The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

She took a copper cable from one pocket other lab robe, used it to connect her blue box to the real telephone. As she did so, she made a face. "Properly, this should be silver," she said. "It's a better conductor of sorcerous influences than copper - but it's also more expensive, and so it's not in our thaumaturgical budget. If I were in private practice-" She shook her head. "If I were in private practice, I'd be less useful. I'm sure you have to manage on fewer resources than you find ideal, too."

"How right you are," I said.

She was making small talk while she could, just to put me at my ease. When the need for serious conjuration came, she started ignoring me. That was all right; I hadn't expect anything different. Wizards dealing with the Other Side don't need their elbows joggled, even metaphorically.

Mistress Chang might have been Hanese by blood, but she used standard Western sorcerous techniques, ones that date back to the Species of Origen and some of them even farther. No reason she shouldn't have; for all I knew, her ancestors might have come to the Confederation a couple of generations before mine. After censing the copper cable (and stinking up my office), she took two metal plaques, each inscribed with a demon's seal, and affixed them to the cable.

"I don't need a full manifestation from either Eligor or Botis," she explained, "but I do require the application of some of their attributes: Eligor discovers hidden things, while Botis discerns past, present, and future. Now if you will excuse me-"

The first gesture of her elegantly manicured hand was a wave to get me to move back a couple of steps. The next was a pass that accompanied her conjuration. Calling up demonic attributes without getting raw demon, so to speak, is a tricky business; I watched quietly and respectfully while she did what she had to do.

It was more like coaxing than commanding: no impressive circles or pentagrams, no manifest thyself or eternal torment shall overwhelm thee. At the climax of the incantation, she just said, "Help me, please, you two great Powers." I tell you, modem sorcery lacks the drama it had in the good old days.

But we can do things now that our ancestors never dreamt of trying. When Celia Chang pointed to the plaques on the cable, the seals that bound Eligor and Botis, which had been black squiggles on silver metal, began to glow with a light that outshone the St Elmo's fire on the ceiling.

The light started to fade, then grew again. They're searching through time for the etheric connection," Celia Chang said. Just then, Botis' seal blazed for a moment; I had to blink and turn my head aside. The CBI wizard softly clapped her hands together. "We have the fix in time. Now to see whether Eligofs allegory algorithm can uncover the missing phone number."

I didn't know what we were waiting for - probably for Eligofs seal to flare up the way Botis' had. That didn't happen; its squiggles continued to shine as they had before. I don't know if you're familiar with Eligor's seal: it looks rather like an open mouth with a rubber arrow threaded through its upper lip.

Arrow or not, though, that sort of a mouth up and spoke like the old Roman godlet Aius Locutius: one number after another, until there were ten. Celia Chang and I both wrote them down as Eligor gave them to us. By the time we'd recorded the last one, the lines on both plaques had stopped glowing.

"Let's compare them," the wizard said. I handed her the scrap of parchment on which I'd taken down the numbers.

She held out the one on which she'd written them. We'd both heard the phone number the same way. She asked, "Is this number familiar to you?"

"No." I shook my head. "It's not Judy's; it's not any phone number I've seen before."

"I expected as much, but you never know," she said.

"We'll have to go to the telephone consortium, then, and learn to whom the number belongs - if anyone, of course. It might be a public phone."

"I hadn't thought of that," I said in a hollow voice. Hard for me to imagine kidnappers having a victim make a call from a pay phone in the middle of the morning, but it was possible, especially if they knew of one that couldn't be easily seen from the street.

Mistress Chang said, "We'll be in touch with you as soon as we learn anything, Mr. Fisher." She packed up her sorcerous impedimenta, nodded to me - still businesslike, but with, I thought, some sympathy, too - and strode out of the office.