Magistrates of Hell (14 page)

‘I’ll speak to my friend.’ Asher saw in the young clerk’s eyes the glimmer of wary disgust, as if he suspected that no such ‘friend’ existed. ‘I’ll ask him what he prefers. Thank you.’

P’ei turned back to the company records and unfolded another sheet in the pool of brightness cast by the lamp. ‘Watch out for An,’ he added. ‘He works for the Tso family – they’ve become one of the biggest gangs in the city. Generally, An – and the Tso – provide the house. Your friend may find himself paying blackmail.’

‘I’ll warn him. Thank you.’

It was close to eight o’clock when he locked up the maps in the cupboard that Sir John had set aside for him in the Legation offices, gave P’ei his ten shillings – the clerk refused with a quiet head-shake the extra crown that he offered – and went out to Meiji Street in quest of a rickshaw. He had arranged to meet Lydia, Karlebach, the Russian attaché the Baron Drosdrov and his wife, and a Belgian professor of Chinese literature for dinner at the Peking Club, and he barely had time to stop at the hotel and change. Lydia and Karlebach had already departed – ‘The old professor took himself off just after five, sir,’ provided Ellen, with a note of disapproval in her voice. ‘Said he had to buy some ties, but
I
say that’s no excuse for leaving poor Mrs Asher to get herself to the Club without an escort.’

It was five hundred yards from the front doors of the Wagons-Lits Hotel to the Peking Club, along two of the best-patrolled streets in China, but Ellen had read – Asher suspected – far too many novels about the Yellow Peril to believe her lady could make the journey in anything resembling safety. ‘Ties are a critical component of a man’s survival in a foreign country, Ellen,’ he replied gravely. ‘I only hope Rebbe Karlebach set forth on his quest in evening dress, because the maître d’ at the Club isn’t likely to admit him if he isn’t, no matter how many ties he has purchased.’

As it happened, he was given the opportunity to judge Karlebach’s attire for himself. As usual – the habit of vigilance never left an old field agent, vampires or no vampires – Asher took note of every doorway, vehicle, and passer-by along Legation Street and Rue Marco Polo as his rickshaw bore him at a brisk trot toward the Peking Club. In the same fashion, over the past three days, he had thoroughly familiarized himself – and Lydia – with the hotel itself, until he knew every stairway, every attic, every cupboard, six different ways of getting to the money cached in the generator room, and most particularly every exit . . . just in case.

It was an old saying in the Department: that time spent in preparation is never wasted.

The night was a cold one, and he kept his own coat-collar turned up and the brim of his top-hat tilted down. Still, he identified people glimpsed in passing: Colonel von Mehren and sly old white-haired Eichorn emerging from the gates of the German Legation; Trade Secretary Oda-san – very trim in his London-tailored suit – crossing the street from the Japanese Legation to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He noted the old Chinese named Mian who peddled newspapers and bamboo baskets all around the Legation Quarter and who Asher suspected of being a letter carrier for at least one spy network and maybe several. Thus, when he stepped down in front of the lighted bronze doors of the Peking Club and paid off his puller (‘Twenty-five cent anywhere in city, chop-chop . . .’) he observed, a few hundred feet down the Rue Hart, the Rebbe Karlebach emerge from the gateway of the Austrian Legation.

Even at that distance, the old man’s wildly outdated overcoat, white beard, and low-crowned hat were unmistakable. Instead of walking back to the Club’s doors, Asher strolled along the street for a few yards, observing the tall, stooped figure by the lighted gateway: Karlebach turned to speak to someone still inside for a moment, then bowed and touched his hat brim before making his way toward the club. He carried no package.

Asher watched him for a few moments before turning himself and climbing the Club steps, to where Lydia – gorgeous in green-and-amber silk – awaited him in the lobby, in company with the Baron Drosdrov and his loud-voiced Baroness, and fragile old Professor Feydreaux. When Karlebach arrived, Asher made no mention of the Austrian Legation, and during an excellent supper of York ham and petits pois, Asher noted that his old teacher made no mention of it, either. Nor of purchasing ties. Lydia asked the old man about his visit to Silk Lane and whether he’d found a guide to show him the Temple of Everlasting Harmony – he said he hadn’t – and hoped he hadn’t had to rush from the hotel.

Karlebach, Asher observed, was a terrible liar.

If the Auswärtiges Amt was recruiting agents, they’d certainly have done better
.

In any case, he couldn’t imagine his friend letting any government – particularly his own, now that it was in close alliance with Germany – hear so much as a word about the Others . . .

Still, it was something to be noted.

Ysidro was waiting for him at the hotel.

Karlebach, Asher, and Lydia had taken two rickshaws back. A Chinese servant handed Asher a note as he and Lydia walked through the door of the Wagons-Lits. He made himself frown for Karlebach’s benefit when he recognized the sixteenth-century handwriting, said, ‘Yet more gossip about Richard Hobart,’ and followed the servant to the same blue-curtained private parlor in which he’d met Count Mizukami four days previously. Ysidro sat beside the fireplace, studying a popular guidebook of Peking.

‘I have spoken with another vampire,’ he said as Asher closed the door.

‘They – or at least one of them – know English, then?’ Asher drew off his gloves, held his hands to the fire. ‘Or Spanish – the Jesuits have sent missionaries here for three hundred years . . .’

‘Father Orsino Espiritu was one of them.’ Ysidro looked considerably less haggard than he had the last time Asher had spoken to him on the night of the windstorm – he guessed he had fed, probably far outside the city – but the haunted watchfulness remained in his eyes. ‘He sleeps in the crypt of a deserted chapel near the old French cemetery.’ He wore, Asher noted also, his usual spotlessly clean linen and a different suit, charcoal-gray tonight and not black.

So where is HE staying?

‘The chapel was burned during the Uprising,’ Ysidro went on. ‘It is little more than rubble now. Father Orsino goes in mortal terror of discovery, and I had to chase him halfway across the old palace pleasure-gardens, only to discover when I caught him that he is quite insane.’

‘That doesn’t sound helpful. Did he speak of the other vampires of Peking?’

‘He says they have all been transformed into gods.’ Ysidro considered the low-burning fire in the grate for a time, long white hands folded on the small, square bone of his elegantly-trousered knee. ‘He seems to have them confused in his mind with the Magistrates of Hell who rule the damned, and he regaled me at tedious length with questions about whether the mountain of knives was in the first or the fourth hell, and whether sinners in the second hell were fried in oil or steamed. There were, he informs me, originally a hundred and thirty-four hells, but there was a reorganization during the T’ang Dynasty and the number reduced to eighteen. Did I know how that came about? A most disconcerting interview.’

Asher settled in the opposite chair, fascinated. ‘Who did he think you were?’

‘A representative of the Inquisition, evidently, come to bring him back to Spain. I fear I did not disabuse him. Rather I warned him that I was working with the Pope’s secret representatives – yourself and Mistress Lydia, as I hope you will remember, should you ever have the misfortune to encounter Father Orsino. He has been hiding, for most of the past three centuries, in the coal mines of the Western Hills—’

Ysidro paused as Asher straightened sharply from the hearth’s warmth.

‘He only left them this summer, because, he said, stinking devils had begun to breed there, and he feared that he was not safe.’

‘This summer?’

‘He saw, he said, the first one last winter. He said he thought it was a bandit who had gone insane and been thrown out of his gang, but he did not attack him because the man was a Catholic. How he ascertained this fact I am not sure. Then later, he said, the man began to deteriorate into a monster and attack the bandits himself, or the villagers if they walked abroad after dark. Father Orsino kept away from the
yao-kuei
, fearing that they would tell the Magistrates of Hell where he was hiding. Later he said they became so numerous he feared they would kill him and eat him, as they did the villagers’ pigs – the villagers, too, if they could get them.’

‘But he was hiding in the hills before that?’

‘From the Magistrates of Hell.’ Ysidro’s yellow eyes caught the glint of the fire as he moved his head. ‘They seek to kill him, he says, because as Christ’s servant he had converted so many Chinese that Hell was becoming depopulated. One can only presume that the Magistrates were being paid on a commission basis.’

‘Or lost face.’

‘As you say. He made a hideout deep in the mines, with bars and locks of silver, which he says they cannot touch. He cannot touch them either, of course.’ Ysidro shrugged with a gesture of a finger. ‘I presume he hired the work done and then made a meal off the workmen – they were stealing the silver, I dare say, and deserved it. In any event, he begged me to take him out of China, to get him back to the Pope, who will – he says – keep the Magistrates at bay. He evidently feels that they have it in their power to take him straight to Hell for his sins.’

Asher said, ‘Hmmn. And I suppose he wasn’t able to tell you who made him a vampire in the first place?’

Ysidro moved his head slightly:
No
.

‘Nor whether there is or was any connection between the
yao-kuei
and the vampires of Peking?’

‘It was, as I have said, a disconcerting interview. He did say that the Magistrates of Hell no longer create more of their own kind, but rule the world through human intermediaries. He then gave me such abundance of details about the ranks, titles, and position in the hierarchy of the Afterlife of each Magistrate as to make me doubt his words. Yet clearly he spoke of vampires. They drink both blood and the spirit – the
chi
– he said, and through those gain power; moreover they sleep in the daytime. And of a surety, one of them made him.’

‘
They would tell the Magistrates of Hell where he was hiding
.’ Asher rose and paced to the window, parted the curtain – heavy peacock brocade from the mills of Manchester – and looked out at the darkness. The Legation gates were closed. Rue Meiji had fallen quiet. Only the moonlight – a few days past full – glimmered on the stagnant waters of the canal.

A patrol of the Legation police walked past, lantern-light winking on the brass of their uniform buttons. At the end of the street, the wall of the Tartar City towered forty feet against the stars.

‘
I hear their voices speaking in my mind
, he said. I could not tell if it was the Others he meant, or if it was the Magistrates. Perhaps he did not know himself.’

‘You remember,’ Asher said slowly, ‘how, three years ago, the master vampire of Constantinople lost the ability to create fledglings? The flesh of the new vampire changed and mutated, but the soul – the spirit – could not enter the mind of the master, to render the transformations complete. So the body of the fledgling deteriorated, half-transformed, with the virus of vampirism still within it . . .’

‘And if that fledgling tried, in such a state, to make a fledgling in his turn?’ The vampire’s pale brows pinched together over the aristocratic curve of his nose. ‘What then? I admit I am curious, as to whether I could hear the thoughts of these creatures, as I listen to human dreams . . . but if indeed they are the servants of the Peking vampires, it may be foolish of me to make the attempt. I would fainer keep my distance from them, until I know at least a little of their intent.’

Asher returned to the hearth, stood for a time, arms folded, looking down at that slender gentleman in gray. ‘Do you think they’d kill you? The Peking vampires, I mean.’

‘I think they
could
,’ replied Ysidro simply. ‘Certainly, Father Orsino has a lively fear that they would kill
him
. But then he is a priest – and mad, as I said. And therefore, almost certainly, a danger to them.’ The vampire was silent then, contemplating the fire as if the sable turrets of ash and ember were indeed the gates to the eighteen departments of Hell, and by study he could probe the dreams of those within.

‘I do find it troubling,’ the vampire went on at last, ‘that with a single exception, every vampire I have encountered of mine own years or older – and Father Orsino has been vampire since 1580 – is insane. If this is something which befalls our kind after three centuries, I should like to know it . . . and also I should like then to know, how old are the Magistrates of Hell? And, are
they
sane?’

Asher was still sitting beside the fire, staring into the amber jewels of the dying grate, when a knock on the parlor door roused him from what he realized – to his annoyance – had been reverie long enough that his knees were stiff when he stood.
Damn Ysidro
– because of course the chair opposite his own was not only empty, but its cushions also returned to the pristine state of cushions which have borne no weight for a considerable time.

It was Lydia at the door. She still wore the evening dress she’d had on at the Club, olive-green satin trimmed with amber and black, but had taken off her jewels and her gloves. In the lobby behind her, Asher heard the clock strike midnight.

She sneaked a glance at the lobby to make sure she was unobserved, then put on her glasses. ‘Is everything all right?’

Asher nodded, and took her hands in his to kiss. ‘It was Ysidro,’ he said, ‘not anything about poor Hobart’s son.’ He dipped in the pocket of his evening jacket, but Ysidro’s note was gone. ‘I’m sorry—’

‘Is he all right?’ She caught herself up a little as she asked the question, and he remembered his own observation that Ysidro looked better . . . which meant that someone, somewhere, had died.