I turned to Kawaguchi and Michael Manstein and asked,
“What are they dropping on them?”
They both stared at me as if I were an idiot. Then Michael said, “That’s right, you are Jewish,” as if reminding himself.
Very gently, he went on, “It’s holy water, David.”
“Oh.” All right, I was an idiot. In fact, I was doubly an idiot not only was the stuff thaumaturgically potent in and of itself, it was also perfect symbolically—what better to oppose fire of any sort than its opposite among the elements?
Once Chocolate Weasel took all the punishment it had urned from the carpet, Kawaguchi blew a long, shrill blast on a whistle. SWAT teams, Yolanda’s hazmat crew, and the EPA hazmat outfit swarmed toward the Chocolate Weasel building. Ordinary constables, the guys with mostly passive sorcerous gear and merely physical weapons— the grunts—followed in their wake.
“They were thrown back twice before,” Kawaguchi said, more to himself than to me or Michael. This time —”
This time they moved forward. The SWAT team wizards carried holy water sprinklers like the ones the Loki guards in Burbank packed. Those hadn’t been enough to protect them against the growing might of the Aztedan Powers before.
Now those Powers had been reduced by bombardment from On High, so to speak. And now the SWAT teams advanced cautiously toward the parking lot in front of Chocolate Weasel, then toward the building itself.
I got distracted at that point: the archdiocesan carpet floated down and landed just a few feet from me. “Good afternoon, Inspector Fisher,” one of the monks on it said. “I wondered it I might see you here today. Somehow it seems fitting.”
“Brother Vahan!” I exclaimed. “It certainly does.” I trotted over to shake his hand. “Were you the bombardier up there?”
“I was indeed,” he said with a sober nod. “God moves in a mysterious way. His wonders to perform. Not scriptural, but in this case accurate.”
A curate? No, you’re an abbot, my mind gibbered. I forced myself back to the here-and-now: “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I was in the cardinal’s office, beseeching him on bended knee to reconsider his prohibition against my brethren’s use of cosmetic sorcery to restore their appearance, when Legate Kawaguchi’s communication reached His Eminence. He thought me an appropriate agent for the task requested, and I was pleased to obey him in this instance.”
Brother Vahan was stubborn to the point of being bullheaded, if he kept after the cardinal to change his mind once he’d decided to do something. You don’t do that if you’re in monastic orders; you are, after all, sworn to obedience along with poverty and chastity. My guess was that Brother Vahan wouldn’t have said a word about the cardinal’s decision had it affected him. For his monks, though, he’d argue—a good man.
And I could see why the cardinal would have wanted him on that carpet: who would have more strength of purpose going up against the probable destroyers of the Thomas Brothers monastery than its abbot?
“As to the other, I gather His Eminence told you no again?” I said.
His thick eyebrows—virtually the only hair he had on his head—twitched upwards. “From what do you infer that?”
“You said you were happy to obey him ‘in this instance,’ ”
I answered. “I took it to mean you weren’t happy about the other.”
“Most Jesuitically reasoned.” His thin smile said he was teasing me. It went away too soon. “I’d rather he had refused me this and granted the other. Many could have done what I just did, but who except me will speak for my brethren?”
I didn’t know what to feel: pleased with myself for understanding the way Brother Vahan’s mind worked, angry at the cardinal for sticking to his refusal like a pricldeburr, or pleased His Eminence had the gumption to commit his best to a crisis. Those last two were inextricably mixed, which only complicated things more.
Faint across a couple of hundred yards came shouts from the constables and then pops of pistol fire. Normally pistols are nothing to scorn—they’re about the most dangerous mechanical hand weapons around. After everything I’d been through that day, those pops and the clouds of gunpowder smoke I saw rising from the parking lot seemed about as consequential as the firecrackers whose cousins they were.
Kawaguchi pulled out his own pistol, cocked it, checked his flint, and then trotted down Nordhoff toward Chocolate Weasel. Michael and I started after him, but a constable about the size of both of us put together shook his head and rumbled, “That wouldn’t be smart.” He stepped in front of us and spread his arms wide to make sure we listened to him.
Since he was doing a pretty good impression of the Great Hanese Wall, I stopped. So did Michael.
That meant we had to wait. Waiting is harder than doing.
When you’re doing, you don’t have time to worry. When you’re waiting, if you’re anything like me, you think about all the things that could go wrong. I’d waited for the Garuda Bird. I’d waited for the carpet from the archdiocese. I was waiting again. I was sick of it. I waited anyhow, peering down Nordhoff to see what I could see.
Not too much, not for a while. Then I heard more pistol pops, and then people started coming back up the street. Some of them were constables, some prisoners with their hands in the air. As they got closer, I saw that several sets of those upraised hands were red, with drips running down toward the elbows. I heard someone make a sick, gulping noise, and realized a moment later it was me.
One of the SWAT team wizards was carrying an obsidian knife. Another one walking beside him kept spraying it with holy water. I gulped again. That knife, I had no doubt, belonged in the Devonshire dump. If ever spells were guaranteed harmful to the environment, they’re the ones that go along with human sacrifice.
I recognized one of the prisoners—Jorge Vasquez. He saw me at about the same time I saw him. I thought about making some crack about his getting shut down for EPA violations along with everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Even captured, he looked too smart and tough for me to want to twit him.
Behind him came Legate Kawaguchi, who was busy loading another charge of powder and ball into his pistol as he walked along. Brother Vahan called to him: “Do any within that building require my services?”
Kawaguchi finished ramming home the ball before he looked up. “For last rites and such, you mean. Brother?” He shook his head. “Just corpses in there.”
“Martyrs,’’ Brother Vahan said, his voice grim. Their reward shall surely come in heaven.”
I wondered about that was somebody who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time a martyr in the same sense as a person who deliberately invited death for the sake of his faith? I’m neither Catholic nor theologian, so I can’t tell you what Brother Vahan should have been thinking by the standards of his church.
That was the least of my worries, anyhow. I lunged for Kawaguchi in a way that almost made him level his newly loaded pistol at me. “Did you—” I choked on fear and had to force myself to go on: “Did you find Judy in there?”
Ib my relief, he slipped the pistol back into its holster.
Then he said, “Inspector Fisher, I neither searched extensively through Ae Chocolate Weasel building nor closely examined the bodies of the victims around the altar.” Something else to be decontaminated, I thought. Kawaguchi was continuing, “So long as you understand these limitations, sir, I can state to you that I did not see a corpse matching the description of your fiancee in that—that abbatoir.”
Kawaguchi talks like an upper-level constable: as if every word he says is going to show up in a written report or as courtroom testimony Real Soon Now. For him to pick a word like abbatoir… all at once I was glad the very large fellow in the blue uniform hadn’t let me follow the legate.
I was also gladder than I could say that—subject to his careful limitations—he hadn’t found Judy. If I chose to believe that she wasn’t there because he hadn’t found her, can you blame me?
Michael said, “Legate, can we lend any further assistance?” We hadn’t lent Kawaguchi much assistance before that I’d noticed. Michael is usually too precise to make a slip like that, but after everything that had happened during the day, can you blame him, either?
Thank you, sir, but I think not,” Kawaguchi answered.
He turned to me. “Inspector Fisher, you did your best to warn me of the magnitude of this threat I must
