Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  Hobart swore, and the rickshaw maneuvered awkwardly in the narrow lane. Asher turned his face to the wall as it passed him again, though he was fairly certain that, coming from the lighted gateway, Hobart would be unable to see him in the alley’s darkness. Damn it, Asher wondered, does a riot mean the Tso will have more guards out? There’ll be stragglers all over the neighborhood . . .

  But not around in the back of the compound, he reminded himself. If anything, a fight among the soldiers will draw whoever is awake to the front of the siheyuan . . .

  He found Prosperity Alley, which led, after several windings, to the lakeshore. So deep was the darkness there that he had to count his steps, his hand to the plastered brick of the wall, to find the doorway he had earlier marked. He opened the slide on the lantern barely enough to show him the lock, and while coaxing the rusted, old-fashioned wards he kept having to stop and re-warm his numb fingers against the hot metal of the lamp. He told himself, a dozen times during this process, that it was rare – unheard of – for the Others to come anywhere near lights and people.

  In Prague they’d stayed down in the river bed and on the shallow islands that broke the stream. If you don’t go looking for them, you are generally safe, Karlebach had said.

  He was nevertheless aware of the pounding of his heart. Now if only this is one of the nights when the vampire goes hunting . . .

  A shot cracked, barely sixty yards away. Asher’s head jerked around, tracking the direction of the sound . . .

  Dim shouts, muffled by the turns of walls and alleys. The shrill screams of women.

  The Empress’s Garden.

  The soldiers.

  Asher whispered a prayer of thanks. Every guard in the Tso household would now be at the front of the compound, close to what sounded like a spreading riot . . .

  He pushed open the gate. With any luck the brouhaha would last long enough for him to get a good look around, always supposing he didn’t encounter a vampire that had become too timid to venture out of its lair. But even that was preferable to running smack into a squad of Madame Tso’s bully boys by day.

  Behind the shelter of the screen wall Asher surveyed the courtyard in the thin blue starlight. Dust lay in drifts from last week’s storm. Crippled weeds had flourished and died along the foundations of the surrounding buildings. Clearly, no one had been there in months.

  He slipped around the screen, ducked through the nearest door: the tao-chuo-fang, the north-facing building which received the least sunlight. Inauspicious, a kitchen or laundry . . .

  He slipped the slide from the lantern again: tall cupboards with their doors open, empty blackness inside; dishes on slatted wooden counters covered with dust. A few torn sacks. In one corner a trapdoor opened on to a ladder and led to a tiny root-cellar, cold as an icebox and damp with the proximity of the Seas. Splintered boxes, rat-chewed baskets, and stacks of cheap dishes, the kind one gave servants to eat off.

  He scrambled up the ladder again, made a circuit of the buildings around the court. Under the cheng-fang – the main building, large and south-facing and generally given over to the formal reception room and the bedrooms of the master and mistress of the house – he found a larger vault, this one brick-lined and accessed by narrow steps, clearly a strongroom dug at some earlier period and containing forgotten treasures: bronze incense-burners of an antique pattern, a small chest which proved to hold hundreds of age-brown silk scrolls with the formal paintings of someone’s ancestors, an exquisite p’i-p’a inlaid with shell. Reascending, he could find no evidence of a cellar beneath the ‘backside house’ behind the cheng-fang, so strode swiftly down the covered walkway to where he calculated the next deserted courtyard would lie.

  Drifted dust, empty goldfish-kongs, stacks of tubs for ornamental trees . . .

  And the fishy, rotten, pervasive smell of the Others, which prickled the hair on the back of his neck.

  It was strongest near the cheng-fang. Rats scuttled around the building’s padlocked door. The lock was brand-new, bright in the sliver of Asher’s lantern-light. When he opened it and gently pushed the doors, from somewhere in the building – somewhere below him – he heard a voice call, ‘Ma-Ma . . .’

  The meaning the same, curiously, in English as in Chinese.

  Mama.

  He closed his eyes. Sick shock flowed over him as he understood what Madame Tso planned, and what she had done.

  It is our families, Father Orsino had said, who are the Magistrates of Hell.

  Had he known?

  In a former bedchamber that flanked the cheng-fang’s main hall, a trap door stood open where, logically, a bed would once have been. Next to the black square of the hole stood a small table, half-covered with empty pottery cups and bottles that sent up a queasy metallic reek. Like Karlebach’s experiments, he thought, with the drugs that he’d given his student Matthias, in the hopes that it would stop the virus from consuming his body.

  Or, in this case, maybe only with the intention of slowing down some of its effects?

  Dark spatterings, like the stains of dripped blood, marked the edge of the table, the floor around the trapdoor.

  When he bent over the square of blackness a voice from below called softly, ‘Is it you, Aunt?’

  And a bleating cry, like the bray of a goat: ‘Mama—’

  Asher rested his forehead briefly against the wall. A metallic clink from the abyss: hinges or bars. The smell of human waste mixed with the fishy nastiness of the yao-kuei. Asher didn’t imagine there was much competition for cleaning whatever cells the two men – or former men – occupied down below in the darkness there. He moved soundlessly across the bedchamber to the door of the main hall . . .

  . . . then flung himself sideways as a sword flashed in the lantern-light, inches from his face.

  The blade jerked back mid-stroke. Round spectacles glinted. ‘Ashu Sensei—’

  Count Mizukami held out his hand for silence.

  Asher caught him by the elbow, steered him across the hall and so to the starlight outside. The Count sheathed his sword, an oiled whisper. His face showed not so much a flicker of surprise to see Asher alive. ‘They are down there?’

  ‘Caged, I think,’ whispered Asher. ‘Being taken care of, and still human enough to talk and think. One of them’s Madame Tso’s son, another’s her nephew.’

  Mizukami’s breath hissed sharply. Then after a moment’s silence, ‘They could have met the tenma on the shore of the Seas. Could have been infected by them there. Your most extraordinary wife found evidence of disappearances in this district, beyond what the rioting last spring could account for – and even the fighting among the criminal gangs. And yesterday, when we rode into the hills to survey how best to blow up all entrances to the mines, Dr Bauer said that she was given money by President Yuan, for all remaining evidence of the things in the hills.’

  ‘I’ve seen Madame Tso twice with Huang Da-feng,’ returned Asher grimly. ‘Yes, her son and her nephew could have stumbled into the yao-kuei on their way home across the marble bridge some night and been accidentally infected in the course of defending themselves, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Is Mrs Asher all right? And Dr Karlebach?’

  ‘They are well. You have married a samurai, Ashu Sensei, and one who keeps her secrets well. She has gone into deep mourning on your behalf and is being courted by every bachelor diplomat in the Quarter.’

  Asher grinned in spite of himself. ‘She’ll murder me if we ever get out of this alive . . .’

  Mizukami smiled. ‘I have seen your love for this woman, Ashu Sensei, and hers for you. She veils herself in black and weeps where people can see her, but her eyes are not red. Nor are they the eyes of a woman who has lost that which she most treasures. And she told me that you speak well of gelignite for blowing up the tunnels in the mines.’

  Asher rolled his eyes.

  ‘She does well,’ insisted Mizukami. ‘And the grief of your friend Ka-ru-ba-ku Sensei is genuine and terrible to see. His he
art and soul are now given to vengeance.’ He nodded toward the blackness of the cheng-fang behind them. ‘So you think that, to gain some advantage, this monstrous woman has had her own son, her own nephew, deliberately infected by these creatures. Why? What would it gain her that she could sell to Yuan? Surely she does not think they will be able to control them, and the rats at their command as well?’

  ‘Not her nephew and her son,’ said Asher. ‘We have one more thing to find.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Shots ripped the windy night; a woman screamed. Still away to the south-west in the direction of the Empress’s Garden. Asher breathed, ‘We’d better hurry. God knows how long we have till the police arrive.’

  Mizukami consulted his watch. ‘I paid the district captain for two hours,’ he said. ‘Ogata can be trusted to keep the riot going at least so long, particularly with Russians there.’

  ‘Remind me,’ said Asher with a grin, ‘to recommend you for work in the Department . . . Not that I have anything to do with them . . .’

  ‘Of course not,’ agreed the Count. And added, ‘Ge-raa Sensei.’

  ‘Never met Professor Gellar in my life.’ He led the way swiftly along a covered walk – cluttered with boxes, two parked rickshaws, and a bicycle – and through a small court, orienting himself by the double roof of a two-story ‘backside house’ that dominated the cold stars of the skyline. Through the latticed windows of a pavilion he glimpsed an empty bedchamber, lamplit and furnished in a half-Western fashion: perhaps the house of assignation, the gate of which opened on to Big Tiger Lane, where An Lu T’ang arranged for Grant Hobart to enjoy specialized pleasures? The bed was disarrayed, and the walls sported two Western-style oil paintings on its walls, graphically depicting some of the more violent loves of Greek gods. Chinese pornography, Asher knew, ranked as some of the least erotic in the world.

  The courtyard beyond this one was deserted. There was no street gate, but the side building on the east – the hsiang-fang – was, unusually, two storied, its upper room shuttered fast, and Asher knew from his daylight reconnaissance that this was in fact a sort of terrace which overlooked the narrow strait that ran between the two lobes of the ‘Sea’.

  This court, too, was littered with debris and dust, but there was none before the shuttered-up cheng-fang. Though the place had not been swept in decades, a pathway had been beaten clear among the tufts of weeds before its door. The lock was a Yale, about twenty years old.

  Asher handed Mizukami the lantern, directed the narrow beam on the lock. ‘Do you believe in the chiang-shi, Mizukami-san?’ he asked softly. ‘The kyonshi?’

  He did not look up from his lockpicks, but he heard his companion’s breath hiss.

  ‘Two weeks ago,’ said the Count at last, ‘or a month . . . I do not know what I would have said to such a question. The tenma we saw in the hills – the terrible thing that befell poor Ito—’

  ‘Those aren’t the chiang-shi.’ Asher held his breath, manipulated the delicate probes in the lock until he felt the mechanism give. Gently tested the handle. If there were a vampire within the building, it would have heard their breathing and the clicking of the tumblers as Asher’s tools shifted them one by one. He could have sung ‘Rule, Britannia!’ at the top of his lungs and the only ones who would have learned something they didn’t already know were whatever residents of the Tso compound weren’t either preparing to defend the house against the rioters or out engaged in looting themselves.

  He pushed the door open, took the lantern and directed its narrow beam, carefully, around the salon within. ‘The chiang-shi are real,’ he went on. ‘I’ve spoken to them – I’ve traveled with them – I’ve killed them and seen them kill.’ His gaze followed the sliver of yellow light as he spoke: a doorway at either side of the big room, the one on the east open, on the west, shut. The steely glint of another Western lock. ‘In Europe – in the West – they don’t trust the living, though they sometimes need our help. I think what’s happened here is that one of them – maybe more, for all I know – has employed the whole Tso family to keep it safe, in return for its help in their criminal endeavors. I think its lair is what we’re going to find downstairs.’

  He handed Mizukami the lantern again when they reached the shut door, knelt with his picklocks.

  The little nobleman looked around at the darkness of the shuttered chamber. ‘Can this be so?’

  ‘Can the other things you’ve seen? Will you wait up here and guard my back? You’ll probably be safer if you come down with me.’

  ‘I am samurai,’ replied the Count quietly, his hand on the hilt of his katana. ‘Yet I am not stupid. What is your judgement? You know these things. I do not.’

  ‘Let’s find the trapdoor down. But watch and listen. You may have no more than a heartbeat’s warning – maybe not that. It’ll try to make your mind sleepy before it strikes.’

  The trapdoor, as Asher had suspected, descended from the locked western room. Like the other he had found, it was fairly wide, in a part of the room which in earlier times would naturally have been covered with a cupboard or a bed, and its darkness breathed the same dank cold. ‘Will you remain at the top?’ he asked softly. ‘It may be out hunting at this hour, but there’s no telling when it will return.’

  Mizukami’s blade whispered from the scabbard.

  Asher descended, the lantern held high. The vault was deep, like the one in the French cemetery chapel; the brick stair made two complete turns, thirty steps. The faint foulness of old blood pervaded the clinging darkness. Things had died there, that no one had been willing to linger long enough to properly clean up.

  He opened a door. The lantern beam caught the glint of reflective eyes, not three yards from his own.

  A man’s low giggle filled the dark of the chamber.

  Mouth dry with shock, Asher yanked the slide fully open.

  The vampire sat enthroned on cushions, facing him. Unmoving, except for the trembling of the belly muscles as it laughed, the twisting of its face. Long hair, longer than Lydia’s even – a streaming black river of it – flowed down over its shoulders, coal-black against the death-pale ivory of its skin. Black eyes caught and reflected the lantern’s light, stared into his: utterly and unmistakably mad.

  And no wonder, thought Asher, so aghast that for a moment he could not breathe. No wonder.

  The vampire – a man in his prime – was nude, a blue silk sheet draped over his lap. His arms had been cut off just below the head of the humerus, his legs, guessed at beneath the folds of the sheet, a few inches below the trochanter of the hip. Vampire flesh does not heal like human flesh, and there was no way of guessing how long ago this had been done. But amid the glazed, waxy glisten of the scabs over what had been the armpit, Asher could see the tiny buds of baby fists growing from the flesh, smaller than the helpless hands of a newborn . . .

  And easy to snip off again with no more than a razor.

  Twenty years. His mind stalled on the thought, dizzy with horror and shock. Maybe more . . .

  There was a little dried blood on the silken sheet, on the pillows near his head.

  They must bring him his kills . . .

  For a time Asher could do nothing but stare as the vampire bellowed with laughter, fangs flashing. Blood dribbled from its gums, and bruises discolored the silk-white skin where the facial sutures would be. The bruising was precisely as Asher had seen on Ito-san.

  They’ve infected him with the blood of the Others. There was no way he could have stopped them from doing so, even if he’d been awake for it.

  Which means he can probably summon them.

  Asher bolted up the stairs, pursued by the vampire’s roars of mirth. Mizukami was flattened against the wall at the top, eyes straining at the darkness of the room beyond his small slip of lantern-light, but he flicked his glance sidelong as Asher emerged.

  ‘Run!’

  Without a question or a sound, Mizukami caught up his lantern and fled at Asher’s heels, across the side room
and across the main salon. They emerged from the door into the courtyard, and shots cracked out, not distant now but just across the court. Bullets tore the wood of the door frame next to Asher’s face. Three men ran toward them, one of them with eyes that reflected the lantern-light like a cat’s. Asher dodged left, returned fire with his revolver while Mizukami kicked the desiccated wood of the door of the two-story side-building. Asher ducked in after the Japanese into the darkness, up an open stairway to the shuttered terrace above.

  The shutters on the upper floor were bolted from the inside but not locked; Asher jerked open a section, dropped both lanterns beside it, then dragged Mizukami to the farthest corner of the room where screens and chairs had been stacked, covered with sheets against the winter’s pervasive dust.

  Both men rolled behind them as feet shook the stair. Moments later their pursuers entered, dashed to the open section of shutter which looked down – Asher knew – on to the narrow ground between the compound wall and the strait that joined the Shih Ch’a Hai – the long northern lobe of the ‘Sea’ – to its southern partner. It was a few hundred yards from where the yao-kuei – and the rats – had nearly cornered him, and he knew how far it was to the entrance to the nearest hutong.

  One of the men swore. ‘Kou p’i!’

  ‘You see them?’

  ‘Get them,’ said a third voice, cold. ‘Go after them.’

  ‘We didn’t see which way they went, Chi T’uan—’

  ‘Then you better get down there and figure it out.’

  The men crossed the room again toward the stair. When the man called Chi T’uan turned his head, in the moonlight Asher glimpsed again the reflective glitter of his eyes. Vampire? Or infected, like the other two down in the cellar, with the blood of the Others in the hopes of mentally controlling them? Of using them: unstoppable soldiers who would never listen to treachery, who wouldn’t have to be paid in anything but living food . . . who wouldn’t run away from a losing fight, and who would be very, very hard to kill.