The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

northwest Europe.”

He was right about the neighborhood changing. I’d gone past a couple of houses that had signs saying Curandero tacked out front. If you ask me, curanderos are frauds who prey on the ignorant, but nobody asked me. A basic principle of magic is that if you believe in something, it’ll be true—for you.

I’ll tell you something I believed. I believed that if the EPA took Devonshire dump to court just on the strength of an increase in elf-shot around the area, the lawyers Sudakis’ people would throw at us would leave us so much not-too-lean ground beef. I had no doubt Tony Sudakis believed it, too.

So I hit him with something bigger and harder. “Are you going to blame the immigrants for the three cases of apsychia around here in the past year?”

He didn’t even blink. “Coincidence,” he said flatly. One hand, though, tugged at the silver chain he wore around his neck. Out popped the ornament on the end of it. I’d expected a crucifix, but instead it was a polished piece of amber with something embedded inside—a pretty piece, and one that probably cost a pretty copper.

“Speaking off the record, Mr. Sudakis, you know as well as I do that three soulless births in one area in one year isn’t coincidence,” I answered. “It’s an epidemic.”

He let the amber amulet slide back under his shirt. “I deny that, off the record or on it.” His voice was so loud and ringing that I would have bet something was Listening to every word we said, ready to spit it back in case we did end up in court. Interesting, I thought. Sudakis went on. “Besides, Inspector, think of it like this: if I didn’t think this place was safe, why would I keep coming to work every day?”

I raised what I hoped was a placating hand. “Mr. Sudakis—Tony, if I may—I’m not, repeat not, claiming you’re personally responsible for anything. I want you to understand that. But evidence of what may be a problem here has come to my attention, and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I ignored it.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “I can deal with that. Look, maybe I can clear this up if I show you the containment scheme. You find any holes in it, Dave”—I was Dave again, so I guess he’d calmed down—“and I will personally shit in my hat and wear it backwards. I swear it.”

“You’re not under oath,” I said hastily. If he turned out to be wrong, I didn’t want to leave him the choice of doing something disgusting or facing the wrath of the Other Side for not following through.

“You heard me.” He got up from his desk, went over to a file cabinet off to one side, started pulling out folders. “Here, look.” He unrolled a parchment in front of me. “Here’s the outer perimeter. You’ll have seen some of that; here’s what all really goes into it. And here’s the protection scheme for the complex we’re sitting in.”

I was already pretty much convinced the outer perimeter of the dump was tight; that’s what the spellchecker had indicated, anyhow. And a cursory glance at the plans to keep the blockhouse safe told me Sudakis didn’t need to be afraid when he came to his job. Satan himself might have forced his way through those wards, or possibly Babylonian Tiamat if her cult were still alive, but the lesser Powers would only get headaches if they tried.

“Now here’s the underground setup.” Sudakis stuck another parchment in front of my face. “You look this over, Dave. You tell me if it’s not as tight as a Vestal’s—”

Unlike the other two plans, this one really did demand a careful onceover. Proper underground containment is the Balder’s mistletoe of almost any toxic spell dump. The ideal solution, of course, would be to float the dump on top of a pool of alkahest, which would dissolve any evil that percolated through to it. But alkahest is a quis custodiet ipsos custodes? phenomenon—being a universal solvent, it dissolves everything it touches, which would in short order include the dumping grounds themselves.

Some of the wilder journal articles suggest using either lodestone levitation or sylphs of the air to raise the dump above the ground and to keep it separated from the alkahest below. I think anybody who’d try such a scheme ought to be made to live in the dump office. Lodelev is a purely physical process, and, like any physical process, vulnerable to magical interference. And sylphs of the air really are just as flighty as their reputation makes them out to be. They’d get bored or playful or whatever and forget what they were supposed to be doing.

That wouldn’t be good, not where alkahest is involved. They used it in the First Sorcerous War, but not in the Second. It’s just too potent, even as a weapon. As it eats its way straight toward the center of the earth, it’s liable to bring up magma or ancient buried Powers through the channels it cuts. Nobody even stockpiles it—how could you?

So, no alkahest under the Devonshire dump. Instead, the designers had put in the usual makeshifts: blessings and relics and holy texts from every faith known to mankind, and elaborate spells renewed twice a year to use the law of contagion to extend their effect to the places where they weren’t actually buried.

“It looks like a good arrangement on parchment,” I said grudgingly. “I presume you rigidly adhere to the resanctification schedule.” I made it sound as if I assumed nothing of the sort.

Tony Sudakis set more parchments in front of me. “Certification under canon law, the ordnances of the Baron of Angels, and national secular law.”

I examined them. They looked like what they were supposed to be. The dump management outfit might have forged the secular documents; the worst the Baron of Angels can do is send you to jail, the worst the secular power can do is leave you short a head. But you’d have to be pretty bold to forge a canon lawyer’s hand or seal. The punishment for that kind of offense could go on forever.

I shoved the pile of parchments back at Sudakis. Now my tone of voice was different: “I have to admit, I don’t know what to tell you. This really does look good on parchment. But something’s not right hereabouts; I know that, too.” I told him about the rest of the birth defects I’d spotted, the vampirism and lycanthropy.

He frowned. “You’re not making that up?”

“Not a word of it. I’ll swear by Adonai Elohaynu, if you like.” I am, God knows, an imperfect Jew. But you’d have to be a lot more imperfect than I am to falsify that oath. People who would risk their souls by falsely calling on the Lord won’t make it past the EPA spiritual background checks, and a good thing, too, if you ask me.

Sudakis’ beefy face set in the frown as if it were made of quick-drying cement. “Our attorneys will still maintain that the effects you cite are just a statistical quirk and have nothing to do with the Devonshire dump, its contents, or its activities. If we go to court, we’ll win.”

“Probably.” I wanted to hit him. The certain knowledge that he’d murder me wasn’t what stopped me. Getting in a good shot or two would have made that worthwhile. Far as I’m concerned, people who hide “it’s wrong” behind “it’s legal” deserve whatever happens to them. The only thing that held me back was knowing I’d bring discredit to the EPA.

Then Sudakis pulled out that little amber charm again. He licked a fingertip, ran it over the smooth surface of the amulet, and murmured something in a language I not only didn’t know but didn’t come close to recognizing. Then he put the amulet back and said, “Now we can talk privately for a little while.”

“Can we?” I had no reason to trust him, every reason to think he was trying to trap me in an indiscretion. The lawyers he’d been throwing at me would have loved that.

But he said, “Yeah, and I think we’d better, too. I don’t like the numbers you laid out for me, I don’t like ’em at all. This place is supposed to be safe, it’s been safe ever since I took over here, and I want it to keep on being safe. That’s what they pay me for, after all.”

“Why do you have to turn aside the Listener if that’s so?” I asked. Come to that, I didn’t know his outrÇ little ritual really had turned aside anything.

He said, “Because the company basically just wants me to run this place so it makes them money. I want to run it right.”

All I could think was, Hell of a note when a man has to deafen the Listener before he says he wants to do a proper job. But he’d convinced me. Too many top corporate managers hide dorsal fins under expensive imported suits. If one of those types got wind of what Sudakis had said, let alone what he’d done, he’d be out on the street with a big dusty footprint on his behind.

“How’d you get word there was trouble here, anyhow?” he asked. “Did you paw through the Thomas Brothers’ files hoping you’d stumble over something you could use to curse us?”

His bosses wouldn’t have let him manage the dump if he was stupid. I answered, “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. I got a call from the District of St. Columba this morning, telling me I ought to check things out. So I did, and now you know what I found.”

“That’s—interesting.” He stuck out his chin. “How’d Charlie Kelly know back there that something was up