The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"The usual way: with prayer and holy water," Bakhtiar answered. "Inspector, I do not claim these are one hundred Ercent efficacious; I am aware there is a residue of power t behind. This, after all, is why we dispose of our toxic spell byproducts at the Devonshire facility, as mandated by the laws of the barony, the province, and the Confederation. If leaks have occurred, surely that is the responsibility of the dump, not of Bakhtiar's Precision Burins. We have complied with the law in every particular."

"If so, you don't have a problem," I answered. "My concern is that someone has been disposing of byproducts that aren't listed on his manifest, things vicious enough to break through the protection setup, even if in only minuscule amounts, and to sorcerously contaminate the surrounding environment." "This I understand," he said, nodding. "As manufacturers of burins and other thaumaturgical tools, however, we operate with a limited range of magic-engendering materials, as you must know. Here, come with me. See if you find one tiny thing in any way out of the ordinary for an establishment such as ours."

I came. He was right; I didn't find anything out of the ordinary. The knives with the black handles were steeped in cat's blood and hemlock and fitted with handles of ram's horn. Interesting that Bakhtiar, a Muslim, conformed to common Judeo-Christian usage there; I'm given to understand the affinity goes back to the shqfar, the ram's-horn trumpet which commemorates the trumpets that toppled Jericho's walls. Another technician was inscribing magical characters onto hazelwood wands and cane staffs. The scribing instrument was a burin, presumably one of Bakhtiar's precision burins.

He also inscribed the seals of the demons Klippoth and Frimost onto wands and staffs, respectively. I could feel the power in the air around him.

The sorcerous and the mundane mingled in the production of the silken cloths in which Bakhtiar's burins and other instruments were wrapped. The firm did its own weaving in-house; three Persian women in black chadors and veils worked clacking looms, turning silk thread into fine, shimmering cloth. I wondered how long it would be before the automated looms of the Japanese made that economically impractical. They'd taken much of the flying carpet business from Detroit, and they were skillful silkworkers. As far as I could see, the combination made it only a matter of time.

Bakhtiar said. The red silk is for the burins, the black, fittingly, for the knife with the black handle, and the green for the other magical instruments. For those others, the proper color is less important, so long as it be neither black nor brown."

A calligrapher with a goose quill dipped in pigeon's blood wrote mystic characters on a finished silk cloth. Around him, a dozen other goose quills, animated by the law of similarity, wrote identical characters on other cloths. I asked Bakhtiar,

"Why are you using automatic writing for this process and not that of inscribing the wands and staffs?"

"As we have the opportunity, we shall, inshallah, do the latter as well," he answered. "But the silks are merely protective vessels for the instruments, while the instruments themselves are filled with a thaumaturgic power which as yet overcomes the automating spells. But we are working on it, as I say. In fact, I read recently that a sorceware designer up in Crystal Valley has had a breakthrough along those very lines."

"Was he using virtuous reality, by any chance?" I asked.

"As a matter of fact, he was." Bakhtiar sounded surprised.

Up till then, his expression had said I was an unmitigated nuisance. Now my nuisance value was at least mitigated. He said, "You are better informed on matters sorcerous than I should have expected from a bureaucrat."

"We don't spend all our times shuffling parchments from one pile to the next," I said. "Too much of our time, yes, but not all."

He stared at me out of black, deep-set eyes. "I might even wish you spent more time at your desk. Inspector, provided that time was the period you have instead set aside for harassing legitimate businesses such as mine."

"Investigation is not harassment," I said, and stared right back. Persians of the lean variety tend to look like prophets about to call down divine wrath on a sinful people, which gave Bakhtiar what I thought of as an unfair advantage in that land of contest, but I held my own. "And we can't afford to take a spill from this dump lightly. In aid of which, may I see the decontamination facility you mentioned?"

"I shall take you there," he said. "I expected that would be your next request."

Sensibly, Bakhtiar kept his decontaminators off the main shop floor and in a chamber of their own. That both minimized any corruption that might interfere with their work and made sure their procedures wouldn't weaken the sorcery that went into the instruments.