At last we were released; I felt as if I were upward bound from purgatory (no, not a Jewish concept, but useful all the same). I staggered off to the jakes with the staff graphic artist.

"At least here I know what I'm doing," I said as we stood side by side. Martin laughed and nodded; he's about as fond of staff meetings as I am.

Having accomplished at least one worthwhile thing that morning, I went back to my desk to see if I could make it two. I wished the thaumatech had been able to catch more about the incendiary sorcery that had torched the Thomas Brothers monastery; it might have given me a better notion of which toxic spell components to be alert for, and from that which consortia to suspect. But if magic were just wishing, life would be too simple to stand.

I made myself a new chart, an expanded version of the one I'd done on my kitchen table the week before. This one broke things out not just by consortium and type of business, but also by specific type of contaminant in lieu of turning the chart three-dimensional, I assembled a neat battle line of quiBs, each in an inkstand of a different color (to be sure I had enough, I'd borrowed some from Martin's immense supply).

Just when I was ready to buckle down to some serious work, the phone yammered at me. I didn't say what I thought, but I thought it real loud. That, of course, didn't make the phone shut up. I spoke to the mouthpiece imp:

"David Fisher, Environmental Perfection Agency."

"Good morning, Dave - Tony Sudakis calling."

"Good morning. Tony. How are you?" Half my annoyance went away; at least the call had something to do with the case I was working on. "What's up?"

"I heard about the Thomas Brothers fire over the weekend. Terrible thing. Those are good people there. We need more like 'em."

That's certainly true. But (here are less like them now - eleven less, I understand."

"Yeah, I know." A pause. I was getting used to pauses from people I talked with, which is not to say I liked them any too well. Once Tony was finally done with his, he went on, "I just want you to know that the Devonshire Land Management Consortium didn't have thing one to do with this fire."

I chewed on that, found I didn't care for the taste. As politely as I could, I pointed out, "Tony, you can speak for yourself, but how can you go about declaring your whole consortium innocent?" Oh, he could declare it, sure, but how was he supposed to make me believe it?

He surprised me - he found a way that sort of worked:

"The consortium management staff is contributing twentyfive thousand crowns to the constabulary's reward fond for the capture and conviction of whoever fired the place."

"Interesting," I said, and it was; interesting enough to write down, in fact. Figuring out exactly what it meant wasn't so simple. The most obvious interpretation was that management staff was innocent. The other possibility was that somebody up there was guilty as sin and had found a particularly devious way to cover his - or even her - tracks. In the absence of further data, I just had to note it and go on.

Sudakis was dealing with my pause now. Into it, he said,

"You don't take anything on trust, do you, Dave?"

"I trust in God," I answered. "He has a more reliable record than most of the people I know."

"life must be easy if you can honestly give all your allegiance to one omniscient, omnipotent deity," Sudakis said.

"But I didn't call you up to talk theology with you. I wouldn't mind doing that over some beer one day, but now now. I've said what I needed to say, and I've got the usual swamp full of alligators here."

He meant that more literally than most people who use the line - and his particular swamp held worse things than mere alligators. We said our goodbyes and hung up. I looked at the phone for a few seconds afterwards. Maybe Sudakis never had reconciled himself to Christianity, or to monotheism generally. That last comment of his made me wonder.

Well, the Confederacy is a free country. He could believe whatever he wanted, as long as the didn't go burning down monasteries to make his point.

"Interesting," I said again, to nobody in particular, and started squeezing the undines out of my own swamp.

I'd decided to note the contaminants from the smaller companies first, before I taclded the light-and-magic outfits and the aerospace consortia. If one of the little guys was dumping something spectacularly illicit, my hopes was that it would stand out like a mullah in the College of Cardinals.

I was amazed to see just how much nasty stuff some of the little guys messed around with. Take the outfit called Slow Jinn Fizz, for instance. Heaven help me, they were using things there I wouldn't have expected to find coming out of Lola's Cobold Works. I mean, they were stowing stove - in Solomon's Seals at Devonshire. You think for awhile about the thaumaturgical pressure it takes to deform one of those things, and the likely effect on the surrounding countryside when you try it, and you'll have some idea why I noted that in red.

Chocolate Weasel had just as manynastinesses, things EPA men in most of the Confederation wouldn't see once in a thousand years - Aztecian stuff, almost exclusively. My stomach did a slow flipflop when I saw one neatly written item on their dumping manifesto: flayed human skin substitute.

As I think I've said before, human sacrifice is - officially - banned within the Aztedan Empire these days. But it used to be a central part of the Aztedan cult. One whole twentyday month of their old calendar, Tiaxipeualiztii (say it three times fast - I dare you), means "boning of the men," and almost all of it had parades where priests capered around wearing the skins of sacrificial victims.

Obviously, death magic is some of the strongest sorcery there is. But modem technology has eliminated the need that was formerly perceived for it. Proper application of the law of similarity lets the Aztecians produce by less bloodthirsty means the same effect they used to get from ripping the hearts out of victims. But it's still a daunting item to find on a form.

There are also rumors that some of the flayed skin substitute isn't created through the law of similarity, but rather through the law of contagion. Yes, I'm afraid that means what you think it does: the substitute material gains its effectiveness by touching a real flayed human skin, one hidden away since the days when such sacrifices were not only legal but required.

The Aztecians spend a lot of time denying those rumors.

The EPA spends a lot of time checking them - we don't want that kind of sorcery getting loose in this country. Nothing's ever been proved. But the rumors persist.

I noted that one down in red ink, too. Chocolate Weasel, I thought, would get a visit from some inspector soon; if not me, then someone else. Properly manufactured flayed skin substitute isn't illegal, but it is one of the things we like to keep an eye on.

None of the other little firms that used the Devonshire dump put anything quite so ferocious in it, though I did raise an eyebrow to see how many roosters' eggshells Essence Extractions was getting rid of. "Cockatrices," I said out loud. The little creatures are dangerous and always have been ferociously expensive because they're so rare, but I wondered if these folks hadn't found a way to turn them out in quantity.

I looked thoughtfully at that manifest before I went on to the next one. If Essence Extractions had found a way to produce lots of cockatrices, they were sitting on the goose that laid the golden egg. Pardon the botched ornithological metaphor, but it's true. And the dumping records gave some good clues on how they were going about it Tony Sudakis hadn't worded about confidentiality for nothing.

Seeing the folks who are trying to thwart you as people just like yourself rather than The Enemy (in Satanic red sometimes, not just capital letters) isn't easy. You're better off dealing with them that way, though, because it's surprising (or revolting, depending on how you look it at) how often they have a point I knocked off at five, slid down to the ground. Pickets were marking on the sidewalk off to one side of the parking lot Pickets marched outside the Confederal Building about three days out of five, touting one cause or another (sometimes the people touting one cause run into those touting another, and then mere can be trouble).