Magistrates of Hell

passer-by along Legation Street and Rue Marco Polo as his rickshaw bore him at a brisk trot toward the Peking Club. In the same fashion, over the past three days, he had thoroughly familiarized himself – and Lydia – with the hotel itself, until he knew every stairway, every attic, every cupboard, six different ways of getting to the money cached in the generator room, and most particularly every exit . . . just in case.

It was an old saying in the Department: that time spent in preparation is never wasted.

The night was a cold one, and he kept his own coat-collar turned up and the brim of his top-hat tilted down. Still, he identified people glimpsed in passing: Colonel von Mehren and sly old white-haired Eichorn emerging from the gates of the German Legation; Trade Secretary Oda-san – very trim in his London-tailored suit – crossing the street from the Japanese Legation to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He noted the old Chinese named Mian who peddled newspapers and bamboo baskets all around the Legation Quarter and who Asher suspected of being a letter carrier for at least one spy network and maybe several. Thus, when he stepped down in front of the lighted bronze doors of the Peking Club and paid off his puller (‘Twenty-five cent anywhere in city, chop-chop . . .’) he observed, a few hundred feet down the Rue Hart, the Rebbe Karlebach emerge from the gateway of the Austrian Legation.

Even at that distance, the old man’s wildly outdated overcoat, white beard, and low-crowned hat were unmistakable. Instead of walking back to the Club’s doors, Asher strolled along the street for a few yards, observing the tall, stooped figure by the lighted gateway: Karlebach turned to speak to someone still inside for a moment, then bowed and touched his hat brim before making his way toward the club. He carried no package.

Asher watched him for a few moments before turning himself and climbing the Club steps, to where Lydia – gorgeous in green-and-amber silk – awaited him in the lobby, in company with the Baron Drosdrov and his loud- voiced Baroness, and fragile old Professor Feydreaux. When Karlebach arrived, Asher made no mention of the Austrian Legation, and during an excellent supper of York ham and petits pois, Asher noted that his old teacher made no mention of it, either. Nor of purchasing ties. Lydia asked the old man about his visit to Silk Lane and whether he’d found a guide to show him the Temple of Everlasting Harmony – he said he hadn’t – and hoped he hadn’t had to rush from the hotel.

Karlebach, Asher observed, was a terrible liar.

If the Auswartiges Amt was recruiting agents, they’d certainly have done better.

In any case, he couldn’t imagine his friend letting any government – particularly his own, now that it was in close alliance with Germany – hear so much as a word about the Others . . .

Still, it was something to be noted.

Ysidro was waiting for him at the hotel.

Karlebach, Asher, and Lydia had taken two rickshaws back. A Chinese servant handed Asher a note as he and Lydia walked through the door of the Wagons-Lits. He made himself frown for Karlebach’s benefit when he recognized the sixteenth-century handwriting, said, ‘Yet more gossip about Richard Hobart,’ and followed the servant to the same blue-curtained private parlor in which he’d met Count Mizukami four days previously. Ysidro sat beside the fireplace, studying a popular guidebook of Peking.

‘I have spoken with another vampire,’ he said as Asher closed the door.

‘They – or at least one of them – know English, then?’ Asher drew off his gloves, held his hands to the fire. ‘Or Spanish – the Jesuits have sent missionaries here for three hundred years . . .’

‘Father Orsino Espiritu was one of them.’ Ysidro looked considerably less haggard than he had the last time Asher had spoken to him on the night of the windstorm – he guessed he had fed, probably far outside the city – but the haunted watchfulness remained in his eyes. ‘He sleeps in the crypt of a deserted chapel near the old French cemetery.’ He wore, Asher noted also, his usual spotlessly clean linen and a different suit, charcoal-gray tonight and not black.

So where is HE staying?

‘The chapel was burned during the Uprising,’ Ysidro went on. ‘It is little more than rubble now. Father Orsino goes in mortal terror of discovery, and I had to chase him halfway across the old palace pleasure-gardens, only to discover when I caught him that he is quite insane.’

‘That doesn’t sound helpful. Did he speak of the other vampires of Peking?’

‘He says they have all been transformed into gods.’ Ysidro considered the low-burning fire in the grate for a time, long white hands folded on the small, square bone of his elegantly-trousered knee. ‘He seems to have them confused in his mind with the Magistrates of Hell who rule the damned, and he regaled me at tedious length with questions about whether the mountain of knives was in the first or the fourth hell, and whether sinners in the second hell were fried in oil or steamed. There were, he informs me, originally a hundred and thirty-four hells, but there was a reorganization during the T’ang Dynasty and the number reduced to eighteen. Did I know how that came about? A most disconcerting interview.’

Asher settled in the opposite chair, fascinated. ‘Who did he think you were?’

‘A representative of the Inquisition, evidently, come to bring him back to Spain. I fear I did not disabuse him. Rather I warned him that I was working with the Pope’s secret representatives – yourself and Mistress Lydia, as I hope you will remember, should you ever have the misfortune to encounter Father Orsino. He has been hiding, for most of the past three centuries, in the coal mines of the Western Hills—’

Ysidro paused as Asher straightened sharply from the hearth’s warmth.

‘He only left them this summer, because, he said, stinking devils had begun to breed there, and he feared that he was not safe.’

‘This summer?’

‘He saw, he said, the first one last winter. He said he thought it was a bandit who had gone insane and been thrown out of his gang, but he did not attack him because the man was a Catholic. How he ascertained this fact I am not sure. Then later, he said, the man began to deteriorate into a monster and attack the bandits himself, or the villagers if they walked abroad after dark. Father Orsino kept away from the yao-kuei, fearing that they would tell the Magistrates of Hell where he was hiding. Later he said they became so numerous he feared they would kill him and eat him, as they did the villagers’ pigs – the villagers, too, if they could get them.’

‘But he was hiding in the hills before that?’

‘From the Magistrates of Hell.’ Ysidro’s yellow eyes caught the glint of the fire as he moved his head. ‘They seek to kill him, he says, because as Christ’s servant he had converted so many Chinese that Hell was becoming depopulated. One can only presume that the Magistrates were being paid on a commission basis.’

‘Or lost face.’

‘As you say. He made a hideout deep in the mines, with bars and locks of silver, which he says they cannot touch. He cannot touch them either, of course.’ Ysidro shrugged with a gesture of a finger. ‘I presume he hired the work done and then made a meal off the workmen – they were stealing the silver, I dare say, and deserved it. In any event, he begged me to take him out of China, to get him back to the Pope, who will – he says – keep the Magistrates at bay. He evidently feels that they have it in their power to take him straight to Hell for his sins.’

Asher said, ‘Hmmn. And I suppose he wasn’t able to tell you who made him a vampire in the first place?’

Ysidro moved his head slightly: No.

‘Nor whether there is or was any connection between the yao-kuei and the vampires of Peking?’

‘It was, as I have said, a disconcerting interview. He did say that the Magistrates of Hell no longer create more of their own kind, but rule the world through human intermediaries. He then gave me such abundance of details about the ranks, titles, and position in the hierarchy of the Afterlife of each Magistrate as to make me doubt his words. Yet clearly he spoke of vampires. They drink both blood and the spirit – the chi – he said, and through those gain power; moreover they sleep in the daytime. And of a surety, one of them made him.’

‘They would tell the Magistrates of Hell where he was hiding.’ Asher rose and paced to the window, parted the curtain – heavy peacock brocade from the mills of Manchester – and looked out at the darkness. The Legation gates were closed. Rue Meiji had fallen quiet. Only the moonlight – a few days past full – glimmered on the stagnant waters of the canal.

A patrol of the Legation police walked past, lantern-light winking on the brass of their uniform buttons. At the