"You said you were happy to obey him 'in this instance,'"
I answered. "I took it to mean you weren't happy about the other."
"Most Jesuitically reasoned." His thin smile said he was teasing me. It went away too soon. "I'd rather he had refused me this and granted the other. Many could have done what I just did, but who except me will speak for my brethren?"
I didn't know what to feeclass="underline" pleased with myself for understanding the way Brother Vahan's mind worked, angry at the cardinal for sticking to his refusal like a pricldeburr, or pleased His Eminence had the gumption to commit his best to a crisis. Those last two were inextricably mixed, which only complicated things more.
Faint across a couple of hundred yards came shouts from the constables and then pops of pistol fire. Normally pistols are nothing to scorn - they're about the most dangerous mechanical hand weapons around. After everything I'd been through that day, those pops and the clouds of gunpowder smoke I saw rising from the parking lot seemed about as consequential as the firecrackers whose cousins they were.
Kawaguchi pulled out his own pistol, cocked it, checked his flint, and then trotted down Nordhoff toward Chocolate Weasel. Michael and I started after him, but a constable about the size of both of us put together shook his head and rumbled, "That wouldn't be smart." He stepped in front of us and spread his arms wide to make sure we listened to him.
Since he was doing a pretty good impression of the Great Hanese Wall, I stopped. So did Michael.
That meant we had to wait. Waiting is harder than doing.
When you're doing, you don't have time to worry. When you're waiting, if you're anything like me, you think about all the things that could go wrong. I'd waited for the Garuda Bird. I'd waited for the carpet from the archdiocese. I was waiting again. I was sick of it. I waited anyhow, peering down Nordhoff to see what I could see.
Not too much, not for a while. Then I heard more pistol pops, and then people started coming back up the street. Some of them were constables, some prisoners with their hands in the air. As they got closer, I saw that several sets of those upraised hands were red, with drips running down toward the elbows. I heard someone make a sick, gulping noise, and realized a moment later it was me.
One of the SWAT team wizards was carrying an obsidian knife. Another one walking beside him kept spraying it with holy water. I gulped again. That knife, I had no doubt, belonged in the Devonshire dump. If ever spells were guaranteed harmful to the environment, they're the ones that go along with human sacrifice.
I recognized one of the prisoners - Jorge Vasquez. He saw me at about the same time I saw him. I thought about making some crack about his getting shut down for EPA violations along with everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Even captured, he looked too smart and tough for me to want to twit him.
Behind him came Legate Kawaguchi, who was busy loading another charge of powder and ball into his pistol as he walked along. Brother Vahan called to him: "Do any within that building require my services?"
Kawaguchi finished ramming home the ball before he looked up. "For last rites and such, you mean. Brother?" He shook his head. "Just corpses in there."
"Martyrs,'' Brother Vahan said, his voice grim. Their reward shall surely come in heaven."
I wondered about that was somebody who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time a martyr in the same sense as a person who deliberately invited death for the sake of his faith? I'm neither Catholic nor theologian, so I can't tell you what Brother Vahan should have been thinking by the standards of his church.
That was the least of my worries, anyhow. I lunged for Kawaguchi in a way that almost made him level his newly loaded pistol at me. "Did you-" I choked on fear and had to force myself to go on: "Did you find Judy in there?"
Ib my relief, he slipped the pistol back into its holster.
Then he said, "Inspector Fisher, I neither searched extensively through Ae Chocolate Weasel building nor closely examined the bodies of the victims around the altar." Something else to be decontaminated, I thought. Kawaguchi was continuing, "So long as you understand these limitations, sir, I can state to you that I did not see a corpse matching the description of your fiancee in that - that abbatoir."
Kawaguchi talks like an upper-level constable: as if every word he says is going to show up in a written report or as courtroom testimony Real Soon Now. For him to pick a word like abbatoir… all at once I was glad the very large fellow in the blue uniform hadn't let me follow the legate.
I was also gladder than I could say that - subject to his careful limitations - he hadn't found Judy. If I chose to believe that she wasn't there because he hadn't found her, can you blame me?
Michael said, "Legate, can we lend any further assistance?" We hadn't lent Kawaguchi much assistance before that I'd noticed. Michael is usually too precise to make a slip like that, but after everything that had happened during the day, can you blame him, either?
Thank you, sir, but I think not," Kawaguchi answered.
He turned to me. "Inspector Fisher, you did your best to warn me of the magnitude of this threat I must concede that at the time of our telephone conversation I did not have a full appreciation of it. My apologies for that error." "Who would have believed this?" I said. My guess was that Kawaguchi still didn't have a full appreciation of what he'd been part of today. Put what happened here together with our desperate struggles back at the Devonshire dump, let both containment efforts fail, and Angels City goes light off the map. And who could say what was happening elsewhere in the Confederation, or would have followed Azbedan success here? Maybe we'd put a spike in the wheel of the Third Sorcerous War.
"David, I shall take you back to Westwood now," Michael said in a tone that brooked no argument. I wasn't in a mood to argue, anyhow; now that the terror which had kept me hopping most of the day was easing, I could feel myself subsiding into something with all the crisp decisiveness of a bowl of tapioca pudding. More boneless with every step, I walked over to his carpet. We headed down toward the Venture Freeway. I told myself I never wanted to see St Ferdinand's Valley again.
When we got to the Confederal Building, Michael got off the carpet and headed for the entrance instead of going home. He gave me a bemused look when I fell into step beside him. "I may as well keep working," I told him. "The more I have to do, the less time I have to worry."
"Ah," he said, "The anodyne of distraction," Which is what I'd just said, but I hadn't managed to boil it into four words.
If I didn't have anything urgent on my desk, I figured I'd write up what I'd been through today. The EPA, like any government agency, thrives on documentation, and I must confess that I've been indoctrinated to the point where I sometimes don't believe something is real until it's committed to parchment On the other hand, if Moses had had to fill out all the EPA forms parting the Red Sea would have required, the Bible would be written in Egyptian.
Only one message waited for me, from a woman named Susan Kuznetsov. I frowned, trying to remember who she was. Then name and face matched: the no-nonsense gal from the Barony's Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health who'd reported little Jesus Cordero's apsychia to me.
I asked my watch the time: going on six. Mistress Kuznetsov had impressed me as the hard-working type, so I called her back. Sure enough, I got her. 'Inspector Fisher!" she said, I thought she sounded pleased. "I'd expected you'd be gone for the day." °I just got back in," I told her. "What can I do for you?"
"Inspector, the Cordero family has been contacted by a consortium styling itself Slow Jinn Fizz," she answered. "This consortium mentioned the possibility of instilling a soul into the infant, something they had been given to believe was impossible. Unlike too many poor and poorly educated families, the Corderos called me for advice instead of allowing themselves to be taken in by probable charlatans. My preliminary investigation, however, indicates that Slow Jinn Fizz may perhaps be able to deliver on some of its claims. I called you to learn whether it's yet come under EPA scrutiny yet"