Magistrates of Hell Page 12

  Blood stained the bodyguard’s mouth. A little basin beside him was filled with red-soaked squares of gauze.

  Karlebach, standing beside the door, buried his face in his hands.

  ‘I will have her sent for.’ Mizukami went to the door and gave some instructions to a servant in the hall, then returned to Asher’s side and knelt again. His voice sank to a whisper. ‘You see how Ito-san was wounded, the flesh of his arm and shoulder torn open. When he beheaded the tenma –’ he used the Japanese word for a demon – ‘he was doused in its blood. I feared infection from their teeth and nails. Is this what comes of it, that his blood has been infected, his very body turning into these things? Is this how they multiply?’

  Contamination of the blood, Ysidro had said. Like vampires.

  Asher glanced back at Karlebach. The old man groaned softly, but made no reply.

  ‘I have heard so.’

  ‘Heard from whom?’ Anger flashed in the little Count’s eyes. ‘You spoke of legends – what legends? Where do these things exist, where have they existed—?’

  Ito groaned, and spoke as if to himself, a stifled handful of words in Japanese. Blood dribbled down from his lips, where the growing fangs cut them. Mizukami put his arms around the young man’s shoulders, held him tight, his face like a mask. ‘Ito,’ he whispered. ‘Ito-kun . . .’

  ‘They’ve existed in Prague,’ said Asher, ‘for five hundred years. They live in the medieval sewers, as far as anyone’s been able to tell, and in the maze of underground tunnels below the Old City. They’ve appeared in no other place, until last winter.’

  Mizukami raised a hand, very gently brushed the bodyguard’s face, which was horribly swollen and discolored where the sutures were softening, elongating it. ‘I heard him last night, walking back and forth across this room,’ the Count whispered. ‘Yesterday morning he said there was a muttering in his mind. Not voices, but like the vibration of moth’s wings, the songs of ghosts, driving him from one place to another, demanding that he kill, or flee, or just let them into his mind. Ki o tsukete, Ito-kun.’ His grip tightened around Ito’s shoulders. Keep your spirit strong.

  Asher half-turned his head, spoke over his shoulder to the old scholar, who had not moved from beside the door. ‘Can nothing be done?’

  Karlebach’s voice was hoarse. ‘No.’

  ‘Not to slow the process? Or to arrest it for a time? The solutions you made, the distillations—’

  ‘NO!’ Karlebach shouted the word, yanked open the door behind him, and blundered from the room. In doing so he nearly ran into Lydia, who was being ushered down the hall by a servant; he pushed past her, almost fled.

  Lydia said, startled, ‘Professor—?’

  ‘In here,’ said Asher. ‘This man needs your help.’

  She hurried into the room and immediately donned her glasses, regardless of the presence of a stranger. ‘Oh, my God—’ Petticoats rustled as she knelt, opened her medical bag.

  As she did so, Asher said, ‘Count Mizukami, may I present my wife, Dr Asher—’ and the Count and Lydia exchanged perfunctory bows. While Lydia examined Ito’s face and mouth, Mizukami recounted to her in a low voice what he had already told Asher, and the events of Friday night. She checked Ito’s heart and blood pressure, looked at his hands – bleeding also from the cuticles where the nails were beginning to thicken into claws – and into his eyes. The electrical light angled into them from her mirror didn’t seem to pain the young samurai.

  Only daylight.

  When she moved to untie the bandages on his arm and shoulder, however, the young man suddenly pushed her away with a violence that threw her to the floor mats and lurched to his feet. He staggered to a corner of the room, and when Mizukami followed him, he rounded on his master and shouted something at him in Japanese.

  Mizukami only faced him, compassion in his eyes.

  Ito whispered something else, desperate, his whole body trembling.

  When his master replied, Ito poured forth a couple of sentences, agony in his voice. The last things he would say, Asher understood with a rush of sickened pity, as a man with thought and volition of his own. Then Ito turned and faced the wall, and sank, first to his knees, then to a curled-up position in the corner farthest from the windows, his knees drawn up to his chest.

  Her face filled with shock and grief, Lydia made a move toward him, but Asher held her back. Mizukami knelt at the bodyguard’s side, then rose and returned to them, where they stood beside the cushion on the floor, the little basin of bloodied gauze.

  ‘He sleeps.’

  Silence stood between them for some minutes. The attaché’s face was a well-bred mask, but for a time he could not speak.

  ‘What did he say?’ Lydia asked softly.

  ‘They call me, he said. They fill my mind. I cannot keep them out any longer.’

  Asher’s gaze crossed Lydia’s. They had both had experience with the ability of some vampires to read and to tamper with the dreams of the living. To whisper into living minds.

  ‘Once it grows dark he’s going to try to get out,’ said Asher quietly. ‘If not tonight, tomorrow. He’ll be seeking to join them. I’m so sorry.’

  Mizukami moved his head a little. ‘There is nothing that can be done.’

  ‘With your permission, Count, I would like to follow him when he does. To see if they’re in the city as well.’

  ‘This is wise of you, Ashu Sensei.’ Mizukami’s voice was suddenly flat with weariness.

  ‘Until that time, I think it’s better that he be kept confined.’

  ‘Of course. It shall be as you say. Thank you.’ He bowed deeply. ‘And you, Dr Ashu.’ He bowed again, to Lydia. His black eyes behind their heavy spectacles seemed opaque, guarding all thought, all feeling within.

  ‘I’m so sorry—’ Lydia began, and Mizukami shook his head again.

  ‘There is nothing that can be done,’ he repeated. ‘I apologize in my servant’s name for his striking you. He would not have done so had he been in his right mind. He has grown up in my household,’ he added, ‘the son of one of my father’s samurai. Thank you for coming to do what you could.’

  Karlebach waited for them in the parlor – the only room in the little house furnished in Western style with couches and chairs – staring through the window into the cold sharp Peking sunlight. Mizukami spoke to a servant, and Asher caught the words for ‘two rickshaws’ – jinrikisha ga nidai – and said, ‘If you will excuse me, Count, the Professor and I would prefer to walk back to the hotel.’

  Lydia – who had taken off her spectacles before stepping through the door of Ito’s room – looked for a moment as if she were going to ask why, then caught his eye and only inquired, ‘Shall I see you for lunch, then?’

  Mizukami helped Lydia up into his personal vehicle at the door of his house, handed her the carefully-wrapped parcel which contained the bloodied pieces of gauze. When the rickshaw darted off down the neat, barracks-like street of the Japanese compound, the Count walked Asher and Karlebach to its rear gate, and bowed to them as they stepped out into Rue Lagrené.

  As soon as he left them, Asher put his arm through Karlebach’s and asked quietly, ‘Is it Matthias?’

  In his heart he already knew.

  Karlebach’s breath went out of him in a sigh. ‘Matthias,’ he whispered, and in his voice Asher heard the echo of King David’s cry, O my son Absalom, my son, my son . . . would God I had died for thee . . .

  From behind the high rear wall of the French barracks, the sharp blast of whistles rose for morning drill, the barking shouts of officers. Across the street, the white-painted brick of the customs yard threw back the sun’s glare. Asher thought of that young man curled up against the wall in his white loincloth, sleeping the dead-still sleep of one who would not wake until darkness.

  When darkness fell, would Ito – who had saved his life, and Karlebach’s, there in the hills – even recall his own name? His family, and the islands of his home?

  There is nothi
ng to be done, Mizukami had said.

  Asher walked in silence for a time.

  ‘He came to my lectures on folklore,’ said Karlebach, as if they had been speaking of the matter for an hour, ‘because he wanted to “know the people” in order to “set them free” – as if they would rather have political representation than the assurance that they wouldn’t be taxed into penury and their sons wouldn’t be drafted. Matthias Uray . . . He was a law student, you understand. The sort of roughneck who riots with political clubs and demands independence for Hungary, and glories in the thickness of the file that the police have on him.’

  ‘You told me he was in the movement for an independent Hungary,’ said Asher. ‘I often wondered how he came to you.’

  ‘That was how.’ The old man’s head was sunk on his chest, as if he carried some terrible weight. ‘Since first I learned of the vampire, I have watched the newspapers, read every account and traveler’s tale, searching for word of their doings. The vampire, and latterly the Others as well. I used Matthias to gather information from sailors and soldiers, and from the workers down on the river docks, the people I am not able to speak to – men who would call me Jew and knock my hat off and kick it down the street for sport. Matthias wanted to know what I was looking for. Why I asked about these things.’

  ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘No, the wicked brat.’ The dark eyes sparkled suddenly with the memory. ‘He went to the oldest newspapers in the city and looked up records, just as your beautiful Lydia does. And then, when he began to see patterns in the disappearances and rumors and things seen and whispered, he went further. He sought out old broadsides and ancient decrees, and letters from the great old banking-houses of the Empire that would send each other whatever strange tales came their way. Then he came to me, asking about the vampire, and about these degenerate cousins of theirs, these Others. He said I was old. Me. Old!’ Karlebach sniffed. ‘He said I needed protection, if I were to go poking about among the affairs of those who hunt the night. And under the sweaty muscle of a ruffian, I found the heart of an ancient knight.’

  He closed his eyes then, as if he saw his ruffianly knight before him again, in a student’s cap and three days’ worth of beard, and the tears he had not been able to shed glittered in the chilly light.

  ‘I told him – again and again I told him – to leave the Others alone. It is the vampire who is our enemy, I said. The Others are merely . . . merely animals, like the rats to whom they are allied. He asked me, “How do you know this?” And when I answered him, that one of the vampires told me this, years ago, he would throw back at me, “But I thought you say they always lie?” The truth is that learning was like a hunger in him, a yearning that nothing could sate.’

  Two French officers passed them as they turned on to Rue Marco Polo: blue jackets, gold braid, the crimson trousers of which the French Army was so proud. On the other side of the street, old Mr Mian called out on his see-saw note, ‘Pao chih! Pao chih! Finest kind new-paper pao chih!’

  ‘So he went down below the bridges one night?’ Asher could almost see the dark figure silhouetted against the water’s gleam, the splinter of light from a shaded lantern. Could almost smell the stench of the Others, against the foul pong of sewage and fish. It’s what Lydia would have done. Or he himself.

  ‘He came to me the following morning,’ Karlebach whispered. ‘He had been bitten, clawed – and had wounded them in return with the sailor’s knife he always carried. His clothing was all soaked with blood, his own and theirs. The vampire Szegédy had told me once – the Master of Prague – that the condition of these creatures seems to spread by the blood, as the physical state of the vampires is spread. Matthias joked about it, as it was his way to do, but he was frightened. He knew what it meant, that their blood had mingled with his. He – we – knew already that the same elements inimical to the vampire would also destroy the flesh of these other Undead: hawthorn, whitethorn, wolfsbane, silver. And there were those before me who had used them in elixirs and distillations in the hope of reversing the physical effects of the vampire’s blood . . .’

  ‘Did they work?’

  ‘Yes.’ The old scholar’s voice came out thin, like wire stretched to breaking point. ‘We watched – we waited . . .’ He walked on for a time, crippled hands jammed into the pockets of his long teal-green coat. Asher heard him trying to steady his breath.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘August of 1911. A few months after you came through Prague. Then one morning Matthias didn’t come to my house. A few days later I heard there had been an arrest of the Young Hungary group. He escaped, his friends told me. Escaped and fled the country.’

  ‘So you started watching,’ said Asher, after long silence. ‘Watching in the medical journals, in newspapers, for some mention of a creature somewhere in the world that could have been him.’

  ‘What could I do?’ Karlebach stopped on the pavement, flung out his arms, his voice a cry of despair.

  ‘Did you hope to be able to help him? To reverse the process?’

  ‘I don’t know what I hoped, Jamie.’ They crossed the street to the hotel doors, absurd in their neo-Gothic splendor in the cold sunlight. ‘I only knew that I could not desert him. And that I could not seek him alone.’

  Liveried footmen sprang to admit them. At the desk the clerk handed Asher a note from P’ei Cheng K’ang, with an enclosure – duly translated – proposing a meeting with An Lu T’ang in two days’ time in the Eight Lanes district. Another note, from Sir Grant Hobart, asked to see him at three that afternoon.

  Asher turned back to his companion. ‘Was this what you were asking about last night at the Austrian Legation?’

  ‘Shipping records.’ Under the heavy white mustaches, Karlebach’s lips twisted. ‘So you see I did pay attention after all to all your talk of spying, my old friend. And yes, a man who could have been Matthias “jumped ship”, as I believe the phrase is, from the Prinz Heinrich at Tientsin last November, after signing on in Trieste in September.’

  They paused at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘When the Greeks said that Hope was one of the things that came out of Pandora’s Box, Jamie, with all the other griefs and woes and pains that are the punishment of humankind, they never meant to describe it as the single ray of light in those clouds of stinging darkness. That was a myth invented by nursery maids, so they could tell that story to children without breaking their little hearts. Hope is the worst of those devils, the cruellest thing that the gods could think of to give to man.’

  He turned in silence and preceded Asher up the stairs.

  TWELVE

  ‘Damn it, Asher, what the hell are you playing at?’ Hobart looked up from his papers the moment the Chinese manservant closed the study door behind Asher. ‘When I said get Rick off this damnable lie, I wasn’t giving you carte blanche to go poking your nose into backstairs gossip!’

  P’ei? Or had one of Richard’s three jolly companions mentioned to Richard that he – Asher – had been asking about Hobart Senior’s diversions . . . and about his servants?

  ‘A British court isn’t going to let your son off a murder charge if his only defense is “it must have been the Chinese”.’

  Hobart still had the same quarters he’d occupied before the Rebellion: eight rooms around what had been a minor courtyard in the rambling old palace that the Legation had originally taken for its own. The red pillars had been repainted and some of the soot stains removed from the ceiling, but the gold on the ancient rafters had never been touched up. The courtyard outside, spotlessly tidy, was bare of the flowers, trees, caged birds or kongs of goldfish that so many old China hands adopted to transform this strange architecture into a semblance of home.

  The Senior Translator jerked to his feet and flung his pen down on the desk. ‘They would if you’d do your job instead of swanning around the hills chasing ghost stories!’

  ‘The job you gave me is to clear your son,’ Asher returned calmly. ‘Part
of that process is to find out who would want to implicate Rick in so hideous a crime, and in order to learn who, one has to ask why.’

  ‘Why?’ It was a fair imitation of someone who didn’t understand what Asher was talking about, but Asher could see fear widen Hobart’s eyes. The harsh voice stammered a little: ‘What d’you mean, why?’ Then he waved his arms, raised his voice to a shout. ‘You can’t tell why a Chinese will do anything, you bloody imbecile! They don’t think like we do! This is a people who believe magic headbands will make them invulnerable to bullets, for God’s sake! Who believe their dead ancestors will arrange favors for them from the afterlife!’

  ‘I suggest you attend a spiritualist seance in any corner of London,’ said Asher, ‘if you want to see people having conversations with their dead ancestors. And talk to the French High Command if you want to hear about how military elan is going to trump German machine guns. Police work is police work whether you’re in Peking or London, and unless one or the other of us can come up with a specific reason why some particular Chinese would want to see your son hang for murder, what a London judge is going to see is your son’s tie around the throat of a girl who was forcing him into a marriage he didn’t want.’

  Hobart opened his mouth to shout something further, but Asher held his eyes, familiar with his temper from those months of tutoring. Determined not to lose his fifty pounds – and with it, all chance of completing his studies – Asher had dodged thrown books, sidestepped physical violence, and plowed head-down through a near-constant deluge of profanity. The curious thing had been that in his calmer moments, Hobart didn’t seem to recall clearly what he had said or done. He’d excuse himself in the most general of terms – that’s just my way, you know . . .

  Was strangling a fourteen-year-old girl in the bedclothes while you sodomized her ‘just my way’ as well?

  ‘You know Eddington isn’t going to be satisfied with “it must have been some Chinese”.’ But unspoken between them hung the words YOU tell ME why the Chinese want to see your son hang.