Magistrates of Hell

TWENTY-TWO

Shots ripped the windy night; a woman screamed. Still away to the south-west in the direction of the Empress’s Garden. Asher breathed, ‘We’d better hurry. God knows how long we have till the police arrive.’

Mizukami consulted his watch. ‘I paid the district captain for two hours,’ he said. ‘Ogata can be trusted to keep the riot going at least so long, particularly with Russians there.’

‘Remind me,’ said Asher with a grin, ‘to recommend you for work in the Department . . . Not that I have anything to do with them . . .’

‘Of course not,’ agreed the Count. And added, ‘Ge-raa Sensei.’

‘Never met Professor Gellar in my life.’ He led the way swiftly along a covered walk – cluttered with boxes, two parked rickshaws, and a bicycle – and through a small court, orienting himself by the double roof of a two-story ‘backside house’ that dominated the cold stars of the skyline. Through the latticed windows of a pavilion he glimpsed an empty bedchamber, lamplit and furnished in a half-Western fashion: perhaps the house of assignation, the gate of which opened on to Big Tiger Lane, where An Lu T’ang arranged for Grant Hobart to enjoy specialized pleasures? The bed was disarrayed, and the walls sported two Western-style oil paintings on its walls, graphically depicting some of the more violent loves of Greek gods. Chinese pornography, Asher knew, ranked as some of the least erotic in the world.

The courtyard beyond this one was deserted. There was no street gate, but the side building on the east – the hsiang-fang – was, unusually, two storied, its upper room shuttered fast, and Asher knew from his daylight reconnaissance that this was in fact a sort of terrace which overlooked the narrow strait that ran between the two lobes of the ‘Sea’.

This court, too, was littered with debris and dust, but there was none before the shuttered-up cheng-fang. Though the place had not been swept in decades, a pathway had been beaten clear among the tufts of weeds before its door. The lock was a Yale, about twenty years old.

Asher handed Mizukami the lantern, directed the narrow beam on the lock. ‘Do you believe in the chiang-shi, Mizukami-san?’ he asked softly. ‘The kyonshi?’

He did not look up from his lockpicks, but he heard his companion’s breath hiss.

‘Two weeks ago,’ said the Count at last, ‘or a month . . . I do not know what I would have said to such a question. The tenma we saw in the hills – the terrible thing that befell poor Ito—’

‘Those aren’t the chiang-shi.’ Asher held his breath, manipulated the delicate probes in the lock until he felt the mechanism give. Gently tested the handle. If there were a vampire within the building, it would have heard their breathing and the clicking of the tumblers as Asher’s tools shifted them one by one. He could have sung ‘Rule, Britannia!’ at the top of his lungs and the only ones who would have learned something they didn’t already know were whatever residents of the Tso compound weren’t either preparing to defend the house against the rioters or out engaged in looting themselves.

He pushed the door open, took the lantern and directed its narrow beam, carefully, around the salon within. ‘The chiang-shi are real,’ he went on. ‘I’ve spoken to them – I’ve traveled with them – I’ve killed them and seen them kill.’ His gaze followed the sliver of yellow light as he spoke: a doorway at either side of the big room, the one on the east open, on the west, shut. The steely glint of another Western lock. ‘In Europe – in the West – they don’t trust the living, though they sometimes need our help. I think what’s happened here is that one of them – maybe more, for all I know – has employed the whole Tso family to keep it safe, in return for its help in their criminal endeavors. I think its lair is what we’re going to find downstairs.’

He handed Mizukami the lantern again when they reached the shut door, knelt with his picklocks.

The little nobleman looked around at the darkness of the shuttered chamber. ‘Can this be so?’

‘Can the other things you’ve seen? Will you wait up here and guard my back? You’ll probably be safer if you come down with me.’

‘I am samurai,’ replied the Count quietly, his hand on the hilt of his katana. ‘Yet I am not stupid. What is your judgement? You know these things. I do not.’

‘Let’s find the trapdoor down. But watch and listen. You may have no more than a heartbeat’s warning – maybe not that. It’ll try to make your mind sleepy before it strikes.’

The trapdoor, as Asher had suspected, descended from the locked western room. Like the other he had found, it was fairly wide, in a part of the room which in earlier times would naturally have been covered with a cupboard or a bed, and its darkness breathed the same dank cold. ‘Will you remain at the top?’ he asked softly. ‘It may be out hunting at this hour, but there’s no telling when it will return.’

Mizukami’s blade whispered from the scabbard.

Asher descended, the lantern held high. The vault was deep, like the one in the French cemetery chapel; the brick stair made two complete turns, thirty steps. The faint foulness of old blood pervaded the clinging darkness. Things had died there, that no one had been willing to linger long enough to properly clean up.

He opened a door. The lantern beam caught the glint of reflective eyes, not three yards from his own.

A man’s low giggle filled the dark of the chamber.

Mouth dry with shock, Asher yanked the slide fully open.

The vampire sat enthroned on cushions, facing him. Unmoving, except for the trembling of the belly muscles as it laughed, the twisting of its face. Long hair, longer than Lydia’s even – a streaming black river of it – flowed down over its shoulders, coal-black against the death-pale ivory of its skin. Black eyes caught and reflected the lantern’s light, stared into his: utterly and unmistakably mad.

And no wonder, thought Asher, so aghast that for a moment he could not breathe. No wonder.

The vampire – a man in his prime – was nude, a blue silk sheet draped over his lap. His arms had been cut off just below the head of the humerus, his legs, guessed at beneath the folds of the sheet, a few inches below the trochanter of the hip. Vampire flesh does not heal like human flesh, and there was no way of guessing how long ago this had been done. But amid the glazed, waxy glisten of the scabs over what had been the armpit, Asher could see the tiny buds of baby fists growing from the flesh, smaller than the helpless hands of a newborn . . .

And easy to snip off again with no more than a razor.

Twenty years. His mind stalled on the thought, dizzy with horror and shock. Maybe more . . .

There was a little dried blood on the silken sheet, on the pillows near his head.

They must bring him his kills . . .

For a time Asher could do nothing but stare as the vampire bellowed with laughter, fangs flashing. Blood dribbled from its gums, and bruises discolored the silk-white skin where the facial sutures would be. The bruising was precisely as Asher had seen on Ito-san.

They’ve infected him with the blood of the Others. There was no way he could have stopped them from doing so, even if he’d been awake for it.

Which means he can probably summon them.

Asher bolted up the stairs, pursued by the vampire’s roars of mirth. Mizukami was flattened against the wall at the top, eyes straining at the darkness of the room beyond his small slip of lantern-light, but he flicked his glance sidelong as Asher emerged.

‘Run!’

Without a question or a sound, Mizukami caught up his lantern and fled at Asher’s heels, across the side room and across the main salon. They emerged from the door into the courtyard, and shots cracked out, not distant now but just across the court. Bullets tore the wood of the door frame next to Asher’s face. Three men ran toward them, one of them with eyes that reflected the lantern-light like a cat’s. Asher dodged left, returned fire with his revolver while Mizukami kicked the desiccated wood of the door of the two-story side-building. Asher ducked in after the Japanese into the darkness, up an open stairway to the shuttered terrace above.

The shutters on the upper floor were bolted from the inside but not locked; Asher jerked open a section, dropped both lanterns beside it, then dragged Mizukami to the farthest corner of the room where screens and chairs had been stacked, covered with sheets against the winter’s pervasive dust.

Both men rolled behind them as feet shook the stair. Moments later their pursuers entered, dashed to the open section of shutter which looked down – Asher knew – on to the narrow ground between the compound wall and the strait that joined the Shih Ch’a Hai – the long northern lobe of the ‘Sea’ – to its southern partner. It was a few hundred yards from where the yao-kuei – and the rats – had nearly cornered him, and he knew how far it was to the entrance to the nearest hutong.

One of the men swore. ‘Kou p’i!’

‘You see them?’

‘Get them,’ said a third voice, cold. ‘Go after them.’

‘We didn’t see which way they went, Chi T’uan—’

‘Then you better get down there and figure it out.’

The men crossed the room again toward the stair. When the man called Chi T’uan turned his head, in the moonlight Asher glimpsed again the reflective glitter of his eyes. Vampire? Or infected, like the other two down in the cellar, with the blood of the Others in the hopes of mentally controlling them? Of using them: unstoppable soldiers who would never listen to treachery, who wouldn’t have to be paid in anything but living food . . . who wouldn’t run away from a losing fight, and who would be very, very hard to kill.

Or both?

When the men had gone, Asher and Mizukami emerged from hiding, crossed to the ghostly rectangle of star-pinned heaven. Enough wind remained to sting Asher’s cheeks and numb the end of his nose. Looking down from the terrace he saw men emerge from Big Tiger Lane on to the lakeside pebbles, some running north, some south, boots crunching in the ice. The pursuers clung together, looked fearfully around themselves . . . So presumably the fact that Madame Tso’s son and nephew had become yao-kuei didn’t mean that the other yao-kuei could be controlled to the point that they wouldn’t attack Tso enforcers.

In the courtyard behind them and below, a woman’s voice rose, sharp with anger. Asher crossed the room silently, opened one of the shutters a crack in time to see Madame Tso, still in her embroidered robe of blue silk, slap Chi T’uan smartly across the face.

‘Lump of dog meat!’

‘We’ll catch them, Aunt.’

‘Are your brother and my son all right?’

‘I’m going down now to see.’

‘And Li?’

‘Aunt, I—’ Chen Chi T’uan pressed a hand to his temple. He was, as far as Asher could see, tall for a Chinese and dressed and barbered in the Western fashion, his coat a flashy double-breasted American style. The hardness in his voice dissolved, and he said, much more quietly, ‘I can’t always hear him.’

She slapped him again. ‘You’re not trying, then! Ungrateful brat!’

‘I am trying.’

‘It should be growing easier.’

‘But it’s not! Aunt, I don’t think it was a good idea to infect him with the blood of the kuei. What if it drives him crazy, the way it has Chi Erh—?’

‘My son has been stupid all his life and hadn’t the strength to resist. And, we hadn’t learned the right combination of herbs then, to keep the mind strong. Chi Fu is all right—’

‘Chi Fu is not all right! Chi Fu is turning into one of those things too, no matter how many herbs and medicines we give him! When I try to find my brother’s mind, it’s like trying to pick up the fragments of a rotting body—’

‘You’re a coward and a fool. Chi Fu will be well. He is recovering. As for Li – Li is chiang-shi. His body is like a diamond, stronger than the blood of the kuei. If he wouldn’t do what is needful to turn you into chiang-shi, what other course was open to us? Don’t be a baby, and give me your arm.’

Chi T’uan held out his arm, steadied his formidable aunt’s mincing steps as he led her toward the door of the main pavilion. Toward the stairway that led down to their prisoner’s lair, where the vampire Li could live in safety and darkness forever.

Asher and Mizukami descended the stair, crossed the courtyard swiftly, their breath clouds of silver in the excruciating cold. There was no one, now, in this part of the compound – everyone being presumably out combing the lakeshore or repelling rioters. They followed the walkway to the small courtyard where An Lu T’ang’s pleasure pavilion stood, and so out into Big Tiger Lane.

The sounds of riot around the Empress’s Garden had died away. As they turned down Lotus Alley, broken shopfronts, smashed shutters, and fragments of furniture and bottles bore witness to the magnitude of the disorder. The lanterns of shopkeepers bobbed in the darkness as they took stock of shattered boxes and looted goods. Here and there bullet holes punctuated the thick walls, and the air reeked with spilled liquor and vomit.

Outside the gate of the wine shop itself, Mizukami stopped a blue-uniformed policeman and asked, ‘Was anyone badly hurt?’

The representative of Peking’s Finest expiated for some minutes on the subject of big-nosed foreign-devil stinking sons of slave girls and hoped their commanding officers would flog them with rusty chains until the skin was stripped off their backs, and no, nobody had been killed. Mizukami handed him a few coins and signaled a couple of rickshaws.

When Asher climbed into one, the Count said to the puller, ‘Japanese Legation.’

An hour and a half later – it was by this time nearly three in the morning – Asher, pacing the sparely-furnished four-mat room at the back of Mizukami’s cottage, heard the cottage door open and the soft scrunch of running feet on the tatami. A moment later, the door of the room was flung open and Lydia threw herself into his arms.