Magistrates of Hell (20 page)

For the sake of the souls of the living whom they do NOT kill
.

For the sake of every soul in the world, if the living begin to use the Undead for their own ends outside the law
.

Was that the reason Ysidro himself had undertaken the perilous journey to China, when he’d learned of the spread of the Others? It was difficult to tell with Ysidro, for whom the game of mirror and shadow went far deeper than the mere hunt. Was it simply that, as a chess player, the vampire saw ahead to what the governments of the living might do to acquire control of such creatures? Or was there something else?

Don Quixote, Asher found himself remembering, had been a Spaniard, too.

He had hoped Ysidro would visit that night, with word from Lydia, if not word about the Others, or the vampires of Peking. For a long time he lay awake, watching the moonlight where it came through the broken roof; then slid into unremembered dreams.

The hardest thing, Lydia found, was not telling Karlebach and Ellen.

The police found Jamie’s blood-soaked coat and jacket in the north-western district of the so-called Tatar City, not far from the shallow lakes locally known as the ‘Stone Relics of the Sea’, late in the afternoon of Thursday, the thirty-first of October. On the following morning the nude body of a man was found in a nearby canal, so shockingly mutilated that it was impossible to determine even if he had been Oriental or European, though he was of Jamie’s six-foot height. Lydia locked herself in her hotel bedroom in a simulated paroxysm of grief and refused to see either the old Professor or her maid for almost twenty-four hours.

She knew they would comfort one another. She couldn’t face either one.

Nor could she face the question that kept recurring to her mind:
was the man they’d found already dead, by coincidence and of some other cause? Or did Simon kill him for the purpose, only because, whoever he was, he was six feet tall?

And would Simon tell me the truth if I asked him?

Miranda she kept with her for a good deal of that time. She read to her quietly, played little games with her, and while the child slept, she continued to work her way through notes from the Peking Police Department. The last thing her baby needed was Mrs Pilley’s lamentations and tears.

At breakfast the following morning – Saturday – she quietly requested that Miranda be spared as much of the displays of grief as possible. ‘I’ll tell her myself, when she’s able to understand,’ she said, firmly, to the old man and the two women of her shattered household. ‘But I beg of you, don’t burden her with this now.’

Ellen and Mrs Pilley both hugged her, something Lydia hated. An hour later the Baroness Drosdrova appeared on the doorstep with a complete mourning costume – donated by the very fashionable Madame Hautecoeur, the French Trade Minister’s wife – a platter of blinis (Paola had been right about the Drosdrov cook), two hours of unsolicited legal advice about dealing with the affairs of a spouse unexpectedly deceased, another forty-five minutes of anecdotes concerning the various bereavements of everyone in the Drosdrov family including Aunt Eirena whose husband had fallen into a reaping-combine on a visit to the United States, and an invitation (although it sounded more like a command) to accompany herself, Madame Hautecoeur, and Paola Giannini to her dressmaker’s to be fitted for still more mourning clothes.

She and Madame Hautecoeur had evidently gone to Silk Lane yesterday afternoon and purchased sufficient black silk for all necessary costumes. ‘We wanted to spare you that.’ They were already being cut and basted by Madame’s Chinese seamstress.

Lydia returned from the fitting (and a late lunch at the French Legation) on Saturday evening to find that Karlebach’s grief had taken the form of plans for an expedition to the Shi’h Liu mines on the following day.

‘It is only the excursion of an afternoon, little bird.’ The old scholar patted Lydia’s hands, made his haggard face into the rictus of cheer. ‘I will hire me a couple of soldiers from the American barracks, and I will follow this so-excellent map.’ He gestured to the one Jamie and the Legation clerk P’ei had been working on. ‘I will see for myself the entrances to these mines, to know how many must be sapped with explosives and what each looks like. Then we will be out of the hills before the sun is out of the sky—’

‘It’s what you thought was going to happen last time!’ Lydia objected. ‘You were nearly killed . . .’

His face grew grave. ‘These things must be hunted in their nests, Madame. Hunted to their destruction.’ And, when Lydia began to protest again: ‘It is my fault – the stupidity of my weakness – that loosed these things into this country, these things that killed him. I owe him a debt. Mine must be the hand that atones.’

How on EARTH would you come to the conclusion that the Others killed him?
She had to put her hand over her lips to silence the words that rose to them.
If the Chinese killed a Westerner they’d have made sure to mutilate the corpse to prevent identification
. . . Definitely
not
the sort of thing a genuine widow would say.

Instead she blurted, ‘You can’t go out there by yourself! You don’t speak any Chinese!’

‘I shall hire this man P’ei as well, this clerk whom . . . This clerk who helped with these maps.’ Karlebach brandished the scribbled papers in his crooked fingers, and he avoided her eyes just as he avoided speaking James Asher’s name. ‘As for not knowing . . . little bird, I know my enemies. You have found solace for your heart in searching for them in your way.’ His wave took in the fresh stack of police reports which had arrived, care of the Japanese Legation, while Lydia was away being fitted for six black walking-suits, four day-costumes, and an evening dress. ‘Let me seek mine.’

Lydia felt a pang of regret that she’d let Karlebach see her note to Mizukami:
I find the exercise relieves my mind of the repetitious circling of grief, and I would like to think myself still able to help in my husband’s quest for the truth behind this shocking affair
.

Did that sound too much like the intrepid heroine of a novel? she wondered.

Would a Real Woman
– her Aunt Lavinnia was extremely fond of the expression, as if the possession of a womb and breasts was not quite sufficient to qualify Lydia for the title –
be so prostrate with grief at the murder of her husband that all she could do would be to lie upon the bed and howl?

Lydia didn’t know.

When her mother had died, she’d been so confused by her family’s efforts to ‘soften the blow’ by lying to her that she found it, even now, difficult to think clearly about that time or to recall exactly how it had felt. Her father had died suddenly, of a stroke, about eighteen months after she had married Jamie: at that time she had not seen the old man for almost three years. He had disowned her when she’d entered Somerville College – terrifying at the time, but miraculous in its way, for the removal of her father’s fortune had opened the way for Jamie to marry her. Her first letter to her father after her expulsion from Willoughby Court had been answered by one of the most spiteful documents she had ever read; subsequent communications, including the announcement of her marriage, had received no answer at all. She had been shocked and startled to hear of his death, but those feelings, too, had been whirled up together in bemusement over the fact that to her own astonishment – and to the howling chagrin of her stepmother – her father had in fact never changed his will, and Lydia had gone from being an impoverished outcast to being an extremely wealthy young woman.

How would a Real Woman react to grief,
she wondered,
if she came from a Real Family and not a grotesque circus fueled by money, social climbing, and a self-centered autocrat who wanted to control his daughter’s every breath?

The poor old Queen had gone into complete seclusion at her husband’s death and had worn deep mourning for the remaining forty years of her life. The eight-year-old Lydia’s observation that this sounded like the most boring existence she’d ever heard of had earned her a smart slap from her Nanna.

In the end, after nearly an hour of arguing, Lydia managed to talk Karlebach down to a daylight expedition to the Golden Seas – the enclosed pleasure-grounds around the three large lakes immediately west of the Forbidden City’s high pink walls – as soon as Count Mizukami could arrange passes through the gates. To his grumbles about the Japanese attaché’s ‘perfidy’, Lydia had asked if he really thought he could answer for the discretion of ‘a couple of soldiers from the American barracks’ when they got in their cups. ‘At least German spies won’t know any Japanese,’ she pointed out. So far as she could tell,
nobody
in the compound knew any Japanese.

Along with the day’s police reports, Mizukami had sent her a note. She unfolded it and read it that night, when she finally settled into bed, with a splitting headache from the effort of remembering to periodically burst into tears throughout the afternoon and a deep feeling of sickened weariness and guilt.

Guilt for Ellen’s reddened nose and bowed shoulders, and for the driven glitter in Karlebach’s eye. Guilt for that unknown tall Chinese. Her whole skin had prickled when Karlebach had spoken of atonement:
if his grief drives him into doing something stupid, Jamie will never forgive himself. And neither will I.

The note said:

Dr Asher
,

Please accept the expression of my deepest feelings of sorrow for you at this time
.

Your strength to pursue these inquiries is a sword blade that will, I hope, cut grief. Might I ask of you, to communicate with me of what you find
?

Please consider me at your service
.

Mizukami

Black shadow, black ice.

Shadow warrior pursuing shadow,

Unto shadow returns.

And Karlebach was right. There would have to be another expedition to the Shi’h Liu mines, and soon. And she knew Karlebach could not be kept away.

In addition to Mizukami’s plump envelope of reports, Lydia had picked up at the desk four other notes, all of them from bachelor diplomats at the Legations, begging her to permit them to be of service to her. Given what Hobart had told Jamie about most of the men in the diplomatic corps needing to marry money, she wasn’t precisely surprised, but she groaned inwardly at the thought of the scramble that would ensue when word got around that her fortune was her own and not in any way entangled in Jamie’s affairs, alive or dead. She wanted to kick herself for having slipped that information into the conversation over lunch with Madame Hautecoeur and the Baroness, in reply to tactfully worded queries as to whether she would need financial assistance: both women, she did not doubt, had too-ample experience with women who came out to the East with husbands and then lost them there.

She leaned back against the pillows, closed her eyes, and wondered if fainting when the subject of her widowhood was brought up would discourage the likes of Mr Edmund Woodreave, the Trade Minister’s Chief Clerk:
‘If at any time you need the solace of a loyal friend . . .’

Indeed! From a man I met precisely ONCE at the Peking Club
. . .

He was the man who had also referred, rather tactlessly, to ‘
your poor husband’s appalling death
’. Lydia wondered again about the man who had actually suffered that ‘appalling death’.

If I asked Simon he would say, ‘Nothing of the kind, Mistress. The man was dead when I found his body.’ Or perhaps, ‘He was a wicked man, and I killed him as he was cutting the throat of an innocent child . . .’

She slipped from beneath the coverlets, hurried – shivering – to the window, and opened one side of the curtain. Peking lay dark beyond the glimmer of lights on Rue Meiji, a mass of upturned roofs against distant stars. She lay long awake, reading in the neat, rather German handwriting of Count Mizukami’s clerk all about disappearances, deaths, and strange things seen around the Stone Relics of the Sea.

But Ysidro did not come.

W
ind from the north sliced Asher’s padded
ch’i-p’ao
like a razor. The moonlight made a cloud of his breath. All around the shores of the Stone Relics of the Sea, ice formed a rough crystalline collar, and the crowding roofs of fancy tea-houses, ancestral temples, pleasure pavilions and dim-sum parlors shouldered black against the sky.

Not a fleck of light in all that shuttered darkness. Curious, Asher reflected, considering what Grandpa Wu and Ling had both told him: that the empty pleasure-grounds along the lakeshore were haunted these days by thieves, gunrunners, and killers-for-hire. From the humpbacked marble bridge where he stood, the smell of smoke from every courtyard around this side of the lakes came to him, in fierce competition with the refuse dumped on the lakeshore near the mouths of every
hutong
that debouched there – impossible to tell whether anyone had built a hidden fire along the lake that night.

Then the wind shifted, and for an instant he caught the stink he’d smelled in the mountains, below the Shi’h Liu mines.

Yao-kuei
.

They’re here
.

That was the short of what he had come to learn. He could go home now . . .

Do the Tso know it yet?

He stepped from the bridge to the muddy verge of the frozen lake itself.

In addition to his knife, his revolver, and a tin dark-lantern, he’d brought with him a sort of halberd that Grandpa Wu had sold him for three dollars American, the kind of thing that gang enforcers carried on late-night forays, like a short sword-blade mounted at the end of a staff. For two nights now he had waited to hear from Ysidro, but the vampire had either gone to ground or, like Father Orsino, was hunting far from Peking. That afternoon Ling had said a friend of her mother’s had smelled ‘rat-monsters’ by the lake. A beggar-child, the woman had said, had disappeared, the third in two weeks.

The Tso family had their headquarters in the triangle of land between the northern and southern lobes of the lake, away to his left across the water. Everyone in this neighborhood worked for them. In daylight, despite the Chinese clothing, Asher knew he could never pass unnoticed. He supposed the sensible thing would be to declare the evening a success, go back to Pig-Dragon Lane, and wait until he heard from Ysidro.