The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"What are they?" "Two good ones, offhand," she answered. "One's in the spiritual realm. We were able to build our own kinda place to meet the spirit - Erasmus, that's what he goes by - in. If your girlfriend's already stuck in the Nine Beyonds, we're gonna hatta go in there and haul her out. Like I said, that ain't gonna be easy."

I wondered what walking through a simulation of the Nine Beyonds would be like. Could even virtuous reality pretty up something with a handle like that so anyone except a Power named the One Called Night would want to go there? I had my doubts, but I also had no choice, not if I wanted Judy back. I asked, "What's the other problem?"

Madame Ruth coughed and looked down at her desk, an elephantine effort at discretion. "It's not spiritual," she said.

"It's more material-like, if you know what I mean." She stopped there.

After a couple of seconds, I figured out what she was flying at. Tm sure Judy's medical insurance will cover your fees," I said. "It's one of the Blue Scutum plans, and it has an excellent thaumaturgy benefits package." "That's okay, then," she said, nodding briskly. I understood that she had to show a profit, but what would Judy have done without insurance? Got stuck in the Nine Beyonds forever because no one would come after her without crowns on the barrelhead? Or ended up bankrupting herself to pay the fees afterwards? Nothing's simple these days.

"Will you try to help her?" I asked.

"Lemme talk with my partner. This is gonna take both of us," she said, and got up to go next door. I didn't age more than eight or ten years in the few minutes she was gone. She came back with Cholmondeley, (weedy as ever, in her wake.

She must have read my face, because she said, "It's okay, Mr.

Fisher. Well give it a try."

I started gasping out thank - yous, but Nigel Cholmondeley cut me off. "Time for all that later, old chap, if we succeed.

Meanwhile, where is Mistress, uh, Ather now located?"

Kawaguchi had told me that. "Her body's at the West Hills Temple of Healing," I said. Where the rest of her was… Well, Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth already knew about that.

Madame Ruth was looking through her appointments scroll. "We're on for this afternoon and tomorrow morning, too," she said. "We can work her in tomorrow afternoon, though, if that's okay wit' you?" She looked at me. I nodded.

I wanted them to drop everything and rush right out to take care of Judy, but everybody else they were working for felt his case was the most important one in the world, too.

Madame Ruth said, "It's okay, Mr. Fisher, maybe even better than okay. This gives us a chance to square things with the constables and with the West Hills place, so as we can be all set up and ready to go."

I nodded again. Cholmondeley unrolled his own scroll, inked a quill, and scribbled a note. "We shall see you there, then, at half past one." He stuck out a bony hand. I clasped it, then walked out of Madame Ruth's office. I wanted to get back to my own shop as soon as I could: I was using vacation time for this visit. Crazy how you keep track of the little things even when the big ones in your world are falling every which way.

There was a rack of news stands outside Madame Ruth's building. I stuck a quarter-crown into the waiting palm of one of the little vending demons, took away a copy of the A.C. Times. I figured yesterday's goings-on would be pageone stuff, and so they were: the flight of the Garuda Bird across St. Ferdinand's Valley isn't something you can easily ignore. Neither is the emergency evacuation of the neighborhoods surrounding the Devonshire toxic spell dump.

Sure enough, both of those got plenty of ink, though the reporters seemed confused about just what had happened.

That didn't bother me; the whole truth here probably would have set off a panic we didn't need, especially since (I hoped) things were back under control.

One of the reporters quoted Matt Arnold out at the Loki works. He gave the impression he'd turned the Garuda Bird loose as a preorbital flight test, then went on about the next step in the space program after the Bird got us into low orbit:

Loki was designing new sorceware to work the Indian Rope Trick from some spot on the equator 22,300 miles straight up to geosynchronous orbit, from which mages could project sorcery over big parts of the globe day and night.

Nobody asked me, but I thought Loki ought to work on a new rope, too.

The mess at Chocolate Weasel made page one, too, but only as a big industrial accident Not a word about the sacrifices, not a word about any connection to the mess at the Devonshire dump.

What really got me, though, was the rest of the headlines.

The Aztecian Emperor had ordered his entire cabinet executed, It was, the Times said, the first general cabinet massacre since the time when Azteca almost joined the First Sorcerous War on the Alemanian side. The new ministers were supposed to be "more inclined toward improving relations with the Confederation than their predecessors had been."