Magistrates of Hell Read online

  She raised the lid, whispered, ‘Verflixt!’ and, with a pair of tongs, gently lifted out the contents on to the metal instrument tray. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not at all,’ murmured Asher. ‘This is fascinating.’

  The skull reminded him of one he’d seen in London, when one of the fledgelings of the Master of London had been burned. Shrunken and discolored, the very structure of the bone had been unable to withstand the terrible changes that sunlight wrought upon vampire tissue. But slow this time, he thought. Slow and in darkness . . .

  Some of the facial bones had dropped off it, and those that remained attached seemed to have grossly shifted their position and angle. A softening of the sutures? Is that possible?

  Lydia would know.

  He flinched at the thought of her riding that winding track through the hills, with rustlings and whisperings in the gorge below.

  The pelvis had shrunk also, and only almond-sized knobs remained of the long bones of arms and legs. Teeth remained in the upper jaw. Not only had the canines developed into fangs – longer than those of the vampire, but as far as Asher could tell exactly similar – but other teeth had burgeoned into tusks as well.

  Frau Bauer stirred with the tongs at the fine blackish dust on the bottom of the box. ‘Bits of the ribs remained, only last week,’ she said. ‘I put a few spoonfuls of the dust into two other boxes: one exposed for fifteen minutes to the daylight, one given no additional exposure. Both boxes were completely empty two days later. There seemed to be no difference between the rates of the dust’s decay.’

  ‘My wife is going to want a copy of your notes, if you’re willing to share them.’ Asher held up the tray, moved it about to further study its contents. ‘She is a medical doctor and deeply interested in . . . cases such as these.’

  ‘Cases?’ Frau Bauer’s eyes widened: shock, dread, eagerness. ‘There have been other such, then? Do you know what these things are?’

  ‘No,’ said Asher quickly. ‘My wife’s interest is in anomalous deaths: specifically, in cases of spontaneous human combustion, which this rather resembles. You say you’ve seen more of these things?’

  ‘Not I myself.’ The missionary moved the lamp closer as Asher angled the tray. ‘Liao Tan, the Number One of the village, saw one in the twilight, in the woods at the end of the valley, about three weeks after this one was found—’

  ‘Where did you come by this one?’ interrupted Karlebach. ‘In your so-interesting article you speak of peasants bringing it to you . . .’

  ‘Liao Ho – Number One’s nephew – has a house beyond the others in the village, on the track toward the mine. His mother – Tan’s sister – was a little mad, and in her later years she could not abide the noise of her neighbors. Ho kept the house after her death. He is something of an eccentric himself.’

  She half-smiled at the thought of her cantankerous parishioner. ‘He keeps pigs and shared the house with three very fierce dogs. Tan told me the week before that his nephew’s pigs had been attacked in their pen by some animal: wolves, he thought. One night, Ho heard the dogs barking wildly out in the darkness and followed them to the edge of the marsh that lies below the old entrance to the mine. He found this thing there, horribly mangled. Later two of the dogs became sick and died as well.’

  Asher’s glance crossed Karlebach’s and saw, behind the small, oval spectacles, the dark eyes fill with tears.

  It had once been a man, thought Asher, setting down the tray with its fragmentary remains. A man with a wife and probably a child – like Miranda. A man who had loved and been loved, wanting only to get through this life . . .

  And unlike the vampire, he had not chosen to make this change.

  Contamination of blood, Ysidro had said. They do not seem to retain that individuality which makes me Simon and you James . . .

  ‘Ho brought the creature back to me at once.’ With the point of the tongs, Dr Bauer gently touched one monstrous fang. ‘Ho has never believed in demons. He insisted that the things people said they saw in the twilight had some kind of natural explanation. He also insists that the stories that these yao-kuei can summon and dismiss hordes of rats from the mines are superstition—’

  ‘Rats?’ Karlebach looked up sharply.

  ‘So the story goes. Such vermin are abundant both in the mines and in the marsh below the main entrance.’

  ‘And how long,’ inquired Asher, ‘has the story “gone” like this, Frau Doktor? I’ve studied the folklore of Hebei Province, and nothing I’ve heard of has ever sounded like this.’

  ‘No, this is very recent. The villagers call them yao-kuei, but most attribute their appearance to the misdeeds of the Emperor and the loss of Heaven’s Mandate for his rule. I first heard stories of yao-kuei being seen not long before Christmas, so it has been almost a year.’

  She replaced the bone fragments in their box and locked it up again. ‘You understand, my people here go out very little once the sun is down. Aside from concern about ghosts in the darkness, for years now there have been brigands in these hills. Now that Kuo Min-tang militia are forming, it isn’t unheard of for men to be kidnapped into their bands. Poor Mrs Wei swears that the yao-kuei took her husband, who was lame and of no use to either the bandits or the Kuo Min-tang.’ She shook her head. ‘One cannot understand people like that.’

  Karlebach whispered, ‘A year . . .’

  ‘It is conceivable, is it not –’ Dr Bauer carefully locked the box back into its cupboard – ‘that a group of these creatures – a little tribe – has been concealed in the caves in these hills, all these centuries? The caves near Nan Che-Ying Village have never been completely explored, and the river that runs through the Kong-Shui caves goes for miles beneath the earth. Such creatures might well scavenge food from the mine workings and from the garbage heaps of the temples.’

  ‘But in that case,’ said Asher, ‘wouldn’t there be stories earlier than last year?’

  ‘Let me see its clothing.’ Karlebach’s voice was hoarse.

  Dr Bauer pulled back the window curtains, opened the shutters, and fetched another box. Good-humoredly, she said, ‘I have to warn you about these.’

  Asher flinched from the smell as she brought out the rags: the remains of a short ch’i-p’ao – the straight, baggy, coat-like tunic that for two hundred and fifty years had been standard dress for all Chinese, male and female – and the remains of a man’s ku trousers. Both had been torn to ribbons by the dogs and were unspeakably soiled.

  ‘You read my description of the thing,’ said Bauer quietly. ‘I wish you could have seen it. It must have observed how men wear clothing and put these on in imitation of what it had seen. You saw the skull. The face wasn’t remotely human. It was almost hairless, its spine bent forward, and the hands bore claws rather than human nails. For twenty-five years I have worked here in Mingliang, calling these beautiful souls here to Christ, and never have I heard of anything like these: not in fairy tales, not in legends, not in the stories that grandfathers told the little ones to scare them from going into the old mines. I’ve heard a thousand fireside legends, Herr Professor, and I’ve talked to hunters who’ve been all over these hills . . .’ She shook her head, her eyes filled with anger and fear.

  ‘Now anthropologists from Berlin call me a faker, and my own bishop has accused me of trying to garner contributions to my mission by coming up with a “scientific discovery”. And all the while my people here tell me they have seen more and more of these things. The village policeman saw what he thought was two of them together, only five days ago – and now I see by your faces that you are not shocked, not even very surprised. Where, and when, have you seen these things before? What can you tell me of them?’

  ‘We can tell you nothing, gnädige Frau,’ said Asher, before Karlebach could speak. ‘Because we know nothing. But it would help us learn if you could have someone take us to the place where your policeman saw these things, and also to the marsh below the coal mine, where Liao Ho’s dogs killed our fr
iend there in the box.’

  ‘It is them.’

  Dr Bauer – pacing sturdily ahead of them along the steep, brush-grown trackway up the gorge – glanced back at the sound of their voices, but Karlebach breathed the words in the Czech which had been his childhood tongue, and which Asher had spoken on his wanderings through Central Europe twenty years before. The missionary had greeted Sergeant Willard and trooper Gibbs in halting English, and in that language had thanked them for accompanying the exploring party. And while Asher knew that thousands of Germans – possibly tens of thousands – considered the Kaiser’s warlike aspirations as irresponsibly appalling as the English did, there was no guarantee that Christina Bauer was one of them.

  And even if she did, Asher knew that in every foreign ministry in every country on the globe there was one clerk or secretary or minister-without-portfolio whose sole business it was to pick up shreds of information – from shopkeepers, from missionaries, from other peoples’ servants – and sort through those shreds for something which could be used by the Home Country. He’d done it himself. He didn’t know what use the German General Staff would think up for things that were deathless, predatory, and might or might not share the mental powers of illusion and deception that seemed to come with the vampire state. But with a colony of them as close to Berlin as Prague, he wasn’t about to take chances.

  ‘What are they doing here?’ he asked softly in the same tongue. ‘I asked vampires I met in Central Europe whether this . . . this mutation, this altered form, had ever been known to spontaneously appear . . .’

  ‘And you believe what they told you?’ His shotgun slung over one powerful shoulder, Karlebach leaned on a stick as he walked, but though the trackway was steep, his breath seemed as strong as that of the two soldiers who brought up the rear of the party.

  ‘They had no reason to lie.’

  ‘It is the nature of the vampire to lie, Jamie,’ retorted the old man. ‘Until you believe that, you will not know them.’

  The gorge of the Mingliang stream had been severely deforested over the centuries. Here and there thin stands of pine trees remained, but mostly there was only brush along the water, and thin yellowed grass flittering in the icy wind. Chan – Liao Ho’s remaining dog – stopped on the trail, a growl rumbling in his throat. ‘What you see back there, eh?’ demanded the little farmer, and he gently shook a handful of his pet’s thick ruff. ‘Somebody follow, not follow?’

  Asher, too, scanned the bleak hill-slopes. All his instincts from seventeen years in the field prickled under his skin. Not the yao-kuei, anyway . . . It was mid-afternoon, the sun slipping from zenith to the western ridges.

  But someone. On the hard dust of the trail he’d seen recent boot prints, enough to know that either bandits – endemic in China during periods of unrest – or Kuo Min-tang ‘militia’ had been in the area within the past few days. Bandits might not feel up to taking on two British soldiers with Enfields – young Trooper Barclay had remained behind in the village with the horses – but those Enfields would appeal strongly to a larger band.

  The track ascended a rise of ground, then went down into what had been a level area in front of the Shi’h Liu mine entrance itself, perhaps a hundred yards in length, once given over to washing sheds, outbuildings, and slag heaps of waste rock. A ramp of rammed earth had been erected – who knew how long ago? – up to the cave mouth, which was a vast uneven oval set on its side, blue with shade in the yellowish rock of the hill’s steep shoulder. Seepage had turned the whole area into a sodden wasteland, weed-clogged, black with coal-dust, choked with cat-tails and sedges and, as Dr Bauer had said, rustling with rats.

  ‘The body lay here.’ Dr Bauer motioned to the nearest of the rock heaps, a few yards from the track where it first began to descend.

  ‘He was running back to the mine.’ Liao Ho put a hand on Chan the dog’s head. Asher let the missionary translate the little farmer’s words into German, for Karlebach’s benefit. ‘Shun and Shuo had torn his throat out, and he had clawed them in return. In the dark –’ he nodded toward the mine – ‘I saw the eyes of others, like the eyes of rats, but man-high. Rats were everywhere in the marsh, squeaking and running about.’

  ‘And was this near where your policeman saw them?’ Asher asked of Bauer, in German still.

  ‘No. Those were nearer the village, much nearer. No one comes this close to the mine in the twilight.’

  ‘You want to be careful, sir,’ warned Sergeant Willard as Asher picked his way around the worst of the pools toward the ramp that led up to the cave mouth. ‘This’s exactly the kind of place bandits’ll camp in . . .’

  Having neither German nor Chinese, the soldiers were under the impression that Asher and Karlebach were seeking a legend, rather like the yeti of the Himalayas: a belief Asher had been careful to foster by his replies to Willard’s questions en route. ‘Does it smell like there’s men hidden inside?’ he asked, and the sergeant’s gray-blue eyes narrowed.

  ‘It don’t smell natural, sir, and that’s a fact.’

  This was true. The latrine-stink of men camped together – and the smell of smoke that would drift up even from fires built far back in the tunnels – was absent, and there was certainly no sign that horses had been anywhere in the valley. But there was a smell of some kind, which raised the hair on the back of Asher’s neck.

  They climbed the ramp, the packed earth dimpled where track had been laid for the mine carts, but the iron rails and wooden ties alike long ago carried away by thrifty villagers. The outer cave was roughly the volume of the church in Wychford where Asher’s father had held his living, and was filled with the same soft grayish gloom. By the low narrow shape of the two tunnels that opened from one end of it, it was clear to Asher that the mining had been done in the old way: with picks, and the coal carried out in baskets on men’s backs. At the other end of the cave the floor had subsided into a sort of sinkhole, where a suggestion of water glimmered far below.

  Asher took the lantern from Sergeant Willard and lit it, and then walked to the nearer tunnel, six inches shorter than his own six-foot height and barely more than half that width.

  Gray rats scurried away into darkness. Turned back to look with eyes like tiny flame.

  The smell was stronger here, nauseating. Asher was aware of his heart pounding. Karlebach came to his side, his less-crippled hand curled on the trigger of the shotgun, the barrel resting lightly across his other wrist. The old man murmured, ‘Yes. They’re here.’

  Eighteen months ago, when Asher had traveled with the vampire Ysidro through the eastern reaches of Europe, they had been in quest of information about whether it were possible – whether any of the vampires in Berlin or Augsburg or Prague or Warsaw had ever heard of it – for vampires to mutate spontaneously, without masters and without instruction in the ways of survival. The Others, however, had been whispered of only in Prague. It had been enough, at the time, to learn that the Others were not the creatures that he sought.

  Staring into the endless black seam, Asher now regretted the questions Ysidro had not asked at that time of his fellow Undead. He started to make a comment to that effect, but the expression on his companion’s face silenced him: a despairing intensity, as if the whole of the old scholar’s being strained to pierce the midnight beyond the kerosene’s glow. Beneath the luxuriant masses of beard his mouth was set, and Asher could see that he trembled.

  Eighteen months ago he was content to live in Prague. Content to study the secrets of that ancient place in the full knowledge that vampires walked its streets . . .

  What changed?

  The knowledge that vampires existed elsewhere in the world had not sufficed to turn the old man from scholar to hunter. Yet when Asher had denied the request in that first letter, the old man had packed up and left the house where he had been born, where he had dwelled the whole of his long life, to journey first to England, then to China.

  Why?

  Why now?

  What does he kn
ow that he has not told me?

  Stirring, deep in the darkness. More eyes glittered, as if the floor of the tunnel were now carpeted with rats. Behind him, Asher was aware that the light in the outer cave was dimming as the sun moved beyond the valley’s rim.

  ‘I think this is all we can accomplish today,’ he said, and Karlebach startled, as if Asher had fired off a gun. ‘We’ve found the place; we’ve ascertained that these are indeed the creatures you know in Prague.’

  Karlebach stammered a little, then said, ‘Yes. Yes, of course you’re right . . .’

  ‘We don’t know how many of them there are, or how deep in the mine they’re hidden – or how much twilight in the world above suffices to wake them.’

  Karlebach nodded. For a moment Asher felt that the old man would have said something else to him. But instead he looked aside, mumbled, ‘That’s true. We had best— We had best be going . . .’

  As if, thought Asher, having come halfway around the world to find this place, he had no clear idea of where to go from here. Of what to do.

  Of what he WANTED to do.

  Odd.

  He followed his old teacher back toward the cave entrance, where Sergeant Willard, Liao Ho, Trooper Barclay, Chan the dog, and Dr Bauer stood silhouetted against the fading daylight.

  Karlebach stopped twice, to look back into the dark of the tunnels.

  Asher wondered what it was that he expected to see.

  SIX

  ‘It’s called the Temple of Everlasting Harmony.’ Like most Russian ladies of good family, the Baroness Tatiana Drosdrova spoke fluent French, and it was in this language that she addressed Lydia as she climbed down and paid off the three rickshaw ‘boys’ who had hauled her party at a jogging run nearly two miles from the Legation Quarter. ‘Stay here, all-same.’ She pointed imperiously down at the hard-packed dirt of the lane – the ‘boy’ to whom she spoke was, to Lydia’s estimation, sixty at least, old enough to be her father and far too old to be hauling stout Russian females around the alleyways of Peking. ‘Ten cents.’