Magistrates of Hell

In addition to Mizukami’s plump envelope of reports, Lydia had picked up at the desk four other notes, all of them from bachelor diplomats at the Legations, begging her to permit them to be of service to her. Given what Hobart had told Jamie about most of the men in the diplomatic corps needing to marry money, she wasn’t precisely surprised, but she groaned inwardly at the thought of the scramble that would ensue when word got around that her fortune was her own and not in any way entangled in Jamie’s affairs, alive or dead. She wanted to kick herself for having slipped that information into the conversation over lunch with Madame Hautecoeur and the Baroness, in reply to tactfully worded queries as to whether she would need financial assistance: both women, she did not doubt, had too-ample experience with women who came out to the East with husbands and then lost them there.

She leaned back against the pillows, closed her eyes, and wondered if fainting when the subject of her widowhood was brought up would discourage the likes of Mr Edmund Woodreave, the Trade Minister’s Chief Clerk: ‘If at any time you need the solace of a loyal friend . . .’

Indeed! From a man I met precisely ONCE at the Peking Club . . .

He was the man who had also referred, rather tactlessly, to ‘your poor husband’s appalling death’. Lydia wondered again about the man who had actually suffered that ‘appalling death’.

If I asked Simon he would say, ‘Nothing of the kind, Mistress. The man was dead when I found his body.’ Or perhaps, ‘He was a wicked man, and I killed him as he was cutting the throat of an innocent child . . .’

She slipped from beneath the coverlets, hurried – shivering – to the window, and opened one side of the curtain. Peking lay dark beyond the glimmer of lights on Rue Meiji, a mass of upturned roofs against distant stars. She lay long awake, reading in the neat, rather German handwriting of Count Mizukami’s clerk all about disappearances, deaths, and strange things seen around the Stone Relics of the Sea.

But Ysidro did not come.

FIFTEEN

Wind from the north sliced Asher’s padded ch’i-p’ao like a razor. The moonlight made a cloud of his breath. All around the shores of the Stone Relics of the Sea, ice formed a rough crystalline collar, and the crowding roofs of fancy tea-houses, ancestral temples, pleasure pavilions and dim-sum parlors shouldered black against the sky.

Not a fleck of light in all that shuttered darkness. Curious, Asher reflected, considering what Grandpa Wu and Ling had both told him: that the empty pleasure-grounds along the lakeshore were haunted these days by thieves, gunrunners, and killers-for-hire. From the humpbacked marble bridge where he stood, the smell of smoke from every courtyard around this side of the lakes came to him, in fierce competition with the refuse dumped on the lakeshore near the mouths of every hutong that debouched there – impossible to tell whether anyone had built a hidden fire along the lake that night.

Then the wind shifted, and for an instant he caught the stink he’d smelled in the mountains, below the Shi’h Liu mines.

Yao-kuei.

They’re here.

That was the short of what he had come to learn. He could go home now . . .

Do the Tso know it yet?

He stepped from the bridge to the muddy verge of the frozen lake itself.

In addition to his knife, his revolver, and a tin dark-lantern, he’d brought with him a sort of halberd that Grandpa Wu had sold him for three dollars American, the kind of thing that gang enforcers carried on late-night forays, like a short sword-blade mounted at the end of a staff. For two nights now he had waited to hear from Ysidro, but the vampire had either gone to ground or, like Father Orsino, was hunting far from Peking. That afternoon Ling had said a friend of her mother’s had smelled ‘rat-monsters’ by the lake. A beggar-child, the woman had said, had disappeared, the third in two weeks.

The Tso family had their headquarters in the triangle of land between the northern and southern lobes of the lake, away to his left across the water. Everyone in this neighborhood worked for them. In daylight, despite the Chinese clothing, Asher knew he could never pass unnoticed. He supposed the sensible thing would be to declare the evening a success, go back to Pig-Dragon Lane, and wait until he heard from Ysidro.

IF I hear from Ysidro.

And if I hear from him before Karlebach looks over Lydia’s shoulder at her police reports some evening and decides to make inquiries here on his own. The old man would have the freedom to come here during the day, but if the Tso were trying to keep inquiries away from the mine, the danger to Karlebach would not be less.

He is obsessed.

Long service in the twilight world – where love of country and duty to the Queen were the only landmarks – had taught Asher what obsession did to men’s judgement. They see what they want to see, his Chief had once said to him. They convince themselves things are safer than they are.

The stench – barely a whiff – disappeared as the wind veered to the north again. From the west, thought Asher. Along the long axis of the northern ‘sea’. Giving the western shore – and the maze of siheyuan that made up the Tso family headquarters – a wide berth, Asher picked his way down counterclockwise along the southern lobe of the lakes, boot soles squeaking in the frozen mud. Movement ahead of him and to his right: he almost jumped out of his skin. But it was only a rat, fattened with garbage to the size of a half-grown cat. Here away from the pleasure pavilions, the waste of soap- and paper- making in the hutongs above him was dumped, as well as the flayed debris of butcher’s stalls that even the ever-hungry poor of the city were unable to use: skulls, shells, cracked horns and the boiled-out husks of hooves. Knowing the Chinese capability for converting the tiniest scraps of waste into something that could be eaten or sold, Asher could only pity the rats trying to make a living off this.

To his right the shore bent away, toward a bridge and another of the city’s canals. The ice on the lake wasn’t thick enough yet to take a man’s weight, and he scanned the black mass of wall and roofs at the top of the bank, searching for the entrance to another hutong. Judging by the filth heaped on the shore just here, it wouldn’t be far. Another rat made the reeds rattle close-by. He saw a third, and a fourth, dart across the open ice, the moonlight so strong that it made little blue shadows around their feet.

Asher moved to the left to skirt the worst of the rubbish – moonlight catching on the lugubrious shapes of skulls and pelvic bones – but his boots broke through the ice. He staggered, the water freezing his feet even through the leather, and waded back the yard or so to the mud and reeds. When true winter came, of course, every child in the city would be out here, skating on the ice . . .

Always provided things haven’t come to shooting by then between the President and the Kuo Min-tang.

The wind that raked his cheeks slackened a little. He smelled it, clearly now despite the cold.

At least one of them, under the bridge.

He turned, to pick his way back along the shore.

And stopped, his breath sticking in his throat. All that formless dark slope, from water’s edge to the wall at the top of the bank, moved with rats.

Shock took his throat like a cold hand. He had never seen that many rats in his life. The silvery-dark scuttering among the reeds was literally like a carpet, alive with a foul, bubbling animation. When he turned they sat up, all of them. Eyes like a spiderweb dewed with flame.

Oh, Jesus.

Looking at him.

The smell of the Others grew stronger behind him. In the moonlight it wasn’t easy to be sure, but he thought he saw something move along the lakeshore, a hundred yards from where he stood. There . . . Black, and man-high against the cold glimmer of the ice. Asher started to edge back, but the rats were moving, too, streaming down behind him. The thought of being swarmed brought nightmare