The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"Did you sell a potion to a pregnant woman named Lupe Cordero a few months ago?" I asked: "One that was supposed to fight morning sickness and keep the baby healthy?"

"I sell lots of these potions," he said, shrugging. "It could be."

"Lupe Cordero's baby was born without a soul," I told him.

He went pale under his swarthy skin; had he started off fair, he would have ended up the color of his shining hair. He crossed himself violently. "No!" he cried. "It cannot be!"

"I'm afraid it is, Mr. Hemandez," I said, remembering Michael Manstein's speculation that the cwandsro might not even know what all was going into his nostrums. I went on, "Sorcerous analysis of your potion shows that part of its power comes from ingredients and spells consecrated to Huitzilopochdi."

Like any Aztecans, he knew of the gods his people had worshiped before the Spainish came to the New World. He got paler still; he reminded me of a cup of coffee into which you kept pouring more cream. "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, sefior, I did not use this, this poison of blood."

"But it was there," I said.

"It's still there," Bornholm the thaumatech added. "I can detect it inside the house. Nasty stuff."

"Stand aside, Mr. Hemandez," Higgins said in a voice like doom. The curandero stood aside, as if caught in a nightmare from which he couldn't wake up. One of the fellows from the SWAT team took charge of him. The rest of us walked past them into the house.

It was none too neat in there; my guess was that he lived alone. A black-framed picture of a gray-haired woman on the mantle put more force behind the guess.

If he followed Huitzilopochdi, he sure didn't let it show.

V

The front room had enough garish Catholic images to stock a couple of churches, assuming you put quality ahead of quantity. Candles flickered in front of a carved wooden statuette of the Virgin. I glanced at Bomholm. She nodded; the little shrine was what it appeared to be.

One of the bedrooms was messy; it got a lot messier after the boys from the SWAT team finished trashing it The kitchen was pretty bad, too: Hemandez was not what you'd call the neat kind of widower. The SWAT team started in there as soon as they were done with the bedroom.

What had been the den was the curandero's laboratory these days. A lot of the things in there were about what you'd expect to find in an Aztecian healer's workroom: peyoti mushrooms (few more effective aids in reaching the Other Side), bark of the olotuhqu plant (which has similar effects but isn't as potent: it's related to jinnsonweed), a potion of xiuh-amolli root and dog urine that was supposed to prevent hair loss. Personally, I'd rather be bald.

Hemandez had had his triumphs, too: a glass bowl held dozens of what looked like tiny obsidian arrow points. Either they were a fraud to impress his patients or he'd been pretty good at curing elf-shot (from which the Aztecans suffer as badly as the Alemans, although Alemanian elves generally make their arrowheads out of flint).

We also found an infusion for invoking Tiazol-teteo, the demon of desire: not, apparently, to provoke lust, but rather to put it down. The infusion had a label written in Spainish on it. Bomholm the thaumatech translated it for us: "To be used together with a hot steam bath.'" She laughed. "I wouldn't be homy after a steam bath anyhow, I don't think."

If that had been all the curandero was up to, the visit by the SWAT team would have been a waste of taxpayers' hardearned crowns. But it wasn't. Bomholm went over to a table in one comer of the room. She looked at her spellchecker in growing concern. "It's here somewhere, in amongst this gynecological stuff," she muttered.

Again, a lot of the stuff you could find at any curandero's: leaves for rubbing against a new mother's back to relive afterpangs, herbs to stimulate milk in women with new babies, a douche of ayo nelhuati herb and eagle dung for pregnant women: all more or less harmless. But with them - "Bingo!" Bornholm said when she opened a jar of clear liquid. I already knew her spellchecker was more sensitive and powerful than mine; now she showed that, being a constabulary model, it was also better protected against malign influences. Her face twisted as she read from the ground glass: "The microimps are reporting human blood and flayed human skin, all right. Disgusting."

"Bring Hernandez in here," Sublegate Higgins ordered.

As soon as a couple of fellows from the SWAT team had done so, Higgins pointed at the jar and said, "What's in there, you?"

"In that jar?" Hemandez said. "Is ferret blood and a little bit dragon's blood. Is for mostly the ladies who are going to have babies. They get the-" He ran out of English and said something in Spainish.

"Hemorrhoids," Bomholm translated. "Yeah, I've heard of that one." She gave the curandero a look on whose receiving end I wouldn't have wanted to be. "Brew this up yourself, did you?"

"No, no." Hemandez shook his head vehemently.