Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘It’s what you thought was going to happen last time!’ Lydia objected. ‘You were nearly killed . . .’

  His face grew grave. ‘These things must be hunted in their nests, Madame. Hunted to their destruction.’ And, when Lydia began to protest again: ‘It is my fault – the stupidity of my weakness – that loosed these things into this country, these things that killed him. I owe him a debt. Mine must be the hand that atones.’

  How on EARTH would you come to the conclusion that the Others killed him? She had to put her hand over her lips to silence the words that rose to them. If the Chinese killed a Westerner they’d have made sure to mutilate the corpse to prevent identification . . . Definitely not the sort of thing a genuine widow would say.

  Instead she blurted, ‘You can’t go out there by yourself! You don’t speak any Chinese!’

  ‘I shall hire this man P’ei as well, this clerk whom . . . This clerk who helped with these maps.’ Karlebach brandished the scribbled papers in his crooked fingers, and he avoided her eyes just as he avoided speaking James Asher’s name. ‘As for not knowing . . . little bird, I know my enemies. You have found solace for your heart in searching for them in your way.’ His wave took in the fresh stack of police reports which had arrived, care of the Japanese Legation, while Lydia was away being fitted for six black walking-suits, four day-costumes, and an evening dress. ‘Let me seek mine.’

  Lydia felt a pang of regret that she’d let Karlebach see her note to Mizukami: I find the exercise relieves my mind of the repetitious circling of grief, and I would like to think myself still able to help in my husband’s quest for the truth behind this shocking affair.

  Did that sound too much like the intrepid heroine of a novel? she wondered.

  Would a Real Woman – her Aunt Lavinnia was extremely fond of the expression, as if the possession of a womb and breasts was not quite sufficient to qualify Lydia for the title – be so prostrate with grief at the murder of her husband that all she could do would be to lie upon the bed and howl?

  Lydia didn’t know.

  When her mother had died, she’d been so confused by her family’s efforts to ‘soften the blow’ by lying to her that she found it, even now, difficult to think clearly about that time or to recall exactly how it had felt. Her father had died suddenly, of a stroke, about eighteen months after she had married Jamie: at that time she had not seen the old man for almost three years. He had disowned her when she’d entered Somerville College – terrifying at the time, but miraculous in its way, for the removal of her father’s fortune had opened the way for Jamie to marry her. Her first letter to her father after her expulsion from Willoughby Court had been answered by one of the most spiteful documents she had ever read; subsequent communications, including the announcement of her marriage, had received no answer at all. She had been shocked and startled to hear of his death, but those feelings, too, had been whirled up together in bemusement over the fact that to her own astonishment – and to the howling chagrin of her stepmother – her father had in fact never changed his will, and Lydia had gone from being an impoverished outcast to being an extremely wealthy young woman.

  How would a Real Woman react to grief, she wondered, if she came from a Real Family and not a grotesque circus fueled by money, social climbing, and a self-centered autocrat who wanted to control his daughter’s every breath?

  The poor old Queen had gone into complete seclusion at her husband’s death and had worn deep mourning for the remaining forty years of her life. The eight-year-old Lydia’s observation that this sounded like the most boring existence she’d ever heard of had earned her a smart slap from her Nanna.

  In the end, after nearly an hour of arguing, Lydia managed to talk Karlebach down to a daylight expedition to the Golden Seas – the enclosed pleasure-grounds around the three large lakes immediately west of the Forbidden City’s high pink walls – as soon as Count Mizukami could arrange passes through the gates. To his grumbles about the Japanese attaché’s ‘perfidy’, Lydia had asked if he really thought he could answer for the discretion of ‘a couple of soldiers from the American barracks’ when they got in their cups. ‘At least German spies won’t know any Japanese,’ she pointed out. So far as she could tell, nobody in the compound knew any Japanese.

  Along with the day’s police reports, Mizukami had sent her a note. She unfolded it and read it that night, when she finally settled into bed, with a splitting headache from the effort of remembering to periodically burst into tears throughout the afternoon and a deep feeling of sickened weariness and guilt.

  Guilt for Ellen’s reddened nose and bowed shoulders, and for the driven glitter in Karlebach’s eye. Guilt for that unknown tall Chinese. Her whole skin had prickled when Karlebach had spoken of atonement: if his grief drives him into doing something stupid, Jamie will never forgive himself. And neither will I.

  The note said:

  Dr Asher,

  Please accept the expression of my deepest feelings of sorrow for you at this time.

  Your strength to pursue these inquiries is a sword blade that will, I hope, cut grief. Might I ask of you, to communicate with me of what you find?

  Please consider me at your service.

  Mizukami

  Black shadow, black ice.

  Shadow warrior pursuing shadow,

  Unto shadow returns.

  And Karlebach was right. There would have to be another expedition to the Shi’h Liu mines, and soon. And she knew Karlebach could not be kept away.

  In addition to Mizukami’s plump envelope of reports, Lydia had picked up at the desk four other notes, all of them from bachelor diplomats at the Legations, begging her to permit them to be of service to her. Given what Hobart had told Jamie about most of the men in the diplomatic corps needing to marry money, she wasn’t precisely surprised, but she groaned inwardly at the thought of the scramble that would ensue when word got around that her fortune was her own and not in any way entangled in Jamie’s affairs, alive or dead. She wanted to kick herself for having slipped that information into the conversation over lunch with Madame Hautecoeur and the Baroness, in reply to tactfully worded queries as to whether she would need financial assistance: both women, she did not doubt, had too-ample experience with women who came out to the East with husbands and then lost them there.

  She leaned back against the pillows, closed her eyes, and wondered if fainting when the subject of her widowhood was brought up would discourage the likes of Mr Edmund Woodreave, the Trade Minister’s Chief Clerk: ‘If at any time you need the solace of a loyal friend . . .’

  Indeed! From a man I met precisely ONCE at the Peking Club . . .

  He was the man who had also referred, rather tactlessly, to ‘your poor husband’s appalling death’. Lydia wondered again about the man who had actually suffered that ‘appalling death’.

  If I asked Simon he would say, ‘Nothing of the kind, Mistress. The man was dead when I found his body.’ Or perhaps, ‘He was a wicked man, and I killed him as he was cutting the throat of an innocent child . . .’

  She slipped from beneath the coverlets, hurried – shivering – to the window, and opened one side of the curtain. Peking lay dark beyond the glimmer of lights on Rue Meiji, a mass of upturned roofs against distant stars. She lay long awake, reading in the neat, rather German handwriting of Count Mizukami’s clerk all about disappearances, deaths, and strange things seen around the Stone Relics of the Sea.

  But Ysidro did not come.

  FIFTEEN

  Wind from the north sliced Asher’s padded ch’i-p’ao like a razor. The moonlight made a cloud of his breath. All around the shores of the Stone Relics of the Sea, ice formed a rough crystalline collar, and the crowding roofs of fancy tea-houses, ancestral temples, pleasure pavilions and dim-sum parlors shouldered black against the sky.

  Not a fleck of light in all that shuttered darkness. Curious, Asher reflected, considering what Grandpa Wu and Ling had both told him: that the empty pleasure-grounds along the l
akeshore were haunted these days by thieves, gunrunners, and killers-for-hire. From the humpbacked marble bridge where he stood, the smell of smoke from every courtyard around this side of the lakes came to him, in fierce competition with the refuse dumped on the lakeshore near the mouths of every hutong that debouched there – impossible to tell whether anyone had built a hidden fire along the lake that night.

  Then the wind shifted, and for an instant he caught the stink he’d smelled in the mountains, below the Shi’h Liu mines.

  Yao-kuei.

  They’re here.

  That was the short of what he had come to learn. He could go home now . . .

  Do the Tso know it yet?

  He stepped from the bridge to the muddy verge of the frozen lake itself.

  In addition to his knife, his revolver, and a tin dark-lantern, he’d brought with him a sort of halberd that Grandpa Wu had sold him for three dollars American, the kind of thing that gang enforcers carried on late-night forays, like a short sword-blade mounted at the end of a staff. For two nights now he had waited to hear from Ysidro, but the vampire had either gone to ground or, like Father Orsino, was hunting far from Peking. That afternoon Ling had said a friend of her mother’s had smelled ‘rat-monsters’ by the lake. A beggar-child, the woman had said, had disappeared, the third in two weeks.

  The Tso family had their headquarters in the triangle of land between the northern and southern lobes of the lake, away to his left across the water. Everyone in this neighborhood worked for them. In daylight, despite the Chinese clothing, Asher knew he could never pass unnoticed. He supposed the sensible thing would be to declare the evening a success, go back to Pig-Dragon Lane, and wait until he heard from Ysidro.

  IF I hear from Ysidro.

  And if I hear from him before Karlebach looks over Lydia’s shoulder at her police reports some evening and decides to make inquiries here on his own. The old man would have the freedom to come here during the day, but if the Tso were trying to keep inquiries away from the mine, the danger to Karlebach would not be less.

  He is obsessed.

  Long service in the twilight world – where love of country and duty to the Queen were the only landmarks – had taught Asher what obsession did to men’s judgement. They see what they want to see, his Chief had once said to him. They convince themselves things are safer than they are.

  The stench – barely a whiff – disappeared as the wind veered to the north again. From the west, thought Asher. Along the long axis of the northern ‘sea’. Giving the western shore – and the maze of siheyuan that made up the Tso family headquarters – a wide berth, Asher picked his way down counterclockwise along the southern lobe of the lakes, boot soles squeaking in the frozen mud. Movement ahead of him and to his right: he almost jumped out of his skin. But it was only a rat, fattened with garbage to the size of a half-grown cat. Here away from the pleasure pavilions, the waste of soap- and paper-making in the hutongs above him was dumped, as well as the flayed debris of butcher’s stalls that even the ever-hungry poor of the city were unable to use: skulls, shells, cracked horns and the boiled-out husks of hooves. Knowing the Chinese capability for converting the tiniest scraps of waste into something that could be eaten or sold, Asher could only pity the rats trying to make a living off this.

  To his right the shore bent away, toward a bridge and another of the city’s canals. The ice on the lake wasn’t thick enough yet to take a man’s weight, and he scanned the black mass of wall and roofs at the top of the bank, searching for the entrance to another hutong. Judging by the filth heaped on the shore just here, it wouldn’t be far. Another rat made the reeds rattle close-by. He saw a third, and a fourth, dart across the open ice, the moonlight so strong that it made little blue shadows around their feet.

  Asher moved to the left to skirt the worst of the rubbish – moonlight catching on the lugubrious shapes of skulls and pelvic bones – but his boots broke through the ice. He staggered, the water freezing his feet even through the leather, and waded back the yard or so to the mud and reeds. When true winter came, of course, every child in the city would be out here, skating on the ice . . .

  Always provided things haven’t come to shooting by then between the President and the Kuo Min-tang.

  The wind that raked his cheeks slackened a little. He smelled it, clearly now despite the cold.

  At least one of them, under the bridge.

  He turned, to pick his way back along the shore.

  And stopped, his breath sticking in his throat. All that formless dark slope, from water’s edge to the wall at the top of the bank, moved with rats.

  Shock took his throat like a cold hand. He had never seen that many rats in his life. The silvery-dark scuttering among the reeds was literally like a carpet, alive with a foul, bubbling animation. When he turned they sat up, all of them. Eyes like a spiderweb dewed with flame.

  Oh, Jesus.

  Looking at him.

  The smell of the Others grew stronger behind him. In the moonlight it wasn’t easy to be sure, but he thought he saw something move along the lakeshore, a hundred yards from where he stood. There . . . Black, and man-high against the cold glimmer of the ice. Asher started to edge back, but the rats were moving, too, streaming down behind him. The thought of being swarmed brought nightmare panic.

  The thought of being wounded – of wounding the yao-kuei in a fight and getting enough of their blood into his own veins to turn him into one of them – brought the instant conviction: No. Not as long as there’s a bullet left. There really were worse things than death.

  He waded out into the lake, ice breaking before his legs and the water excruciating. Plowed his way back toward the mouth of Big Tiger Lane, which led south toward more populous streets. A yao-kuei came down the slope toward him at a shambling run, from another hutong somewhere ahead along the wall in the dark. Asher backed further into the water, almost to his waist. Debris underfoot slithered and rocked, and he cut at the first of the rats with his halberd, struggling to keep his balance.

  The next moment the yao-kuei flung itself at him, floundering in the water, clawed hands grabbing, fanged mouth gaping to gouge. Asher had sufficient experience with quarterstaff and single-stick to know how to leverage the halberd blade to deadly effect, and his first blow took the thing’s head three-quarters off . . . but only three-quarters. Head dangling by a flap of flesh, arteries fountaining blood, the yao-kuei staggered, threshing its clawed hands to find its prey. Asher stepped in as close as he dared and severed the hamstrings of both legs, then turned and stumbled through the water, scanning the banks.

  He was in luck. Something – a dog pack, he thought, though in moonlight and the black shadows of the bank it was impossible to tell – had scented the enormous multitude of rats on the bank and charged in for a hunt. Asher had an impression of scuttling black forms, of red eyes sparking as the smaller animals fled. He pulled the slide from his lantern, hurled the tin light into the thick of the rats that swarmed between him and the dark rectangle that he hoped and prayed was the opening to Big Tiger Lane. Everything on the bank was wet with slush, but the scant oil in the lantern’s reservoir flared up as it hit the ground. The rats scurried from the flame, and Asher ran upslope as he’d never run before.

  From the corner of his eye he glimpsed two yao-kuei running up the bank far behind him, moving as if coordinated by some unheard communication. His mind logged the phenomenon even as he threw himself into the indigo chasm of the alleyway, as he fled, stumbling, one hand on its wall to guide him.

  He didn’t stop running till he reached the back gates of the Forbidden City; skirted its massive walls, taller than the average London house, clear around, to pass it on the eastern side rather than go anywhere near the walls of the Palace Lakes to the west. The Palace Lakes connected with the ‘Seas’, as did the Forbidden City’s moats and the canal that flowed a little further east. Soaked to the waist, shivering and numb, Asher finally hailed a rickshaw near the new University, but he flinch
ed every time they passed over another canal.

  At this hour the streets were empty. He thought of Lydia, safe among lace-trimmed pillows in the Wagons-Lits Hotel, and wondered if she were being watched.

  Probably. By the Tso Family or those who might work for them – who might or might not be riding Grant Hobart like a horse on a curb bit. Or by the Legation police, who wanted nothing more than to do their duty and slap a suspected traitor in a cell where some employee of the Tso would have a good chance to get at him . . .

  Asher rubbed his frozen fingers and wondered how long his hideout in Pig-Dragon Lane would be safe.

  And whether Karlebach would stay out of trouble until it was safe to get word to him.

  And if Lydia was safe.

  And what had happened to Ysidro . . .

  It was three days before Lydia realized that Ysidro was missing.

  On Sunday – the day after Lydia received Mizukami’s packet of further police reports – the Count himself called at the Wagons-Lits Hotel, to extend to her whatever help he was capable of giving and, a little to her surprise, to offer to arrange her journey home.

  ‘Thank you.’ She leaned across the hearth of the blue-curtained private parlor off the hotel’s lobby, pressed the Colonel’s white-gloved hand. ‘I feel that I can be of some use here. The task Jamie set out to accomplish is unfinished.’ Her eyes met Mizukami’s – slightly blurred even at a distance of two feet. She put back the veils of her hat, an elegant confection of sable tulle and plumes, to see him more clearly. ‘And it is something which cannot be walked away from.’

  ‘I honor you for wishing to continue it, Madame. You are willing, then, to go on as you have begun with the reports? For I begin to suspect that these tenma – these creatures – may indeed be in Peking as well.’

  ‘I am, thank you,’ said Lydia. ‘Though it’s rather difficult to pick out patterns in a foreign country, a world not my own. Could you – would you . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Is it possible that it is within your powers to get me access to banking records as well?’