Magistrates of Hell (26 page)

But the living they could use: through illusion, through dreams, through fear.

Even through loyalty, as Ysidro had used him.

The
siheyuan
of the Tso spread over thousands of square feet, on the little peninsula between the two north-westerly lakes. Roofs rose above the gray walls like dark masses of cloud in the twilight. Asher noted those where weeds had sprouted in the mud that held the tiles. Gates and doorways, some flanked with brightly-painted pillars, or fanciful beasts: lions, dragons, birds. He saw where paint had not been refreshed, where hinges bore rust and the accumulated gray-yellow dust of many winters. There were compounds in Peking where the courtyards, like the one he currently occupied, went uninhabited for decades; where weasels and foxes, geckos and stray cats and even
yang kwei tse
spies might dwell in perfect safety. The Tso walls backed on to the long northern arm of the Sea, across from a pleasure ground of ancestral temples and fancy tea-houses; looking back along the wide verges of ice-rimmed water toward the bridge, Asher shivered at the recollection of how nearly he had been himself surrounded the night before last.

Their families worship them
, Father Orsino had said.
They are gods
. . .

But a moment later he had said,
They trust no one. It is hundreds of years since one of them created a vampire. They fear even their children
.

So what was the truth?

He turned back along the
hutongs
away from the water. In the lane that everyone called Prosperity Alley he was nearly crushed against the wall by a very long black Mercedes car, driven along the rutted way with little more than a foot of clearance on either side. Through its rear windows he glimpsed the woman he’d seen at Eddington’s, and sure enough, the car halted outside the main gate of the Tso compound – the gilding and red-lacquered latticework of which would have done credit to a palace – and the Presidential attaché Huang Da-feng climbed out.

Half-hidden by the turn of the lane, Asher watched as Huang bowed and handed the lady out. Like many of the President’s staff, Huang favored a European suit beneath his well-cut camel-hair British overcoat, but Madame Tso was all Chinese in her dress, the bulky, square-cut
ch’i-p’ao
of blue silk delicately embroidered, her coal-black hair oiled and smoothed close to her head and looped up into an ebony roll decorated with fresh gardenia blossoms that made expensive mock of the frozen season. Asher placed her at about his own age – forty-seven – with the round face and slight air of creamy stoutness that would cause a Chinese to liken her beauty to the sky with stars. She tottered elegantly on her bound feet, each of her blue silk shoes – the length of a schoolboy’s finger – wrought of enough pearls and gold wire to purchase a farm.

So you have become their servant
. . .?

He wondered how they had met, and what she had offered him – this vampire, whoever he was – that had convinced him to become the god of her family. Ysidro had told him that few vampires cared anything about their own families, once they themselves were vampire. For most, all that existed was the hunt.

Was it just that this woman knew a way to make the hunt easier or more entertaining?

Or had the vampire, whoever he was, simply been drawn to her? As Ysidro, deny it though he would, was drawn to Lydia – a friendship that filled Asher with foreboding. It was not jealousy, nor yet fear for his wife’s immortal soul: Lydia was mildly disinclined to believe in anything she couldn’t locate in the dissecting rooms, and she would have greeted the idea that she might one day run away with the vampire with a whoop of laughter and a question about the sleeping arrangements.

Yet he feared for her, nevertheless.

The porters shut the gate, leaving the black Mercedes to block the lane. Its driver glared at Asher as he squeezed past it, with an expression that implied he would murder him should his buttons scratch the lacquer of its doors.

What am I doing back at the Temple
?

Lydia looked around the cluttered, shabby courtyard, aware that she was dreaming but puzzled:
why am I dreaming about the Temple of Everlasting Harmony instead of about rats?

They had returned to Peking shortly after full darkness. Exhausted and trembling, Lydia had insisted on accompanying Takahashi to the clinic at Peita University, to have his horrible injuries treated and to begin the long and painful course of treatment for rabies. Throughout the endless winter afternoon, as she, Mizukami, Karlebach and the remaining two warriors had followed Liao Ho through the rough terrain of the hills, again and again she found she had to force her mind aside from what had happened at the mine. She had made notes, matched probable tunnels on the map with the subsidiary entrances Liao showed them. Climbed old trails down which the coal had once been carried in baskets, now overgrown with laurel and weeds, while Private Nishiharu and Ogata the Bodyguard had scanned the horizon with their rifles.

At every entrance – some of them mere holes in the hillside, save for the slag heaps around them – she had gone as close as she dared and listened. Because Karlebach was there, she could not speak, could not call down into that darkness. But each time they’d climbed up toward those inky pits, those long-overgrown piles of dirt and stone, frantic fear had clutched at her, frantic horror.

Simon
. . .

They had covered something like twelve miles on foot and horseback, and Lydia was certain they’d have to go back to locate the rest of the entrances. At no point had a second whisper passed through her mind, nor any indication that the first had been anything more than illusion. And all the while the underbrush in the gullies, the withered brown grass on the deforested hill-slopes, had rustled with the constant, restless, horrible movement of rats.

Stricken with guilt over her fraudulent mourning, upon her return to the hotel she had consented to have supper with Karlebach, to make sure that the old man was all right. But she had barely listened to his tales of the iniquities of the vampires of Prague over the centuries of his research, had been unable to touch more than a spoonful of her food.

Only Miranda cheered her. Only in the hour she’d spent holding her daughter against her and reading aloud – watching the still-wordless thoughts chase each other through those lovely brown eyes – did she feel at rest.

But falling into bed, sick with weariness and shock, she had been positive she was going to dream about rats.

Or, worse, about that single, dying whisper in the back of her mind:
Mistress
. . .

Yet here she was in the courtyard of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony, listening to the muffled yammer of voices from Silk Lane and the soft brisk tap of passing donkey-hooves on the dirt lane outside its gate.

It was cold, and she was glad of her coat. (
Thank goodness it’s the pink merino with the chinchilla collar! But I thought I left that back in Oxford, and in any case I shouldn’t be wearing pink with black
. . .) The stone kongs where goldfish had swum only last week were frozen. The wind that had whipped and wailed over the hills all day sobbed around the temple’s upturned eaves and filled the air with the smell of dust.

From the dark of the temple, eyes gleamed like a line of terrible dragons: the ten Magistrates of Hell, surrounded by the writhing damned. Movement in the shadow – a pale flicker near the back of the long hall, where a door opened into a narrow garden. Lydia advanced a step to the threshold, her every instinct telling her:
Don’t
. . .

But not afraid.

‘Simon?’

Not a sound from within, save the moan of wind in the rafters. It was all exactly as she recalled it from her excursion with Paola and the Baroness, down to the yellow dog, curled up asleep in the corner by the God of War’s altar, and the tattered banners of cut paper that swayed and groped like spirit hands overhead. Lydia walked forward over the worn flagstones, caught the heel of her shoe in a crack –
drat it, I really do need a lantern
. . .

And, as she often was able to do in dreams, told herself:
there’s one over by the altar of that Fifth Magistrate, the one in charge of the people-chopper-upper machine
. . .

And so there was. And a box of matches on the corner of the altar.

She lit the wick, closed the glass slide, achingly grateful for the warmth of the small flame on her frozen fingers . . .

Turned back to the dark of the temple, raising the lantern high.

But there was nothing there. No one, where she had been ready to swear that someone had stood, just moments before, just to the right of the God of War’s altar, in the moving seaweed shadows of the hanging scrolls. Someone thin and old, who had watched her patiently. Who had known her name.

There was no one there now. Determined not to let the dream go, Lydia proceeded to search the Temple with her lantern, probing every dark corner and startling spiders and crickets.

She found nothing. The Temple of Everlasting Harmony was as empty as Ysidro’s brass-bound trunk had been, in the rented safety of the bank vault next door.

A
s the following day – Friday – required the presence of the Japanese military attaché at one of the regular meetings of the Legations Council, Lydia had accepted an invitation for coffee and elevenses with the Baroness. For all her overbearing ways (she was widely rumored to beat her servants with a riding whip), the Baroness Drosdrova was capable of both kindness and sensitivity, so the only other company that morning was Paola Giannini. Lydia had had a headache planned, should she have walked into the Russian Minister’s conservatory and found Madame Schrenk there.

There was a good deal of talk of opera, over an assortment of too-sweet jelly-cakes and rubbery blini. Madame Drosdrova had newspapers sent to her from every European capital and could chatter knowledgeably of what was on at La Scala and the Paris Opera. And there was a good deal more said about the Eddington murder, which would be arraigned the following week.

‘Has nothing further been discovered?’ asked Paola. ‘Poor Sir Grant must be distracted!’

‘Poor Sir Grant my foot.’ Madame dusted powdered sugar from her fingers. ‘I hear he goes in and shouts at Sir John and tears his hair and weeps, yet it doesn’t seem to have stopped his visits to that house of accommodation he goes to, in the native city.’

‘Surely, he wouldn’t . . .’

‘
Ma chère
,’ said the Baroness, ‘the innocence of your heart gives me the greatest admiration for your husband’s character . . . or his tact. Only yesterday, when one would think Sir Grant Hobart would have nothing on his thoughts but conferring with the Legation solicitor – though anyone who would trust that slick little piece of Hibernian
canaille
is simply asking for what he’ll get! – Hobart took a rickshaw out of the Quarter, all muffled up in a fur coat and scarves, as if everyone in the Quarter doesn’t know those
frightful
yellow shoes of his at sight . . .
And
didn’t return until the small hours of the morning, flaming drunk and shouting at the gate guards to let him in, Hans Erlich tells me. Is he still sending you notes, my dear?’ She turned her lorgnette in Lydia’s direction. ‘Considering everything the man has to feel guilt about . . . And what’s this, that nasty cat Hilda Schrenk was telling me about you going riding with Count Mizukami, of all people?’

‘And did Madame Schrenk think to mention that I was accompanied not only by the Count, but also by Professor Karlebach and about half a regiment of Japanese soldiers as chaperones? I didn’t think so.’ Lydia caught herself up, set down the thumb-sized fragment of rock-dry toast on which she’d been spreading and re-spreading caviar for the past five minutes, and added, with a little quaver in her voice, ‘I hope Madame Schrenk will never have the occasion to discover what it’s like to . . . to feel trapped, and closed-in, so that
anything
will be preferable to staying in the hotel.’

She had heard her school friend Mary Teasborough say something of the kind, shortly after her brother had died, and hoped it would serve. But the memory of the rats in the mines, of the voice in her head whispering,
Mistress
, returned to her with such sudden force then that her hands shook and she pushed the toast-point aside.
At least new widowhood excuses one from eating the productions of the Drosdrov cook
. . .

‘Darling—’ Paola took her hand. ‘You know you could have called upon either one of us.’

Lydia nodded, struggling to put that whisper from her mind. With what she hoped was a convincing-sounding catch to her voice, she murmured, ‘As Professor Karlebach has been employed by the University of Tokyo to continue the Oriental portion of . . . of Jamie’s work, he very kindly asked me to go along. I felt it was for the best . . .’

‘And so it is!’ The Baroness leaned across the table to grip her other hand. ‘Hilda Schrenk is a spiteful old cat, particularly since you turned down that imbecile Alois Blucher’s offer to go walking with you – he’s her cousin, you know, and
frantically
in need of an heiress to marry. And Mr Woodreave was saying to me only yesterday—’

‘If you speak of Edmund Woodreave to me,’ said Lydia, ‘I shall scream. But on the subject of taking the air – and I am much better today, thank you – I wondered if perhaps we might return to the Temple of Everlasting Harmony near Silk Lane this morning? I had a dream about it,’ she added as the Baroness opened her mouth to point out that the Temple of Heaven, with its nine terraces and its curious round structure, was greatly superior architecturally to some forgotten shrine lost in the middle of the
hutongs
.

‘What did you dream?’ asked Paola, but the Baroness interrupted her.

‘Dreams are nonsense. I’m forever searching the maids’ rooms to get rid of those idiotic horoscope charts and dream books they all pore over, as if there weren’t far more elevating literature in the world. I try to educate them, but the stubbornness of the Lower Orders is quite astonishing.’