The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"Sure - by the time we get there, I'll be hungry enough to do proper damage to the menu. And afterwards - always assuming I don't fall asleep on your couch because I'm so full - maybe we can do something perverse."

She snorted again.

VIII

Monday shaped up as a very good day. Not only did I have a date with Judy, but Maximum Ruhollah had come through with the show-cause order that would let me - Michael Manstein and me, actually - go up and examine the area around the Devonshire dump to see what was leaking and, God willing, find out why. That happened Thursday. He spent Friday quashing appeals from the Devonshire Land Management Consortium.

The order was still good when I got to the Confederal building Monday morning. Had one of the appeals succeeded, the words would have faded right off the page.

They tell stories about officials who go out to conduct their business, open up their briefcases, and pull out a blank sheet of parchment. Nobody dies of embarrassment, but sometimes you wish you could. I reminded myself to check my document before I handed it to Tony Sudakis. If there was anybody I didn't want laughing his head off at me, he was the guy.

I met Michael Manstein up on the seventh floor. He was packing vials of this, jars of that, silk bags full of other things and tied with elaborately knotted scarlet cords into his little black bag. I scratched my head. "Why not just take a good spellchecker?" I asked.

He glanced up from what he was doing. "I am operating under the assumption that we will be searching around the walls for leaks, David," he said, as patiently as if I were a kiddygarden pupil. The containment spells would degrade the performance of the microimps in a spellchecker."

That had certainly happened when I used my own portable to run an unofficial scan of the dump: it hadn't picked up anything but the containment cantrips. I'd figured a more sensitive model would overcome the interference, but the reason I had Michael along, after all, was that he knew more of such things than I did. "You're the wizard," I told him. "Shall we go? Your carpet or mine?"

We ended up taking his; he'd had a special option package installed to insulate his sylphs from the potent magics he often flew with. I didn't care to risk having my carpet break down and strand me in the middle of nowhere (for which, as detractors of Angels City will tell you, St. Ferdinands Valley is an excellent substitute). As we slid down to the lot, I grinned - no staff meeting for me today.

Michael Manstein flew exactly as you would expect: exactly at the speed limit, exactly where he ought to have been, every change of height or direction signaled at exactly the right time. Exact fits Michael exactly, as you will have gathered.

He parked his carpet in the same lot I'd used when I first came up to the Devonshire dump. We got off and started across toward the dump. I'd taken maybe three steps when I said, "Didn't you forget to activate your anti-theft gear? You ought to go back and do it; this isn't a saintly neighborhood."

His thin, rather pallid face took on an expression I'd never seen there before. If you can believe it, Michael Manstein looked smug. He said, "What's sorce for the gear is sorce for the gander."

Sometimes magicians are irritating people. All right, so Michael had better theft protection on his carpet than the usual gear woven into the fibers while it's still on the loom.

All right, so even if someone succeeded in beating that protection, he'd still be able to tell where his rug had gone. But was that excuse enough for making bad puns about it? I didn't think so, especially not early in the morning.

The security guard sitting in his glass booth was a different fellow from the one who'd been there the last time I went up to the dump, so he didn't recognize me. Two EPA sigils and a show-cause order prominently displayed (yes, it still had writing on it) were plenty to get his attention, though. He picked up his phone, called Tony Sudakis, then came back out to us and said, "He'll be here in a minute."

Sudakis took longer than that, but not much. The guard set the insulated footbridge over the barrier so Tony could come out and talk with us. He gave me a bonecrusher handclasp, made Michael wince with another one, and said,

"Okay, let's see the order."

I gave it to him. He read it carefully, handed it back to me.

This says you're authorized to search 'the surround of the aforementioned property.'" He made a face. "Lawyer talk. Anyway, this doesn't say thing one about coming inside."

That's right" I nodded. "We're trying to see what's leaking out, after all."

"Okay," Sudakis said again. "I am directed by our legal staff to provide no more cooperation than what the order demands. That means that if you need to take a leak, you've got to do it across the street. You can't come into the containment area for anything." He gave me an apologetic shrug.

"I'm sorry, Dave, but that's what my orders are."