“Alevai,” I said, a most un-Catholic endorsement of his sentiment. But I didn’t stop worrying, or even slow down.
The Spainish who’d brought Christianity to Aztecia were fanatics, nothing else but; they had to be, or else they never would have tried it. But over the years, the Church has turned fat and lazy and rich and comfortable. The fanatics were in the Chocolate Weasel building now, doing their best to fuel the revival of the old Aztecian gods.
Balance of Powers, I thought, and shivered.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked Kawaguchi. “Exorcists to come and try to drive Huitzilopochtli back to the Other Side before he can fully establish himself here?”
The constable, you will have gathered, was a worn, dour fellow. Now he surprised me with a wall-to-wall smile. The response the cardinal offered me was nowhere near so halfhearted.”
I wished he hadn’t said halfhearted, not when you thought about how Huitzilopochtli and Huehueteod were being summoned into Angels City. But the cardinal, that stiffnecked Erseman—I’d thought he was on the fanatical side when he refused to grant the burned Thomas Brothers monks a dispensation for cosmetic sorcery. Most of the time, I still thought that kind of fanaticism out of place in our century.
But right this minute, it might end up saving all our asses—and maybe our souls, too.
Kawaguchi kept watching the sky. Had Quetzalcoad shown any skin of manifesting himself along with the other Aztecian Powers, I would have tried to get hold of Burbank again to see what the Garuda Bird could do against the Feathered Serpent As things were, though, I didn’t see how the Bird could help.
I wondered what Kawaguchi was waiting for. Whatever it was, I hoped it would be good—and powerful. Something nasty—something else nasty, I mean—was going to happen inside that building any minute now. I could feel it coming, in the same part of the inner me that felt the growing presence of Huehueteod like a bad sunburn.
Suddenly, Kawaguchi pointed. I spotted a flying carpet, way above the usual flyways and ignoring their traffic grid as if it didn’t exist. Maybe it had a constabulary clearance that overcame all the anti-flying invocations that gave people and business their privacy… or maybe it was under the control of a higher Power.
As it got closer, I saw it was a big carpet, a freight hauler, and heavily loaded. It was gold, with a white cross—the colors of the Vatican flag. I knew the Vatican rug would also bear a woven—in legend in white—IN HOC SIGNO VINCES—but it was too high and too far away for me to be able to read that.
It was heading straight over the Chocolate Weasel building. Huehueteod’s magical fire flamed up to meet it. I was afraid the flames would bum down the carpet and everybody on it. But one thing I give the Catholic Church—it has a saintly hierarchy in charge of looking out for more different things than all the bureaucrats in D.StC. put together. St. Florian watches specially over those who must contend with fire. I have no idea whether his power would have been enough to overcome Huehueteod down inside the Chocolate Weasel building, but it sufficed to keep the god from crisping the carpets. One of the monks riding the carpet (I could see his bare pate shining in the late afternoon sun) tipped a big earthenware urn down onto the roof of the Chocolate Weasel building, then another and another and another, mediodical as if he were on a carpet bombing run over Alemania in the Second Sorcerous War.
Those ums and whatever they held were heavy—I could hear them smashing on and maybe through the roof from several blocks away. And whatever was in them was spectacularly efficacious. The constant heat on my soul that radiated from Huehueteod went away, as if my spirit had suddenly dived into a clear stream. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He refresheth my said ran through my head.
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 concede that at the time of our telephone conversation I did not have a full appreciation of it. My apologies for that error.”
“Who would have believed this?” I said. My guess was that Kawaguchi still didn’t have a full appreciation of what he’d been part of today. Put what happened here together with our desperate struggles back at the Devonshire dump, let both containment efforts fail, and Angels City goes light off the map. And who could say what was happening elsewhere in the Confederation, or would have followed Azbedan success here? Maybe we’d put a spike in the wheel of the Third Sorcerous War.
“David, I shall take you back to Westwood now,” Michael said in a tone that brooked no argument. I wasn’t in a mood to argue, anyhow; now that the terror which had kept me hopping most of the day was easing, I could feel myself subsiding into something with all the crisp decisiveness of a bowl of tapioca pudding. More boneless with every step, I walked over to his carpet. We headed down toward the Venture Freeway. I told myself I never wanted to see St Ferdinand’s Valley again.
When we got to the Confederal Building, Michael got off the carpet and headed for the entrance instead of going home. He gave me a bemused look when I fell into step beside him. “I may as well keep working,” I told him. “The more I have to do, the less time I have to worry.”
“Ah,” he said, “The anodyne of distraction,” Which is what I’d just said, but I hadn’t managed to boil it into four words.
If I didn’t have anything urgent on my desk, I figured I’d write up what I’d been through today. The EPA, like any government agency, thrives on documentation, and I must confess that I’ve been indoctrinated to the point where I sometimes don’t believe something is real until it’s committed to parchment On the other hand, if Moses had had to fill out all the EPA forms parting the Red Sea would have required, the Bible would be written in Egyptian.
Only one message waited for me, from a woman named Susan Kuznetsov. I frowned, trying to remember who she was. Then name and face matched: the no-nonsense gal from the Barony’s Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health who’d reported little Jesus Cordero’s apsychia to me.
I asked my watch the time: going on six. Mistress Kuznetsov had impressed me as the hard-working type, so I called her back. Sure enough, I got her. “Inspector Fisher!” she said, I thought she sounded pleased. “I’d expected you’d be gone for the day.” °I just got back in,” I told her. “What can I do for you?”
“Inspector, the Cordero family has been contacted by a consortium styling itself Slow Jinn Fizz,” she answered. “This consortium mentioned the possibility of instilling a soul into the infant, something they had been given to believe was impossible. Unlike too many poor and poorly educated families, the Corderos called me for advice instead of allowing themselves to be taken in by probable charlatans. My preliminary investigation, however, indicates that Slow Jinn Fizz may perhaps be able to deliver on some of its claims. I called you to learn whether it’s yet come under EPA scrutiny yet”
“As a matter of fact, I was out there myself, right around the time Jesus Cordero was being born,” I said.
When I didn’t go on right away, Susan Kuznetsov said,
“And? Are they flimflam men like so many outfits with impressive claims?”
“You know, I don’t really think so,” I answered. “I think they’re right on the edge of making psychic synthesis possible, and I think the procedure may well have important benefits for apsychic patients and give them at least a chance at life after death.”
“Really?” She sounded surprised. “You recommend the procedure, then?”
“I didn’t say that,” I told her, and then explained: “I don’t knew where or from whom the pieces of soul the jinni are synthesizing come from, or whether Slow Jinn Fizz is solving one problem now at the
expense of widespread psychic depletion years, maybe even generations, down the line. It’s certainly a tempting technology, but you know who the Tempter is.”
“I certainty do,” she said. “So you’d suggest the Corderos stay away from it?”
If she’d asked me that the day before, I would have said yes. Thanks to modem medicine, Jesus Cordero had every chance of living to a ripe old age, and psychic synthesis would be investigated and refined until people understood all the gremlins in the process. That would be the right time for him to have a soul implanted.
But after what had happened at the Devonshire dump and then at Chocolate Weasel, I felt less easy about that waitfor—developments approach. Just because the odds said you were likely to lead a long life didn’t mean you would: a big piece of Angels City had almost gone up in flames. If you were an apsychic, could you afford to take a chance like that?
Would you want to, knowing extinction awaited?
“Mistress Kuznetsov,” I said carefully, “the EPA hasn’t taken a position on Slow Jinn Fizz and what it does. Before we do, we’ll have to weigh short-term benefits against lowergrade long-term risks. My guess is that the technology won’t be allowed out of the experimental stage and into general use for many years.”
“I know that much already,” she answered. “The people from Slow Jinn Fizz said as much to the Corderos, and I give them credit for it. What I’m realty asking is, what would you do if that were your kid?”
“If it’s my kid, I worry about saving him first and everything else later,” I said. “Isn’t that what being a parents all about? But just because that’s what I’d do doesn’t mean it makes good public policy.”
“That’s fair,” she said. “Let me put it a different way, then; would the EPA have kittens if the Slow Jinn Fizz experimental protocol expanded to include Jesus Cordero?”
“Right now, the answer to that is no,” I said. Too much else—bigger stuff—was going on for us to worry about Slow Jinn Fizz right now, but I didn’t tell that to Susan Kuznetsov.
I hoped that one day (one day soon. God willing) things would slow down to the point where we’d be able to worry about the problems synthesized souls present No doubt they were important but they weren’t world-threatening, so for now they’d just have to wait And besides, I told myself, how much environmental damage on the Other Side would manufacturing a soul for one little boy cause? Not much, surety, and it would do so much good for Jesus Cordero.
The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Page 36
