Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Nothing simpler.’ He took a small tablet from the pocket of his plain blue uniform jacket and made a note to himself. ‘You understand that the Chinese – particularly the more traditional families – use a different system . . .?’

  ‘This would be Western banks,’ said Lydia. ‘The Franco-Chinois, the Hong Kong Specie Bank, the Indochine . . .’

  ‘It will be my pleasure, Dr Asher.’

  She was aware that something she’d said had sparked his curiosity. His head tilted a little, and she felt, though she could not see his expression clearly, that behind his own thick lenses he was studying her face.

  Crossing the lobby to return to her suite, she was accosted by the most persistent of her would-be suitors, Mr Edmund Woodreave: tallish, stooped, pot-bellied and wearing a coat which had seen better days. ‘Mrs Asher,’ he said, striding so quickly to cut her off from the stairs that she would have had to break into a run to avoid him, ‘I beg of you to give me the opportunity to express to you how sorry I am . . .’

  ‘Please . . .’ She made one of her Aunt Lavinnia’s best I’m-going-to-faint gestures.

  ‘Of course.’ Woodreave took her hand. ‘I quite understand. I only mean to tell you how deeply I appreciate the position in which you find yourself now, and to place myself entirely at your service.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lydia, in her most frail and failing accents. ‘If you will—’

  He tightened his eager grip. ‘I hope you know that you can call upon me, at any time, for any service whatsoever. I know we’re not well acquainted, but I know also how difficult it is to be suddenly left on your own—’

  ‘I’m quite—’

  ‘—and any service that I can render you, at any hour of the day or night, you have only to send a note round to my lodgings at the Legation . . .’

  Only the rigor of Lydia’s instruction by her Nanna, four aunts, and a stepmother prior to being brought ‘out’ in London Society, that she could not, must not, ever ever scream at anyone: Would you go away and let me alone? no matter how much they deserved it – and the knowledge that to do so now might announce to someone that she was not truly a widow and that Jamie was hiding somewhere – kept her silent for the next thirty minutes while Mr Woodreave explained to her how terrible it was to be a widow and how much he would like to help her.

  Returning to her suite, she then had to deal with a stream of callers who arrived to pay their respects. Madame Hautecoeur and the Baroness turned up first – indeed, it was the Baroness who finally drove Mr Woodreave from the lobby – and presided over the tea table, bearing the brunt of the conversational duties while Paola Giannini stayed, loyal and blessedly silent, at Lydia’s side. Lydia felt sick with dread that Lady Eddington would appear. Much of the talk, in fact, was of that bereaved lady, who was preparing for the terrible task of accompanying her murdered daughter’s body home to England on the Princess Imperial. The women who came to comfort Lydia in her supposed grief spoke with genuine sorrow of Holly, and for the most part she hadn’t the courage to even open her mouth.

  She finally pleaded a headache, and for the remainder of the day she stayed in her room, reading stories to Miranda and tallying police reports . . .

  And scanning through banking records that were delivered at supper time, for any of a dozen names she had encountered in previous research.

  On the following day she found one.

  Esteban Sierra of Rome (does he REALLY have a house in Rome?) had made arrangements not only to open a substantial account in the Banque Franco-Chinoise, but also to rent a storage room in its underground vault. For ‘antiquities and objets d’art’ said the application, in that strong, vertical handwriting with its odd loops and flourishes. Current contents: a single large trunk.

  Don Simon had told Jamie once that vampires knew when the living were on their trail. People who lingered once too often on the sidewalk opposite a suspect house. Faces seen in neighborhoods where the vampires, with their hyper-acute awareness of human features, knew every face. By showing even an interest in the underground bank-vault, the ‘antiquities and objets d’art’, Lydia was aware she had committed the paramount sin of bringing ‘Esteban Sierra’ to the attention of anyone. She – and Jamie – had only lived this long because Ysidro understood that they knew the rules.

  She left the curtains of her window half-open, half-closed yet again, as she had last night and the night before.

  In the morning she sent Count Mizukami a note.

  The Count was the soul of discretion. He had watched events in China long enough – and had sufficient familiarity with its current ‘acting’ President – to understand the danger of a single wrong word, the smallest misplaced whisper, flying to official ears. He accepted without question Lydia’s word that nothing must be spoken of her visit to the bank vault. He must acquire permission, and the keys, but only Lydia would be permitted to enter.

  The aplomb with which he made these arrangements – with which he could make such arrangements – caused Lydia to wonder a good deal about the contents, and renters, of the bank’s other strongrooms.

  Just before closing time on Wednesday, the sixth of November, Mizukami and Ellen conducted Lydia two doors down the street to the bank, and a clerk escorted them as far as the stairs. Her veils over her face, the rustle of her black silk skirts like the scraping of silver files in the stillness of the underground hallway, Lydia made her way by the bright electric glare to the vault door marked 12. The clerk had explained the procedure for opening it, and she guessed she would be very politely searched by a female bank employee the moment she emerged. She was aware of her heart pounding: he would be furious, she knew, when he learned that she had violated the secrecy with which he surrounded himself.

  It might lose her his friendship: that queer, shining shadow that shouldn’t exist but did. If he heard her – felt her – through his dreams, he would be cursing her now.

  But he might be in danger.

  When last they had spoken, she had seen the fear in his eyes.

  As the application said, there was only one thing in the vault: a huge tan leather travel-trunk with brass corners, easily large enough to hold the body of a man. He’s keeping his clothing and books somewhere else . . .

  It was like him, she thought as the door shut behind her, to rent a bank vault next door to their hotel.

  From her handbag she took her silvery spectacle-case, lifted her veils aside and donned her glasses.

  The trunk was closed. She knew it could be locked from the inside. The outer locks were just for show. It was daylight outside, though not a ray of it penetrated to this room. He would be asleep. With the door closed the silence was like a weight, pressing in on her eardrums. She’d asked him once how much vampires were aware of, during their daytime sleep, and he had only said, ‘The dreams of vampires are not like the dreams of men.’

  Forgive me . . .

  She took a deep breath, put her hands on the trunk’s lid, and pushed.

  It opened with soundless ease.

  The trunk was empty.

  SIXTEEN

  The ruined chapel, Ysidro had said, near the old French cemetery.

  The rickshaw-puller knew the place. Asher left the man by the steps of the new Cathedral, with instructions (and an extra fifteen cents) to wait for him there. The district had been hammered mercilessly by Boxer cannon, so many of the buildings hereabouts were new and built in the Western style. The chapel ruins looked as if they’d been shuttered up for years.

  The moon was dwindling, and at this hour few lamps remained in any of the shops along Shun Chih Men Street. Once dark fell on Peking, the blackness in the huntongs had to be experienced to be believed. The feeble glimmer of his tin dark-lantern barely showed Asher the other side of the alleyways as he made his way on foot toward the chapel. He understood that he was taking his life in his hands, but his life had been, in a sense, a mosquito sitting on the arm of Fate ever since he’d come to China.

  On the ch
apel steps, he paused and put around his neck the silver crucifix he’d purchased early in his association with vampires. He had quickly learned that the holy symbol was only as good as its silver content, at least as far as protection was concerned, but under his collar and scarf he wore the silver chains that never left him. On this occasion the crucifix served another purpose.

  He took also from his pocket the little tin box that Karlebach had given him on their arrival in China: crushed, slightly gummy herbs, the bitterness of which was accompanied by a quickening of his heartbeat and a heightened clarity of mind. Vampires hunted by sleepiness and inattention. Even a half-second could make a difference.

  Inside, the building was littered with debris. Everything wooden had long since been carried off by the neighbors for fuel. Fury at Western missionaries had left only a single statue of the Virgin still standing, in a niche to the east of the main altar. Raising his lantern Asher saw that her face had been blackened, her nose chipped off, her eyes gouged out. Someone had recently repaired them with new plaster, carefully painted. Her lips still smiled.

  He took a candle from his pocket and lit it at the lantern’s flame. This he set on the altar; then he knelt, hands folded. ‘In nomine patrii, et filii, et spiritu sanctii, amen. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum . . .’

  His father would be turning in his grave.

  But then the old man would be used to the exercise by that time.

  And if Father Orsino Espiritu was listening, the Latin prayer – and the unspoken lie that the supplicant was Catholic – might just save his life.

  A Jesuit, Ysidro had said.

  When the Order came to China in the sixteenth century every country in Europe had been broken on the rack of religious war. To accomplish their conversions in the East, the Jesuits had clothed Catholicism in the trappings of Buddhism, learned the language – almost the only Westerners to do so – and dressed themselves in the robes of Buddhist monks. Later, when the greed of Western merchants had sought to tap China’s riches, they – and the men and women they had converted – were seen as traitors, lackeys of the West.

  He has been hiding for most of the past three centuries . . . Ysidro had said of Father Orsino. ‘I hear their voices speaking in my mind . . .’

  Asher whispered the Latin of every prayer he could remember, aware that any vampire entering the ruins would be able to hear the pounding of his heart.

  Of course the vampires of Peking would watch a Jesuit. So what would they make of the appearance of a second Spanish vampire, save that they were in league? Was that why Ysidro had not been in contact with him since he’d taken refuge in the Chinese City, a week ago now? What would they make of a living man, in the Chinese garb that the Jesuits assumed, whispering Latin prayers in the darkness?

  ‘At te levavi animam meam: Deus meus, in te confido . . .’ In you I will place my trust . . .

  Gray sleepiness crushed down on his mind, stealthy and overwhelming. He thrust himself away from the altar rail in the instant before a clawed hand seized his throat. The hand jerked back, and he heard a curse in antique Spanish; ducked, turned his body as a blow brushed his face. ‘Padre Orsino!’

  In the candle’s light he glimpsed the thin white face, the reflective glimmer of eyes. A hand seized his arm and hurled him out on to the stone floor of the nave with an impact that knocked the breath from his body. The vampire pinned him, caught his wrists and again pulled back with a hissing scream of pain and rage. Asher rolled, scrambled clear and shouted, ‘In nomine Patrii, Orsino! I’m here from Ysidro!’

  The words weren’t out of his mouth as the vampire slammed him against the ruined altar-rail, clawed hands gripping his shoulders with brutal power.

  But Asher felt him hesitate, and he said into that moment’s stillness, ‘Simon Ysidro sent me.’ He spoke Latin. At a guess, Padre Orsino wouldn’t understand modern Spanish.

  The vampire tilted his head. Regarded him with eyes that were, in the candlelight, dark as coffee and had clearly not been sane in centuries. Straddling his body, he held Asher without effort against the broken railing and the floor. When he pressed a clawed hand to the side of Asher’s face, it was warm. His clothing smelled of blood.

  ‘You are his servant?’

  ‘I am. I am called Asher.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I came to see if you knew that. I have heard nothing of him for seven days.’

  ‘He is vanished.’ Father Orsino rose. He stood over Asher’s body, a small man whose hair, like his eyes, seemed very dark in the dense gloom of the chapel against the pallor of his skin. He wore the long Manchu ch’i-p’ao and ku trousers, but his hair was sleeked back into a bun on the back of his head, after the fashion of the Chinese before the conquest by the Manchus. ‘Come,’ he said. He glanced around him, held down his hand to pull Asher to his feet – Asher guessed by the pain in his side that the vampire’s violence had cracked a rib or two. ‘They cannot hear us, beneath the earth,’ Orsino whispered conspiratorially. ‘They cannot listen – cannot find me.’

  He took Asher by the elbow, picked up the lantern and led the way past the main altar to a broken doorway and the ruin of a vestry. Most of its roof and part of a wall was gone, but there was no sign of rats or other vermin. Another doorway opened on to a stairway down to the crypt, two full turns down into a Stygian abyss that smelled of mold. A new door had been installed at the bottom. There were bolts on its inner side, a hasp with a padlock. The stone vaulting of the crypt beyond barely cleared the top of Asher’s head, and by the lantern’s feeble glimmer he made out piles of dug-up earth, and straw baskets for moving it, among the fat wooden pillars.

  Presumably Father Orsino was in the process of making a more secure lair for himself deeper down. Asher wondered where he planned to dispose of the dug-out dirt.

  The vampire shot the bolts and turned to face Asher. Though Ysidro was too wary to risk a kill anywhere in the city, Asher knew that the weight of the earth blocked vampire perceptions. Father Orsino might consider it safe.

  ‘Don Simon told me that I could find you here,’ he said, to remind his host – in case it had slipped whatever was left of his mind – that he, Asher, was supposedly a good Catholic and working for the Pope.

  ‘He said you could take me back to Rome.’ Orsino set the lantern on a corner of the huge old chest that lay, half-hidden, by the low pillars at the nearer end of the crypt, and he folded his heavy, thick-fingered hands. ‘He said His Holiness would forgive me my sins, because I have in all these years killed only the damned. God save me . . .’

  ‘I know nothing of what His Holiness said to Ysidro. It is only my task to serve him.’

  ‘What, none of you know?’ The hushed voice had a twisted shrillness to it, the gleaming eyes narrowed. ‘Are you lying to me? Trying to trap me?’ Orsino seized Asher again by the shoulder of his coat, shoved him back against a pillar. ‘Is that what happened to Don Simon? That you betrayed—?’

  ‘I know nothing.’ Asher kept his own voice steady with an effort. ‘Truly. It’s why I must find him.’

  The Father’s lip lifted back from his fangs. ‘I find it hard to believe that none in your company knows the mandate of His Holiness.’

  ‘There is no company. Only myself and my master. Did Don Simon tell you otherwise?’

  Father Orsino passed a hand over his forehead, his brow suddenly tightening with confusion and pain. ‘They are gods,’ he said. ‘You cannot . . . A man cannot fight against gods.’ He blinked at Asher, dark eyes filled with terror. ‘I’ve done everything I can, but hundreds worship them, you see. Thousands. The living bow down to them in their pagan temples, bring them sacrifices. And they have, each of them, a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand prisoners, dead men, dead women, flesh burned off their bones but walking still. These they call up out of Hell . . .’

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘Every day.’ Orsino’s voice sank still further, hoarse with terror. �
�I sleep, and I see them, surrounded in flame with their flayed worshipers all burning around them.’

  Truth? Dream? Madness? A recollection of his days trying to convert the Chinese? ‘And they trust their worshipers?’

  ‘They are gods,’ the priest repeated. ‘Of course their worshipers must obey. Else they themselves will be dragged down to Hell by the bailiffs, Ox-Head and Horse-Face, down a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps to the gates of the First Hell, which is called Chin-kuang. The living must obey them because their ancestors are in Hell, where all unbelievers go. They dare not disobey. Their families will not allow it.’

  His face convulsed, and his grip tightened on Asher’s shoulder. ‘Did he send you to trap me? My father . . . and the Pope . . . The monster that first came to the hills was Catholic! Did the Pope send him? I heard him pray . . .’

  ‘The Pope has not betrayed you.’ Even cold with fright, Asher felt a queasy shiver of enlightenment. ‘The Devil speaks Latin as well as the Pope, Padre. It was the Devil who sent you a monster out of Hell, to try your spirit and your faith. His Holiness would never betray you.’

  Father Orsino released his hold, almost threw Asher from him. ‘What you say is true.’ His eyes were ravenous, riveted now to the shoulder of Asher’s ch’i-p’ao where hot blood soaked through the padded cloth.

  Get him thinking of something else quickly. ‘Do the vampires rule over their living families here? Is that what it is? That some of them are the ancestors that the family venerates?’

  ‘No. Yes.’ The vampire stammered as the words disrupted his attention. ‘I–I have never seen them. I don’t know. Not one. Ever, ever in all these long years . . .’

  ‘Not he who made you?’

  The question seemed to confuse Father Orsino, who shook his head. ‘They don’t make others like themselves any more,’ he said. ‘Nor do they suffer one another to make them. They trust no one, do you understand? Not their families, not one another.’