“Nor did I,” he answered. “Do not blame yourself, my son. You uncovered a great evil at that dump; that I knew when you spoke to me of what you’d found. Now it has proved greater than either of us dreamt. But that is no reason to draw back from it. Rather, it is more reason to work to root it out.”
I had nothing to say to that. I just dipped my head, the way you do when you hear the truth. Rather to my relief, Kawaguchi came back just then. A couple of men in red dashed into the ruins. My eye followed them. Seeing my head twist, Kawaguchi nodded. “They will make the effort, Inspector Fisher. They have, of course, no guarantee of success.”
“Of course.” I noted the understatement. After a moment, I went on with a question: “Did you call me up here just to take my information, or can I help you with what you’re doing?”
“The former, I fear, unless you have resources concealed in your carpet which are not immediately obvious.” Did the legate’s eyes twinkle? I wasn’t sure. If he had a sense of humor, it was drier than Angels City in the middle of one of our droughts.
“Well, then,” I said, “do you mind my asking you for as much as you can give me of what you’ve found out here? The more I learn about how this fire started and the magics that went into it, the better my chance of correlating those data with one or more of the consortia that use the Devonshire dump. That’ll help me figure out whose spells are leaking, which ought to help you figure out who’s to blame for this burning.”
I’ve worked with constabularies before. Constables are always chary about telling anybody anything, even if the person who wants to know is on the same side they are. Kawaguchi visibly wrestled with himself; under other circumstances, it would have been funny.
Finally he said, “That is a reasonable request.” Which didn’t mean he was happy about it. “Come with me, then. You may accompany us if you like, Mistress Adler.”
“How generous of you,” Judy said. I knew she’d have accompanied us whether Kawaguchi liked it or not, and gone off like a demon out of its pentacle if he tried to stop her. The irony in her voice was thick enough to slice. If the legate noticed it, though, he didn’t let on. I wondered if the Angels City constabulary wizards had perfected an anti-sarcasm amulet. If they had, I wanted to buy one.
Such foolishness vanished as the legate took Judy and me over to his command post (Brother Vahan tagged along, without, I noticed, any formal invitation). The firecrew forensics man was talking with his opposite number in the constabulary, a skinny blond woman who had a spellchecker that made my little portable look like a three- year-old’s toy.
I stared at it with honest envy. As soon as Kawaguchi introduced me to her—she was Chief Thaumatechnician Bornholm—I asked, “How many megageists in that thing, anyway?”
She must have heard me salivating, because she smiled, which made her look a little younger and a lot less tough. “Four meg active, eighty meg correlative,” she answered.
“Wow,” I said; beside me, Judy whistled softly. I wondered when the EPA would get a portable spellchecker with that kind of power. Probably some time in the new millennium; it would just about take the Millennium for us to have the tools we need to do the job right. The next century shouldn’t be more than two or three decades old before we’re ready to deal with this one.
“So what do we have in there?” Kawaguchi asked.
Bornholm was a good constable; she glanced over to him and got his nod before she started talking in front of us civilian types. Then she said, “Even with the spellchecker, this won’t be as easy as I’d like; on hallowed ground, sorcerous evidence has a way of evanescing in a hurry.” She turned her head in Brother Vahan’s direction. “The abbot here has a most holy establishment: good for his monks and a credit to him, but hard on the constabulary.”
“All right, I won’t expect you to hand me the case all sealed up with a papal chrysobull,” the legate said, “though I wouldn’t have been sorry if you did. Tell me what you know.”
“About what you’d expect in an arson case,” Bornholm said: “strong traces of salamander, rather weaker ones from the use of a blasting rod.”
“Uh-huh,” Kawaguchi said. “Any special characteristics of the salamander that would help us trace it back to a particular source on the Other Side?” Different rituals summon different strains of salamander; had this been one of the unusual ones, it could have told a lot about who called the creature to the monastery.
But the thaumatech shook her head. “As generic a spell as you can find. Ten thousand campers use it out in the woods every day to get their fires going. Of course, they tack a dismissal onto it, too, and that didn’t happen here. Just the opposite, in fact; it was encouraged. Same with the blasting rod: very ordinary magic.”
“Hellfire,” Kawaguchi said, which wasn’t literally true—salamanders are morally neutral creatures—but summed things up well enough.
Bornholm hesitated, then went on, “When I first set up, I thought something else might be there, too. I wanted to stake down the certain arson traces before anything else, though, and by the time I came back to the other, it was gone. Hallowed ground, like I said. I’ll take the rap for it—it was my choice.”
“That’s what free will is about,” Kawaguchi said. “You did what you thought was best. I presume you ordered the spirit to remember, not just analyze. We can do further evaluation later.”
“Certainly,” Bornholm answered, with a
“I understand that.” Kawaguchi smacked right fist into left palm in frustration. I didn’t blame him, either. There was the spellchecker, with access and correlation capability on relations with the Other Side for everybody from Achaeans to Zulus and all stops in between, with hordes of microimps inside to do the thinking faster and more thoroughly than any mere man could manage—but, as the thaumatech had said, you can’t analyze what isn’t there.
“Legate!” The shout rang through the smoky night. Kawaguchi spun round (so did all of us, as a matter of fact). One of the guys from the sorce-and-rescue crew had emerged from the ruined scriptorium. His boots thumped on the pavement as he walked over to us. He was sooty and sweaty and looked about half beaten to death, but his eyes held triumph. “We made contact with that access spirit, Legate.”
“Good news!” Kawaguchi exclaimed. “That’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard tonight. What sort of shape is the spirit in?”
“I was just getting to that, Legate,” the sorce-and-rescue man said, and some of the sudden hopes I’d got up came crashing down again—he didn’t sound what you’d call upbeat. “The spirit’s here—it’s manifested enough so we can move it—but it’s not in good shape, not even slightly. Preliminary diagnosis is that whoever set the fire went after the poor creature on the Other Side, too.”
“Poor Erasmus,” Brother Vahan said, with as much concern as if he were talking about one of his monks.
“Erasmus? Oh,” the sorce-and-rescue man said; then: “I don’t think it’ll perish, but it’s had a rough time. Hard to characterize torments on the Other Side, but—did it used to manifest itself with its spectacles cracked?”
“No,” Brother Vahan said, and started to weep as if that was to him the crowning tragedy of all those which had befallen the Thomas Brothers monastery tonight. I remembered the fussy, precise spirit and the neat little pair of glasses it had worn. How could you crack lenses that weren’t really there? I suppose there are ways, but I got queasy thinking about them.
“We can run the spellchecker on this access spirit,” Thaumatech Bornholm said. “Maybe we’ll learn just what hit the monastery by finding out how the spirit was tormented.”
“For that matter, simple questioning may yield the same information,” said Kawaguchi, who sounded ready to start asking poor abused Erasmus questions right then and there if the sorce-and-rescue man would summon the spirit onto a ground-glass screen.
But the sorce-and-rescue man shook his head. “Nobody’s going to run a spellchecker on that spirit any time soon. Any sorcerous nudge right now, before it has a chance to regain some strength, and it’ll be gone for good. I’m not kidding—a sorcerous nudge right now
“I shall pray for Erasmus’ recovery along with the recovery of my brethren who took hurt in the fire,” Brother
