The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Brother Vahan was stubborn to the point of being bullheaded, if he kept after the cardinal to change his mind once he'd decided to do something. You don't do that if you're in monastic orders; you are, after all, sworn to obedience along with poverty and chastity. My guess was that Brother Vahan wouldn't have said a word about the cardinal's decision had it affected him. For his monks, though, he'd argue - a good man.

And I could see why the cardinal would have wanted him on that carpet: who would have more strength of purpose going up against the probable destroyers of the Thomas Brothers monastery than its abbot?

"As to the other, I gather His Eminence told you no again?" I said.

His thick eyebrows - virtually the only hair he had on his head - twitched upwards. "From what do you infer that?"

"You said you were happy to obey him 'in this instance,'"

I answered. "I took it to mean you weren't happy about the other."

"Most Jesuitically reasoned." His thin smile said he was teasing me. It went away too soon. "I'd rather he had refused me this and granted the other. Many could have done what I just did, but who except me will speak for my brethren?"

I didn't know what to feel: pleased with myself for understanding the way Brother Vahan's mind worked, angry at the cardinal for sticking to his refusal like a pricldeburr, or pleased His Eminence had the gumption to commit his best to a crisis. Those last two were inextricably mixed, which only complicated things more.

Faint across a couple of hundred yards came shouts from the constables and then pops of pistol fire. Normally pistols are nothing to scorn - they're about the most dangerous mechanical hand weapons around. After everything I'd been through that day, those pops and the clouds of gunpowder smoke I saw rising from the parking lot seemed about as consequential as the firecrackers whose cousins they were.

Kawaguchi pulled out his own pistol, cocked it, checked his flint, and then trotted down Nordhoff toward Chocolate Weasel. Michael and I started after him, but a constable about the size of both of us put together shook his head and rumbled, "That wouldn't be smart." He stepped in front of us and spread his arms wide to make sure we listened to him.

Since he was doing a pretty good impression of the Great Hanese Wall, I stopped. So did Michael.

That meant we had to wait. Waiting is harder than doing.

When you're doing, you don't have time to worry. When you're waiting, if you're anything like me, you think about all the things that could go wrong. I'd waited for the Garuda Bird. I'd waited for the carpet from the archdiocese. I was waiting again. I was sick of it. I waited anyhow, peering down Nordhoff to see what I could see.

Not too much, not for a while. Then I heard more pistol pops, and then people started coming back up the street. Some of them were constables, some prisoners with their hands in the air. As they got closer, I saw that several sets of those upraised hands were red, with drips running down toward the elbows. I heard someone make a sick, gulping noise, and realized a moment later it was me.

One of the SWAT team wizards was carrying an obsidian knife. Another one walking beside him kept spraying it with holy water. I gulped again. That knife, I had no doubt, belonged in the Devonshire dump. If ever spells were guaranteed harmful to the environment, they're the ones that go along with human sacrifice.

I recognized one of the prisoners - Jorge Vasquez. He saw me at about the same time I saw him. I thought about making some crack about his getting shut down for EPA violations along with everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Even captured, he looked too smart and tough for me to want to twit him.

Behind him came Legate Kawaguchi, who was busy loading another charge of powder and ball into his pistol as he walked along. Brother Vahan called to him: "Do any within that building require my services?"

Kawaguchi finished ramming home the ball before he looked up. "For last rites and such, you mean. Brother?" He shook his head. "Just corpses in there."

"Martyrs,'' Brother Vahan said, his voice grim. Their reward shall surely come in heaven."

I wondered about that was somebody who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time a martyr in the same sense as a person who deliberately invited death for the sake of his faith? I'm neither Catholic nor theologian, so I can't tell you what Brother Vahan should have been thinking by the standards of his church.

That was the least of my worries, anyhow. I lunged for Kawaguchi in a way that almost made him level his newly loaded pistol at me. "Did you-" I choked on fear and had to force myself to go on: "Did you find Judy in there?"

Ib my relief, he slipped the pistol back into its holster.