After the spirit promised it would indeed remember both versions of the report, I waited for it to finish setting down the new one. When that finally wafted over to my desk, I read it through to make sure all the alterations were accurately transcribed, then set it in my boss' in-basket for the next round of changes. And then, it being about the time it was, I went out to my carpet and headed home.

I took with me the list of firms that used the Devonshire dump. I left behind the forms that showed what they'd dumped there; those would be more secure behind the office's wards than the cheap ones my block of flats uses. But I figured I could do some useful work at the kitchen table, just grouping the firms by type. That would also give me at last a start on knowing what sort of toxic spells were in there.

After a dinner I'd rather not remember - certainty nothing to compare to the lush Hanese spread I'd enjoyed with Judy the night before - I piled dishes in the sink, gave the table a couple of haphazard wipes, took out a sheet of parchment and inked a pen, then buckled down to it The first dung that hit me was just how many defense firms dumped at the Devonshire site. All the big aerospace consortia that have kept the Angels City economy booming for decades used the place: Confederated Voodoo (it's Convoo these days, what with the stupid and paranoid mania for clipping consortiate names into meaningless syllables: who'd waste time with name magic against as diffuse an entity as a consortium?). North American Aviation and Levitation, Demondyne, Loki (I wondered if byproducts from Lola's famous Cobold Works were trying to trickle through the wards around the dumps; some of them might be very bad news indeed), all the other famous names.

Along with them were a host of smaller outfits, subcontractors mostly, that nobody's ever heard of except their mothers: firms with names like Bakhtiart Precision Burins, Portentous Potions, and Essence Extractions, Inc. I looked at that last one for a while, trying to figure out in which square it belonged: my transmogrifled list had evolved into a chart. Finally I stuck it in almost at random: with a name like that, it could have done just about anything (another modem trend I despise).