Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

“He is,” I said, and let it go at that. If I’d taken another oath, the Corderos might have thought the first one wasn’t to be trusted. Father Flanagan nodded slowly, understanding what I’d done.

Susan Kuznetsov said, “Besides, Jesus there is a native-born citizen of the Confederation, and entitled to all the protection of our laws.” When she turned that into Spainish, the Corderos beamed; they liked the idea. The woman from the Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health quietly added, “I just wish our laws could do more for the poor little guy.” Neither she nor Father Flanagan translated that.

I said my goodbyes, collected Mistress Kuznetsov’s carte de visite , and flew back to the office. The elves hadn’t magically cleaned up my desk while I was gone. I didn’t care. It could stay dirty a while longer. I picked up the phone and called Charlie Kelly.

The yammering at the other end went on for so long that I wondered if he was back from lunch yet. It was well past two back in D.St.C.; where the demons did those confounded Confederal bureaucrats get the nerve to keep swilling at the public sty like that? All I needed was a minute of no answer on the phone to swell up and bellow like an enraged bull taxpayer, when after all I was a confounded Confederal bureaucrat my very own self.

“Environmental Perfection Agency, Charles Kelly speaking.” Finally!

“Charlie, this is Dave Fisher in Angels City. We just had another apsychic birth close by the Devonshire dump. That makes four in a little more than a year. This isn’t going to be a quiet investigation any more, Charlie. I’m going to find out what’s leaking and why, no matter how noisy I have to get.”

He kind of grunted. “Do what you think necessary.”

“Shit, Charlie, you’re the one who sicced me onto this.” I’m not usually vulgar on the phone and I’m not usually vulgar in the office, but I was steaming. “Now you’re making it a lot harder than it has to be.”

“In what way?” he asked, as if he hadn’t the slightest idea.

When Charlie Kelly goes all innocent on you, check how many fingers and toes you’re wearing. The odds are real good they’ll add up to a number smaller than twenty. I can’t imagine how I kept from screaming at him. “You know perfectly well. Tell me about the bloody bird that keeps singing in your ear.”

“I’m sorry, David, but I can’t,” he said. “I never should have mentioned that to you in the first place.”

“Well, you did and now you’re stuck with it,” I said savagely. “There’s something rotten in the area of that dump. People are being born without souls. People are dying, too, if you’ll remember the Thomas Brothers fire. You started me on this and now you won’t give with what you know? That’s—damnable.”

“I have to pray you’re wrong,” Charlie answered. “But whether you are or not, I can’t give you what you’re asking. This whole matter is bigger than what you seem to grasp—bigger than I thought, too. If I could, I’d shut down your whole investigation.”

This, from a high-powered EPA man? “Good God, Charlie? What are we talking about here, the Third Sorcerous War?”

“If we were, I couldn’t tell you so,” Kelly said. “Goodbye, David. I’m afraid you’re on your own in this one.” My imp stopped reproducing his imp’s breathing; he’d hung up on me.

I don’t know how long I stared at my own phone before I hung up, too. Jose Franco walked past my office door. I think he was just going to nod at me, the way he usually does, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw my face. “What’s the matter, Dave?” he asked, real concern in his voice. He’s a good guy, Jose is. “You look like you just saw your own ghost.”

“Maybe I did,” I said, which left him shaking his head.

Why in God’s name was Charlie Kelly acting altogether too serious about a Third Sorcerous War? The first two were disasters beyond anything imaginable even in nightmares before this century. A third one? If mankind was stupid enough to start a Third Sorcerous War, we’d probably never have to worry about a fourth one, because nobody’d be left to fight it.

And Charlie wouldn’t even tell me who the enemy was liable to be. You ever look back on your life and notice just how many sins you’ve committed to get where you are, how everything that always seemed solid all at once starts to crumble under your feet until you’re peering straight down into the Pit? That was what I felt like after I got off the phone with Kelly. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. No wonder I’d alarmed Jose.

Afterwards, I needed to give myself a good hard shake before I went back to work. When you’ve spent a while contemplating Armageddon, environmental concerns don’t look as big as they did. If the Third Sorcerous War comes along, there won’t be any environment left to protect, anyhow.

I drowned my sorrows in a cup of coffee, wishing it were something stronger. Then, more or less by main force, I made myself call Legate Kawaguchi to find out how Erasmus was doing. People are like that: the world may be going to hell around them (and the Third Sorcerous War would be a reasonable approximation, believe me), but they try to keep their own little pieces of it tidy.

“Ah, Inspector Fisher,” Kawaguchi said after I’d made it through the maze of constabulary operators to his phone. “I was going to phone you in the next few days. We expect that access spirit to become accessible to interrogation within that time frame.”

“That’s good,” I said, both because I hoped I’d learn something that would help my case (and, presumably, Kawaguchi’s) and because I was glad Erasmus would make it. “What other news do you have about the fire?”

“Investigations are continuing,” he answered, which meant he had no news.

Or maybe it meant he just didn’t feel like telling me anything. Constables are like that sometimes. I decided to give him a nudge, see if I could shake something loose: “Have your forensic sorcerers made any progress in analyzing those strange traces the thaumatech picked up at the scene, the ones the consecrated ground erased before she could fully get them into her spellchecker?”

“You have a retentive memory, Inspector.” Kawaguchi did not make it sound like a compliment: more as if he’d hoped I’d forgotten. Yet another phone pause, this one, I suppose, while he figured out whether to try to lie to me. Interesting choice for him. Sure, I was a civilian, but a civilian who worked for a Confederal agency. If he did lie and I found out about it, my bosses could make things unpleasant for his bosses, who would make things unpleasant for him.

He finally said, “The traces remain vanishingly faint, but enhancement techniques seem to indicate some sorceries of Persian origin.”

“Do they?” I said. Slow Jinn Fizz moved up a few notches on the suspect list. So did Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins, an outfit I hadn’t yet got around to visiting. I asked him, “What enhancement techniques do the Angels City constabulary use?” I hoped my own shop could learn something new and useful.

But he answered, “Nothing out of the ordinary, I’m afraid. We had our best results with an albite lens focusing the rays of the full moon on the spellchecker chamber that holds the memory microimps.”

“Yes, that’s pretty much standard,” I agreed. Only a constable would call it albite; the more usual name is moonstone. Because it’s opaque, a moonstone lens removes moonshine from moonbeams, thereby improving recollections.

“Is there anything else, Inspector Fisher?” Kawaguchi asked.

I wondered if I ought to tell him one of my superiors was afraid the case was connected with the Third Sorcerous War. He’d probably think I was moonstruck—or lunatic, if you prefer the Latin. I hoped he’d be right. Better that than Charlie being right. Besides, Kawaguchi had enough worries of his own; a constable’s job is neither easy nor pleasant.