Magistrates of Hell

a vampire within the building, it would have heard their breathing and the clicking of the tumblers as Asher’s tools shifted them one by one. He could have sung ‘Rule, Britannia!’ at the top of his lungs and the only ones who would have learned something they didn’t already know were whatever residents of the Tso compound weren’t either preparing to defend the house against the rioters or out engaged in looting themselves.

He pushed the door open, took the lantern and directed its narrow beam, carefully, around the salon within. ‘The chiang-shi are real,’ he went on. ‘I’ve spoken to them – I’ve traveled with them – I’ve killed them and seen them kill.’ His gaze followed the sliver of yellow light as he spoke: a doorway at either side of the big room, the one on the east open, on the west, shut. The steely glint of another Western lock. ‘In Europe – in the West – they don’t trust the living, though they sometimes need our help. I think what’s happened here is that one of them – maybe more, for all I know – has employed the whole Tso family to keep it safe, in return for its help in their criminal endeavors. I think its lair is what we’re going to find downstairs.’

He handed Mizukami the lantern again when they reached the shut door, knelt with his picklocks.

The little nobleman looked around at the darkness of the shuttered chamber. ‘Can this be so?’

‘Can the other things you’ve seen? Will you wait up here and guard my back? You’ll probably be safer if you come down with me.’

‘I am samurai,’ replied the Count quietly, his hand on the hilt of his katana. ‘Yet I am not stupid. What is your judgement? You know these things. I do not.’

‘Let’s find the trapdoor down. But watch and listen. You may have no more than a heartbeat’s warning – maybe not that. It’ll try to make your mind sleepy before it strikes.’

The trapdoor, as Asher had suspected, descended from the locked western room. Like the other he had found, it was fairly wide, in a part of the room which in earlier times would naturally have been covered with a cupboard or a bed, and its darkness breathed the same dank cold. ‘Will you remain at the top?’ he asked softly. ‘It may be out hunting at this hour, but there’s no telling when it will return.’

Mizukami’s blade whispered from the scabbard.

Asher descended, the lantern held high. The vault was deep, like the one in the French cemetery chapel; the brick stair made two complete turns, thirty steps. The faint foulness of old blood pervaded the clinging darkness. Things had died there, that no one had been willing to linger long enough to properly clean up.

He opened a door. The lantern beam caught the glint of reflective eyes, not three yards from his own.

A man’s low giggle filled the dark of the chamber.

Mouth dry with shock, Asher yanked the slide fully open.

The vampire sat enthroned on cushions, facing him. Unmoving, except for the trembling of the belly muscles as it laughed, the twisting of its face. Long hair, longer than Lydia’s even – a streaming black river of it – flowed down over its shoulders, coal-black against the death-pale ivory of its skin. Black eyes caught and reflected the lantern’s light, stared into his: utterly and unmistakably mad.

And no wonder, thought Asher, so aghast that for a moment he could not breathe. No wonder.

The vampire – a man in his prime – was nude, a blue silk sheet draped over his lap. His arms had been cut off just below the head of the humerus, his legs, guessed at beneath the folds of the sheet, a few inches below the trochanter of the hip. Vampire flesh does not heal like human flesh, and there was no way of guessing how long ago this had been done. But amid the glazed, waxy glisten of the scabs over what had been the armpit, Asher could see the tiny buds of baby fists growing from the flesh, smaller than the helpless hands of a newborn . . .

And easy to snip off again with no more than a razor.

Twenty years. His mind stalled on the thought, dizzy with horror and shock. Maybe more . . .

There was a little dried blood on the silken sheet, on the pillows near his head.

They must bring him his kills . . .

For a time Asher could do nothing but stare as the vampire bellowed with laughter, fangs flashing. Blood dribbled from its gums, and bruises discolored the silk-white skin where the facial sutures would be. The bruising was precisely as Asher had seen on Ito-san.

They’ve infected him with the blood of the Others. There was no way he could have stopped them from doing so, even if he’d been awake for it.

Which means he can probably summon them.

Asher bolted up the stairs, pursued by the vampire’s roars of mirth. Mizukami was flattened against the wall at the top, eyes straining at the darkness of the room beyond his small slip of lantern-light, but he flicked his glance sidelong as Asher emerged.

‘Run!’

Without a question or a sound, Mizukami caught up his lantern and fled at Asher’s heels, across the side room and across the main salon. They emerged from the door into the courtyard, and shots cracked out, not distant now but just across the court. Bullets tore the wood of the door frame next to Asher’s face. Three men ran toward them, one of them with eyes that reflected the lantern-light like a cat’s. Asher dodged left, returned fire with his revolver while Mizukami kicked the desiccated wood of the door of the two-story side-building. Asher ducked in after the Japanese into the darkness, up an open stairway to the shuttered terrace above.

The shutters on the upper floor were bolted from the inside but not locked; Asher jerked open a section, dropped both lanterns beside it, then dragged Mizukami to the farthest corner of the room where screens and chairs had been stacked, covered with sheets against the winter’s pervasive dust.

Both men rolled behind them as feet shook the stair. Moments later their pursuers entered, dashed to the open section of shutter which looked down – Asher knew – on to the narrow ground between the compound wall and the strait that joined the Shih Ch’a Hai – the long northern lobe of the ‘Sea’ – to its southern partner. It was a few hundred yards from where the yao-kuei – and the rats – had nearly cornered him, and he knew how far it was to the entrance to the nearest hutong.

One of the men swore. ‘Kou p’i!’

‘You see them?’

‘Get them,’ said a third voice, cold. ‘Go after them.’

‘We didn’t see which way they went, Chi T’uan—’

‘Then you better get down there and figure it out.’

The men crossed the room again toward the stair. When the man called Chi T’uan turned his head, in the moonlight Asher glimpsed again the reflective glitter of his eyes. Vampire? Or infected, like the other two down in the cellar, with the blood of the Others in the hopes of mentally controlling them? Of using them: unstoppable soldiers who would never listen to treachery, who wouldn’t have to be paid in anything but living food . . . who wouldn’t run away from a losing fight, and who would be very, very hard to kill.

Or both?

When the men had gone, Asher and Mizukami emerged from hiding, crossed to the ghostly rectangle of star- pinned heaven. Enough wind remained to sting Asher’s cheeks and numb the end of his nose. Looking down from the terrace he saw men emerge from Big Tiger Lane on to the lakeside pebbles, some running north, some south, boots crunching in the ice. The pursuers clung together, looked fearfully around themselves . . . So presumably the fact that Madame Tso’s son and nephew had become yao-kuei didn’t mean that the other yao-kuei could be controlled to the point that they wouldn’t attack Tso enforcers.

In the courtyard behind them and below, a woman’s voice rose, sharp with anger. Asher crossed the room silently, opened one of the shutters a crack in time to see Madame Tso, still in her embroidered robe of blue silk, slap Chi T’uan smartly across the face.

‘Lump of dog meat!’

‘We’ll catch them, Aunt.’

‘Are your brother and my son all right?’

‘I’m going down now to see.’

‘And Li?’

‘Aunt, I—’ Chen Chi T’uan pressed a hand to his temple. He was, as far as Asher could see, tall for a Chinese and dressed and barbered in the Western fashion, his coat a flashy double-breasted American style. The hardness in his voice dissolved, and he said, much more quietly, ‘I can’t always hear him.’

She slapped him again. ‘You’re not trying, then! Ungrateful brat!’