Magistrates of Hell (6 page)

‘We can. Provided nothing goes wrong.’ Asher sat back as the white-jacketed Chinese waiter brought green turtle soup and
petite sole aux tomates
to their table. The dining room of the Wagons-Lits Hotel was justly famous throughout the diplomatic community for the excellence of its lunches, and Asher had taken great care to obtain a table in the most inconspicuous corner of that elegant salon.

‘Have you ever ridden in a motor car, sir?’ Asher asked. ‘The tires are rubber: on a good macadam road you can go twenty or thirty miles between punctures. But here?’ He made an eloquent gesture with his eyebrows. ‘The road ends at Men T’ou Kuo. We’d have to procure horses there – or donkeys, more likely – to ride on to Mingliang. Given the presence of bandit groups in the hills – and Kuo Min-tang militia – personally, I would rather wait till we have an armed escort.’

‘I bow to your greater experience, Jamie.’ The old man rumbled his discontent. ‘It’s just, when I think of those who will be placed in danger—’

‘If someone will inevitably be placed in danger,’ said Lydia, ‘I would much rather that it not be you, sir, or Jamie.’ And she laid a hand over Asher’s wrist.

For this reason, with the conclusion of lunch, Asher passed the afternoon in giving his companions a Cook’s Tour of the Legation Quarter, with its odd mix of modern European structures and antique gateways left over from the days before the Uprising. Parade grounds, barracks, and soldiers in the uniforms of most of the armies of Europe served to remind them that they were intruders in that ancient land, and unwelcome ones at that.

‘Half this area was a regular Chinese neighborhood up till the Boxers shelled it into rubble,’ Asher explained as they paused to marvel over the Gothic absurdity of the French Post Office. ‘A maze of
hutongs
– those high-walled alleyways – and
siheyuan
, courtyard houses—’

‘Like the Legation this morning?’ asked Lydia.

‘They make up most of Peking. Sometimes one courtyard per house, sometimes two or three or five or ten, all leading out of one another. You never knew what was in some of those compounds. What the Boxers didn’t demolish was burned by Chinese mobs, or destroyed by the Expeditionary Force when they came through.’

Karlebach listened, nodded, and growled, but made the observation that it wasn’t to play Sherlock Holmes that they had come to China. When they reached the end of Legation Street, and looked out through the gate across the open glacis that surrounded the Quarter’s wall, he rumbled, ‘So he could be anywhere out there, could he not? Your vampire.’ He surveyed the sea of upturned tile roofs, the line of gaudy shops on the other side of Hatamen Street. Rickshaws, laden donkeys, and lines of thick-bodied, two-humped shaggy camels passed them, and endless streams of blue-clad Chinese.

‘He might.’ Asher felt Lydia’s silence beside him. Her anger at Ysidro over the death of a traveling companion – three years ago in Constantinople – had left her, and she would speak of the vampire perfectly readily if the subject arose. Yet he noticed she never brought up his name herself.

Except now and again, in her sleep.

As generally happened in any open space in Peking, the portion of the glacis from the gate to the polo ground – some two hundred feet – had been taken over by Chinese vendors of dumplings and caged birds, cloth shoes and horoscopes, fried scorpions and paper toys, as well as by the occasional acrobat, storyteller, juggler or newspaper seller, and a long rank of rickshaws, the pullers of which shouted their readiness to transport passers-by to anywhere in the Republic for twenty cents. Thronging together, they smelled different from English crowds. As he had on his previous visit to China, Asher felt as if he had disembarked, not on another corner of the planet, but on another world altogether, as different from England as H.G. Wells’s description of the civilization on the Moon.

You can’t tell what’s going on in their minds
, Hobart had protested – loudly.
How would I know how they’re connected?

He isn’t far wrong
, reflected Asher, listening to the babble of voices, the curious sing-song effect of a language in which changing tone is as much a part of the meaning of the word as its consonants and vowels. Watching the gestures of hands, the slight cues of clothing and demeanor that communicated nothing to an observer who didn’t understand the culture or the city.

But, in fact, Hobart is lying
.

And I wish I knew about what
.

That night, after supper, and after Miranda had been put to bed – impatient with parents who had been largely at her beck and call throughout the six weeks on the ship and who now left her with Mrs Pilley and Ellen – Asher returned to the Quarter’s eastern gate. He’d left Lydia and Professor Karlebach poring over issues of the various medical journals which had appeared subsequent to Dr Christina Bauer’s article about the creature whose body she had dissected – journals which contained derisive letters speculating on everything from the missionary’s attempts to claim undeserved credit in the scientific community by a fraudulent ‘discovery’, to the degenerate nature of Oriental races in general. The night was still, and the cold piercing. He traded a cigarette with the guards on the gate – Russians, tonight – and talked with them a little in their own language before moving on.

Beyond the gate – across the open glacis – he could see the massive towers of the Hatamen Gate, shut and barred now for the night and guarded by a prosaic brace of blue-uniformed policemen. The wide avenue was growing quiet.

Remaining within the Quarter’s high wall – a city within a city – he walked up Avenue Yamato and along Rue Hart, passing the lights of the Peking Club and the elaborate gateway of the Austrian Legation, then quartered back along Rue du Club past the customs house and the rear of the French barracks. His footfalls echoed on the pavement, though he was a silent-moving man.

Promenading oneself
, Ysidro called it. What a vampire did when he came into a city not his own. Vampires were ferociously territorial, and no vampire would dare hunt on the grounds of another without first speaking with the Master of the local nest.

Asher suspected Karlebach knew this, and knew where he was going when he’d said, ‘I’m going to take a walk.’ As he’d gone out the door of the hotel suite, he’d felt the old man’s eyes on his back.

He knew the signs and guessed that Ysidro had not fed for many nights. As Karlebach had said, without the energy absorbed from the victim at a kill, a vampire’s psychic skills – the abilities which enabled them to pass unnoticed in a crowd, to make the living see them as they wished to be perceived – waned. Throughout their conversation last night, Asher had been disconcertingly aware of dreamlike flashes of Ysidro’s true appearance, skeletal and strange, like a vision that came and went.

The vampire, too, might be out promenading, placing himself where the vampires of Peking – assuming that Peking
had
vampires – would be aware of him. Giving them the option of where and when to accost him and ask him his business.

Always supposing they spoke English, or Spanish – possibly even Latin.

Always supposing that they didn’t, like the so-called Boxers – religious cultists and practitioners of one of the several forms of martial arts, who had led the massive uprising a dozen years previously – believe that any European, even an Undead one, should be killed at sight.

For his part, Asher didn’t believe for a moment that Don Simon Ysidro would go to ground outside the Legation Quarter. He certainly hadn’t sufficient Chinese to make arrangements to hide his coffin – actually a double-lidded tan traveling-trunk with brass corners – anywhere in the ‘Tatar city’ that lay beyond the Quarter’s walls, and the Chinese city beyond that. And ninety-nine one-hundredths of the population of that city actually believed in vampires and would have been more than eager to hunt them down and kill them.

Our strength
, Ysidro had said to him once,
is that no one believes
. . .

But the rules were different, here.

So Asher walked, and listened, uneasily aware that there was a slim chance that European vampires might have survived the Uprising and the Boxer siege of the Legations and might still be hiding in the Quarter itself.

He had asked Karlebach once,
Do they know of your researches?
after the old man had admitted to him that he was indeed acquainted with the vampires of Prague.

Oh, yes
, Karlebach had replied, with a grim glitter in his eyes.

Later, on the
Royal Charlotte
as it steamed its way through the Mediterranean and across the Indian Ocean, Asher had seen that, like himself and Lydia, Karlebach wore links of silver chain around his knotted wrists, enough to burn the hand of any vampire who seized him, even through the frayed linen of his cuffs. An instant’s break in that superhuman grip could be the difference between life and death.

Around his throat he also wore silver chains – like Asher, whose neck was tracked with bite scars from collarbone to ear lobe. As Karlebach had said, a vampire could get the living to obey, but this was no guarantee that the other vampires of a given nest would approve of the knowledge that living servant might gain. It was a situation which seldom ended well.

Do all who have to do with vampires end up wearing those chains?

He turned his steps back toward the hotel just after midnight. The watergate at the southern end of the canal had been repaired since the Uprising: it was a proper gate now, which couldn’t be slipped through by ill-intentioned persons. Still, Asher found himself listening, and he remembered the equivocal shadows below the bridges of Prague, the dank stone tunnels that led into the old city’s maze of crypts and sub-cellars . . .

Peking – lying close to the deserts of the north – was a city of artificial lakes and marble bridges, of waterways built by emperors to cool and brighten their playgrounds and to thwart the dry spirits of evil. The sides of the canal had been embanked with bricks since last he was here, and the smelly water lay invisible in the shadows. The noises he heard he thought – he hoped – were rats.

Ysidro didn’t accost him. If anyone – or anything – else watched him pass, he was unaware of it.

But later that night he dreamed that he was back on the banks of the canal, and that something was moving along the opposite side in the darkness. Something that stopped when he stopped, yet when he moved on again he heard footfalls scrunch softly on the gravel of the road verge. Once, in a glimmer of starlight, he saw that whoever it was, he – or she – or it – bore Richard Hobart’s red-and-blue silk necktie in hand.

Peking’s new railway line ran directly out to the village of Men T’ou Kuo, but the nearest ferry over the river Hun Ho lay some miles to the south. Thus it was almost noon on the following day before Asher and Professor Karlebach, accompanied by Sergeant Willard and His Majesty’s troopers Barclay and Gibbs, reached the little town on horseback.

The Western Hills rose some fifteen miles from the walls of Peking, steep-sided, dry, dun with coming winter. Thin brush and an occasional straggle of pine or laurel grew in deep gorges, or around the sprawling half-empty temple complexes where Europeans would picnic in summer among the chanting monks. The unpaved track from Men T’ou Kuo to Mingliang Village wound along the main river gorge and then up over a ridge under sharp, heatless sun.

‘Used to be a fair bit of traffic along this way, sir,’ provided the sergeant, in the treacle accents of the Liverpool Irish. ‘Back in the nineties when the mines at Shi’h Liu was still a goin’ concern.’ He pronounced it Shee-Loo. ‘Like a picture book it was, with lines of camels and donkeys takin’ coal down to the depot – coolies, too, some of ’em carryin’ a hundredweight of tools or what-have-you just on a shoulder-pole. Tough little buggers.’

‘And when did they quit working the mines?’ asked Asher. Sergeant Willard looked about his own age, graying and sturdy.
One parent, probably his mother, from South Ireland
, he calculated by the man’s pronunciation of terminal
– er
.

‘Been quit for years, sir. Well, stands to reason – they been diggin’ those mines back since God invented dirt. The new ones is over toward Tong-shan. Hardly anything left of Mingliang these days, now the mine’s shut.’ The sergeant turned sharply in his saddle to glance at the crests of the hills above them. He’d done this three or four times, Asher had observed, since they’d left Men T’ou Kuo.

And he was listening, as Asher himself had listened now for an hour.

Softly, he asked, ‘What do you hear, Sergeant?’

‘Could just be monkeys, sir,’ spoke up Trooper Barclay, his glottal vowels putting his birthplace within a few streets of London Bridge. ‘There’s a deal of ’em in these ’ills, an’ they’ll follow riders sometimes for miles.’

Or it could be the Kuo Min-tang
. Yuan Shi-k’ai’s assurances to the contrary, not all Chinese felt ‘happy and secure’ with the heavy hand of the generalissimo of the Northern Army on the rein. Rumor was rife in Peking of the militia groups forming to protect the Republic should its ‘provisional President’ decide – as he was rumored to be contemplating – to found a new Imperial dynasty with himself as its first Emperor. But as Hobart had pointed out on Wednesday night at Eddington’s, an army could be concealed in these empty hills. They were by all accounts riddled with abandoned coal-mines as well as natural cave systems, some of which ran underground for miles.

Lydia had protested that morning at being left behind to collect gossip about Richard Hobart (‘Why do I
always
have to do that bit? You’re going to need a medical opinion of whatever specimens Dr Bauer preserved . . .’), but when it came down to it, Asher had wanted to make the first reconnaissance himself. Every time he glanced over his shoulder at the brush-choked gorge below, or strained his ears to identify some fancied anomalous sound, he was glad he’d left her behind.

He would have left Karlebach as well, had the old man not refused to surrender his ‘rightful place’ in the party. ‘I know about these things, Jamie,’ he had insisted. ‘I have studied them for decades.’ He had grown more autocratic, Asher thought, since the death of old ‘Mama’ Karlebach – that bent, tiny woman who had welcomed Asher as a student to the house in the old Prague ghetto back in the eighties. She had spoken only Yiddish, but had been a formidable scholar in her own right. Since her death ten years ago, it had seemed to Asher, from Karlebach’s infrequent letters, that the old scholar had relied more and more on his students, adopting one or another of them as he had adopted Asher, in preference to the company of a family with whom he had nothing in common.