Magistrates of Hell

TWENTY-THREE

‘Forty.’ Asher turned Ysidro’s note over in his fingers.

Though the cottage was wired for modern electrical lamps, Mizukami clearly preferred the dimmer glow of paraffin. An oil-lamp stood – incongruous with its pink-flowered globe – on the small Chinese table in the corner, and by its honey-colored light the queer letters – drawn with a writing brush as if they were pictures – were clearly readable on the stiff yellow paper.

Other than the lamp and its table, the room, like all those in the house, was furnished in the Japanese style, which to a Westerner’s mind meant not very furnished at all. When Asher and Mizukami had returned there, servants had brought out quilts for Asher to sleep on, a neat dark square that took up two-thirds of the floor.

He now sat cross-legged on the floor mats beside a low table, Lydia perched on a cushion at his side.

A servant had brought tea, and then left them alone.

It was nearly dawn.

‘Forty isn’t so very many.’ Lydia spoke in the neutral tone that Asher had observed her use when she was deeply troubled about something.

He knew what it was: what she wasn’t saying.

‘It is when there’s only five or six in the defending party,’ he replied. ‘And when you know that if you’re wounded – if enough of their blood gets into the cut – you’ll be one of them within days.’

Lydia looked down at her hands. Not saying – because she could not say it, not even in her own heart – we have to get him out.

The words stood between them as they discussed the explosives, and chlorine gas, and how to keep the rats at bay long enough to plant the gelignite charges. (‘Do the German regiments have any flammenwerfer they’d lend us, I wonder?’)

Asher understood. It was one thing to say, He is what he is, and he cannot help what he is. The same was true of Grant Hobart. Karlebach had said to him once of Ysidro, Every kill he makes henceforth will be upon your head, and Asher knew that this was the truth.

The fact that Don Simon Ysidro had gone to the mines in the first place to help Asher’s investigation of the Others – to keep the threat from spreading further – made no difference.

Nor did the fact that he had saved Asher’s life, and Lydia’s, and that of Miranda before she was born.

The fact that Asher had himself killed, repeatedly, over the span of nearly twenty years in the service of the Department made no difference, either. He had walked away from it. Ysidro could not, and never would.

To do him justice, the vampire was probably not expecting rescue. Nevertheless, Asher felt like a Judas, the pain of betraying and deserting a comrade grinding in him like the poisoned barbs of an arrow.

‘She really deliberately infected her son, and then her nephew – two of her nephews! – with the blood of the Others, for . . . for the sake of power?’ Lydia shook her head disbelievingly, when Asher told her of what he’d found in the Tso compound, and what he’d overheard. ‘How could she? How could anyone do that?’

He knew she was thinking of Miranda. Tiny, perfect, like a red-and-white flower . . .

‘She’s a woman who had her feet mutilated by her own mother before she reached the age of six,’ replied Asher, ‘so that she’d be “beautiful” enough to sell to someone whose influence would help her family.’

Lydia started to say something else, then couldn’t, and only shook her head.

‘A woman whose feet are bound lives in daily pain for the rest of her life, Lydia. I wouldn’t say it gave Madame Tso a hatred for her family, but I can’t see how it wouldn’t give you a rather specialized view of what a family can reasonably ask its members.’

‘And I thought Aunt Louise was bad . . .’

‘I don’t know how Madame Tso found herself in the position to mutilate the vampire Li and make him her prisoner,’ Asher went on quietly. ‘Whether it was chance, or whether he trusted her enough to let her know where he slept.’

‘Well, I must say it certainly explains why the Peking vampires don’t trust the living.’

‘Or anyone. My guess is, once she had him at her mercy, she starved him—’

‘It’s what I’d do,’ agreed Lydia reasonably. ‘That is, if I were – um – that kind of person . . .’

Asher brought up her hand and kissed it. ‘I’ve seen you in the dissecting rooms, Best Beloved, and you are that kind of person. You just haven’t had her motives. There’s nothing I wouldn’t put past you, if Miranda were in danger.’

‘Well, no.’ She blinked at him behind her spectacles, as if his observation were self-evident.

‘Later she had victims brought to him, in exchange for his using a vampire’s ability to read dreams – and plant dreams – to give her husband and his enforcers an edge over other criminal families in Peking.’

‘And reading dreams,’ went on Lydia, ‘and being able to . . . to touch the minds of others, the way very old vampires can do, he would have become aware of the minds of the Others. Or the hive mind, anyway, which is what it sounds like they have.’ Her brow furrowed briefly. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to have had Madame Tso’s dreams for the past twenty years . . .’

‘No. But if he’s been sending her wake-up-screaming nightmares every night for two decades, it’s still a price she’s willing to pay. She’s willing to pay any price for power for herself and her family – including her sons and her nephews. It sounds as if she tried to force Li into making them into vampires, and when Li wouldn’t cooperate, infected him – and them – with the blood of the Others, in the hopes of controlling the Others through Li. I’m guessing that not everyone in the family knows about Li.’

‘Well, it’s not a secret I’d share with some of the people in my family.’ Lydia shifted her weight on the cushion. She had arrived, Asher was hugely amused to observe, fastidiously turned-out in a black silk mourning costume glittering with beads of jet. Her red hair, now unloosed from its careful chignon, stood out against the dark cloth like a river of lava. ‘Can the mind of a contaminated victim be preserved by those potions you saw in the Tso compound?’

‘Matthias Uray’s was, as long as he was able to take them.’ Asher shivered at the thought. ‘But whether the nephew I saw – Chen Chi T’uan – will be strong enough to control the vampire Li is another matter.’

‘It’s a scheme which may turn on her,’ went on Lydia thoughtfully, ‘if Li becomes able to control these yao-kuei with any kind of accuracy. I wonder how precise his control will be, once he gets the hang of it? If it doesn’t make him insane first, that is. I must say,’ she added, ‘it does serve them all right.’

Asher hid a grin, then sobered. ‘It would,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t serve those around them right. And the innocent in every country on earth, if President Yuan decides to sell the secret to buy himself alliances. Those are the ones who’ll suffer. This man who brought you the message –’ he touched it again, on the table beside them – ‘this priest . . .’

‘Chiang – I think that was what he said his name was. He’s one of the priests from the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. At least, he wears the same kind of robe.’

‘A yi,’ said Asher. ‘It’s the type of clothing the Chinese wore before the Manchu conquered them and made them wear ch’i-p’ao and queues. The Japanese adopted it from them, way back in the days – you’ll usually see it only on temple priests. He said he dreamed this?’

‘Copied it from a dream.’ Lydia turned the paper around, studied the characters again in the lamplight. Even the idiosyncrasies of Ysidro’s handwriting had been reproduced, the characteristic sixteenth-century loops on the Fs and Ys, the flourish on the end of each S.

‘He must have a high degree of psychic sensitivity,’ said Asher thoughtfully, ‘given that Ysidro is trapped beneath the earth. Would he agree to be hypnotized, I wonder?’

‘We can ask. His English isn’t good, though. Do you know how to hypnotize people, Jamie?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But he may agree to put himself into a meditative state that would allow us to communicate with Ysidro in the mine.’

She met his eyes then, opened her mouth – and closed it. Only looked at him, her eyes, behind the thick rounds of glass, filling with tears.

And what? she would have asked him, he guessed. Ask him to help us even though we’re going to abandon him? Seal him in a grave – a grave filled with corrosive gas, skin and eyes burning away, conscious, blind, and without hope of ever escaping – forever?

Yes, and yes . . . and yes.

Like playing chess, reflected Asher wearily. Or more simply, like playing Patience. When you know five moves ahead that you can’t win and there’s nothing you can do about it . . .

Remember me kindly . . . Ysidro had written.

He gathered her into his arms. She took off her glasses, laid them on the table beside Ysidro’s note, and pressed her face to his shoulder, shivering as if with bitterest cold.

‘Voice in dreams.’

The priest Chiang passed his hand across his high, balding forehead, white brows contracted with pain.

Lydia had not left Mizukami’s bungalow until almost daybreak; Asher had slept until past noon. Mizukami’s dwelling stood near the end of the grassy mall in a corner of the Japanese Legation, not far from the small service-gate that let on to an alley off Rue Lagrené. The military attaché’s servants (and, surprisingly, his mistress, whose voice Asher heard through the thin walls but whom he never saw) were loyal, quiet, and treated Asher as if he were simultaneously very honored and completely invisible. It was not difficult to slip out of the Legation Quarter and meet Lydia in Silk Lane at two.

‘I trust we’re going to clear your name completely in short order,’ she had said as they’d walked briskly in the direction of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. ‘I’m positive that someone noticed me sneaking out of the hotel at three o’clock this morning, and that word’s already going about that I’ve got a lover – I swear Annette Hautecoeur has the hotel servants on retainer . . . If anyone sees us together while you’re dressed like that, people are going to start saying I have a Chinese lover, and then I’ll simply have to go live in Paris or someplace, though even in Paris that would be considered outside of enough.’

‘I shall keep a respectful three paces behind you, ma’am,’ responded Asher meekly, and he tugged his scarves a little higher up over the bridge of his nose. He had bathed at the bungalow – something that it had been simply too cold to do very often in the half-ruined courtyard on Pig-Dragon Lane – and Mizukami had provided him with a new ch’i-p’ao, ku, and cap. ‘You could borrow Mrs Pilley’s coat, couldn’t you? And Ellen’s skirt and hat?’

‘I could, but that’s the oldest trick in the book – I dare say Madame Hautecoeur has used it a thousand times herself. I could tell everyone you were conducting me to an opium den, though,’ she had added, suddenly cheered. ‘That would be perfectly acceptable—’

‘It would be nothing of the kind!’

‘Well, it would be understandable, and everyone would ask me what it was like . . . Which I’ll have to find out before the story goes too far . . .’

But upon arrival at the Temple, the stout priest had informed them that Chiang had gone out begging – the occupation of all good priests – and would not return until dusk. Thus it was not until after nightfall that the experiment in hypnotism could be made.

‘Voice in dreams,’ repeated Chiang, and he brushed his forehead with his fingers, as he had when speaking to Lydia in the hotel parlor.

The old-fashioned lamps in the building behind the temple wavered in the drafts – desert wind blew down on the city again, the air fuzzy with dust. Shadows loomed, huge as the kuei in some old fairy-tale: a broken-down bed, a rack of scrolls, piles of books heaped everywhere. A thousand bottles and jars – ginseng, peony root, turtle plastron and rhinoceros horn – knobby ginger, and the bones and teeth of mice. A line of pestles in graduating size; a set of acupuncture needles like some strange, tiny musical instrument.

In the corner, the gleam of a halberd blade.

‘You speak to voice?’ asked Asher in Chinese.

The black eyes, bright as a squirrel’s, turned toward him, and in the same language the old man replied, ‘Sometimes I can. All my life I have spoken with spirits, you understand.’ He gestured toward the scrolls, toward the line of tablets – slices of bamboo with characters carved into them – that hung on the soot-blackened wall of the room. ‘My mother also had this gift. When a family is in trouble, or in need of advice, I can sometimes reach out to the Great Beyond and ask an ancestor what it is best that they do. Or if someone is troubled with a hungry ghost, who cannot find rest and so returns to trouble the living: often these can be treated with and given what it is that keeps them from peace. But this – this cold thing that came to me as I slept . . . This was not a spirit.’

Asher said, ‘No. Not spirit.’

‘Yet nor is he a living man.’

Again Asher shook his head.

The priest frowned in thought, then rose and put a couple of pieces of coal in the brick stove which occupied one corner of the room. Asher guessed his age as in his seventies, but he could have been older. His hair, milk white, hung below his hips, not queued any more but tied in a simple thong; his thin beard and mustaches trailed down his chest. The temple’s other two priests – the stout little man and a taller, younger one – had seemed a little afraid of him, which made Asher smile inwardly.

Every one of Rebbe Solomon Karlebach’s students – himself included – had been terrified of the old scholar.

‘Perhaps he is a bodhisattva?’ inquired Chiang. ‘A saint who has achieved the Buddha-nature within himself – who has freed himself from the cycle of rebirths – but has lingered behind in this world to save others? Yet this coldness is nothing I have felt before. When a man’s soul divides at death, and the upper soul is carried off to Heaven by the Spirit of the Dragon of Wisdom, the lower soul remains . . . but I understand that it usually disperses. Although, if one reads the writings of Wang Bi on the subject . . . Oh, yes, ten thousand pardons. You said you wished to speak to him . . .’

He returned to his stool, beside the bench where Asher sat. Closed his eyes.

Stillness filled the room, save for the keening of the wind around the temple’s eaves.

Then he whispered, ‘Under the mountain.’

‘You speak to him?’

Chiang moved his head a little, as if to say, No, then was still.

After another long silence he murmured in English, ‘Mistress—’

‘Are you all right?’ Lydia put her hand to her lips the instant the question passed them, probably realizing, thought Asher, what a useless one it was. But, he thought, she couldn’t not ask.

‘I am well.’ Even the timbre of that uninflected voice was the same.

‘We’re going to seal the mine –’ Asher kept his tone deliberately matter-of-fact – ‘after detonating cylinders of chlorine gas. Will that kill them?’

‘Most assuredly. They are not immortal, James. Twelve entrances. The farthest two are ventilation shafts on the north-east flank of the mountain.’

‘We know of all twelve.’

‘There is a thirteenth you must also destroy, the worst. Below the level of the mine tunnels lies a natural cave system. The old mine entrance, on the far side of the mountain; follow the tunnel to the great gallery on the left, filled with slag and broken rock. From there the tunnel slopes down sharply and breaks through into the caves below. This tunnel must be sealed. They do not go there yet, but if driven they will. I know not how far those caves extend.’

‘It will be done.’

‘Thank you . . .’ Lydia whispered.

‘I assure you, Mistress, that had I known what this information would cost me, you would never have had it.’

‘Could a vampire control these things?’ asked Asher.

‘This vampire cannot. Trust me, I have tried. The vampires of Prague have been trying for years.’

‘What about a vampire who was infected with their blood?’

Into the long silence which followed this, Lydia added, ‘Jamie found one of them. One of the old ones, it sounds like. He’s being kept prisoner by a criminal family who’s trying to get control of the Others.’

‘Prisoner?’

‘Tso—’ Chiang flinched, put his hand to his head again, opened his eyes. ‘A sound,’ he explained in Chinese, looking at Asher. ‘Something moving in the darkness. Where is this? Where is he?’

‘Western Hills.’

‘And you understood the words I said? Extraordinary.’ Chiang’s face was alight with fascination. ‘Kuo Hsiang writes that it is possible to completely detach the mind from one’s activities, to become utterly one with the Way; a most astonishing sensation. But he is afraid,’ he added. ‘Your friend. The things he fears, the things in the dark underground . . . I have heard stories of them. Now – since summer – when I go begging I hear of things here in the city as well, things seen in the night on the shores of the Seas—’

‘You try,’ asked Asher, ‘bid these things come, bid them go? Listen to minds, as you listen for speech of spirits?’

Chiang tilted his head. There was something in his eyes that told Asher that he’d tried.

In time he said, ‘No. There is nothing. Only madness, and hunger that cannot be assuaged.’

‘Tomorrow, next day,’ said Asher, ‘come with us to hills? We destroy these creatures, yao-kuei in Shi’h Liu mine. We need all help we can get.’

The old man was silent for a moment, studying Asher’s face. At length he said, ‘Yes. I will come.’