Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  Dammit . . .

  When he dragged her through the pavilion’s central room she could hear Li screaming down below, hideous shrieks. Dear God, they must be tearing him to pieces, eating him as he lies there . . .

  She tripped over the corpses in the doorway. Two of Mrs Tso’s men, blood-covered.

  ‘Dying in my head,’ whispered Hobart. ‘I feel it – I felt them all, dying, oh God! I’m going mad, and I can’t go mad . . . I’ll make her give me medicine . . .’

  In the middle of the courtyard a third figure lay: a woman’s, in a satin ch’i-p’ao. Bound feet in tiny shoes poked out from beneath her hem, and a gun lay near her hand.

  Tell him who she was, or not? He barely seemed aware of her.

  ‘You’ll be all right. Swear it. Honor bright—’ Hobart giggled suddenly and looked down into Lydia’s face. ‘Just – put you someplace safe for awhile. There’s places under the bridges, under the palaces—’

  ‘That really isn’t necessary.’ She forced her voice to be matter-of-fact. ‘I can arrange—’

  ‘No arrangement.’ He dragged her to the walkway. ‘Fed up to the bloody back teeth with goddam arrangements. Can’t let them see me like this. She’ll give me the medicine. I’ll make her. They’re all dying, I can feel them . . .’

  More voices shouted in the courtyard, over the braying of the yao-kuei. Hobart stopped, and Lydia turned, to see in the moonlight indistinct figures rushing into the court as the slumped forms of the Others emerged from the pavilion. A shotgun roared. Lydia thought she saw the white blur of a beard on one tall figure, the flash of round spectacles and a samurai blade. She screamed, ‘Jamie!’ as Hobart seized her around her waist and lifted her from her feet, covered her mouth with a reeking hand.

  And ran. Faster than she’d guessed the yao-kuei could run, down the walkway, across a court. Lydia kicked, writhed, nearly suffocated by the paw over her face, but he only tightened his grip. She heard him panting, almost in her ear, the hoarse, animal note of it terrifying. His mind is nearly gone, and what then . . .?

  Through a broken gate and out on to the sloping shore of the shallow lake, water scummed with dirty ice in the moonlight. A marble bridge where the northern lake ran into the southern, and broken steps leading down to blackness underneath. Hobart stopped, set her feet on the ground and looked around him—

  ‘Remember this place,’ he panted. ‘Extraordinary—’ And there was a lightness in his voice, like a man in a dream. ‘Never been here in my life but remember it. They were here, there’s a hole they went down, cellars – cellars into cellars . . . It’s like I dreamed it.’

  Then he flinched, put one hand to his head, face twisted with pain. ‘They’re dying. They scream when they die, inside my head. It’s like pieces torn away bleeding from my brain. I’ll put you there safe, then go back, talk to her . . . make her give me the medicine. It saved her boys, or would have, if they hadn’t been killed—’

  ‘She can’t give you medicine,’ gasped Lydia. ‘She’s dead. Back there. She’s dead.’

  He struck her, jerking her arm to drag her into the blow. Half-stunned, Lydia sagged against his gripping hand, and he pulled her up again, held her against him. The moonlight reflected in his eyes like mirrors. ‘You’re lying,’ he whispered. ‘Won’t do you any good. You cunning little bitch.’

  Then he grinned, with his bloody teeth, and put his palm to her cheek. ‘But pretty—’

  A second set of reflective eyes appeared behind his shoulder, and a long white hand wrapped around his chin, another braced on his shoulder. Hobart roared, spun, faster than Lydia had ever seen a living man move, flung her down on the broken steps and slashed at Ysidro with his claws. Ysidro strange and wraithlike, as she had seen him when he hadn’t fed, weakened and stripped of illusion. He dodged, tried to twist free as Hobart grabbed him by the wrists—

  And as if she’d rehearsed it a dozen times for a pantomime performance, Lydia stuck her foot between Hobart’s legs.

  Hobart went down like a felled tree on top of her, his weight crushing, and with a whispered oath, Ysidro reached down and neatly broke his neck.

  ‘Dios.’ The vampire rolled the horrible corpse away, held out his hand to help Lydia to her feet. His fingers were like frozen bone, his long hair hanging in his eyes. ‘Mistress, I—’

  In the same instant that Jamie’s voice shouted, ‘NO!’ a dozen yards away, a shotgun roared.

  Ysidro’s body bowed under the impact of the blast, his white shirt starred suddenly with blood. For an instant his hand closed convulsively on hers, and their eyes met, as if he would have said something to her . . . She was aware of running footsteps, of Jamie and Professor Karlebach racing toward them, Asher tearing the shotgun out of Karlebach’s hand—

  Then Ysidro’s eyes closed. His fingers slipped from hers, and he stepped back from her, his face relaxed into an expression of unearthly peace, and fell into the ebony lake without a sound.

  THIRTY

  ‘He was a vampire,’ was all Karlebach would say. ‘A murderer a thousand times over. How can you shed one single tear for such a thing? What kind of woman are you?’

  Asher knew there was no hope of making him understand. Kneeling – cradling Lydia in his arms, her body shaking though she made not a whisper – he replied quietly, ‘She’s a woman who has just had her life saved and seen her rescuer killed before her eyes.’

  Karlebach’s face was the face of an Old Testament prophet, who speaks the judgement of God and is not moved. ‘He was a vampire.’ It was as if, for that space of time, he knew neither of them, nor anything beyond that fact.

  The yellow light of flames sprang up behind the roofs of the Tso compound and showed Asher the trim little shape of Count Mizukami making his way down from the broken gate. ‘Madame Ashu—’

  ‘Is well.’ Asher rose to his feet with Lydia held against him, all that exhaustion and the pain in his side would tolerate. Her face pressed to his shoulder, her hands gripped his torn sleeves convulsively, unable to speak or to meet the eyes of anyone around her. ‘But I’m taking her back to the hotel. You’ll tidy up here?’ He glanced toward the spreading blaze now visibly licking above the roofs.

  ‘It is done.’ Mizukami must have used the spare petrol from the boot of his motor car, or else found lamp oil in one of the rooms near the vampire Li’s prison. ‘I even sent a man for the Fire Department.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Asher felt drained, emptied of every thought and feeling except that Lydia was alive and unhurt.

  And that Ysidro was dead at last.

  Young Private Seki, chalk-pale, brought the motor car around to the spot where Big Tiger Lane opened on to the lakeshore. Asher’s boots crunched the icy sand as he stumbled up the short slope, laid Lydia gently in the back seat and covered her with the car rug. Rigid and silent, Karlebach got into the front beside the driver, his shotgun by his side.

  And he has a right, thought Asher wearily, closing his eyes, to be bitter. He did the right thing, by all the laws of God and man, and received no thanks for it. Not even acknowledgement for the death of the young man he loved like a son. Instead he was betrayed by one whom he’s seen falling further and further beneath a vampire’s seducing spell.

  No wonder he pulled that trigger, even as Ysidro saved Lydia’s life.

  Shooting Ysidro had been an act of salvation, to free both Asher and Lydia from servitude to the vampire’s spells.

  He is right. Asher leaned back into the leather of the car seat, Lydia’s head resting on his thigh. Under his hands her tangled hair was wet silk. Lydia alive. Lydia unhurt. He’s right.

  In the dark behind his eyelids, Asher saw Ysidro’s body buckle under the spray of silver buckshot. White shirt starred with blood, colorless hair like spider silk around the scarred and skull-like face. No expression, neither pain nor joy, anger nor regret, like a strange statue wrought of ivory, air and time.

  Saw him fall backward into the near-freezing black water.

  Into p
eace. Into death. Into Hell. A thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down . . .

  The following day Karlebach informed him that he had changed his ticket home, and instead of traveling by the Ravenna with the Ashers at the end of the month, he would take the Liliburo out of Shanghai next week, alone.

  On the night of the twentieth of November, Asher dreamed of Don Simon Ysidro.

  He’d gone with Ellen and Miranda to see Rebbe Karlebach off at the train station, for his journey to Shanghai: Lydia still kept to her room. He’d offered to accompany his old teacher south on the day-long journey, and when Karlebach had refused – Mrs Asher, he said, needed her husband at her side – had arranged for the Legation clerk P’ei Cheng K’ang to go with him, and to see him safely on to the boat. On the platform the old man had embraced him, and returning the embrace Asher had felt how fragile his old friend seemed, stiff and brittle and unyielding. Karlebach had whispered his name, and Asher had said, ‘Thank you, my friend.’ He did not say for what.

  They both knew – Asher felt this through his bones – that nothing would be the same between them again.

  It had been a week of nine-days’-wonders in the Legation Quarter. The news that Sir Grant Hobart’s body had been found in the fire-gutted house of the notorious Mrs Tso (‘I can’t say I’m wildly surprised,’ had been Annette Hautecoeur’s comment) had been followed hard by Asher’s resurrection (‘No, no, haven’t the slightest idea what it was all about . . .’), and by Mr Timms’s gruff apology on behalf of the Legation police (‘Telegram from London informs us that the charge was all balderdash – no, they said no more than that . . .’).

  ‘How astonishing,’ Asher had said, with what he hoped was a convincing look of baffled surprise.

  Yet all these developments had been dwarfed by the appearance of five Chinese – presumably cousins of various Legation servants, though there was no way of proving this – and a dilapidated American artist named Jones, who walked into the Legation police station and independently swore that they’d seen Richard Hobart at various times on the night of October twenty-third wearing a tie which in no way resembled the murder weapon. Moreover, the rickshaw-puller who had brought Richard to Eddington’s put in an appearance, and testified in excellent English – he’d been a professor of that language at the Imperial Railway College at Shanhaikuan before the downfall of the dynasty – that when he had brought the young man, incapably drunk, to the gate, it had been to find Holly Eddington’s body lying already dead in the garden. His fare had, in fact, stared down at the body, sobbed pitifully, ‘Oh Holly, who has done such a dreadful thing?’ and had fainted. Mr K’ung had attempted to revive him and had only run away from the scene when people began to come from the house.

  Asher wondered where the dead Mi Ching’s cousins had located an English-speaking rickshaw-puller for the purpose, not to speak of an impoverished American artist. But, Lydia had commented over tea later in the afternoon, it was a very nice touch.

  Lydia had been very quiet through it all.

  Now Asher dreamed of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. Lydia, guidebook in hand, was telling him about the various fearsome statues that stood along its western wall: ‘This is Lu, Magistrate of the Wu Kuan Hell – I think that’s the hell where sinners are fried in cauldrons of oil, only those poor people around his feet in the statue look like they’re being steamed instead of fried . . .’

  ‘Perhaps they’re given a choice,’ Asher suggested.

  ‘Like the dumplings in a native restaurant?’ She looked better than she had all the previous week, as if the horror of what had happened at the Tso compound, the grief at Ysidro’s death, were beginning to loosen their grip on her. She still bore the bruises on her face where Hobart had struck her, and her glasses were her rimless spare pair, which she’d been wearing all week. Under his shirt, waistcoat, jacket and coat – the night was a cold one – Asher was conscious of the sticking-plaster dressing on his ribs.

  ‘And this is Bao Cheng,’ she went on, ‘who was an official of the Sung Dynasty before he was promoted – I suppose you could call it that – to being Magistrate of . . . let’s see . . . the Yama Hell. Is that the one with the metal cylinder they’re supposed to climb with the fire lit inside it? Oh, and here’s Chiang Tzu-Wen . . .’

  They had reached the end of the temple, and in the doorway beside the war god’s banner-draped niche Ysidro stood, wrapped in the earth-colored robe of the temple priests, his pale hair tied back in their fashion. His arms were folded, as if against the chill, for indeed it had snowed that afternoon. A thin layer of it was visible beyond him in the disheveled garden – the pigeon-coops gone now, the garbage cleared away – glittering gently in the brightness of the moon. ‘Mistress,’ he said. ‘James.’

  Lydia gasped, moved an impulsive step towards him, then stopped herself, threw an uncertain glance at Asher. He took the guidebook from her hand and, freed of the encumbrance, she flung herself into Ysidro’s arms.

  Held him, tight and motionless, without a word, rocking a little in his arms. Face pressed to his shoulder, red hair like fire and poppies around the cold ivory spindles of his fingers.

  ‘I’m glad to see you’re all right,’ said Asher.

  ‘I trust, at my age, that a half-dozen pellets of silver in my shoulder aren’t sufficient to discommode me from pulling myself under still water to safety.’ The vampire put a hand on Lydia’s back and added, in his soft, reasonable voice, ‘Hush, Mistress, hush. What is this? Your husband will demand satisfaction of me. Has that lunatic vampire-hunter taken himself off for Prague?’

  ‘This afternoon.’ It was in Asher’s mind to wonder if he would ever see the old scholar again.

  ‘May his ship go down with all hands.’ As he had in the mines, Don Simon looked thin and haggard, and very unhuman. The scars on his face and throat, which he generally used his psychic glamor to cover from living eyes, were shockingly visible. Asher wondered whether this was because this was only a dream, or because of the silver that had scorched his flesh.

  ‘I suppose the thought has never crossed his mind that, had he followed his own dictates and simply destroyed that precious student of his the moment he became infected, rather than giving him the wherewithal to travel and spread the virus, all this might have been avoided.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Asher, ‘I think the thought was very much in his mind. This journey for him was penance – and redemption.’

  ‘At someone else’s expense,’ said the vampire with a sniff. ‘And without asking those he would “help” if they wanted his interference. Like all the Van Helsings of the world, who must become a little mad in order to pursue such phantoms as we. Obsession with us destroys them – as obsession with our own safety destroys us, in the end. I am only grateful,’ he added as Lydia stepped back from him, ‘that ’twas no worse. Is it well with you, Mistress?’

  She smiled a little and straightened her glasses. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Asher. ‘Thank you – more than I can say.’

  Ysidro’s eyes touched Asher’s – asking permission, as gentlemen do. Asher nodded, and the vampire took Lydia’s hand and brushed the ink-stained fingers lightly with cold lips. He released his hold at once, and when Asher held out his own hand to him, took it – a little gingerly – in a skeletal clasp.

  Behind Ysidro, in the shadows of Kuan Yu’s statue, Asher became aware of the priest Chiang, curiously young-looking in the moonlight, his eyes gleaming reflectively, like a cat’s.

  And deep in his dreaming, Asher wondered how he could possibly not have noticed that the old Taoist was a vampire.

  Did he always look like that? Asher had the impression that the man’s coloring had been warmer, not silk pale as it was now. He had no recollection of noticing before that the old man didn’t breathe, nor had he ever taken note – and he couldn’t imagine he had been that unobservant – that the long nails of his hands, like Ysidro’s, were hard and shiny
as claws. Moreover, he had the impression somewhere at the back of his mind that he’d seen the old man in daylight. Whether the psychic illusion did not hold in dreams, or merely because Chiang wished to make matters more clear, Asher saw him now.

  He said, ‘Chiang Tzu-Wen. One of the ten Magistrates of Hell. You were an official in the Han Dynasty and later worshiped as a god in the Moliang District—’

  His Chinese was much better in his dream than it was in real life.

  ‘Long ago.’ The old vampire responded to him in Latin and inclined his head. ‘We all of us – Professor Gellar – have lives which we once lived, once upon a time.’

  He rested his hand on Ysidro’s shoulder, the black claws curving like a dragon’s against the skin of his throat. ‘I will say that I was surprised – and not pleased – to learn that one of those whom I summoned here to deal with the Filthy Ones turned out to be a vampire. We had enough to deal with, my kindred and I, without the concern about a newcomer making alliances that would shift the balance of things here in this city.’

  ‘Without his assistance,’ replied Asher, ‘we could not have destroyed them – if they are indeed destroyed.’

  ‘They are. I – and my kindred – have gone out to the mine and have walked by night among the bridges and temples on the shores of Peking’s five Seas. No trace of the things have we found. Li had summoned to him all those few that dwelled in the city, and all perished together in the flames. We have gone to the place: nothing of them remains.’

  Through the door behind him, in the moonlit garden, Asher was briefly conscious of other shadows among the bare wisteria, the timeless stones: a woman with the unbound hair of a shamaness, a great sturdy man who stood like a warrior, a cold-faced mandarin in the robes of a dynasty long perished. They kept their distance from one another, their eyes like pale marsh-fire, wary and ancient and indescribably alien, more like dragons than human souls.

  And Lydia, who had been listening with difficulty – her Latin being limited to medical texts – stepped forward and put a hand on Chiang’s ragged sleeve. ‘He risked his life to learn of them,’ she said. ‘And he didn’t have to come here.’