Magistrates of Hell (18 page)

Men had been waiting on either side of the alley, just within its mouth. How many, he wasn’t sure at first, for only the barest whisper of lantern-light leaked through from the
hutong
. The puller, the moment he felt Asher jump clear, dashed around the corner deeper into the alleyway, taking the rickshaw and its lantern with him: Asher spared a curse for him but didn’t really blame him. Faced with the prospect of being accidentally murdered in the course of an affray that had nothing to do with him, he suspected he’d run, too. He guessed more than actually saw the shadows of two men blocking the mouth of the alleyway where it ran into the
hutong
, and fired at them, more to let them know he had a gun than in the hopes of hitting either one. Then he ran for the alley mouth with all the speed he could muster, hoping fear of another shot would keep them back.

It didn’t. His legs collided with something in the blackness, and as he staggered, trying to catch his balance, he heard the whistle of what he guessed was the Asian version of a blackjack. Something clipped his shoulder with numbing force, knocked him off-balance –
a flail
, he thought, tried to get up, and then they were on him. He kicked, twisted as someone tried to grab his head, slashed with his knife, nearly blind in the darkness. Twisted again, and the flail – two short oak sticks joined in the middle by chain – hit hard against his back. Someone had his wrist, wrenched at the gun in his hand—

Then let go, very suddenly.

He smelled blood. A lot of it. And the voided waste of a dying man.

One of his attackers cried out, and Asher scrambled free of the melee.

Feet pattered frantically. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see two men’s forms flee up the alleyway and away. Darkness still hid nearly everything in the narrow space, but he glimpsed a pale glimmer of colorless face, colorless hair, just where the fight would have taken place, like a misty glimmer of wraith-light.

A soft voice remarked from the darkness, ‘I did not think you were acquainted with any Chinese, James.’

Asher leaned against the wall, shaking. His shoulder throbbed as if it had been broken. He’d seen men who’d been beaten with rice flails and guessed how near he had come to death.

‘Have these gentlemen anything to do with your attempted arrest?’ The vampire was next to him, with the eerie suddenness of encounters in a dream. Asher could smell blood on his clothes. ‘Or have you two separate sets of foes?’ Ysidro took his hand, pressed the flail into it, and Asher transferred it to his greatcoat pocket.

‘Can the rickshaw-puller be trusted?’ Ysidro said, then handed him his knife, which he’d lost in the fight, and steered him back toward the
hutong
and – a few yards further – toward the lanterns and clamor of the Hsi Chu Shih. ‘It’s a dead-end alley. He’s crouched at the farthest corner of it. Or shall we hire another?’

‘I’ll hire another.’ Asher was a little surprised at the steadiness of his own voice. ‘I’m not sure I could find my way to Pig-Dragon Lane on my own, and my friend back there –’ he nodded behind him, down the alley – ‘would tell the gang he works for where I am.’

‘Here.’ Ysidro halted a few yards short of the end of the
hutong
, where its shadows would still hide them, and held out to Asher a worn and rather dirty blue cotton
ch’i-p’ao
, taken, Asher knew, from one of the dead men they’d left behind. Without a word, he transferred the contents of his ulster and jacket to the pockets of his trousers, then stripped off the outer garments and donned the long, quilted coat. There was a black cotton cap in one of the pockets, and this he also put on.

‘What lies in Pig-Dragon Lane?’ Ysidro took the discarded clothing over one arm. ‘And what, if I may so inquire, is a Pig-Dragon?’

‘It’s a creature that supposedly lived beneath some of the bridges of Peking.’ The dead man had been nearly Asher’s height and burly for a Chinese, to judge by the way the quilted garment hung on him. ‘In Pig-Dragon Lane I hope to find a man who’ll offer me safe lodging and tell me which gang it is that’s after me, and why. I think they followed me from Mizukami’s this evening.’ He double-checked his pockets, slipped the knife back into his boot. ‘Whether this has anything to do with my questions about who to go to if one’s tastes are unorthodox, or—’

Ysidro turned his head sharply, a movement so out of character with him that Asher thought,
I wasn’t the only one who felt himself followed
. . .

‘What is it?’

‘Naught.’ But the vampire’s yellow gaze quested sidelong, giving his words the lie, and it occurred to Asher that his companion had not fed upon the men he’d killed.

Dared not.

He laid a hand on the jacket and coat, felt the skeletal arm beneath. ‘Might I impose on you to smear these in blood and dispose of them in such a fashion that whoever is after me – whether it’s Hobart or Mizukami or the Germans or the Austrians or Uncle Tom Cobbley and all – will be reasonably sure I’ve come to a bad end? Nothing discourages pursuit like proof of one’s demise.’

A flicker of a smile touched the vampire’s eyes. ‘Two hearts with but a single thought.’

‘And would you tell Lydia that I’m well? Tell her also that she’s not to let anyone – not Ellen, not Professor Karlebach, no one – know that she knows it. She must convince whoever is watching her – waiting for me – that I’m dead.’

‘I will tell her. You do not trust the good Professor?’ The flex in Ysidro’s tone would have been a raised eyebrow, a cocked head in another man.

‘Not as an actor.’ They stepped out into the Hsi Chu Shih; it was the gesture of a moment to signal a rickshaw. ‘I’m sorry to do this to him,’ he added. ‘And to Ellen. I know they will grieve. But Hobart wouldn’t try to have me killed. This is someone else – something else. And it’s beginning to look to me like someone doesn’t want me poking around at the Shi’h Liu mine.’

‘I will bear your words in mind.’ The vampire stepped back as Asher sprang up into the rickshaw. ‘And I trust you will not have the bad taste to request me to keep these same assassins from murdering the good Professor Karlebach.’

Asher laughed. ‘I wouldn’t ask it of you, Don Simon. But I will ask that you warn them. And that you look after Lydia.’

What a lunatic thing to say to a vampire
, reflected Asher as the puller picked up his poles.
To a man who has for three hundred and fifty years prolonged his own life by killing others
. . .

Yet when Ysidro inclined his head and murmured, ‘Such has always been my endeavor,’ Asher felt not the slightest fear or doubt that the life of his wife – and of his baby daughter – was safe in the vampire’s hands.

The rickshaw slipped into motion. When Asher glanced back, Ysidro was gone, as if he had never been.

No wonder Karlebach doesn’t trust me
.

When Lydia was ten years old her mother had died, after a lingering illness. She’d been sent to live with her Aunt Faith, who, among the five sisters, had been closest in age and temperament to her mother, and a concerted effort was made to ‘protect’ her from all knowledge of the disease that was ravaging her mother’s body. Driven nearly to distraction by the sugary untruths, the smiling euphemisms and blatant attempts to divert her mind from ‘unpleasantness’ (
do they really think taking me to the pantomime is going to make me stop wondering what’s HAPPENING to Mother?
), Lydia had finally slipped out of the house in the early hours of the morning and walked the two miles to her father’s town house in Russell Square, to find the place closed up and her parents gone.

In real life she’d returned home in time to retrieve and tear up the note she’d left before her Nanna had found it – Nanna had very strict ideas about discipline for rebellious little girls. In her dream tonight, in the strange cold bed in the Wagons-Lits Hotel in Peking, she had somehow gotten into the house and was moving through its shuttered rooms, as she always wandered in the recurring dreams that had begun after that day. The parlor with its ultra-fashionable gilt-touched wallpaper and Japanoiserie – even the smell of the potpourri was the same. Her mother’s bedroom, the pillows on the quasi-Moorish bed – all the rage that year – an undisturbed blue and crimson mountain, as if her mother had never lain there. The stillness, in which her own stealthy tread on the carpets made a distinct silvery crunch.

Sometimes in her dreams she was alone in the house. Sometimes she knew her parents were there somewhere, only she couldn’t find them.

In her dream tonight someone else was there.

Someone she had never met. Someone terrible, and old, and cold as the darkness between the stars. Someone she couldn’t see, but who listened to her breathing and smelled the blood in her veins.

He knew her name.

Frightened, Lydia tried to find her way downstairs again – in her dream she’d picked the lock on the kitchen door, though in fact she hadn’t learned to pick locks until James had taught her, at the age of fifteen . . . But the rooms kept changing. She went through the spartan chamber she’d shared with that frightful German girl the first year she’d attended Madame Chappedelaine’s Select Academy in Switzerland, whatever her name had been – Gretchen? Gretel?
How did I get here?
But there was Lake Como outside the window, shining in the moonlight . . . Only, when she opened the door there wasn’t the hall outside, but the Temple of Everlasting Harmony, with an endlessly long line of statues stretching away into the gloom. The Magistrates of Hell: only, some of them weren’t statues, but followed her with eyes that reflected the single candle-glow like cats’.

She picked up her skirts and hurried, hurried, knowing somehow that in some finite span of time they’d be able to move and would come after her . . .

She stumbled through the garden door beside the altar, which opened into the upstairs parlor of her own house on Holywell Street in Oxford.

Ysidro was sitting at Jamie’s desk. ‘Mistress,’ he said.

Lydia woke. The oil lamp that illuminated the bedroom still burned. By its amber glow she saw the litter of books and magazines that strewed the blue-and-white counterpane around her. The curtains of the window opposite the bed billowed and stirred, to the discontented threnody of desert wind. The air smelled of dust.

She found her glasses, got to her feet, wrapped herself in her robe – the bedroom was freezing, Heaven only knew what time it was – and, as she crossed the room, she made an effort to find enough hairpins still in the thick red braid of her hair to fix it up into a knot again. As surely as she knew her own name, she knew who would be in the parlor.

And he was.

‘Mistress.’ Don Simon Ysidro rose from the chair beside the hearth, inclined his head.

Lydia stood still in the doorway.
You knew he was in Peking
, she reminded herself. And there was nothing between them,
could
be nothing between them. Could never be anything between the living and the dead.

Except there was.

‘Simon.’

He’d built up the fire. Just minutes ago, to judge by the way it was burning and the chill that still gripped the room. His fingers, when he took her hand to guide her to the other hearth-side chair, were cold as marble, but without the mollience of the dead flesh with which Lydia was familiar from the dissecting rooms of the Infirmary. She could not keep herself from noting he had the drawn look that he did when he hadn’t fed in many nights.

She fought the impulse to hold his fingers as they slipped from hers.

‘James instructed me to tell you that he is well.’

She took a deep breath, let it out.
He is what he is
. Held her hands to the fire. They didn’t shake. Part of her was aware of him, wildly and completely, and yet . . .
It’s only Simon
. ‘You’ve seen him?’

‘I followed his rickshaw to a place in the Chinese City which rejoices in the name of Pig-Dragon Lane.’ The firelight traced the aquiline curve of his nose, the shape of his cheekbones; gave a warm counterfeit of human coloration to his flesh. ‘I lingered only long enough to assure myself that the man with whom he sought refuge did indeed admit him, and did not murder him out of hand. I dared not tarry.’

His head tilted a little, listening for something: a very slight distance in his eyes. Even at this hour, echoes of passers-by and rickshaw bells drifted from beyond the high city wall.

‘He made it safely, then?’

‘Not entirely. He was set upon by Chinese assassins, sent – he is well, I assure you, Madame – sent, he believes, not by this Hobart, whose tiresome son may rot in prison for all I care, but by those who would rather he did not interfere with events at the Shi’h Liu Mine. He is unharmed,’ he reiterated, seeing the look on her face. ‘Bruises only. Yet whether those behind the attempt are German or Chinese or – I may add – Japanese, I know not, and neither does he.’

‘Is he still in danger?’

‘He will be, should he be discovered. Thus he bade me arrange it that his bloodstained clothing be found tomorrow, and that word go out that he is dead. His hope – and in this I believe he is wise – is to go to ground until he can learn who it is who pursues him. Thus he asks of you, Mistress, that you make a great outcry that you know in your heart that he is dead. Can you do this?’

She nodded, chilled inside.
What if I do it wrong—?

The strange eyes regarded her, gauged her; then he smiled and took her hand again. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Karlebach is not to know, he says, nor your maid nor any others whosoever they may be.’

‘It will break the old man’s heart!’ exclaimed Lydia, though she knew absolutely that her husband was right. ‘He loves Jamie like a son. And coming on top of the loss of his friend Matthias – it’s a horrible thing to do to him. But it’s true,’ she added sadly, ‘that he’s a dreadful actor. Nobody would believe him for a minute, if he didn’t really think it was so. And he can’t do what a woman can, and just cover up in veils and stay indoors – oh, dear, I suppose this means I’ll have to go into mourning. I wonder where one can purchase . . .? They hired
assassins
?’