The Inquisitor's Apprentice by Chris Moriarty Page B

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
    Â 
    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 across 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