Magistrates of Hell

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘I understand. I am grateful for the misunderstanding, without which my comrades and I would surely have been killed.’

  There was silence then, save for the moaning of the wind outside, and those bright black eyes met Asher’s in somber horror.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Mizukami at last. ‘You had the villagers lead you straight to the mines, to the place where, I think, these – these akuma, these tenma, originated. Did you know they would be there?’

  Asher hesitated. The fact that Britain and Japan were allies at the moment might or might not guarantee the help of this man, or his silence. ‘I didn’t, no.’

  ‘But it was they that you sought?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘We don’t know. It’s a form of pathology we haven’t encountered—’

  ‘Disease does not do what I saw last night. They took wounds no man could survive. Two of them we beheaded, and their bodies did not fall, but ran away down into the gorge. Ito cut the legs from several of them – in one case the arms also – and this did not kill them, did not even put them into shock. Without a word, they moved about you on the trail, like fingers of a hand, like dogs herding sheep. This is not disease, Ashu Sensei. Their faces were not the faces of men. Are they indeed devils, which science tells us do not exist?’

  ‘I don’t believe so, no,’ replied Asher slowly. ‘For all that the villagers call them that. But for this reason they must be studied, and studied in utmost secrecy. God only knows what the Germans would make of them – or do with them.’ He watched Mizukami’s face as he spoke, and though the Japanese remained expressionless, he saw the dark eyes move with his thought. He added, more quietly, ‘And God only knows what my own government would decide to do with them – or yours. And what the results might be.’

  Mizukami’s breath whispered in a tiny sigh. But he only repeated, ‘I am a soldier. My business is with armies, not with . . . with the things that come out of Hell. But the new emperor of my land is . . . is not a well man. Since his accession this spring, nearly all the affairs of the Empire have found their way into the hands of the Diet – and of the High Command. I do not say that my judgement is better than theirs, yet I know that once the gates of Hell have been opened, it may not be possible to shut them again. You were not sent here by your government?’

  Asher shook his head. ‘The soldiers were detailed by the ambassador to assist in my investigation of backcountry legend. The night was dark; I told them our attackers were bandits, and they appeared to believe me. None of them saw what you saw.’

  ‘And do any others know of these things? Ka-ru-ba-ku Sensei—’

  ‘He has made a study of their legends,’ said Asher carefully. ‘It was he who recognized the description, when a missionary wrote of finding one of their bodies. My wife also knows. No others.’

  ‘Ah, so desu.’ The Count folded his hands over the hilt of his sword, studied Asher’s face with those bright black eyes. ‘So what now? Find how many of them there are, how long they have been there—?’

  ‘According to Dr Bauer, they began appearing no more than a year ago. We don’t know why. It’s one of the things we need to find out, and quickly. In the darkness it was hard to judge their numbers,’ Asher went on. ‘At least twenty.’

  ‘That was my thought. And more, I thought, remained in the gorge. You say they are in the Shi’h Liu mine—?’

  ‘I think so, yes. They are creatures of underground, of darkness.’

  ‘And yet not demons.’ Mizukami regarded him thoughtfully. ‘Would the records of the mining company be of use? This morning I sent to the offices of the Ministry of the Interior; I can have one of my clerks translate, if plans of the tunnels themselves exist.’

  ‘That would be of great help.’ Asher bowed again.

  ‘I see that there are things about these – these yao-kuei – that you are not telling me, Ashu Sensei. Yet one thing I do ask – I must know. Have they spread into this city? Or into any other part of the countryside? I can see they are devils: they are creatures of Hell. Yet their bodies are like the bodies of men. Their faces—’ He shook his head. ‘You say they have been there no more than a year, and you know not whence they came. Yet they must have come from somewhere. So I must ask: are they multiplying?’

  Asher thought of the moonlight on the Charles Bridge in Prague, the inky shadows of its gothic towers and the stirring somewhere below its arches. There is a strangeness on this city, Ysidro had written to him . . .

  He said, ‘It’s something we’re trying to find out.’

  Asher went walking when the wind died down, through darkness that smelled of the Gobi Desert beneath a smoke-red moon. Rickshaws passed with a hiss of pluming dust, their pullers laboring. On the steps of the hotel, and in the doorways of every shop along Legation Street, Chinese servants plied shovels and brooms, and he knew that in every Legation tomorrow soldiers – German, British, Russian, American, Japanese – would be doing the same.

  His breath in the moonlight made a cloud of diamonds.

  Are they spreading?

  Asher shivered at the thought.

  Karlebach had grumbled about taking the Japanese attaché into their confidence, despite the fact that the Count had seen their attackers clearly last night: better that he know, than that he make inquiries that would touch off other inquiries. Once the gates of Hell have been opened, it may not be possible to shut them again.

  Lydia had asked him: was it possible for the Count to arrange for her to see records from the Peking police, about either mysterious disappearances during the past year, or murder in which the victims had been either exsanguinated or torn by what appeared to be animals? She wanted particularly to know about the vicinity of the old lakes of the walled Palace pleasure-grounds, or near what were called the ‘Stone Relics of the Sea’, the two unwalled artificial lakes in the northern part of the city. Given the political unrest that had gripped Peking since the Emperor’s abdication – to say nothing of the Chinese troop riots in February and the roving ‘beheading squads’ which had followed in their wake – Asher guessed it was going to be very difficult to determine any pattern that might point to the appearance of Undead monsters in the city, but agreed to ask.

  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.

  TEN

  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.’