Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  She’d dreamed she was married to Edmund Woodreave.

  Dreamed she was tied to him inescapably. Was forced to stay at home and organize teas and pay calls on relatives in an endless round of hypocritical chit-chat . . .

  Dreamed of wishing he were dead.

  Dreamed of seeing his eyes as someone stabbed him before her . . .

  Oh, God, that really happened—!

  She woke. Slivers of twilight through shuttered windows showed her painted Chinese rafters overhead. She lay on a carpet. When she turned her head she made out the enclosing shape of a Chinese bed, like a little wooden room faintly smelling of cedar and dust. The carpet had simply been pushed on to the bare platform, and the whole room around her smelled of mustiness, and of something rotting nearby.

  The carpet, she thought cloudily.

  There were workmen with rolled-up carpets in the lobby. That must be how they got me out of the hotel, rolled up like Cleopatra in a rug.

  And how they got poor Mr Woodreave’s body out. She shuddered again, at that last sight of his eyes. Ellen and Mrs Pilley won’t know I’m missing. They’ll think I went off somewhere with him.

  She moved, and somewhere in the room there was an instant scrabble and scurrying. Rats. She sat up hastily, groped for her reticule with her eyeglasses in it and had only to think of it to give the matter up in despair. Her money was in it, too, so the man in charge of the carpet-carriers had undoubtedly simply appropriated it as part of his pay. Her exploring hands found the protective silver chains gone from her throat and wrists. Her cameo, earrings, and necklaces of jet beads – suitable for mourning – were also gone. She pulled up her skirts and found the little roll of picklocks still buttoned to the bottom edge of her corset, and whispered a prayer of thanks to Jamie for suggesting she never go out of the house without it, even if it was only for a walk with Miranda.

  Though if they’ve bolted the door from the outside I’m out of luck.

  It was growing dark, wherever she was. Scratching at the wall somewhere close, tiny nasty little pink feet . . . Lydia struggled against panic at the sound. With the fetor in the room she wasn’t surprised there were rats. We must be near a midden or a garbage tip . . .

  No.

  I’m at Mrs Tso’s.

  Cold swallowed her heart as the knowledge fell into place.

  Hobart brought me here. He’s working for them. With everything they know about him, of course they’re blackmailing him. This must be the pavilion Jamie told me about: the pavilion where those two poor young men – or what used to be men – are being kept.

  She got quickly to her feet. She was too nearsighted to see if there were rats in the shadows along the wall, but if there were, they weren’t moving. Holding her skirts well up around her knees, she groped her way to the windows. They were shuttered, bolted on the inside, but when she unbolted and tested them, a hasp and padlock thumped softly on the other side of the thick wood. Damn.

  Jamie, don’t let them make you do anything stupid!

  The door had a bolt on the inside but none on the outside. The room had evidently been an ordinary bedroom, and it opened into a larger chamber, likewise shuttered and padlocked, but scuttering with rats. The attic at Willoughby Court had been a haven of them, for both her mother and stepmother had had a loathing of cats, and one of her nanny’s favorite threats had been that she would lock her up there. The smell in this room was stronger, too – one with which Lydia was profoundly familiar from her residency in a London charity clinic. Rotting flesh and human filth.

  The door on the south side of the big room would lead into the courtyard, she guessed, given that the windowless wall of the bedroom where the bed stood was north. At least that’s what the Baroness had said was true of all Chinese dwellings. The courtyard door was padlocked on the outside as well. In the other bedroom – the western one – the stench was worse, and the long table by the trapdoor near its west wall confirmed her fear. It was, as Jamie had described, stained, as if chunks of bleeding meat had been set carelessly down on one end of it, and there were spatters and dribbles of other substances, dark on the pale wood. Of the jars and bottles he’d seen there, all that remained were a sort of chafing dish and couple of small clay drinking-vessels stained with dark residue.

  They must have cleared everything off after Jamie snooped through.

  She took the candle from the chafing dish, hunted in the table drawer and found a box of matches. Whispered another prayer of relief. It was hard to guess how much daylight was left, but the thought of being in this place after full dark fell – completely blind – sickened her. She had Jamie’s word that the poor wretches in the cellar were locked up in some fashion, but anything could have changed in the past two days. She lit the candle, descended the stair – also not locked nor even equipped with a lock. Mrs Tso can’t have had the scheme to use them for very long. She must have counted on keeping the pavilion itself under lock and key.

  From what she’d heard of Mrs Tso, it was hard to imagine any member of the woman’s household would dare go poking around in a place where they weren’t supposed to be.

  The stench at the bottom of the stairs was horrific, but still not worse than the yard behind the surgical theater of the charity hospital on a hot day after they’d been doing amputations. Lydia held the candle high up, squinting to see and not daring to go closer to the two men whose sleeping forms she could just make out.

  They were chained to the walls at opposite ends of the little brick strongroom. There were buckets for drinking water and waste, but it was clear that both prisoners were beginning to forget that earliest of civilized behaviors. It was also clear, as far as Lydia could see, that the room was cleaned on a regular basis. They had blankets and quilts. Rats darted in the dense shadows, chewed on the half-eaten carcasses that lay on the floor nearby: what looked like part of a chicken and the half-picked leg of a goat.

  She did this to them. Lydia backed carefully up the stairs, trembling and, despite herself, slightly faint. Deliberately infected them, in the hopes of controlling the rest. For a moment her mind flashed to Miranda, to what it felt like to hold her child in her arms.

  What woman could do that to her own flesh?

  Not someone whose power I want to be in.

  She turned and climbed the remaining steps swiftly.

  Grant Hobart was at the top.

  Lydia gasped with shock and nearly fell back down the stair, but when he reached to steady her, she jerked sharply away. ‘Don’t you touch me!’

  His face convulsed with anger, as if he would have shouted at her, and his hand flinched to strike. Then he stopped himself, panting. In the candlelight she saw his eyes glitter with fever.

  And am I REALLY going to run back down into that room below?

  ‘Don’t blame me, Mrs Asher,’ he gasped. ‘I beg of you, don’t think hard of me.’

  ‘Don’t think hard of you?’ She knew she should pretend whatever he wanted, and couldn’t.

  ‘I couldn’t help it! They forced my hand—’

  ‘They didn’t force you to get mixed up with them in the first place!’

  He turned his face away. His breath had stunk of blood and decaying flesh, and she could see where his teeth had begun to sprout and deform, even since that morning when he’d seized her at the hotel. The telltale swollen bruising of his face showed where the frontal sutures of his skull had begun to loosen, to re-form in the characteristic shape of the yao-kuei. ‘You don’t understand.’ He moved aside to let her step off the stair and into the room.

  ‘I understand –’ she kept her voice steady with an effort – ‘that you brought me here so Mrs Tso and her minions can get hold of my husband, to keep him from interfering with Mrs Tso’s efforts to control those things in the mines so she can sell them to President Yuan.’

  ‘He’s not going to be harmed! Good God, woman, you don’t think I’d let Chinese harm a white man! They only want him out of the country!’

  ‘They we
re waiting for him the night he fled,’ Lydia pointed out. ‘And what did you think the Crown was going to do with your accusation of treason when he got back to England? Say, Oh, that’s all right, what you do in China doesn’t really count?’

  ‘Look, they – they’ve found a man who’ll confess to the Eddington girl’s murder.’ He passed his hand over his face, like a man trying to scrub away sleep that is nearly overwhelming. ‘Five hundred pounds – a Chinese, he’s ill, dying, he needs it for his family.’

  ‘And you believed that?’ Lydia stared at him in appalled incredulity.

  ‘I—’ Hobart stammered. ‘An told me . . .’

  ‘And what a pillar of rectitude he is. All it means is that they found some man who’d confess, in order to keep his wife, or some member of his family, from being killed. That five hundred pounds is going straight into Mrs Tso’s pocket . . . And did Mr An also tell you that the girls he’d bring to you liked being beaten up?’

  The big man’s distorted features contracted, and he looked away from her again. ‘You don’t understand.’ He rubbed his face once more. Lydia could see where his nails were thickening, his hands deforming, bruised and swollen. They must hurt like the very devil. ‘I’m not the only one in the Legations to use An’s services, you know.’

  Lydia forced herself not to shout at him, And that makes it all right? Instead she asked, in a quieter voice, ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I came here Thursday night to give An the money. Your husband had fled; I prayed that would be enough for them. An was late, so I waited for him in . . . in one of the smaller courtyards . . .’

  He shied away there from speaking of something – a lifetime of myopia and participation in the London social seasons had made Lydia very good at reading the inflections of peoples’ voices when they were lying. The pavilion Jamie saw, with the pornographic paintings? How does one go about ordering pornographic paintings when one is in China, anyway? Annette Hautecoeur would know . . .

  ‘I heard some kind of commotion and went out into the courtyard. This . . . this thing, this creature came out of the dark at me. I have a sword-cane, I cut it – one of Mrs Tso’s nephews came running, and I didn’t see – good God, what happened to them? I didn’t see his – its! – face until it was close. T’uan and Yi – that’s Madame’s oldest boy – and their bully boys came and dragged them both away, and Yi told me I was not to speak of what I’d seen, of what had happened. As I valued my own life and my son’s, they said . . . They can get a man into the Legation stockade, you know, to kill a prisoner there. But I could see T’uan’s face was changing, too.’

  ‘And you came back,’ she said softly, ‘when you started getting sick yourself?’

  ‘I had to! I could see T’uan was all right, you see. I mean, he looked frightful, but he seemed to be in his right mind. He didn’t have these – these terrible blank spaces, these horrible urges that come over me . . . When I came here on Friday night, the night of the riot at the Empress Garden, Mrs Tso told me, yes, they have Chinese medicine, Chinese herbs, that will control this sickness. They’d give them to me, she said, if I brought you here. They only want to talk to you, she said. She swore to me you wouldn’t be harmed . . .’

  ‘What did she swear on?’ inquired Lydia, genuinely curious. ‘The Bible? Is Mrs Tso a Christian? Does one swear on the Sayings of Confucius? I suppose one could—’

  His hand jerked back again, and his mouth gaped suddenly, as if he not only would strike, but also bite. ‘Shut up, you wittering bitch!’ Lydia sprang back, got the corner of the table between them. ‘I’m telling you you won’t be hurt—’

  ‘They didn’t have any hesitation about hurting Mr Woodreave,’ she said softly.

  Hobart’s head jerked sideways, like a horse tormented by a fly. ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Woodreave? The man you paid – I presume – to get me downstairs, knowing I’d come at his request but not at yours?’

  ‘I – he shouldn’t have . . .’ By the blurred candle-flame she saw a tremor shake him, and he pawed the air near one ear. ‘Excuse me?’ He blinked at her, as if waking from a dream himself.

  His mind is starting to go. Panic flooded her. How long does it take to turn completely into one of those things? How long do I have before he turns on me?

  She took a deep breath and pretended she had a procedure to finish that had to be done correctly before the patient stopped breathing or went into shock. There’s plenty of time, but this needs to be done with delay . . .

  ‘Why did you come back here?’ she asked. ‘And how did you get in?’

  For a moment he looked at her a little blankly, as if he’d forgotten again, then went to the corner by the open trapdoor, Lydia never taking her eyes from him as he moved. He picked up something he’d leaned against the wall, and she moved back away from the table a little. As she did, a whisper of icy air breathed on her from the total blackness of the room.

  Moving air.

  Door open. Window open.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He held up a black rod. By the way he handled its weight it had to be a spanner or pry bar. ‘Something . . . I had to come. I had to come here. It wants me.’

  ‘Who wants you?’ If I run, will he chase me, as a dog will if you flee?

  ‘The ruler. The – The Lord of Hell – one of the Lords of Hell. Of this part of Hell. He needs me to— What?’ His head jerked again, and in the near-dark, his stance changed, his hunched shoulders dropped a little. ‘I – I’m sorry. This afternoon I dreamed – I slept, and I dreamed that I had to come back here. When I woke it was all I could think of. I didn’t mean to, but . . . but it’s as if I drifted off again for a bit, and then woke up and here I was.’ He hefted the pry bar in his hand. He’s a big man, she thought. He can easily break a skull.

  ‘Did you break in through one of the gates?’ she inquired, in the same tone of voice in which she’d have asked Lady Cottesmore where she’d got the shrimp for her buffet. Thank you, Aunt Lavinnia, for all those lessons in speaking calmly and politely no matter what one feels . . .

  ‘Yes. There’s not a soul in this part of the house, you know.’ The words came out perfectly naturally. Then his head began to move again, as if he were disoriented, and he said something in Chinese. The candle in Lydia’s hand flickered – she risked a glance down at it and saw it was burned nearly to its end in its little porcelain dish.

  Hobart gasped and dropped the pry bar – it made a great, ringing clatter on the tiled floor – and clutched his head. Voices cried out in the room below: one in Chinese, the other simply bleating, a goatish sound that made Lydia’s stomach turn.

  Without a word, Hobart lurched away from her and vanished down the stair. Lydia turned at once and scanned the darkness, looking for anything . . .

  There. A lighter rectangle in the blackness. He’d pried open a window.

  She ran to it as soundlessly as she could, climbed out into the dark.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  DAMN those wretched gangsters for stealing my glasses!

  Lydia strode along the side of the building to its corner in the darkness, one hand to the wall, trying desperately to remember whether Jamie had said anything about which way one went to get out of this particular courtyard. Both Jamie and the Baroness Drosdrova had explained to her that in the larger courtyard houses, only a few courtyards had gates or doors leading out into the hutongs, and it would make sense that Mrs Tso wouldn’t imprison her son and her nephew in any courtyard that fit that description . . .

  So how had Grant Hobart found it?

  Something was drawing him – the hive mind of the Others?

  Whatever was happening – completely aside from the hostage-for-Jamie issue – Lydia didn’t want any part of it.

  There isn’t a soul in this part of the house, Hobart had said.

  Moonlight painted the elaborate tiled ridges of the roofs, but the courtyard remained plunged in shadow. A walkway led away westward from the corner of the building, a blotchy pat
chwork of darkness and deeper darkness. There might well be more than one route out of the courtyard, but Lydia wasn’t about to stay and look for others. Hobart’s pry bar would make short work of the staples that held the yao-kueis’ chains to the cellar wall. The walkway led around two corners and branched; she heard a woman’s voice in one direction, and the voices of children, and smelled cooking oil. The other way took her into a deserted courtyard, and she made her way slowly around its entire perimeter, searching for anything resembling a doorway.

  Two other walkways. It was like getting lost in the hutongs that lay somewhere on the other side of all those crowding walls. One led to a courtyard that was definitely occupied – the dim glow of oil-light outlined windows showed Lydia goldfish-kongs and laundry. The other opened into a longer walkway where the light of a lantern bobbed, coming closer.

  Lydia turned and walked away as if she were merely another member of the family, but it didn’t work. A man shouted at her in Chinese. She broke into a run, dodged around a corner and back along another walkway – or was it one she’d already traversed? She fled across a courtyard, and two women emerged from one of the rooms off it, shouting at her (presumably – for all she knew they could be screaming about stains on the good tablecloth the way her stepmother did). She tried to find another way out, but the men with the lantern came running from another corner of the court, shouting ‘T’ing!’ One of them fired a pistol, which knocked splinters of brick from a wall yards from her, and both Chinese women immediately turned upon the guards and started to shriek at them.

  Lydia tried to dart past them, but one of them seized her and twisted her arm brutally, and the other struck her in the face with force that took her breath away. The Chinese women still screaming at them, the men dragged her into the nearest room – empty, but obviously somebody’s home, with blankets piled on a kang stove-bed and clothing of some kind hanging in the shadows on the wall. One of the men yelled a command to the women in the courtyard. There were shrieks of argument (whoever said Chinese women were trained to be submissive? Lydia wondered), and then running feet. A child’s, Lydia thought as she was shoved into a battered bamboo chair. The way the women had moved, it was obvious that their feet were crippled.