Magistrates of Hell

formal reception room and the bedrooms of the master and mistress of the house – he found a larger vault, this one brick-lined and accessed by narrow steps, clearly a strongroom dug at some earlier period and containing forgotten treasures: bronze incense-burners of an antique pattern, a small chest which proved to hold hundreds of age-brown silk scrolls with the formal paintings of someone’s ancestors, an exquisite p’i-p’a inlaid with shell. Reascending, he could find no evidence of a cellar beneath the ‘backside house’ behind the cheng-fang, so strode swiftly down the covered walkway to where he calculated the next deserted courtyard would lie.

Drifted dust, empty goldfish-kongs, stacks of tubs for ornamental trees . . .

And the fishy, rotten, pervasive smell of the Others, which prickled the hair on the back of his neck.

It was strongest near the cheng-fang. Rats scuttled around the building’s padlocked door. The lock was brand-new, bright in the sliver of Asher’s lantern-light. When he opened it and gently pushed the doors, from somewhere in the building – somewhere below him – he heard a voice call, ‘Ma-Ma . . .’

The meaning the same, curiously, in English as in Chinese.

Mama.

He closed his eyes. Sick shock flowed over him as he understood what Madame Tso planned, and what she had done.

It is our families, Father Orsino had said, who are the Magistrates of Hell.

Had he known?

In a former bedchamber that flanked the cheng-fang’s main hall, a trap door stood open where, logically, a bed would once have been. Next to the black square of the hole stood a small table, half- covered with empty pottery cups and bottles that sent up a queasy metallic reek. Like Karlebach’s experiments, he thought, with the drugs that he’d given his student Matthias, in the hopes that it would stop the virus from consuming his body.

Or, in this case, maybe only with the intention of slowing down some of its effects?

Dark spatterings, like the stains of dripped blood, marked the edge of the table, the floor around the trapdoor.

When he bent over the square of blackness a voice from below called softly, ‘Is it you, Aunt?’

And a bleating cry, like the bray of a goat: ‘Mama—’

Asher rested his forehead briefly against the wall. A metallic clink from the abyss: hinges or bars. The smell of human waste mixed with the fishy nastiness of the yao-kuei. Asher didn’t imagine there was much competition for cleaning whatever cells the two men – or former men – occupied down below in the darkness there. He moved soundlessly across the bedchamber to the door of the main hall . . .

. . . then flung himself sideways as a sword flashed in the lantern-light, inches from his face.

The blade jerked back mid-stroke. Round spectacles glinted. ‘Ashu Sensei—’

Count Mizukami held out his hand for silence.

Asher caught him by the elbow, steered him across the hall and so to the starlight outside. The Count sheathed his sword, an oiled whisper. His face showed not so much a flicker of surprise to see Asher alive. ‘They are down there?’

‘Caged, I think,’ whispered Asher. ‘Being taken care of, and still human enough to talk and think. One of them’s Madame Tso’s son, another’s her nephew.’

Mizukami’s breath hissed sharply. Then after a moment’s silence, ‘They could have met the tenma on the shore of the Seas. Could have been infected by them there. Your most extraordinary wife found evidence of disappearances in this district, beyond what the rioting last spring could account for – and even the fighting among the criminal gangs. And yesterday, when we rode into the hills to survey how best to blow up all entrances to the mines, Dr Bauer said that she was given money by President Yuan, for all remaining evidence of the things in the hills.’

‘I’ve seen Madame Tso twice with Huang Da-feng,’ returned Asher grimly. ‘Yes, her son and her nephew could have stumbled into the yao-kuei on their way home across the marble bridge some night and been accidentally infected in the course of defending themselves, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Is Mrs Asher all right? And Dr Karlebach?’

‘They are well. You have married a samurai, Ashu Sensei, and one who keeps her secrets well. She has gone into deep mourning on your behalf and is being courted by every bachelor diplomat in the Quarter.’

Asher grinned in spite of himself. ‘She’ll murder me if we ever get out of this alive . . .’

Mizukami smiled. ‘I have seen your love for this woman, Ashu Sensei, and hers for you. She veils herself in black and weeps where people can see her, but her eyes are not red. Nor are they the eyes of a woman who has lost that which she most treasures. And she told me that you speak well of gelignite for blowing up the tunnels in the mines.’

Asher rolled his eyes.

‘She does well,’ insisted Mizukami. ‘And the grief of your friend Ka-ru-ba-ku Sensei is genuine and terrible to see. His heart and soul are now given to vengeance.’ He nodded toward the blackness of the cheng- fang behind them. ‘So you think that, to gain some advantage, this monstrous woman has had her own son, her own nephew, deliberately infected by these creatures. Why? What would it gain her that she could sell to Yuan? Surely she does not think they will be able to control them, and the rats at their command as well?’

‘Not her nephew and her son,’ said Asher. ‘We have one more thing to find.’

TWENTY-TWO

Shots ripped the windy night; a woman screamed. Still away to the south-west in the direction of the Empress’s Garden. Asher breathed, ‘We’d better hurry. God knows how long we have till the police arrive.’

Mizukami consulted his watch. ‘I paid the district captain for two hours,’ he said. ‘Ogata can be trusted to keep the riot going at least so long, particularly with Russians there.’

‘Remind me,’ said Asher with a grin, ‘to recommend you for work in the Department . . . Not that I have anything to do with them . . .’

‘Of course not,’ agreed the Count. And added, ‘Ge-raa Sensei.’

‘Never met Professor Gellar in my life.’ He led the way swiftly along a covered walk – cluttered with boxes, two parked rickshaws, and a bicycle – and through a small court, orienting himself by the double roof of a two-story ‘backside house’ that dominated the cold stars of the skyline. Through the latticed windows of a pavilion he glimpsed an empty bedchamber, lamplit and furnished in a half-Western fashion: perhaps the house of assignation, the gate of which opened on to Big Tiger Lane, where An Lu T’ang arranged for Grant Hobart to enjoy specialized pleasures? The bed was disarrayed, and the walls sported two Western-style oil paintings on its walls, graphically depicting some of the more violent loves of Greek gods. Chinese pornography, Asher knew, ranked as some of the least erotic in the world.

The courtyard beyond this one was deserted. There was no street gate, but the side building on the east – the hsiang-fang – was, unusually, two storied, its upper room shuttered fast, and Asher knew from his daylight reconnaissance that this was in fact a sort of terrace which overlooked the narrow strait that ran between the two lobes of the ‘Sea’.

This court, too, was littered with debris and dust, but there was none before the shuttered-up cheng-fang. Though the place had not been swept in decades, a pathway had been beaten clear among the tufts of weeds before its door. The lock was a Yale, about twenty years old.

Asher handed Mizukami the lantern, directed the narrow beam on the lock. ‘Do you believe in the chiang-shi, Mizukami-san?’ he asked softly. ‘The kyonshi?’

He did not look up from his lockpicks, but he heard his companion’s breath hiss.

‘Two weeks ago,’ said the Count at last, ‘or a month . . . I do not know what I would have said to such a question. The tenma we saw in the hills – the terrible thing that befell poor Ito—’

‘Those aren’t the chiang-shi.’ Asher held his breath, manipulated the delicate probes in the lock until he felt the mechanism give. Gently tested the handle. If there were