The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I shoved stones around till it was time to go home. After supper, I called Judy. One of the things that makes troubles smaller is talking about them. Actually, I suppose the troubles stay the same size, but when they're spread between two people they seem smaller. I told her about poor little Jesus Cordero, and also about what Charlie Kelly had had to say.

"Maybe one of these days Ramzan Durani can synthesize a soul for the little boy," she said. She has a knack for remembering names and other details that slip through my fingers like sand. Now she went on, "But this other… My God, David, was he serious?"

"Who, Charlie? He sure sounded that way to me. What really frosts me is knowing how much he knows that he's not telling."

"I understand," she said. "But what are we supposed to do while he's not telling? Just go on with our lives as if we didn't know anything was wrong? That's not just hard, that's impossible."

"I know, but what choice do we have?" I answered. "People have been doing it as long as there have been people: carrying on inside their own little circles and holding their affairs together as best they could no matter what was going on around them. If they didn't I've got a feeling the world would have torn itself to pieces a long time ago."

"Maybe you're right," she said, and then, suddenly,

"Come over, David, would you? I don't want to be alone, not tonight, not after what you just told me."

"Be there in half an hour," I promised.

I made if too, with a good five minutes to spare. Judy lives in a flat down in Long Beach, in a neighborhood marginally better than mine. The Guardian at the outer entrance to her building knows me by now, so I didn't have any trouble getting in. Fair enough; I went there about as often as she came to see me.

I liked her place. It was in an older block of flats than mine, so it had occasional plumbing problems, no ice elemental connection for hot summer days, and a wheezy excuse for a salamander that couldn't keep the place warm in winter, but there were compensations. The main one, I think, was decently thick walls: you didn't find out everything your neighbors were up to as if you watched them in a crystal ball.

She'd lived there for five years, and the flat had the stamp of her personality on it. It was crammed with books, maybe even more than mine. The knickknacks (aside from the menorah and brass candlesticks for the Sabbath) were museum copies of Greek and Roman sorcerous apparatus, all mellow clay and greened bronze. The prints on the wall were by Arcimboldo - you know, the fellow who made portraits out of interlocked fish or fruit or imps. They're endlessly fascinating to look at, and you never can decide just how far out of his tree old Arcimboldo was.

If you think I'm building up to a tale of lurid lovemakmg, I'm sorry - it wasn't like that. We hugged each other, she made some coffee, we talked later than we should have, and when we slept together, that's all we did: we slept together.

If you're under twenty-five you probably won't believe me, but sometimes that's better - and more intimate, too - than twitches and moans. Not, believe me, that I have anything against twitches and moans, but to every thing its season.

My sleep season ended too soon the next morning; the horological demon in Judy's alarm clock bounced me out of her bed with a bloodcurdling ululation. I hurried back to my place (which luckily wasn't far out of my way), showered, changed clothes, grabbed a Danish and my portable spellchecker, and headed for the office.

What I had in mind was racing through business in the morning and heading up to the Corderos' house in the afternoon to take some readings with the spellchecker. That's what I ended up doing, too, but it wasn't as simple as I'd had in mind. Something large and unpleasant landed on my desk with a thud.

I don't quite mean that literally, but the report I was going to have to produce would be fat enough to thud down somewhere. I've mentioned that Angels City is in the middle of a drought. The note Bea passed to me explained that some sorcerers up in the north end of the Barony of Angels tried to bring rain with Chumash Indian charmstones, perhaps in the hope that native spirits would have more effect on the local weather than imported white man's magic.

They got nothing. I don't mean they didn't get rain.