Magistrates of Hell

women had moved, it was obvious that their feet were crippled.

She sat motionless, head throbbing from the blow. A more intrepid heroine, she reflected, would probably take on both guards with the chair. But one of them had the gun pointed at her, and she didn’t see how being beaten senseless was going to help her flee later, to say nothing of the fact that even if she got out of this room and the courtyard, she still hadn’t the slightest idea of which way the compound’s single open gate was, if it was still open . . .

They need me as a hostage. They can’t kill me, they need me as a hostage . . .

Only until they get Jamie.

The door opened.

There was only one person with Mrs Tso, a fat little Chinese man dressed in Western style, his hair cut short and smelling faintly of pomade. Lydia couldn’t make out his features clearly but could see at least no sign of the horrors visible in Hobart’s face and on the poor samurai Ito’s. Her oldest son?

Mrs Tso swayed forward on her tiny stubs of feet, slapped Lydia hard, and poured out a tirade of furious Chinese at her. When the man hesitantly spoke to her – she MUST be his mother! – she turned on him, slapped him as well, then returned her attention to Lydia, black eyes flashing poison.

The man said, in halting English, ‘My mother say you are foolish girl, you put self in danger, try to escape here. No harm come to you, if you wait and be quiet.’

Yes, and my Aunt Harriet’s husband is descended in a true line from Henry VIII’s secret marriage to Bess Blount and is the rightful King of England, too. Lydia looked meekly down at her captor’s shoes and asked, in as timorous a voice as she could muster, ‘Promise?’

Running boots in the courtyard. The door opened. More lantern-light, and a Niagara of Chinese from another guard.

Somebody must have discovered the prison door open and the two boys gone. Or else the gate into the street open, wherever it is—

Madame Tso went rigid with shock, then launched into several minutes of quick-fire questions and answers with the guard before turning back to Lydia, hand raised to slap again.

Lydia shrank back and covered her face. Those small, strong hands grabbed her wrist, pulled her hand aside. More questions shouted at her, furiously, as the older woman shook her by a handful of her hair.

Tso Jr. peered around his mother and asked, ‘How you get out?’

‘I heard someone moving about in the other room.’ Lydia widened her eyes and looked terrified, something that didn’t require a great deal of acting at the moment. ‘Scraping and banging noises, as if the locks were being wrenched off the door. I hid until the noise got quieter, then I looked out. There was no one in the outer room, but one of the windows was open. I climbed out and ran.’

‘You not go in other room?’ He stood close enough that she could see his face: young and hard, with a wisp of mustache and brutal eyes. ‘Not go down stairs?’

Lydia shook her head, eyes swimming with tears. ‘No.’ After having her hair pulled, tears weren’t hard to summon, either, but any girl who’d had a London Season acquired the ability to weep at will, for purposes of either blackmail or self-defense. ‘I was afraid, I didn’t know what was happening—’

Tso Jr. – whose surname, Lydia recalled, was actually something else – Chen? – related this information to his mother. Chen, she thought, watching their faces. For his father, whom she now suspected had been eaten up alive by Madame in the fashion of spider husbands. Definitely, they’ve discovered the boys have been freed . . .

Madame stepped back, made a slashing gesture with one hand. Her son took Lydia’s elbow, helped rather than pulled her to her feet. ‘Please, not to do anything foolish,’ he advised in a completely neutral tone as they led her from the room, across the court, down a walkway in the bobbing light of the lanterns. ‘My mother—’ He glanced at the woman who strode beside them, hanging on to his other arm but without the slightest sign of the pain which, Lydia knew, each step caused her.

Madame rolled her eyes, rattled off instructions as to what he was to say, and he obediently repeated, ‘Courtyards guarded by dogs, big dogs. Wolves. Attack and kill. Tigers also.’

Funny, Jamie completely forgot to mention the tigers the other night . . .

She gasped and looked petrified.

‘If you escape, we cannot save you. Stay where you are, all be well.’

They entered another courtyard, dust-drifted and deserted in the lantern-light, and Lydia gasped in earnest. It was as Jamie had described: the pathways beaten in the weeds before the shallow steps of the main pavilion, the nailed-up shutters, the western lock on its door. They pushed her through its main chamber and into its eastern room, which had no lock on it; Madame pulled a silk sash from the pocket of her ch’i-p’ao, threw it to her son with a brief command.

‘Not to be frightened,’ he said to Lydia as the single guard with them (they must be short- handed tonight – why?) dragged her hands behind her.

‘No—’ She struggled desperately as they thrust her against one of the pillars at the rear of the room, tied her wrists behind her and around it. ‘Please, don’t tie me—!’

‘All be well.’ He hesitated, then took one of the lanterns and hung it near the door. ‘All be well.’

By the way he glanced at his mother as they filed from the room, he didn’t believe this for a second.

Half a dozen horses stood saddled and bridled outside the half-ruined Temple of the Concealed Buddha. ‘I found them in the gully, below the rear entrance to the mine,’ Chiang explained. The tack was German, the blankets the five-colored stripe of the new Republic. ‘I do not ride,’ he added as Asher and the others mounted. ‘The philosopher Chuang Tzu, in the time of the Warring States, wrote that to make a slave of an animal in that fashion disturbs not only the Path of the animal, but the soul’s own path . . .’

‘We not leave you.’ The moon was barely a sliver, but the night, though icy, was clear. Beyond the scrim of trees that surrounded the temple, Asher could see the narrow track that led back toward the Mingliang gully where the mine’s main entrance lay. They had, he now saw, passed the temple itself on their reconnaissance of that flank of the mountain, never guessing that its crypt held a tunnel. Neither Ysidro nor the engineers of the Hsi Fang-te Company had suspected – nor, presumably, had the emperors who had condemned the Buddhist sects. ‘Kuo Min- tang, also bandits—’

‘My son.’ The moonlight – and his smile – turned the priest’s face curiously young. ‘What can bandits steal of me? My stick? I will then cut another. Go quickly now, and do not let an old man’s prejudice slow you down. I know the way back to the City. I have walked it many times.’

Asher didn’t linger to argue. He reined his horse around and set off at a hand gallop down the track, as swift as the thin moonlight would let him ride, the others stringing out behind him. It could have been a lie, he told himself. T’uan could have told you anything about Lydia, without any way to prove it. Yet the hair prickled on the back of his neck. Lydia knew to stay away from Grant Hobart, but at a guess, there were others in the Legations who had been sufficiently careless, foolish, or unfortunate as to fall into the power of the Tso to blackmail – and the recollection of what the Tso had hidden in their house turned his heart to ice.

It would be two hours’ ride from Mingliang Village before they could reach the motor car Mizukami had left in Men T’ou Kuo, even if they didn’t encounter the Kuo Min-tang again. Vampires could move very swiftly, either afoot or by using some means of tricking or seducing the living into aiding them with transport. But whether, once he reached Peking, Ysidro could find the Tso house was another question, entirely apart from the very real possibility that the vampires of Peking would kill him before he reached the place.

They trust no one, Father Orsino had said.

Certainly not a ch’ang pi kwei vampire working in obvious alliance with the living. Did they say of him what Karlebach did, that he could not be trusted and should be killed at sight?

As the horses topped the gully edge and the steep trail dropped away, Asher turned in the saddle. The Temple of the Concealed Buddha could still be glimpsed in the moonlight on the barren hillside, but of Chiang, no trace remained.

Lydia estimated that the lantern lasted an hour before it burned out. The fact that light could be seen in the room – even in the form of dull topaz needles through chinks in the shutters – filled her with horror, but when it finally perished, the absolute blackness was ten times worse.