Still, you can't really complain about hot and sour soup, beef with black mushrooms, crispy duck, and crystal-boiled chicken with spicy sauces. Everything was good, too; this was a place I'd visit again. While Judy and I ate, I told her about the Devonshire dump.
"Three cases of apsydua this year?" she said. Her eyebrows went way up, and stayed way up. "Something's badly wrong there."
"I think so, too, and so does the dump administrator - fellow named Tony Sudakis - even though he won't say so where a Listener can hear him." I sipped my tea. "You deal with magic more intimately than I do, maybe even more intimately than Sudakis: intimately in a way different from his, anyhow. I'm glad you're worded, it tells me I'm right to feel the same way."
"You certainly are." She nodded so vigorously, her hair flew out in a cloud around her head. Then her eyes filled with tears, "just think of those poor babies-"
"I know." I'd thought about them a lot I couldn't help it.
Vampires and lycanthropes have their problems, heaven knows, but what hope is there for a kid with no soul? None, zero, zip. I drank more tea, hoping it would cleanse my mind along with my palate. No such luck. Then I told Judy what Charlie Kelly had said about a bird telling him something might be amiss at the dump. "He wouldn't give me any details - he wanted to be coy. What do you suppose he meant?"
"A bird? Not a little bird?" She waited for me to shake my head, then started ticking off possibilities on her fingers.
"First thing that occurs to me is something to do with Quetzalcoatf."
"You just made dinner worth putting on the expense account," I said, beaming. "I hadn't thought of that."
I felt stupid for not thinking of it, too, for no sooner had I spoken than a busboy stopped at the table to clear away some dirty dishes. Unlike our waiter, he wasn't Hanese; he was stockier, a little darker, and spoke his little Anglo-Saxon with a strong Spainish accent. A lot of the scutwork in Angels City gets done by people from the south. As Sudakis had said, more of them come here every year, too. Times are so hard, people so poor, down in the Empire that even scutwork looks good to a lot of people.
Angels City, much of the Confederation's southwest, used to belong to the Empire of Azteca. The nobles, some of them, still plot revenge after a century and a half. For that matter, though most people in the Empire speak Spainish these days, some of the old families there, the ones that go back before the Spaniards came, go right on worshiping then own gods in secret, even though they go to Mass, too.
Quetzalcoati, the Feathered Serpent, is much the nicest of those gods, believe me.
The old families crave the Empire's old borders, too, even if their own ancestors never ruled hereabouts. They call our southwest Azdan, and dream it's theirs. The way immigration is headed, in a couple of generations that may be true in all but name. Some people, though, might not want to wait. So, Quetzalcoati.
Judy asked, "What ideas have you had yourself?" Thinking is hard work. She didn't want to do it all herself, for which I couldn't blame her.
I seized a big, meaty mushroom on my chopsticks, then said, "The Peacock Throne crossed my mind."
Judy was chewing, too. She held up a finger, swallowed, then said, "Yes, I can see that, especially since - didn't you say?-you know some Persian firms use that dump?"
"That's right. Sudakis told me so." The Peacock Throne is the one which was wanned by the fundament of the ShahanShah of Persia until the secularists threw him out a few years ago. St. Ferdinand's Valley has a large Persian refugee community. And if Persians had been whispering in Charlie Kelly's ear, I wouldn't have any trouble getting a warrant from old Maximum Ruhollah, either. He was plus royal que Ie roi, if you know what I mean.
"After the Peacock Throne, the next possibility I thought of was the Garuda Bird project," I went on. "Aerospace and defense are Siamese twins, and a lot of defense outfits use the Devonshire dump."
Judy nodded, slowly. Her eyes caught fire. So did mine whenever I thought about the Garuda Bird. Up till now, no one's ever found a sorcerous way to get us off Earth and physically into space. People have even talked about trying to do it with pure mechanicals, though anybody who'd fly a mechanical in a universe full of mystic forces is crazier than any three people I want to deal with.
But the Garuda Bird project links the ancient Hindu Bird with the most modern western spell-casting techniques. Before long, if everything goes as planned, we'll try visiting the moon and the worlds in person, not just by astral projection.
There's a good-sized Hind community up in the Valley, too," Judy said.
"That's true." It was, but I didn't know how much it meant. Angels City and its metropolitan area are so big, they have good-sized communities from just about every nation on earth. If God decided to build the Tower of Babel now, he'd put it right here: the schools, for instance, have to try to teach lads who speak close to a hundred different languages, and some towns have laws that signs have to be at least partly in the Roman alphabet so police, firefighters, and exorcists can find the places in case of emergency.
I ate another mushroom, then said, "Any more ideas?"
"I didn't have any others until you mentioned the Peacock Throne," Judy said, "but that made me think of something else." She didn't go on; she didn't look as if she wanted to.
"Well?" I asked at last. She looked around and lowered her voice before she spoke; maybe she didn't want anybody but me hearing.
"There's the Peacock Throne, but there's also the Peacock Angel."
Not everybody, especially in this part of the world, would have taken her meaning. But while neither one of us is a sorcerer, we both deal with the Other Side as much as a lot of people who make a good living at wizardry. I felt a chill run up my back. The Peacock Angel is a euphemism the Persians use for Satan.
"Judy, I hope you're wrong," I told her.
"So do I," she said. "Believe me, so do I."
I remembered the knot of stirring flies I'd seen in the dump - Beelzebub is very high up (or low down, depending on how you look at things) in the infernal hierarchy. And that Nothing-had I really seen it, or was it just jitters at being in a-literally-spooky place? If it was real, what, or who, caused it? Those were interesting thoughts. I didn't like any of them.
Suddenly a little bit of Nothing seemed to fall like a cloak over the warm, comfortable restaurant. I didn't want to be there any more. I waved for the bill, pulled money from my wallet to cover it, and left in a hurry. Judy didn't argue. Even euphemisms can bring trouble in their wake.
My flat felt like a fortress against our gloom. As soon as I'd locked the door and touched the mezuzah that warded it, Judy came into my arms. We hugged, hard, just holding each other for a long time. Then she said, "Why don't you bring me another bottle of beer?"
When I got back from the icebox with it, she'd taken from her purse two small alabaster cups, thin to the point of translucency. Into each she poured a little powder from a vial she carried. I'd once asked the ingredients of the "cup of roots," and she'd told me gum of Alexandria, liquid alum, and garden crocus. Mixed with beer, it was a contraceptive that dated back to the ancient Egyptians. I was convinced it worked: not only had it never failed us, how many ancient Egyptians have you seen lately?
Just to be safe, though, I also followed Pliny's advice and kept the testicles and blood of a dunghill cock under my bed.
Unlike the old Roman's, mine were sealed in glass so they wouldn't prove contraceptive merely by stinking prospective partners out of the bedroom. If you ask me, making love, especially with someone you do love, is the most sympathetic magic of all. Afterwards, I asked Judy, "Do you want to stay the night?" I admit I had an ulterior motive; she's different from most of the women I've known in that she often feels frisky in the morning.