Magistrates of Hell

mopped and washed, and paused long enough to hold out the brandy flask to Karlebach, who sank down on to a heap of rubble nearby, his face nearly green with shock.

‘Take his pulse,’ she ordered Mizukami. ‘Sit him on something – tree stump will do – and get his head between his knees . . . please,’ she added, remembering belatedly that Japanese men, even more so than English, were unused to taking orders from a woman. As she worked on the stricken soldier she spoke over her shoulder: ‘Professor, can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying? Please answer—’

Faintly, Karlebach replied, ‘I hear, little bird.’

‘Can you breathe? Does your chest hurt you?’

‘I’m well.’ His voice was a little muffled, for the Count had obeyed Lydia’s orders with great promptness and had lowered the old man’s head down as instructed. ‘I am – dear God . . .!’

‘Count, have one of your men get this man – what is his name?’

‘Takahashi.’

‘Please have one of your men get Takahashi-san back to Dr Bauer. He’ll need to be started on rabies treatments as soon as we get back to Peking. Mr Liao—’

She looked around for the guide, who was helping Ogata hold the frantic ponies.

‘Count Mizukami, would you ask Mr Liao if he’s up to guiding us to the remaining mine-entrances that he knows about? I realize it’s a horrid thing to have to do.’

‘No, honored Madame,’ the Count replied quietly, ‘it is not horrid. At least, no more horrid, as you say, than war. And this is war: something for which, in times past, women in my country have been as trained and ready as men.’

He stood back as Lydia went over to kneel beside Karlebach. ‘Are you feeling better, sir?’ she asked softly. ‘I think you should go back with Takahashi-san to the village.’

‘No.’ He waved weakly, groped for his shotgun. ‘No, the more of us who know the land – who know the places where explosives and gas must be placed – the better. Anything could happen to any of us . . . The old legends, the old accounts, said they could call rats to their bidding. In the catacombs beneath Prague Castle, in the wells and tunnels and chambers that all connect . . . Matthias was sometimes turned back by the rats. But never like this . . .’

Never that you knew about. Lydia looked back up at the mine entrance. Or was that one of the things the Master of Prague told you that you thought he was lying about?

From here she could see, in the shadows of the outer cave, hundreds of rats still darting around the crushed and battered corpses of their comrades. The cold breath that seeped from underground brought her their sweetish, frowsty stink. One of them, running back up the icy slope nearby her, made her almost jump out of her skin.

She realized she herself was trembling, with shock and cold that seemed to penetrate to her marrow.

Mizukami held out to her the brandy flask. ‘Now at least,’ he said softly, ‘we have a good reason – a logical reason – for ordering hundreds of cylinders of chlorine and as much explosive as it will take to cave in the mine. Moreover, you know and I know now what it is that President Yuan seeks to control, if he can achieve command over these devils. Yabe—?’

The young soldier – who looked younger than most of Jamie’s students, thought Lydia – was almost green with shock, but he stood stiffly to listen to his Colonel’s instructions.

‘Hai.’ The young man saluted and helped his bleeding and half-conscious comrade on to one of the ponies. Chinese ponies being what they were, he led it down the trail toward the village, rather than risk riding. Karlebach got to his feet like a man half-stunned, looked around him for his lantern; it lay on its side just within the entrance to the cave.

Bracing herself with loathing, Lydia climbed back up the half-dozen yards that separated her from the gaping darkness in the hillside. The sound of rats squeaking and scuttering in the cave raised the hair on her nape. Chlorine gas, she thought. Seal the mine, detonate the containers . . . It would eat away most living tissue.

She bent quickly, picked up the lantern, straightened.

And, like a breath, a thought passed through her mind.

A whisper that seemed to come from the darkness; not physical sound, but something deeper, as if someone had breathed her name.

Only, it wasn’t her name.

A single word passed through the back of her mind, leaving her shocked and cold and aghast and filled with horror.

Mistress . . .

And then was gone.

NINETEEN

Despite brutal cold and a cutting wind that kept everyone on Peking’s dark streets wrapped in as many scarves as they could obtain, Asher felt as exposed as he would have had he been wandering the Tatar city in tweeds and a homburg. Even in the early-falling autumn twilight he kept instinctively to the smaller hutongs, avoided crowds and the lights of shops. There were Han Chinese six feet tall, especially from the north; with his hands gloved in cut-out rags and the lower half of his face swathed, he was no more conspicuous than any other passer-by in a faded, quilted ch’i-p’ao and padded trousers tucked into felt-soled boots.

But, years ago, Don Simon Ysidro had said to him, We usually have warning of their suspicions, when the talk had turned to the friends, lovers, and bereaved families of the vampires’ victims who might guess how their loved one had died. Most of us have good memories for faces, for names, and for details . . .

Even locked in the irresistible sleep of the daylight hours, the vampire was not truly unconscious.

Asher knew he’d have only one chance to get a look at the outer walls, to identify the various doors and gates, of the Tso compound. On a second pass, even in daylight, one who slept within might well turn in his sleep and think: I have heard that unfamiliar stride before, smelled that flesh.

He was fairly sure, now, what was in the Tso house and why the family had risen so swiftly to such power.

And felt like the world’s supreme idiot, for not having thought of it before.

That is our strength, Ysidro had said to him once. That no one believes, and not believing, lets us be.

Yet at the moment he walked the streets of a city in which ninety-nine men of a hundred believed in the Undead and would be perfectly ready to hunt them and kill them . . .

Or use them for their own ends.

Or be used by them, for mutual benefit.

So you have become their servant? Karlebach had asked him, a year and a half ago. His day man – like the shabbas goy my granddaughter employs to light the fires in the stoves here on the Seventh Day . . .

They kill those who serve them . . . he had said.

And Asher thought now: But what if they didn’t?

What if they employed, not one ‘day man’, but – as Father Orsino had said – an entire extended family of them: grandfathers, uncles, daughters, cousins? What if they helped and enriched and protected that family, in exchange for protection during the daytimes . . . and a steady supply of weak or confused or very young victims? They rule the world, Father Orsino had said . . . The spirit hidden in the cellar, the secret at the heart of the family, the ruler of the enclave – the Magistrate of Hell.

The thought was monstrous, but not nearly as monstrous as machine guns or phosgene gas or the staggering, horrifying stupidity of generals who remained convinced that an army’s ‘will to fight’ and ‘patriotic spirit’ was going to carry a bayonet charge against a line of Vickers guns.

He turned off the Te Ching Men Street, worked his way eastward past the Catholic University, glancing now