“Magister Arnold must accompany you to the facility, sir,” he answered, unsmiling. The guy outside the Devonshire dump had billed himself as a security guard. This Loki fellow really was one.
I found another question: “Suppose I ditch the talisman once I go inside?”
“First, sir, any attempt to do so would rouse the demon. Second, once inside the door there, the talisman will weld itself to your clothing and remain bonded to it until you emerge. If you’re a good enough sorcerer, sir, you can beat the talisman, but you’ll set off a great many alarms in the process, and will be apprehended in short order.”
“I don’t want to beat it and I don’t want to be apprehended,” I said. “I was just curious.” The guard nodded, polite but unconvinced. His job was being unconvinced, and he was real good at it.
Magister Arnold came out a couple of minutes later. He was a big, rangy fellow in his mid-fifties, in a lab robe almost as fancy as Ramzan Durani’s. “Call me Matt,” he said after we shook hands. “Come along with me now.”
I came along. The door closed behind us. I gave the talisman a surreptitious yank. Sure enough, it was stuck to the front of my shirt. I’d figured it would be. Loki took security seriously.
I found out just how seriously when we got to the door of Arnold’s office: it was hermetically sealed. Now I grant you that Hermes is a good choice of protector for an aerospace office—in his wingfoot aspect, he’s naturally related to flight sciences, and who better to propitiate in a security system than the patron deity of thieves?
But merciful heavens, the expense! A security system isn’t just a seal; the backup is a lot more important. Maintaining a whole cult at a level sufficient to keep its god active and alert will kill you with priests’ fees, fanes, sacrifices, what have you. I wondered how much of the bill Loki was paying itself and how much it was passing on to the taxpayer. Somehow cost overruns never turn out to be anybody’s fault. They’re just
Be that as it may, Magister Arnold rubbed the toggle that served as the door Herm’s erect phallus. The Herm must have recognized his touch, for it smiled and the door came open.
It closed behind us with a definitive-sounding
“No, thanks,” I answered; I’d just as soon drink vitriol as muck that was reheating all day. And besides— “You really don’t feel like following me down the hall if I have to use the men’s room, do you?”
“Oh, yes, of course. That’s right, you’re wearing a visitor’s talisman, aren’t you? I hope you don’t mind if I have a cup?” At my inviting wave, Arnold poured himself one. It looked as thick and dark and oily as I’d figured it would. Even the fumes were enough to make my nostrils twitch. When he set the cup down, he asked, “So what have we done that’s brought the EPA down on us?” He didn’t say
“I don’t know that you’ve done anything,” I answered. “I do know that somebody’s spells are leaking out of the Devonshire dump, and I also know that whoever that somebody is, he’s murdered monks to keep his secret.”
That got Arnold’s instant and complete attention. His eyes gripped me like the Romanian giants Eastern European sorcerers use to handle magical apparatus they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot Pole. He was quick on the uptake. “The Thomas Brothers fire is connected to this affair, is it?” he said. “A bad business, very bad.”
“Yes.” I let it go at that; no need for him to know I was personally involved with the monastery fire. I pulled out my chart. “As near as I can tell from this, Magister Arnold, Loki puts more toxic spells into Devonshire than anybody else—and the ones I have here are those you admit to publicly.”
“For the record,” Arnold said loudly, “I deny there are any others.” His tone was just as sincere as Tony Sudakis’, and told me (in case I hadn’t been sure already) a Listener was in there with us.
I liked that tone even less from the magister, because I knew he wasn’t on my side while I hoped Sudakis was. All Arnold wanted to do was play with his projects, whatever they happened to be. It wasn’t that I doubted their worth. I didn’t; as I’ve said, I’m demons for the space program myself. But nobody has any business fouling the nest and then pretending his hands are clean.
“For the record,” I answered, just as loudly and just as snottily, “I don’t believe you.” Arnold glared; my guess was that nobody’d talked to him like that for a while. I let him steam for a few seconds, then said, “Are you seriously telling me nothing too secret to get into your EPA forms goes on at the Cobold Works?”
“What Cobold Works?” he said, but he couldn’t keep a twinkle from his eye. That the establishment in the desert exists is an open secret. But his smile disappeared in a hurry. “If it’s too secret to go into the forms, Inspector Fisher, it’s also too secret to talk about with you. No offense, but you need to understand that.”
“I’m not out to betray our secrets to the Hanese or the Ukrainians,” I said. “You need to understand that, and to understand that the situation around the Devonshire dump is serious.” I tossed him the report on birth defects around the site. As he read it, his face screwed up as if he’d bitten into an unripe medlar. “You see what I mean, magister.”
“Yes, I do. You have a problem there, absolutely. But I don’t believe the Loki Space Division, at least, is responsible for it. If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll tell you why.”
“Go ahead,” I said. Nobody I’d talked to would even entertain the idea that he could be responsible for the leaks. Well, I didn’t find the idea entertaining, either.
“Thanks.” Arnold steepled his fingers, more a thoughtful gesture, I judged, than a prayerful one. He went on. “I gather this toxic spell leak is believed to be through the dump’s containment system rather than airborne.”
“Yes, I believe that’s true,” I said cautiously. “So?”
He nodded as if he’d scored a point. “Thought as much. I’m not breaking security to tell you that Space Division spells are universally volatile in nature, with byproducts to match. That’s not surprising, is it, considering what we do?”
“I suppose not,” I said. “What exactly is your consortium’s role in getting the Garuda Bird out of the atmosphere?”
That did it. He started rolling like the Juggernaut’s car, which, considering the project we were talking about, isn’t the worst of comparisons. Loki was in charge of two project phases, the second of which (presumably because it dealt with air elementals) had been split into two elements.
“First, we handle the new spells pertaining to the Garuda Bird itself.” Arnold pointed to a picture tacked onto the wall behind him: an artist’s conception of the Bird lifting a cargo into low orbit, with the curve of the Earth and the black of space behind it. Even in a painting, the Bird is something to see. Think of a roc squared and then square that again—well, the Bird could turn a roc into a pebble. For a second, I forgot about being an investigator and felt like a kid with a new kite.
“The Bird is magic-intensive anyway,” Arnold went on. “Has to be, or else that big bulk would never get off the ground. But we’ve had to upgrade all the spell systems and develop a whole new set for upper-atmospheric and exatmospheric work. They do fine in similarity modeling; pretty soon we’ll get to see what the models are worth. You with me so far?”
“Pretty much so, yeah,” I answered. “What’s this other phase you were talking about? Something to do with sylphs?”
“That’s right. Turns out our models show that max-Q—”
“What?”
“Maximum dynamic pressure on the Bird,” he explained grudgingly, and then, because I still didn’t get it, added more grudgingly still, “Maximum air buffeting.”
“Oh.”
I’d distracted him. He gave me a dirty look, as if he were a wizard who’d forgotten the key word of an invocation just as his demon was about to appear in the pentacle. When I didn’t rip off his head or swallow him whole, he pulled himself together. “As I was saying, max-Q on the Garuda Bird occurs relatively low in the atmosphere, due to sylphic action on the traveler through the aery realm.”
“Sylphs are like that,” I agreed. “Always have been. How do you propose to get them to act any different?”
“As I said before, we have a two-element approach to the problem—”
He pulled a chart out of his top desk drawer and showed me what he meant. If he hadn’t been an aerospace thaumaturge, he would have called it the carrot-and-stick approach. As it was, he talked about sylph-esteem and sylph-discipline.
