The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

place where I’d seen it before. For an instant I thought it did, but when I blinked it was gone.

“What’s there?” Sudakis asked when I turned my head.

“Nothing,” I said, but I meant—I guessed I meant—it with a small n. I laughed a little nervously. “A figleaf of my imagination.”

“You work here a while, you’ll get those for sure.” He nodded, hard. I wondered what all he’d seen—or maybe not seen—since he started working here.

When we got out to the front gate, the security guard again carefully placed the footbridge so it straddled the red line. I felt like a free man as soon as I was on the outside of the dump site. Sudakis waved across from his side, then went back to his citadel.

It wasn’t until I’d crossed the crosswalk, chanted the phrase that unlocked the antitheft geas on my carpet, and actually gotten into the air that I remembered the vampires, the werewolves, the kids born without souls, all the other birth defects around the Devonshire dump. Getting outside the site didn’t necessarily free you from it. Were that so, I wouldn’t have had to make this trip in the first place.

Midday traffic was a lot thinner than the usual morning madness. I was more than twice as far from my Westwood office in the Confederal Building as I was when I left from my flat, but I didn’t need any more time to get there than I do on my normal commute. I slid into my reserved parking space (penalty for unauthorized use, a hundred crowns or an extra year for your soul in purgatory, or both—judge’s discretion: if he thinks you won’t rate purgatory, he’ll just fine you), then walked inside.

The elevator shaft smelt of almond oil. At the bottom was a virgin parchment inscribed with the words GOMERT and KAILOETH and the sigil of the demon Khil, who has control over some of the spirits of the air (he can also cause earthquakes, and so is a useful spirit to know in Angels City). The almond oil is part of the paste that summons him, the other ingredients being olive oil, dust from close by a coffin, and the brain of a dunghill cock. “Seventh floor,” I said, and was lifted up.

As soon as I got into the office, I called Charlie Kelly. He listened while I told him what I’d found, then said, “Nice piece of work, Dave. That confirms and amplifies the information I’d already received. Go to work on that warrant right away.”

“I will,” I promised. “I know just the judge: I’ll take the information over to qadi Ruhollah. He’s about the strictest man in A.C. when it comes to environmental damage.” I chuckled. “For that matter, he’s a rigorist on just about everything—Maximum Ruhollah, we call him out here.”

“Sounds like the fellow we need, all right,” Kelly said. “Anything else?”

I started to say no, but had to think better of it. “There is one other thing, as a matter of fact. Sudakis—the dump manager—wondered how you’d heard something new might be wrong at his place when no one out here had a clue. I couldn’t give him an answer, but it made me curious, too.”

As it had once or twice when he’d called me at home, the silence stretched longer than imp relay could account for by itself. Finally Charlie said, “A bird told me, you might say.”

“A little bird, right?” I started to laugh. “Charlie, I stopped believing in that little bird about the same time I found out the stork only brings changelings.”

“However you want it,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you, and more than I ought to.”

I thought about pushing some more, but decided not to. People back in D.C. are supposed to have good sources; they justify the fancy salaries that come out of your purse and mine by knowing what’s going on all over the country and how to find out about it even if the people who are doing it don’t want it found out. But I was still moderately graveled that somebody a continent away had picked up on something I hadn’t heard the first thing about right in my own back yard.

“Get the warrant, Dave,” Charlie said. “We’ll go from there, depending on what we learn.”

“Right,” I said, and hung up. Then I grabbed a sandwich and a cup of coffee at the little cafeteria in the building. They perfectly balanced virtue and vice: they were lousy but cheap. Lousy or not, my stomach stopped growling. I made another phone call.

The phone on the other end must have yammered for quite a while, because I listened to my imp drumming his fingers on the inside of the handset until at last I got an answer: “Hand-of-Glory Press, Judith Adler speaking.”

“Hi, Judy—it’s Dave.”

“Oh, hi, Dave.” I thought her voice went from businesslike to warm, but with two phone imps between us I had a hard time being sure. “Sorry I took so long to pick up there. I was in the middle of a tough passage, and I wanted to get to the end of a sentence so I could be sure I wouldn’t miss even a single word when I went back to it.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “Doing what you do, you have to be careful.”

Hand-of-Glory Press, as you’d guess from the name, publishes grimoires of all sorts, from simple ones on carpet maintenance up to the special secret sort with olive-drab covers. Judy’s their number one proofreader and copy editor. She’s the most intensely detail-minded person I know, and she needs to be. An error in a grimoire on flying carpets might end you up in Boston, Oregon, instead of Boston, Mass. An error in a military magic manual might leave you dead, or worse.

She said, “So what’s up?”

“Feel like going out to dinner with me tonight?” I asked. “I ran into something interesting today, and I wouldn’t mind hearing what you think of it.” Knowing someone who can see not only forest and trees but also count leaves is wonderful. Being in love with her is even better.

“Sure,” she said. “Meet at your place after work? I ought to be able to get there before six.”

“You’ll probably beat me there, then, the way traffic on St. James’ has been lately,” I told her.

“Sounds good.”

“There’s a new Hanese place a few blocks away that I want to try.”

“Sounds good to me, too. You know how much I like Hanese food.”

“See you tonight, then. Now I’ll let you get back to what you were doing. ’Bye.”

I went back to work, too, although my mind wasn’t really on the main project that currently infested my desk. A couple of days before, a big carpet carrying fumigants had overturned in an accident, spilling finely ground linseed, psellium seed, violet and wild parsley root, aloes, mace, and storax. Because they’re materials used in conjurations, I had to draft the environmental impact statement.

I could have just written no impact and let it go at that: the fumigants were harmless in and of themselves, and required combustion and ritual to become magically significant. A two-word report, however, would not have made my boss happy, and might have given people outside the EPA the idea that we didn’t take seriously the job we were doing.

So, instead, I wasted taxpayers’ time and parchment writing five leaves that ended up saying no impact but did it in a bureaucratically acceptable way. I do sometimes wonder why governmental agencies have to act like that, but it seems as universal as the law of contagion.

Suffused in virtue, I dropped the draft of my statement on my boss’ desk for her changes, then went down the slide, out to my carpet, and onto the freeway. Sure enough, traffic was beastly, especially down by the airport. Not only was everybody getting on and off there, but the flight lanes for the big international carrier really cramp air space for local travelers.

Judy was waiting for me when I got home, as I’d thought she would be. We’d been seeing each other for about two and a half years, then; I’d gotten her a spare entry talisman and given her the unlocking Word for my door pretty early in that time, and she’d done the same for me.

She greeted me with a pucker on her lips and a cold beer in her hand. “Wonderful woman,” I told her, which might have helped heat the kiss a little. She got a beer for herself, too. We sat down to drink them before we went out.

Judy’s a big tall brunette with hazel eyes and a mass of wavy brown hair that falls halfway down her back. She doesn’t walk, exactly; when she moves, it’s more like flowing. She looked too feline ever to seem quite at home on my angular apartment-house furniture. I enjoyed watching her all the same.

“So what did you come across today?” she asked.

I finished my beer and said, “Let’s talk about it at the restaurant. If I start explaining it now, we won’t get to the restaurant, and then you’ll think I invited you over just to lure you into bed.”

“It is nice to know you occasionally have other things on your mind,” she admitted, upending her own bottle.