Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  The old vampire regarded her with a dragon’s inhuman gaze. ‘It is so, Lady,’ he said. ‘And as I said, I was surprised. It is not often that the chiang-shi –’ the pronunciation was completely different from that of his name – ‘display interest in anything but the hunt and their own immediate safety.’ He shared, in part, in Ysidro’s quality of stillness, but Asher detected the momentary flicker of a derisive glance at the vampires in the courtyard beyond the door. ‘We all owe you thanks.’

  The Magistrates in the courtyard – among whom, Asher was interested to note, Father Orsino was not present – did not look as if they thought they owed the yang kwei tse anything, living or dead, but evidently nobody was going to argue with Chiang Tzu-Wen. After a moment they too inclined their heads, then stepped back and dissolved into the moonlight. Their reflective eyes seemed to linger on for a moment more.

  ‘Much as my heart longs to say that it was our pleasure,’ remarked Ysidro, ‘I can assure you, my lord, it was not.’

  ‘Even so.’ Chiang’s hand tightened slightly on his uninjured shoulder, then released him. ‘Yet you did it nevertheless. The Tso woman has been put out of the way, along with poor Li: as you will have observed, the living who meddle in the affairs of the dead are far less dangerous to all than the dead who meddle in the affairs of the living. One hopes that a lesson was learned by all –’ he glanced again toward the now-empty courtyard – ‘and that the matter will not arise another time.’ The last gleam of lingering eyes flickered away.

  Chiang made a move to step away, and Lydia – always insatiably curious – lifted her hand again, as if to stay him. ‘Sir,’ she asked diffidently, in her careful Latin, ‘when Li summoned the Others – the yao-kuei – to him, was it to get him out of there? Or might he have known that they would destroy him – might he have known he couldn’t control them . . . but only wished to end his life in the only way that he could?’

  Chiang considered her for a moment, half a smile touching his mouth. ‘This I do not know, Lady,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Li did not know either. But assuredly, he has gone on to Hell—’ He stepped back into the shadows of the war god’s niche, so that, like the Cheshire cat, only the glimmer of his eyes and the ghost of his voice remained. ‘Not as a Magistrate, but as a humble client, as we all shall one day be.’

  ‘Domine salvet me,’ Ysidro whispered, and from the darkness, Chiang’s voice replied.

  ‘No doubt He will, when He has a use for your services.’

  Waking, Asher laid his hand on the pillow at his side. Swathed in a heavy quilt, Lydia sat beside the window that overlooked Rue Meiji. But she was looking at her hand, and as Asher sat up, she brushed the back of it with her finger, where Ysidro’s cold lips had touched. At his movement she turned her head and her eyes met his.

  She looked at peace.

  He went to her, and she opened the quilt, to wrap him as well. ‘Did you dream about him?’ he asked.

  ‘In the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. You spoke to Mr Chiang in Chinese . . . I’ve never dreamed in Chinese! And then in Latin, of all things. And Chiang—’

  ‘Chiang is a vampire,’ said Asher quietly. ‘By the sound of it, I suspect he’s the Master of Peking.’

  ‘Well, he had no business getting sniffy about the dead meddling with the affairs of the living,’ said Lydia, ‘if he was getting the other priests in the Temple to work for him.’ She pushed her rimless glasses more firmly on to her nose. ‘I think his coffin must be one of those crates in the strongroom below the Temple . . . What did he mean, he summoned us here? We came here because—’

  She broke off, calculating back in her mind how it was they’d happened to journey to China. ‘Chiang killed the thing whose body Dr Bauer found in Mingliang, didn’t he?’

  ‘I think he must have,’ said Asher. ‘With fewer than a dozen vampires in Peking – one of them missing for the past twenty years, and who knows how many of them insane, as Father Orsino is – the Master of Peking may have felt in need of Western help. The Prague vampire nest has never been able to make headway against the Others, and they’ve been there since the fourteenth century. I think Chiang Tzu-Wen must have lain in wait by the mines until he was able to kill one, which he left where a Western doctor would find it. He knew she’d write it up in a journal somewhere. He knew someone would come. I’m guessing he’s dealt with vampire hunters before.’

  ‘The Van Helsings of the world,’ quoted Lydia softly. ‘When Ysidro was trapped in the mine, he said he dreamed of him . . .’

  ‘I think it more likely that Chiang went to the mine himself. It was certainly Chiang who helped me escape from the yao-kuei – and the rats – when they cornered me on the lakeshore. Even at the time I thought my escape was . . . providential. The fact was that he still needed me.’

  Lydia’s hand closed tight on his.

  After a long time she asked, ‘Did Ysidro say in your dream – he didn’t in mine – where he’s going, when he leaves Peking?’

  Asher shook his head. His eyes met those of his wife, troubled behind their thick glasses, afraid for that strange friend whom neither of them had any business speaking to, let alone serving now and again, no matter what the cause. In her dream, he wondered, had she thrown herself into Ysidro’s arms? In her dream, what had Ysidro said to her?

  What kind of woman are you? Karlebach had asked, almost spitting the words.

  And what kind of man am I?

  She wrapped her arms – carefully – around his ribcage, rested her head on his shoulder.

  There’s an answer to that question somewhere. But God only knows what it is.

  Neither dreamed of Don Simon Ysidro again before they left China, nor for a long time thereafter.

  But as he and Lydia walked up the gangplank of the Ravenna at Tientsin a week later in the freezing winter dusk, Asher did notice, among the trunks being loaded in the hold, a massive one of tan leather with brass corners.