Heavens, before I could get started, I had to go to the reference library to look up Chumash charmstones and how they fit into the rest of the Indians' cult. I found out they were used not only for making rain, but also in war (they could make you invisible to arrows), in medicine, and in general sorcery. They tied in with other talismans - 'atishwin, the Chumash called those - and with the Powers who helped the Chumash shamans. And now, by what Bea had passed to me, they were just little carved chunks of steatite, as inert as ifthey'd never had any magical intent at all.

I went up to Bea's office, shot the breeze with her secretary (Rose really runs that place; if she ever quit, we'd fall apart) until she got off the phone, then ducked in fast before it made noise again. "What's my priority on this Chumash thing?" I asked her. "The Devonshire project is taking up a lot of my time right now."

"I know," she answered. "It still comes first - it's active, while if the Chumash Powers really are extinct, there's no hurry about saying so. You'll want to get a more formal investigation going to check that out one way or the other, have the thaumaturges see if the Chumash gods of the Upper World, the First People, or the Nunashish of the Lower World are still accessible to invocation."

"You've been reading up on this," I said; up until a couple of minutes before, I'd never heard of the dark, misshapen Nunaskish.

She grinned at me. "Of course I have. If I knew about these spirits off the top of my head, they wouldn't be on the edge of extinction, would they? If it turns out they haven't gone over the edge, report back to me right away, because we'll need to try to arrange a preservation scheme - assuming we can afford one."

Doing a cost-benefit analysis to figure out whether it's worthwhile to save an endangered deity is so coldblooded that it's one of my least favorite parts of the job. It is, unfortunately, also all too often necessary. As I noted when I saw Matt Arnold's door Herm, maintaining a cult for a supernatural being who would otherwise be gone is expensive: it's the Other Side's equivalent of a captive breeding program for an animal that's vanished from the wild, If the Chumash Powers were still alive, somebody - me, most likely - would have to figure out their role in the local thecosystem, and whether that role justified the money to provide worshipers and whatever else they needed. I'd never been part of the God Squad before. It's an awesome responsibility, when you think about it.

Bea must have seen the look on my face. "Don't get yourself in an uproar, David. The odds are that these Powers have just faded away, like so many others the Indians reverenced before white folks-and black-settled here. If that's so, all you'll have to do is write up the report. It's only if the Nunashish and the rest are still around that you'll have any bigger worries."

"I know that," I answered - "Actually, I hope they do survive. But if they do, and if they're very much enfeebled - which they will be-"

"Yes, I know. Holding a Power's fate in your hands isn't easy. In the old days, they were proud of ridding the world of gods in whom they didn't believe - some of the early Christian writings, the ones from the time of the Great Extinctions in Europe, will sicken you with their gloating.

But our ideas are different now; we know everything has its place in Creation, to be preserved if possible."

"But to be the one who decides if it's possible, and then to have to live with myself afterwards… it won't be easy, Bea."

"If you wanted a job that was easy all the time, you wouldn't be here," she said. "Anything else? No? All right, thank you, David."

I went back to my office and made a couple of calls, got the ball rolling on the Chumash channstones. Then I plowed through as much of the more routine stuff as I could before lunch. If I'd known how bad lunch was going to be, I'd have worked straight through it. The cafeteria must have assembled the unappetizing glop on my plate with help from the law of contagion: some time a long while ago, it might have been in contact with real food. Two crowns ninety-five shot to - well, you get the idea.

I slid down to my carpet with my spellchecker in my lap.

My stomach made small unhappy noises. Hoping they wouldn't turn into large unhappy noises, I flew on up into St.

Ferdinand's Valley. The brown dirt and yellow-brown dry brush of the pass were getting to look very familiar.

The Corderos lived in a neighborhood that had been upper middle class maybe thirty years before. A lot of the houses still looked pretty nice, but it wasn't upper middle class any more. Gang symbols and tags, mostly in Spainish, were scrawled on too many walls, sometimes on top of one another. And the houses, even the nice-looking ones, often held three, four, or more families, because that was the only way the new immigrants could afford to pay the rent.

The house the Corderos lived in was like that. Three women and a herd of kids not old enough for school watched me while I set up the spellchecker. All the men, including Ramon Cordero, were out working. Lupe held poor little Jesus and nursed him while she tried to keep track of a toddler who looked just like her.

One of the women - her name was Magdalena - spoke good English. She translated for me when I said, "First things first. Let me check that bottle of tonic you were telling me about, Mrs. Cordero."

Lupe Cordero rattled off something in Spainish. The woman who wasn't Magdalena disappeared into the back part of the house. She came back a minute later with a jar that had started out life holding tartar sauce. It was half full of a murky brown liquid. Lupe made a face. "Don' taste good," she said.

I actuated the spellchecker with Passover wine and a Hebrew blessing. My rite was close enough to what the women were used to - a Latin prayer and communion wine - that they didn't remark on it, not even to say I'd omitted the skin of the cross. I was almost disappointed. "Soy JwKo" is one of the Spainish phrases I do know.

I unscrewed the lid of the ex-tartar-sauce jar, sniffed the current contents myself. The brown liquid didn't smell like anything in particular. I reminded myself that Lupe had drunk it without ill effect, and that Father Flanagan had told me few curanderos trafficked in - or with - anything dangerous. That reminded me: I asked Lupe, "Want to tell me the name of the person you got this from?"

She shook her head. "Don' remember," she said stubbornly. I shrugged; I hadn't expected anything different.

I started to stick the spellcheckers probe right into the liquid, but the microimps inside the unit started screaming as soon as I got the end of the probe over the rim of the jar.

The women exclaimed bilingually. I decided I'd better not put the probe in until I saw what the spellchecker was screaming about.

Words started showing up on the ground glass as the microimps tried to tell me what was wrong. They'd been programmed to write in what was mirror image for them, but they were so agitated that they kept forgetting. It didn't matter, I could follow either style well enough.

The ingredient listing came first: ocdi (maguey beer to you), ocelot blood, ferret flesh, dragon blood - I blinked a little at that one, but the Aztecans have dragons, too. Then the spellchecker's imps started writing UNIDENTIFIED - FORBIDDEN over and over and over. I'd never seen the spellchecker do that before. I never wanted to see it again, either.

"Ceuak," I muttered under my breath; sometimes English lacks the words you need. I almost wished Judaism had a convenient gesture like the skin of the cross. I could have used one just then. To say I was flummoxed is to put it mildly.

"Let's try it again," I said, as much to steady myself as for any other reason. I tried again, from square one, shutting down the spellchecker and reactivating it. You have to be careful if you do that more than once in a short time: the spirits inside can take on too many spirits from the wine and lose memory. But it did make them stop screaming.