The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Legate Kawaguchi's office was a musty little cell, smaller than a monk would live in and messier than an abbot would tolerate. I'm not exaggerating; Brother Vahan was in there when I walked through the door and, by the look on his face, he would have given Kawaguchi a really nasty penance if he'd thought he could get away with it.

"How are you faring?" I asked him after we shook hands.

"Did the cardinal ever grant that dispensation so your burned monks could get cosmetic sorcery?"

"No," he said. With that one word, his heavy face dosed down completely, so that he looked like nothing so much as one of those alarmingly realistic portrait busts from Republican Rome. The St. Elmo's fire from the ceding gleamed off his bare pate as if it were polished marble.

Kawaguchi said, "The scriptorium spirit - Erasmus - was more severely harmed in the fire than we realized. Even now, a couple of weeks after the arson was perpetrated, we've needed a team of specialists to establish contact with it. I was just explaining this to the abbot when you came in, Inspector Fisher."

"Please go on, then," I answered. "If I find myself lost, I hope you won't mind me interrupting with a question or two."

"Certainly," Kawaguchi said. "As I was telling Brother Vahan, Madame Ruth and Mr. Cholmondeley" - he pronounced it, correctly, as if it were spelled Chumlee - "combine to facilitate communication between This Side and the Other. She is a medium and he a channeler; by pooling their talents and infusing new technology into their work, they've achieved some remarkable results. We have every reason to hope for another success here today."

"Let us hope you are correct. Legate," Brother Vahan said, and I nodded, too.

They are waiting for us in Interrogation Room Two,"

Kawaguchi said. "Nominally, since the scriptorium spirit is on the Other Side, it could be manifested anywhere.

However, evoking it in an interrogation room will hopefully add to the weight of the questions being asked. And" - the legate coughed - "the chamber in question has more space available than this office, which might otherwise have been suitable."

"Take us to Interrogation Room Two, then," I said.

Brother Vahan got up from his chair. The fire and its aftermath had taken a lot out of him. His stride had been strong and vigorous, but now he walked like an old man, thinking about where he'd plant each toot before it came down.

Interrogation Room Two lay halfway down a long, gloomy haD that seemed especially designed to put the fear of God into miscreants brought there. Kawaguchi opened the door, waved Brother Vahan and me through ahead of him. Introductions took up the next couple of minutes.

Madame Ruth was a tall, swarthy woman with a goldcapped tooth. She was also enormously fat; her bright print dress would have been a tent on anyone else, but had to stretch to cover all of her. "Pleased t'meetehuz," she said.

When she shook hands with me, she had a grip like a longshoreman's.

Her partner Nigel Cholmondeley couldn't have been more different from her if he'd spent his whole life deliberately trying. He was as Britannic as his name: elegant accent; long, thin, red-cheeked face complete with a little brush of sandy mustache; old school cravat… Let me put it this way: if he'd been born under a caul, it would have been a tweed one.

Legate Kawaguchi said, "Before we begin, would you care to give the hofy abbot and the inspector a notion of the techniques you will utilize?"

The large medium and the English channeler looked at each other for a moment before Cholmondeley said, "Allow me." Madame Ruth shrugged massively. I tried not to show how relieved I was; I'd sooner have listened to him than her any day.

He said, "While communication with the Other Side is as old as mankind, techniques have recently taken several steps forward. As you'll notice, much of the equipment we employ would have been unfamiliar to the practitioners of only a few decades ago."

He pointed to the battered table shoved off to one side of the interrogation chamber. On it were five of the strangestlooking helmets I'd ever seen. They looked as if they'd been made to cover the whole top of the head, from the middle of the nose on up. I didn't see any eyeholes for them, and they had long, blunt projections out from where your ears would go. With one on, you'd look something like an insect and something like a man who'd just had a length of tree trunk pounded in one ear and out the other.

After giving Brother Vahan and me a few seconds to examine those curious artifacts, Cholmondeley resumed: "By your expressions, gentlemen, I should venture to say this is your first experience with virtuous reality."