Magistrates of Hell

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 Szegedy 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.

Or why they want YOU to see your son hang.

Hobart cleared his throat. Blotches of red stood out on his cheekbones, like badly applied rouge. ‘You’re right, of course.’ He sat again at his desk. ‘Problem is, you can’t tell – no white man can – which of those Chinks is working for which tong or gang or Triad or family or for the bloody Kuo Min-tang. Sure, they may give you some story about . . . oh, I don’t know, revenge or protecting someone or . . . or family honor . . . But how can you tell it’s true? The only thing I’m asking you to do is find some kind of hard evidence – something a judge will believe – that it wasn’t and couldn’t have been Rick. It doesn’t have to be the truth—’

He waved impatiently when Asher opened his mouth to speak.

‘Just do something, understand? And don’t waste your time with the Chinese.’

Asher had heard that tone any number of times from his superiors in the Department, upon those occasions that he’d asked for permission to look into what had later turned out to be some murky Departmental jiggery-