The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  He finished the circle before he answered; one thing at a time with Michael Manstein. “I order them from Bakhtiar’s,” he said at last. “They’ve always given me good results.”

  Back before the Industrial Revolution, a wizard had to be his own smith, his own woodworker, his own tanner. If he didn’t make his instruments himself—sometimes right down to refining the ore from which a metal would be drawn—they wouldn’t be properly attuned to him and would give weak results or none at all.

  Modern technology has changed all that. Correct application of the law of contagion allows thaumaturgical tools to keep the mystic links to their original manufacturer even when someone else uses them, while the law of similarity permits their attunement to any wizard because of his likeness to the mage who made them. Some firms take one approach, some the other, some seek to combine the two.

  Michael asked, “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Because I thought you used Bakhtiar’s tools,” I answered, “and because Bakhtiar’s may be somehow connected to the jar of potion I just gave you. What I know is that Bakhtiar’s dumps at Devonshire, and there may be an involvement between the Devonshire dump case and this stuff. It’s a circumstantial link if it’s there at all, but I figured you ought to know about it.”

  “You’re right. Thank you,” Manstein said. “I have a spare set my father brought with him when he came here from Alemania after the First Sorcerous War. I’ll use that to make sure there’s no conflict of sorcerous interest.”

  “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.

  Then something else occurred to me: Hernandez’s horrible nostrum might end up in the Devonshire toxic spell dump. Tasting the irony of that, I went back to my office and got on the phone.

  The first constable I talked to was a fellow named Joaquin Garcia. “Madre de Dios!” he burst out when I told him what I’d run into. Being of Aztecan descent, he had a culturally ingrained understanding of just how nasty a power Huitzilopochtli was. I knew it in my head; he felt it in his gut. He bumped me up to his superior, a sublegate called Higgins, and he must have given him an earful, too, because Higgins was the soul of cooperation.

  “We’ll get going on a warrant for this right away, Inspector Fisher,” he promised. “Any time we get a chance to put one like that out of business, we leap on it.”

  He didn’t argue when I said I wanted to go along, either; sometimes constables get stuffy about things like that. I added, “Better make sure your people are well warded, Sublegate: with one potion like that around, who knows what else Hernandez has in there with him?”

  “We’ll send out the Special Wizards and Thaumaturges team,” Higgins said. “If they can’t handle it, nobody this side of D.St.C. can. I’ll call you back as soon as we have the warrant. Thanks for passing on the information.”

  “My pleasure,” I told him. “I want this guy shut down at least as much as you do.”

  After I got off the ether with Higgins, I went back through my files and found the names and addresses of the other three apsychic kids born near the Devonshire dump in the past year. Then I checked in the phone grimoire; two of the families were listed. I called both those houses and, by luck, got an answer each time. What I wanted to know was whether the mothers had bought any potions from CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez.

  Both women I talked to answered no. I thanked them and added the data to my notes, then spent a while scratching my head. The curandero’s nostrum was certainly vile enough to have caused Jesus Cordero to be born without a soul, but just because it could have didn’t necessarily mean it had. I kicked myself for not doing a more thorough job around the Corderos’ house, but I didn’t kick too hard. When the microimps in your spellchecker start going berserk, you’d better pay attention to that.

  More nearly routine stuff kept me busy the rest of the day. When Bea walked by my office door in the middle of the afternoon and saw me there, she raised an eyebrow and said, “I expected you’d be in the field now.”

  I’d hoped to get to Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins myself, but it just wasn’t working. I said, “I’ll probably be out tomorrow or the next day,” and explained what Manstein had found in the potion I’d brought back from Lupe Cordero’s house.

  “That’s—revolting,” she said. “You’re right, we need to clamp down on that as hard as we can. With the enormous Aztecian population in Angels City, the last thing we need here is a large-scale flareup of Huitzilopochtlism.”

  “It would make worries over Medvamps rather small potatoes, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  “I do admire your talent for understatement, David.” Bea headed on down the hall.

  Understatement was an understatement. If Huitzilopochtli got established in Angels City, it wouldn’t be fruit trees drained dry, it would be people. I thought about hearts torn out on secret altars, necromancy, ritual cannibalism a lot less refined than the genteel Christian variety.

  I also thought about all the other bloodthirsty Powers that would be drawn to the area. The act of human sacrifice is so powerful a magical instrument that it reverberates through the Other Side. All sorts of hungry Things would head this way, wanting their share: “When the gods smelled the sweet savor, they gathered like flies above the sacrifice.” What Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh five thousand years ago remains true today.

  They say that’s how the horror happened in Alemania. But the Leader didn’t try to throw the Powers out. Oh, no. He welcomed them with open arms and fed them, I dare say, beyond their wildest dreams.

  The whole world has seen what came of that. Not here, I thought. Never again.

  Courts in Angels City open at half past nine. At exactly 9:37 the next morning (I asked my watch afterwards), I got a call from Sublegate Higgins. “We have the warrant,” he said. It was so fast, I wondered if he’d used Maximum Ruhollah. Maybe not; he operated out of the St. Ferdinand’s Valley substation, and he’d be sure to have a local judge up there under his spell. He went on, “We’re moving out at ten-thirty. If you’re not here by then, you’ll be late.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said, and got off the phone. Miserable cowboy, I thought: everything had to be his way. But I headed for my carpet as fast as I could; when you’re dealing with people like that, you don’t want to give them any excuse to mess you up.

  Just as well I did, too—I made it to the substation with only about three minutes to spare. Traffic up through the pass was just ghastly. Don’t ask me how, but when a big long-haul transport carpet broke down and had to land, a unicorn got out of its cage. People on carpets and others riding pegasi were trying to herd it back to where it belonged, and weren’t having much luck.

  As my carpet crawled through the gawkers’ block, I wondered if they’d have to go to a nunnery to find someone who could calm the beautiful beast. Given Angels City’s reputation, they might have had a tough time finding a virgin outside of one. Catching the unicorn, thank God, was not my worry.

  When I finally did get to the constabulary station, Higgins gave me a disapproving look so perfectly flinty he must have practiced it in the mirror. He introduced me to the SWAT team, who looked more like combat soldiers than highly trained mages. I nodded to the thaumatech. “We’ve met before.”

  “So we have.” It was Bornholm. “You came up to the Thomas Brothers fire.”

  “That’s right. I still envy you your spellchecker.”

  “Enough chitchat,” Higgins said. “Let’s fly.”

  I’d never ridden on a black-and-white carpet before. Let me tell you, those things are hot. As we shot up the flyways to the curandero’s place, I reflected that the sylphs in the constabulary carpet could have used a little discipline themselves. A couple of turns would have tossed me off on my ear if I hadn’t been wearing my belt. But we got there in a hurry.

  Hernandez’s house was on O’Melveny, a couple of lots east of Van Nuys. I hadn’t known whether he had a storefront for his death shop, but no, it was just a little old house with a hand-lettered sign—in green and red, as Lupe Cordero had told me—that said CURANDERO nailed onto the front porch.

  Watching the SWAT team operate was something else, too. Police carpets aren’t bound by the governing spells that restrict ordinary vehicles to their flyways. The mages drew an aerial ward circle around Hernandez’s establishment from above before anybody landed. Whatever he had in there, they weren’t about to give him a chance to use it. Constables don’t live to enjoy their grandchildren by taking risks they don’t have to.

  Sublegate Higgins used an insulated umbrella
(same principle as the footbridge at the Devonshire dump, but applied upside down) to penetrate the circle. With him came four of the SWAT team wizards, Bornholm the thaumatech with her fancy spellchecker, and, bringing up the rear, yours truly. All the firepower that preceded me—the constables were armed for any sort of combat, physical as well as magical—made me wish I was one of the mild-mannered bureaucrats the public imagines all government workers to be; I wouldn’t have minded falling asleep at my desk just then.

  Bornholm said, “The spellchecker’s already sniffing something nasty up ahead.”

  Higgins rapped on the door. Now the boys from the SWAT team stood on either side of him, ready to kick it down. But it opened. I don’t know what I’d expected CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez to look like, but an Aztecan version of your well-loved grandfather wasn’t it. He had white hair, spectacles, and, until he took in the crowd on his front porch, a very pleasant expression.

  That faded in a hurry, to be replaced by bewilderment. “What you want?” he asked in accented English.

  “You are CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez, the curandero?” Higgins said formally.

  “Sí, but—” The old man smiled. “You need what I got, señor? Maybe you have trouble keeping your woman happy?”

  From the way the back of Higgins’ neck went purple and then white, maybe he did have trouble keeping his woman happy. But he was a professional; his voice didn’t change as he went on, “Mr. Hernandez, I have here a warrant permitting the Angels City Constabulary to search these premises for substances contravening various sections of city, provincial, and Confederal ordinances dealing with controlled sorcerous materials, and another warrant for your arrest on a charge of dispensing such materials. You are under arrest, sir. Anything you say may be used against you.”

  Hernandez stared as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Señor, you must be mistaken,” he said with considerable dignity. “I am just a curandero; I don’t hardly do no magic worth the name.”

  “Did you sell a potion to a pregnant woman named Lupe Cordero a few months ago?” I asked: “One that was supposed to fight morning sickness and keep the baby healthy?”