The Inquisitor's Apprentice

by Chris Moriarty

  "Er ... hmmm," Wolf said, looking at Sacha and Lily as if he was trying to find a polite way of asking them what they were doing there.

  "Your new apprentices," Payton prompted.

  "I thought they were supposed to start next week."

  "This is next week."

  "Did I miss another weekend? What was I doing?"

  "Working. What else?"

  "I don't even know why I ask anymore," Wolf sighed. He thumbed through the case files on Payton's desk, slid one out of the middle of the pile, and drifted back into his office looking like he was well on his way to forgetting about his new apprentices all over again.

  "Don't just stand there!" Payton urged, shooing them across the room and through Wolf's door. "Go in!"

  Wolf looked surprised to see them, but he waved vaguely toward the two straight-backed wooden chairs in front of his desk. Then he wiped his glasses on his tie, opened the case file, and settled in to read it as serenely as if the two of them weren't going through agonies waiting for him to say something.

  Sacha and Lily stared at each other. Lily gave a little shrug as if to say she didn't know what was going on either.

  Then they waited.

  And waited.

  Sacha didn't dare watch Wolf, so he examined the office instead. It wasn't much bigger than the front room where Payton sat—and it was even messier. Every flat surface was covered with papers, books, and food. The papers were piled so high that they spilled over onto the floor in shaggy white drifts. The food looked like it must have been inedible (at least by Sacha's mother's standards) even when it was still fresh. And most of the books looked like they'd been read in the bathtub.

  But the strangest thing in the room was a muddy heap of black wool on the floor next to Wolf's desk. At first Sacha thought it was a dog. Then he realized it was just Wolf's overcoat. He must have shucked it off onto the floor, mud and all, when he got to work that morning.

  "So," Wolf asked, his eyes still on his file, "do you two have names?"

  Sacha and Lily stared at each other again, neither one wanting to speak first.

  "I'm Lily Astral," Lily said finally.

  Now Wolf did look up, blinking in astonishment. "Good heavens, a girl," he murmured. "And Maleficia Astral's daughter too. What on earth am I supposed to do with you?"

  Lily blushed furiously and muttered something about just wanting a fair chance, no matter who her mother was.

  "Fair?" Wolf asked, still in the same tone of mild amusement. "If you don't mind my saying so, Miss Astral, you appear to be under a serious misapprehension about the nature of the Inquisitors Division. Not to mention life in general. I fear that severe disappointment lurks in your future."

  By this time Lily's face was so red that Sacha almost felt sorry for her.

  But then Wolf turned his attention to Sacha, and he forgot all about Lily's problems.

  "And I suppose you would be ... um..." Wolf glanced back at the file on his desk. Whatever he was looking for, he didn't seem to find it there.

  "Sacha Kessler."

  "Right. Kessler." Wolf's oddly colorless eyes settled on Sacha. "Why do I think I know that name? You don't have any relatives who would have come to the attention of the police before? No wonderworking rabbis or practical Kabbalists or revolutionary rabble-rousers?"

  "Oh, no! Nothing like that! We're complete and utter nobodies!"

  That was Sacha's first lie. He regretted it bitterly the minute the words were out of his mouth. And he would have regretted it even more if he'd known how many other lies he'd end up piling on top of it.

  He had the oddest feeling that Wolf knew it was a lie, too. Not that he said so. He just went all bland and mild and absentminded. But as the seconds ticked by, Sacha's skin began to itch and he had to bite his tongue to keep from blurting out a confession just to fill the awkward silence.

  Just when Sacha was sure he couldn't stand it anymore, Wolf turned back to Lily Astral. "There are two sorts of girls in this world," he told her. "Girls who like to stare at omnibus accidents, and girls who don't. Which kind are you?"

  Lily blinked in surprise. "I—I suppose I'm the staring kind."

  "I'm sorry to hear it," Wolf said cheerfully. "Ghoulish curiosity is a dreadful character flaw in a young lady. But quite promising from a professional standpoint. You're hired. And only mostly because your father would have me fired if I didn't hire you."

  While Lily was still choking on that, Wolf turned back to Sacha. "And what about you? You don't have any rich relatives. Why should I hire you?"

  "Well," Sacha stammered, "I can ... you know ... see witches?"

  Wolf leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. His face still looked bland and expressionless, but Sacha got the distinct impression that he was laughing at them.

  "It seems to me that between the two of you, you have the makings of exactly one decent apprentice," he said. "Miss Astral here has a burning ambition to be an Inquisitor, but"—he leaned forward again to check her file—"no magical abilities whatsoever. Or none that she'll admit to, anyway. You, on the other hand, are overflowing with talent but don't seem to have a clue why you want the job. Or am I missing something?"

  Wolf took off his spectacles and held them up to the light as if he were trying to formulate a plan of attack against the smudges and fingerprints. He took his already untucked shirttail and began using that to clean the glasses—or more likely just rearrange the smudges, considering that the shirt looked like Wolf had been sleeping in it for a week.

  The silence thickened. Sacha could feel Lily staring at him out of the corners of her eyes like a spooked horse. "I, um," he stammered, "I want to fight magical crime? And, uh, protect and defend the innocent?"

  Wolf looked up—and Sacha felt a quiver of shock run down his spine.

  Judging by the thickness of Wolf's glasses, he had expected to see the vague, myopic gaze of a nearsighted man. But Wolf's eyes were as bright as fresh-fallen snow on a sunny day. In fact, Sacha would have bet good money that Wolf didn't need glasses at all.

  Then the moment passed. Wolf put his glasses back on—no cleaner than before—and was once more average and forgettable. He was also clearly disappointed with Sacha's answer.

  Sacha felt a hot wave of shame sweep over him. Who was Wolf to judge him? Who was Lily Astral? What did they know about his life and his reasons for being here?

  "My family needs the money!" he blurted out before he could stop himself. "Is there something wrong with that?"

  Wolf lowered his eyes to the files on his desk so that Sacha couldn't read their expression. "There's not a thing in the world wrong with that," he said softly. "And what's more, it's the first true thing you've said to me."

  Then, Wolf smiled at Sacha. It was a clean, clear, honest smile. There was humor in it. And intelligence. And not even the faintest hint of meanness. People would follow a man who smiled like that, Sacha caught himself thinking. They'd follow him just about anywhere.

  "Message from Commissioner Keegan," Payton called, sticking his head around the door. "You're supposed to be at J. P. Morgaunt's mansion. The commissioner's already waiting for you there. He seems quite put out about it."

  Wolf raised an eyebrow. "Since when does Mr. Morgaunt rate a house call?"

  "Since he got Commissioner Roosevelt run out of town on a rail," Payton drawled.

  "Sailing off for an African safari with three French chefs and a string of polo ponies hardly constitutes being run out of town on a rail," Wolf observed mildly. "Most people would consider it a thrilling adventure."

  Payton snorted. "Not most New Yorkers!"

  Wolf coughed as if he'd gotten something caught in his throat. Then he unfolded his lanky body from behind the desk, slouched over to the muddy heap of coat on the floor, and began shrugging his way into it. "I suppose the commissioner will expect me to bring the apprentices?"

  "We might as well keep him happy," Payton agreed smoothly.

  Wolf made a
face at that—but he nodded at Sacha and Lily to follow him. They had just about made it to the door when Payton put a hand up to stop them.

  "Pockets!" he announced in the peremptory tone of a train conductor ordering passengers to produce their tickets.

  Without a word of protest, Wolf began emptying out his pockets and placing their contents in Payton's hands.

  Suddenly Sacha understood why Wolf's clothes looked so baggy and bulgy. In short order he produced several chewed pencil stubs, a collection of rubber bands worthy of a slingshot champion, and a dozen crumpled scraps of paper entirely covered in tiny, deceptively neat yet completely illegible handwriting. The scraps of paper seemed to come from every corner of New York and every walk of life. There were laundry tickets, lottery tickets, Bowery playbills. Even a greasy wad of old newsprint that looked suspiciously like a used fish wrapper.

  Payton collected these items as solemnly as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. As he followed Wolf out of the office, Sacha looked back and saw Payton frowning over the fish wrapper as if he expected it to reveal all the secrets of the universe.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The House of Morgaunt

  SACHA AND LILY followed Wolf downstairs, through the chaos of the booking hall, and out onto the sidewalk. The Inquisitors Division was right on the edge of Hell's Kitchen—a notorious slum where no cabbie would risk picking up a fare. Nonetheless, a shiny black hansom cab jingled around the corner and stopped in front of them before Wolf even had time to put his hand up. Wolf climbed in as calmly as if cabs always appeared out of nowhere for him, and soon they were trotting through Central Park.

  As they neared the East Side, the scene grew more fashionable. Society ladies strolled under the towering elms and chestnuts. Nurses pushed wicker prams full of fat babies. Draft horses gave way to thoroughbreds, and there were even a few long black motorcars gliding among the carriages like sharks prowling through schools of lesser fish.

  Sacha forced himself not to stare at the motorcars; he didn't want to give Lily the satisfaction. But when he caught his first glimpse of Millionaire's Mile, he couldn't stop his jaw from dropping.

  He felt as if he had fallen out of New York and landed in a book of fairy tales. Roman villas sprawled beside French châteaus and Venetian palazzi. And each mansion was larger and more opulent than the next. New York's Wall Street Wizards and Robber Barons were determined to outshine their neighbors, and they had the money to do it.

  Still, everyone who'd ever read a New York newspaper knew that James Pierpont Morgaunt's new mansion would be the greatest of them all. It had been under construction for years, not because the work was going slowly—no one who worked for Morgaunt would dare to dawdle—but because Morgaunt kept updating its design to incorporate the latest scientific advances.

  Morgaunt had hired Thomas Edison to install every imaginable modern convenience. The kitchen was equipped with automated ovens and automated dish washers. The books in Morgaunt's vast library were recorded in an automated card catalog. The central heating plant was connected to an exotic-sounding device called a Therm-O-Stat. Even the bathrooms were automated—whatever that meant!

  From the outside, the Morgaunt mansion was a crouching Gothic pile that covered a whole city block. But as their cab pulled through the monumental front gate, the illusion of a medieval fortress gave way to the reality of a construction site. The bones and sinews of Edison's modern conveniences sprawled everywhere like broken clockwork. Half of the courtyard was buried under something that looked like a giant bicycle chain. A group of engineers were puzzling over it like paleontologists trying to put together one of the dinosaurs over at the Museum of Natural History.

  "What do you think that is?" Sacha whispered to Lily.

  "It's the automated horseless carriage parking system," she answered promptly. "Morgaunt told us about it last time he came to dinner. You press a button, and the car you want just rolls right off the conveyer belt. He's already assigned number and letter codes to all his motorcars. He's even bought the rights to print special numbered license plates from City Hall. He says it's a growth industry. In five years everyone's going to be building automatic motorcar parks."

  "But who'll use them?" Sacha asked doubtfully. "You can't park a horse like that."

  "Horses are history," Lily scoffed. "Too much pollution."

  Sacha expected a butler to meet them at the door, but instead they were met by a black-eyed, black-haired, olive-skinned woman in a black dress tight enough to make him blush.

  "That's Morgaunt's librarian," Lily whispered as they followed her across an echoing marble entrance hall toward a set of double doors that looked as if they were carved out of solid blocks of bronze. "Her name is Bella da Serpa. She says she's Portuguese, but no one knows the first thing about her. Except that she's helped Morgaunt gather the greatest collection of magical manuscripts in the world. Not that he uses them, of course. It's all quite respectable; he just collects them for the pictures."

  But Sacha hardly heard her, because they had just stepped into the famous room that people were already calling "the" Morgaunt Library.

  Sacha's first thought was that it was the library of a madman. Books ranged along the walls in shelves that rose two, three, four stories overhead. Spindly wrought-iron staircases spiraled up to narrow balconies from which rolling ladders rose, row upon row, to ever narrower balconies. Daylight filtered faintly through soaring Gothic windows, and the oak-paneled walls were decorated with the mounted heads of dead animals. There were white rhinos and Kodiak bears, African lions and Bengal tigers. And they all stared down at Morgaunt's visitors with their glassy eyes as if to say, What hope do you have of standing up to the man who killed us?

  Two figures waited in front of the immense fireplace. Sacha noticed Commissioner Keegan first because he was standing. But from the moment he saw the man slouched in the big leather wing chair next to Keegan, Sacha knew he was the real power in the room.

  Presidents trembled before James Pierpont Morgaunt—and as soon as you met him you knew why. Morgaunt was as tall as Inquisitor Wolf but much broader. His steel-gray eyes bored into you like augers. His steel-gray hair looked sharp enough to cut you. His hands were smooth-skinned and immaculately clean: a rich man's hands. But when Sacha took a closer look at them, he saw that they were as sinewy and powerful as the hands

  of the roughest laborer. And there was something about the way he used them—the way he held a glass of Scotch or gestured as he spoke or picked an invisible piece of lint off his immaculate trousers—that made Sacha sure he'd be terrified of Morgaunt even if he weren't the richest man in America.

  "Ye're late!" Commissioner Keegan snapped before anyone else could get a word in.

  "Yes," Wolf said in his blandest voice. "I'm afraid I was unavoidably detained."

  Keegan glared. "I should have listened to the people who told me to run you out of town with Teddy Roosevelt. They all warned me about you. They said ye'd be a thorn in my side."

  "And have I been?" Wolf asked in the absentminded tones of a man trying to feign polite interest in someone else's problems.

  In the shadows of the wing chair Morgaunt snorted in amusement.

  "Don't sass me, boyo!" Keegan's Irish brogue got thicker as he got angrier. "I didn't want to call you at all, but Mr. Morgaunt insisted. Said he needed the best Inquisitor on the force to get to the bottom o' this."

  "Er ... the bottom of what?"

  Keegan waved impatiently in Morgaunt's direction. "Use your eyes, man!"

  For the first time, Sacha noticed the leather-upholstered footstool drawn up in front of Morgaunt's chair—and the silver chafing dish in which Morgaunt was icing his swollen ankle.

  "Gout?" Wolf asked in a blandly sympathetic tone.

  "No, you prat! He sprained it!"

  "Er ... condolences. But perhaps in that case a doctor might be more helpful than an Inquisitor?"

  Morgaunt smiled. Even his smiles were terrifying. His eyes slid acr
oss Wolf in a way that could only be considered insulting. "Hello, Miss Astral," he said to Lily. "Your new employer has an unusual sense of humor. Do you think he would find it entertaining to hear that I sprained my ankle foiling an assassination attempt?"

  Lily gasped. Sacha managed to stay silent, but he was shocked too. Morgaunt was no stranger to assassination attempts. A few years ago he'd narrowly escaped death at the hands of bomb-throwing Wiccanists. Sacha remembered the joke that had gone around New York at the time: Morgaunt had died and gone to hell, but he'd been sent straight back home again when the Devil himself turned out to be a Pentacle Industries employee. Sacha had never been sure if the point of the joke was that Morgaunt was meaner than the Devil or richer than the Devil. Either way, it was probably true.

  "Can you identify the assassin?" Wolf asked.

  Instead of answering, Morgaunt planted both feet on the floor and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees in order to stare at Wolf. He examined him like a collector classifying an exotic beetle. "What are you, Wolf?" he asked abruptly. "Irish? German? What?"

  It was a predictable question in a city where most people's jobs and social status were determined by who their parents were. But Wolf's reply surprised Sacha.

  "No one knows."

  Morgaunt raised one eyebrow in a silent question.

  "I was left on the doorstep of the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage."

  "In a basket with a note, no doubt," Morgaunt scoffed.

  "No note."

  "So the nuns named you Maximillian? That's a pretty fancy name for an orphan."

  Wolf smiled faintly. "The Sisters of Mercy had high hopes for me."

  "And you've lived up to them. You must be a very able man to have risen so fast without money or family to smooth your path."

  "I've been lucky in my friends."

  "Or maybe not so lucky." Morgaunt leaned back into the shadows of his wing chair and put his foot up again. "Roosevelt didn't take you to Washington with him. Your choice or his?"