"I am," Michael said; I might have guessed he would be.
He went on, "It combines the ideograms for 'danger' and 'opportunity.'"
Kawaguchi looked surprised and maybe a little disappointed that,a pale blond chap had stepped on his lines. But he nodded and said, "Exactly so. And developments here have now reached the crisis stage. If in the next few minutes Huitdlopochdi succeeds in manifesting himself as dioroughlyas Huehueteod has-"
That was the danger, all right. If it happened. Angels City was in more trouble than it had ever known. The only problem was, I didn't see any skin of the opportunity.
"I have been in touch with the archdiocese of Angels City," Kawaguchi said. They will do what they can for us."
"An acute strategic move. Legate," Michael said, nodding in approval. The Power based at Rome successfully overcame those centered on Tenochtitlan almost five hundred years ago; with luck, it will do so again."
"Alevai," I said, a most un-Catholic endorsement of his sentiment. But I didn't stop worrying, or even slow down.
The Spainish who'd brought Christianity to Aztecia were fanatics, nothing else but; they had to be, or else they never would have tried it. But over the years, the Church has turned fat and lazy and rich and comfortable. The fanatics were in the Chocolate Weasel building now, doing their best to fuel the revival of the old Aztecian gods.
Balance of Powers, I thought, and shivered.
"What are we waiting for?" I asked Kawaguchi. "Exorcists to come and try to drive Huitzilopochtii back to the Other Side before he can fully establish himself here?"
The constable, you will have gathered, was a worn, dour fellow. Now he surprised me with a wall-to-wall smile. The response the cardinal offered me was nowhere near so halfhearted."
I wished he hadn't said halfhearted, not when you thought about how Huitzilopochtii and Huehueteod were being summoned into Angels City. But the cardinal, that stiffnecked Erseman - I'd thought he was on the fanatical side when he refused to grant the burned Thomas Brothers monks a dispensation for cosmetic sorcery. Most of the time, I still thought that kind of fanaticism out of place in our century.
But right this minute, it might end up saving all our asses - and maybe our souls, too.
Kawaguchi kept watching the sky. Had Quetzalcoad shown any skin of manifesting himself along with the other Aztecian Powers, I would have tried to get hold of Burbank again to see what the Garuda Bird could do against the Feathered Serpent As things were, though, I didn't see how the Bird could help.
I wondered what Kawaguchi was waiting for. Whatever it was, I hoped it would be good - and powerful. Something nasty - something else nasty, I mean - was going to happen inside that building any minute now. I could feel it coming, in the same part of the inner me that felt the growing presence of Huehueteod like a bad sunburn.
Suddenly, Kawaguchi pointed. I spotted a flying carpet, way above the usual flyways and ignoring their traffic grid as if it didn't exist. Maybe it had a constabulary clearance that overcame all the anti-flying invocations that gave people and business their privacy… or maybe it was under the control of a higher Power.
As it got closer, I saw it was a big carpet, a freight hauler, and heavily loaded. It was gold, with a white cross - the colors of the Vatican flag. I knew the Vatican rug would also bear a woven - in legend in white - IN HOC SIGNO VINCES - but it was too high and too far away for me to be able to read that.
It was heading straight over the Chocolate Weasel building. Huehueteod's magical fire flamed up to meet it. I was afraid the flames would bum down the carpet and everybody on it. But one thing I give the Catholic Church - it has a saintly hierarchy in charge of looking out for more different things than all the bureaucrats in D.StC. put together. St. Florian watches specially over those who must contend with fire. I have no idea whether his power would have been enough to overcome Huehueteod down inside the Chocolate Weasel building, but it sufficed to keep the god from crisping the carpets. One of the monks riding the carpet (I could see his bare pate shining in the late afternoon sun) tipped a big earthenware urn down onto the roof of the Chocolate Weasel building, then another and another and another, mediodical as if he were on a carpet bombing run over Alemania in the Second Sorcerous War.
Those ums and whatever they held were heavy - I could hear them smashing on and maybe through the roof from several blocks away. And whatever was in them was spectacularly efficacious. The constant heat on my soul that radiated from Huehueteod went away, as if my spirit had suddenly dived into a clear stream. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He refresheth my said ran through my head.
I turned to Kawaguchi and Michael Manstein and asked,
"What are they dropping on them?"
They both stared at me as if I were an idiot. Then Michael said, "That's right, you are Jewish," as if reminding himself.
Very gently, he went on, "It's holy water, David."
"Oh." All right, I was an idiot. In fact, I was doubly an idiot not only was the stuff thaumaturgically potent in and of itself, it was also perfect symbolically - what better to oppose fire of any sort than its opposite among the elements?
Once Chocolate Weasel took all the punishment it had urned from the carpet, Kawaguchi blew a long, shrill blast on a whistle. SWAT teams, Yolanda's hazmat crew, and the EPA hazmat outfit swarmed toward the Chocolate Weasel building. Ordinary constables, the guys with mostly passive sorcerous gear and merely physical weapons - the grunts - followed in their wake.
"They were thrown back twice before," Kawaguchi said, more to himself than to me or Michael. This time-"
This time they moved forward. The SWAT team wizards carried holy water sprinklers like the ones the Loki guards in Burbank packed. Those hadn't been enough to protect them against the growing might of the Aztedan Powers before.
Now those Powers had been reduced by bombardment from On High, so to speak. And now the SWAT teams advanced cautiously toward the parking lot in front of Chocolate Weasel, then toward the building itself.
I got distracted at that point: the archdiocesan carpet floated down and landed just a few feet from me. "Good afternoon, Inspector Fisher," one of the monks on it said. "I wondered it I might see you here today. Somehow it seems fitting."
"Brother Vahan!" I exclaimed. "It certainly does." I trotted over to shake his hand. "Were you the bombardier up there?"
"I was indeed," he said with a sober nod. "God moves in a mysterious way. His wonders to perform. Not scriptural, but in this case accurate."
A curate? No, you're an abbot, my mind gibbered. I forced myself back to the here-and-now: "What do you mean?"
"I mean that I was in the cardinal's office, beseeching him on bended knee to reconsider his prohibition against my brethren's use of cosmetic sorcery to restore their appearance, when Legate Kawaguchi's communication reached His Eminence. He thought me an appropriate agent for the task requested, and I was pleased to obey him in this instance."
Brother Vahan was stubborn to the point of being bullheaded, if he kept after the cardinal to change his mind once he'd decided to do something. You don't do that if you're in monastic orders; you are, after all, sworn to obedience along with poverty and chastity. My guess was that Brother Vahan wouldn't have said a word about the cardinal's decision had it affected him. For his monks, though, he'd argue - a good man.
And I could see why the cardinal would have wanted him on that carpet: who would have more strength of purpose going up against the probable destroyers of the Thomas Brothers monastery than its abbot?
"As to the other, I gather His Eminence told you no again?" I said.
His thick eyebrows - virtually the only hair he had on his head - twitched upwards. "From what do you infer that?"