The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"I trust in God," I answered. "He has a more reliable record than most of the people I know."

"life must be easy if you can honestly give all your allegiance to one omniscient, omnipotent deity," Sudakis said.

"But I didn't call you up to talk theology with you. I wouldn't mind doing that over some beer one day, but now now. I've said what I needed to say, and I've got the usual swamp full of alligators here."

He meant that more literally than most people who use the line - and his particular swamp held worse things than mere alligators. We said our goodbyes and hung up. I looked at the phone for a few seconds afterwards. Maybe Sudakis never had reconciled himself to Christianity, or to monotheism generally. That last comment of his made me wonder.

Well, the Confederacy is a free country. He could believe whatever he wanted, as long as the didn't go burning down monasteries to make his point.

"Interesting," I said again, to nobody in particular, and started squeezing the undines out of my own swamp.

I'd decided to note the contaminants from the smaller companies first, before I taclded the light-and-magic outfits and the aerospace consortia. If one of the little guys was dumping something spectacularly illicit, my hopes was that it would stand out like a mullah in the College of Cardinals.

I was amazed to see just how much nasty stuff some of the little guys messed around with. Take the outfit called Slow Jinn Fizz, for instance. Heaven help me, they were using things there I wouldn't have expected to find coming out of Lola's Cobold Works. I mean, they were stowing stove - in Solomon's Seals at Devonshire. You think for awhile about the thaumaturgical pressure it takes to deform one of those things, and the likely effect on the surrounding countryside when you try it, and you'll have some idea why I noted that in red.

Chocolate Weasel had just as manynastinesses, things EPA men in most of the Confederation wouldn't see once in a thousand years - Aztecian stuff, almost exclusively. My stomach did a slow flipflop when I saw one neatly written item on their dumping manifesto: flayed human skin substitute.

As I think I've said before, human sacrifice is - officially - banned within the Aztedan Empire these days. But it used to be a central part of the Aztedan cult. One whole twentyday month of their old calendar, Tiaxipeualiztii (say it three times fast - I dare you), means "boning of the men," and almost all of it had parades where priests capered around wearing the skins of sacrificial victims.

Obviously, death magic is some of the strongest sorcery there is. But modem technology has eliminated the need that was formerly perceived for it. Proper application of the law of similarity lets the Aztecians produce by less bloodthirsty means the same effect they used to get from ripping the hearts out of victims. But it's still a daunting item to find on a form.

There are also rumors that some of the flayed skin substitute isn't created through the law of similarity, but rather through the law of contagion. Yes, I'm afraid that means what you think it does: the substitute material gains its effectiveness by touching a real flayed human skin, one hidden away since the days when such sacrifices were not only legal but required.

The Aztecians spend a lot of time denying those rumors.

The EPA spends a lot of time checking them - we don't want that kind of sorcery getting loose in this country. Nothing's ever been proved. But the rumors persist.

I noted that one down in red ink, too. Chocolate Weasel, I thought, would get a visit from some inspector soon; if not me, then someone else. Properly manufactured flayed skin substitute isn't illegal, but it is one of the things we like to keep an eye on.

None of the other little firms that used the Devonshire dump put anything quite so ferocious in it, though I did raise an eyebrow to see how many roosters' eggshells Essence Extractions was getting rid of. "Cockatrices," I said out loud. The little creatures are dangerous and always have been ferociously expensive because they're so rare, but I wondered if these folks hadn't found a way to turn them out in quantity.

I looked thoughtfully at that manifest before I went on to the next one. If Essence Extractions had found a way to produce lots of cockatrices, they were sitting on the goose that laid the golden egg. Pardon the botched ornithological metaphor, but it's true. And the dumping records gave some good clues on how they were going about it Tony Sudakis hadn't worded about confidentiality for nothing.