The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  “Kirk is an elder of the Church of the Covenant,”

  Bakhtiar told me quietly. The diversity of Angels City has its advantages.”

  “I’ll say,” I agreed. Ishaq Bakhtiar was one sharp operator.

  The distinction between clergy and laity is much less in Protestant churches than in Catholicism; the prayers of an elder, who presumably was among the elect, were as likely to’ be heard as a minister’s. And Bakhtiar could hire two laymen for less than he’d have had to pay one who was consecrated.

  Like I said, a sharp operator.

  He was also sharp enough to say, “And if you have any doubts whatsoever, Inspector Fisher, as the whether the decontaminators are fully employed, come back to my office with me now and I will show you complete records of their activity since we moved into this building.”

  I had no doubts, but I went with him nonetheless. He rummaged through his files, plopped a handful down in front of me. I looked through them. They showed me what he’d said they would. This left me unsurprised: how often will the head of a business voluntarily show documents that don’t paint him in the best possible tight?

  But if anything was wrong at Bakhtiars Precision Burins, you couldn’t have proved it by me. All his procedures were what they should have been; his decontamination team might have been unorthodox (in the nontheological sense of the word), but it was effective.

  “Anything else, Inspector?” he asked when I’d worked my way through the last folder. Rather pointedly, he asked his watch what time it was.

  The little horological demon’s answer showed I’d already devoured fifty-five of his precious and irreplaceable minutes, where I’d promised to make do with a mere forty-five. I guess I was supposed to wail and abase myself and swear never to sin in that particular way again. Living in a large city, though, has a way of coarsening you. When I said, Tm sorry I took up so much of your time,” I put just enough bureaucratic indifference into my voice to let him know I wasn’t the least bit sorry.

  He glared at me again. This time, I didn’t bother glaring back, which only irked him more. I got up. “I think I can find my own way out.”

  “No, you mis—” He caught himself. If he was really rude to me, who could guess how much trouble I’d cause him?

  Persians understand about revenge. He tried again: “No, Inspector, you forget the door. It is active in both directions.”

  So, no matter how much he didn’t care for me, he had to escort me out so I wouldn’t alarm his door (and in case you’re wondering, I hadn’t forgotten). He gave me some insincere parting pleasantries and let me walk up the hall by myself.

  Cyndi Mendoza hit me with a dazzling smile when I came out to her desk (I’d forgotten about her—Bakhtiar could have won the exchange if he’d called her back to his office to bring me out, but that would have cost him an extra couple of minutes of my presence, and I suppose he was too efficient to think of it). She said, “Do you remember that opening spell?”

  Which was, no doubt, intended to get around to asking if I thought it would work on her. I forestalled that, though: I said, “Tm sorry, no—I make it a point never to remember anything.” I walked out while she was still staring.

  When I got back to the Confederal Building and went up to my office, I found on my desk a note from Rose in big red letters: David, come up to Bea’s office immediately. Wondering what sort of trouble I’d managed to get into while I was gone, I went up to Bea’s office.

  In the anteroom sat Rose—the real ruler of the domain—and a fussy-looking little fellow with a big nose and a loud cravat. He was looking through one of Rose’s stationery catalogues, which meant he was either madly meticulous or bored stiff: the latter, if a couple of little faint spots on his shirt meant anything.

  “Hello, Dave,” Rose said to me, and then, “Here he is, Mr. Epstein.”

  The little man bounced to his feet. “You are David Fisher, Inspector, Environmental Perfection Agency?” he asked, running my name and job title together.

  “Yes,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “Samuel Epstein, subclerk of the courts. Angels City, Barony of Angels.” From under the stationery catalogue he drew out a piece of parchment so splendid with calligraphy (it’s mostly done by automatic writing these days, as with the quills inscribing symbols on the silk instrument covers at Bakhtiar’s, but it stffl looks mighty impressive) and gaudy with seals. “I hereby deliver unto your person this summons to appear in the court at the day and hour incvited hereon in the matter of The Constabulary of Angels City vs.

  Ctiauhtemoc Hemandez.” He presented it to me with such a gorgeous flourish that I half expected to hear a ruffle of drums.

  I read the parchment. It was what Epstein said it was. “I’ll be there,” I told him. “Sorry to keep you waiting here so long. Couldn’t you just have left this on my desk?”

  “Not in cases involving thaumaturgy in the commission of a first-degree felony,” he answered. “In such cases, the chain of transmission of summonses must be as tightly controlled as that concerning the transmission of evidence.”

  “Okay,” I said, shrugging; he undoubtedly knew the arcana of his own field, “But you must spend an awful lot to time just sitting and waiting. Why don’t you bring along something more interesting to read than that?” I pointed at the catalogue.

  But he recoiled with as much horror as if I’d offered him a bacon cheeseburger. “Anticipating idleness would constitute moral turpitude on my part. Good day to you, sir.” He edged around me and fled.

  Rose and I looked at each other. She said, “If I spent a lot of working time waiting, I’d bring something interesting, too.” That relieved my mind; if Rose doesn’t think something involves moral turpitude, you can take it to the bank that it doesn’t.

  All the way home, I thought about what had gone on at Bakhtiai’s. It was of a piece with everything else connected with the Devonshire dump case: as far as I could tell on a quick visit, everything there was on the up and up, and the boss loudly denied doing anything that could possibly make toxic spell byproducts get out of the containment area and into the environment. Somebody was lying, but who? Not knowing was devilishly frustrated.

  I was going to call Judy after I finished dinner, but she called me first “Want to do something perverse?” she asked.

  I know a straight line when I’m handed one. “Sure,” I answered, “Do you want to fly up here, or shall I go down there?” Besides, the very male part of me panted, there was always the outside chance that was what she had in mind.

  The snort she gave me said it wasn’t—and also said she’d fed me the line on purpose. Maybe she wanted to see what I’d do with it, or maybe she’d already guessed what I’d do with it and wanted to see if she was right. She said, “I was thinking more along the lines of a Monday night date.”

  That’s perverse, all right,” I agreed. “Why Monday night?”

  “Because I read in the Independent Press-Scryer that a new Numidian restaurant is opening up Monday night about six blocks from here. Feel like coming down and trying it with me?”

  “Numidian, eh?” Jews often go to Muslim-style restaurants, and the other way round, too; no need to worry about pork on the menu or back in the kitchen. And Aside from that, I like North African food. Couscous, salata meshwiya—tuna salad with chili pepper, eggs, tomatoes, and peppers, dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt—chicken with prunes and honey, the lamb soup called harira souiria, with onions, paprika, and saffron… my stomach rumbled just thinking about it. “Sounds wonderful. Only thing is, how crowded will it be?

  “We can find out. Of course, if you don’t want to—”

  “I said it sounded wonderful.” I really had, too, so I got points for that “What time do you want me down there?”

  “What time do you want to come?”

  “Listen, Mistress Ather, this is your date, so you tell me what to do.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Is that how it’s supposed to work? Okay, I’
ll play along—is a quarter to eight all right?”

  “Sure—by the time we get there, I’ll be hungry enough to do proper damage to the menu. And afterwards—always assuming I don’t fall asleep on your couch because I’m so full—maybe we can do something perverse.”

  She snorted again.

  VIII

  Monday shaped up as a very good day. Not only did I have a date with Judy, but Maximum Ruhollah had come through with the show-cause order that would let me—Michael Manstein and me, actually—go up and examine the area around the Devonshire dump to see what was leaking and, God willing, find out why. That happened Thursday. He spent Friday quashing appeals from the Devonshire Land Management Consortium.

  The order was still good when I got to the Confederal building Monday morning. Had one of the appeals succeeded, the words would have faded right off the page.

  They tell stories about officials who go out to conduct their business, open up their briefcases, and pull out a blank sheet of parchment. Nobody dies of embarrassment, but sometimes you wish you could. I reminded myself to check my document before I handed it to Tony Sudakis. If there was anybody I didn’t want laughing his head off at me, he was the guy.

  I met Michael Manstein up on the seventh floor. He was packing vials of this, jars of that, silk bags full of other things and tied with elaborately knotted scarlet cords into his little black bag. I scratched my head. “Why not just take a good spellchecker?” I asked.

  He glanced up from what he was doing. “I am operating under the assumption that we will be searching around the walls for leaks, David,” he said, as patiently as if I were a kiddygarden pupil. The containment spells would degrade the performance of the microimps in a spellchecker.”

  That had certainly happened when I used my own portable to run an unofficial scan of the dump: it hadn’t picked up anything but the containment cantrips. I’d figured a more sensitive model would overcome the interference, but the reason I had Michael along, after all, was that he knew more of such things than I did. “You’re the wizard,” I told him. “Shall we go? Your carpet or mine?”

  We ended up taking his; he’d had a special option package installed to insulate his sylphs from the potent magics he often flew with. I didn’t care to risk having my carpet break down and strand me in the middle of nowhere (for which, as detractors of Angels City will tell you, St. Ferdinands Valley is an excellent substitute). As we slid down to the lot, I grinned—no staff meeting for me today.

  Michael Manstein flew exactly as you would expect: exactly at the speed limit, exactly where he ought to have been, every change of height or direction signaled at exactly the right time. Exact fits Michael exactly, as you will have gathered.

  He parked his carpet in the same lot I’d used when I first came up to the Devonshire dump. We got off and started across toward the dump. I’d taken maybe three steps when I said, “Didn’t you forget to activate your anti-theft gear? You ought to go back and do it; this isn’t a saintly neighborhood.”

  His thin, rather pallid face took on an expression I’d never seen there before. If you can believe it, Michael Manstein looked smug. He said, “What’s sorce for the gear is sorce for the gander.”

  Sometimes magicians are irritating people. All right, so Michael had better theft protection on his carpet than the usual gear woven into the fibers while it’s still on the loom.

  All right, so even if someone succeeded in beating that protection, he’d still be able to tell where his rug had gone. But was that excuse enough for making bad puns about it? I didn’t think so, especially not early in the morning.

  The security guard sitting in his glass booth was a different fellow from the one who’d been there the last time I went up to the dump, so he didn’t recognize me. Two EPA sigils and a show-cause order prominently displayed (yes, it still had writing on it) were plenty to get his attention, though. He picked up his phone, called Tony Sudakis, then came back out to us and said, “He’ll be here in a minute.”

  Sudakis took longer than that, but not much. The guard set the insulated footbridge over the barrier so Tony could come out and talk with us. He gave me a bonecrusher handclasp, made Michael wince with another one, and said,

  “Okay, let’s see the order.”

  I gave it to him. He read it carefully, handed it back to me.

  “This says you’re authorized to search ‘the surround of the aforementioned property.’ ” He made a face. “Lawyer talk. Anyway, this doesn’t say thing one about coming inside.”

  That’s right” I nodded. “We’re trying to see what’s leaking out, after all.”

  “Okay,” Sudakis said again. “I am directed by our legal staff to provide no more cooperation than what the order demands. That means that if you need to take a leak, you’ve got to do it across the street. You can’t come into the containment area for anything.” He gave me an apologetic shrug.

  “I’m sorry, Dave, but that’s what my orders are.”

  “Since we’ll be sniffing around your wall, maybe I’ll just stand up against it if I need to whizz,” I told him. He gave me a funny look; bureaucrats aren’t supposed to talk like that.

  Michael Manstein said, “I’m going to get to work now.” He opened up his little black bag and started taking things out of it Sudakis watched him setting up. I watched Sudakis. After a minute or so, I said, “Walk around the comer with me, Tony.”

  “Why? You gonna whizz on my shoes?” But he walked around the comer with me.

  As soon as we were out of sight of Michael—and, more to the point, the security guard—I gestured as if I were pulling out an amulet. Tony Sudakis might be a bruiser, but don’t ever think he’s dumb. He went through his little pagan ritual with the chunk of amber he wore in place of a crucifix.

  When he nodded to me, I said, “Okay, we can’t go inside the dump. I understand your position. But I still want to ask you about something I saw, or thought I saw, when I was in there before. I’d have done it sooner, but I keep forgetting.”

  “What is it?” His voice was absolutely neutral; I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to help, was angry at me, curious, or anything. He just set the words out in front of him as if they’d been printed on parchment.

  I described as best I could the Nothing I’d seen in the dump, the way, just for an instant, the containment wall seemed to recede to an infinite distance from my eyes. “Did you ever notice anything like that?” I asked him. “It was—unnerving.”

  “Sounds that way,” he agreed, and now he let life creep back into his words. He shook his big fair head. “Nope, can’t say I ever did see anything of that sort.” He quickly raised a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, Dave—I believe you. You spend as much time as I have inside that containment area and you’ll see all lands of strange things. Like I said before, you get all those toxic bits of not-quite-spent sorcery reacting with each other and you will see funny things. You’d better believe you will. But that particular one, no. Sorry.”

  “Okay, thanks anyhow.” I didn’t know whether to believe him or not; as usual, he was hard to get a spell on. I wondered if it was because he worshiped Perkunas. In a mostly Judeo-Christian country (and the same goes for Muslim lands, too), followers of other Powers often seem difficult to fathom. On the other hand, Tony probably would have been tricky if he’d been a Catholic, too.

  “Anything else—anything else short—you want to talk about while the charm’s still on?” he asked.

  I shook my head. We went back around the comer to the containment area entrance. The security guard looked moderately entranced himself, watching Michael set up. Tony Sudakis didn’t give Manstein even a glance; he positioned the footbridge, motioned for the guard to pick it up again, and marched in toward his office.

  Maybe working in the toxic spell dump for so long had dulled Tony’s sense of wonder. Lots of strange things undoubtedly happened in there, most of the sort you wouldn’t want to see outside a stout sorcerous barrier. But for me—and evidently f
or the security guard, too—nothing is more interesting than watching a skilled thaumaturgical craftsman at work. And Michael Manstein is one of the best If you’re looking merely to detect the presence of most substances and Powers, you don’t need fancy sorcery. Suppose you want to find out if someone’s spilled sugar under a rug, for instance. Get out some sugar of your own and apply the law of similarity. If you get a reaction in your control bowl, it was sugar under the rug all along (ants everywhere are a good due, too).

  But if you’re trying to see whether the influence of, say, Beelzebub is leaking out of a toxic spell dump, you don’t go about summoning up Beelzebub to see if the law of similarity applies—not if you’re in your right mind, you don’t, anyhow. Byproducts from spells that invoke Beelzebub are contained within warded dumps for good reason: you don’t want them getting out into the environment And if you summon the Lord of the Flies outside the containment area, that’s just what’s going to happen.

  And so Michael Manstein attacked the problem indirectly.

  I mention Beelzebub because that’s Whose influence he was checking for when Tony Sudakis and I came back from our sub rosa (or should I say sub sucino?) chat Instead of even thinking about invoking the demon, he pulled out a jar full of every thaumaturge’s friend, the good old common fruit fly.

  Because fruit flies are very simple—and very stupid—creatures, they’re exceptionally sensitive to mage.

  Apprentices practice spells with them; if you can’t make your charms work on fruit flies, you’re better off in another line of work.

  And when that magic has anything to do with Beelzebub, of course, their sensitivity increases even more. Just by watching the way they flew from the jar, Michael could tell whether the demon’s influence had leaked out where it didn’t belong. It was as elegant and low-risk a test as you could imagine.