XI

II took my troubles down to Madame Ruth - you know, that medium with the gold - capped tooth. She had an office down on 34th and Vine. I hoped she could help with a problem like mine. When Erasmus had been so dreadfully hurt | as the Thomas Brothers monastery was torched, she and I Nigel Cholmondeley managed to access him where everyone else had failed. I was praying she'd be able to do the same for Judy.

In her green silk dress and the matching scarf she used to cover her hair, she put me in mind of nothing so much as an enormous watermelon wearing too much makeup. But her looks didn't matter, not to me they didn't. She and her English partner were the local experts on virtuous reality, and from what I'd seen of the technique, I figured it offered the best chance of rescuing Judy's spirit and bringing it back to This Side where it belonged.

Madame Ruth heard me out, then slowly shook her head back and forth. "I dunno, Inspector Fisher," she said. "This ain't gonna be as easy as gettin' hold of what's-his-name, the scriptorium spirit, was. You don't just wanna access your fiancee's spirit, you wanna download it, too. That's one fresh problem."

"If you say that's one, you mean there are more," I said.

"What are they?" "Two good ones, offhand," she answered. "One's in the spiritual realm. We were able to build our own kinda place to meet the spirit - Erasmus, that's what he goes by - in. If your girlfriend's already stuck in the Nine Beyonds, we're gonna hatta go in there and haul her out. Like I said, that ain't gonna be easy."

I wondered what walking through a simulation of the Nine Beyonds would be like. Could even virtuous reality pretty up something with a handle like that so anyone except a Power named the One Called Night would want to go there? I had my doubts, but I also had no choice, not if I wanted Judy back. I asked, "What's the other problem?"

Madame Ruth coughed and looked down at her desk, an elephantine effort at discretion. "It's not spiritual," she said.

"It's more material-like, if you know what I mean." She stopped there.

After a couple of seconds, I figured out what she was flying at. Tm sure Judy's medical insurance will cover your fees," I said. "It's one of the Blue Scutum plans, and it has an excellent thaumaturgy benefits package." "That's okay, then," she said, nodding briskly. I understood that she had to show a profit, but what would Judy have done without insurance? Got stuck in the Nine Beyonds forever because no one would come after her without crowns on the barrelhead? Or ended up bankrupting herself to pay the fees afterwards? Nothing's simple these days.

"Will you try to help her?" I asked.

"Lemme talk with my partner. This is gonna take both of us," she said, and got up to go next door. I didn't age more than eight or ten years in the few minutes she was gone. She came back with Cholmondeley, (weedy as ever, in her wake.

She must have read my face, because she said, "It's okay, Mr.

Fisher. Well give it a try."

I started gasping out thank - yous, but Nigel Cholmondeley cut me off. "Time for all that later, old chap, if we succeed.

Meanwhile, where is Mistress, uh, Ather now located?"

Kawaguchi had told me that. "Her body's at the West Hills Temple of Healing," I said. Where the rest of her was… Well, Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth already knew about that.

Madame Ruth was looking through her appointments scroll. "We're on for this afternoon and tomorrow morning, too," she said. "We can work her in tomorrow afternoon, though, if that's okay wit' you?" She looked at me. I nodded.

I wanted them to drop everything and rush right out to take care of Judy, but everybody else they were working for felt his case was the most important one in the world, too.

Madame Ruth said, "It's okay, Mr. Fisher, maybe even better than okay. This gives us a chance to square things with the constables and with the West Hills place, so as we can be all set up and ready to go."

I nodded again. Cholmondeley unrolled his own scroll, inked a quill, and scribbled a note. "We shall see you there, then, at half past one." He stuck out a bony hand. I clasped it, then walked out of Madame Ruth's office. I wanted to get back to my own shop as soon as I could: I was using vacation time for this visit. Crazy how you keep track of the little things even when the big ones in your world are falling every which way.

There was a rack of news stands outside Madame Ruth's building. I stuck a quarter-crown into the waiting palm of one of the little vending demons, took away a copy of the A.C. Times. I figured yesterday's goings-on would be pageone stuff, and so they were: the flight of the Garuda Bird across St. Ferdinand's Valley isn't something you can easily ignore. Neither is the emergency evacuation of the neighborhoods surrounding the Devonshire toxic spell dump.

Sure enough, both of those got plenty of ink, though the reporters seemed confused about just what had happened.

That didn't bother me; the whole truth here probably would have set off a panic we didn't need, especially since (I hoped) things were back under control.

One of the reporters quoted Matt Arnold out at the Loki works. He gave the impression he'd turned the Garuda Bird loose as a preorbital flight test, then went on about the next step in the space program after the Bird got us into low orbit:

Loki was designing new sorceware to work the Indian Rope Trick from some spot on the equator 22,300 miles straight up to geosynchronous orbit, from which mages could project sorcery over big parts of the globe day and night.

Nobody asked me, but I thought Loki ought to work on a new rope, too.

The mess at Chocolate Weasel made page one, too, but only as a big industrial accident Not a word about the sacrifices, not a word about any connection to the mess at the Devonshire dump.

What really got me, though, was the rest of the headlines.

The Aztecian Emperor had ordered his entire cabinet executed, It was, the Times said, the first general cabinet massacre since the time when Azteca almost joined the First Sorcerous War on the Alemanian side. The new ministers were supposed to be "more inclined toward improving relations with the Confederation than their predecessors had been."

Or else, I read between the lines.

There'd also been some sort of disaster outside D.StC., but I didn't even glance at that story. I just headed over to Westwood to go back to work.

When I got up to my floor, Bea was coming down the corridor as I stepped out of the elevator shaft. She asked about Judy and gave me her best in a way that sounded as if she really meant it. I'm sure she did, too; Bea cares about people. Sounding as if you care, though, isn't so easy. Then she said, "You and Michael have done some very important work lately, and under extremely trying circumstances. I want you to know I know it, and I couldn't be more pleased."

"Thank you," I said. "But you know what? I think I'd rather have spent all that time in a nice, dull staff meeting."

Her head went to one side; I realized I'd stuck my foot in my face. "I'm going to understand that the way I hope you meant it," she said, to my relief more in sorrow - and in amusement - than in anger.

She let me escape then, so escape I did, to the smaller problems left behind after the spectacular collapse of the bigger ones. I plugged away at the leprechaun study, lining up values for my variables so I could get rolling on the crystal-ball prognostications maybe next week. I had to call the Angels City archdiocese for some of the data I needed; the Catholic Church has lived side by side with the Wee Polk on the Emerald Isle for the past fifteen hundred years, and knows more about 'em than anybody these days.

Try as I would, though, I didn't get a whole lot done.