Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

“Er … quite,” Wolf answered coolly.

Edison didn’t appear to notice Wolf’s lack of enthusiasm. “I’ve arranged a little demonstration for you. Nothing formal, you understand. the etherograph is still in its early stages. We’ve got our work cut out for us before the grand opening. Oh, yes, we’ll certainly be burning the midnight oil — or rather the midnight electricity.”

“Actually,” Wolf said, “I was hoping to ask you about last night’s attack.”

“A triviality,” Edison said with an airy wave. “Never mind that, the etherograph’s the thing!”

He led them over to the back corner of the lab. Sacha realized that this must have been where the fire was: a faint smell of smoke hung in the air, and the floor showed signs of hasty cleaning. Edison pointed to a cluttered lab table. But there was no etherograph on it. There were only advertisements for one.

They came in all shapes and sizes. There were ads for billboards, ads for subway stations, ads for omnibuses and trolley cars and railway sidings. The etherograph in the ads looked a lot like the Edison Portable Home Phonograph Sacha had seen in ads all over the city for the last few months. It had the same fluted speaker horn and the same lunchbox-shaped metal body, the same hinged top that you flipped up to insert a fresh cylinder. But the etherograph’s top was emblazoned with a screaming eagle that looked just like the eagle on an Inquisitor’s badge, and beneath the eagle was stamped

EDISON ETHEROGRAPHS

Portable Etheric Emanation Detection System

Instead of the two blond girls from the home phonograph ads, the etherograph ads featured a dark-skinned wizard cowering in front of a heroic blond Inquisitor. This Inquisitor was too handsome to look much like Inquisitor Wolf — or, for that matter, any other real person Sacha had ever met. But the artist had made the wizard very realistic in a mean-spirited, nasty kind of way.

That long, pointed nose that arched like an eagle’s beak. Those unhealthily thin cheeks with their sharply carved worry lines. The dark eyes, with even darker circles of exhaustion under them. They all looked terribly familiar to Sacha. In fact, the wizard looked like Sacha’s father. Or like his father would have looked if he were in the habit of going around with a five-day beard and dressing up in ridiculous penny-opera Kabbalist’s robes embroidered with satanic symbols.

It was a brilliant ad. There wasn’t a thing that Sacha could have improved upon.

He hated it.

“Thrilling,” Wolf said, though he couldn’t have sounded less thrilled if he’d actually slipped into a coma right in front of their eyes. “And is there an actual etherograph to go with the advertisements?”

“But you saw it yourself at Morgaunt’s libra—”

Wolf silenced Sacha with a flick of his wrist.

“Of course there’s an etherograph … or rather, that is to say, there will be.” Edison gave a nervous little laugh. “Mr. Morgaunt has placed a great deal of operating capital in my hands, and I don’t intend to disappoint him!”

Edison turned away from Wolf to fix the two apprentices with the piercing blue gaze for which he was famous. “What can you tell me about etheric force?” he asked them.

Sacha thought this was a pathetically obvious attempt to change the subject, so he hesitated and glanced at Wolf instead of answering.

Lily, on the other hand, was way too much of a know-it-all to keep her mouth shut. “It’s what witches use to do magic. Everyone knows that .” She pointed at Sacha. “And he can see it!”

Suddenly everyone was staring at Sacha.

“I don’t do it on purpose,” he said, feeling like he had to apologize to Edison for beating his prototype into production. “It just … happens.”

“Humph!” Edison snorted. “Well, never mind that. I haven’t got all day. I’m already three minutes and twelve seconds behind schedule.”

He strode into the darkest corner of the lab where Sacha could just make out a hulking, misshapen something crouching in the shadows under an oil-stained dustcloth. Edison whisked the cloth away with a flourish that reminded Sacha of his Uncle Mordechai. Come to think of it, there were a lot of things about Edison that reminded Sacha of Uncle Mordechai. He wondered suddenly how much of Edison’s inventing was science and how much was showmanship.

“Behold the Edison Portable Etheric Emanation Detector!” Edison cried.

It was as big as a cookstove. Mismatched gear casings and switch boxes were soldered and bolted onto every visible surface of the machine and connected to one another by a tangled bird’s nest of rubber tubes and copper electrical wires. And on the floor beneath the etherograph, a motley collection of pie tins and cracked tea saucers collected the oily fluid that leaked from every joint and valve of the machine.

“Ahem,” Edison said with a rather silly look on his face. “The, er, prototype.”

Sacha stared at the thing in astonishment. It looked nothing like the etherograph in the ads — or like the machine they’d seen in Morgaunt’s library. Had that one simply been for playing the cylinders, not recording them? Or was there more than one etherograph — more than one design, even? Wolf seemed to be wondering the same thing.

“It doesn’t look much like the advertisement,” he pointed out.

“Yes, well, we have several weeks before the grand opening. And anyway, packaging is ninety-nine percent of the battle when it comes to selling a new product to the public. And this product will sell. Oh, yes! Mark my words, in five years there’ll be one in every police station in the country! And after that … well, Inquisitor, the rest is up to you!”

Wolf just gazed stolidly at Edison. He didn’t voice an opinion. He didn’t even seem to have an opinion. It was amazing what a chameleon the man was. Sometimes he looked so subtle and clever and humorous that Sacha could imagine him lounging around the Café Metropole with Uncle Mordechai. But back at Morgaunt’s house he’d looked like a butler. And now he looked like a dumb Irish cop who didn’t have a thought in his head except where the next beer was coming from.

Wolf’s dumb-cop look had an amazing effect on Thomas Edison. The inventor seemed to feel that Wolf was accusing him of something, and the silent accusation cut deeper than fine words and flowery speeches ever could. Edison drew himself up to his full height with an outraged look on his face. He was clearly getting ready to put Wolf in his place. But then all the air seemed to go out of him.

Suddenly he wasn’t the Wizard of Luna Park anymore. Suddenly he was just plain Tom Edison. It looked as if some tiny puppet master inside of him had packed up his props and gone home, leaving behind only the bare bones of the empty theater.

“You think I like this?” he asked forlornly. “I didn’t get into inventing to deport people. If I had my way, I’d be working on moving pictures. Funny ones! Romantic ones! Movies that would make people forget their troubles and have fun for a few hours! That’s what I’d rather be doing. But I only invent things. I can’t make people go out and buy ’em. And laughter and romance don’t sell. Fear sells. Witch hunts sell.”

Wolf raised his eyebrows slightly at this — which for Wolf was a big reaction.

“Could we see a demonstration of the etherograph, if it’s not too much trouble?” he asked after a moment.

“Is that really necessary? I’m a very busy man, Inquisitor.”

“Someone’s trying to kill you, Mr. Edison. Don’t you want to catch him?”