Magistrates of Hell (13 page)

Peking was quiet now.

He reached the north wall of the Legation Quarter. Wind swirled dust around him, brought him the scent of tobacco from the gates, where the guards sneaked a cigarette. In the open glacis, vendors who dwelled within the Tatar City were taking down their barrows: candied fruit, second-hand shoes, scorpions skewered on sticks and fried in oil. Voices chattered in the brisk sing-song of the Peking dialect. Beyond that – beyond the wide Tung Ch’ang An Street – the roofs of the real Peking rose: the Tatar City that surrounded the Imperial City that surrounded the Forbidden City – more puzzle boxes, each locked behind its massive gates – where the young ex-Emperor still lived among half-deserted courtyards and pavilions going to ruin.
And who’s sweeping the dust from his doorstep tonight?

On his way back, Asher turned down the service lane that ran between the Legation wall and the lower wall that defined the back gardens of the line of brick bungalows where the Legation officials had their homes. Through bare branches of garden trees, he made out the roofline of the Eddington house, one lamplit window.

Is Myra Eddington able to sleep yet?

Would I be, if it was Miranda who lay dead?

His heart contracted inside him at the thought of that red-haired child, whom he had left crawling busily around the parlor in quest of the blocks Lydia had hidden everywhere (including in Karlebach’s beard).

Holly Eddington – shrill-voiced, nervous, awkward in her girlish white gown and ready to trick a man into marrying her, for the sake of his money . . . She had been a child like that once.

And so had the girl – whatever her name was – that Grant Hobart had killed because he couldn’t climax any other way.

‘James,’ a voice murmured in his ear. ‘A pleasure to see you well.’

Asher turned sharply.

A trace of wind stirred the vampire’s long white hair, lifted the skirts of his greatcoat. ‘Don’t look at me,’ Ysidro added, seeing his expression. ‘I had nothing to do with the girl’s death.’

‘You heard something in the garden, though, when we spoke at Eddington’s?’

‘I did.’ The vampire turned at once down the Rue Meiji, away from the gate, and Asher fell into step. ‘When interrupted by your so-charming friend I went out and found the girl dead – only by minutes – and the young man in an advanced state of drunken unconsciousness. Had I been such a fool as to taste his blood I couldn’t have found my way back to my own coffin. Does your Professor think me that stupid?’

‘That greedy for blood.’

A line appeared – briefly – at the corner of Ysidro’s mouth, then vanished. ‘When the only thing in your life is a hammer, all problems look like nails. In an unknown city, where the presence of the vampires imbues the very stones, it were madness to drink without leave.’

It was clear, to Asher’s eye, that he still had not fed. There was a look to him, skeletal and a little inhuman, as if he had trouble maintaining the illusion of life that made his victims trust him. The scars on his face were now clearly visible, white ridges over brow and cheekbone. He had gotten them in Lydia’s defense.

‘I suspect,’ Asher said, ‘that Karlebach, for all his studies, doesn’t know as much about vampires as he thinks he does.’
Or
I
don’t know as much about them as
I
think I do
. . .

‘I have observed before this,’ Ysidro commented. ‘That vampire hunters become obsessed with their prey, to the exclusion of all else: family, friends, the joy of study or of love – everything but the hunt. In this they become like the vampire themselves. Their worlds narrow and focus, until they become a perfect weapon . . . but a weapon is all they are. I take it you did indeed find the Others in the Western Hills.’

Asher raised his brows. ‘If you tell me you were present and didn’t lend us your aid—’

‘
Dios
, no! The dead travel swiftly, but I had errands of my own last night – which did not prosper, I regret to say. The first I knew of your adventures was when I saw you return to your hotel in the small hours, looking as if you had been to the wars. And this evening in the barracks quarter, your Soldiers Three spoke feelingly of an encounter with the foulest-smelling gang of brigands this side of Hell. Drugged, they said, or practitioners of mysterious techniques, like those of the
amuk
warriors of the Philippines.’

‘Just as well. The last thing we need is for anybody’s network of gossips to send word of their existence back to the species of bastards who invented phosgene gas.’ Briefly, Asher recounted the events of the previous thirty-six hours as they walked, including the theft of their horses and the behavior of Dr Bauer’s medical specimens when exposed to sunlight. ‘I’d have liked to see the effects of a few drops of silver nitrate on some of those bones, and Karlebach has a whole pharmacopoeia of distillations, though how you’d convince the things to drink them is beyond me. I gather Dr Bauer believes them to be some kind of atavistic survival from prehistory, like the apemen in
The Lost World
, and hopes to prove this to the scientific community.’

‘
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy
,’ quoted the vampire. ‘It is in fact no less reasonable than to believe in vampires.’

They reached the wall of the Imperial City, black and towering thirty feet above them on the opposite side of the street, its crenellations outlined dimly against the lights of the railroad yard. A street vendor’s voice somewhere on the other side wailed hoarsely the virtues of pancakes and watermelon seeds.

‘What have you learned from the vampires of Peking?’

‘Naught.’ Hands in the pockets of his long black greatcoat, Ysidro was barely visible in the night. ‘Not even their shadows have I seen. Yet their presence hangs in the air like smoke. I promenaded myself along the glacis, and a little distance into the city, listening for their voices. I heard nothing. But when I sleep, I dream of being watched by something I cannot understand. Something terrible, silent, and cold.’

It was the first time Asher had ever heard him speak of dreaming.

The vampire countess Anthea Farren – gone now, burned up in a holocaust of flame in Constantinople – had said to Asher once that it was as if God had chosen, as the punishment for those who killed in order to steal more life, to make them seek every attribute of death except peace. To be vampire was a condition predicated upon always having somewhere to hide; always having inviolable control over one’s environment. Thus as the years passed their un-life grew smaller and more rigid, and they sought to control every atom of the world that might be some threat to them. Most never dared travel. Many ceased to venture more than a few miles from where their coffins were hidden, lest they be somehow caught from home by the unforeseen.

Like that fairy book
, she had said, in the darkness of a Vienna night,
where a man’s limbs are replaced, one by one, by magic with limbs of tin, until suddenly he realizes he has no heart and is no longer a man. I’m afraid
, she had said,
and I know I should be more afraid than I am. I could die in moments, just because I don’t know the right place to hide, the right turning to take
. . .

Her death, when it came, had not taken moments.

All of this echoed in Ysidro’s stillness.

‘Would it help you,’ Asher asked, with a certain diffidence, ‘if I went with you when you sought them? At least I could speak to them, if they appeared.’

‘You would die,’ said Ysidro, quite simply. ‘Maybe I also, for allying myself with the living. I know not even if speaking to you thus tonight dooms you at their hands. I have no sense of their presence here in the Legation Quarter, yet this, too, may be an illusion wrought by them upon my mind. I cannot tell. I can say only,
walk carefully, and take all possible precautions
, for in my bones I feel they can strike with the speed of thought. I am sorry,’ he added, and it sounded like he meant it.

Dust blew in Asher’s eyes. As he wiped them he became aware that he had been standing for some time on the bank of the canal alone, where it ran beneath the city wall. In the sickly moonlight, only his own tracks marked the dust along Rue Meiji, back toward the hotel’s yellow lights.

P’
ei Cheng K’ang, Sir John Jordan said, was the most reliable of the British Legation’s Chinese clerks, a young man whose parents had emigrated to India when K’ang was eight and who had subsequently been educated at Cambridge. He had family in Peking, however, and had recently married a young woman of their choosing, so he was grateful for Asher’s offer of ten shillings per evening, to help him go over the maps and diagrams compiled by the Hsi Fang-te Hsing Sheng Company of its mine in Mingliang. The company itself had gone bankrupt years previously, and no wonder, thought Asher as he drew the musty sheaf of yellow paper from the envelope Mizukami had sent him. A glance told him the maps were incomplete. Even when he’d ascertained which portion of it was supposed to represent the Mingliang gorge, he could see it wasn’t to scale, nor did it resemble much the terrain he had passed over on Friday.

‘No, that’s Mingliang, all right, sir,’ the clerk reassured him, when Asher slid the map across to him. ‘I suspect the man who put this map together had never been near the place and was trying to make the earlier maps all fit.’

They worked in the Legation offices – Asher had a deep mistrust about anyone knowing any more about his family or place of residence than was absolutely necessary – in a room of the original old princely palace that hadn’t even been piped for gas, let alone wired for electricity. Paraffin lamps threw strange shadows over the red-lacquered pillars that rose between the prosaic desks of the clerks, caught glints of peeled gold and faded polychrome among the maze of ceiling beams. As he studied the maps, Asher found a great deal of his long-neglected Chinese returned to him, though he was glad of an assistant: ‘Is that
incline
there? Does that
ten
mean degrees of slope?’

‘That’s
keng
– pit. I assume ten
bu
deep, unless – when was this made? Unless they were using meters.’

‘When did the company switch over to meters? Does it say?’

P’ei shook his head. ‘If a mine was getting its equipment from Germany or France they’d sometimes switch over to meters – even as far back as 1880 – but it depended on whether they kept foremen who were more used to measuring things in
chi
and
bu
. And then some of the foremen came from parts of the country where it was five
chi
to a
bu
, and some from where it was six
chi
.’

‘Hmn.’ Asher reflected that it was no wonder the unfortunate Emperor Kwang Hsu – before he’d been locked up by his ferocious old aunt the Empress Dowager and poisoned – had wanted to reform measurements. ‘And where does this lead? It says
old tunnel
.’

‘
Old tunnel
could mean something that was dug in the time of the T’ang emperors, sir. That part of the hills is riddled with old mines. Some of the tunnels are caved in or flooded. Others go Heaven knows where. The Company got cheated when it bought the diggings and tried to get its money back out of its workers’ wages. They never put up enough shorings, or bothered to keep their pumps working properly.’

Asher glanced across the table at the young man, neat as any Cockney clerk in a blue suit and starched collar, with a little close-clipped French mustache. ‘Have you ever been to the mines?’

P’ei shook his head. ‘But one of my mother’s neighbors worked in the Shi’h Liu mines, both before and after the Hsi Fang-te Company bought them. He said the galleries would sometimes connect with older diggings – from back even before the . . .’ He stopped himself from saying
Long-Nosed Devils
. ‘Before the Europeans came to China.’

‘Did he ever scare you with stories of things hiding in the mine?’

The clerk grinned. ‘You mean demons? He used to scare the daylights out of me and my brother telling us about a
kuei
like a giant catfish, with six pairs of men’s arms and eyes that glowed in the dark. It would haul itself along the tunnel singing in a woman’s voice and devour miners.’

But no
yao-kuei
. That would be – he tried to estimate the young man’s age – maybe twenty years ago? And his instincts told him that Dr Bauer was correct. That the
yao-kuei
were of very recent appearance.

But how? Where did they come from? And why?

ARE the vampires of Peking behind it somehow?

During these three days of examining maps, Asher also paid visits to the other friends of Richard Hobart – a Trade Ministry clerk named Cromwell Hall, and the dandified German translator Hans Erlich – and confirmed what he already suspected: that on the evening of their disastrous expedition to Eight Roads, young Hobart hadn’t been wearing the tie with which Holly Eddington had been strangled. It was clear to him that the young man had been very neatly separated from his companions that night, drugged – the rickshaw-puller must have showed Hobart’s pass to the gate guards – and dumped in the garden beside his fiancée’s dead body. The Department at its finest couldn’t have done better.

On the third evening, Asher brought up the subject of where a
yang jên
gentleman of moderate wealth and specialized tastes might go to seek entertainment in Peking.

‘A friend of mine asked me to make inquiries,’ he explained.

‘You mean a boy?’ P’ei didn’t turn a hair. ‘Or children?’

Waiters in Peking eating houses used the same tone to inquire:
All-same want steam rice, want fry rice
?

‘Girls,’ Asher said. ‘Young girls. Who would I speak to about that?’

The clerk was silent for a moment, studying his face, though Asher himself had learned long ago that it wasn’t always possible to judge a man’s tastes in the bedroom by looking at him. In time he replied, ‘I would go to Fat Yu, or An Lu T’ang. Yu, if your friend likes his girls very young. An, if he does not wish to be troubled by the law, if it should so happen that the girl gets . . . hurt.’