The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Since I'm not a mage myself, to me that just looked like little brownish flies coming out of a bottle. When Michael screwed the lid back on, I figured I could safely interrupt him, so I asked, "Any skin of Beelzebub?"

"None apparent to me," he answered. The Lord of the Flies is renowned for his trickery, but I do not believe him capable of evading the fruit-fly test; it draws them even more strongly than spoiled plums."

"Good to hear," I said, "because I know there are spell byproducts with his influence on them inside the dump."

"Yes, that is to a certain degree reassuring," Michael agreed. "If a Power so corrosive as Beelzebub cannot break free of the containment area, that augues well for its chances of holding in other, less aggressive, toxic spells."

"Who after Beelzebub?" I asked.

"I had thought Huitzilopochdi," he answered. "He is at least as dangerous as Beelzebub, and we have seen through the case of that wretched curandero's nostrum that he is active - and seeking to become more active - in the Angels City area."

Again, he didn't try to invoke the Aztedan war god: after all, we were doing everything we could to keep Huitzilopochdi from manifesting himself around Angels City. Instead, he performed another indirect test, this one using flayed human skin substitute. It looked like parchment, but it made my flesh creep all the same.

Michael chanted hi a clucking, gobbling language. It wasn't Poultry; it was Nahuad. Spainish is the dominant tongue in Aztecia today, but many people still use Nahuad in their day-to-day lives, and it's as much the language of the native Powers as Arabic is forjinni. I hadn't known Michael knew it, but I wouldn't bet against Michael's knowing any particular tiling.

The chant ended. Michael looked down at the square of flayed human skin substitute. It seemed just the same as it had when he took it out of his bag. He grunted softly.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"I would have expected to observe some reaction there," he answered. "Huitzilopochdic contamination is as likely an inducer of apsychia as any I can think of. But there appears to be no external seepage, at least not as measured by this test."

"What were you expecting to see?" I asked.

"The influence of Huitzilopochdi was brought into the Devonshire toxic spell containment area by means of flayed human skin substitute. Had that influence spread beyond the containment area, the sheet of the substitute material I have here would have demonstrated it by beginning to bleed."

I gulped; I was sorry I'd asked. "Would it be - real blood?" I asked.

"In diaumaturgy, 'real' is a word almost witthout meaning," Michael said sniffily. "It would look, feel, smell, and taste real. Whedier it could be successfully removed from the flayed human skin substitute and impplanted in the veins of someone who had suffered a loss from injury or vampirism… Truth to tell, I do not know. It might be worth determining. An interesting question. Yes."

He pulled a pencil out of the pocket of his lab robe, peered around for something on which he could jot a note.

For one dreadful second, I feared he was going to scribble on the piece of flayed human skin substitute. I don't think my stomach could have stood that. But at the last minute he fished out a parchment notebook instead, and did his jotting on that.

He spent the rest of the morning and the whole afternoon on tests of that sort. To my amazement and distress, he came up empty every time. No, I take that back: he did find one leak. After four in the afternoon, when both of us were fed up and frustrated enough to try something silly, he tested for stardust, and sure enough, the tip of the wand he was using glowed for a minute.

"Undoubtedly deposited here, along with more unsavory items, by one of the Hollywood light-and-magic outfits in search of a hit," Michael said.

"But even if stardust is leaking, it's not toxic," I said. "The most it could possibly do would be to make somebody popular who doesn't deserve to be."

Michael Manstein looked at me as if I were a schoolboy who'd added two and two and come up with three. Not five, but definitely three - I'd fallen short of what was expected of me. Like a good schoolmaster, he set me straight: "The problem is not stardust outside the containment area, David. As you say, that is trivial in and of itself. The problem is that stardust could not possibly get out of the dump if it were not leaking. We have, therefore, established that the leak exists.

What we have not established is which serious contaminants are emerging from it."

"Oh," I said, feeling dumb. Odds were awfully good that he was right. Still, though - "You tested for all the dangerous Powers whose influences are likely to be in the dump, and came up with zip. Stardust is pretty elusive stuff; even the light-and-magic people don't know for sure where it'll stick. Maybe it did leak out by itself."