Magistrates of Hell

TWENTY-ONE

Last year, as they had traveled through Eastern Europe together, Ysidro had said, There is a strangeness in Prague . . .

Heart racing slightly from the last of Karlebach’s stay-alert powder, and cracked ribs gouging him at every step, Asher slipped through the courtyards of Grandpa Wu’s compound, feeling a little like a ghost himself. Beyond his own deserted courtyard, most of the lamps had been put out already. He passed by men belatedly fastening shutters over their windows and women trading talk in doorways after their children had been put to bed. But they all looked aside from Mr Invisible. He stepped past a screen and so out by one of the compound’s several subsidiary gates into Big God of Fire Temple Alley without garnering so much as a glance.

Deep night lay on Peking.

With any luck, by the time he reached the Stone Relics of the Sea, the Tso vampire would be out hunting and the Tso themselves asleep.

Get in and get out, he told himself. You can’t learn any more just watching the place from the outside.

Yesterday’s twilight reconnaissance had identified three areas of the Tso compound which the state of the roofs had led Asher to believe were deserted. One of these had a gate, the old-fashioned bronze lock of which Asher was fairly certain he could pick. He carried a dark-lantern and kept his revolver in the pocket of his baggy ch’i-p’ao. It would be death to use it, since a shot would waken the household.

There was, almost certainly, a vampire in the Tso compound. Maybe – the thought made him flinch – a nest of them.

And there might be yao-kuei as well. Karlebach had spoken of the enmity between the vampires and the Others in Prague: the vampires fear them . . . more than they do any of the living . . . Sometimes they will kill a vampire: open its crypt, and summon rats to devour it while it sleeps . . .

But the rules were different in China. He had no idea what he would find, behind those tall gray walls.

But whatever it was, he had no desire to see it fall into the hands of President Yuan Shi-k’ai, who had proved already that he was willing to make any alliance, use any means, to keep his power.

And whatever had befallen Ysidro, Asher knew that he was now on his own.

In Shun Chin Men Ta Street he signaled a rickshaw – the one commodity one was virtually certain to find on the streets at literally any hour, outdoing even the prostitutes – and, after flashing his pass at the gate guards, had it take him as far as the old palace of Prince Ch’ing. From there he crossed the Jade Fountains canal on a footbridge and worked his way back along the dark hutongs, watching and listening for what he guessed he would not be able to either see or hear. Even at this hour, in the larger streets there were wine shops open, amber oil-light outlining the open gates of courtyards from which the rough voices of men spilled like gravel. He heard the rattle of pai-gow tiles and the sweet, nasal wail of sing-song girls. When he passed the Empress’s Garden he saw the courtyard – and the encircling galleries within – filled with soldiers: Russian, German, Japanese.

He crossed into the darkness on the other side of the hutong, used the reflected light to check his map again. He was close. The new moon was barely a thread and the alleyways pitch-black. Anything could be watching him, listening to his breathing . . .

In Big Tiger Lane a rickshaw passed him, driver panting. The dim gold lamplight of a gate opening was like a bonfire’s blaze in the dark. Asher flattened against a wall as a tall man emerged, wrapped in a black European overcoat. The Chinese who came out a moment later said, ‘My threshold is honored by your honored foot, sir.’

Grant Hobart’s unmistakable bray responded, ‘You mean your money belt is honored by my honored money! Say what you mean, you damn pander.’

The Chinese bowed – a small man, gray-haired, in a dark ch’i-p’ao; presumably An Lu T’ang. ‘It is as your honor pleases.’

Hobart grunted. ‘Slippery bastard,’ he said, in English, this time, and got into the rickshaw. ‘Not that way, idiot,’ he added in Chinese as the puller started away.

‘Best you go over the marble bridge and past the Drum Tower, honored sir,’ added An, with another bow. ‘There are western soldiers at the Empress’s Garden. Better to avoid Lotus Alley tonight.’

Hobart swore, and the rickshaw maneuvered awkwardly in the narrow lane. Asher turned his face to the wall as it passed him again, though he was fairly certain that, coming from the lighted gateway, Hobart would be unable to see him in the alley’s darkness. Damn it, Asher wondered, does a riot mean the Tso will have more guards out? There’ll be stragglers all over the neighborhood . . .

But not around in the back of the compound, he reminded himself. If anything, a fight among the soldiers will draw whoever is awake to the front of the siheyuan . . .

He found Prosperity Alley, which led, after several windings, to the lakeshore. So deep was the darkness there that he had to count his steps, his hand to the plastered brick of the wall, to find the doorway he had earlier marked. He opened the slide on the lantern barely enough to show him the lock, and while coaxing the rusted, old-fashioned wards he kept having to stop and re-warm his numb fingers against the hot metal of the lamp. He told himself, a dozen times during this process, that it was rare – unheard of – for the Others to come anywhere near lights and people.

In Prague they’d stayed down in the river bed and on the shallow islands that broke the stream. If you don’t go looking for them, you are generally safe, Karlebach had said.

He was nevertheless aware of the pounding of his heart. Now if only this is one of the nights when the vampire goes hunting . . .

A shot cracked, barely sixty yards away. Asher’s head jerked around, tracking the direction of the sound . . .

Dim shouts, muffled by the turns of walls and alleys. The shrill screams of women.

The Empress’s Garden.

The soldiers.

Asher whispered a prayer of thanks. Every guard in the Tso household would now be at the front of the compound, close to what sounded like a spreading riot . . .

He pushed open the gate. With any luck the brouhaha would last long enough for him to get a good look around, always supposing he didn’t encounter a vampire that had become too timid to venture out of its lair. But even that was preferable to running smack into a squad of Madame Tso’s bully boys by day.

Behind the shelter of the screen wall Asher surveyed the courtyard in the thin blue starlight. Dust lay in drifts from last week’s storm. Crippled weeds had flourished and died along the foundations of the surrounding buildings. Clearly, no one had been there in months.

He slipped around the screen, ducked through the nearest door: the tao-chuo-fang, the north-facing building which received the least sunlight. Inauspicious, a kitchen or laundry . . .

He slipped the slide from the lantern again: tall cupboards with their doors open, empty blackness inside; dishes on slatted wooden counters covered with dust. A few torn sacks. In one corner a trapdoor opened on to a ladder and led to a tiny root-cellar, cold as an icebox and damp with the proximity of the Seas. Splintered boxes, rat-chewed baskets, and stacks of cheap dishes, the kind one gave servants to eat off.

He scrambled up the ladder again, made a circuit of the buildings around the court. Under the cheng-fang – the main building, large and south-facing and generally given over to the formal reception room and the bedrooms of the master and mistress of the house – he found a larger vault, this one brick-lined and accessed by narrow steps, clearly a strongroom dug at some earlier period and containing forgotten treasures: bronze incense-burners of an antique pattern, a small chest which proved to hold hundreds of age-brown silk scrolls with the formal paintings of someone’s ancestors, an exquisite p’i-p’a inlaid with shell. Reascending, he could find no evidence of a cellar beneath the ‘backside house’ behind the cheng-fang, so strode swiftly down the covered walkway to where he calculated the next deserted courtyard would lie.

Drifted dust, empty goldfish-kongs, stacks of tubs for ornamental trees . . .

And the fishy, rotten, pervasive smell of the Others, which prickled the hair on the back of his neck.

It was strongest near the cheng-fang. Rats scuttled around the building’s padlocked door. The lock was brand-new, bright in the sliver of Asher’s lantern-light. When he opened it and gently pushed the doors, from somewhere in the building – somewhere below him – he heard a voice call, ‘Ma-Ma . . .’

The meaning the same, curiously, in English as in Chinese.

Mama.

He closed his eyes. Sick shock flowed over him as he understood what Madame Tso planned, and what she had done.

It is our families, Father Orsino had said, who are the Magistrates of Hell.

Had he known?

In a former bedchamber that flanked the cheng-fang’s main hall, a trap door stood open where, logically, a bed would once have been. Next to the black square of the hole stood a small table, half-covered with empty pottery cups and bottles that sent up a queasy metallic reek. Like Karlebach’s experiments, he thought, with the drugs that he’d given his student Matthias, in the hopes that it would stop the virus from consuming his body.

Or, in this case, maybe only with the intention of slowing down some of its effects?

Dark spatterings, like the stains of dripped blood, marked the edge of the table, the floor around the trapdoor.

When he bent over the square of blackness a voice from below called softly, ‘Is it you, Aunt?’

And a bleating cry, like the bray of a goat: ‘Mama—’

Asher rested his forehead briefly against the wall. A metallic clink from the abyss: hinges or bars. The smell of human waste mixed with the fishy nastiness of the yao-kuei. Asher didn’t imagine there was much competition for cleaning whatever cells the two men – or former men – occupied down below in the darkness there. He moved soundlessly across the bedchamber to the door of the main hall . . .

. . . then flung himself sideways as a sword flashed in the lantern-light, inches from his face.

The blade jerked back mid-stroke. Round spectacles glinted. ‘Ashu Sensei—’

Count Mizukami held out his hand for silence.

Asher caught him by the elbow, steered him across the hall and so to the starlight outside. The Count sheathed his sword, an oiled whisper. His face showed not so much a flicker of surprise to see Asher alive. ‘They are down there?’

‘Caged, I think,’ whispered Asher. ‘Being taken care of, and still human enough to talk and think. One of them’s Madame Tso’s son, another’s her nephew.’

Mizukami’s breath hissed sharply. Then after a moment’s silence, ‘They could have met the tenma on the shore of the Seas. Could have been infected by them there. Your most extraordinary wife found evidence of disappearances in this district, beyond what the rioting last spring could account for – and even the fighting among the criminal gangs. And yesterday, when we rode into the hills to survey how best to blow up all entrances to the mines, Dr Bauer said that she was given money by President Yuan, for all remaining evidence of the things in the hills.’

‘I’ve seen Madame Tso twice with Huang Da-feng,’ returned Asher grimly. ‘Yes, her son and her nephew could have stumbled into the yao-kuei on their way home across the marble bridge some night and been accidentally infected in the course of defending themselves, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Is Mrs Asher all right? And Dr Karlebach?’

‘They are well. You have married a samurai, Ashu Sensei, and one who keeps her secrets well. She has gone into deep mourning on your behalf and is being courted by every bachelor diplomat in the Quarter.’

Asher grinned in spite of himself. ‘She’ll murder me if we ever get out of this alive . . .’

Mizukami smiled. ‘I have seen your love for this woman, Ashu Sensei, and hers for you. She veils herself in black and weeps where people can see her, but her eyes are not red. Nor are they the eyes of a woman who has lost that which she most treasures. And she told me that you speak well of gelignite for blowing up the tunnels in the mines.’

Asher rolled his eyes.

‘She does well,’ insisted Mizukami. ‘And the grief of your friend Ka-ru-ba-ku Sensei is genuine and terrible to see. His heart and soul are now given to vengeance.’ He nodded toward the blackness of the cheng-fang behind them. ‘So you think that, to gain some advantage, this monstrous woman has had her own son, her own nephew, deliberately infected by these creatures. Why? What would it gain her that she could sell to Yuan? Surely she does not think they will be able to control them, and the rats at their command as well?’

‘Not her nephew and her son,’ said Asher. ‘We have one more thing to find.’