I said, "Is Mr. Bakhtiar free to see me?"

"Just a minute, I'll check." She picked up the handset of the phone. Bakhtiafs Precision Burins wasn't in the high-rent district but it used all the latest sorceware. The silencing spell on the phone was so good that I couldn't hear a word the receptionist said till she hung up. "He says he can give you forty-five minutes at the most. Will that be all right?" "Thanks. It should be fine, Mistress Mendoza," I answered, reading the name plate on her desk:CYNTHIA MENDOZA.

"Call me Cyndi," she said. "Everybody does. Here, come on with me. I have to let you into the back of the shop because of the security system."

I followed her back down the hall. Balditiar's doorway wasn't hermetically sealed; as I've said, only really big firms and governments can afford that much security. But he did have an alarmed door: if anybody who wasn't audiorized touched the doorknob, it would yell bloody murder.

Cyndi Mendoza took the knob in her hand and chanted softly from the Book of Proverbs:" 'She criedi at the gates, at the entrance of the city, at the coming of the doors,'" and then from the Song of Solomon: " I rose up to open to my beloved. I opened to my beloved.'" The knob turned in her hand. She waved me through ahead other, then murmured something else to the door to propitiate it for having let me through.

"Do you know," she said as she led me through the burin works to Bakhtiar's office, "the same charm that persuades the alarmed door to open peaceably is also used sometimes as a seduction spell?"

"Is that a fact?" I said, though it didn't surprise me: nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition blends sensuality and mystic power like the Song of Solomon.

She nodded. "It doesn't get tried as often as it used to, though - it only works on virgins." This brought forth more giggles.

She couldn't have made it more obvious she was interested in me if she'd run up a flag. A man always finds that flattering, but I wasn't interested back. I said, "Is that a fact?" again. It's one of the few things you can safely say under any circumstances, because it doesn't mean a thing.

"Well, here we are," Cyndi said, stopping in front of a door that had ISHAQ BAKHTIAR, MARGRAVE painted on it in black letters edged with gilt She tapped on the door - which mustn't have been alarmed, since it didn't scream - then headed back toward her own desk. I'm afraid she gave me a dirty look as she went by.

Ishaq Bakhtiar opened his own door, waved for me to come in. He didn't look like a corporate margrave; he looked - and dressed - like a working journeyman wizard.

By stereotype, Persians come in two varieties, short and round or long and angular. Ramzan Durani of Slow Jinn Fizz had been of the first sort. Bakhtiar exemplified the second.

Everything about him was vertical lines: thin arms and legs, his big, not quite straight nose and the creases to either side of it, the beard worn short on the cheeks and long on the chin that made his face seem even narrower than it was.

Like Ramzan Durani, he wore a white lab robe. Unlike Durani's, his didn't give the impression of being something he put on to impress visitors. It wasn't what you'd call shabby, but it had been washed a good many times and still bore faint stains that looked like old blood and herbal juices.

When we clasped hands, his engulfed mine - and I'm not a small man, nor one with short fingers. But if he hadn't gone into sorcery, he would have made a master harpsichordist; those spidery fingers of his seemed to reach halfway up my arm.

"I am pleased to meet you, Inspector Fisher," he said with a vanishing trace of Persian accent that did more to lend his English dignity than to turn it guttural. "Please take a seat" "Thank you." I sat down in the chair to which he waved me. It wasn't very comfortable, but it was the same as the one behind his desk, so I couldn't complain.

"Will you take mint tea?" he asked, pointing at a samovar that must have come from a junk shop. "Or perhaps, since the day is warm, you would rather have an iced sherbet?

Please help yourself to sweetmeats, also."

Since he poured tea for himself, I had some, too. It was excellent; he might not have cared how things looked, but how they performed mattered to him. The sweetmeats sent up the ambrosial perfume of almond paste. Their taste didn't disappoint, either.

He didn't linger over the courtesies, nor had I expected him to, not when he'd blocked out only forty-five minutes for me. As soon as we'd both wiped crumbs from our fingers, he leaned forward, showing he was ready to get down to business. I took the hint and said, "I'm here, Mr. Bakhtiar, because you're one of the major dumpers of toxic spell byproducts at the Devonshire site, and, as I said over the phone, the dump appears to be leaking."

His dark brows came down like thunderclouds. "And so you think it is my byproducts that are getting out. You think I am the polluter. Allah, Muhammad, and Hussein be my witnesses, I deny this, Inspector Fisher."

"I don't know whether you're the polluter," I said. "I do know from your manifests that enough sorcerous byproducts come from this business to make me have to look into the possibility."

"Get the burin - maker - he is always the polluter."

Bakhtiar scowled at me, even more blackly than before. 'In superstitious Persia, I could understand this attitude though I know how foolish it is. Here in the Confederation, where reason is supposed to rule, my heart breaks to hear it. Taken over all, Inspector, Bakhtiar's Precision Burins reduces the sorcerous pollution in Angels City; we do not increase it.

This I can demonstrate."

"Go on, sir." I thought I knew the argument he was going to use, but I might have been wrong.

I wasn't He said, "Consider, Inspector, if every wizard had to manufacture his own sorcerous tools, as was true in the olden days: not just burins but also swords, staves, rods, lancets, arctraves, needles, poniards, swords, and knives with white and black handles. Because the sorcerers of the barony would be less efficient and more widespread than we are here, far more magical contamination would result from their work. But that does not happen, because most thaumaturges purchase their instruments from me. They cause no pollution because they are not doing the work. I am, and because of it, Bakhtiar's Precision Burins draws the attention of regulators like yourself."

I've heard that single-source argument many times. It generally has an element of truth to it: doing things in one place often is more efficient and better for the environment than scattering them all over the landscape. And Bakhtiar was right when he said single-source providers do stand out because they still pollute and the people who use their services don't. But all that doesn't mean single-source providers can't pollute more than they should.

I said as much. Bakhtiar got to his feet. "Come with me, Inspector. You shall see for yourself."

He took me out onto the production floor. It was as efficiently busy as most other light industrial outfits I've seen. A worker wearing asalamandric gloves lifted a rack of red-glowing pieces of steel out of a fire, turned and quenched them in a bath from which strong-smelling steam rose.

That must have been the third heating for the burin blanks," Bakhtiar said. "Now they steep in magpie's blood and the juice of the herbforoile."

"Ergonomically efficient," I said; the factory hand had been able to transfer them from the flames to the bath without taking a step. As they soaked up the virtues of the blood and the herb, he prayed over them and spoke words of power. Among the Names I caught were those of the spirits Lumech, Gadal, and Mitatron, all of whom are potent indeed. I asked, "How do you decontaminate the quenching bath after you've infused the Powers into it?"