‘It is done.’ Mizukami must have used the spare petrol from the boot of his motor car, or else found lamp oil in one of the rooms near the vampire Li’s prison. ‘I even sent a man for the Fire Department.’
‘Thank you.’ Asher felt drained, emptied of every thought and feeling except that Lydia was alive and unhurt.
And that Ysidro was dead at last.
Young Private Seki, chalk-pale, brought the motor car around to the spot where Big Tiger Lane opened on to the lakeshore. Asher’s boots crunched the icy sand as he stumbled up the short slope, laid Lydia gently in the back seat and covered her with the car rug. Rigid and silent, Karlebach got into the front beside the driver, his shotgun by his side.
Shooting Ysidro had been an act of salvation, to free both Asher and Lydia from servitude to the vampire’s spells.
In the dark behind his eyelids, Asher saw Ysidro’s body buckle under the spray of silver buckshot. White shirt starred with blood, colorless hair like spider silk around the scarred and skull-like face. No expression, neither pain nor joy, anger nor regret, like a strange statue wrought of ivory, air and time.
Saw him fall backward into the near-freezing black water.
Into peace. Into death. Into Hell. A thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down . . .
The following day Karlebach informed him that he had changed his ticket home, and instead of traveling by the
On the night of the twentieth of November, Asher dreamed of Don Simon Ysidro.
He’d gone with Ellen and Miranda to see Rebbe Karlebach off at the train station, for his journey to Shanghai: Lydia still kept to her room. He’d offered to accompany his old teacher south on the day-long journey, and when Karlebach had refused – Mrs Asher, he said, needed her husband at her side – had arranged for the Legation clerk P’ei Cheng K’ang to go with him, and to see him safely on to the boat. On the platform the old man had embraced him, and returning the embrace Asher had felt how fragile his old friend seemed, stiff and brittle and unyielding. Karlebach had whispered his name, and Asher had said, ‘Thank you, my friend.’ He did not say for what.
They both knew – Asher felt this through his bones – that nothing would be the same between them again.
It had been a week of nine-days’-wonders in the Legation Quarter. The news that Sir Grant Hobart’s body had been found in the fire-gutted house of the notorious Mrs Tso (‘I can’t say I’m wildly surprised,’ had been Annette Hautecoeur’s comment) had been followed hard by Asher’s resurrection (‘No, no, haven’t the slightest idea what it was all about . . .’), and by Mr Timms’s gruff apology on behalf of the Legation police (‘Telegram from London informs us that the charge was all balderdash – no, they said no more than that . . .’).
‘How astonishing,’ Asher had said, with what he hoped was a convincing look of baffled surprise.
Yet all these developments had been dwarfed by the appearance of five Chinese – presumably cousins of various Legation servants, though there was no way of proving this – and a dilapidated American artist named Jones, who walked into the Legation police station and independently swore that they’d seen Richard Hobart at various times on the night of October twenty-third wearing a tie which in no way resembled the murder weapon. Moreover, the rickshaw-puller who had brought Richard to Eddington’s put in an appearance, and testified in excellent English – he’d been a professor of that language at the Imperial Railway College at Shanhaikuan before the downfall of the dynasty – that when he had brought the young man, incapably drunk, to the gate, it had been to find Holly Eddington’s body lying already dead in the garden. His fare had, in fact, stared down at the body, sobbed pitifully, ‘Oh Holly, who has done such a dreadful thing?’ and had fainted. Mr K’ung had attempted to revive him and had only run away from the scene when people began to come from the house.
Asher wondered where the dead Mi Ching’s cousins had located an English-speaking rickshaw-puller for the purpose, not to speak of an impoverished American artist. But, Lydia had commented over tea later in the afternoon, it was a very nice touch.
Lydia had been very quiet through it all.
Now Asher dreamed of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. Lydia, guidebook in hand, was telling him about the various fearsome statues that stood along its western wall: ‘This is Lu, Magistrate of the Wu Kuan Hell – I think that’s the hell where sinners are fried in cauldrons of oil, only those poor people around his feet in the statue look like they’re being steamed instead of fried . . .’
‘Perhaps they’re given a choice,’ Asher suggested.
‘Like the dumplings in a native restaurant?’ She looked better than she had all the previous week, as if the horror of what had happened at the Tso compound, the grief at Ysidro’s death, were beginning to loosen their grip on her. She still bore the bruises on her face where Hobart had struck her, and her glasses were her rimless spare pair, which she’d been wearing all week. Under his shirt, waistcoat, jacket and coat – the night was a cold one – Asher was conscious of the sticking-plaster dressing on his ribs.
‘And this is Bao Cheng,’ she went on, ‘who was an official of the Sung Dynasty before he was promoted – I suppose you could call it that – to being Magistrate of . . . let’s see . . . the Yama Hell. Is that the one with the metal cylinder they’re supposed to climb with the fire lit inside it? Oh, and here’s Chiang Tzu-Wen . . .’
They had reached the end of the temple, and in the doorway beside the war god’s banner-draped niche Ysidro stood, wrapped in the earth-colored robe of the temple priests, his pale hair tied back in their fashion. His arms were folded, as if against the chill, for indeed it had snowed that afternoon. A thin layer of it was visible beyond him in the disheveled garden – the pigeon-coops gone now, the garbage cleared away – glittering gently in the brightness of the moon. ‘Mistress,’ he said. ‘James.’
Lydia gasped, moved an impulsive step towards him, then stopped herself, threw an uncertain glance at Asher. He took the guidebook from her hand and, freed of the encumbrance, she flung herself into Ysidro’s arms.
Held him, tight and motionless, without a word, rocking a little in his arms. Face pressed to his shoulder, red hair like fire and poppies around the cold ivory spindles of his fingers.
‘I’m glad to see you’re all right,’ said Asher.
‘I trust, at my age, that a half-dozen pellets of silver in my shoulder aren’t sufficient to discommode me from pulling myself under still water to safety.’ The vampire put a hand on Lydia’s back and added, in his soft, reasonable voice, ‘Hush, Mistress, hush. What is this? Your husband will demand satisfaction of me. Has that lunatic vampire- hunter taken himself off for Prague?’
‘This afternoon.’ It was in Asher’s mind to wonder if he would ever see the old scholar again.
‘May his ship go down with all hands.’ As he had in the mines, Don Simon looked thin and haggard, and very unhuman. The scars on his face and throat, which he generally used his psychic glamor to cover from living eyes, were shockingly visible. Asher wondered whether this was because this was only a dream, or because of the silver that had scorched his flesh.
‘I suppose the thought has never crossed his mind that, had he followed his own dictates and simply destroyed that precious student of his the moment he became infected, rather than giving him the wherewithal to travel and spread the virus, all this might have been avoided.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Asher, ‘I think the thought was very much in his mind. This journey for him was penance – and redemption.’
‘At someone else’s expense,’ said the vampire with a sniff. ‘And without asking those he would “help” if they wanted his interference. Like all the Van Helsings of the world, who must become a little mad in order to pursue such phantoms as we. Obsession with us destroys them – as obsession with our own safety destroys us, in the end. I am only grateful,’ he added as Lydia stepped back from him, ‘that ’twas no worse. Is it well with you,
