Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  She sat motionless, head throbbing from the blow. A more intrepid heroine, she reflected, would probably take on both guards with the chair. But one of them had the gun pointed at her, and she didn’t see how being beaten senseless was going to help her flee later, to say nothing of the fact that even if she got out of this room and the courtyard, she still hadn’t the slightest idea of which way the compound’s single open gate was, if it was still open . . .

  They need me as a hostage. They can’t kill me, they need me as a hostage . . .

  Only until they get Jamie.

  The door opened.

  There was only one person with Mrs Tso, a fat little Chinese man dressed in Western style, his hair cut short and smelling faintly of pomade. Lydia couldn’t make out his features clearly but could see at least no sign of the horrors visible in Hobart’s face and on the poor samurai Ito’s. Her oldest son?

  Mrs Tso swayed forward on her tiny stubs of feet, slapped Lydia hard, and poured out a tirade of furious Chinese at her. When the man hesitantly spoke to her – she MUST be his mother! – she turned on him, slapped him as well, then returned her attention to Lydia, black eyes flashing poison.

  The man said, in halting English, ‘My mother say you are foolish girl, you put self in danger, try to escape here. No harm come to you, if you wait and be quiet.’

  Yes, and my Aunt Harriet’s husband is descended in a true line from Henry VIII’s secret marriage to Bess Blount and is the rightful King of England, too. Lydia looked meekly down at her captor’s shoes and asked, in as timorous a voice as she could muster, ‘Promise?’

  Running boots in the courtyard. The door opened. More lantern-light, and a Niagara of Chinese from another guard.

  Somebody must have discovered the prison door open and the two boys gone. Or else the gate into the street open, wherever it is—

  Madame Tso went rigid with shock, then launched into several minutes of quick-fire questions and answers with the guard before turning back to Lydia, hand raised to slap again.

  Lydia shrank back and covered her face. Those small, strong hands grabbed her wrist, pulled her hand aside. More questions shouted at her, furiously, as the older woman shook her by a handful of her hair.

  Tso Jr. peered around his mother and asked, ‘How you get out?’

  ‘I heard someone moving about in the other room.’ Lydia widened her eyes and looked terrified, something that didn’t require a great deal of acting at the moment. ‘Scraping and banging noises, as if the locks were being wrenched off the door. I hid until the noise got quieter, then I looked out. There was no one in the outer room, but one of the windows was open. I climbed out and ran.’

  ‘You not go in other room?’ He stood close enough that she could see his face: young and hard, with a wisp of mustache and brutal eyes. ‘Not go down stairs?’

  Lydia shook her head, eyes swimming with tears. ‘No.’ After having her hair pulled, tears weren’t hard to summon, either, but any girl who’d had a London Season acquired the ability to weep at will, for purposes of either blackmail or self-defense. ‘I was afraid, I didn’t know what was happening—’

  Tso Jr. – whose surname, Lydia recalled, was actually something else – Chen? – related this information to his mother. Chen, she thought, watching their faces. For his father, whom she now suspected had been eaten up alive by Madame in the fashion of spider husbands. Definitely, they’ve discovered the boys have been freed . . .

  Madame stepped back, made a slashing gesture with one hand. Her son took Lydia’s elbow, helped rather than pulled her to her feet. ‘Please, not to do anything foolish,’ he advised in a completely neutral tone as they led her from the room, across the court, down a walkway in the bobbing light of the lanterns. ‘My mother—’ He glanced at the woman who strode beside them, hanging on to his other arm but without the slightest sign of the pain which, Lydia knew, each step caused her.

  Madame rolled her eyes, rattled off instructions as to what he was to say, and he obediently repeated, ‘Courtyards guarded by dogs, big dogs. Wolves. Attack and kill. Tigers also.’

  Funny, Jamie completely forgot to mention the tigers the other night . . .

  She gasped and looked petrified.

  ‘If you escape, we cannot save you. Stay where you are, all be well.’

  They entered another courtyard, dust-drifted and deserted in the lantern-light, and Lydia gasped in earnest. It was as Jamie had described: the pathways beaten in the weeds before the shallow steps of the main pavilion, the nailed-up shutters, the western lock on its door. They pushed her through its main chamber and into its eastern room, which had no lock on it; Madame pulled a silk sash from the pocket of her ch’i-p’ao, threw it to her son with a brief command.

  ‘Not to be frightened,’ he said to Lydia as the single guard with them (they must be short-handed tonight – why?) dragged her hands behind her.

  ‘No—’ She struggled desperately as they thrust her against one of the pillars at the rear of the room, tied her wrists behind her and around it. ‘Please, don’t tie me—!’

  ‘All be well.’ He hesitated, then took one of the lanterns and hung it near the door. ‘All be well.’

  By the way he glanced at his mother as they filed from the room, he didn’t believe this for a second.

  Half a dozen horses stood saddled and bridled outside the half-ruined Temple of the Concealed Buddha. ‘I found them in the gully, below the rear entrance to the mine,’ Chiang explained. The tack was German, the blankets the five-colored stripe of the new Republic. ‘I do not ride,’ he added as Asher and the others mounted. ‘The philosopher Chuang Tzu, in the time of the Warring States, wrote that to make a slave of an animal in that fashion disturbs not only the Path of the animal, but the soul’s own path . . .’

  ‘We not leave you.’ The moon was barely a sliver, but the night, though icy, was clear. Beyond the scrim of trees that surrounded the temple, Asher could see the narrow track that led back toward the Mingliang gully where the mine’s main entrance lay. They had, he now saw, passed the temple itself on their reconnaissance of that flank of the mountain, never guessing that its crypt held a tunnel. Neither Ysidro nor the engineers of the Hsi Fang-te Company had suspected – nor, presumably, had the emperors who had condemned the Buddhist sects. ‘Kuo Min-tang, also bandits—’

  ‘My son.’ The moonlight – and his smile – turned the priest’s face curiously young. ‘What can bandits steal of me? My stick? I will then cut another. Go quickly now, and do not let an old man’s prejudice slow you down. I know the way back to the City. I have walked it many times.’

  Asher didn’t linger to argue. He reined his horse around and set off at a hand gallop down the track, as swift as the thin moonlight would let him ride, the others stringing out behind him. It could have been a lie, he told himself. T’uan could have told you anything about Lydia, without any way to prove it. Yet the hair prickled on the back of his neck. Lydia knew to stay away from Grant Hobart, but at a guess, there were others in the Legations who had been sufficiently careless, foolish, or unfortunate as to fall into the power of the Tso to blackmail – and the recollection of what the Tso had hidden in their house turned his heart to ice.

  It would be two hours’ ride from Mingliang Village before they could reach the motor car Mizukami had left in Men T’ou Kuo, even if they didn’t encounter the Kuo Min-tang again. Vampires could move very swiftly, either afoot or by using some means of tricking or seducing the living into aiding them with transport. But whether, once he reached Peking, Ysidro could find the Tso house was another question, entirely apart from the very real possibility that the vampires of Peking would kill him before he reached the place.

  They trust no one, Father Orsino had said.

  Certainly not a ch’ang pi kwei vampire working in obvious alliance with the living. Did they say of him what Karlebach did, that he could not be trusted and should be killed at sight?

  As the horses topped the gully edge and the steep trail d
ropped away, Asher turned in the saddle. The Temple of the Concealed Buddha could still be glimpsed in the moonlight on the barren hillside, but of Chiang, no trace remained.

  Lydia estimated that the lantern lasted an hour before it burned out. The fact that light could be seen in the room – even in the form of dull topaz needles through chinks in the shutters – filled her with horror, but when it finally perished, the absolute blackness was ten times worse.

  Would Hobart – and the two Tso Others to whom he had now allied himself – be able to track her by the smell of living flesh, living blood, in the darkness?

  She didn’t know.

  At least there were no rats here. Although the vampire Li, down in his cellar tomb, was – Jamie had assured her – utterly unable to move, still the antipathy that all animals had to those Undead predators seemed to persist. Even Simon’s cats back in London gave the vampire wide berth, at least – Lydia suspected – until he had fed.

  But the thought of that tall, narrow house on its nameless side-street – the street that had by coincidence been left off every map of London since the late sixteenth century – brought a desperate tightness to Lydia’s throat, the sting of tears to her eyes. Every wall jammed with bookshelves, the carved graceful products of eighteenth-century cabinetmakers’ art or simple goods boxes stacked on top of them . . . A desk of inlaid ebony, and a strange old German calculating-engine that grinned with ivory keys.

  They are unable to reach me, nor I to pass them . . .

  She remembered how cold his hands were when they touched hers; the journey in his company from Paris to Constantinople, long nights playing picquet to the swaying of the train coach (‘. . . the representation in little of all human affairs,’ he described the game, while beating her at it, soundly and mercilessly.) She still had a handful of his sonnets, hidden in the back of a drawer at home, a fact that she had never told either Simon or Jamie.

  Remember me kindly, if we meet not again.

  She leaned her head back against the pillar behind her. Her knees ached from standing, but she did not dare slither down to sit. The tightness of the binding on her wrists was such that, despite flexing and turning her hands as well as she could, her fingers kept going numb.

  You don’t understand, Hobart had whispered. A killer asking to be excused.

  Simon had never asked that, nor pretended that he wasn’t what he was.

  Did that make him less deserving of being buried alive in a gas-choked mine?

  No. No.

  Then why are you crying?

  The silence in the pavilion seemed deeper in the darkness. Then through that silence, dim and muffled, a voice lifted. Screaming. Words, Lydia thought, though the thickness of the intervening earth made it impossible to tell . . .

  Does he scream every night?

  Or just since they infected him with the blood of the yao-kuei?

  Twenty years, Jamie had said. Maybe longer. Twenty years of lying propped on a little daybed with his long hair flowing down around him, unable to move. Had he trusted Mrs Tso, beautiful as the sky with stars? Had he let her know where he slept? Relied on her to do things for him, the way Don Simon Ysidro relied on her and Jamie? She had twice seen Ysidro asleep, sunk in the vampire trance of the daylight hours, from which nothing could waken them. On the second of those occasions, in St Petersburg, Jamie could have – should have, Karlebach would say – killed Simon where he lay, to save the lives of who knew how many thousands of men and women in the future.

  And Karlebach was right! she thought despairingly.

  But it had never – would never – have occurred to either of them to chop off his arms and legs and keep him alive to use his powers over the minds of others at their bidding.

  And I suppose that’s the reason I’m not the all-powerful matriarch of a gangster family.

  But even that, Lydia reflected, was unfair. She had been born wealthy, a rich man’s only child. God only knew where Mrs Tso had come from, or what had been done to her – other than crippling her feet to make her ‘more beautiful’ (and also more expensive on the market) – to turn her into a woman who would think of doing that. Who would use her son, and then her nephews, as pawns, so that she herself would never be that helpless again.

  Deep below her, the vampire Li screamed in the dark.

  Screaming? Or calling out?

  Calling out for who?

  TWENTY-NINE

  A shot cracked the night.

  Close. Lydia’s heart lurched. A few courtyards away . . .

  In this part of the Tatar City gunplay could have nothing to do with the situation in the Tso compound tonight. Since the Emperor’s fall, Peking had become a violent place, the gangs that controlled the brothels and p’ai-gow games, the rickshaw stables and opium dens all fighting for mastery, the soldiers of the President and of the Kuo Min-tang staging murderous battles in the taverns. Robbers, layabouts, and killers for hire hid out under the bridges and in the empty temples around the shallow ‘Sea’ and vastly outnumbered the new police-force.

  But the shot filled her with panic.

  Deep beneath the pavilion, Li had fallen silent.

  For a thousandth time, Lydia pulled and twisted at the silken rope around her wrists, trying to at least get her fingernails on the knots.

  Nothing.

  Then, so softly she wasn’t sure if the sound was actually in the ground beneath her or inside her head, Lydia heard Li crooning, a horrible mixture of words and throat sounds.

  Oh, God, she thought, struggling again though she knew it would do her no good. Oh God—

  Something – someone – pounded on the pavilion door.

  Where are the wretched guards? They were every way I turned three hours ago . . .

  Yet there had really been only a few. Not a soul, Hobart had said, and he’d been very nearly right; she remembered how Mrs Tso had appeared with only her son for escort. Had they heard that Jamie was going out to the Western Hills today and went out to prevent them blowing up the mine?

  And did Li know that?

  Fists crashed on the shutters, a yard from her head. Lydia fought not to scream. Two of them – even in her terror she identified the sounds at the windows. Two of them, pounding on the wood with the violence of machinery. Hobart’s face swam into her mind, distorted, fanged. The bloody mouth and sprouting teeth of the samurai Ito, the horrible thick claws of the things chained in the cellar . . .

  More crashing, on the shutters of the main room this time, the pitchy darkness seeming to shake with the noise—

  Jamie, Jamie get me out of here!

  Gunshots again, right outside the pavilion. The things hammering at the front windows stopped, but the crashing at the windows beside her, in front of her, kept on, unheeding, and through the hammer blows she heard a man scream. Three more gunshots, with the speed of someone shooting wild in panic, and then the rending crash of wooden shutters tearing, and moonlight streamed into the room.

  Two of them, black slumped silhouettes. One crossed the room to the door as if it didn’t see her, but the other came straight for her, eyes flashing yellow like a cat’s. After the blackness the dim blue moonlight seemed bright, and Lydia brought up one foot and kicked it in the stomach with all her strength as it reached for her.

  It staggered back, bayed at her, a yawping animal sound, then drove in again. She kicked again and felt her skirt tear where it grabbed her, kicked a third time, and a fourth – it didn’t seem to have any other strategy than to keep coming, keep grabbing, as if it knew that she’d tire long before it did. It leaned its weight on her, swung its arms, and her kick turned into a desperate shove, holding it away.

  It howled.

  Then it turned from her and followed its companion out the door and into the main room.

  Lydia heard other things in that room and realized that the crashing in that direction had stopped. So had the screams and the shots. The smell of fresh blood came to her, and of cordite. She heard them crashing and pounding
on the door of the western chamber, drowning out the crooning wail of the vampire Li below.

  Can he really control them, once he’s brought them to him? Command them?

  Or will they only see him as flesh that can’t fight them when they go to eat it?

  There was nothing on the floor around her – or nothing she could see, by dim moonlight without her glasses: no shattered glass or broken shards of wood. There’s got to be something . . . Hesitantly, she bent her cramped knees, slithered down the pillar and squinted to get a better look at the floor. Distant and muffled, she heard Li’s voice, shouting what sounded like commands . . .

  Shouting them again, louder and then louder . . .

  Then he screamed.

  A slumped form loomed suddenly in the moonlight, huge as it staggered through the door. Lydia tried to push herself to her feet but it was too quick for her. She smelled the blood on its clothing, blood on the huge hand that closed on her arm as it dragged her up to her feet.

  Blood on Hobart’s breath as he stammered, ‘Get you out— Get you out— Oh God, that thing down there!’

  He must have had a penknife in his pocket. Lydia twisted her hand aside when he sliced her bonds. Do not, DO NOT get a cut . . .

  He kept his grip on her arm, stared down at her with eyes that caught the moonlight like an animal’s. In a voice that astonished her with its own reasonableness, she said, ‘Let me go, I can walk,’ just exactly as if he were Mr Woodreave trying to help her over a puddle.

  It didn’t work. His grip tightened.

  ‘You’ll run away.’ His voice slurred over the swollen bloodiness of his growing fangs. ‘Need you. Make them give me medicine.’