Magistrates of Hell

and then at the hand-drawn map Ling and her brothers had worked up for him. A line of camels passed him, laden with coal; a rickshaw bearing two daintily-bediziened prostitutes nearly ran him down. This whole district was the domain of the Tso family. From the Tatar city’s western wall almost to the old granaries on the east side, rickshaw-pullers worked for them, hawkers of hot soup and fried watermelon seeds rented their pitches on the street corners from them, small shopkeepers paid them for ‘protection’, gambling parlors gave them ‘squeeze’. Everyone passed them information. Everyone wanted to be on their good side. It was a situation far from exclusive to China or Peking.

He counted turnings, looked for landmarks. In the cold twilight the narrow gray-walled hutongs seemed all very much the same to a foreign eye. But there he noted the shape of a gate with green-and-gold pillars instead of the more common red. At that intersection was an enormous, gaudy banner announcing THE EMPRESS’S GARDEN beside the gate of an eating house, tiers of open galleries around a central paradise. (And what do the local Republicans make of THAT?) Here was a hutong that made ten turns inside of two hundred feet and another that ran straight as a railway line for nearly that distance, and Asher’s mind, trained to detail, logged these individual minutiae as he would have noted exits from a house in which he planned to meet an enemy.

He’d heard vampires speak of their fellow Undead who grew timid, shrinking in on themselves: afraid to leave their houses, afraid to go beyond what was familiar. Afraid lest some accident somehow trap them out of doors, in the burning horror of the rising sun. Sometimes they’d get their vampire compatriots to hunt for them, to bring them prey . . . But on the whole, Ysidro had told him more than once, genuine friendship among vampires was rare.

But the living they could use: through illusion, through dreams, through fear.

Even through loyalty, as Ysidro had used him.

The siheyuan of the Tso spread over thousands of square feet, on the little peninsula between the two north-westerly lakes. Roofs rose above the gray walls like dark masses of cloud in the twilight. Asher noted those where weeds had sprouted in the mud that held the tiles. Gates and doorways, some flanked with brightly-painted pillars, or fanciful beasts: lions, dragons, birds. He saw where paint had not been refreshed, where hinges bore rust and the accumulated gray-yellow dust of many winters. There were compounds in Peking where the courtyards, like the one he currently occupied, went uninhabited for decades; where weasels and foxes, geckos and stray cats and even yang kwei tse spies might dwell in perfect safety. The Tso walls backed on to the long northern arm of the Sea, across from a pleasure ground of ancestral temples and fancy tea-houses; looking back along the wide verges of ice-rimmed water toward the bridge, Asher shivered at the recollection of how nearly he had been himself surrounded the night before last.

Their families worship them, Father Orsino had said. They are gods . . .

But a moment later he had said, They trust no one. It is hundreds of years since one of them created a vampire. They fear even their children.

So what was the truth?

He turned back along the hutongs away from the water. In the lane that everyone called Prosperity Alley he was nearly crushed against the wall by a very long black Mercedes car, driven along the rutted way with little more than a foot of clearance on either side. Through its rear windows he glimpsed the woman he’d seen at Eddington’s, and sure enough, the car halted outside the main gate of the Tso compound – the gilding and red-lacquered latticework of which would have done credit to a palace – and the Presidential attache Huang Da-feng climbed out.

Half-hidden by the turn of the lane, Asher watched as Huang bowed and handed the lady out. Like many of the President’s staff, Huang favored a European suit beneath his well-cut camel-hair British overcoat, but Madame Tso was all Chinese in her dress, the bulky, square-cut ch’i-p’ao of blue silk delicately embroidered, her coal-black hair oiled and smoothed close to her head and looped up into an ebony roll decorated with fresh gardenia blossoms that made expensive mock of the frozen season. Asher placed her at about his own age – forty-seven – with the round face and slight air of creamy stoutness that would cause a Chinese to liken her beauty to the sky with stars. She tottered elegantly on her bound feet, each of her blue silk shoes – the length of a schoolboy’s finger – wrought of enough pearls and gold wire to purchase a farm.

So you have become their servant . . .?

He wondered how they had met, and what she had offered him – this vampire, whoever he was – that had convinced him to become the god of her family. Ysidro had told him that few vampires cared anything about their own families, once they themselves were vampire. For most, all that existed was the hunt.

Was it just that this woman knew a way to make the hunt easier or more entertaining?

Or had the vampire, whoever he was, simply been drawn to her? As Ysidro, deny it though he would, was drawn to Lydia – a friendship that filled Asher with foreboding. It was not jealousy, nor yet fear for his wife’s immortal soul: Lydia was mildly disinclined to believe in anything she couldn’t locate in the dissecting rooms, and she would have greeted the idea that she might one day run away with the vampire with a whoop of laughter and a question about the sleeping arrangements.

Yet he feared for her, nevertheless.

The porters shut the gate, leaving the black Mercedes to block the lane. Its driver glared at Asher as he squeezed past it, with an expression that implied he would murder him should his buttons scratch the lacquer of its doors.

What am I doing back at the Temple?

Lydia looked around the cluttered, shabby courtyard, aware that she was dreaming but puzzled: why am I dreaming about the Temple of Everlasting Harmony instead of about rats?

They had returned to Peking shortly after full darkness. Exhausted and trembling, Lydia had insisted on accompanying Takahashi to the clinic at Peita University, to have his horrible injuries treated and to begin the long and painful course of treatment for rabies. Throughout the endless winter afternoon, as she, Mizukami, Karlebach and the remaining two warriors had followed Liao Ho through the rough terrain of the hills, again and again she found she had to force her mind aside from what had happened at the mine. She had made notes, matched probable tunnels on the map with the subsidiary entrances Liao showed them. Climbed old trails down which the coal had once been carried in baskets, now overgrown with laurel and weeds, while Private Nishiharu and Ogata the Bodyguard had scanned the horizon with their rifles.

At every entrance – some of them mere holes in the hillside, save for the slag heaps around them – she had gone as close as she dared and listened. Because Karlebach was there, she could not speak, could not call down into that darkness. But each time they’d climbed up toward those inky pits, those long-overgrown piles of dirt and stone, frantic fear had clutched at her, frantic horror.

Simon . . .

They had covered something like twelve miles on foot and horseback, and Lydia was certain they’d have to go back to locate the rest of the entrances. At no point had a second whisper passed through her mind, nor any indication that the first had been anything more than illusion. And all the while the underbrush in the gullies, the withered brown grass on the deforested hill-slopes, had rustled with the constant, restless, horrible movement of rats.

Stricken with guilt over her fraudulent mourning, upon her return to the hotel she had consented to have supper with Karlebach, to make sure that the old man was all right. But she had barely listened to his tales of the iniquities of the vampires of Prague over the centuries of his research, had been unable to touch more than a spoonful of her food.

Only Miranda cheered her. Only in the hour she’d spent holding her daughter against her and reading aloud – watching the still-wordless thoughts chase each other through those lovely brown eyes – did she feel at rest.

But falling into bed, sick with weariness and shock, she had been positive she was going to dream about rats.

Or, worse, about that single, dying whisper in the back of her mind: Mistress . . .

Yet here she was in the courtyard of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony, listening to the muffled yammer of voices from Silk Lane and the soft brisk tap of passing donkey-hooves on the dirt lane outside its gate.

It was cold, and she was glad of her coat. (Thank goodness it’s the pink merino with the chinchilla collar! But I thought I left that back in Oxford, and in any case I shouldn’t be wearing pink with