Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  She looked around for the guide, who was helping Ogata hold the frantic ponies.

  ‘Count Mizukami, would you ask Mr Liao if he’s up to guiding us to the remaining mine-entrances that he knows about? I realize it’s a horrid thing to have to do.’

  ‘No, honored Madame,’ the Count replied quietly, ‘it is not horrid. At least, no more horrid, as you say, than war. And this is war: something for which, in times past, women in my country have been as trained and ready as men.’

  He stood back as Lydia went over to kneel beside Karlebach. ‘Are you feeling better, sir?’ she asked softly. ‘I think you should go back with Takahashi-san to the village.’

  ‘No.’ He waved weakly, groped for his shotgun. ‘No, the more of us who know the land – who know the places where explosives and gas must be placed – the better. Anything could happen to any of us . . . The old legends, the old accounts, said they could call rats to their bidding. In the catacombs beneath Prague Castle, in the wells and tunnels and chambers that all connect . . . Matthias was sometimes turned back by the rats. But never like this . . .’

  Never that you knew about. Lydia looked back up at the mine entrance. Or was that one of the things the Master of Prague told you that you thought he was lying about?

  From here she could see, in the shadows of the outer cave, hundreds of rats still darting around the crushed and battered corpses of their comrades. The cold breath that seeped from underground brought her their sweetish, frowsty stink. One of them, running back up the icy slope nearby her, made her almost jump out of her skin.

  She realized she herself was trembling, with shock and cold that seemed to penetrate to her marrow.

  Mizukami held out to her the brandy flask. ‘Now at least,’ he said softly, ‘we have a good reason – a logical reason – for ordering hundreds of cylinders of chlorine and as much explosive as it will take to cave in the mine. Moreover, you know and I know now what it is that President Yuan seeks to control, if he can achieve command over these devils. Yabe—?’

  The young soldier – who looked younger than most of Jamie’s students, thought Lydia – was almost green with shock, but he stood stiffly to listen to his Colonel’s instructions.

  ‘Hai.’ The young man saluted and helped his bleeding and half-conscious comrade on to one of the ponies. Chinese ponies being what they were, he led it down the trail toward the village, rather than risk riding. Karlebach got to his feet like a man half-stunned, looked around him for his lantern; it lay on its side just within the entrance to the cave.

  Bracing herself with loathing, Lydia climbed back up the half-dozen yards that separated her from the gaping darkness in the hillside. The sound of rats squeaking and scuttering in the cave raised the hair on her nape. Chlorine gas, she thought. Seal the mine, detonate the containers . . . It would eat away most living tissue.

  She bent quickly, picked up the lantern, straightened.

  And, like a breath, a thought passed through her mind.

  A whisper that seemed to come from the darkness; not physical sound, but something deeper, as if someone had breathed her name.

  Only, it wasn’t her name.

  A single word passed through the back of her mind, leaving her shocked and cold and aghast and filled with horror.

  Mistress . . .

  And then was gone.

  NINETEEN

  Despite brutal cold and a cutting wind that kept everyone on Peking’s dark streets wrapped in as many scarves as they could obtain, Asher felt as exposed as he would have had he been wandering the Tatar city in tweeds and a homburg. Even in the early-falling autumn twilight he kept instinctively to the smaller hutongs, avoided crowds and the lights of shops. There were Han Chinese six feet tall, especially from the north; with his hands gloved in cut-out rags and the lower half of his face swathed, he was no more conspicuous than any other passer-by in a faded, quilted ch’i-p’ao and padded trousers tucked into felt-soled boots.

  But, years ago, Don Simon Ysidro had said to him, We usually have warning of their suspicions, when the talk had turned to the friends, lovers, and bereaved families of the vampires’ victims who might guess how their loved one had died. Most of us have good memories for faces, for names, and for details . . .

  Even locked in the irresistible sleep of the daylight hours, the vampire was not truly unconscious.

  Asher knew he’d have only one chance to get a look at the outer walls, to identify the various doors and gates, of the Tso compound. On a second pass, even in daylight, one who slept within might well turn in his sleep and think: I have heard that unfamiliar stride before, smelled that flesh.

  He was fairly sure, now, what was in the Tso house and why the family had risen so swiftly to such power.

  And felt like the world’s supreme idiot, for not having thought of it before.

  That is our strength, Ysidro had said to him once. That no one believes, and not believing, lets us be.

  Yet at the moment he walked the streets of a city in which ninety-nine men of a hundred believed in the Undead and would be perfectly ready to hunt them and kill them . . .

  Or use them for their own ends.

  Or be used by them, for mutual benefit.

  So you have become their servant? Karlebach had asked him, a year and a half ago. His day man – like the shabbas goy my granddaughter employs to light the fires in the stoves here on the Seventh Day . . .

  They kill those who serve them . . . he had said.

  And Asher thought now: But what if they didn’t?

  What if they employed, not one ‘day man’, but – as Father Orsino had said – an entire extended family of them: grandfathers, uncles, daughters, cousins? What if they helped and enriched and protected that family, in exchange for protection during the daytimes . . . and a steady supply of weak or confused or very young victims? They rule the world, Father Orsino had said . . . The spirit hidden in the cellar, the secret at the heart of the family, the ruler of the enclave – the Magistrate of Hell.

  The thought was monstrous, but not nearly as monstrous as machine guns or phosgene gas or the staggering, horrifying stupidity of generals who remained convinced that an army’s ‘will to fight’ and ‘patriotic spirit’ was going to carry a bayonet charge against a line of Vickers guns.

  He turned off the Te Ching Men Street, worked his way eastward past the Catholic University, glancing now and then at the hand-drawn map Ling and her brothers had worked up for him. A line of camels passed him, laden with coal; a rickshaw bearing two daintily-bediziened prostitutes nearly ran him down. This whole district was the domain of the Tso family. From the Tatar city’s western wall almost to the old granaries on the east side, rickshaw-pullers worked for them, hawkers of hot soup and fried watermelon seeds rented their pitches on the street corners from them, small shopkeepers paid them for ‘protection’, gambling parlors gave them ‘squeeze’. Everyone passed them information. Everyone wanted to be on their good side. It was a situation far from exclusive to China or Peking.

  He counted turnings, looked for landmarks. In the cold twilight the narrow gray-walled hutongs seemed all very much the same to a foreign eye. But there he noted the shape of a gate with green-and-gold pillars instead of the more common red. At that intersection was an enormous, gaudy banner announcing THE EMPRESS’S GARDEN beside the gate of an eating house, tiers of open galleries around a central paradise. (And what do the local Republicans make of THAT?) Here was a hutong that made ten turns inside of two hundred feet and another that ran straight as a railway line for nearly that distance, and Asher’s mind, trained to detail, logged these individual minutiae as he would have noted exits from a house in which he planned to meet an enemy.

  He’d heard vampires speak of their fellow Undead who grew timid, shrinking in on themselves: afraid to leave their houses, afraid to go beyond what was familiar. Afraid lest some accident somehow trap them out of doors, in the burning horror of the rising sun. Sometimes they’d get their vampire compatriots to
hunt for them, to bring them prey . . . But on the whole, Ysidro had told him more than once, genuine friendship among vampires was rare.

  But the living they could use: through illusion, through dreams, through fear.

  Even through loyalty, as Ysidro had used him.

  The siheyuan of the Tso spread over thousands of square feet, on the little peninsula between the two north-westerly lakes. Roofs rose above the gray walls like dark masses of cloud in the twilight. Asher noted those where weeds had sprouted in the mud that held the tiles. Gates and doorways, some flanked with brightly-painted pillars, or fanciful beasts: lions, dragons, birds. He saw where paint had not been refreshed, where hinges bore rust and the accumulated gray-yellow dust of many winters. There were compounds in Peking where the courtyards, like the one he currently occupied, went uninhabited for decades; where weasels and foxes, geckos and stray cats and even yang kwei tse spies might dwell in perfect safety. The Tso walls backed on to the long northern arm of the Sea, across from a pleasure ground of ancestral temples and fancy tea-houses; looking back along the wide verges of ice-rimmed water toward the bridge, Asher shivered at the recollection of how nearly he had been himself surrounded the night before last.

  Their families worship them, Father Orsino had said. They are gods . . .

  But a moment later he had said, They trust no one. It is hundreds of years since one of them created a vampire. They fear even their children.

  So what was the truth?

  He turned back along the hutongs away from the water. In the lane that everyone called Prosperity Alley he was nearly crushed against the wall by a very long black Mercedes car, driven along the rutted way with little more than a foot of clearance on either side. Through its rear windows he glimpsed the woman he’d seen at Eddington’s, and sure enough, the car halted outside the main gate of the Tso compound – the gilding and red-lacquered latticework of which would have done credit to a palace – and the Presidential attaché Huang Da-feng climbed out.

  Half-hidden by the turn of the lane, Asher watched as Huang bowed and handed the lady out. Like many of the President’s staff, Huang favored a European suit beneath his well-cut camel-hair British overcoat, but Madame Tso was all Chinese in her dress, the bulky, square-cut ch’i-p’ao of blue silk delicately embroidered, her coal-black hair oiled and smoothed close to her head and looped up into an ebony roll decorated with fresh gardenia blossoms that made expensive mock of the frozen season. Asher placed her at about his own age – forty-seven – with the round face and slight air of creamy stoutness that would cause a Chinese to liken her beauty to the sky with stars. She tottered elegantly on her bound feet, each of her blue silk shoes – the length of a schoolboy’s finger – wrought of enough pearls and gold wire to purchase a farm.

  So you have become their servant . . .?

  He wondered how they had met, and what she had offered him – this vampire, whoever he was – that had convinced him to become the god of her family. Ysidro had told him that few vampires cared anything about their own families, once they themselves were vampire. For most, all that existed was the hunt.

  Was it just that this woman knew a way to make the hunt easier or more entertaining?

  Or had the vampire, whoever he was, simply been drawn to her? As Ysidro, deny it though he would, was drawn to Lydia – a friendship that filled Asher with foreboding. It was not jealousy, nor yet fear for his wife’s immortal soul: Lydia was mildly disinclined to believe in anything she couldn’t locate in the dissecting rooms, and she would have greeted the idea that she might one day run away with the vampire with a whoop of laughter and a question about the sleeping arrangements.

  Yet he feared for her, nevertheless.

  The porters shut the gate, leaving the black Mercedes to block the lane. Its driver glared at Asher as he squeezed past it, with an expression that implied he would murder him should his buttons scratch the lacquer of its doors.

  What am I doing back at the Temple?

  Lydia looked around the cluttered, shabby courtyard, aware that she was dreaming but puzzled: why am I dreaming about the Temple of Everlasting Harmony instead of about rats?

  They had returned to Peking shortly after full darkness. Exhausted and trembling, Lydia had insisted on accompanying Takahashi to the clinic at Peita University, to have his horrible injuries treated and to begin the long and painful course of treatment for rabies. Throughout the endless winter afternoon, as she, Mizukami, Karlebach and the remaining two warriors had followed Liao Ho through the rough terrain of the hills, again and again she found she had to force her mind aside from what had happened at the mine. She had made notes, matched probable tunnels on the map with the subsidiary entrances Liao showed them. Climbed old trails down which the coal had once been carried in baskets, now overgrown with laurel and weeds, while Private Nishiharu and Ogata the Bodyguard had scanned the horizon with their rifles.

  At every entrance – some of them mere holes in the hillside, save for the slag heaps around them – she had gone as close as she dared and listened. Because Karlebach was there, she could not speak, could not call down into that darkness. But each time they’d climbed up toward those inky pits, those long-overgrown piles of dirt and stone, frantic fear had clutched at her, frantic horror.

  Simon . . .

  They had covered something like twelve miles on foot and horseback, and Lydia was certain they’d have to go back to locate the rest of the entrances. At no point had a second whisper passed through her mind, nor any indication that the first had been anything more than illusion. And all the while the underbrush in the gullies, the withered brown grass on the deforested hill-slopes, had rustled with the constant, restless, horrible movement of rats.

  Stricken with guilt over her fraudulent mourning, upon her return to the hotel she had consented to have supper with Karlebach, to make sure that the old man was all right. But she had barely listened to his tales of the iniquities of the vampires of Prague over the centuries of his research, had been unable to touch more than a spoonful of her food.

  Only Miranda cheered her. Only in the hour she’d spent holding her daughter against her and reading aloud – watching the still-wordless thoughts chase each other through those lovely brown eyes – did she feel at rest.

  But falling into bed, sick with weariness and shock, she had been positive she was going to dream about rats.

  Or, worse, about that single, dying whisper in the back of her mind: Mistress . . .

  Yet here she was in the courtyard of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony, listening to the muffled yammer of voices from Silk Lane and the soft brisk tap of passing donkey-hooves on the dirt lane outside its gate.

  It was cold, and she was glad of her coat. (Thank goodness it’s the pink merino with the chinchilla collar! But I thought I left that back in Oxford, and in any case I shouldn’t be wearing pink with black . . .) The stone kongs where goldfish had swum only last week were frozen. The wind that had whipped and wailed over the hills all day sobbed around the temple’s upturned eaves and filled the air with the smell of dust.

  From the dark of the temple, eyes gleamed like a line of terrible dragons: the ten Magistrates of Hell, surrounded by the writhing damned. Movement in the shadow – a pale flicker near the back of the long hall, where a door opened into a narrow garden. Lydia advanced a step to the threshold, her every instinct telling her: Don’t . . .

  But not afraid.

  ‘Simon?’

  Not a sound from within, save the moan of wind in the rafters. It was all exactly as she recalled it from her excursion with Paola and the Baroness, down to the yellow dog, curled up asleep in the corner by the God of War’s altar, and the tattered banners of cut paper that swayed and groped like spirit hands overhead. Lydia walked forward over the worn flagstones, caught the heel of her shoe in a crack – drat it, I really do need a lantern . . .

  And, as she often was able to do in dreams, told herself: there’s one over by the altar of that Fifth Magistrate,
the one in charge of the people-chopper-upper machine . . .

  And so there was. And a box of matches on the corner of the altar.

  She lit the wick, closed the glass slide, achingly grateful for the warmth of the small flame on her frozen fingers . . .

  Turned back to the dark of the temple, raising the lantern high.

  But there was nothing there. No one, where she had been ready to swear that someone had stood, just moments before, just to the right of the God of War’s altar, in the moving seaweed shadows of the hanging scrolls. Someone thin and old, who had watched her patiently. Who had known her name.

  There was no one there now. Determined not to let the dream go, Lydia proceeded to search the Temple with her lantern, probing every dark corner and startling spiders and crickets.

  She found nothing. The Temple of Everlasting Harmony was as empty as Ysidro’s brass-bound trunk had been, in the rented safety of the bank vault next door.

  TWENTY

  As the following day – Friday – required the presence of the Japanese military attaché at one of the regular meetings of the Legations Council, Lydia had accepted an invitation for coffee and elevenses with the Baroness. For all her overbearing ways (she was widely rumored to beat her servants with a riding whip), the Baroness Drosdrova was capable of both kindness and sensitivity, so the only other company that morning was Paola Giannini. Lydia had had a headache planned, should she have walked into the Russian Minister’s conservatory and found Madame Schrenk there.

  There was a good deal of talk of opera, over an assortment of too-sweet jelly-cakes and rubbery blini. Madame Drosdrova had newspapers sent to her from every European capital and could chatter knowledgeably of what was on at La Scala and the Paris Opera. And there was a good deal more said about the Eddington murder, which would be arraigned the following week.

  ‘Has nothing further been discovered?’ asked Paola. ‘Poor Sir Grant must be distracted!’

  ‘Poor Sir Grant my foot.’ Madame dusted powdered sugar from her fingers. ‘I hear he goes in and shouts at Sir John and tears his hair and weeps, yet it doesn’t seem to have stopped his visits to that house of accommodation he goes to, in the native city.’