The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  “Whoa, there.” I held up a hand. “Blaming people for not having skills isn’t fair. And the whites who took the land away from the natives weren’t what you’d call saints. Conquest by firewater, deliberately spread smallpox, and mass exorcisms of the native Powers isn’t anything to be proud of.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “But if Europeans had not found the Americas until, for example, the day before yesterday, they would not have found them much different from the way they were five hundred years ago. And that is precisely the point I am trying to make. Thanks to modem thaumaturgy, our present culture supports far more people at a higher level of affluence and greater material comfort than any other in the history of the world.”

  “Is that all you judge culture by?” I asked. “Seems to me there should be more to life.”

  “Oh, no doubt. But make note of this, David: as a general rule—not universal, I concede, but general—the people who show the greatest contempt for material comforts are those lucky enough to have them. The Abyssinian peasant starving in his drought-stricken field, the Canaanite cobbler suffering under a plague of gnats because no local sorcerer knows enough to properly control Beelzebub, the slum-dweller in D.StC. aching with a rotten tooth because her parents hadn’t had the crowns to go to an odontomagus to affix the usual invisible shields to her mouth… they will not speak slightingly of the virtues of a full belly and a healthy body, things we take for granted despite their being historically rare.”

  “Wait a minute, Michael. You just cheated there. You were talking about how wonderful our culture is, and then one of your suffering examples comes straight out of our own slums. You can’t have it both ways.”

  He didn’t answer for a few seconds; he was getting the carpet off the freeway. Once he’d done that, though, he said, “I fail to see why not. I never claimed we were perfect. Perfection is an attribute of the divine, not the human. I said that, on the whole, we do better for more people than anyone else has. Our flaws notwithstanding, I hold to that position.”

  I thought about it. The only times I’d ever been hungry were at Yom Kippur fasts, and those I undertook for the sake of ritual, not because I had no food. I slept in a flat on a bed; I was protected against diseases and curses that had lain whole nations waste in ancient times. I said, “You have a point”

  The other thing was, the Chumash Powers and the Aztedans wanted to restore the unpleasant old days. The trouble with that was that most of the millions of people in the Barony of Angels liked the new days better. What would happen to them? My limited acquaintance with the Chumash Powers didn’t make me think they were that ferocious, but Huitzilopochtli—The Chumash Powers must have cut a deal with the Aztedan war god, I realized. I tried to imagine the secret dealings that must have happened on the Other Side. Huitzilopochtli was a much bigger fish than the Sky Coyote, the Lizard, or the demons of the Lower World, but they were extra powerful here because the Barony of Angels was their native territory. The combination could prove deadly.

  I reached that unpleasant conclusion about the time Michael pulled into the parking lot across the flyway from the Devonshire dump. To my relief, three or four black-and-whites were already there, their synchronized salamander lanterns flashing red and blue.

  X

  People were standing on the sidewalk rubbernecking the way they always do when something goes wrong. Over on the dump side of the street, a couple of constables were laying down the ritual yellow tape that keeps rubberneckers from getting too close to the action.

  Michael and I hurried across. The constables saw our EPA sigils and demystified a stretch of tape so we could cross the line. “Did you get a hazmat team here?” I asked one of them. “Yeah, we did,” he said. I thought they had; there were more black-and-whites in the parking lot than constables outside the dump. But while his partner put the magic back into the line, the fellow went on, “The guy who runs the dump tried to get an EPA hazmat team, too, but it was already on an urgent call, worse luck.”

  Luck had nothing to do with it; I’d told Kawaguchi he was liable to need that team at Chocolate Weasel. And he was, God knows. But Tony Sudakis was liable to need it here, too.

  No magic yet has made people able to be two places at the same time. They’re working on it, I understand, with thaumatechnology based on what they’ve learned with ectoplasmic cloning, but so far it happens only in light-and-magic shows and sorcerous fiction stories. Too bad. Boy, could we have used it. The security guard recognized Michael and me. Without being asked, he brought out the footbridge so we could cross into the containment area. As soon as we did, he yanked it away as fast as he could. In principle, that was smart; you didn’t want to weaken the magical containment scheme in any way. In practice, I was afraid it would do about as much good as sunglasses under the megasalamander blast Professor Blank had mentioned.

  About three steps down the warded path that led to Tony Sudakis’ office, I stopped dead in my tracks. Tony hadn’t been kidding—you could see the Nothing from anywhere on the walkway now. You felt that if you leaned forward, you might fall straight toward it forever. And he’d been right about the feeling that pervaded the dump, too; it was as if the Nothing were an egg quivering on the verge of hatching.

  But that wasn’t the only thing that made me stop and stare. The constables from the hazardous materia magica team weren’t working only from the warded path—they’d actually gone into the dump itself to come to grips with the Nothing.

  Sure, they knew what they were doing. Sure, they were draped with so many different kinds of apotropaic amulets that they looked like perambulating Christmas trees. Sure, their shoes had cold-iron soles to insulate them from the thaumaturgic vileness that littered the place. All the same, they put their souls on the line, not just their soles. I wouldn’t have gone out there for a million crowns.

  For Judy? Yes, without a second thought. If you don’t know what really matters to you, why bother living?

  Tony Sudakis was up on the roof of his office. He saw Michael and me, waved, and disappeared. A minute later, he came pounding down the path toward us. He had a hard hat on his head, his cravat was loosened and his collar open. He was a foreman again, not an administrator, and looked as if he loved it.

  “Glad you got here,” he said. “Dave, on the phone you sounded like you know more about this shit than maybe anybody. You want to brief Yolanda there?” He pointed up ahead to one of the hazmat team people.

  Up till then, I hadn’t noticed the boss of the team was a woman. She was black, slim, maybe my age—not half bad, though she looked both too smart and too tough to be model pretty.

  I told her what I knew about the Chumash Powers, and what I’d heard from Professor Blank not an hour earlier.

  When I was through, she crossed herself. “What are we supposed to do, then?” she said. This is worse than we’re really set up to face. Maybe a military team would be a better bet to resist” I doubt that,” Michael put in. “Military teams are configured against specific security threats—Persian, Aztecian, Ukrainian. But the Chumash, till this moment, have never posed a danger to the Confederation. Warrior priests and the like will not be able to help us.”

  Yolanda scowled; you could tell she was the kind of person who wanted to get right in there and do things, then worry about consequences later. “What do the two of you recommend, then?” she demanded.

  Do as weU as you can, was the answer that immediately sprang to mind. If the Chumash Powers remanifested themselves with the burst of thaumaturgic energy Professor Blank had feared, there was nothing else to do, and even that wouldn’t help. But you always have to play the game as if you think you’re going to win—which, when you get down to it, is also part of dying well.

  So I said, “Delay. Every second we keep that Nothing encysted buys us time to evacuate the neighborhood. It may not help, but then again, it may. Tony, I presume you have procedures in place for an emergency evacuation?”

  “Sure,” he said.

>   “You’d better implement them, then. EPA orders, if you like.”

  “You got it, boss.” He went back to his office on the dead run. If his procedures were like most people’s, he’d have a bunch of spells completed but for the last word or pass or whatever, so he could but them into effect one after another, bang,bang, bang.

  Sure enough, maybe thirty seconds later we heard a dreadful cacophony from the cacodemons mounted at each comer of the containment fence. It reminded me, fittingly enough, of the air raid warnings that would help mark the start of the Third Sorcerous War.

  After they’d screeched for a while, the cacodemons started yelling, “Evacuate the area. Evacuate the area. Contamination may escape from the Devonshire containment site. Evacuate the area.” Then they shouted what I think was the same thing, only in Spainish.

  They were loud enough to be heard for miles. That was why they were there, but they made talk inside the containment area just about impossible for anybody who wasn’t an accomplished lip-reader. I was sure my ears would ring for the next couple of days—assuming I was still around in a couple of days.

  Michael stuck his head next to mine, bawled in my ear,

  “Delay is all very well, but to the end futile. Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Chumash Powers will succeed in breaking free of their encystment and returning to This Side, with the accompanying energy release you have described.”

  He turned his head so I could y

  ell into his ear. It was my turn, after all. Yell I did: “I know, but we’ll get some people away, so when the Great Eagle and the Lizard and rest get out, they won’t do the damage they want to.”

  I turned my head. Michael shouted. “Possibly not. The damage they do inflict, however, will be more than adequate to satisfy anyone not—” I’m sure he kept talking after that, but I stopped hearing him. I was running for Tony Sudalds’ office as fast as my legs would cany me.

  He was coming out as I dashed in. He might as well have been Phyuis Kaminsky—I almost bowled him over. “Phone,”

  I said, panting. Inside the blockhouse, the noise from the cacodemons was just too loud, not deafening.

  “Sure, go ahead.” He followed me back up the hall. I made my call, talked for maybe a minute and a half, hung up. When I was done, Tony stared at me, big-eyed. “You drink that’ll work?” he asked, unwontecally quiet.

  “Let me put it this way,” I answered. “If it doesn’t, do you think these concrete blocks are going to save us?” He shook his head. I went on, “I don’t, either. The hazmat mages out there will delay all they can, but how long is that. Sooner or later, probably sooner”—I realized I was echoing Michael—“the Chumash Powers wttl break out. And when they do—”

  “Bend over and loss your bum goodbye. Yeah,” Sudakis said. “How much time do you drink they need to buy?”

  “I just don’t know,” I answered. “Burbank isn’t far, but I don’t know how much prep they have to do first. All we can do now is wait and hope.”

  We walked back out into the unbelievable din together. I bawled into Michael’s ear; Tony yelled into Yolanda’s (no question he got the better half of that deal). Michael shouted back at me, “Not the best chance, but I see none better.”

  Then he walked over to scream, presumably, the same dring at Tony.

  “I wish I had your connections,” Yolanda shouted at me.

  “I wish I didn’t have them,” I answered, “because that would mean dris miserable case never happened.”

  She nodded grimly. We all stared toward the east, like the Kings of Orient with somebody extra thrown in for luck.

  Trouble was, all the luck in this case had been bad.

  I tfiought about poor little Jesus Cordero. Seeing if the Slow Jinn Fizz jinnetic engineering techniques could make him a soul hadn’t seemed urgent. He was just a baby, after all; years and years would go by before he had to worry about forever vanishing from the scheme of things. That’s what I’d thought. But if the Chumash Powers burst forth, he’d be gone for good. Not even limbo. Just gone.

  Out in the dump, one of the hazmat mages crumpled like soggy parchment I couldn’t tell whether the toxic spell residues had overcome him or whether he’d just broken under the burden of delaying the burst. Yolanda leaped off the warded path and dragged him back toward its very tenuous safety.

  One he was back on the path, he pulled himself into fetal position and lay there shivering: sorcerous shock of some kind, sure enough. He was breathing, and he nodded his head when Yolanda shouted at him, so he wasn’t critical.

  Since he wasn’t, the rest of us kept looking eastward. Either we’d be saved, in which case we could treat the hazmat mage later, or we wouldn’t, in which case nothing we did for him now would matter anyway.

  I preferred the first choice, but wouldn’t have bet anything big on getting it.

  Suddenly, Tony Sudakis’ finger stabbed out. “Isn’t that-?” He didn’t go on, maybe for fear his words would induce it not to be.

  “I don’t think it is,” I yelled—hard to sound bitter when you’re yelling, but I managed. “More likely to be a big cargo carpet on me landing approach toward Burbank airport”

  We all watched for another couple of seconds. Tony shook his head. “A carpet heading into Burbank would be getting smaller. This is getting bigger.”

  “So it is,” Michael said. He forgot to yell, but I read his lips. When Michael forgets to do something he should, you know he’s under strain. We all were. I didn’t want to think he was right, just because that would have made getting my hopes dashed all the crueler.

  But after another few seconds, there could be no doubt. The speck in the air we were watching swelled out of speckdom far faster than any carpet could have, and it didn’t have a carpet’s shape, either. I saw great wings beat majestically.

  “The Garuda Bird!” I shouted—with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my might, as the Bible says.

  The Bird came on unbelievably fast. Two or three more flaps and it was hovering over the dump. Of course, it didn’t need to work its wings the way a merely material creature of flesh and feathers would have. The Other Side suffused it; it was, after all, an avatar of Vishnu. As Matt Arnold had said back at the Loki works, it couldn’t have flown—or existed at all—as a material creature; when it hovered above the dump, its wings spanned the entire width of the containment area and more, and cast the ground into shadow almost as deep as night It looked much like the poster in Arnold’s office—those incredible wings supporting a huge—chested body that didn’t look birdlike at all to my mind. Nor was its head anything like that of a natural bird, but for the hooked beak that took the place of nose and mouth. The rest, especially the eyes, looked more nearly human, and the feathers on top of its head, instead of being peacock—brilliant tike those of the body and wings, were black and soft like hair.

  The wings beat again, right over our heads. The blast of wind from a flap like that should have blown walls down, and blown dust motes like us into the next barony, but it didn’t After a moment, I realized why: since it flew more by magic than with its wings, their flapping was just a symbolic act, not quite a real one. And thank God for that; it wasn’t something I’d worried about when I called Matt Arnold.

  The Garuda Bird threw back its anthropomorphic head and let out a bellow that sounded like a tuba about the size of a city block played by a mad giant wfao’d quit halfway through his first tuba lesson. Let me put it like this: by comparison, the squalling cacodemons were quiet and melodious.

  One thing, or rather two sets of things, thoroughly ornithomorphic (ah, Greek!) about the Garuda Bird were its talons. In fact, it was the most talented bird I’d ever seen: those enormous gleaming daws could have punctured the Midgard Serpent, by the look of them. I would have paid a good many crowns to watch that fight—from a safe distance, say the surface of the moon.

  Now, as the Bird hovered over the Devonshire dump, its left foot closed on the Nothing. The hazmat mage
s pelted back out of the way. I found I was holding my breath. This was something else I hadn’t had figured when I called Arnold: was the Garuda Bird’s magic strong enough to penetrate the encystment the Chumash Powers had thrown up around themselves? If not—well, if not, I told myself, we weren’t any worse off than we would have been without the Bird.

  When the Garuda Bird’s talons struck the Nothing, sparks flew, but the talons didn’t go in. I was praying and cursing at the same time, both as hard as I could. The Garuda Bird bellowed again, this time in fury. I staggered, wondering if the top of my head would fall off and whether I’d ever hear again.

  The muscles in the Garuda Bird’s monster drumsticks bunched. That’s what I saw, anyhow, though I knew it was only a quasi—physical manifestation like the Bird’s flapping wings. What it meant was that, on the Other Side, the Garuda Bird was gathering all its thaumaturgic force.

  Its claws closed on the Nothing once more. More sparks flew. The Bird cried out yet again, but its talons still would not penetrate. I thought we were doomed. But then, ever so slowly, the needle tips of those immense claws began sinking into the Chumash Powers’ shell of withdrawal.

  Tony’s mouth was wide open. So were Michael’s and Yolanda’s and mine. We were all shouting for all we were worth, but I couldn’t hear any of us, not even me.

  The Garuda Bird’s feet disappeared into Nothing. You couldn’t see them. They were just-gone. I stopped shouting. My heart went into my mouth. The Garuda Bird wasn’t a power that had had to hide itself away to keep from going extinct; the belief of hundreds of millions of people fueled it Never in my most dreadful nightmares had I imagined that it wouldn’t be able to overcome the Chumash Powers that hid inside the Nothing if once it broke their shell.

  The Bird’s next roar carried a note of pain. It flapped its wings again: almost a real flap this time, for dust rose in a choking cloud from the dry dirt of the dump. Through the dust, I saw more of the Garuda Bird’s leg than I had before.