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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 hafta 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. "I'm sure
Judy's medical insurance will cover your fees," I said "Its 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, tweedy as ever, in her wake. She must have read my face, because
she said, 'It's okay, Mr. Fisher. We'll 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,
Adler 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
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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 felling every which way.
There was a rack of news stands outside Madame Ruth's building. I stuck a
quarter-crown into the
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waiting palm of one of the little vending demons, took away a copy of the AC.
Times
. I figured yesterday's goings-on would be page-one 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 Lola 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."
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