Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Surely, he wouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Ma chère,’ said the Baroness, ‘the innocence of your heart gives me the greatest admiration for your husband’s character . . . or his tact. Only yesterday, when one would think Sir Grant Hobart would have nothing on his thoughts but conferring with the Legation solicitor – though anyone who would trust that slick little piece of Hibernian canaille is simply asking for what he’ll get! – Hobart took a rickshaw out of the Quarter, all muffled up in a fur coat and scarves, as if everyone in the Quarter doesn’t know those frightful yellow shoes of his at sight . . . And didn’t return until the small hours of the morning, flaming drunk and shouting at the gate guards to let him in, Hans Erlich tells me. Is he still sending you notes, my dear?’ She turned her lorgnette in Lydia’s direction. ‘Considering everything the man has to feel guilt about . . . And what’s this, that nasty cat Hilda Schrenk was telling me about you going riding with Count Mizukami, of all people?’

  ‘And did Madame Schrenk think to mention that I was accompanied not only by the Count, but also by Professor Karlebach and about half a regiment of Japanese soldiers as chaperones? I didn’t think so.’ Lydia caught herself up, set down the thumb-sized fragment of rock-dry toast on which she’d been spreading and re-spreading caviar for the past five minutes, and added, with a little quaver in her voice, ‘I hope Madame Schrenk will never have the occasion to discover what it’s like to . . . to feel trapped, and closed-in, so that anything will be preferable to staying in the hotel.’

  She had heard her school friend Mary Teasborough say something of the kind, shortly after her brother had died, and hoped it would serve. But the memory of the rats in the mines, of the voice in her head whispering, Mistress, returned to her with such sudden force then that her hands shook and she pushed the toast-point aside. At least new widowhood excuses one from eating the productions of the Drosdrov cook . . .

  ‘Darling—’ Paola took her hand. ‘You know you could have called upon either one of us.’

  Lydia nodded, struggling to put that whisper from her mind. With what she hoped was a convincing-sounding catch to her voice, she murmured, ‘As Professor Karlebach has been employed by the University of Tokyo to continue the Oriental portion of . . . of Jamie’s work, he very kindly asked me to go along. I felt it was for the best . . .’

  ‘And so it is!’ The Baroness leaned across the table to grip her other hand. ‘Hilda Schrenk is a spiteful old cat, particularly since you turned down that imbecile Alois Blucher’s offer to go walking with you – he’s her cousin, you know, and frantically in need of an heiress to marry. And Mr Woodreave was saying to me only yesterday—’

  ‘If you speak of Edmund Woodreave to me,’ said Lydia, ‘I shall scream. But on the subject of taking the air – and I am much better today, thank you – I wondered if perhaps we might return to the Temple of Everlasting Harmony near Silk Lane this morning? I had a dream about it,’ she added as the Baroness opened her mouth to point out that the Temple of Heaven, with its nine terraces and its curious round structure, was greatly superior architecturally to some forgotten shrine lost in the middle of the hutongs.

  ‘What did you dream?’ asked Paola, but the Baroness interrupted her.

  ‘Dreams are nonsense. I’m forever searching the maids’ rooms to get rid of those idiotic horoscope charts and dream books they all pore over, as if there weren’t far more elevating literature in the world. I try to educate them, but the stubbornness of the Lower Orders is quite astonishing.’

  Nevertheless, she rang the bell, ordered the servant to send for the rickshaw-pullers, and for Menchikov and Korsikov, and proceeded to take charge of the expedition.

  Lydia wasn’t certain what she hoped or expected to encounter at the Temple, but through the morning her anxiety had grown, both for Don Simon and for Asher. She wasn’t a fanciful woman, but she was, in her own way, an imaginative one. It wasn’t difficult to picture a situation in which Ysidro could have become trapped in the Shi’h Liu mine, where the weight of the earth would prevent him from making any kind of clear contact – as she knew he could – in her dreams.

  And though she knew that he could not be other than what he was, she’d seen the effects of chlorine gas on human tissue. The thought of him being still in the mines when hundreds of liters of chlorine were dumped down to form gas there, and the mine sealed, was a hideous one. It took no fancy or imagination to nauseate her with dread, and to send her to a place where she was fairly certain she wouldn’t have dreamed about – much less twice! – on her own.

  But when they reached the Temple, all things were very much as she had seen them in her dream, except that now the hall was filled with gray, prosaic daylight, and there was not the slightest trace of anyone untoward there. Only a fat, middle-aged priest, vainly sweeping at last night’s dust on the floor, and the yellow dog scratching for fleas by the War-God’s altar. For the sum of ten cents, Lydia was conducted over the entire building, including the back garden – choked with pigeon coops – and the cellar and sub-cellar, which seemed to be filled with broken birdcages, sacks of potatoes, anonymous crates, torn oceans of tattered banners, and the remains of a set of faded puppets.

  She thanked the priest, tipped him, and took her departure – the Baroness discoursing at the top of her lungs on the subject of rafters, doweling, and the history of tile roofs in China – with the deep sense that she’d missed something. That she’d looked right at it – whatever it was – and had failed to notice it. As she crossed the courtyard to the gate she glanced back, but saw only, in the shadows of the Temple, the line of grimacing devils that were the Magistrates of Hell. Ancient local gods, dead warriors of forgotten dynasties, personified variations of Buddhist saints, trampling on the bodies of the meticulously catalogued sinners.

  Employees in the service of the King of the Damned.

  And they probably had to take Civil Service Examinations to get the post.

  At the hotel, a note awaited her at the front desk from Count Mizukami. Takahashi-san was resting more easily, the note said. He had had to have four fingers amputated, but retained the sight in one eye. He would be returning to Japan as soon as the course of rabies treatment was complete. Please do not take blame upon yourself, for the expedition in the course of which this terrible thing came to pass, the Count wrote.

  How did he know? she wondered as she sank into the chair by the fireplace in her suite.

  As I said yesterday, this is war, and in war men sustain such injuries and far worse. It is a soldier’s duty and his honor to bear them, as one day it will be mine. I have written to the proper authorities to report swarms of rabid and aggressive rats in the mine, and have made arrangements for the shipment of 1,000 liters of chlorine. Within days I believe I shall receive authorization to use explosives to seal the mine.

  On Monday I return to the Western Hills to complete reconnaissance of the mine entrances. You and Professor Karlebach are most welcome to accompany me, should you choose to do so. Yet, do not feel obligated, should you wish to spare yourselves – and particularly the good Professor – the hardships, exhaustion, and shocks of yesterday. Believe that the interests of the human race are in good hands.

  Sincerely,

  Mizukami

  When Karlebach – clearly the worse for the hardships, exhaustion, and shocks of yesterday – read the letter a few hours later, he only sighed deeply and nodded. ‘I will go, of course.’

  Lydia wondered how much of this resolve was undertaken to keep an eye on Mizukami. The old scholar had – Ellen had reported – spent much of the day in his bed: she had gone to his room three or four times, to make sure he was well. Now, resplendent in a stunningly outdated blue tailcoat and a tie which could only have been described as antediluvian, he looked a little better than he had last night, but there was a gray haggardness to his skin that Lydia didn’t like.

  She put her hand on his arm, said gently, ‘It isn’t him any more, you know. If he . . . If your friend . .
. is still alive at all. That is . . . Do they die?’ She had changed for dinner, into yet another lugubrious costume that she felt wasn’t helping the old man’s mood any. ‘If they aren’t killed by Mr Liao’s dogs, I mean, or beheaded by poor Ito-san. Do they just . . . die?’

  ‘I think so. Eventually.’ He rubbed his gloved hand over his face. ‘Else they would have spread beyond Prague ere this. And believe me, Madame, since first I learned of their existence, I have watched the newspapers and every account and traveler’s tale that circulates Europe. And I know,’ he went on, ‘that Matthias – if his body still lives – would not recognize me. And that all these things I have brought –’ he patted his pockets, where he usually kept his little phials of herbal decoctions – ‘would not bring him back.’

  No, reflected Lydia sadly. But you carried them to the mines yesterday all the same.

  And it was for him that you were looking, hoping against hope . . .

  And last night you had nightmares that when the chlorine gas is released into the sealed mine, it is the Matthias Uray that you knew – your ruffianly knight, your substitute son – who will choke his life out, and not some mindless Other who wears his flesh.

  As even in waking I have nightmares about Simon.

  They descended to the lobby, Lydia veiled and clinging to the old man’s arm. As usual with the approach of the dinner hour, the handsome room, with its wood paneling, its Wilton carpets and the curlicued majesty of its Venetian chandeliers, buzzed softly with the conversations not only of the hotel’s guests, but also of the various ministers, attachés, senior clerks and translators of the Legations who sought the talents of its chef and the clubby, friendly atmosphere of its dining room.

  As Karlebach crossed the lobby to collect his mail from the desk, Lydia scanned the crowd, listening for voices that she knew, identifying French Trade Minister Hautecoeur by his silver-streaked leonine mane and by the color and shape of his wife’s gown: Annette Hautecoeur, for all her crooning catlike tact, was a tall broad-shouldered woman whose silhouette was unmistakable . . . to say nothing of the fact that she was always surrounded by men, who were fascinated by her. And over there that splotch of green and blue had to be little Madame Bonnefoy from the Belgian Legation with her two daughters. With men it was more difficult. Lydia had to listen for their voices, watch the way they moved . . .

  ‘I mean-ter-say, honestly, Colonel Morris—’

  Lydia’s blood ran cold at the plummy Etonian accents, followed – inevitably – by a maddening little giggle.

  ‘—what earthly difference does it make whether Yuan’s elected or t’other chap?’

  Edmund Woodreave. She picked out his stoop-shouldered outline near the door, handing coat and overcoat to the Chinese porter – and Karlebach was deep in conversation with someone or other by the desk . . .

  ‘You know we’re going to have to blast the Germans out of Shantung sooner or later . . .’

  He’d turn in a minute, and clothed in black as she was Lydia knew she’d be identifiable across the room even to someone as unobservant as Woodreave. She stepped back quickly into the open door of one of the lobby’s private parlors and closed it almost to behind her.

  ‘Oh! I’m so sorry—’ she said an instant later. ‘Tui-bu-chi,’ she added laboriously and hoped that what she’d said was actually I’m sorry and not something horribly indelicate.

  ‘Nothing.’ The Chinese gentleman bowed and waved a staying hand when Lydia would have slipped from the room again (and not, she prayed, straight into Edmund Woodreave’s arms . . .). ‘Mis-sus Ashu?’

  For an instant Lydia was too startled to do anything but say, ‘Yes.’ She wondered in the next instant how he’d got in there. The management of the Wagons-Lits Hotel generally admitted only the best-dressed and most socially prominent Chinese to its lobby and parlor, and then – in the most tactful fashion possible – it did not let them linger.

  And this old gentleman, though clearly not of the laboring classes, was shabbily, even raggedly, dressed . . . which was why he looked familiar, Lydia realized. His flowing robe wasn’t the nearly-universal Manchu ch’i-p’ao, but the simple brown garment, rather like a Japanese kimono, worn by the priests at the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. Like the fat priest who’d showed her around the temple from rafters to sub-crypt this afternoon, this frail old gentleman wore his long white hair in the fashion of centuries ago, before the Manchu had conquered China (as Madame Drosdrova had pointed out, at length). The hand he held out to her, with a folded piece of paper in it, was like a bundle of broken chopsticks.

  ‘Dream.’ He touched his high, domed forehead. ‘Last night, other night. So sorry, speak not, write not. Dream. This hotel, red hair—’ He gestured at his own white hair where it flowed down over his shoulders, his nails long, like an old mandarin’s. ‘Black gown. Ashu, he say. Not any other.’

  Feeling as if in a dream herself, Lydia took the paper.

  The words had been written with a brush – drawn rather, as if carefully copied – but the up and down strokes, the strange loops and flourishes, were reproduced with eerie exactness.

  Mistress,

  I am in the mine, trapped. They cannot reach me, nor can I pass them. I have counted forty here. They sleep in the central chamber of the original mine, at the bottom of the first down-shaft, a hundred seventy feet deep, all together. Twice I have heard the voices of the living: two men, at least, and a woman, Chinese. I know not what they said, but they come and go in the day.

  Remember me kindly, should it come to pass that we meet not again.

  Unto eternity,

  Ysidro

  TWENTY-ONE

  Last year, as they had traveled through Eastern Europe together, Ysidro had said, There is a strangeness in Prague . . .

  Heart racing slightly from the last of Karlebach’s stay-alert powder, and cracked ribs gouging him at every step, Asher slipped through the courtyards of Grandpa Wu’s compound, feeling a little like a ghost himself. Beyond his own deserted courtyard, most of the lamps had been put out already. He passed by men belatedly fastening shutters over their windows and women trading talk in doorways after their children had been put to bed. But they all looked aside from Mr Invisible. He stepped past a screen and so out by one of the compound’s several subsidiary gates into Big God of Fire Temple Alley without garnering so much as a glance.

  Deep night lay on Peking.

  With any luck, by the time he reached the Stone Relics of the Sea, the Tso vampire would be out hunting and the Tso themselves asleep.

  Get in and get out, he told himself. You can’t learn any more just watching the place from the outside.

  Yesterday’s twilight reconnaissance had identified three areas of the Tso compound which the state of the roofs had led Asher to believe were deserted. One of these had a gate, the old-fashioned bronze lock of which Asher was fairly certain he could pick. He carried a dark-lantern and kept his revolver in the pocket of his baggy ch’i-p’ao. It would be death to use it, since a shot would waken the household.

  There was, almost certainly, a vampire in the Tso compound. Maybe – the thought made him flinch – a nest of them.

  And there might be yao-kuei as well. Karlebach had spoken of the enmity between the vampires and the Others in Prague: the vampires fear them . . . more than they do any of the living . . . Sometimes they will kill a vampire: open its crypt, and summon rats to devour it while it sleeps . . .

  But the rules were different in China. He had no idea what he would find, behind those tall gray walls.

  But whatever it was, he had no desire to see it fall into the hands of President Yuan Shi-k’ai, who had proved already that he was willing to make any alliance, use any means, to keep his power.

  And whatever had befallen Ysidro, Asher knew that he was now on his own.

  In Shun Chin Men Ta Street he signaled a rickshaw – the one commodity one was virtually certain to find on the streets at literally any hour, outdoing even the prostitutes �
� and, after flashing his pass at the gate guards, had it take him as far as the old palace of Prince Ch’ing. From there he crossed the Jade Fountains canal on a footbridge and worked his way back along the dark hutongs, watching and listening for what he guessed he would not be able to either see or hear. Even at this hour, in the larger streets there were wine shops open, amber oil-light outlining the open gates of courtyards from which the rough voices of men spilled like gravel. He heard the rattle of pai-gow tiles and the sweet, nasal wail of sing-song girls. When he passed the Empress’s Garden he saw the courtyard – and the encircling galleries within – filled with soldiers: Russian, German, Japanese.

  He crossed into the darkness on the other side of the hutong, used the reflected light to check his map again. He was close. The new moon was barely a thread and the alleyways pitch-black. Anything could be watching him, listening to his breathing . . .

  In Big Tiger Lane a rickshaw passed him, driver panting. The dim gold lamplight of a gate opening was like a bonfire’s blaze in the dark. Asher flattened against a wall as a tall man emerged, wrapped in a black European overcoat. The Chinese who came out a moment later said, ‘My threshold is honored by your honored foot, sir.’

  Grant Hobart’s unmistakable bray responded, ‘You mean your money belt is honored by my honored money! Say what you mean, you damn pander.’

  The Chinese bowed – a small man, gray-haired, in a dark ch’i-p’ao; presumably An Lu T’ang. ‘It is as your honor pleases.’

  Hobart grunted. ‘Slippery bastard,’ he said, in English, this time, and got into the rickshaw. ‘Not that way, idiot,’ he added in Chinese as the puller started away.

  ‘Best you go over the marble bridge and past the Drum Tower, honored sir,’ added An, with another bow. ‘There are western soldiers at the Empress’s Garden. Better to avoid Lotus Alley tonight.’