Magistrates of Hell

SIXTEEN

The ruined chapel, Ysidro had said, near the old French cemetery.

The rickshaw-puller knew the place. Asher left the man by the steps of the new Cathedral, with instructions (and an extra fifteen cents) to wait for him there. The district had been hammered mercilessly by Boxer cannon, so many of the buildings hereabouts were new and built in the Western style. The chapel ruins looked as if they’d been shuttered up for years.

The moon was dwindling, and at this hour few lamps remained in any of the shops along Shun Chih Men Street. Once dark fell on Peking, the blackness in the huntongs had to be experienced to be believed. The feeble glimmer of his tin dark-lantern barely showed Asher the other side of the alleyways as he made his way on foot toward the chapel. He understood that he was taking his life in his hands, but his life had been, in a sense, a mosquito sitting on the arm of Fate ever since he’d come to China.

On the chapel steps, he paused and put around his neck the silver crucifix he’d purchased early in his association with vampires. He had quickly learned that the holy symbol was only as good as its silver content, at least as far as protection was concerned, but under his collar and scarf he wore the silver chains that never left him. On this occasion the crucifix served another purpose.

He took also from his pocket the little tin box that Karlebach had given him on their arrival in China: crushed, slightly gummy herbs, the bitterness of which was accompanied by a quickening of his heartbeat and a heightened clarity of mind. Vampires hunted by sleepiness and inattention. Even a half-second could make a difference.

Inside, the building was littered with debris. Everything wooden had long since been carried off by the neighbors for fuel. Fury at Western missionaries had left only a single statue of the Virgin still standing, in a niche to the east of the main altar. Raising his lantern Asher saw that her face had been blackened, her nose chipped off, her eyes gouged out. Someone had recently repaired them with new plaster, carefully painted. Her lips still smiled.

He took a candle from his pocket and lit it at the lantern’s flame. This he set on the altar; then he knelt, hands folded. ‘In nomine patrii, et filii, et spiritu sanctii, amen. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum . . .’

His father would be turning in his grave.

But then the old man would be used to the exercise by that time.

And if Father Orsino Espiritu was listening, the Latin prayer – and the unspoken lie that the supplicant was Catholic – might just save his life.

A Jesuit, Ysidro had said.

When the Order came to China in the sixteenth century every country in Europe had been broken on the rack of religious war. To accomplish their conversions in the East, the Jesuits had clothed Catholicism in the trappings of Buddhism, learned the language – almost the only Westerners to do so – and dressed themselves in the robes of Buddhist monks. Later, when the greed of Western merchants had sought to tap China’s riches, they – and the men and women they had converted – were seen as traitors, lackeys of the West.

He has been hiding for most of the past three centuries . . . Ysidro had said of Father Orsino. ‘I hear their voices speaking in my mind . . .’

Asher whispered the Latin of every prayer he could remember, aware that any vampire entering the ruins would be able to hear the pounding of his heart.

Of course the vampires of Peking would watch a Jesuit. So what would they make of the appearance of a second Spanish vampire, save that they were in league? Was that why Ysidro had not been in contact with him since he’d taken refuge in the Chinese City, a week ago now? What would they make of a living man, in the Chinese garb that the Jesuits assumed, whispering Latin prayers in the darkness?

‘At te levavi animam meam: Deus meus, in te confido . . .’ In you I will place my trust . . .

Gray sleepiness crushed down on his mind, stealthy and overwhelming. He thrust himself away from the altar rail in the instant before a clawed hand seized his throat. The hand jerked back, and he heard a curse in antique Spanish; ducked, turned his body as a blow brushed his face. ‘Padre Orsino!’

In the candle’s light he glimpsed the thin white face, the reflective glimmer of eyes. A hand seized his arm and hurled him out on to the stone floor of the nave with an impact that knocked the breath from his body. The vampire pinned him, caught his wrists and again pulled back with a hissing scream of pain and rage. Asher rolled, scrambled clear and shouted, ‘In nomine Patrii, Orsino! I’m here from Ysidro!’

The words weren’t out of his mouth as the vampire slammed him against the ruined altar-rail, clawed hands gripping his shoulders with brutal power.

But Asher felt him hesitate, and he said into that moment’s stillness, ‘Simon Ysidro sent me.’ He spoke Latin. At a guess, Padre Orsino wouldn’t understand modern Spanish.

The vampire tilted his head. Regarded him with eyes that were, in the candlelight, dark as coffee and had clearly not been sane in centuries. Straddling his body, he held Asher without effort against the broken railing and the floor. When he pressed a clawed hand to the side of Asher’s face, it was warm. His clothing smelled of blood.

‘You are his servant?’

‘I am. I am called Asher.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I came to see if you knew that. I have heard nothing of him for seven days.’

‘He is vanished.’ Father Orsino rose. He stood over Asher’s body, a small man whose hair, like his eyes, seemed very dark in the dense gloom of the chapel against the pallor of his skin. He wore the long Manchu ch’i-p’ao and ku trousers, but his hair was sleeked back into a bun on the back of his head, after the fashion of the Chinese before the conquest by the Manchus. ‘Come,’ he said. He glanced around him, held down his hand to pull Asher to his feet – Asher guessed by the pain in his side that the vampire’s violence had cracked a rib or two. ‘They cannot hear us, beneath the earth,’ Orsino whispered conspiratorially. ‘They cannot listen – cannot find me.’

He took Asher by the elbow, picked up the lantern and led the way past the main altar to a broken doorway and the ruin of a vestry. Most of its roof and part of a wall was gone, but there was no sign of rats or other vermin. Another doorway opened on to a stairway down to the crypt, two full turns down into a Stygian abyss that smelled of mold. A new door had been installed at the bottom. There were bolts on its inner side, a hasp with a padlock. The stone vaulting of the crypt beyond barely cleared the top of Asher’s head, and by the lantern’s feeble glimmer he made out piles of dug-up earth, and straw baskets for moving it, among the fat wooden pillars.

Presumably Father Orsino was in the process of making a more secure lair for himself deeper down. Asher wondered where he planned to dispose of the dug-out dirt.

The vampire shot the bolts and turned to face Asher. Though Ysidro was too wary to risk a kill anywhere in the city, Asher knew that the weight of the earth blocked vampire perceptions. Father Orsino might consider it safe.

‘Don Simon told me that I could find you here,’ he said, to remind his host – in case it had slipped whatever was left of his mind – that he, Asher, was supposedly a good Catholic and working for the Pope.

‘He said you could take me back to Rome.’ Orsino set the lantern on a corner of the huge old chest that lay, half-hidden, by the low pillars at the nearer end of the crypt, and he folded his heavy, thick-fingered hands. ‘He said His Holiness would forgive me my sins, because I have in all these years killed only the damned. God save me . . .’

‘I know nothing of what His Holiness said to Ysidro. It is only my task to serve him.’

‘What, none of you know?’ The hushed voice had a twisted shrillness to it, the gleaming eyes narrowed. ‘Are you lying to me? Trying to trap me?’ Orsino seized Asher again by the shoulder of his coat, shoved him back against a pillar. ‘Is that what happened to Don Simon? That you betrayed—?’

‘I know nothing.’ Asher kept his own voice steady with an effort. ‘Truly. It’s why I must find him.’

The Father’s lip lifted back from his fangs. ‘I find it hard to believe that none in your company knows the mandate of His Holiness.’

‘There is no company. Only myself and my master. Did Don Simon tell you otherwise?’

Father Orsino passed a hand over his forehead, his brow suddenly tightening with confusion and pain. ‘They are gods,’ he said. ‘You cannot . . . A man cannot fight against gods.’ He blinked at Asher, dark eyes filled with terror. ‘I’ve done everything I can, but hundreds worship them, you see. Thousands. The living bow down to them in their pagan temples, bring them sacrifices. And they have, each of them, a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand prisoners, dead men, dead women, flesh burned off their bones but walking still. These they call up out of Hell . . .’

‘Have you seen them?’

‘Every day.’ Orsino’s voice sank still further, hoarse with terror. ‘I sleep, and I see them, surrounded in flame with their flayed worshipers all burning around them.’

Truth? Dream? Madness? A recollection of his days trying to convert the Chinese? ‘And they trust their worshipers?’

‘They are gods,’ the priest repeated. ‘Of course their worshipers must obey. Else they themselves will be dragged down to Hell by the bailiffs, Ox-Head and Horse-Face, down a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps to the gates of the First Hell, which is called Chin-kuang. The living must obey them because their ancestors are in Hell, where all unbelievers go. They dare not disobey. Their families will not allow it.’

His face convulsed, and his grip tightened on Asher’s shoulder. ‘Did he send you to trap me? My father . . . and the Pope . . . The monster that first came to the hills was Catholic! Did the Pope send him? I heard him pray . . .’

‘The Pope has not betrayed you.’ Even cold with fright, Asher felt a queasy shiver of enlightenment. ‘The Devil speaks Latin as well as the Pope, Padre. It was the Devil who sent you a monster out of Hell, to try your spirit and your faith. His Holiness would never betray you.’

Father Orsino released his hold, almost threw Asher from him. ‘What you say is true.’ His eyes were ravenous, riveted now to the shoulder of Asher’s ch’i-p’ao where hot blood soaked through the padded cloth.

Get him thinking of something else quickly. ‘Do the vampires rule over their living families here? Is that what it is? That some of them are the ancestors that the family venerates?’

‘No. Yes.’ The vampire stammered as the words disrupted his attention. ‘I–I have never seen them. I don’t know. Not one. Ever, ever in all these long years . . .’

‘Not he who made you?’

The question seemed to confuse Father Orsino, who shook his head. ‘They don’t make others like themselves any more,’ he said. ‘Nor do they suffer one another to make them. They trust no one, do you understand? Not their families, not one another.’

He stepped forward again, put his palms against the sides of Asher’s head, drew him close, his words a frightful halitus of blood. ‘They told me it is the children that lead vengeance to their doors. When we come up out of Hell we are helpless, like snails ripped from their curly armor. It is why they all had to become gods, you see. They wouldn’t let me, because I had sinned. The Yama-King gave them a choice about which Hell they would rule, once he’d reorganized. There used to be twelve thousand, eight hundred hells under the earth, eight dark hells, eight cold hells, and eighty-four thousand hells located on the edges of the universe, though I should imagine some of them were quite small. When I was a man I used to study them.’

He frowned, gazing into Asher’s eyes as if hypnotized. ‘When I was a man—’

‘Is that why he made you vampire, then?’ asked Asher steadily. ‘Because you were not of his own family?’

‘He wanted—’ Father Orsino blinked, trying to call memory back. ‘I no longer remember what he wanted. There was a reason then.’ He pressed his palms hard against Asher’s skull, struggling with some thought.

‘He is—?’

‘Li. Li Jung Shen. He is insane now. His family brings him prey, that he may do their bidding. Except . . .’ He fell silent again, losing the thread of his thought. His hands slackened their crushing grip, only stirred through Asher’s hair, absent-mindedly, as a man might stroke a dog. But his wandering gaze returned to Asher’s shoulder where the blood darkened his coat.

‘Except—?’ Asher reminded him gently.

‘Except when I waken sometimes at fall of dark, I hear him screaming.’

He stepped back a little then, and Asher slipped out of his reach, half breathless with the pain in his side, and gauged the distance to the doorway and the stair. His every instinct told him to flee, but a terrible suspicion was growing in his mind, and he asked instead, ‘Can you tell where?’

The vampire shook his head, a slight gesture, reminiscent of Ysidro’s stillness. ‘Near here,’ he said. ‘A thousand miles straight down beneath the ground. A thousand miles and ten thousand and a hundred thousand miles, beyond the Third Hell, which is for bad mandarins, forgers, and backbiters. The forgers are made to swallow melted gold and silver, to the extent that they forged those metals in life. And the Fifth Hell is the Hell of Dismemberment, where the lustful, murderers, and the sacrilegious are torn into pieces, ground into pulp between rocks, run over by the red-hot iron wheels of spiked vehicles. Bao is the Magistrate of that Hell, Bao Cheng, who used to be a warrior in the time of the Sung emperors: a fearsome man, they say, but a writer of drinking songs and love songs. You are not sacrilegious, are you?’

He caught Asher’s arm again, stared intently into his face. ‘Your father prayed for you. Wanted you to enter the Church. You disobeyed him.’

Did he read that in my thoughts? Or is it of his own father that he speaks? ‘My father wanted me to serve the Church,’ said Asher, quite truthfully . . . Though we won’t go into the subject of which church. ‘I trod my own path, until I came into Don Simon’s service.’

The vampire’s brow twisted again. ‘We are all prisoners of our families,’ he said in a much quieter voice, and his eyes, yellowly reflective in the candle gleam, suddenly seemed to focus. ‘They are the true Magistrates of Hell. Even when we flee them, they live on in our dreams. My mother—’ He stammered on the words. ‘My mother and my uncles wanted me to join the Society of Jesus, because I had a God-given talent for tongues. My father had died fighting the heretics in Holland. It was hard – it was very hard – to tell Christiana that it was not to be between us, Christiana whom I loved – or thought I loved. My uncle told me I would learn to love God more and to see Christiana’s body for what it was, a sack of guts and blood, as are the bodies of all women. But it was hard.’

Very gently, Asher disengaged his arm from the gripping claws. ‘I will ask Ysidro, when I find him, exactly what arrangements His Holiness has made to get you back to Rome. Since I am the one who must make them, and carry them out, I will bring you word here when I hear.’

‘Arrangements—?’

‘To get you back to Rome.’

‘Of course.’ Father Orsino shook his head a little, like a man who realizes he does not remember what he has said. ‘Who is Pope now? I made myself a refuge in the mines, behind bars of silver, behind gates the Magistrates cannot touch. A thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down into the darkness . . . My book is there. Ysidro said he would go get it for me. It is dedicated to His Holiness, but I hear so little of the world.’

‘His Holiness Pius X,’ replied Asher. ‘A most sanctified and resolute man.’ And stubborn and reactionary – the sixteenth-century Inquisitors would probably have regarded him as a Milquetoast for merely declaring Protestant-Catholic marriages ‘religiously invalid’ instead of demanding the lives of those who dared participate in them.

‘And you will speak for me?’

‘I will speak for you. Ysidro, too—’

‘Oh, he has been eaten by the monsters in the mines.’ Suddenly like a friendly priest guiding his parishioner into a confessional, Father Orsino waved Asher toward the stair. ‘This is why I say that you must have some other member of your party who knows the arrangement.’

‘Eaten?’ Asher thought for one instant about going back and picking up his lantern – on the opposite side of the crypt – rather than ascending that long, narrow stair in pitch darkness with a vampire at his elbow, but discarded the idea at once. Not if it meant letting the vampire get between him and the door.

‘He said he was going to the mines. Didn’t I tell you? He went to fetch my book for me, my life’s work, my refutation of all the works of the heretic Luther . . . I told him how to open the silver doors. So they must have eaten him.’

Asher put his hand to the wall of the stair, to guide him up, and – presumably in friendliness – Father Orsino laid a hand on Asher’s back.

‘I’ve given it a good deal of thought, and I think what happened must have been this,’ the priest went on. ‘The First Hell – Chin-kuang, the one closest to the surface of the earth, where Chiang Tzu-wen, who used to be a warrior monk in the days of the Han, is the Magistrate – that is where the cases of the sinners are heard and punishments assigned. But I think that in fact the Second Hell, Chujiang, where Li is the Magistrate, is the Hell of Beasts, where dishonest intermediaries and ignorant doctors are devoured, gored, trampled, torn apart by demons in the form of beasts. And if that is so, then that’s what these creatures are: shou-kuei, beast-devils, who got back into the First Hell through the carelessness of the Magistrate of Chin-kuang, and then managed to get through a hole in the wall of the First Hell and into the mines. That would account for his coming to the mines . . .’

‘Ysidro?’

‘No, no, the Magistrate of Chin-kuang! He’s been there. I thought at one time it must have been Li, the Magistrate of Chujiang, but I don’t think he’d dare. I have heard his footfalls in the dark.’

The priest’s hand tightened on Asher’s arm. He felt Father Orsino move past him. Heard the creak of the broken door, and a moment later – bright after the total blackness of the stair – faint starlight showed him the outlines of the holes in the vestry roof, the dense flat shadows of the broken walls.

‘The shou-kuei will have eaten Don Simon by this time,’ the vampire went on sadly. ‘That is why you must help me, you and your family, to get my book and take it to the Pope. Can I count on you?’

A little breathlessly, Asher said, ‘You may count on me. On us.’

‘God bless you.’ The Jesuit traced before him in the air the sign of the cross, then took Asher by the shoulders and very lightly kissed him on either cheek, lips warm with someone else’s stolen life. ‘And God speed you.’

A moment later, though the chapel was drowned in indigo and starlight, Asher woke with a gasp, as if from a dream, still standing in the ruined vestry before the black hole of the crypt stair. Silvery dawn light filled the room. His ribs hurt as if he’d been hit by a train. Outside in the alley, a woman was shouting the virtues of steamed dumplings.