when you hadn’t heard anything out here?” No, he wasn’t stupid at all, not if he knew the fellow at the EPA who was likeliest to give me orders.
“His job is to hear things like that,” I answered, suspicious again. Not all the ways Sudakis might have learned about Kelly were savory ones.
“Yeah, sure, sure. But how?” If he was acting, he could have given lessons. He looked down at his wrist, said something scatological. That’s a safer way to work off your feelings than swearing or cursing. “My stinking watch says it’s day before yesterday. Must be eddy currents from the garbage outside.”
“You ought to wear something better than that cheap mechanical,” I said. I touched the tail of the timekeeper that coiled round my wrist. It’s a better-behaved little demon than the one that sits on my nightstand at home. It yawned, stretched, piped, “Eleven forty-two,” and went back to sleep.
Sudakis scatologized again. “The Listener will go back on duty any minute now. I can’t put it out two times running; the magic doesn’t work. I hate doing it even once: too much magic loose here as is. That’s why I don’t wear a fancy watch like yours. Mechanicals are all right. When one gets bollixed, I just buy another one: no need to worry about rites or anything like that.”
I shrugged; it wasn’t my business. But I have as little to do with mechanicals as I can. If the Other Side weren’t as real as this one, they might be all right. But as Atheling the Wise put it, though, most forces are also Persons, and mechanicals have no Personalities of their own to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—to say nothing of outraged (or sometimes just mischievous) Forces. That’s why you’ll never see lodestone levitation under an alkahest pool.
Sometimes, when I’m in the mood for utopian flights of fancy, I think about how smoothly the world would run if all natural forces were as inanimate as the ones that let mechanicals operate. We’d never have to screen against megasalamanders launched on the wings of supersylphs to incinerate cities anywhere in the world. Neither of the Sorcerous Wars that devastated whole countries could have happened. For that matter, I wouldn’t have had to worry about toxic spell dumps or the ever-growing pollution of the environment. Things would be simpler all around.
Yeah, I know it’s a dream from the gate of ivory. Without magic, the world would probably have farmers, maybe towns, but surely not the great civilization we know. Can you imagine mass production without the law of similarity, or any kind of communications network without the law of contagion?
And medicine? I shiver to think of it. Without ectoplasmic beings to see and reach inside the body, how would medicine be possible at all? If you got sick, you’d bloody well die, just like one of Tony Sudakis’ cheap watches when magic touched its works.
I pulled my mind back to business and asked him, “Can you give me a list of the firms whose spells you’re storing at this containment facility?” That was a question I could legitimately ask him, regardless of whether the Listener was conscious.
He said, “Inspector Fisher, in view of the unofficial nature of your visit, I have to tell you no. If you bring me a warrant, I will of course cooperate to the degree required by civil and canon law.” He thought he was being heard again—he tipped me a wink as he spoke.
“Such a list is a matter of public record,” I argued, both because it was something I really wanted to have and because I still wasn’t sure I could trust him.
“And I will surrender it to properly constituted authority, but only to such authority,” he said. “But it could also give competitors important information on the spells and charms we use at this facility. Limited access to magical secrets is one of the oldest principles of both canon and civil law.”
He might have been playing it to the hilt for the sake of the Listener, but he had me and I knew it. Sophisticated magic has to be kept secret or else everyone starts using it and the originator gains no benefit from hard and often dangerous research work. People who want to socialize sorcery don’t realize there wouldn’t be much sorcery to socialize if they took away the incentive for devising new spells.
“I shall return with that warrant, Mr. Sudakis,” I said formally.
He grinned and gave me a silent thumbs-up the Listener wouldn’t notice, so he was either really on my side or one fine con man. “Will there be anything else, Inspector?” he asked.
I started to shake my head, then changed my mind. “Is there a safe spot in this building where I can look out at the whole dump?”
“Sure is. Why don’t you come with me?” Sudakis looked happy for any excuse to get up from behind his desk. My guess was that he’d been promoted for outstanding work in the field—he probably liked the money from his administrative job but not a whole lot of other things about it.
Our shoes rang on the spiral stairway that led to the roof of the cinderblock office. Steps and rail alike were cold iron, a sensible precaution in a building surrounded by such nasty magic. The trapdoor through which we climbed was also of iron, heavily greased against the rains Angels City wasn’t seeing lately. Sudakis effortlessly pushed it out of the way.
“Here you are,” he said waving. “You’re about as safe here as you are indoors; topologically, we’re still inside the same shielding system. But it doesn’t feel the same out in the open air, does it?”
“No,” I admitted. I felt exposed to I didn’t know what. I wondered if the air itself was bad somehow. I imagined tiny demons I couldn’t even see crawling down into my lungs and relieving themselves among my bronchial passages. An unpleasant thought—I scuttled it as fast as I could.
The dump still looked like a couple of acres of overgrown, underwatered ground. If it had been paved over, it would have been a perfect used carpet lot. I don’t know what I’d expected from a panoramic view: maybe that I could spot boxes or barrels with corporate names on them. I didn’t see anything, though. The most interesting thing I did see was a little patch of ground about fifty yards from the office building that seemed to be moving of its own accord. I pointed. “What’s over there?”
Tony Sudakis’ eyes followed my finger. “Oh, that. It’ll be a while before decon does much with that area, I’m afraid. Byproducts from a defense plant—I can say that much. Those are flies you see stirring around.”
“Oh.” I dropped the subject, at once and completely. I’d thought about the Lord of the Flies on the way over to the dump. He’s such a potent demon prince that even saying his name can be dangerous.
I didn’t care for the notion of the Defense Department dealing with Beelzebub, either. I know the Pentagram has the best wizards in the world, but they’re only human. Leave out a single line—by God, misplace a single comma—and you’re liable to have hell on earth.
I looked back toward the place where I’d seen a whole lot of Nothing when I was coming up the protected (I hoped) walk toward Sudakis’ office. From this angle, it didn’t look any different from the rest of the dump. I thought about mentioning it to Sudakis, but didn’t bother; he probably saw enough weird things in the course of a week to last an ordinary chap with an ordinary job a lifetime or two.
Besides, that thought gave rise to another: “How often do you run across synergistic reactions among the spells that get dumped here?”
“It does happen sometimes, and sometimes it’s no fun at all when it does.” He rolled his eyes to show how big an understatement that was. “Persian spells are particularly bad for that, for some reason, and there’s a large Persian community here in the Valley—refugees from the latest secularist takeover, most of them. When their spiritual elements fused with some from a Baghdadi candy-maker’s preservation charm, of all the unlikely things —”
I drew my own picture. It wasn’t pleasant. Shia and Sunni magic are starkly different but argue from the same premises. That makes the minglings worse when they happen: as if Papists and Protestants used the same dump in Ireland. The Confederation is a melting pot, all right, but sometimes the pot wants to melt down.
I didn’t see anything else about which to question Sudakis, so I went back down the spiral stairs. He followed, pausing only to shut the trap door over our heads. As we walked back to his office, I said, “I’ll be back with the warrant as soon as I can: in the next couple of days, anyhow.”
“Whatever you say, Inspector Fisher.” He winked again to show he was really on my side. I wondered if he was. He sounded very much like a man speaking for the Listener when he said, “I’m happy to cooperate informally with an informal investigation, but I do need the formal parchment before I can exceed the scope of my instructions from management.”
He went out to the entrance with me. I craned my neck to see if the Nothing reappeared as I passed the
