Magistrates of Hell

gauged the distance to the doorway and the stair. His every instinct told him to flee, but a terrible suspicion was growing in his mind, and he asked instead, ‘Can you tell where?’

The vampire shook his head, a slight gesture, reminiscent of Ysidro’s stillness. ‘Near here,’ he said. ‘A thousand miles straight down beneath the ground. A thousand miles and ten thousand and a hundred thousand miles, beyond the Third Hell, which is for bad mandarins, forgers, and backbiters. The forgers are made to swallow melted gold and silver, to the extent that they forged those metals in life. And the Fifth Hell is the Hell of Dismemberment, where the lustful, murderers, and the sacrilegious are torn into pieces, ground into pulp between rocks, run over by the red-hot iron wheels of spiked vehicles. Bao is the Magistrate of that Hell, Bao Cheng, who used to be a warrior in the time of the Sung emperors: a fearsome man, they say, but a writer of drinking songs and love songs. You are not sacrilegious, are you?’

He caught Asher’s arm again, stared intently into his face. ‘Your father prayed for you. Wanted you to enter the Church. You disobeyed him.’

Did he read that in my thoughts? Or is it of his own father that he speaks? ‘My father wanted me to serve the Church,’ said Asher, quite truthfully . . . Though we won’t go into the subject of which church. ‘I trod my own path, until I came into Don Simon’s service.’

The vampire’s brow twisted again. ‘We are all prisoners of our families,’ he said in a much quieter voice, and his eyes, yellowly reflective in the candle gleam, suddenly seemed to focus. ‘They are the true Magistrates of Hell. Even when we flee them, they live on in our dreams. My mother—’ He stammered on the words. ‘My mother and my uncles wanted me to join the Society of Jesus, because I had a God-given talent for tongues. My father had died fighting the heretics in Holland. It was hard – it was very hard – to tell Christiana that it was not to be between us, Christiana whom I loved – or thought I loved. My uncle told me I would learn to love God more and to see Christiana’s body for what it was, a sack of guts and blood, as are the bodies of all women. But it was hard.’

Very gently, Asher disengaged his arm from the gripping claws. ‘I will ask Ysidro, when I find him, exactly what arrangements His Holiness has made to get you back to Rome. Since I am the one who must make them, and carry them out, I will bring you word here when I hear.’

‘Arrangements—?’

‘To get you back to Rome.’

‘Of course.’ Father Orsino shook his head a little, like a man who realizes he does not remember what he has said. ‘Who is Pope now? I made myself a refuge in the mines, behind bars of silver, behind gates the Magistrates cannot touch. A thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down into the darkness . . . My book is there. Ysidro said he would go get it for me. It is dedicated to His Holiness, but I hear so little of the world.’

‘His Holiness Pius X,’ replied Asher. ‘A most sanctified and resolute man.’ And stubborn and reactionary – the sixteenth-century Inquisitors would probably have regarded him as a Milquetoast for merely declaring Protestant-Catholic marriages ‘religiously invalid’ instead of demanding the lives of those who dared participate in them.

‘And you will speak for me?’

‘I will speak for you. Ysidro, too—’

‘Oh, he has been eaten by the monsters in the mines.’ Suddenly like a friendly priest guiding his parishioner into a confessional, Father Orsino waved Asher toward the stair. ‘This is why I say that you must have some other member of your party who knows the arrangement.’

‘Eaten?’ Asher thought for one instant about going back and picking up his lantern – on the opposite side of the crypt – rather than ascending that long, narrow stair in pitch darkness with a vampire at his elbow, but discarded the idea at once. Not if it meant letting the vampire get between him and the door.

‘He said he was going to the mines. Didn’t I tell you? He went to fetch my book for me, my life’s work, my refutation of all the works of the heretic Luther . . . I told him how to open the silver doors. So they must have eaten him.’

Asher put his hand to the wall of the stair, to guide him up, and – presumably in friendliness – Father Orsino laid a hand on Asher’s back.

‘I’ve given it a good deal of thought, and I think what happened must have been this,’ the priest went on. ‘The First Hell – Chin-kuang, the one closest to the surface of the earth, where Chiang Tzu-wen, who used to be a warrior monk in the days of the Han, is the Magistrate – that is where the cases of the sinners are heard and punishments assigned. But I think that in fact the Second Hell, Chujiang, where Li is the Magistrate, is the Hell of Beasts, where dishonest intermediaries and ignorant doctors are devoured, gored, trampled, torn apart by demons in the form of beasts. And if that is so, then that’s what these creatures are: shou-kuei, beast-devils, who got back into the First Hell through the carelessness of the Magistrate of Chin-kuang, and then managed to get through a hole in the wall of the First Hell and into the mines. That would account for his coming to the mines . . .’

‘Ysidro?’

‘No, no, the Magistrate of Chin-kuang! He’s been there. I thought at one time it must have been Li, the Magistrate of Chujiang, but I don’t think he’d dare. I have heard his footfalls in the dark.’

The priest’s hand tightened on Asher’s arm. He felt Father Orsino move past him. Heard the creak of the broken door, and a moment later – bright after the total blackness of the stair – faint starlight showed him the outlines of the holes in the vestry roof, the dense flat shadows of the broken walls.

‘The shou-kuei will have eaten Don Simon by this time,’ the vampire went on sadly. ‘That is why you must help me, you and your family, to get my book and take it to the Pope. Can I count on you?’

A little breathlessly, Asher said, ‘You may count on me. On us.’

‘God bless you.’ The Jesuit traced before him in the air the sign of the cross, then took Asher by the shoulders and very lightly kissed him on either cheek, lips warm with someone else’s stolen life. ‘And God speed you.’

A moment later, though the chapel was drowned in indigo and starlight, Asher woke with a gasp, as if from a dream, still standing in the ruined vestry before the black hole of the crypt stair. Silvery dawn light filled the room. His ribs hurt as if he’d been hit by a train. Outside in the alley, a woman was shouting the virtues of steamed dumplings.

SEVENTEEN

Two notes awaited Lydia when she returned to her suite. One – from Sir Grant Hobart – she simply put into the fireplace, as she had done two others he had sent her, behavior completely to be expected from a new-made widow, she thought. Anger at him still flushed heat behind her breastbone. If Jamie HAD died, it would have been his fault.

Whatever excuse he’ll offer, I don’t want to hear it.

The other – accompanied by a gaudy bouquet which must have come by rail from the south of China at considerable expense – was from Edmund Woodreave. Under Mrs Pilley’s accusing gaze Lydia didn’t feel she could very well dispose of the note, much less the flowers, as she’d disposed of Hobart’s. And Woodreave’s courtship, much as it exasperated Lydia, also amused her in its way: does he really think ANY woman whose husband was murdered last week is going to find this attractive?

Evidently he did.

Or is he so desperate to further his career that he’s willing to try anything?

‘He’s such a very nice gentleman,’ said Mrs Pilley, watching Lydia’s face anxiously, ‘and so devoted to you.’

‘He barely knows me.’ Lydia removed her hat and gloves and gathered Miranda into her arms. ‘He met me exactly once, before I—’ She bit off the words came on to the market, gave her head a little shake, and in her best imitation of Aunt Faith’s die-away voice said, ‘I find his importunities in the very worst of taste.’

Mrs Pilley sighed deeply, the expression on her face making it clear to Lydia that the little widow had what schoolgirls called a ‘crush’ on Mr Woodreave herself, though of course he would have no use for a woman who had