The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

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.