"Okay, Dave, come on with me and then you can let me know what this is all about. All our inspection parchments are properly signed, sealed, blessed, fumigated, what have you. I keep the originals on file in my desk; I know you government folks are never satisfied with copies called up in the ground glass."

"What sorcery summons, sorcery may shift," I said, making it sound as if I was quoting official EPA policy. And I was.

Still, I believed him. If his parchmentwork wasn't in order, he wouldn't brag about it. Besides, if his parchmentwork wasn't in order, he'd have more to fret about than a surprise visit from an EPA inspector. He'd be worrying about the wrath of God, both from bosses who didn't pay him to screw up and maybe from On High, too. A lot of things in the dump were unholy in the worst way.

His office didn't feel like a citadel, even if it had no windows. The diffuse glow of St. Elmo's fire across the ceiling gave the room the cool, even light of a cloudy day. The air was cool to breathe, too, though St. Ferdinand's Valley, which like the rest of Angels City was essentially a desert before it got built up, still has desertly weather.

Sudakis noticed me visibly not toasting. He grinned.

"We're on a circuit with one of the frozen water elementals up in Greenland. A section of tile here"-he pointed to the wall behind his desk-"touched the elemental once, and now it keeps the place cool thanks to the law of contagion."

"Once in contact, always in contact," I quoted. "Modem as next week." A lot of buildings in Angels City cool themselves by contagious contact with ice elementals. That wasn't what I meant by modem; the law of contagion may be the oldest magical principle known. But regulating the effect so people feel comfortable, not stuck on an ice floe themselves, is a new process - and an expensive one. The people who made a profit off the dump didn't stint their employees; I wondered how the leak had happened if they had money like this to throw around.