Magistrates of Hell

FIFTEEN

Wind from the north sliced Asher’s padded ch’i-p’ao like a razor. The moonlight made a cloud of his breath. All around the shores of the Stone Relics of the Sea, ice formed a rough crystalline collar, and the crowding roofs of fancy tea-houses, ancestral temples, pleasure pavilions and dim-sum parlors shouldered black against the sky.

Not a fleck of light in all that shuttered darkness. Curious, Asher reflected, considering what Grandpa Wu and Ling had both told him: that the empty pleasure-grounds along the lakeshore were haunted these days by thieves, gunrunners, and killers-for-hire. From the humpbacked marble bridge where he stood, the smell of smoke from every courtyard around this side of the lakes came to him, in fierce competition with the refuse dumped on the lakeshore near the mouths of every hutong that debouched there – impossible to tell whether anyone had built a hidden fire along the lake that night.

Then the wind shifted, and for an instant he caught the stink he’d smelled in the mountains, below the Shi’h Liu mines.

Yao-kuei.

They’re here.

That was the short of what he had come to learn. He could go home now . . .

Do the Tso know it yet?

He stepped from the bridge to the muddy verge of the frozen lake itself.

In addition to his knife, his revolver, and a tin dark-lantern, he’d brought with him a sort of halberd that Grandpa Wu had sold him for three dollars American, the kind of thing that gang enforcers carried on late-night forays, like a short sword-blade mounted at the end of a staff. For two nights now he had waited to hear from Ysidro, but the vampire had either gone to ground or, like Father Orsino, was hunting far from Peking. That afternoon Ling had said a friend of her mother’s had smelled ‘rat-monsters’ by the lake. A beggar-child, the woman had said, had disappeared, the third in two weeks.

The Tso family had their headquarters in the triangle of land between the northern and southern lobes of the lake, away to his left across the water. Everyone in this neighborhood worked for them. In daylight, despite the Chinese clothing, Asher knew he could never pass unnoticed. He supposed the sensible thing would be to declare the evening a success, go back to Pig-Dragon Lane, and wait until he heard from Ysidro.

IF I hear from Ysidro.

And if I hear from him before Karlebach looks over Lydia’s shoulder at her police reports some evening and decides to make inquiries here on his own. The old man would have the freedom to come here during the day, but if the Tso were trying to keep inquiries away from the mine, the danger to Karlebach would not be less.

He is obsessed.

Long service in the twilight world – where love of country and duty to the Queen were the only landmarks – had taught Asher what obsession did to men’s judgement. They see what they want to see, his Chief had once said to him. They convince themselves things are safer than they are.

The stench – barely a whiff – disappeared as the wind veered to the north again. From the west, thought Asher. Along the long axis of the northern ‘sea’. Giving the western shore – and the maze of siheyuan that made up the Tso family headquarters – a wide berth, Asher picked his way down counterclockwise along the southern lobe of the lakes, boot soles squeaking in the frozen mud. Movement ahead of him and to his right: he almost jumped out of his skin. But it was only a rat, fattened with garbage to the size of a half-grown cat. Here away from the pleasure pavilions, the waste of soap- and paper-making in the hutongs above him was dumped, as well as the flayed debris of butcher’s stalls that even the ever-hungry poor of the city were unable to use: skulls, shells, cracked horns and the boiled-out husks of hooves. Knowing the Chinese capability for converting the tiniest scraps of waste into something that could be eaten or sold, Asher could only pity the rats trying to make a living off this.

To his right the shore bent away, toward a bridge and another of the city’s canals. The ice on the lake wasn’t thick enough yet to take a man’s weight, and he scanned the black mass of wall and roofs at the top of the bank, searching for the entrance to another hutong. Judging by the filth heaped on the shore just here, it wouldn’t be far. Another rat made the reeds rattle close-by. He saw a third, and a fourth, dart across the open ice, the moonlight so strong that it made little blue shadows around their feet.

Asher moved to the left to skirt the worst of the rubbish – moonlight catching on the lugubrious shapes of skulls and pelvic bones – but his boots broke through the ice. He staggered, the water freezing his feet even through the leather, and waded back the yard or so to the mud and reeds. When true winter came, of course, every child in the city would be out here, skating on the ice . . .

Always provided things haven’t come to shooting by then between the President and the Kuo Min-tang.

The wind that raked his cheeks slackened a little. He smelled it, clearly now despite the cold.

At least one of them, under the bridge.

He turned, to pick his way back along the shore.

And stopped, his breath sticking in his throat. All that formless dark slope, from water’s edge to the wall at the top of the bank, moved with rats.

Shock took his throat like a cold hand. He had never seen that many rats in his life. The silvery-dark scuttering among the reeds was literally like a carpet, alive with a foul, bubbling animation. When he turned they sat up, all of them. Eyes like a spiderweb dewed with flame.

Oh, Jesus.

Looking at him.

The smell of the Others grew stronger behind him. In the moonlight it wasn’t easy to be sure, but he thought he saw something move along the lakeshore, a hundred yards from where he stood. There . . . Black, and man-high against the cold glimmer of the ice. Asher started to edge back, but the rats were moving, too, streaming down behind him. The thought of being swarmed brought nightmare panic.

The thought of being wounded – of wounding the yao-kuei in a fight and getting enough of their blood into his own veins to turn him into one of them – brought the instant conviction: No. Not as long as there’s a bullet left. There really were worse things than death.

He waded out into the lake, ice breaking before his legs and the water excruciating. Plowed his way back toward the mouth of Big Tiger Lane, which led south toward more populous streets. A yao-kuei came down the slope toward him at a shambling run, from another hutong somewhere ahead along the wall in the dark. Asher backed further into the water, almost to his waist. Debris underfoot slithered and rocked, and he cut at the first of the rats with his halberd, struggling to keep his balance.

The next moment the yao-kuei flung itself at him, floundering in the water, clawed hands grabbing, fanged mouth gaping to gouge. Asher had sufficient experience with quarterstaff and single-stick to know how to leverage the halberd blade to deadly effect, and his first blow took the thing’s head three-quarters off . . . but only three-quarters. Head dangling by a flap of flesh, arteries fountaining blood, the yao-kuei staggered, threshing its clawed hands to find its prey. Asher stepped in as close as he dared and severed the hamstrings of both legs, then turned and stumbled through the water, scanning the banks.

He was in luck. Something – a dog pack, he thought, though in moonlight and the black shadows of the bank it was impossible to tell – had scented the enormous multitude of rats on the bank and charged in for a hunt. Asher had an impression of scuttling black forms, of red eyes sparking as the smaller animals fled. He pulled the slide from his lantern, hurled the tin light into the thick of the rats that swarmed between him and the dark rectangle that he hoped and prayed was the opening to Big Tiger Lane. Everything on the bank was wet with slush, but the scant oil in the lantern’s reservoir flared up as it hit the ground. The rats scurried from the flame, and Asher ran upslope as he’d never run before.

From the corner of his eye he glimpsed two yao-kuei running up the bank far behind him, moving as if coordinated by some unheard communication. His mind logged the phenomenon even as he threw himself into the indigo chasm of the alleyway, as he fled, stumbling, one hand on its wall to guide him.

He didn’t stop running till he reached the back gates of the Forbidden City; skirted its massive walls, taller than the average London house, clear around, to pass it on the eastern side rather than go anywhere near the walls of the Palace Lakes to the west. The Palace Lakes connected with the ‘Seas’, as did the Forbidden City’s moats and the canal that flowed a little further east. Soaked to the waist, shivering and numb, Asher finally hailed a rickshaw near the new University, but he flinched every time they passed over another canal.

At this hour the streets were empty. He thought of Lydia, safe among lace-trimmed pillows in the Wagons-Lits Hotel, and wondered if she were being watched.

Probably. By the Tso Family or those who might work for them – who might or might not be riding Grant Hobart like a horse on a curb bit. Or by the Legation police, who wanted nothing more than to do their duty and slap a suspected traitor in a cell where some employee of the Tso would have a good chance to get at him . . .

Asher rubbed his frozen fingers and wondered how long his hideout in Pig-Dragon Lane would be safe.

And whether Karlebach would stay out of trouble until it was safe to get word to him.

And if Lydia was safe.

And what had happened to Ysidro . . .

It was three days before Lydia realized that Ysidro was missing.

On Sunday – the day after Lydia received Mizukami’s packet of further police reports – the Count himself called at the Wagons-Lits Hotel, to extend to her whatever help he was capable of giving and, a little to her surprise, to offer to arrange her journey home.

‘Thank you.’ She leaned across the hearth of the blue-curtained private parlor off the hotel’s lobby, pressed the Colonel’s white-gloved hand. ‘I feel that I can be of some use here. The task Jamie set out to accomplish is unfinished.’ Her eyes met Mizukami’s – slightly blurred even at a distance of two feet. She put back the veils of her hat, an elegant confection of sable tulle and plumes, to see him more clearly. ‘And it is something which cannot be walked away from.’

‘I honor you for wishing to continue it, Madame. You are willing, then, to go on as you have begun with the reports? For I begin to suspect that these tenma – these creatures – may indeed be in Peking as well.’

‘I am, thank you,’ said Lydia. ‘Though it’s rather difficult to pick out patterns in a foreign country, a world not my own. Could you – would you . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Is it possible that it is within your powers to get me access to banking records as well?’

‘Nothing simpler.’ He took a small tablet from the pocket of his plain blue uniform jacket and made a note to himself. ‘You understand that the Chinese – particularly the more traditional families – use a different system . . .?’

‘This would be Western banks,’ said Lydia. ‘The Franco-Chinois, the Hong Kong Specie Bank, the Indochine . . .’

‘It will be my pleasure, Dr Asher.’

She was aware that something she’d said had sparked his curiosity. His head tilted a little, and she felt, though she could not see his expression clearly, that behind his own thick lenses he was studying her face.

Crossing the lobby to return to her suite, she was accosted by the most persistent of her would-be suitors, Mr Edmund Woodreave: tallish, stooped, pot-bellied and wearing a coat which had seen better days. ‘Mrs Asher,’ he said, striding so quickly to cut her off from the stairs that she would have had to break into a run to avoid him, ‘I beg of you to give me the opportunity to express to you how sorry I am . . .’

‘Please . . .’ She made one of her Aunt Lavinnia’s best I’m-going-to-faint gestures.

‘Of course.’ Woodreave took her hand. ‘I quite understand. I only mean to tell you how deeply I appreciate the position in which you find yourself now, and to place myself entirely at your service.’

‘Thank you,’ said Lydia, in her most frail and failing accents. ‘If you will—’

He tightened his eager grip. ‘I hope you know that you can call upon me, at any time, for any service whatsoever. I know we’re not well acquainted, but I know also how difficult it is to be suddenly left on your own—’

‘I’m quite—’

‘—and any service that I can render you, at any hour of the day or night, you have only to send a note round to my lodgings at the Legation . . .’

Only the rigor of Lydia’s instruction by her Nanna, four aunts, and a stepmother prior to being brought ‘out’ in London Society, that she could not, must not, ever ever scream at anyone: Would you go away and let me alone? no matter how much they deserved it – and the knowledge that to do so now might announce to someone that she was not truly a widow and that Jamie was hiding somewhere – kept her silent for the next thirty minutes while Mr Woodreave explained to her how terrible it was to be a widow and how much he would like to help her.

Returning to her suite, she then had to deal with a stream of callers who arrived to pay their respects. Madame Hautecoeur and the Baroness turned up first – indeed, it was the Baroness who finally drove Mr Woodreave from the lobby – and presided over the tea table, bearing the brunt of the conversational duties while Paola Giannini stayed, loyal and blessedly silent, at Lydia’s side. Lydia felt sick with dread that Lady Eddington would appear. Much of the talk, in fact, was of that bereaved lady, who was preparing for the terrible task of accompanying her murdered daughter’s body home to England on the Princess Imperial. The women who came to comfort Lydia in her supposed grief spoke with genuine sorrow of Holly, and for the most part she hadn’t the courage to even open her mouth.

She finally pleaded a headache, and for the remainder of the day she stayed in her room, reading stories to Miranda and tallying police reports . . .

And scanning through banking records that were delivered at supper time, for any of a dozen names she had encountered in previous research.

On the following day she found one.

Esteban Sierra of Rome (does he REALLY have a house in Rome?) had made arrangements not only to open a substantial account in the Banque Franco-Chinoise, but also to rent a storage room in its underground vault. For ‘antiquities and objets d’art’ said the application, in that strong, vertical handwriting with its odd loops and flourishes. Current contents: a single large trunk.

Don Simon had told Jamie once that vampires knew when the living were on their trail. People who lingered once too often on the sidewalk opposite a suspect house. Faces seen in neighborhoods where the vampires, with their hyper-acute awareness of human features, knew every face. By showing even an interest in the underground bank-vault, the ‘antiquities and objets d’art’, Lydia was aware she had committed the paramount sin of bringing ‘Esteban Sierra’ to the attention of anyone. She – and Jamie – had only lived this long because Ysidro understood that they knew the rules.

She left the curtains of her window half-open, half-closed yet again, as she had last night and the night before.

In the morning she sent Count Mizukami a note.

The Count was the soul of discretion. He had watched events in China long enough – and had sufficient familiarity with its current ‘acting’ President – to understand the danger of a single wrong word, the smallest misplaced whisper, flying to official ears. He accepted without question Lydia’s word that nothing must be spoken of her visit to the bank vault. He must acquire permission, and the keys, but only Lydia would be permitted to enter.

The aplomb with which he made these arrangements – with which he could make such arrangements – caused Lydia to wonder a good deal about the contents, and renters, of the bank’s other strongrooms.

Just before closing time on Wednesday, the sixth of November, Mizukami and Ellen conducted Lydia two doors down the street to the bank, and a clerk escorted them as far as the stairs. Her veils over her face, the rustle of her black silk skirts like the scraping of silver files in the stillness of the underground hallway, Lydia made her way by the bright electric glare to the vault door marked 12. The clerk had explained the procedure for opening it, and she guessed she would be very politely searched by a female bank employee the moment she emerged. She was aware of her heart pounding: he would be furious, she knew, when he learned that she had violated the secrecy with which he surrounded himself.

It might lose her his friendship: that queer, shining shadow that shouldn’t exist but did. If he heard her – felt her – through his dreams, he would be cursing her now.

But he might be in danger.

When last they had spoken, she had seen the fear in his eyes.

As the application said, there was only one thing in the vault: a huge tan leather travel-trunk with brass corners, easily large enough to hold the body of a man. He’s keeping his clothing and books somewhere else . . .

It was like him, she thought as the door shut behind her, to rent a bank vault next door to their hotel.

From her handbag she took her silvery spectacle-case, lifted her veils aside and donned her glasses.

The trunk was closed. She knew it could be locked from the inside. The outer locks were just for show. It was daylight outside, though not a ray of it penetrated to this room. He would be asleep. With the door closed the silence was like a weight, pressing in on her eardrums. She’d asked him once how much vampires were aware of, during their daytime sleep, and he had only said, ‘The dreams of vampires are not like the dreams of men.’

Forgive me . . .

She took a deep breath, put her hands on the trunk’s lid, and pushed.

It opened with soundless ease.

The trunk was empty.