Magistrates of Hell

no money of her own. A bleak and unfair world, reflected Lydia sadly, that condemned a young mother to looking after someone else’s child (and in China, no less!) so that she could scrape enough money to keep her own son in school in England, simply because no man of her own class would take a woman without a ‘portion’ to sweeten the bargain.

She carried Miranda into the bedroom, to keep her company while Ellen helped her out of her dress and brushed her hair; put on her glasses and played little games with her daughter, cheered as always by the infant’s curiosity and love. But when Mrs Pilley came in to carry Miranda off to bed, Lydia felt an uneasy qualm as she said, ‘Professor Karlebach and I are going out to the Western Hills first thing tomorrow morning. We probably won’t be back until after dark.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ The nurse’s large blue eyes were both puzzled and accusing: how can you possibly do anything at all, with poor Professor Asher dead and in so terrible a fashion . . .?

If Jamie were really dead, WOULD I be able to do nothing but stay in my room and wail?

Lydia didn’t know.

She lifted her chin, made her voice tremble a little as she added, ‘This is something Professor Asher would have wanted me to do.’

Instantly, the nurse’s eyes flooded with tears. Ellen, coming in with a cup of cocoa and an extra scuttle of coal, gazed upon her mistress with such pity and sympathy that Lydia writhed inwardly. It was shame, not grief bravely borne, that filled her own eyes with tears as her two loving handmaidens made their exit with the sleeping Miranda in their arms.

Jamie, thought Lydia, I know this is all to keep you from being hunted down and murdered, but as soon as you’re home safe I’m going to shake you till your teeth rattle, for doing this to me.

She had already spent an exhausting evening – after returning from the bank – arguing with Karlebach over how trustworthy Count Mizukami actually was, and then about whether she was really sure she was ‘able for’ tomorrow’s reconnaissance expedition to the Western Hills, to locate all the lesser entrances to the Shi’h Liu mine. The Count had sent three soldiers out to Men T’ou Kuo by train that afternoon, to arrange horses for the party. God knew what the Baroness, and Madame Hautecoeur, and that poisonous beldame Madame Schrenk at the Austrian Legation, would have to say about that.

Jamie, wherever you are, I hope you appreciate what I’m doing.

But the thought was like a child’s cry in the darkness. And as she sat at the dressing table, and let the stillness of the night finally close around her, the thoughts returned that all her activity that day, and all her researches into bank records and police reports and maps of the Western Hills, had been designed to hide: that it had been six days since Ysidro had come to give her the news that Jamie was safe.

Six days is a long time.

Jamie . . .

Lydia pressed her hands to her face, trying to still her sudden trembling.

And the worst of it was that she didn’t know exactly for whom it was that her breath came short and tears suddenly poured down her cheeks.

For her daughter’s father, for unbending strength and wry humor, for the warmth of his arms around her?

Or for the expressionless whisper and cool yellow eyes of a man who’d been dead since 1555?

Her mind returned to the bank vault she had entered that afternoon. To the tan leather trunk with its brass corners and elaborate locks.

Empty.

Keep walking forward.

This was what her friend Anne had told her – that steady and pragmatic Fellow of Somerville College – back in the days when Lydia’s father had disowned her, when Jamie had disappeared into the wilds of Africa and at seventeen Lydia had been tutoring medical students in order to pay her board bill. Keep walking forward. You don’t know what’s beyond the next rise of the ground.

She dreamed that night that she was looking for Pig-Dragon Lane. Darkness was falling, and something was terribly wrong about the rickshaw-puller: she kept trying to lean forward, to see his face. He was naked save for a white loincloth such as the bodyguard Ito had been wearing when she’d seen him at Mizukami’s house, and like Ito he had bandages on his left arm and side. In the twilight she thought the man’s thinning hair was falling out in patches, the way Ito’s had been.

She abandoned the rickshaw in terror, but found herself afoot in lanes that all looked alike, with silk shops and paper lanterns and jostling crowds of Chinese. She asked the candy-maker at the corner of Silk Lane if he had seen Ysidro, and he answered her – in perfect English – ‘He apologizes for being detained, ma’am, but he’s left a message for you at the Temple of Everlasting Harmony.’ He gave her some candy and pointed her the way through the crowd. As she made her way toward the Temple, she kept half-recognizing someone in the crowd, someone who wasn’t there every time she turned around. Someone whose face she knew.

Jamie?

Simon?

The rickshaw-puller Ito?

A single lamp had been kindled in the Temple. By its glow, the eyes of the statues were reflective, vampire eyes. They followed her as she stepped into its darkness.

Whoever she’d seen behind her in the crowds of the street, she thought, was in the Temple somewhere. She could see him move. She knew she should be mortally afraid of him, and she wasn’t.

The knowledge that she should have felt fear and didn’t was what remained with her when she woke, heart pounding, to the sound of the hotel chambermaid laying the fire in the parlor and the voices in the street of a couple of American soldiers coming off patrol.

‘Tell about Stone Relics of the Sea.’

Wu Tan Shun bowed deeply and signed to Ling to bring the bamboo tray of dim sum – small tidbits of shrimp rolls, ‘phoenix claws’ (which bore a suspicious resemblance to chicken feet), egg tarts, and dumplings big and small, steamed and fried – to the small table beside Asher’s makeshift brazier on its section of matting. Four tiny pots of tea were already lined up. Since everyone in the surrounding courtyards continued to ignore him – including the doctor who had arrived that morning to strap up his cracked ribs – Ling had stepped in as cook and housekeeper, occasionally assisted by her three-year-old daughter Mei-Mei.

Mei-Mei was with her today, gravely bearing a smaller tray with a single plate of bao on it, her black eyes sparkling at the honor of serving both Grandpa Wu and Yin Hsing Jen: Mr Invisible.

‘A city must have water,’ said Wu, when Ling and her daughter withdrew. ‘The lakes themselves are very ancient, dug by the first of China’s emperors. The presence of water mitigates the influences of wind and dryness here, and provides a barrier over which demons cannot cross. This is, of course, of paramount importance, in a place where the Son of Heaven himself resides.’

Asher said, ‘Of course.’ As a folklorist he’d been long familiar with the legend that vampires cannot cross running water, and Ysidro had revealed the more complex truth of the matter last year as the first-class railway carriage they’d shared had sped across the Elbe. I assume ’tis a sort of tidal magnetism, the vampire had said in his whispering voice, his long fingers shuffling the deck in one of their endless games of cards. Its effect on our abilities slacks for brief periods at midnight. Yet in fact none of us knows why: only that it is so.

Asher guessed that the sluggish movement of the water from the Jade Fountain outside the city and through the lakes was too slight to discommode a vampire much, but it interested him that the principle remained. ‘What there now,’ he asked in his clumsy Chinese, ‘Stone Relics of the Sea?’

From pouches of fat, the dark gaze rested speculatively on his face. ‘It is not a good place these days, Mr Invisible. Not a safe place, once night has come.’

‘When start? People—’ He fished for a moment, trying to recall the word for disappear. ‘When yao-kuei under bridges?’

‘Ah.’ Wu managed to look sad and thoughtful while tucking into egg tarts and ‘chicken-velvet’ with the