Magistrates of Hell

say I spread for you?’

Asher smiled. ‘What tell husband honorable mother not my business,’ he replied, and her answering smile widened. ‘Tea?’ And he gestured toward the extremely pretty celadon pot – which he suspected had been stolen – that had arrived a few minutes previously with the noodles and the soup.

Her eyes brightened as she knelt on the straw mat in the doorway and poured out the first cup: ‘This is Grandpa Wu’s good p’o lai,’ she exclaimed. ‘He must really like you! You’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you?’

‘Tell me story,’ he said and sat cross-legged again on the other mat. ‘Tell me about yao- kuei by Golden Sea.’

It was a bow drawn at a venture, but he saw dread darken her eyes. ‘The Golden Sea? Is that true, then?’ she asked worriedly. ‘My younger sister’s husband says there are devils in the Western Hills – horrible things that stink, which you cannot kill with guns . . . My younger sister’s husband is in the Kuo Min-tang, you understand. The leader of his unit says there is no such thing as these devils because we now have science and are breaking free of the imperialist superstitions of the past . . . Are they indeed now in the city?’

‘Don’t know.’ Asher accepted the tea, Green Snail Spring from Tong T’ing. ‘You learn for me? Learn, not tell them—’ He gestured to the courtyards beyond the wall, then touched his finger to his lips. ‘I am not here.’

‘I’ll ask my brothers. We live only over in Crooked Hair Family Alley. That is, my family lives – my husband’s brothers also. Why does the Tso Family want to kill you?’

Asher rubbed his shoulder. ‘Tso Family, eh? And what is your honorable name?’

‘Ling.’ The name meant Good Reputation. ‘Ch’iu P’ing Ling. My husband’s honored mother is Grandpa Wu’s niece.’

‘Ling. Not know –’ which wasn’t quite true, Asher reflected as pieces began to fall into place – ‘why Tso want to kill.’

‘It isn’t like the Tso,’ Ling said thoughtfully, ‘to go after a Long-Nosed Devil. Even though they’re the enemies of the Republic and plot with the vile reactionary Yuan, nobody wants your armies back shooting everyone in sight. So you must have done something.’

She was, Asher guessed, very much a child of the hutongs – only an extremely lower-class girl would have escaped having her feet mutilated – and by Chinese standards not particularly pretty, with her long, horse-like face and wiry build. ‘But why hide with Grandpa Wu?’

‘Fear Tso family has sons, has cousins, work servants in Legation?’ suggested Asher. ‘Servants kill while sleep?’ He made a throat-cutting gesture.

‘No, you don’t need to worry about that – are you going to eat that dumpling?’ She pointed her chin at the one he’d left on his plate. ‘The Tso don’t have family in the Legations. It’s mostly the Wei, the Hsiang, and the K’ung – the old families that have run things for hundreds of years here in Peking – or the families that work for them, like the Shen and the Shen –’ there was a different tonal dip there: the one spoken high meant gentleman, the other on a descending tone meant cautious – ‘and the Miao and the P’ei. And the Hsiang all hate the Tso, and the Wei owe too many favors to the Hsiang to go against them, if the Tso tried to sneak anyone in. The Tso only started making themselves a big family twenty years ago, my mother-in-law says: upstarts. Madame Tso gives herself airs now, my mother-in-law says, but her father was only a night-soil collector in the Nine Turns Alley, after all. My mother-in-law says the Tso are paying Yuan Shi-k’ai to try to get their people in, but it hasn’t happened yet. You can make a lot of squeeze, working in the Legations.’

‘Not during Uprising?’ He lifted an eyebrow with a quizzical look, and Ling grinned.

‘Not in the Uprising, no. I was only little then, but I remember Grandpa Wu had six or seven whole families of the P’ei hiding in this very courtyard, because the Boxers would have killed them. But of course now Grandpa says that never happened. A lot more hid in the coal mines in the Western Hills,’ she added. ‘And I never heard any of them say there were devils out there.’

‘What about girl Ugly English Devil kill in Madame Tso house?’ asked Asher casually. ‘She was Miao? Or Shen?’

‘Shen,’ Ling corrected, using a different tone, and her long face clouded. ‘You mean Mi Ching? Bi Hsu tells me – my husband’s younger brother, who works over in Big Shrimp Alley – Bi Hsu tells me her brothers were nearly distracted with anger when they heard about it. But the family’s really poor. When An Lu T’ang offered money for Ching, their father would never have sold her if he’d known what An wanted her for. But An Lu T’ang works for the Tso, so you can’t really say no to him, any more than you can bring an English Devil to justice, no matter what he does. This is the kind of exploitation that the Kuo Min-tang seeks to rectify, but as long as Yuan Shi-k’ai continues to enslave China to the foreign economic interests, nothing will get done.’

‘Shen Mi Ching brothers, servants in Legation?’

‘No, but all their cousins are.’ Ling licked a final morsel of dumpling from her fingers. ‘Bi Hsu said to my husband that Mi Ching’s brothers should just wait outside Mrs Tso’s house for the next time Ugly English Devil comes for a girl. He goes about once a week, though usually he just hits them or cuts them. But Bi Wang – my husband – told him not to be stupid. As long as our nation is enslaved to Western imperial interests, no justice will be possible for the people of China, and you can’t just kill an English Devil in the street.’

Well, not unless he’s a traitor selling information to the Germans, reflected Asher. Though Ling was clearly parroting the harangues she’d heard from her sister’s husband and his friends, he saw the sparkle of genuine anger in her face: anger at the lines of men who’d marched along the Chien Men Ta Chieh in 1901, at the German soldiers who now occupied Shantung, and at the Japanese who’d taken over Formosa and had their eyes on Manchuria, with its coal and iron, as well.

He recalled the pockmarked militia commander in the hills, the ragged men who’d helped themselves to his second-best greatcoat and the British Army’s scrawny Australian horses: farmers driven from their land by taxes and starvation. Recalled, too, the sleek young aide Huang Da-feng at Eddington’s reception, hobnobbing with the Western officers, with that elegant madame on his arm. Runs half the brothels in Peking . . .

No wonder this girl was angry.

Shen Mi Ching. Hobart probably didn’t even know her name. Asher felt rage at the man pass through him, a slow red wave, and thought about what he’d arrange for any man who harmed Miranda, or Lydia – or even his obnoxious, whining, spoiled nieces and cousins, for God’s sake! – if by some happenstance or turn of events he was unable to prove such a crime on the perpetrator . . .

And he shivered at the first thought that went through his mind: I’d speak to Ysidro.

He’d do it. And he wouldn’t care.

And that, Asher thought, after Ling took her departure and he retreated from the bitter cold of the courtyard to the nearly as cold corner of the cheng-fang where he’d installed the brazier and his blankets, is the true reason Karlebach seeks to destroy the vampire, wherever and however they exist.

For the sake of the souls of the living whom they do NOT kill.

For the sake of every soul in the world, if the living begin to use the Undead for their own ends outside the law.

Was that the reason Ysidro himself had undertaken the perilous journey to China, when he’d learned of the spread of the Others? It was difficult to tell with Ysidro, for whom the game of mirror and shadow went far deeper than the mere hunt. Was it simply that, as a chess player, the vampire saw ahead to what the governments of the living might do to acquire control of such creatures? Or was there something else?

Don Quixote, Asher found himself remembering, had been a Spaniard, too.

He had hoped Ysidro would visit that night, with word from Lydia, if not word about the Others, or the vampires of Peking. For a long time he lay awake, watching the moonlight where it came through the broken roof; then slid into unremembered dreams.

The hardest thing, Lydia found, was not telling Karlebach and Ellen.

The police found Jamie’s blood-soaked coat and jacket in the north-western district of the so-called Tatar City, not far from the shallow lakes locally known as the ‘Stone Relics of the Sea’, late in the afternoon of Thursday, the thirty-first of October. On the following morning the nude body of a man was found in a nearby canal, so