The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  “As a matter of fact, I still don’t know myself,” I said. “I went to the reference center to look it up, but I couldn’t fend it there. That means it’s not local, whatever it is. I’ll call Kawaguchi back this afternoon and find out I’ll let you know as soon as I do.” One way to keep a secretary happy is not to hold out on her.

  I went back to my office, dug through my notes, found the phone number for Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins, and called. The way my luck had been running, I figured a thunderbolt would probably smite the Confederal Building just as I made the connection.

  And I was close. The phone at the other end had just begun to squawk when a little earthquake rattled the building.

  I sat there waiting, wondering the way you always do whether the little earthquake would turn into a big one. It didn’t; in a few seconds, the rattling stopped. Along with (I’m sure) several million other people, I breathed a prayer of thanksgiving.

  The secretary for Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins and I spent a little while going “Did you feel that?” and “I sure did” back and forth at each other before I confirmed my appointment and hung up. Then I got back on the phone—this morning I’d used it as much as Bea usually does—and called Tony Sudakis. “HeDo, Dave,” he said. “I was wondering when I’d hear from you again. Thought maybe my file fell behind your desk or something.” He laughed to show I wasn’t supposed to take him seriously.

  I laughed too, to show I didn’t. “No such luck,” I told him.

  “This is just to let you know that we will be doing a sorcerous decontamination check of the area around your site as soon as we can get the apparatus together. I appreciate the courtesy of the call, Inspector,” he answered slowly—I wasn’t Dave any more. I have to tell you, though, we still deny any contamination. You’ll need a show-cause order before you can start anything like that, and we’ll fight it.”

  “I know,” I said. “When your legal staff asks you, tell them the case is under the jurisdiction of Judge Ruhollah”—I spelled it for him—“since he granted me the original search warrant.” If the EPA couldn’t get a show-cause order out of Maximum Ruhollah, I figured it was time for us to fold our tents and head off into the desert.

  “Judge Ruhollah,” Sudakis repeated. “I’ll pass it along.

  ’Bye.” I didn’t think he knew about RuhoBah. But the consortium’s lawyers would.

  I moved parchments from one pile to another on my desk, called Legate Kawaguchi again and found out he was still at the crime scene, then ate a rubberized hamburger at the cafeteria. I washed it down with a cup of hot black mud, slid down the parking lot, and headed up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley again.

  Normally I wouldn’t go up there ten times a year. I’d been doing it so often lately that I was starting to memorize the freeway exits. I got off at White Oak and flew north toward Balditiar’s Precision Burins. On the way, I passed a church dedicated to St. Andrew: actually, to San Andreas, because it was an Aztecan neighborhood. A line of penitents was filing in. I wondered why; St Andrew’s feast day isn’t until November.

  Then I remembered the morning’s earthquake. No doubt they were calling on the saint to keep more and worse from happening. Their chants rang so loud and sincere, they made me sure that if another earthquake did strike, it wouldn’t be San Andreas’ fault I flew into the parking lot behind Bakhtiafs Precision Burins a couple of minutes early. The building that housed the outfit was four times the size of Slow Jinn Fizz’s fancy establishment on Venture Boulevard, and probably cost about a fourth as much to rent It had the virtue of absolute plainness—one more industrial building in an industrial part of town.

  The receptionist who greeted me was about a fourth as decorative as the one at Slow Jinn Fizz, too. So it goes. But she was friendly enough, or maybe more than friendly enough. “Oh, you’re Inspector Fisher,” she said when I showed her my EPA sign. “Did the earth move for you, too?”

  She giggled.

  I didn’t know what to make of that If I’d been unattached, I might have been more interested in finding out As it was, I figured the best thing to do was let it alone, so I did.

  I said, “Is Mr. Bakhtiar free to see me?”

  “Just a minute, I’ll check.” She picked up the handset of the phone. Bakhtiafs Precision Burins wasn’t in the high-rent district but it used all the latest sorceware. The silencing spell on the phone was so good that I couldn’t hear a word the receptionist said till she hung up. “He says he can give you forty-five minutes at the most. Will that be all right?”

  “Thanks. It should be fine, Mistress Mendoza,” I answered, reading the name plate on her desk:CYNTHIA MENDOZA.

  “Call me Cyndi,” she said. “Everybody does. Here, come on with me. I have to let you into the back of the shop because of the security system.”

  I followed her back down the hall. Balditiar’s doorway wasn’t hermetically sealed; as I’ve said, only really big firms and governments can afford that much security. But he did have an alarmed door: if anybody who wasn’t audiorized touched the doorknob, it would yell bloody murder.

  Cyndi Mendoza took the knob in her hand and chanted softly from the Book of Proverbs: “ ‘She criedi at the gates, at the entrance of the city, at the coming of the doors,’ ” and then from the Song of Solomon: “ ‘I rose up to open to my beloved. I opened to my beloved.’ ” The knob turned in her hand. She waved me through ahead other, then murmured something else to the door to propitiate it for having let me through.

  “Do you know,” she said as she led me through the burin works to Bakhtiar’s office, “the same charm that persuades the alarmed door to open peaceably is also used sometimes as a seduction spell?”

  “Is that a fact?” I said, though it didn’t surprise me: nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition blends sensuality and mystic power like the Song of Solomon.

  She nodded. “It doesn’t get tried as often as it used to, though—it only works on virgins.” This brought forth more giggles.

  She couldn’t have made it more obvious she was interested in me if she’d run up a flag. A man always finds that flattering, but I wasn’t interested back. I said, “Is that a fact?” again. It’s one of the few things you can safely say under any circumstances, because it doesn’t mean a thing.

  “Well, here we are,” Cyndi said, stopping in front of a door that had ISHAQ BAKHTIAR, MARGRAVE painted on it in black letters edged with gilt She tapped on the door—which mustn’t have been alarmed, since it didn’t scream—then headed back toward her own desk. I’m afraid she gave me a dirty look as she went by.

  Ishaq Bakhtiar opened his own door, waved for me to come in. He didn’t look like a corporate margrave; he looked—and dressed—like a working journeyman wizard.

  By stereotype, Persians come in two varieties, short and round or long and angular. Ramzan Durani of Slow Jinn Fizz had been of the first sort. Bakhtiar exemplified the second.

  Everything about him was vertical lines: thin arms and legs, his big, not quite straight nose and the creases to either side of it, the beard worn short on the cheeks and long on the chin that made his face seem even narrower than it was.

  Like Ramzan Durani, he wore a white lab robe. Unlike Durani’s, his didn’t give the impression of being something he put on to impress visitors. It wasn’t what you’d call shabby, but it had been washed a good many times and still bore faint stains that looked like old blood and herbal juices.

  When we clasped hands, his engulfed mine—and I’m not a small man, nor one with short fingers. But if he hadn’t gone into sorcery, he would have made a master harpsichordist; those spidery fingers of his seemed to reach halfway up my arm.

  “I am pleased to meet you, Inspector Fisher,” he said with a vanishing trace of Persian accent that did more to lend his English dignity than to turn it guttural. “Please take a seat”

  “Thank you.” I sat down in the chair to which he waved me. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it was the same as the one behind his desk, so I couldn�
��t complain.

  “Will you take mint tea?” he asked, pointing at a samovar that must have come from a junk shop. “Or perhaps, since the day is warm, you would rather have an iced sherbet?

  Please help yourself to sweetmeats, also.”

  Since he poured tea for himself, I had some, too. It was excellent; he might not have cared how things looked, but how they performed mattered to him. The sweetmeats sent up the ambrosial perfume of almond paste. Their taste didn’t disappoint, either.

  He didn’t linger over the courtesies, nor had I expected him to, not when he’d blocked out only forty-five minutes for me. As soon as we’d both wiped crumbs from our fingers, he leaned forward, showing he was ready to get down to business. I took the hint and said, “I’m here, Mr. Bakhtiar, because you’re one of the major dumpers of toxic spell byproducts at the Devonshire site, and, as I said over the phone, the dump appears to be leaking.”

  His dark brows came down like thunderclouds. “And so you think it is my byproducts that are getting out. You think I am the polluter. Allah, Muhammad, and Hussein be my witnesses, I deny this, Inspector Fisher.”

  “I don’t know whether you’re the polluter,” I said. “I do know from your manifests that enough sorcerous byproducts come from this business to make me have to look into the possibility.”

  “Get the burin—maker—he is always the polluter.”

  Bakhtiar scowled at me, even more blackly than before. “In superstitious Persia, I could understand this attitude though I know how foolish it is. Here in the Confederation, where reason is supposed to rule, my heart breaks to hear it. Taken over all, Inspector, Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins reduces the sorcerous pollution in Angels City; we do not increase it. This I can demonstrate.”

  “Go on, sir.” I thought I knew the argument he was going to use, but I might have been wrong.

  I wasn’t He said, “Consider, Inspector, if every wizard had to manufacture his own sorcerous tools, as was true in the olden days: not just burins but also swords, staves, rods, lancets, arctraves, needles, poniards, swords, and knives with white and black handles. Because the sorcerers of the barony would be less efficient and more widespread than we are here, far more magical contamination would result from their work. But that does not happen, because most thaumaturges purchase their instruments from me. They cause no pollution because they are not doing the work. I am, and because of it, Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins draws the attention of regulators like yourself.”

  I’ve heard that single-source argument many times. It generally has an element of truth to it: doing things in one place often is more efficient and better for the environment than scattering them all over the landscape. And Bakhtiar was right when he said single-source providers do stand out because they still pollute and the people who use their services don’t. But all that doesn’t mean single-source providers can’t pollute more than they should.

  I said as much. Bakhtiar got to his feet. “Come with me, Inspector. You shall see for yourself.”

  He took me out onto the production floor. It was as efficiently busy as most other light industrial outfits I’ve seen. A worker wearing asalamandric gloves lifted a rack of red-glowing pieces of steel out of a fire, turned and quenched them in a bath from which strong-smelling steam rose.

  That must have been the third heating for the burin blanks,” Bakhtiar said. “Now they steep in magpie’s blood and the juice of the herbforoile.”

  “Ergonomically efficient,” I said; the factory hand had been able to transfer them from the flames to the bath without taking a step. As they soaked up the virtues of the blood and the herb, he prayed over them and spoke words of power. Among the Names I caught were those of the spirits Lumech, Gadal, and Mitatron, all of whom are potent indeed. I asked, “How do you decontaminate the quenching bath after you’ve infused the Powers into it?”

  “The usual way: with prayer and holy water,” Bakhtiar answered. “Inspector, I do not claim these are one hundred Ercent efficacious; I am aware there is a residue of power t behind. This, after all, is why we dispose of our toxic spell byproducts at the Devonshire facility, as mandated by the laws of the barony, the province, and the Confederation. If leaks have occurred, surely that is the responsibility of the dump, not of Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins. We have complied with the law in every particular.”

  “If so, you don’t have a problem,” I answered. “My concern is that someone has been disposing of byproducts that aren’t listed on his manifest, things vicious enough to break through the protection setup, even if in only minuscule amounts, and to sorcerously contaminate the surrounding environment.”

  “This I understand,” he said, nodding. “As manufacturers of burins and other thaumaturgical tools, however, we operate with a limited range of magic-engendering materials, as you must know. Here, come with me. See if you find one tiny thing in any way out of the ordinary for an establishment such as ours.”

  I came. He was right; I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The knives with the black handles were steeped in cat’s blood and hemlock and fitted with handles of ram’s horn. Interesting that Bakhtiar, a Muslim, conformed to common Judeo-Christian usage there; I’m given to understand the affinity goes back to the shqfar, the ram’s-horn trumpet which commemorates the trumpets that toppled Jericho’s walls. Another technician was inscribing magical characters onto hazelwood wands and cane staffs. The scribing instrument was a burin, presumably one of Bakhtiar’s precision burins.

  He also inscribed the seals of the demons Klippoth and Frimost onto wands and staffs, respectively. I could feel the power in the air around him.

  The sorcerous and the mundane mingled in the production of the silken cloths in which Bakhtiar’s burins and other instruments were wrapped. The firm did its own weaving in-house; three Persian women in black chadors and veils worked clacking looms, turning silk thread into fine, shimmering cloth. I wondered how long it would be before the automated looms of the Japanese made that economically impractical. They’d taken much of the flying carpet business from Detroit, and they were skillful silkworkers. As far as I could see, the combination made it only a matter of time.

  Bakhtiar said. The red silk is for the burins, the black, fittingly, for the knife with the black handle, and the green for the other magical instruments. For those others, the proper color is less important, so long as it be neither black nor brown.”

  A calligrapher with a goose quill dipped in pigeon’s blood wrote mystic characters on a finished silk cloth. Around him, a dozen other goose quills, animated by the law of similarity, wrote identical characters on other cloths. I asked Bakhtiar,

  “Why are you using automatic writing for this process and not that of inscribing the wands and staffs?”

  “As we have the opportunity, we shall, inshallah, do the latter as well,” he answered. “But the silks are merely protective vessels for the instruments, while the instruments themselves are filled with a thaumaturgic power which as yet overcomes the automating spells. But we are working on it, as I say. In fact, I read recently that a sorceware designer up in Crystal Valley has had a breakthrough along those very lines.”

  “Was he using virtuous reality, by any chance?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, he was.” Bakhtiar sounded surprised.

  Up till then, his expression had said I was an unmitigated nuisance. Now my nuisance value was at least mitigated. He said, “You are better informed on matters sorcerous than I should have expected from a bureaucrat.”

  “We don’t spend all our times shuffling parchments from one pile to the next,” I said. “Too much of our time, yes, but not all.”

  He stared at me out of black, deep-set eyes. “I might even wish you spent more time at your desk. Inspector, provided that time was the period you have instead set aside for harassing legitimate businesses such as mine.”

  “Investigation is not harassment,” I said, and stared right back. Persians of the lean variety tend to look like prophe
ts about to call down divine wrath on a sinful people, which gave Bakhtiar what I thought of as an unfair advantage in that land of contest, but I held my own. “And we can’t afford to take a spill from this dump lightly. In aid of which, may I see the decontamination facility you mentioned?”

  “I shall take you there,” he said. “I expected that would be your next request.”

  Sensibly, Bakhtiar kept his decontaminators off the main shop floor and in a chamber of their own. That both minimized any corruption that might interfere with their work and made sure their procedures wouldn’t weaken the sorcery that went into the instruments.

  “Inspector Fisher, allow me to present Dagoberto Velarde and Kirk McCuDough, the decontamination team for Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins,” Bakhtiar said. “Bert, Kirk, this is David Fisher of the EPA. They think we’re responsible for a leak at the Devonshire dump.”

  I didn’t bother denying that any more; I’d seen I wasn’t going to convince Bakhtiar and his crew. The decontaminators glared at me. Velarde was short and copper-brown, McCullough tall, gaunt, and red-haired, with the light of religious certainty shining in his hard gray eyes. “Just carry on, gentlemen,” I said. “Pretend I’m not here.”

  By their expressions, they wished I wasn’t. They made an odd team, one you wouldn’t find everywhere, but they worked smoothly together, as if they’d been doing it for years. They probably had. One of the guys from the shop floor—no, I take it back, it was a woman in hard hat, overalls, and boots-wheeled in a vat on a dolly. She slid it off, nodded to the decontaminators, and headed back out Bert Velarde broke open an ampule of holy water, sprinkled it over the vat to neutralize as much of the goetic power in there as it could. Holy water is efficacious if applied by any believer, and, while you can’t always tell by looking, I would have bet two weeks’ pay he was Catholic.

  But prayers by Catholic layfolk aren’t as potent as those from priests. Velarde didn’t pray. That was Kirk McCullough’s job. He had a deep, impressive voice and a thick Caledonian burr. He hardly bothered looking at the Book of Common Prayer he held in his big hands; he knew the words by heart. That didn’t mean he was just reciting by rote, though—he put his heart into every word.