"You're not under oath," I said hastily. If he turned out to be wrong, I didn't want to leave him the choice of doing something disgusting or facing the wrath of the Other Side for not following through. "You heard me." He got up from his desk, went over to a file cabinet off to one side, started pulling out folders. "Here, look." He unrolled a parchment in front of me. "Here's the outer perimeter. You'll have seen some of that; here's what all really goes into it. And here's the protection scheme for the complex we're sitting in."

I was already pretty much convinced the outer perimeter of the dump was tight; that's what the speUchecker had indicated, anyhow. And a cursory glance at the plans to keep the blockhouse safe told me Sudakis didn't need to be afraid when he came to his job. Satan himself might have forced his way through those wards, or possibly Babylonian Tiamat if her cult were still alive, but the lesser Powers would only get headaches if they tried.

"Now here's the underground setup." Sudakis stuck another parchment in front of my face. "You look this over, Dave. You tell me if it's not as tight as a Vestal's-"

Unlike the other two plans, this one really did demand a careful onceover. Proper underground containment is the Balder's mistletoe of almost any toxic spell dump. The ideal solution, of course, would be to float the dump on top of a pool of alkahest which would dissolve any evil that percolated through to it. But alkahest is a quis custodiet ipsos custodes phenomenon-being a universal solvent, it dissolves everything it touches, which would in short order include the dumping grounds themselves.

Some of the wilder journal articles suggest using either lodestone levitation or sylphs of the air to raise the dump above the ground and to keep it separated from the alkahest below. I think anybody who'd try such a scheme ought to be made to live in the dump office. Lodelev is a purely physical process, and, like any physical process, vulnerable to magical interference. And sylphs of the air really are just as flighty as their reputation makes them out to be. They'd get bored or playful or whatever and forget what they were supposed to be doing.