to either side of it, the beard worn short on the cheeks and long on the chin that made his face seem even narrower than it was.
Like Ramzan Durani, he wore a white lab robe. Unlike Durani’s, his didn’t give the impression of being something he put on to impress visitors. It wasn’t what you’d call shabby, but it had been washed a good many times and still bore faint stains that looked like old blood and herbal juices.
When we clasped hands, his engulfed mine—and I’m not a small man, nor one with short fingers. But if he hadn’t gone into sorcery, he would have made a master harpsichordist; those spidery fingers of his seemed to reach halfway up my arm.
“I am pleased to meet you, Inspector Fisher,” he said with a vanishing trace of Persian accent that did more to lend his English dignity than to turn it guttural. “Please take a seat”
“Thank you.” I sat down in the chair to which he waved me. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it was the same as the one behind his desk, so I couldn’t complain.
“Will you take mint tea?” he asked, pointing at a samovar that must have come from a junk shop. “Or perhaps, since the day is warm, you would rather have an iced sherbet?
Please help yourself to sweetmeats, also.”
Since he poured tea for himself, I had some, too. It was excellent; he might not have cared how things looked, but how they performed mattered to him. The sweetmeats sent up the ambrosial perfume of almond paste. Their taste didn’t disappoint, either.
He didn’t linger over the courtesies, nor had I expected him to, not when he’d blocked out only forty-five minutes for me. As soon as we’d both wiped crumbs from our fingers, he leaned forward, showing he was ready to get down to business. I took the hint and said, “I’m here, Mr. Bakhtiar, because you’re one of the major dumpers of toxic spell byproducts at the Devonshire site, and, as I said over the phone, the dump appears to be leaking.”
His dark brows came down like thunderclouds. “And so you think it is my byproducts that are getting out. You think I am the polluter. Allah, Muhammad, and Hussein be my witnesses, I deny this, Inspector Fisher.”
“I don’t know whether you’re the polluter,” I said. “I do know from your manifests that enough sorcerous byproducts come from this business to make me have to look into the possibility.”
“Get the burin—maker—he is always the polluter.”
Bakhtiar scowled at me, even more blackly than before. “In superstitious Persia, I could understand this attitude though I know how foolish it is. Here in the Confederation, where reason is supposed to rule, my heart breaks to hear it. Taken over all, Inspector, Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins reduces the sorcerous pollution in Angels City; we do not increase it. This I can demonstrate.”
“Go on, sir.” I thought I knew the argument he was going to use, but I might have been wrong.
I wasn’t He said, “Consider, Inspector, if every wizard had to manufacture his own sorcerous tools, as was true in the olden days: not just burins but also swords, staves, rods, lancets, arctraves, needles, poniards, swords, and knives with white and black handles. Because the sorcerers of the barony would be less efficient and more widespread than we are here, far more magical contamination would result from their work. But that does not happen, because most thaumaturges purchase their instruments from me. They cause no pollution because they are not doing the work. I am, and because of it, Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins draws the attention of regulators like yourself.”
I’ve heard that single-source argument many times. It generally has an element of truth to it: doing things in one place often is more efficient and better for the environment than scattering them all over the landscape. And Bakhtiar was right when he said single-source providers do stand out because they still pollute and the people who use their services don’t. But all that doesn’t mean single-source providers can’t pollute more than they should.
I said as much. Bakhtiar got to his feet. “Come with me, Inspector. You shall see for yourself.”
He took me out onto the production floor. It was as efficiently busy as most other light industrial outfits I’ve seen. A worker wearing asalamandric gloves lifted a rack of red-glowing pieces of steel out of a fire, turned and quenched them in a bath from which strong-smelling steam rose.
That must have been the third heating for the burin blanks,” Bakhtiar said. “Now they steep in magpie’s blood and the juice of the herbforoile.”
“Ergonomically efficient,” I said; the factory hand had been able to transfer them from the flames to the bath without taking a step. As they soaked up the virtues of the blood and the herb, he prayed over them and spoke words of power. Among the Names I caught were those of the spirits Lumech, Gadal, and Mitatron, all of whom are potent indeed. I asked, “How do you decontaminate the quenching bath after you’ve infused the Powers into it?”
“The usual way: with prayer and holy water,” Bakhtiar answered. “Inspector, I do not claim these are one hundred Ercent efficacious; I am aware there is a residue of power t behind. This, after all, is why we dispose of our toxic spell byproducts at the Devonshire facility, as mandated by the laws of the barony, the province, and the Confederation. If leaks have occurred, surely that is the responsibility of the dump, not of Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins. We have complied with the law in every particular.”
“If so, you don’t have a problem,” I answered. “My concern is that someone has been disposing of byproducts that aren’t listed on his manifest, things vicious enough to break through the protection setup, even if in only minuscule amounts, and to sorcerously contaminate the surrounding environment.”
“This I understand,” he said, nodding. “As manufacturers of burins and other thaumaturgical tools, however, we operate with a limited range of magic-engendering materials, as you must know. Here, come with me. See if you find one tiny thing in any way out of the ordinary for an establishment such as ours.”
I came. He was right; I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The knives with the black handles were steeped in cat’s blood and hemlock and fitted with handles of ram’s horn. Interesting that Bakhtiar, a Muslim, conformed to common Judeo-Christian usage there; I’m given to understand the affinity goes back to the shqfar, the ram’s-horn trumpet which commemorates the trumpets that toppled Jericho’s walls. Another technician was inscribing magical characters onto hazelwood wands and cane staffs. The scribing instrument was a burin, presumably one of Bakhtiar’s precision burins.
He also inscribed the seals of the demons Klippoth and Frimost onto wands and staffs, respectively. I could feel the power in the air around him.
The sorcerous and the mundane mingled in the production of the silken cloths in which Bakhtiar’s burins and other instruments were wrapped. The firm did its own weaving in-house; three Persian women in black chadors and veils worked clacking looms, turning silk thread into fine, shimmering cloth. I wondered how long it would be before the automated looms of the Japanese made that economically impractical. They’d taken much of the flying carpet business from Detroit, and they were skillful silkworkers. As far as I could see, the combination made it only a matter of time.
Bakhtiar said. The red silk is for the burins, the black, fittingly, for the knife with the black handle, and the green for the other magical instruments. For those others, the proper color is less important, so long as it be neither black nor brown.”
A calligrapher with a goose quill dipped in pigeon’s blood wrote mystic characters on a finished silk cloth. Around him, a dozen other goose quills, animated by the law of similarity, wrote identical characters on other cloths. I asked Bakhtiar,
“Why are you using automatic writing for this process and not that of inscribing the wands and staffs?”
“As we have the opportunity, we shall, inshallah, do the latter as well,” he answered. “But the silks are merely protective vessels for the instruments, while the instruments themselves are filled with a thaumaturgic power which as yet overcomes the automating spells. But we are working on it, as I say. In fact, I read recently that a sorceware designer up in Crystal Valley has had a breakthrough along those very lines.”
“Was he using virtuous reality, by any chance?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, he was.” Bakhtiar sounded surprised.
Up till then, his expression had said I was an unmitigated nuisance. Now my nuisance value was at least mitigated. He said, “You are better informed on matters sorcerous than I should have expected from a bureaucrat.”
“We don’t spend all our times shuffling parchments from one pile to the next,” I said. “Too much of our time, yes, but not all.”
He stared at me out of black, deep-set eyes. “I might even wish you spent more time at your desk. Inspector, provided that time was the period you have instead set aside for harassing legitimate businesses such as
