Magistrates of Hell

THIRTY

‘He was a vampire,’ was all Karlebach would say. ‘A murderer a thousand times over. How can you shed one single tear for such a thing? What kind of woman are you?’

Asher knew there was no hope of making him understand. Kneeling – cradling Lydia in his arms, her body shaking though she made not a whisper – he replied quietly, ‘She’s a woman who has just had her life saved and seen her rescuer killed before her eyes.’

Karlebach’s face was the face of an Old Testament prophet, who speaks the judgement of God and is not moved. ‘He was a vampire.’ It was as if, for that space of time, he knew neither of them, nor anything beyond that fact.

The yellow light of flames sprang up behind the roofs of the Tso compound and showed Asher the trim little shape of Count Mizukami making his way down from the broken gate. ‘Madame Ashu—’

‘Is well.’ Asher rose to his feet with Lydia held against him, all that exhaustion and the pain in his side would tolerate. Her face pressed to his shoulder, her hands gripped his torn sleeves convulsively, unable to speak or to meet the eyes of anyone around her. ‘But I’m taking her back to the hotel. You’ll tidy up here?’ He glanced toward the spreading blaze now visibly licking above the roofs.

‘It is done.’ Mizukami must have used the spare petrol from the boot of his motor car, or else found lamp oil in one of the rooms near the vampire Li’s prison. ‘I even sent a man for the Fire Department.’

‘Thank you.’ Asher felt drained, emptied of every thought and feeling except that Lydia was alive and unhurt.

And that Ysidro was dead at last.

Young Private Seki, chalk-pale, brought the motor car around to the spot where Big Tiger Lane opened on to the lakeshore. Asher’s boots crunched the icy sand as he stumbled up the short slope, laid Lydia gently in the back seat and covered her with the car rug. Rigid and silent, Karlebach got into the front beside the driver, his shotgun by his side.

And he has a right, thought Asher wearily, closing his eyes, to be bitter. He did the right thing, by all the laws of God and man, and received no thanks for it. Not even acknowledgement for the death of the young man he loved like a son. Instead he was betrayed by one whom he’s seen falling further and further beneath a vampire’s seducing spell.

No wonder he pulled that trigger, even as Ysidro saved Lydia’s life.

Shooting Ysidro had been an act of salvation, to free both Asher and Lydia from servitude to the vampire’s spells.

He is right. Asher leaned back into the leather of the car seat, Lydia’s head resting on his thigh. Under his hands her tangled hair was wet silk. Lydia alive. Lydia unhurt. He’s right.

In the dark behind his eyelids, Asher saw Ysidro’s body buckle under the spray of silver buckshot. White shirt starred with blood, colorless hair like spider silk around the scarred and skull-like face. No expression, neither pain nor joy, anger nor regret, like a strange statue wrought of ivory, air and time.

Saw him fall backward into the near-freezing black water.

Into peace. Into death. Into Hell. A thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down . . .

The following day Karlebach informed him that he had changed his ticket home, and instead of traveling by the Ravenna with the Ashers at the end of the month, he would take the Liliburo out of Shanghai next week, alone.

On the night of the twentieth of November, Asher dreamed of Don Simon Ysidro.

He’d gone with Ellen and Miranda to see Rebbe Karlebach off at the train station, for his journey to Shanghai: Lydia still kept to her room. He’d offered to accompany his old teacher south on the day-long journey, and when Karlebach had refused – Mrs Asher, he said, needed her husband at her side – had arranged for the Legation clerk P’ei Cheng K’ang to go with him, and to see him safely on to the boat. On the platform the old man had embraced him, and returning the embrace Asher had felt how fragile his old friend seemed, stiff and brittle and unyielding. Karlebach had whispered his name, and Asher had said, ‘Thank you, my friend.’ He did not say for what.

They both knew – Asher felt this through his bones – that nothing would be the same between them again.

It had been a week of nine-days’-wonders in the Legation Quarter. The news that Sir Grant Hobart’s body had been found in the fire-gutted house of the notorious Mrs Tso (‘I can’t say I’m wildly surprised,’ had been Annette Hautecoeur’s comment) had been followed hard by Asher’s resurrection (‘No, no, haven’t the slightest idea what it was all about . . .’), and by Mr Timms’s gruff apology on behalf of the Legation police (‘Telegram from London informs us that the charge was all balderdash – no, they said no more than that . . .’).

‘How astonishing,’ Asher had said, with what he hoped was a convincing look of baffled surprise.

Yet all these developments had been dwarfed by the appearance of five Chinese – presumably cousins of various Legation servants, though there was no way of proving this – and a dilapidated American artist named Jones, who walked into the Legation police station and independently swore that they’d seen Richard Hobart at various times on the night of October twenty-third wearing a tie which in no way resembled the murder weapon. Moreover, the rickshaw-puller who had brought Richard to Eddington’s put in an appearance, and testified in excellent English – he’d been a professor of that language at the Imperial Railway College at Shanhaikuan before the downfall of the dynasty – that when he had brought the young man, incapably drunk, to the gate, it had been to find Holly Eddington’s body lying already dead in the garden. His fare had, in fact, stared down at the body, sobbed pitifully, ‘Oh Holly, who has done such a dreadful thing?’ and had fainted. Mr K’ung had attempted to revive him and had only run away from the scene when people began to come from the house.

Asher wondered where the dead Mi Ching’s cousins had located an English-speaking rickshaw-puller for the purpose, not to speak of an impoverished American artist. But, Lydia had commented over tea later in the afternoon, it was a very nice touch.

Lydia had been very quiet through it all.

Now Asher dreamed of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. Lydia, guidebook in hand, was telling him about the various fearsome statues that stood along its western wall: ‘This is Lu, Magistrate of the Wu Kuan Hell – I think that’s the hell where sinners are fried in cauldrons of oil, only those poor people around his feet in the statue look like they’re being steamed instead of fried . . .’

‘Perhaps they’re given a choice,’ Asher suggested.

‘Like the dumplings in a native restaurant?’ She looked better than she had all the previous week, as if the horror of what had happened at the Tso compound, the grief at Ysidro’s death, were beginning to loosen their grip on her. She still bore the bruises on her face where Hobart had struck her, and her glasses were her rimless spare pair, which she’d been wearing all week. Under his shirt, waistcoat, jacket and coat – the night was a cold one – Asher was conscious of the sticking-plaster dressing on his ribs.

‘And this is Bao Cheng,’ she went on, ‘who was an official of the Sung Dynasty before he was promoted – I suppose you could call it that – to being Magistrate of . . . let’s see . . . the Yama Hell. Is that the one with the metal cylinder they’re supposed to climb with the fire lit inside it? Oh, and here’s Chiang Tzu-Wen . . .’

They had reached the end of the temple, and in the doorway beside the war god’s banner-draped niche Ysidro stood, wrapped in the earth-colored robe of the temple priests, his pale hair tied back in their fashion. His arms were folded, as if against the chill, for indeed it had snowed that afternoon. A thin layer of it was visible beyond him in the disheveled garden – the pigeon-coops gone now, the garbage cleared away – glittering gently in the brightness of the moon. ‘Mistress,’ he said. ‘James.’

Lydia gasped, moved an impulsive step towards him, then stopped herself, threw an uncertain glance at Asher. He took the guidebook from her hand and, freed of the encumbrance, she flung herself into Ysidro’s arms.

Held him, tight and motionless, without a word, rocking a little in his arms. Face pressed to his shoulder, red hair like fire and poppies around the cold ivory spindles of his fingers.

‘I’m glad to see you’re all right,’ said Asher.

‘I trust, at my age, that a half-dozen pellets of silver in my shoulder aren’t sufficient to discommode me from pulling myself under still water to safety.’ The vampire put a hand on Lydia’s back and added, in his soft, reasonable voice, ‘Hush, Mistress, hush. What is this? Your husband will demand satisfaction of me. Has that lunatic vampire-hunter taken himself off for Prague?’

‘This afternoon.’ It was in Asher’s mind to wonder if he would ever see the old scholar again.

‘May his ship go down with all hands.’ As he had in the mines, Don Simon looked thin and haggard, and very unhuman. The scars on his face and throat, which he generally used his psychic glamor to cover from living eyes, were shockingly visible. Asher wondered whether this was because this was only a dream, or because of the silver that had scorched his flesh.

‘I suppose the thought has never crossed his mind that, had he followed his own dictates and simply destroyed that precious student of his the moment he became infected, rather than giving him the wherewithal to travel and spread the virus, all this might have been avoided.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Asher, ‘I think the thought was very much in his mind. This journey for him was penance – and redemption.’

‘At someone else’s expense,’ said the vampire with a sniff. ‘And without asking those he would “help” if they wanted his interference. Like all the Van Helsings of the world, who must become a little mad in order to pursue such phantoms as we. Obsession with us destroys them – as obsession with our own safety destroys us, in the end. I am only grateful,’ he added as Lydia stepped back from him, ‘that ’twas no worse. Is it well with you, Mistress?’

She smiled a little and straightened her glasses. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

‘Yes,’ said Asher. ‘Thank you – more than I can say.’

Ysidro’s eyes touched Asher’s – asking permission, as gentlemen do. Asher nodded, and the vampire took Lydia’s hand and brushed the ink-stained fingers lightly with cold lips. He released his hold at once, and when Asher held out his own hand to him, took it – a little gingerly – in a skeletal clasp.

Behind Ysidro, in the shadows of Kuan Yu’s statue, Asher became aware of the priest Chiang, curiously young-looking in the moonlight, his eyes gleaming reflectively, like a cat’s.

And deep in his dreaming, Asher wondered how he could possibly not have noticed that the old Taoist was a vampire.

Did he always look like that? Asher had the impression that the man’s coloring had been warmer, not silk pale as it was now. He had no recollection of noticing before that the old man didn’t breathe, nor had he ever taken note – and he couldn’t imagine he had been that unobservant – that the long nails of his hands, like Ysidro’s, were hard and shiny as claws. Moreover, he had the impression somewhere at the back of his mind that he’d seen the old man in daylight. Whether the psychic illusion did not hold in dreams, or merely because Chiang wished to make matters more clear, Asher saw him now.

He said, ‘Chiang Tzu-Wen. One of the ten Magistrates of Hell. You were an official in the Han Dynasty and later worshiped as a god in the Moliang District—’

His Chinese was much better in his dream than it was in real life.

‘Long ago.’ The old vampire responded to him in Latin and inclined his head. ‘We all of us – Professor Gellar – have lives which we once lived, once upon a time.’

He rested his hand on Ysidro’s shoulder, the black claws curving like a dragon’s against the skin of his throat. ‘I will say that I was surprised – and not pleased – to learn that one of those whom I summoned here to deal with the Filthy Ones turned out to be a vampire. We had enough to deal with, my kindred and I, without the concern about a newcomer making alliances that would shift the balance of things here in this city.’

‘Without his assistance,’ replied Asher, ‘we could not have destroyed them – if they are indeed destroyed.’

‘They are. I – and my kindred – have gone out to the mine and have walked by night among the bridges and temples on the shores of Peking’s five Seas. No trace of the things have we found. Li had summoned to him all those few that dwelled in the city, and all perished together in the flames. We have gone to the place: nothing of them remains.’

Through the door behind him, in the moonlit garden, Asher was briefly conscious of other shadows among the bare wisteria, the timeless stones: a woman with the unbound hair of a shamaness, a great sturdy man who stood like a warrior, a cold-faced mandarin in the robes of a dynasty long perished. They kept their distance from one another, their eyes like pale marsh-fire, wary and ancient and indescribably alien, more like dragons than human souls.

And Lydia, who had been listening with difficulty – her Latin being limited to medical texts – stepped forward and put a hand on Chiang’s ragged sleeve. ‘He risked his life to learn of them,’ she said. ‘And he didn’t have to come here.’

The old vampire regarded her with a dragon’s inhuman gaze. ‘It is so, Lady,’ he said. ‘And as I said, I was surprised. It is not often that the chiang-shi –’ the pronunciation was completely different from that of his name – ‘display interest in anything but the hunt and their own immediate safety.’ He shared, in part, in Ysidro’s quality of stillness, but Asher detected the momentary flicker of a derisive glance at the vampires in the courtyard beyond the door. ‘We all owe you thanks.’

The Magistrates in the courtyard – among whom, Asher was interested to note, Father Orsino was not present – did not look as if they thought they owed the yang kwei tse anything, living or dead, but evidently nobody was going to argue with Chiang Tzu-Wen. After a moment they too inclined their heads, then stepped back and dissolved into the moonlight. Their reflective eyes seemed to linger on for a moment more.

‘Much as my heart longs to say that it was our pleasure,’ remarked Ysidro, ‘I can assure you, my lord, it was not.’

‘Even so.’ Chiang’s hand tightened slightly on his uninjured shoulder, then released him. ‘Yet you did it nevertheless. The Tso woman has been put out of the way, along with poor Li: as you will have observed, the living who meddle in the affairs of the dead are far less dangerous to all than the dead who meddle in the affairs of the living. One hopes that a lesson was learned by all –’ he glanced again toward the now-empty courtyard – ‘and that the matter will not arise another time.’ The last gleam of lingering eyes flickered away.

Chiang made a move to step away, and Lydia – always insatiably curious – lifted her hand again, as if to stay him. ‘Sir,’ she asked diffidently, in her careful Latin, ‘when Li summoned the Others – the yao-kuei – to him, was it to get him out of there? Or might he have known that they would destroy him – might he have known he couldn’t control them . . . but only wished to end his life in the only way that he could?’

Chiang considered her for a moment, half a smile touching his mouth. ‘This I do not know, Lady,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Li did not know either. But assuredly, he has gone on to Hell—’ He stepped back into the shadows of the war god’s niche, so that, like the Cheshire cat, only the glimmer of his eyes and the ghost of his voice remained. ‘Not as a Magistrate, but as a humble client, as we all shall one day be.’

‘Domine salvet me,’ Ysidro whispered, and from the darkness, Chiang’s voice replied.

‘No doubt He will, when He has a use for your services.’

Waking, Asher laid his hand on the pillow at his side. Swathed in a heavy quilt, Lydia sat beside the window that overlooked Rue Meiji. But she was looking at her hand, and as Asher sat up, she brushed the back of it with her finger, where Ysidro’s cold lips had touched. At his movement she turned her head and her eyes met his.

She looked at peace.

He went to her, and she opened the quilt, to wrap him as well. ‘Did you dream about him?’ he asked.

‘In the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. You spoke to Mr Chiang in Chinese . . . I’ve never dreamed in Chinese! And then in Latin, of all things. And Chiang—’

‘Chiang is a vampire,’ said Asher quietly. ‘By the sound of it, I suspect he’s the Master of Peking.’

‘Well, he had no business getting sniffy about the dead meddling with the affairs of the living,’ said Lydia, ‘if he was getting the other priests in the Temple to work for him.’ She pushed her rimless glasses more firmly on to her nose. ‘I think his coffin must be one of those crates in the strongroom below the Temple . . . What did he mean, he summoned us here? We came here because—’

She broke off, calculating back in her mind how it was they’d happened to journey to China. ‘Chiang killed the thing whose body Dr Bauer found in Mingliang, didn’t he?’

‘I think he must have,’ said Asher. ‘With fewer than a dozen vampires in Peking – one of them missing for the past twenty years, and who knows how many of them insane, as Father Orsino is – the Master of Peking may have felt in need of Western help. The Prague vampire nest has never been able to make headway against the Others, and they’ve been there since the fourteenth century. I think Chiang Tzu-Wen must have lain in wait by the mines until he was able to kill one, which he left where a Western doctor would find it. He knew she’d write it up in a journal somewhere. He knew someone would come. I’m guessing he’s dealt with vampire hunters before.’

‘The Van Helsings of the world,’ quoted Lydia softly. ‘When Ysidro was trapped in the mine, he said he dreamed of him . . .’

‘I think it more likely that Chiang went to the mine himself. It was certainly Chiang who helped me escape from the yao-kuei – and the rats – when they cornered me on the lakeshore. Even at the time I thought my escape was . . . providential. The fact was that he still needed me.’

Lydia’s hand closed tight on his.

After a long time she asked, ‘Did Ysidro say in your dream – he didn’t in mine – where he’s going, when he leaves Peking?’

Asher shook his head. His eyes met those of his wife, troubled behind their thick glasses, afraid for that strange friend whom neither of them had any business speaking to, let alone serving now and again, no matter what the cause. In her dream, he wondered, had she thrown herself into Ysidro’s arms? In her dream, what had Ysidro said to her?

What kind of woman are you? Karlebach had asked, almost spitting the words.

And what kind of man am I?

She wrapped her arms – carefully – around his ribcage, rested her head on his shoulder.

There’s an answer to that question somewhere. But God only knows what it is.

Neither dreamed of Don Simon Ysidro again before they left China, nor for a long time thereafter.

But as he and Lydia walked up the gangplank of the Ravenna at Tientsin a week later in the freezing winter dusk, Asher did notice, among the trunks being loaded in the hold, a massive one of tan leather with brass corners.