Magistrates of Hell (29 page)

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.

‘F
orty.’ Asher turned Ysidro’s note over in his fingers.

Though the cottage was wired for modern electrical lamps, Mizukami clearly preferred the dimmer glow of paraffin. An oil-lamp stood – incongruous with its pink-flowered globe – on the small Chinese table in the corner, and by its honey-colored light the queer letters – drawn with a writing brush as if they were pictures – were clearly readable on the stiff yellow paper.

Other than the lamp and its table, the room, like all those in the house, was furnished in the Japanese style, which to a Westerner’s mind meant not very furnished at all. When Asher and Mizukami had returned there, servants had brought out quilts for Asher to sleep on, a neat dark square that took up two-thirds of the floor.

He now sat cross-legged on the floor mats beside a low table, Lydia perched on a cushion at his side.

A servant had brought tea, and then left them alone.

It was nearly dawn.

‘Forty isn’t so very many.’ Lydia spoke in the neutral tone that Asher had observed her use when she was deeply troubled about something.

He knew what it was: what she wasn’t saying.

‘It is when there’s only five or six in the defending party,’ he replied. ‘And when you know that if you’re wounded – if enough of their blood gets into the cut – you’ll be one of them within days.’

Lydia looked down at her hands. Not saying – because she could not say it, not even in her own heart –
we have to get him out
.

The words stood between them as they discussed the explosives, and chlorine gas, and how to keep the rats at bay long enough to plant the gelignite charges. (‘Do the German regiments have any
flammenwerfer
they’d lend us, I wonder?’)

Asher understood. It was one thing to say,
He is what he is, and he cannot help what he is
. The same was true of Grant Hobart. Karlebach had said to him once of Ysidro,
Every kill he makes henceforth will be upon your head
, and Asher knew that this was the truth.

The fact that Don Simon Ysidro had gone to the mines in the first place to help Asher’s investigation of the Others – to keep the threat from spreading further – made no difference.

Nor did the fact that he had saved Asher’s life, and Lydia’s, and that of Miranda before she was born.

The fact that Asher had himself killed, repeatedly, over the span of nearly twenty years in the service of the Department made no difference, either. He had walked away from it. Ysidro could not, and never would.

To do him justice, the vampire was probably not expecting rescue. Nevertheless, Asher felt like a Judas, the pain of betraying and deserting a comrade grinding in him like the poisoned barbs of an arrow.

‘She really deliberately infected her son, and then her nephew –
two
of her nephews! – with the blood of the Others, for . . . for the sake of
power
?’ Lydia shook her head disbelievingly, when Asher told her of what he’d found in the Tso compound, and what he’d overheard. ‘How
could
she? How could
anyone
do that?’

He knew she was thinking of Miranda. Tiny, perfect, like a red-and-white flower . . .

‘She’s a woman who had her feet mutilated by her own mother before she reached the age of six,’ replied Asher, ‘so that she’d be “beautiful” enough to sell to someone whose influence would help her family.’

Lydia started to say something else, then couldn’t, and only shook her head.

‘A woman whose feet are bound lives in daily pain for the rest of her life, Lydia. I wouldn’t say it gave Madame Tso a hatred for her family, but I can’t see how it wouldn’t give you a rather specialized view of what a family can reasonably ask its members.’

‘And I thought Aunt Louise was bad . . .’

‘I don’t know how Madame Tso found herself in the position to mutilate the vampire Li and make him her prisoner,’ Asher went on quietly. ‘Whether it was chance, or whether he trusted her enough to let her know where he slept.’

‘Well, I must say it certainly explains why the Peking vampires don’t trust the living.’

‘Or anyone. My guess is, once she had him at her mercy, she starved him—’

‘It’s what I’d do,’ agreed Lydia reasonably. ‘That is, if I were – um – that kind of person . . .’

Asher brought up her hand and kissed it. ‘I’ve seen you in the dissecting rooms, Best Beloved, and you
are
that kind of person. You just haven’t had her motives. There’s nothing I wouldn’t put past you, if Miranda were in danger.’

‘Well, no.’ She blinked at him behind her spectacles, as if his observation were self-evident.

‘Later she had victims brought to him, in exchange for his using a vampire’s ability to read dreams – and plant dreams – to give her husband and his enforcers an edge over other criminal families in Peking.’

‘And reading dreams,’ went on Lydia, ‘and being able to . . . to touch the minds of others, the way very old vampires can do, he would have become aware of the minds of the Others. Or the hive mind, anyway, which is what it sounds like they have.’ Her brow furrowed briefly. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to have had Madame Tso’s dreams for the past twenty years . . .’