Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

“You forgot to mention the opium smuggling and white slavery,” Wolf pointed out. Sacha was pretty sure that even Lily must be able to hear the sardonic edge in his voice. But, amazingly enough, she couldn’t. Sacha was starting to suspect that Lily Astral didn’t get much of a chance to use her sense of humor at home. It seemed weak and shaky, like a muscle that didn’t get enough exercise.

“Right,” Lily corrected herself, still oblivious to Wolf’s sarcasm. “I knew about that. It just slipped my mind for a minute. Is there anything else I should know?”

“Actually,” Wolf said, “I think you’d be better off if you knew less. The Immortals have nothing to do with the tongs. And they have no power over anyone, certainly not the power of fear.”

“But they are wizards,” Lily pestered him.

Or at least Sacha told himself she was pestering. Deep down he was a little jealous, though. He wondered where she got the gumption to talk to Wolf like that, as if she just naturally assumed they were equals. He guessed it came from being richer than God and hobnobbing with Roosevelts and Vanderbilks.

“Yes,” Wolf told Lily. “They’re just about the most powerful wizards there are.”

“So why don’t the Inquisitors arrest them?”

“It’s not illegal to be a wizard,” Wolf replied, “any more than it’s illegal to be a Kabbalist or a druid … or even a good old-fashioned New England witch.”

“So then what is illegal?” Lily asked.

Wolf laughed uncomfortably. “That’s … shall we say a gray area? A hundred years ago there were country witches and warlocks all over New England. They put out shingles and took paying customers. They even advertised in the newspapers. The Inquisitors were more like traffic cops than witch-hunters back then. We were really just around to make sure no one got cheated. But then the bankers and Robber Barons turned magic into big business with their factories and railroads and sweatshops. They started squeezing out the little independent witches and warlocks. Then … but that’s politics.” He stopped short, obviously feeling he’d said too much. “And you two are far too young to worry about politics.”

But Lily had gotten hold of a bone and she wasn’t ready to let go of it. “But that’s just … just…”

“Ridiculous?” Wolf teased.

“Yes, frankly! You talk about bankers and Robber Barons as if they were all conjure men. But surely some of them are honest businessmen.”

“I’m sure they are.” Wolf sounded like he desperately wanted to change the subject.

“My father doesn’t do magic, does he?”

“I certainly didn’t intend to suggest anything about your father, Miss Astral.”

Sacha thought the temperature inside the cab must have dropped twenty degrees in the last sixty seconds. But Lily was too busy arguing to notice.

“No respectable person uses magic these days, Inquisitor Wolf. Oh, I know it used to be different. My mother says that when she was a girl all the best New England families used to give their daughters witchcraft lessons, just like they give them drawing lessons and dancing lessons. But nowadays real Americans don’t do magic. Only, well, Irish and Italians and … you know … that sort of people. Isn’t that right, Inquisitor Wolf? Or I mean … well … is it?”

Suddenly Sacha forgot to be offended by Lily’s crack about real Americans. Something truly strange was going on. Lily’s voice had gone all tight and scratchy during this little speech. And she had the oddest look on her face — like she was trying to trick Wolf into saying something she really didn’t want to hear.

Wolf heard it too. Sacha was sure he did. He was looking at Lily as if he felt sorry for her.

“Like I said,” he told her, “you’re much too young to worry about politics.”

By now the cabbie had turned off Broadway and begun to nose his way down Mulberry Street. They were in the heart of Chinatown. And though they were only a few blocks from Grandpa Kessler’s synagogue, Sacha barely knew these streets. He stared as they inched past gaudily painted shopfronts full of silks and spices and dusty packets of Chinese medicines. In one store, he even glimpsed a stuffed albino tiger as big as a horse, with its claws unsheathed and its teeth bared menacingly.

The street peddlers here didn’t carry their wares in pushcarts. Instead, they balanced long bamboo poles across their shoulders with red-lacquered baskets that bobbed on either end like candied apples in a carnival booth. And the smells wafting from those baskets were incredible. Caramel and curry and carp and crispy duck and a thousand other exotic delights tickled Sacha’s nose. His head was spinning and his stomach rumbling by the time the cab pulled up in front of a nondescript herbalist’s shop.

Wolf whisked them into the shop — and then straight through it and out the back door into a high-walled inner courtyard hung with so many clotheslines that they seemed to be walking under a solid roof of fluttering white sheets and linens. The shopkeeper’s entire family seemed to live around the courtyard, along with a flock of unusually lively chickens. As Sacha hurried past, he glanced through an open door and saw them all sitting down to lunch around an ingenious little table with a portable cookstove built into it.

Behind the first courtyard lay another courtyard. This one contained only a very large mulberry tree and a very tiny old man, who was carrying two fat white mice in an ornate wicker birdcage. The old man pantomimed an introduction as they raced by: Children, meet mice; mice, meet children. Wolf paused just long enough to nod politely to the mice. Then he yanked open a narrow metal door that looked like it led to a broom closet, slipped inside — and vanished.

When Sacha stepped through after him, he found himself in a place that was like nowhere he’d ever been before.

It wasn’t just the size of the place — though it seemed enormous. It was that, for the first time in his life, Sacha couldn’t hear even the faintest sound of traffic. Instead the air was filled with the chirping of crickets and the warbling of sparrows and the sharp smell of the ancient pine trees whose twisted limbs blocked out half the sky. Sacha had the eerie feeling that he was no longer in New York at all, but had stepped through some magical door into the heart of China.

At the far end of a long courtyard stood a massive wooden gate built from age-blackened timbers. It looked as if it had stood there for centuries, as did the tile-roofed building behind it. Above the gate, emblazoned on a fluttering silk banner, stretched four immense golden Chinese characters.

“What does that sign say?” Sacha asked.

Wolf smiled ever so slightly. “It says ‘White Lotus Young Ladies’ Dancing and Deportment Academy.’ But don’t worry. There are boys here too. It’s an orphanage. And it wasn’t a dancing academy even before it was an orphanage. They just call it that to stay out of trouble with the police because it’s illegal to teach … well, you’ll see.”

Wolf pulled at the bell rope beside the heavy oak door, and a deep bell tolled somewhere far off inside the building. A moment later they heard the patter of bare feet on stone, and a child opened the door for them. The child was wearing a pigtail and the same white cotton pajamas that Sacha had seen Chinese men wearing. Sacha thought it was a boy, since he was wearing pants, but he wasn’t really sure. And after another look, he wasn’t even sure if he was Chinese or not. The hair and eyes looked right. But whoever heard of a Chinese person with freckles?