Magistrates of Hell (19 page)

‘The blood that will be on his coat and jacket when they’re dragged from the old palace lake is theirs. Your husband is a doughty fighter.’ The smallest flicker of a smile touched one corner of his lips, a human expression, rueful. ‘More so than ever I was in life.’

‘Did you get in duels?’ Lydia tried to picture him as he had been then, before a variant strain of the vampire state had bleached the color from his eyes and hair, before long years of concealment and observation had taught him their dreadful lessons about the nature of humankind. The scars on his face and throat, left by the claws of the master of Constantinople, after three years were as ghastly as ever, though he had spoken to her once of having been burned by sunlight and having healed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added quickly. ‘It’s none of my business—’

‘As a Spaniard and a Catholic in England, I could scarce help it. And like a fool I thought t’was my right to walk where I chose in London. I look upon myself in those days and wonder that I lived to be taken by the Undead.’

Lydia was silent, studying his face in the firelight, aloof as the image on a tomb. What had he looked like, she wondered, as a living man? That rush of consciousness of his presence had passed, and what she felt toward him now mostly was comfort, and trust. ‘Can you take a message to him?’

‘I will if you ask it of me, Mistress.’ Ysidro got to his feet, gathered his long greatcoat from the back of the nearby chair. ‘Yet my every instinct tells me that to step outside the Legation Quarter is to step beneath the hanging blade of a sword. The vampires of Peking watch me, invisible; even within its walls I am not safe. You would laugh, I dare say, to see me tiptoe like a thief from the watergate to the train station, to hunt in peasant villages with unpronounceable names, in terror lest I miss my way back before daylight.’

‘Well,’ pointed out Lydia practically, ‘it
does
serve you right.’

‘Indeed it does.’ The cold, thin fingers closed around hers. ‘Father Orsino – the Spanish priest – passed three centuries in the Shi’h Liu mine in composing a refutation of Luther’s teachings, which he begs me to collect for him from his hideaway there, that he may take it back to the Pope, to whom it is dedicated . . . truly a frightful thought, when one considers how long it must be by this time.’

‘Are you going to the mine?’ she asked, and she shivered at the recollection of what Jamie had told her of the things that had attacked him. At the memory of Ito’s bruised and swollen face.
They whisper in my mind
. . .

‘I shall at least draw close enough to see what may be seen. At the moment what we most lack of these Others is information: their numbers, their movements, the shape and nature of their minds. Your husband is not the only one who has worked for his country in this fashion, Mistress, and from the first, when I read of these creatures, it crossed my mind that there may be things of them that only the Dead can learn.’

The words
be careful
stuck in her throat.
I CANNOT ask him to take care, since he’ll probably conclude his investigation by murdering some perfectly innocent person
.

And she felt overwhelmed again by the despairing knowledge that Ysidro was right. There could be no friendship between the living and the dead.

Not as long as the dead chose to prolong their stay on Earth by taking the lives of others.

Yet when her eyes met his, and saw in the pleated yellow depths that he was familiar with all those thoughts, her heart ached for him.

He bowed and kissed her hand. Cold lips like white silk, which covered killing fangs. The clock on the velvet-draped overmantle chimed, four sweet notes.

‘To wake you thus each night were little kindness, Mistress. Therefore leave one curtain of your bedroom window open when it grows dark, if conference is required.’

Lydia felt the touch of his mind on hers, a crushing velvet sleepiness, and tightened her grip on his skinny fingers. ‘Did you come in my dream? Not about being in this room, I mean, but in Papa’s house?’

The weight of sleep withdrew. His colorless brows knit very slightly: ‘The house of your father?’

‘After Mother died,’ whispered Lydia. ‘I was trapped there, looking for her from room to room. I often dream that. But this time there was someone – something – in the house with me.’

‘No,’ said the vampire softly. ‘That was not me.’

W
u Tan Shun – a little fatter and a little more gray than he’d been in 1898 – welcomed Asher, took his money, and guided him through a maze of courtyards strung with washing and crammed with pigsties and pigeon cages, barely visible by the faint orange lamp-glow that leaked through shuttered windows, to a
siheyuan
in a far corner of the rambling compound, its buildings drifted with dust and littered with broken roof-tiles. He was given a couple of US Army blankets, and the following morning a young man – possibly an inhabitant of one of the other courtyards – came in and left a pail of water, a bowl of rice and vegetables, Chinese trousers and shoes, and hurried away without even looking around. In the course of the day Asher investigated the other buildings around his own particular courtyard and of those nearby and collected a brazier, two buckets of coal balls – coal dust mixed with hardened mud – and a couple of straw mats. In the process he found that Wu had guaranteed his concealment simply by paying everyone in the other courtyards to give him what he asked while ignoring him completely.

It wasn’t the Hotel Wagons-Lits, but Asher had no complaints.

On the second evening, as he was consuming the supper that had been brought to him – still without a word or a glance – by another man who looked like an impoverished farmer, a Chinese girl came around the screen wall into the courtyard, glanced around at the ruined buildings, then crossed to the doorway where Asher sat.

‘Honorable sir cold?’ she inquired when she reached him. ‘Extra blanket?’ she added and started to remove her
ch’i-p’ao
.

Asher got to his feet – he’d been expecting something along these lines, knowing Wu – and took the girl’s hands, halting the disrobing process. ‘
Pu yao, hsieh-hsieh,
’ he said and inclined his head in thanks. ‘I most grateful, but honorable father of my wife forbidden me have congress other ladies during hiding. Can not dishonor his request.’

The girl – Asher guessed her age at seventeen or eighteen – smiled dazzlingly to hear him speak Chinese and bowed. ‘Is there another service that I can do for the honorable gentleman?’ Her voice was startlingly deep for a girl’s, her Chinese the Peking dialect and somewhat removed from Mandarin, but at least, Asher reflected, intelligible. ‘If I do nothing and go straight home,’ she explained when he shook his head, ‘my husband’s mother will be displeased, because Mr Wu has paid her already and she’ll have to give him the money back. May I
say
I spread for you?’

Asher smiled. ‘What tell husband honorable mother not my business,’ he replied, and her answering smile widened. ‘Tea?’ And he gestured toward the extremely pretty celadon pot – which he suspected had been stolen – that had arrived a few minutes previously with the noodles and the soup.

Her eyes brightened as she knelt on the straw mat in the doorway and poured out the first cup: ‘This is Grandpa Wu’s good
p’o lai
,’ she exclaimed. ‘He must really like you! You’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you?’

‘Tell me story,’ he said and sat cross-legged again on the other mat. ‘Tell me about
yao-kuei
by Golden Sea.’

It was a bow drawn at a venture, but he saw dread darken her eyes. ‘The Golden Sea? Is that true, then?’ she asked worriedly. ‘My younger sister’s husband says there are devils in the Western Hills – horrible things that stink, which you cannot kill with guns . . . My younger sister’s husband is in the Kuo Min-tang, you understand. The leader of his unit says there is no such thing as these devils because we now have science and are breaking free of the imperialist superstitions of the past . . . Are they indeed now in the city?’

‘Don’t know.’ Asher accepted the tea, Green Snail Spring from Tong T’ing. ‘You learn for me? Learn, not tell them—’ He gestured to the courtyards beyond the wall, then touched his finger to his lips. ‘I am not here.’

‘I’ll ask my brothers. We live only over in Crooked Hair Family Alley. That is, my family lives – my husband’s brothers also. Why does the Tso Family want to kill you?’

Asher rubbed his shoulder. ‘Tso Family, eh? And what is your honorable name?’

‘Ling.’ The name meant Good Reputation. ‘Ch’iu P’ing Ling. My husband’s honored mother is Grandpa Wu’s niece.’

‘Ling. Not know –’ which wasn’t quite true, Asher reflected as pieces began to fall into place – ‘why Tso want to kill.’

‘It isn’t like the Tso,’ Ling said thoughtfully, ‘to go after a Long-Nosed Devil. Even though they’re the enemies of the Republic and plot with the vile reactionary Yuan,
nobody
wants your armies back shooting everyone in sight. So you must have done
some
thing.’

She was, Asher guessed, very much a child of the
hutongs
– only an extremely lower-class girl would have escaped having her feet mutilated – and by Chinese standards not particularly pretty, with her long, horse-like face and wiry build. ‘But why hide with Grandpa Wu?’

‘Fear Tso family has sons, has cousins, work servants in Legation?’ suggested Asher. ‘Servants kill while sleep?’ He made a throat-cutting gesture.

‘No, you don’t need to worry about that – are you going to eat that dumpling?’ She pointed her chin at the one he’d left on his plate. ‘The Tso don’t have family in the Legations. It’s mostly the Wei, the Hsiang, and the K’ung – the old families that have run things for hundreds of years here in Peking – or the families that work for them, like the Shen and the Shen –’ there was a different tonal dip there: the one spoken high meant
gentleman
, the other on a descending tone meant
cautious
– ‘and the Miao and the P’ei. And the Hsiang all hate the Tso, and the Wei owe too many favors to the Hsiang to go against them, if the Tso tried to sneak anyone in. The Tso only started making themselves a big family twenty years ago, my mother-in-law says: upstarts. Madame Tso gives herself airs now, my mother-in-law says, but her father was only a night-soil collector in the Nine Turns Alley, after all. My mother-in-law says the Tso are paying Yuan Shi-k’ai to try to get their people in, but it hasn’t happened yet. You can make a lot of squeeze, working in the Legations.’

‘Not during Uprising?’ He lifted an eyebrow with a quizzical look, and Ling grinned.

‘Not in the Uprising, no. I was only little then, but I remember Grandpa Wu had six or seven whole families of the P’ei hiding in this very courtyard, because the Boxers would have killed them. But of course now Grandpa says that never happened. A lot more hid in the coal mines in the Western Hills,’ she added. ‘And I never heard any of
them
say there were devils out there.’

‘What about girl Ugly English Devil kill in Madame Tso house?’ asked Asher casually. ‘She was Miao? Or Shen?’

‘Shen,’ Ling corrected, using a different tone, and her long face clouded. ‘You mean Mi Ching? Bi Hsu tells me – my husband’s younger brother, who works over in Big Shrimp Alley – Bi Hsu tells me her brothers were nearly distracted with anger when they heard about it. But the family’s really poor. When An Lu T’ang offered money for Ching, their father would never have sold her if he’d known what An wanted her for. But An Lu T’ang works for the Tso, so you can’t really say no to him, any more than you can bring an English Devil to justice, no matter what he does. This is the kind of exploitation that the Kuo Min-tang seeks to rectify, but as long as Yuan Shi-k’ai continues to enslave China to the foreign economic interests, nothing will get done.’

‘Shen Mi Ching brothers, servants in Legation?’

‘No, but all their cousins are.’ Ling licked a final morsel of dumpling from her fingers. ‘Bi Hsu said to my husband that Mi Ching’s brothers should just wait outside Mrs Tso’s house for the next time Ugly English Devil comes for a girl. He goes about once a week, though usually he just hits them or cuts them. But Bi Wang – my husband – told him not to be stupid. As long as our nation is enslaved to Western imperial interests, no justice will be possible for the people of China, and you can’t just kill an English Devil in the street.’

Well, not unless he’s a traitor selling information to the Germans
, reflected Asher. Though Ling was clearly parroting the harangues she’d heard from her sister’s husband and his friends, he saw the sparkle of genuine anger in her face: anger at the lines of men who’d marched along the Chien Men Ta Chieh in 1901, at the German soldiers who now occupied Shantung, and at the Japanese who’d taken over Formosa and had their eyes on Manchuria, with its coal and iron, as well.

He recalled the pockmarked militia commander in the hills, the ragged men who’d helped themselves to his second-best greatcoat and the British Army’s scrawny Australian horses: farmers driven from their land by taxes and starvation. Recalled, too, the sleek young aide Huang Da-feng at Eddington’s reception, hobnobbing with the Western officers, with that elegant madame on his arm.
Runs half the brothels in Peking
. . .

No wonder this girl was angry.

Shen Mi Ching. Hobart probably didn’t even know her name
. Asher felt rage at the man pass through him, a slow red wave, and thought about what he’d arrange for any man who harmed Miranda, or Lydia – or even his obnoxious, whining, spoiled nieces and cousins, for God’s sake! – if by some happenstance or turn of events he was unable to prove such a crime on the perpetrator . . .

And he shivered at the first thought that went through his mind:
I’d speak to Ysidro
.

He’d do it. And he wouldn’t care
.

And that
, Asher thought, after Ling took her departure and he retreated from the bitter cold of the courtyard to the nearly as cold corner of the
cheng-fang
where he’d installed the brazier and his blankets,
is the true reason Karlebach seeks to destroy the vampire, wherever and however they exist
.