Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

Karlebach listened, nodded, and growled, but made the observation that it wasn’t to play Sherlock Holmes that they had come to China. When they reached the end of Legation Street, and looked out through the gate across the open glacis that surrounded the Quarter’s wall, he rumbled, ‘So he could be anywhere out there, could he not? Your vampire.’ He surveyed the sea of upturned tile roofs, the line of gaudy shops on the other side of Hatamen Street. Rickshaws, laden donkeys, and lines of thick-bodied, two-humped shaggy camels passed them, and endless streams of blue-clad Chinese.

‘He might.’ Asher felt Lydia’s silence beside him. Her anger at Ysidro over the death of a traveling companion – three years ago in Constantinople – had left her, and she would speak of the vampire perfectly readily if the subject arose. Yet he noticed she never brought up his name herself.

Except now and again, in her sleep.

As generally happened in any open space in Peking, the portion of the glacis from the gate to the polo ground – some two hundred feet – had been taken over by Chinese vendors of dumplings and caged birds, cloth shoes and horoscopes, fried scorpions and paper toys, as well as by the occasional acrobat, storyteller, juggler or newspaper seller, and a long rank of rickshaws, the pullers of which shouted their readiness to transport passers-by to anywhere in the Republic for twenty cents. Thronging together, they smelled different from English crowds. As he had on his previous visit to China, Asher felt as if he had disembarked, not on another corner of the planet, but on another world altogether, as different from England as H.G. Wells’s description of the civilization on the Moon.

You can’t tell what’s going on in their minds , Hobart had protested – loudly. How would I know how they’re connected?

He isn’t far wrong , reflected Asher, listening to the babble of voices, the curious sing-song effect of a language in which changing tone is as much a part of the meaning of the word as its consonants and vowels. Watching the gestures of hands, the slight cues of clothing and demeanor that communicated nothing to an observer who didn’t understand the culture or the city.

But, in fact, Hobart is lying .

And I wish I knew about what .

That night, after supper, and after Miranda had been put to bed – impatient with parents who had been largely at her beck and call throughout the six weeks on the ship and who now left her with Mrs Pilley and Ellen – Asher returned to the Quarter’s eastern gate. He’d left Lydia and Professor Karlebach poring over issues of the various medical journals which had appeared subsequent to Dr Christina Bauer’s article about the creature whose body she had dissected – journals which contained derisive letters speculating on everything from the missionary’s attempts to claim undeserved credit in the scientific community by a fraudulent ‘discovery’, to the degenerate nature of Oriental races in general. The night was still, and the cold piercing. He traded a cigarette with the guards on the gate – Russians, tonight – and talked with them a little in their own language before moving on.

Beyond the gate – across the open glacis – he could see the massive towers of the Hatamen Gate, shut and barred now for the night and guarded by a prosaic brace of blue-uniformed policemen. The wide avenue was growing quiet.

Remaining within the Quarter’s high wall – a city within a city – he walked up Avenue Yamato and along Rue Hart, passing the lights of the Peking Club and the elaborate gateway of the Austrian Legation, then quartered back along Rue du Club past the customs house and the rear of the French barracks. His footfalls echoed on the pavement, though he was a silent-moving man.

Promenading oneself , Ysidro called it. What a vampire did when he came into a city not his own. Vampires were ferociously territorial, and no vampire would dare hunt on the grounds of another without first speaking with the Master of the local nest.

Asher suspected Karlebach knew this, and knew where he was going when he’d said, ‘I’m going to take a walk.’ As he’d gone out the door of the hotel suite, he’d felt the old man’s eyes on his back.

He knew the signs and guessed that Ysidro had not fed for many nights. As Karlebach had said, without the energy absorbed from the victim at a kill, a vampire’s psychic skills – the abilities which enabled them to pass unnoticed in a crowd, to make the living see them as they wished to be perceived – waned. Throughout their conversation last night, Asher had been disconcertingly aware of dreamlike flashes of Ysidro’s true appearance, skeletal and strange, like a vision that came and went.

The vampire, too, might be out promenading, placing himself where the vampires of Peking – assuming that Peking had vampires – would be aware of him. Giving them the option of where and when to accost him and ask him his business.

Always supposing they spoke English, or Spanish – possibly even Latin.

Always supposing that they didn’t, like the so-called Boxers – religious cultists and practitioners of one of the several forms of martial arts, who had led the massive uprising a dozen years previously – believe that any European, even an Undead one, should be killed at sight.

For his part, Asher didn’t believe for a moment that Don Simon Ysidro would go to ground outside the Legation Quarter. He certainly hadn’t sufficient Chinese to make arrangements to hide his coffin – actually a double-lidded tan traveling-trunk with brass corners – anywhere in the ‘Tatar city’ that lay beyond the Quarter’s walls, and the Chinese city beyond that. And ninety-nine one-hundredths of the population of that city actually believed in vampires and would have been more than eager to hunt them down and kill them.

Our strength , Ysidro had said to him once, is that no one believes . . .

But the rules were different, here.

So Asher walked, and listened, uneasily aware that there was a slim chance that European vampires might have survived the Uprising and the Boxer siege of the Legations and might still be hiding in the Quarter itself.

He had asked Karlebach once, Do they know of your researches? after the old man had admitted to him that he was indeed acquainted with the vampires of Prague.

Oh, yes , Karlebach had replied, with a grim glitter in his eyes.

Later, on the Royal Charlotte as it steamed its way through the Mediterranean and across the Indian Ocean, Asher had seen that, like himself and Lydia, Karlebach wore links of silver chain around his knotted wrists, enough to burn the hand of any vampire who seized him, even through the frayed linen of his cuffs. An instant’s break in that superhuman grip could be the difference between life and death.

Around his throat he also wore silver chains – like Asher, whose neck was tracked with bite scars from collarbone to ear lobe. As Karlebach had said, a vampire could get the living to obey, but this was no guarantee that the other vampires of a given nest would approve of the knowledge that living servant might gain. It was a situation which seldom ended well.

Do all who have to do with vampires end up wearing those chains?

He turned his steps back toward the hotel just after midnight. The watergate at the southern end of the canal had been repaired since the Uprising: it was a proper gate now, which couldn’t be slipped through by ill-intentioned persons. Still, Asher found himself listening, and he remembered the equivocal shadows below the bridges of Prague, the dank stone tunnels that led into the old city’s maze of crypts and sub-cellars . . .