"So what's going on in Chatsworth?" I asked. "Especially what's going on that you need to bounce me out of bed?"

"I am sorry about that," he said, so calmly that I knew he'd known what time it was out here before he called. Which meant it was urgent. Which meant I could start worrying.

Which I did. He went on, "We may have a problem with a dump in the hills up there."

I riffled through my mental files. "That'd be the Devonshire dump, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, that's the name," he agreed eagerly - too eagerly.

Devonshire's been giving Angels City on-and-off problems for years. The trouble with magic is, it's not free. All the good it produces is necessarily balanced by a like amount of evil.

Yeah, I know people have understood that since Newton's day: for every quality, there is an equal and opposite counterquality, and all the math that goes with the law. But mostly it's a lip-service understanding, along the lines of, as long as I don't shit in my yard, who cares about next door?

That attitude worked fine - or seemed to - as long as next door meant the wide open spaces. If byproducts of magic blighted a forest or poisoned a stream, so what? You just moved on to the next forest or stream. A hundred years ago, the Confederated Provinces seemed to stretch west forever.

But they don't I ought to know; Angels City, of course, sits on the coast of the Peaceful Ocean. We don't have unlimited unspoiled land and water to exploit any more. And as industrial magic has shown itself ever more capable of marvelous things, its byproducts have turned ever more noxious. You wouldn't want them coming downstream at you, believe me you wouldn't. My job is to make sure they don't.

"What's gone wrong with Devonshire now?" I asked. The answer I really wanted was nothing. A lot of local industries dispose of waste at Devonshire, and some of the biggest ones are defense firms. By the very nature of things, the byproducts from their spells are more toxic than anybody else's.