Magistrates of Hell Read online

  He stepped forward again, put his palms against the sides of Asher’s head, drew him close, his words a frightful halitus of blood. ‘They told me it is the children that lead vengeance to their doors. When we come up out of Hell we are helpless, like snails ripped from their curly armor. It is why they all had to become gods, you see. They wouldn’t let me, because I had sinned. The Yama-King gave them a choice about which Hell they would rule, once he’d reorganized. There used to be twelve thousand, eight hundred hells under the earth, eight dark hells, eight cold hells, and eighty-four thousand hells located on the edges of the universe, though I should imagine some of them were quite small. When I was a man I used to study them.’

  He frowned, gazing into Asher’s eyes as if hypnotized. ‘When I was a man—’

  ‘Is that why he made you vampire, then?’ asked Asher steadily. ‘Because you were not of his own family?’

  ‘He wanted—’ Father Orsino blinked, trying to call memory back. ‘I no longer remember what he wanted. There was a reason then.’ He pressed his palms hard against Asher’s skull, struggling with some thought.

  ‘He is—?’

  ‘Li. Li Jung Shen. He is insane now. His family brings him prey, that he may do their bidding. Except . . .’ He fell silent again, losing the thread of his thought. His hands slackened their crushing grip, only stirred through Asher’s hair, absent-mindedly, as a man might stroke a dog. But his wandering gaze returned to Asher’s shoulder where the blood darkened his coat.

  ‘Except—?’ Asher reminded him gently.

  ‘Except when I waken sometimes at fall of dark, I hear him screaming.’

  He stepped back a little then, and Asher slipped out of his reach, half breathless with the pain in his side, and gauged the distance to the doorway and the stair. His every instinct told him to flee, but a terrible suspicion was growing in his mind, and he asked instead, ‘Can you tell where?’

  The vampire shook his head, a slight gesture, reminiscent of Ysidro’s stillness. ‘Near here,’ he said. ‘A thousand miles straight down beneath the ground. A thousand miles and ten thousand and a hundred thousand miles, beyond the Third Hell, which is for bad mandarins, forgers, and backbiters. The forgers are made to swallow melted gold and silver, to the extent that they forged those metals in life. And the Fifth Hell is the Hell of Dismemberment, where the lustful, murderers, and the sacrilegious are torn into pieces, ground into pulp between rocks, run over by the red-hot iron wheels of spiked vehicles. Bao is the Magistrate of that Hell, Bao Cheng, who used to be a warrior in the time of the Sung emperors: a fearsome man, they say, but a writer of drinking songs and love songs. You are not sacrilegious, are you?’

  He caught Asher’s arm again, stared intently into his face. ‘Your father prayed for you. Wanted you to enter the Church. You disobeyed him.’

  Did he read that in my thoughts? Or is it of his own father that he speaks? ‘My father wanted me to serve the Church,’ said Asher, quite truthfully . . . Though we won’t go into the subject of which church. ‘I trod my own path, until I came into Don Simon’s service.’

  The vampire’s brow twisted again. ‘We are all prisoners of our families,’ he said in a much quieter voice, and his eyes, yellowly reflective in the candle gleam, suddenly seemed to focus. ‘They are the true Magistrates of Hell. Even when we flee them, they live on in our dreams. My mother—’ He stammered on the words. ‘My mother and my uncles wanted me to join the Society of Jesus, because I had a God-given talent for tongues. My father had died fighting the heretics in Holland. It was hard – it was very hard – to tell Christiana that it was not to be between us, Christiana whom I loved – or thought I loved. My uncle told me I would learn to love God more and to see Christiana’s body for what it was, a sack of guts and blood, as are the bodies of all women. But it was hard.’

  Very gently, Asher disengaged his arm from the gripping claws. ‘I will ask Ysidro, when I find him, exactly what arrangements His Holiness has made to get you back to Rome. Since I am the one who must make them, and carry them out, I will bring you word here when I hear.’

  ‘Arrangements—?’

  ‘To get you back to Rome.’

  ‘Of course.’ Father Orsino shook his head a little, like a man who realizes he does not remember what he has said. ‘Who is Pope now? I made myself a refuge in the mines, behind bars of silver, behind gates the Magistrates cannot touch. A thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down into the darkness . . . My book is there. Ysidro said he would go get it for me. It is dedicated to His Holiness, but I hear so little of the world.’

  ‘His Holiness Pius X,’ replied Asher. ‘A most sanctified and resolute man.’ And stubborn and reactionary – the sixteenth-century Inquisitors would probably have regarded him as a Milquetoast for merely declaring Protestant-Catholic marriages ‘religiously invalid’ instead of demanding the lives of those who dared participate in them.

  ‘And you will speak for me?’

  ‘I will speak for you. Ysidro, too—’

  ‘Oh, he has been eaten by the monsters in the mines.’ Suddenly like a friendly priest guiding his parishioner into a confessional, Father Orsino waved Asher toward the stair. ‘This is why I say that you must have some other member of your party who knows the arrangement.’

  ‘Eaten?’ Asher thought for one instant about going back and picking up his lantern – on the opposite side of the crypt – rather than ascending that long, narrow stair in pitch darkness with a vampire at his elbow, but discarded the idea at once. Not if it meant letting the vampire get between him and the door.

  ‘He said he was going to the mines. Didn’t I tell you? He went to fetch my book for me, my life’s work, my refutation of all the works of the heretic Luther . . . I told him how to open the silver doors. So they must have eaten him.’

  Asher put his hand to the wall of the stair, to guide him up, and – presumably in friendliness – Father Orsino laid a hand on Asher’s back.

  ‘I’ve given it a good deal of thought, and I think what happened must have been this,’ the priest went on. ‘The First Hell – Chin-kuang, the one closest to the surface of the earth, where Chiang Tzu-wen, who used to be a warrior monk in the days of the Han, is the Magistrate – that is where the cases of the sinners are heard and punishments assigned. But I think that in fact the Second Hell, Chujiang, where Li is the Magistrate, is the Hell of Beasts, where dishonest intermediaries and ignorant doctors are devoured, gored, trampled, torn apart by demons in the form of beasts. And if that is so, then that’s what these creatures are: shou-kuei, beast-devils, who got back into the First Hell through the carelessness of the Magistrate of Chin-kuang, and then managed to get through a hole in the wall of the First Hell and into the mines. That would account for his coming to the mines . . .’

  ‘Ysidro?’

  ‘No, no, the Magistrate of Chin-kuang! He’s been there. I thought at one time it must have been Li, the Magistrate of Chujiang, but I don’t think he’d dare. I have heard his footfalls in the dark.’

  The priest’s hand tightened on Asher’s arm. He felt Father Orsino move past him. Heard the creak of the broken door, and a moment later – bright after the total blackness of the stair – faint starlight showed him the outlines of the holes in the vestry roof, the dense flat shadows of the broken walls.

  ‘The shou-kuei will have eaten Don Simon by this time,’ the vampire went on sadly. ‘That is why you must help me, you and your family, to get my book and take it to the Pope. Can I count on you?’

  A little breathlessly, Asher said, ‘You may count on me. On us.’

  ‘God bless you.’ The Jesuit traced before him in the air the sign of the cross, then took Asher by the shoulders and very lightly kissed him on either cheek, lips warm with someone else’s stolen life. ‘And God speed you.’

  A moment later, though the chapel was drowned in indigo and starlight, Asher woke with a gasp, as if from a dream, still standing in the ruined vestry before the black h
ole of the crypt stair. Silvery dawn light filled the room. His ribs hurt as if he’d been hit by a train. Outside in the alley, a woman was shouting the virtues of steamed dumplings.

  SEVENTEEN

  Two notes awaited Lydia when she returned to her suite. One – from Sir Grant Hobart – she simply put into the fireplace, as she had done two others he had sent her, behavior completely to be expected from a new-made widow, she thought. Anger at him still flushed heat behind her breastbone. If Jamie HAD died, it would have been his fault.

  Whatever excuse he’ll offer, I don’t want to hear it.

  The other – accompanied by a gaudy bouquet which must have come by rail from the south of China at considerable expense – was from Edmund Woodreave. Under Mrs Pilley’s accusing gaze Lydia didn’t feel she could very well dispose of the note, much less the flowers, as she’d disposed of Hobart’s. And Woodreave’s courtship, much as it exasperated Lydia, also amused her in its way: does he really think ANY woman whose husband was murdered last week is going to find this attractive?

  Evidently he did.

  Or is he so desperate to further his career that he’s willing to try anything?

  ‘He’s such a very nice gentleman,’ said Mrs Pilley, watching Lydia’s face anxiously, ‘and so devoted to you.’

  ‘He barely knows me.’ Lydia removed her hat and gloves and gathered Miranda into her arms. ‘He met me exactly once, before I—’ She bit off the words came on to the market, gave her head a little shake, and in her best imitation of Aunt Faith’s die-away voice said, ‘I find his importunities in the very worst of taste.’

  Mrs Pilley sighed deeply, the expression on her face making it clear to Lydia that the little widow had what schoolgirls called a ‘crush’ on Mr Woodreave herself, though of course he would have no use for a woman who had no money of her own. A bleak and unfair world, reflected Lydia sadly, that condemned a young mother to looking after someone else’s child (and in China, no less!) so that she could scrape enough money to keep her own son in school in England, simply because no man of her own class would take a woman without a ‘portion’ to sweeten the bargain.

  She carried Miranda into the bedroom, to keep her company while Ellen helped her out of her dress and brushed her hair; put on her glasses and played little games with her daughter, cheered as always by the infant’s curiosity and love. But when Mrs Pilley came in to carry Miranda off to bed, Lydia felt an uneasy qualm as she said, ‘Professor Karlebach and I are going out to the Western Hills first thing tomorrow morning. We probably won’t be back until after dark.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ The nurse’s large blue eyes were both puzzled and accusing: how can you possibly do anything at all, with poor Professor Asher dead and in so terrible a fashion . . .?

  If Jamie were really dead, WOULD I be able to do nothing but stay in my room and wail?

  Lydia didn’t know.

  She lifted her chin, made her voice tremble a little as she added, ‘This is something Professor Asher would have wanted me to do.’

  Instantly, the nurse’s eyes flooded with tears. Ellen, coming in with a cup of cocoa and an extra scuttle of coal, gazed upon her mistress with such pity and sympathy that Lydia writhed inwardly. It was shame, not grief bravely borne, that filled her own eyes with tears as her two loving handmaidens made their exit with the sleeping Miranda in their arms.

  Jamie, thought Lydia, I know this is all to keep you from being hunted down and murdered, but as soon as you’re home safe I’m going to shake you till your teeth rattle, for doing this to me.

  She had already spent an exhausting evening – after returning from the bank – arguing with Karlebach over how trustworthy Count Mizukami actually was, and then about whether she was really sure she was ‘able for’ tomorrow’s reconnaissance expedition to the Western Hills, to locate all the lesser entrances to the Shi’h Liu mine. The Count had sent three soldiers out to Men T’ou Kuo by train that afternoon, to arrange horses for the party. God knew what the Baroness, and Madame Hautecoeur, and that poisonous beldame Madame Schrenk at the Austrian Legation, would have to say about that.

  Jamie, wherever you are, I hope you appreciate what I’m doing.

  But the thought was like a child’s cry in the darkness. And as she sat at the dressing table, and let the stillness of the night finally close around her, the thoughts returned that all her activity that day, and all her researches into bank records and police reports and maps of the Western Hills, had been designed to hide: that it had been six days since Ysidro had come to give her the news that Jamie was safe.

  Six days is a long time.

  Jamie . . .

  Lydia pressed her hands to her face, trying to still her sudden trembling.

  And the worst of it was that she didn’t know exactly for whom it was that her breath came short and tears suddenly poured down her cheeks.

  For her daughter’s father, for unbending strength and wry humor, for the warmth of his arms around her?

  Or for the expressionless whisper and cool yellow eyes of a man who’d been dead since 1555?

  Her mind returned to the bank vault she had entered that afternoon. To the tan leather trunk with its brass corners and elaborate locks.

  Empty.

  Keep walking forward.

  This was what her friend Anne had told her – that steady and pragmatic Fellow of Somerville College – back in the days when Lydia’s father had disowned her, when Jamie had disappeared into the wilds of Africa and at seventeen Lydia had been tutoring medical students in order to pay her board bill. Keep walking forward. You don’t know what’s beyond the next rise of the ground.

  She dreamed that night that she was looking for Pig-Dragon Lane. Darkness was falling, and something was terribly wrong about the rickshaw-puller: she kept trying to lean forward, to see his face. He was naked save for a white loincloth such as the bodyguard Ito had been wearing when she’d seen him at Mizukami’s house, and like Ito he had bandages on his left arm and side. In the twilight she thought the man’s thinning hair was falling out in patches, the way Ito’s had been.

  She abandoned the rickshaw in terror, but found herself afoot in lanes that all looked alike, with silk shops and paper lanterns and jostling crowds of Chinese. She asked the candy-maker at the corner of Silk Lane if he had seen Ysidro, and he answered her – in perfect English – ‘He apologizes for being detained, ma’am, but he’s left a message for you at the Temple of Everlasting Harmony.’ He gave her some candy and pointed her the way through the crowd. As she made her way toward the Temple, she kept half-recognizing someone in the crowd, someone who wasn’t there every time she turned around. Someone whose face she knew.

  Jamie?

  Simon?

  The rickshaw-puller Ito?

  A single lamp had been kindled in the Temple. By its glow, the eyes of the statues were reflective, vampire eyes. They followed her as she stepped into its darkness.

  Whoever she’d seen behind her in the crowds of the street, she thought, was in the Temple somewhere. She could see him move. She knew she should be mortally afraid of him, and she wasn’t.

  The knowledge that she should have felt fear and didn’t was what remained with her when she woke, heart pounding, to the sound of the hotel chambermaid laying the fire in the parlor and the voices in the street of a couple of American soldiers coming off patrol.

  ‘Tell about Stone Relics of the Sea.’

  Wu Tan Shun bowed deeply and signed to Ling to bring the bamboo tray of dim sum – small tidbits of shrimp rolls, ‘phoenix claws’ (which bore a suspicious resemblance to chicken feet), egg tarts, and dumplings big and small, steamed and fried – to the small table beside Asher’s makeshift brazier on its section of matting. Four tiny pots of tea were already lined up. Since everyone in the surrounding courtyards continued to ignore him – including the doctor who had arrived that morning to strap up his cracked ribs – Ling had stepped in as cook and housekeeper, occasionally assisted by her three-year-old daughter Me
i-Mei.

  Mei-Mei was with her today, gravely bearing a smaller tray with a single plate of bao on it, her black eyes sparkling at the honor of serving both Grandpa Wu and Yin Hsing Jên: Mr Invisible.

  ‘A city must have water,’ said Wu, when Ling and her daughter withdrew. ‘The lakes themselves are very ancient, dug by the first of China’s emperors. The presence of water mitigates the influences of wind and dryness here, and provides a barrier over which demons cannot cross. This is, of course, of paramount importance, in a place where the Son of Heaven himself resides.’

  Asher said, ‘Of course.’ As a folklorist he’d been long familiar with the legend that vampires cannot cross running water, and Ysidro had revealed the more complex truth of the matter last year as the first-class railway carriage they’d shared had sped across the Elbe. I assume ’tis a sort of tidal magnetism, the vampire had said in his whispering voice, his long fingers shuffling the deck in one of their endless games of cards. Its effect on our abilities slacks for brief periods at midnight. Yet in fact none of us knows why: only that it is so.

  Asher guessed that the sluggish movement of the water from the Jade Fountain outside the city and through the lakes was too slight to discommode a vampire much, but it interested him that the principle remained. ‘What there now,’ he asked in his clumsy Chinese, ‘Stone Relics of the Sea?’

  From pouches of fat, the dark gaze rested speculatively on his face. ‘It is not a good place these days, Mr Invisible. Not a safe place, once night has come.’

  ‘When start? People—’ He fished for a moment, trying to recall the word for disappear. ‘When yao-kuei under bridges?’

  ‘Ah.’ Wu managed to look sad and thoughtful while tucking into egg tarts and ‘chicken-velvet’ with the relentlessness of a machine. ‘You have heard those tales? They began only this year, a few weeks after the riots. It may be that while the Emperor reigned, some order was retained and the kuei kept their distance in fear. The Tso family lives by the side of the Sea, and what they think of it, they do not say, though I admit to being most curious about it. But people disappearing—’