Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

“Makes sense,” I said. “And Michael—”

“Yes?”

“Be careful of what’s in that jar. I have the bad feeling it’s really vicious.”

“I’m always careful,” Manstein said.

The phone yelled at me. I felt like yelling right back. I’d spend most of the morning trying to put together a panel to investigate the thecological status of the Chumash Indian Powers, and I wasn’t having much luck. Half the people I’d talked to seemed convinced in advance that the Powers were extinct and good riddance to them. If you listened to the other half, you’d move eight million people out of the Barony of Angels so the Powers could have free rein as they did in the days when the Chumash lived here.

“David Fisher, Environmental Perfection Agency.”

It wasn’t any of the thecologists, for which I heartily thanked God. It was Michael Manstein. He said, “David, could you come down to the laboratory, please? I’d like to discuss the specimen you brought me for analysis.”

“Okay, if you want me to.” As soon as I’d heard his voice, I’d picked up a leadstick and a pad of foolscap. “But can’t you just tell me what’s in it over the phone?”

“I’d really rather not,” he said. Judging somebody’s tone on the phone is always risky, and Michael wouldn’t be anything but mild and serious even if the world started coming to an end around him. But I didn’t think he sounded cheerful.

Some new safety symbols were up around the lab, but I didn’t pay them any particular attention. Like any wizard worth his lab robe, Manstein was always fiddling with his protective setup. Technology changes all the time; if you don’t keep up, it’s your soul you’re risking. Michael Manstein wasn’t a man to take risks he could avoid.

“What do you have for me?” I asked as I came through the door. He’d arranged more amulets inside the lab, too; a lot of them featured the feathered serpent. I made the connection. “Is it as bad as that?”

He stared at me. His eyes had a slightly unfocused look I’d never seen in them before, as if he’d gone fishing for minnows and hooked the Midgard Serpent. On his lab table stood the ex-tartar-sauce jar I’d given him. Around it was scribed a sevenfold circle. Let me put it like this: they only protect the intercontinental megasalamander launch sites with eight. It wasn’t “as bad as that,” it was worse.

He said, “David, I have been a practicing thaumaturge for twenty-seven years now.” Utterly characteristic of him to be exact; had it been me, I’d’ve said something like going on thirty . He went on, “In that entire period, I do not believe I have ever seen an abomination of this magnitude.”

“Enough to cause apsychia in a fetus?” I asked.

“I’m surprised it didn’t desoul the mother,” he answered. From anyone else, that would have been exaggeration for conversational effect. Michael doesn’t talk that way. He handed me a sheet of parchment. “Here are the preliminary results of the analysis.”

My eyes swept down the list. For a few seconds, they didn’t believe what they were seeing, just as at first you refuse to draw meaning from pictures of camp survivors—and camp victims—of the Second Sorcerous War. Some horrors are too big to take in all at once.

I went back for a second look. The words, curse them, did not change. I made my mouth utter them: “Human blood, Michael? Flayed human skin? Are you sure your techniques distinguish between the substitute and the real thing? Maybe it was a substitute made through contagion rather than similarity?” That would be bad enough, but— I was grasping at straws and I knew it.

But Manstein shook his head. “Probability zero, I’m afraid. I hoped the same thing, but I didn’t just use sorcerous tests: I also employed mechanical forensic analysis. There can be no doubt of the actual human component of this elixir.”

I gulped. What he’d just told me meant that Lupe Cordero, a very nice girl, was also an unwitting cannibal. I wondered how anybody was supposed to break that to her. Poor kid—all she’d wanted to do was keep her breakfast down. As if she didn’t have troubles enough.

I looked at the thaumaturgical column on the parchment. Most of it was innocuous, even beneficial: Manstein had found invocations of the Virgin, the Son (I remembered the name of Lupe’s son), several saints from Aztecia, a couple of minor demons related (his neatly printed note said) to childbirth. But there in the middle of them, standing out like a dragon in a fairy ring: “Huitzilopochtli,” I said.

“Yes.” Michael’s understated agreement held a world of meaning.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t the Aztecian war god have been teetering on the edge of extinction? No one, not even the sort of people who march to save Medvamps, would have shed a tear to see him leave the Other Side for wherever gods go when they die. His influence on This Side has always been baleful, his power fueled by hearts ripped from human victims. What maniac, I wondered, had imagined he should be summoned to strengthen a potion that exalted life, not gore?

But I knew the answer to that: CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez. I must have said the name out loud, for one of Michael Manstein’s butter-colored eyebrows rose an eighth of an inch or so. “The curandero who made this stuff,” I explained.

“Ah,” Michael said. The eyebrow went down.

“Have you called the constabulary about this yet?” I asked.

“No; I thought it appropriate that you be the first to know.”

“Thanks.” I added, “Thanks twice, in fact. I don’t think I’ll eat any lunch today, so my waistline thanks you, too.”

“Heh, heh,” he said, just like that. I’m afraid he really is as straitlaced as that makes him sound.

“We’re going to be involved in nailing this curandero along with the constables,” I said. “I don’t remember the last time anything so nasty got loose in the environment, and God only knows how many jars are still sitting on shelves in the nostrums cabinet or next to the sink. If we’re real lucky, Hernandez will have kept records on the women he’s sold it to so he can try and poison them again with something else. Odds are, though, we’ll have to spread the word through the dailies and the churches.”

“Hernandez may not even be totally responsible,” Manstein said.

“How’s that?” I asked indignantly.

“The tests I performed seem to me to indicate that the mild beneficial influences in the potion were overlain on top of the already present summoning of Huitzilopochtli,” he answered. “The curandero may not have been aware that the latter was present.”

“If he didn’t know it was there, then he’s responsible for being a damned fool,” I snapped, and I meant it literally. “He certainly shouldn’t be allowed to run around loose practicing thaumaturgy and inflicting this garbage”—I pointed at the tartar-sauce jar—“on innocent, ignorant immigrant women.”

“There I cannot disagree with you,” Michael said. “Do you want to call the constabulary, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it,” I said after a few seconds’ thought. “I’ll want to fly up there with them and be in on the arrest, make sure however much of this potion Hernandez has is sealed and then properly disposed of.” I wished Solomon had heard of Huitzilopochtli; that would have made the problem of sealing the vicious stuff simple. But however effective the great king’s design is with jinni, baalim, and other Middle Eastern denizens of the Other Side, it’s useless against New World Powers, except those largely subsumed into a Christian matrix. And Huitzilopochtli, as Manstein’s analysis had shown all too clearly, still had a great deal of independent potency.