to make them for themselves.”

“Whoa, there.” I held up a hand. “Blaming people for not having skills isn’t fair. And the whites who took the land away from the natives weren’t what you’d call saints. Conquest by firewater, deliberately spread smallpox, and mass exorcisms of the native Powers isn’t anything to be proud of.”

“You’re right,” he said. “But if Europeans had not found the Americas until, for example, the day before yesterday, they would not have found them much different from the way they were five hundred years ago. And that is precisely the point I am trying to make. Thanks to modem thaumaturgy, our present culture supports far more people at a higher level of affluence and greater material comfort than any other in the history of the world.”

“Is that all you judge culture by?” I asked. “Seems to me there should be more to life.”

“Oh, no doubt. But make note of this, David: as a general rule—not universal, I concede, but general—the people who show the greatest contempt for material comforts are those lucky enough to have them. The Abyssinian peasant starving in his drought-stricken field, the Canaanite cobbler suffering under a plague of gnats because no local sorcerer knows enough to properly control Beelzebub, the slum-dweller in D.StC. aching with a rotten tooth because her parents hadn’t had the crowns to go to an odontomagus to affix the usual invisible shields to her mouth… they will not speak slightingly of the virtues of a full belly and a healthy body, things we take for granted despite their being historically rare.”

“Wait a minute, Michael. You just cheated there. You were talking about how wonderful our culture is, and then one of your suffering examples comes straight out of our own slums. You can’t have it both ways.”

He didn’t answer for a few seconds; he was getting the carpet off the freeway. Once he’d done that, though, he said, “I fail to see why not. I never claimed we were perfect. Perfection is an attribute of the divine, not the human. I said that, on the whole, we do better for more people than anyone else has. Our flaws notwithstanding, I hold to that position.”

I thought about it. The only times I’d ever been hungry were at Yom Kippur fasts, and those I undertook for the sake of ritual, not because I had no food. I slept in a flat on a bed; I was protected against diseases and curses that had lain whole nations waste in ancient times. I said, “You have a point”

The other thing was, the Chumash Powers and the Aztedans wanted to restore the unpleasant old days. The trouble with that was that most of the millions of people in the Barony of Angels liked the new days better. What would happen to them? My limited acquaintance with the Chumash Powers didn’t make me think they were that ferocious, but Huitzilopochtli—The Chumash Powers must have cut a deal with the Aztedan war god, I realized. I tried to imagine the secret dealings that must have happened on the Other Side. Huitzilopochtli was a much bigger fish than the Sky Coyote, the Lizard, or the demons of the Lower World, but they were extra powerful here because the Barony of Angels was their native territory. The combination could prove deadly.

I reached that unpleasant conclusion about the time Michael pulled into the parking lot across the flyway from the Devonshire dump. To my relief, three or four black-and-whites were already there, their synchronized salamander lanterns flashing red and blue.