The Inquisitor's Apprentice

by Chris Moriarty

  "That hat's much too young for her," Sacha's mother had told his father the first time she saw it. "But at least she's finally spending some money on herself."

  Sacha's father had said nothing, as usual. But later Sacha noticed him speaking quietly to Mrs. Lehrer—and then listening to her for far longer than Sacha could ever remember seeing anyone listen to her. And the next week in synagogue, Sacha's father stood up with Mo to recite the Mourners' Kaddish for her lost sisters.

  The rolling cadence of the ancient prayer sounded through the little shul like the tolling of a deep bell, and beneath it Sacha heard something he'd never heard before in all the years he'd lived on Hester Street: Mrs. Lehrer weeping. Sacha didn't understand the point of making her cry, just as he had never really understood the Kaddish. It wasn't even about death, let alone deaths that were wrong and violent. It was only a simple song of praise to the Name of the One beyond all earthly knowing.

  But Mrs. Lehrer seemed to understand. She looked more truly content afterward than Sacha had ever seen her. And Rabbi Kessler was content too. "There's a right way and a wrong way to keep the dead alive," he'd told Sacha's father as they locked up the shul together. Then he'd given him a shrewd look from under his eyebrows. "Maybe you should have gone into the family business after all."

  Sacha didn't know what to make of that—or of the measuring look he'd caught his father and grandfather giving him a moment later. Nor did he know what to make of the confusing fact that his dybbuk seemed to have brought some kind of real peace into Mrs. Lehrer's life. When it came right down to it, the only thing he really knew about his dybbuk was that he hadn't seen it since the fire at the Elephant Hotel. He'd worried about it for the first few weeks, but as the months slipped by, he began to think that this might be one of those times when not knowing was better than knowing. If the dybbuk was off living the high life with Mrs. Lehrer's savings, then more power to it. "Live and let live" was Sacha's new motto—as long as the dybbuk didn't plan to live anywhere near him.

  Meanwhile, Inquisitor Wolf hadn't fired Sacha after all, which was the miracle of miracles, considering all the lies he'd told. In fact, Wolf had never so much as reprimanded him over the Edison mess. Sacha had come clean about his family too ... well, mostly. Uncle Mordechai seemed like a bit too much even for Wolf to swallow.

  Wolf had taken it all in without so much as a raised eyebrow. And when Sacha asked if he thought the dybbuk was really gone, he just shrugged and said he hoped so.

  "So that's it?" Sacha asked. "What about Morgaunt?"

  "What about him?"

  "Well ... what do I do now? Just go back to life as usual, knowing that the most powerful man in New York wants to kill me?" He didn't mention Morgaunt's attempt to hire him. Somehow the thought that he could ever end up working for Morgaunt was even creepier than the thought of Morgaunt killing him.

  "He's not trying to kill you, Sacha. He's trying to kill magic. You just happen to be in the way." Wolf grinned. "Welcome to the club."

  And that was all Wolf had to say about it—except that a few days later an anonymous package arrived for Sacha's mother containing her locket with the chain carefully repaired.

  As for Lily Astral ... well, she really was a mensch once you got to know her a little. If she weren't so ridiculously rich, Sacha could almost imagine being friends with her. In fact, as he looked around the room at his boisterous, laughing family, he caught himself wishing Lily was here right now. But that was crazy! The Kesslers didn't even own a chair that Maleficia Astral's daughter would consider safe to sit in.

  And anyway, Lily's parents had spirited her off to their beach house in Newport, Rhode Island, for the Christmas vacation. Sacha had been mystified by this when she first mentioned it, since he couldn't fathom why any sane person would go to the beach in December. But then Lily had let slip that the Astral "beach house" was made of marble and had thirty-two bedrooms. Which sort of said all you needed to know about whether a Sacha Kessler and a Lily Astral could really be friends.

  This thought bothered Sacha more than he wanted to admit, and he was just asking himself why he'd want to be friends with a girl anyway when Mrs. Lehrer shouted his name from the back room. "Sachele! Someone to see you!"

  Sacha started violently. Could Lily somehow have tracked him down at his own home? If she had, he would never forgive her for the humiliation she was about to inflict on him. But then he reminded himself that he was perfectly safe from Lily Astral because she was in Rhode Island.

  The next instant, he was at the door and face-to-face with his visitor.

  It was Antonio.

  Sacha stared at him for a long moment. He wasn't sure what was more shocking, the fact that Antonio had dared to walk alone on streets where no self-respecting local kid would let him pass unscathed, or the fact that he'd come to see Sacha at all.

  "Can we talk?" Antonio jerked his head toward the dark hallway behind him to indicate that whatever he had to tell Sacha required privacy.

  "Uh ... sure," Sacha said.

  He followed Antonio into the hall and down the two flights to street level. They went outside together and stood awkwardly on the stoop. Sacha sat down on the top step. Antonio stayed on his feet, as if he just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

  "I, uh, came to make sure you were okay," he said.

  "I am. No dybbuk. And ... um ... thanks for saving me."

  "You saved me first," Antonio said grudgingly. "Did you really mean it when you told it to take you instead of me?"

  "Well ... yeah. I mean, it's my dybbuk. Was, hopefully. I felt responsible."

  This seemed to surprise and disturb Antonio. He turned away abruptly and didn't speak for a moment.

  "Are you going to be okay?" Sacha asked.

  Antonio turned on him, all the friendliness gone in an instant. "What do you think?" he asked savagely. "My father's still dead, and I didn't even manage to—"

  He walked down the steps to the sidewalk.

  "I'm so sorry," Sacha said helplessly.

  Antonio stared up at him, his dark eyes burning. "I know you are. I know it's not your fault that Morgaunt summoned that thing. And I know it was the dybbuk that killed my father, not you. But that doesn't mean I want to have to look at your face and be reminded of it all over again."

  Sacha didn't know what to say to that.

  "I guess we could have been friends if things had been different," Antonio offered.

  "I guess so," Sacha said. It was true. He was sure they could have been friends. He knew it the way you sometimes do, for no logical reason, the minute you lay eyes on someone.

  That wasn't going to happen, though. The memory of Antonio's father would always stand between them, along with the knowledge that if Sacha had done something, anything, differently, he might still be alive.

  "I'm sorry," Sacha said helplessly. "I'm so, so sorry."

  But Antonio was already walking away, and Sacha couldn't tell if he'd even heard the words.

  He sighed and trudged back upstairs. The apartment was just as warm and comfortable as it had been when he left, but suddenly he felt like a stranger in his own home. He went to the window and lifted the curtain to look for Antonio's slim figure in the street. There was nothing to see except lamplight and cobblestones. Sacha peered into the darkness for a moment. Then he dropped the curtain and turned away.

  Two stories below, a ragged figure lurked in the shadows. It gazed hungrily at the warm light spilling from the windows. It listened to the many sounds of the close-packed tenements, straining to hear the tones of a few familiar voices among all the others.

  It knew those voices. It knew their names, their faces, their fears and desires and secrets. It knew everything there was to know about them. And it loved them.

  But they only loved the thief.

  A dead horse lay in the street a few yards away. It had died in the traces that afternoon, and the driver had cut the harness off it and left it for the city cleanup crews. Already, despite
the cold of the winter season, the flies were thick upon it.

  The dybbuk listened to their buzzing, momentarily distracted from the human voices. It stretched out a pale hand and beckoned them. The flies rose, milling around in a confused swarm. Then they drifted over to the dybbuk and settled on him like a shroud.

  If there had been anyone at all there to see him, they would have thought he was a boy made out of coal dust. But the view from inside was different. The wings were all shot through with the light of the street lamps. They flickered and flashed and sparked like stars burning in the blackest sky.

  They were beautiful. And they would speak for him.

  Once he had lacked the power to summon the flies. Now he had it. Soon he would have the power to summon words and send them forth to work in the world. The thief had his voice now, but he would have it back—along with everything else the thief had stolen from him.

  There were no words yet in the flies' buzzing. It wasn't a voice yet. It wasn't even the ghost of a whisper.

  But it was a beginning.

  A Brief Note on Alternate History

  Attentive readers will have noticed a few differences between Sacha's New York and our own.

  In our New York, Thomas Edison was the Wizard of Menlo Park, not Luna Park. James Pierpont Morgan never owned a shirtwaist monopoly or an indelible ink monopoly—though he did own a lot of other monopolies. The Yankees were officially called the New York Highlanders until 1913—though their fans had long ago adopted their famous nickname. And the Elephant Hotel, which burned down in 1896, was a lot smaller and seedier than the one Sacha visited.

  The reasons for those differences would fill a much longer book than this one. Alternate history is an arcane subject—an inky battlefield where persnickety professors torpedo each other with footnotes, and careers sink on the shoals of unsupported theses and insufficient bibliographical references. So perhaps we'd best leave the arguing to the academics and content ourselves with noting that in the infinite spectrum of parallel worlds, everything that can happen has happened.

  There is a world somewhere out there where Wall Street Wizards deal in magic as well as stocks and bonds, and Mrs. Lassky is selling her Mother-in-Latkes, and Inquisitor Wolf is gazing absentmindedly around a magical crime scene.

  And of course some things are the same in every world. Baseball is still baseball. And New York ... well, New York is magical in any universe.